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THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE
Critical Art Ensemble
Part 2 of 7
Published by Autonomedia
ISBN 1-57027-006-6
The avant-garde never gives up, and yet the limitations of
antiquated models and sites of resistance tend to push
resistance into the void of disillusionment. It is
important to keep the bunkers under siege; however, the
vocabulary of resistance must be expanded to include means
of electronic disturbance. Just as authority located in the
street was once met by demonstration and barricades, the
authority that locates itself in the electronic field must
be met with electronic resistance. Spatial strategies may
not be key in the endeavor, they are necessary for support,
at least in the case of broad spectrum disturbance. These
older strategies of physical challenge are also better
developed, while the electronic strategies are not. It is
time to turn attention to the electronic resistance, both in
terms of the bunker and the nomadic field. The electronic
field is an area where little is known; in such a gamble,
one should be ready to face the ambiguous and unpredictable
hazards of an untried resistance. Preparations for the
double-edged sword should be made.
Nomadic power must be resisted in cyberspace rather than in
physical space. The postmodern gambler is an electronic
player. A small but coordinated group of hackers could
introduce electronic viruses, worms, and bombs into the data
banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly
bringing the destructive force of inertia into the nomadic
realm. Prolonged inertia equals the collapse of nomadic
authority on a global level. Such a strategy does not
require a unified class action, nor does it require
simultaneous action in numerous geographic areas. The less
nihilistic could resurrect the strategy of occupation by
holding data as hostage instead of property. By whatever
means electronic authority is disturbed, the key is to
totally disrupt command and control. Under such conditions,
all dead capital in the military/corporate entwinement
becomes an economic drain--material, equipment, and labor
power all would be left without a means of deployment. Late
capital would collapse under its own excessive weight.
Even though this suggestion is but a science-fiction
scenario, this narrative does reveal problems which must be
addressed. Most obvious is that those who have engaged
cyberreality are generally a depoliticized group. Most
infiltration into cyberspace has either been playful
vandalism (as with Robert Morris' rogue program, or the
string of PC viruses like Michaelangelo), politically
misguided espionage (Markus Hess' hacking of military
computers, which was possibly done for the benefit of the
KGB), or personal revenge against a particular source of
authority. The hacker(*) code of ethics discourages any act
of disturbance in cyberspace. Even the Legion of Doom (a
group of young hackers that put the fear into the Secret
Service) claims to have never damaged a system. Their
activities were motivated by curiosity about computer
systems, and belief in free access to information. Beyond
these very focused concerns with decentralized information,
political thought or action has never really entered the
group's consciousness. Any trouble that they have had with
the law (and only a few members break the law) stemmed
either from credit fraud or electronic trespass. The
problem is much the same as politicizing scientists whose
research leads to weapons development. It must be asked,
How can this class be asked to destabilize or crash its own
world? To complicate matters further, only a few understand
the specialized knowledge necessary for such action. Deep
cyberreality is the least democratized of all frontiers. As
mentioned above, cyberworkers as a professional class do not
have to be fully unified, but how can enough members of this
class be enlisted to stage a disruption, especially when
cyberreality is under state-of-the-art self-surveillance?
(*) "Hacker" refers here to a generic class of computer
sophisticates who often, but not always, operate
counter to the needs of the military/corporate
structure. As used here the term includes crackers,
phreakers, hackers proper, and cypherpunks.
These problems have drawn many artists to electronic media,
and this has made some contemporary electronic art so
politically charged. Since it is unlikely that scientific
or techno-workers will generate a theory of electronic
disturbance, artists-activists (as well as other concerned
groups) have been left with the responsibility to help
provide a critical discourse on just what is at stake in the
development of this new frontier. By approaching the
legitimate authority of "artistic creation," and using it as
a means to establish a public forum for speculation on a
model of resistance within emerging techno-culture, the
cultural producer can contribute to the perpetual fight
against authoritarianism. Further, concrete strategies of
image/text communication, developed through the use of
technology that has fallen through the cracks in the war
machine, will better enable those concerned to invent
explosive material to toss into the political-economic
bunkers. Postering, pamphleteering, street theater, public
art--all were useful in the past. But as mentioned above,
where is the "public"; who is on the street? Judging from
the number of hours that the average person watches
television, it seems that the public is electronically
engaged. The electronic world, however, is by no means
fully established, and it is time to take advantage of the
fluidity through invention, before we are left with only
critique as a weapon.
Bunkers have already been described as privatized public spaces
which serve various particularized functions, such as
political continuity (government offices or national
monuments), or areas for consumption frenzy (malls). In
line with the feudal tradition of the fortress mentality,
the bunker guarantees safety and familiarity in exchange for
the relinquishment of individual sovereignty. It can act as
a seductive agent offering the credible illusion of
consumptive choice and ideological peace for the complicit,
or it can act as an aggressive force demanding acquiescence
for the resistant. The bunker brings nearly all to its
interior with the exception of those left to guard the
streets. After all, nomadic power does not offer the choice
not to work or not to consume. The bunker is such an all-
embracing feature of everyday life that even the most
resistant cannot always approach it critically. Alienation,
in part, stems from this uncontrollable entrapment in the
bunker.
Bunkers vary in appearance as much as they do in function.
The nomadic bunker--the product of "the global village"--has
both an electronic and an architectural form. The
electronic form is witnessed as media; as such it attempts
to colonize the private residence. Informative distraction
flows in an unceasing stream of fictions produced by
Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and CNN. The economy of desire
can be safely viewed through the familiar window of screenal
space. Secure in the electronic bunker, a life of alienated
autoexperience (a loss of the social) can continue in quiet
acquiescence and deep privation. The viewer is brought to
the world, the world to the viewer, all mediated through the
ideology of the screen. This is virtual life in a virtual
world.
Like the electronic bunker, the architectural bunker is
another site where hyperspeed and hyperinertia intersect.
Such bunkers are not restricted to national boundaries; in
fact, they span the globe. Although they cannot actually
move through physical space, they simulate the appearance of
being everywhere at once. The architecture itself may vary
considerably, even in terms of particular types; however,
the logo or totem of a particular type is universal, as are
its consumables. In a general sense, it is its redundant
participation in these characteristics that make it so
seductive.
This type of bunker was typical of capitalist power's first
attempt to go nomadic. During the Counterreformation, when
the Catholic Church realized during the Council of Trent
(1545-63) that universal presence was a key to power in the
age of colonization, this type of bunker came of age. (It
took the full development of the capitalist system to
produce the technology necessary to return to power through
absence). The appearance of the church in frontier areas
both East and West, the universalization of ritual, the
maintenance of relative grandeur in its architecture, and
the ideological marker of the crucifix, all conspired to
present a reliable place of familiarity and security.
Wherever a person was, the homeland of the church was
waiting.
In more contemporary times, the gothic arches have
transformed themselves into golden arches. McDonalds' is
global. Wherever an economic frontier is opening, so is a
McDonalds'. Travel where you might, that same hamburger and
coke are waiting. Like Bernini's piazza at St. Peters, the
golden arches reach out to embrace their clients--so long as
they consume, and leave when they are finished. While in
the bunker, national boundaries are a thing of the past, in
fact you are at home. Why travel at all? After all,
wherever you go, you are already there.
There are also sedentary bunkers. This type is clearly
nationalized, and hence is the bunker of choice for
governments. It is the oldest type, appearing at the dawn
of complex society, and reaching a peak in modern society
with conglomerates of bunkers spread throughout the urban
sprawl. These bunkers are in some cases the last trace of
centralized national power (the White House), or in others,
they are locations to manufacture a complicit cultural elite
(the university), or sites of manufactured continuity
(historical monuments). These are sites most vulnerable to
electronic disturbance, as their images and mythologies are
the easiest to appropriate.
In any bunker (along with its associated geography,
territory, and ecology) the resistant cultural producer can
best achieve disturbance. There is enough consumer
technology available to at least temporarily reinscribe the
bunker with image and language that reveal its sacrificial
intent, as well as the obscenity of its bourgeois
utilitarian aesthetic. Nomadic power has created panic in
the streets, with its mythologies of political subversion,
economic deterioration, and biological infection, which in
turn produce a fortress ideology, and hence a demand for
bunkers. It is now necessary to bring panic into the
bunker, thus disturbing the illusion of security and leaving
no place to hide. The incitement of panic in all sites is
the postmodern gamble.
Chapter 3 ]]> Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries
The medium of video was born in crisis. This postmodern
technology has been shoved back into the womb of history
with the demand that it progress through the same
developmental stages as its older siblings, film and
photography. The documentary--the paramount model for
resistant video production--gives witness less to the
endless parade of guerrilla actions, street demonstrations,
and ecological disasters than it does to the persistence of
Enlightenment codes of truth, knowledge, and a stable
empirical reality. The hegemony of the documentary moves
the question of video technology away from its function as a
simulator, and back to the retrograde consideration of the
technology as a replicator (witness). Clearly technology
will not save us from the insufferable condition of eternal
recurrence.
Recall file entitled "Enlightenment." Enlightenment: A
historical moment past, which must now be looked upon
through the filter of nostalgia. Truth was so simple then.
The senses were trusted, and the discrete units of sensation
contained knowledge. To those ready to observe, nature
surrendered its secrets. Every object contained useful
pieces of data exploding with information, for the world was
a veritable network of interlocking facts. Facts were the
real concern: everything observable was endowed with
facticity. Everything concrete merited observation, from a
grain of sand to social activity. "Knowledge" went nova.
The answer to the problem of managing geometrically
cascading data was specialization: Split the task of
observation into as many categories and subcategories as
possible to prevent observational integrity from being
distracted by the proliferation of factual possibility. (It
is always amazing to see authoritarian structures run wild
in the utopian moment.) Specialization worked in the
economy (complex manufacture) and in government management
(bureaucracy); why not also with knowledge? Knowledge
entered the earthly domain (as opposed to the
transcendental), giving humanity control over its own
destiny and initiating an age of progress with science as
redeemer.
In the midst of this jubilation, a vicious scepticism
haunted the believers like the Encyclopedists, the new
social thinkers (such as Turgot, Fontenelle, and Condorcet),
and later, the logical positivists. The problem of
scepticism was exemplified by David Hume's critique of the
empirical model, which placed Enlightenment epistemology
outside the realm of certainty. The senses were shown to be
unreliable conveyers of information, and factual
associations were revealed as practical inference.
Strengthened by the romantic critique developed later under
the banner of German Idealism, the argument became
acceptable that the phenomenal world was not a source of
knowledge, since perception could be structured by given
mental categories which might or might now show fidelity to
a thing-in-itself. Under this system, science was reduced
to a practical mapping of spatial-temporal constellations.
Unfortunately, the idealists were unable to escape the
scepticism from which they had emerged. Their own system of
transcendentalism was just as susceptible to the sceptic's
arguments.
Science found itself in a peculiar position in regard to the
19th-century sociology of knowledge. Since it did produce
what secularists interpreted as desirable practical results,
it became an ideological legitimizer even on the ordinary
level of everyday life. Within the sceptic's vacuum,
empirical science by default usurped the right to pronounce
what was real in experience. Sensible judgement was secure
in the present, but to judge past events required immediate
perception to be reconstituted through memory. The problem
of memory was transformed into a technological problem
because the subjective elements of memory led to the decay
of the facticity of the sensible object, and written
representation as a means to maintain history was
insufficient. Although theory and method were mature and
legitimized, a satisfactory technology had yet to emerge.
This problem finally resolved itself with the invention of
photography. Photography could provide a concrete visual
record (vision being the most trustworthy of the senses) as
an account of the past. Photography represented facts,
rather than subjectively dissolving them into memory, or
abstracting them as with writing. At last, there was a
visual replicator to produce a record independent of the
witness. Technology could mediate perception, and thereby
impose objectivity upon the visual record. To this extent,
photography was embraced more as a scientific tool than as a
means to manifest aesthetic intent.
Artists from all media began to embrace the empirical model,
which had been rejuvenated by these innovations in
replicating technology. Their interest in turn gave birth
to Realism and literary Naturalism. In these new genres,
the desire for replication became more complex. A new
political agenda had insinuated itself into cultural
production. Unlike in the past when politics generally
served to maintain the status quo, the agenda of the newly-
born left began to make a clear-cut appearance in empirical
cultural representation. The proponents of the movement no
longer worshipped the idealistic cultural icons of the
romantic predecessors, but fetishized facticity--tendencies
that reduced the artist's role to that of mechanical
reproduction. The visual presentation of factual data
allowed one to objectively witness the injustice of history,
providing those eliminated from the historical record a way
to make their places known. The use of traditional media
combined with Enlightenment epistemology to promote a new
leftist ideology that failed relatively fast. Even the
experimental novels of Zola, in the end, could only be
perceived as fiction, not as historical accounts. The
Realist painters' work seemed equally unreliable, as the
paintbrush was not a satisfactory technological means to
insure objectivity, while its product was tied too closely
to an elitist tradition and to its institutions. Perhaps
their only actual victory was to produce a degraded sign of
subversive intent that meekly insisted on the
horizontalization of traditional aesthetic categories,
particularly in the area of subject matter.
By the end of the century, having nowhere else to turn, some
leftist cultural producers began to rethink photography and
its new advancement, film. The first documentary makers
intended to produce an objective and accurate visual record
of social injustice and leftist resistance, and guided by
those aims the documentary began to take form. The
excitement over new possibilities for socially responsible
representation allowed production to precede critical
reflection about the medium, and the mistakes that were made
continue as institutions into the present.
The film documentary was a catastrophe from its inception. Even
as far back as the Lumiere brothers' work, the facticity of
nonfiction film has been crushed under the burden of
ideology. A film such as _Workers Leaving the Lumiere
Factory_ functions primarily as an advertisement for
industrialization--a sign of the future divorced from the
historical forces which generated it. In spite of its
static camera and the necessary lack of editing, the
function of replication was lost, because the life presented
in the film was yet to exist for most. From this point on,
the documentary proceeded deeper into its own fatality. A
film such as _Elephant Processions at Phnom Penh_ became the
predecessor of what we now think of as the cynical
postmodern work. The documentary went straight to the heart
of colonial appropriation. This film was a spectacular
sideshow that allowed the viewer to temporarily enter a
culture that never existed. It was an opportunity to revel
in a simulated event, again isolated from any type of
historical context. In this sense, Lumiere was Disney's
predecessor. Disney World is the completion of the Lumiere
cultural sideshow project. By appropriating cultural debris
and reassembling it in a means palatable for temporary
consumption, Disney does in 3-D what Lumiere had done in 2-
D: produce a simulation of the world culture-text in the
fixed location of the bunker.
The situation continued to worsen. Robert Flaherty
introduced complex narrative into the documentary in his
film _Nanook of the North_. The film was marked by an
overcoded film grammar that transcendentally generated a
story out of what were supposed to be raw facts. The gaps
between the disparate re-presented images had to be brought
together by the glue of the romantic ideology favored by the
filmmaker. In a manner of speaking, this had to happen,
since there were no facts to begin with, but only
reconstituted memory. Flaherty's desire to produce the
exotic led him to simulate a past that never existed. In
the film's most famous sequence, Flaherty recreates a walrus
hunt. Nanook had never been on a hunt without guns, but
Flaherty insisted he use harpoons. Nanook had a memory of
what his father had told him about traditional hunting, and
he had seen old Eskimo renderings of it. Out of these
memories, entwined with Falherty's romantic conceptions, the
walrus hunt was reenacted. Representation was piled on
representation under the pretense of an unachievable
originality. It did make an exciting and entertaining
story, but it had no more factual integrity than D. W.
Griffiths' _Birth of a Nation_.
It is unnecessary to repeat the cynical history of the
documentary oscillating along the political continuum from
Vertov to Riefenstahl. In all cases it has been
fundamentally cynical--a political commodity doomed by the
very nature of the technology to continually replay itself
within the economy of desire. Film is not now nor has it
ever been the technology of truth. It lies at a speed of 24
frames a second. Its value is not as a recorder of history,
but simply as a means of communication, a means by which
meaning is generated. The frightening aspect of the
documentary film is that it can generate rigid history in
the present in the same manner that Disney can generate the
colonial meaning of the culture of the Other. Whenever
imploded films exist simultaneously as fiction and
nonfiction they stand as evidence that history is made in
Hollywood.
The documentary's uneasy alliance with scientific methodology
attempts to exploit the seeming power of science to stop the
drift of multifaceted interpretation. Justifiably or not,
scientific evidence is incontrovertible; it rests
comfortably under the sign of certitude. This is the
authority that the documentary attempts to claim for itself.
Consequently, documentary makers have always used
authoritarian coding systems to structure the documentary
narrative.
This strategy relies on the complete exhaustion of the image
at the moment of immediate apprehension. The narrative
structure must envelop the viewer like a net and close off
all other possible interpretation. The narrative guiding
the interpretation of the images must flow along a unilinear
pathway, at such a speed that the viewer has no time for any
reflection. Key in this movement is to produce the
impression that each image is causatively linked to the
images preceding it. Establishment of causality between the
images renders a seamless effect and keeps the viewers'
interpretive flow moving along a predetermined course. The
course ends with the conclusion prepared by the documentary
maker in constructing the causal chain of images, offering
what seems to be an incontrovertible resolving statement.
After all, who can challenge replicated causality? Its
legitimation by traditional rational authority is too great.
A documentary fails when the causal chain breaks down,
showing the seams and allowing a moment of disbelief to
disrupt the predetermined interpretive matrix. Without the
scientific principle of causality rigorously structuring the
narrative, the documentary's legitimized authority
dissipates quite rapidly, revealing its true nature as
fictional propaganda. When a legitimation crisis occurs in
the film, the image becomes transparent, rather than
exhausting itself, and the ideology of the narrative is
displayed in all its horrifying glory. The quality
documentary does not reveal itself, and it is this
illusionistic chicanery--first perfected by Hollywood
realism--that unfortunately guides the grand majority of
documentary and video witness work that leftist cultural
workers currently produce in endless streams.
This pitiful display is particularly insidious because it
turns the leftist cultural workers into that which they most
fear: Validators of the conservative interpretive matrix.
If the fundamental principle of conservative politics is to
maintain order for the sake of economy, to complement the
needs and desires of the economic elite, and to discourage
social heterogeneity, then the documentary, as it now
stands, is complicit in participating in that order, even if
it flies the banner of social justice over its ideological
fortress. This is true because the documentary does not
create an opportunity for free thought, but instills self-
censorship in the viewer, who must absorb its images within
the structure of a totalizing narrative. If one examines
the sign of censorship itself, as it was embodied, for
example, in Jesse Helms' criticisms of Andre Serrano's _Piss
Christ_, one can see the methods of totalizing
interpretation at work. Helms argued that a figure of
Christ submerged in piss leads to a single conclusion, that
the work is an obscene sacrilege. Helms' interpretation is
a fair one; however, it is not the only one. Helms used
senatorial spectacle as an authority to legitimize and
totalize his interpretation. Under his privileged
interpretive matrix, the image is immediately exhausted.
However, anyone who reflects on Serrano's image for only a
moment can see that numerous other meanings are contained
within it. There are meanings that are both critical and
aesthetic (formal). Helms' overall strategy was not so much
to use personal power as a means to censorship, but to
create the preconditions for the public to blindly follow
into self-censorship, thereby agreeing to the homogenous
order desired by the elite class. The resistant documentary
depends upon this same set of conditions for its success.
The long-term consequences of using such methods, even with
good intentions, is to make the viewer increasingly
susceptible to illusionistic narrative structure, while the
model itself becomes increasingly sophisticated through its
constant revision. Anywhere along the political continuum
the electronic consumer turns, s/he is treated like media
sheep. To stop this manipulation, documentary makers must
refuse to sacrifice the subjectivity of the viewer. The
nonfiction film needs to travel other avenues than the one
inherited from tradition.