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THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE
Critical Art Ensemble
Part 5 of 7
Published by Autonomedia
ISBN 1-57027-006-6
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%Body without Organs% (second manifestation)
BwO NOW.
BwO NOW.
BwO NOW.
Imperfect flesh is the foundation of screenal economy. The
frenzy of the screenal sign oscillates between perfection
and excess, production and counter-production, panic and
hysteria. Screenal space inscribes the flesh as the abject.
The screenal space seduces the flesh into the abyss of the
surface. The electronic body is the perfect body. The
Electronic body is the body without organs positioned in its
screenal space. It is both self and mirrored self. The
electronic body is the complete body. The body without
organs does not decay. The electronic body does not need
the plastic surgeon's scalpel, liposuction, make-up, or
deodorant. It is a body without organs which cannot suffer,
not physiologically, not psychologically, not
sociologically; it is not conscious of separation. The
electronic body seduces those who see it into the bliss of
counter-production by offering the hope of a bodily unity
that transcends consumption. But the poor, pathetic,
organic body is always in a state of becoming. If it
consumed just one more product, perhaps it might become
whole, perhaps it too could become a body without organs
existing in electronic space.
The electronic body oscillates between panic perfection and
hysterical aphanisis. The electronic body inscribes the
flesh as the abject. At any moment the organic body could
fracture and its surface could decay with sickness, ooze and
squirt anti-social fluids. The electronic body has shown
%ad nauseam% that the spilling of guts, the projecting of
vomit, the splitting of skin, the eruption of pus, or any
sign of the organic in screenal space exists there only to
instill fear, contempt, and embarrassment.
BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
BwO NOW.
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Chapter 5 ]]> Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality,
and Electronic Cultural Production
Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural
world. Typically it has been viewed as the theft of
language, ideas, and images by the less than talented, often
for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige. Yet,
like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily
inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation
of representation and the privatization of language that are
suspect; perhaps the plagiarist's actions, given a specific
set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to
cultural enrichment. Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism
was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English
poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch
and call it his own. In accordance with the classical
aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly
acceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested
less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in
the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it
probably would not have appeared. The works of English
plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne,
Coleridge, and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the
English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this
day.
At present, new conditions have emerged that once again make
plagiarism an acceptable, even crucial strategy for textual
production. This is the age of the recombinant:
recombinant bodies, recombinant gender, recombinant texts,
recombinant culture. Looking back through the privileged
frame of hindsight, one can argue that the recombinant has
always been key in the development of meaning and invention;
recent extraordinary advances in electronic technology have
called attention to the recombinant both in theory and in
practice (for example, the use of morphing in video and
film). The primary value of all electronic technology,
especially computers and imaging systems, is the startling
speed at which they can transmit information in both raw and
refined forms. As information flows at a high velocity
through the electronic networks, disparate and sometimes
incommensurable systems of meaning intersect, with both
enlightening and inventive consequences. In a society
dominated by a "knowledge" explosion, exploring the
possibilities of meaning in that which already exists is
more pressing than adding redundant information (even if it
is produced using the methodology and metaphysic of the
"original"). In the past, arguments in favor of plagiarism
were limited to showing its use in resisting the
privatization of culture that serves the needs and desires
of the power elite. Today one can argue that plagiarism is
acceptable, even inevitable, given the nature of postmodern
existence with its techno-infrastructure. In a recombinant
culture, plagiarism is productive, although we need not
abandon the romantic model of cultural production which
privileges a model of %ex nihilo% creation. Certainly in a
general sense the latter model is somewhat anachronistic.
There are still specific situations where such thinking is
useful, and one can never be sure when it could become
appropriate again. What is called for is an end to its
tyranny and to its institutionalized cultural bigotry. This
is a call to open the cultural data base, to let everyone
use the technology of textual production to its maximum
potential.
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in
the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress
implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use
of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces
it with the right idea. (1)
Plagiarism often carries a weight of negative connotations
(particularly in the bureaucratic class); while the need for
its use has increased over the century, plagiarism itself
has been camouflaged in a new lexicon by those desiring to
explore the practice as method and as a legitimized form of
cultural discourse. Readymades, collage, found art or found
text, intertexts, combines, detournement, and appropriation-
-all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism.
Indeed, these terms are not perfectly synonymous, but they
all intersect a set of meanings primary to the philosophy
and activity of plagiarism. Philosophically, they all stand
in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text: They
all assume that no structure within a given text provides a
universal and necessary meaning. No work of art of
philosophy exhausts itself in itself alone, in its being-in-
itself. Such works have always stood in relation to the
actual life-process of society from which they have
distinguished themselves. Enlightenment essentialism failed
to provide a unit of analysis that could act as a basis of
meaning. Just as the connection between a signifier and its
referent is arbitrary, the unit of meaning used for any
given textual analysis is also arbitrary. Roland Barthes'
notion of the lexia primarily indicates surrender in the
search for a basic unit of meaning. Since language was the
only tool available for the development of metalanguage,
such a project was doomed from its inception. It was much
like trying to eat soup with soup. The text itself is
fluid--although the language game of ideology can provide
the illusion of stability, creating blockage by manipulating
the unacknowledged assumptions of everyday life.
Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to
restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by
appropriating and recombining fragments of culture. In this
way, meanings can be produced that were not previously
associated with an object or a given set of objects.
Marcel Duchamp, one of the first to understand the power of
recombination, presented an early incarnation of this new
aesthetic with his readymade series. Duchamp took objects
to which he was "visually indifferent," and recontextualized
them in a manner that shifted their meaning. For example,
by taking a urinal out of the rest room, signing it, and
placing it on a pedestal in an art gallery, meaning slid
away from the apparently exhaustive functional
interpretation of the object. Although this meaning did not
completely disappear, it was placed in harsh juxtaposition
to another possibility--meaning as an art object. This
problem of instability increased when problems of origin
were raised: The object was not made by an artist, but by a
machine. Whether or not the viewer chose to accept other
possibilities for interpreting the function of the artist
and the authenticity of the art object, the urinal in a
gallery instigated a moment of uncertainty and reassessment.
This conceptual game has been replayed numerous times over
the 20th century, at times for very narrow purposes, as with
Rauschenberg's combines--done for the sake of attacking the
critical hegemony of Clement Greenberg--while at other times
it has been done to promote large-scale political and
cultural restructuring, as in the case of the Situationists.
In each case, the plagiarist works to open meaning through
the injection of scepticism into the culture-text.
Here one also sees the failure of Romantic essentialism.
Even the alleged transcendental object cannot escape the
sceptics' critique. Duchamp's notion of the inverted
readymade (turning a Rembrandt painting into an ironing
board) suggested that the distinguished art object draws its
power from a historical legitimation process firmly rooted
in the institutions of western culture, and not from being
an unalterable conduit to transcendental realms. This is
not to deny the possibility of transcendental experience,
but only to say that if it does exist, it is prelinguistic,
and thereby relegated to the privacy of an individual's
subjectivity. A society with a complex division of labor
requires a rationalization of institutional processes, a
situation which in turn robs the individual of a way to
share nonrational experience. Unlike societies with a
simple division of labor, in which the experience of one
member closely resembles the experience of another (minimal
alienation), under a complex division of labor, the life
experience of the individual turned specialist holds little
in common with other specialists. Consequently,
communication exists primarily as an instrumental function.
Plagiarism has historically stood against the privileging of
any text through spiritual, scientific, or other
legitimatizing myths. The plagiarist sees all objects as
equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena.
All texts become potentially usable and reusable. Herein
lies an epistemology of anarchy, according to which the
plagiarist argues that if science, religion, or any other
social institution precludes certainty beyond the realm of
the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with as
many categories of interpretation as possible. The tyranny
of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as
greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive
costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking
and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high.
Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should
instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best
suited to the social conditions of a given situation.
It is a matter of throwing together various cut-up
techniques in order to respond to the omnipresence of
transmitters feeding us with their dead discourses
(mass media, publicity, etc.). It is a question of
unchaining the codes--not the subject anymore--so that
something will burst out, will escape; words beneath
words, personal obsessions. Another kind of word is
born which escapes from the totalitarianism of the
media but retains their power, and turns it against
their old masters.
Cultural production, literary or otherwise, has traditionally
been a slow, labor-intensive process. In painting,
sculpture, or written work, the technology has always been
primitive by contemporary standards. Paintbrushes, hammers
and chisels, quills and paper, and even the printing press
do not lend themselves well to rapid production and broad-
range distribution. The time lapse between production and
distribution can seem unbearably long. Book arts and
traditional visual arts still suffer tremendously from this
problem, when compared to the electronic arts. Before
electronic technology became dominant, cultural perspectives
developed in a manner that more clearly defined texts as
individual works. Cultural fragments appeared in their won
right as discrete units, since their influence moved slowly
enough to allow the orderly evolution of an argument or an
aesthetic. Boundaries could be maintained between
discipline and schools of thought. Knowledge was considered
finite, and was therefore easier to control. In the 19th
century this traditional order began to collapse as new
technology began to increase the velocity of cultural
development. The first strong indicators began to appear
that speed was becoming a crucial issue. Knowledge was
shifting away from certitude, and transforming itself into
information. During the American Civil War, Lincoln sat
impatiently by his telegraph line, awaiting reports from his
generals at the front. He had no patience with the long-
winded rhetoric of the past, and demanded from his generals
an efficient economy of language. There was no time for the
traditional trappings of the elegant essayist. Cultural
velocity and information have continued to increase at a
geometric rate since then, resulting in an information
panic. Production and distribution of information (or any
other product) must be immediate; there can be no lag time
between the two. Techno-culture has met this demand with
data bases and electronic networks that rapidly move any
type of information.
Under such conditions, plagiarism fulfills the requirements
of economy of representation, without stifling invention.
If invention occurs when a new perception or idea is brought
out--by intersecting two or more formally disparate systems-
-then recombinant methodologies are desirable. This is
where plagiarism progresses beyond nihilism. It does not
simply interject scepticism to help destroy totalitarian
systems that stop invention; it participates in invention,
and is thereby also productive. The genius of an inventor
like Leonardo da Vinci lay in his ability to recombine the
then separate systems of biology, mathematics, engineering,
and art. He was not so much an originator as a synthesizer.
There have been few people like him over the centuries,
because the ability to hold that much data in one's own
biological memory is rare. Now, however, the technology of
recombination is available in the computer. The problem now
for would-be cultural producers is to gain access to this
technology and information. After all, access is the most
precious of all privileges, and is therefore strictly
guarded, which in turn makes one wonder whether to be a
successful plagiarist, one must also be a successful hacker.
Most serious writers refuse to make themselves
available to the things that technology is doing. I
have never been able to understand this sort of fear.
Many are afraid of using tape recorders, and the idea
of using any electronic means for literary or artistic
purposes seems to them some sort of sacrilege.
To some small degree, a small portion of technology has fallen
through the cracks into the hands of the lucky few.
Personal computers and video cameras are the best examples.
To accompany these consumer items and make their use more
versatile, hypertextual and image sampling programs have
also been developed--program designed to facilitate
recombination. It is the plagiarist's dream to be able to
call up, move, and recombine text with simple user-friendly
commands. Perhaps plagiarism rightfully belongs to post-
book culture, since only in that society can it be made
explicit what book culture, with its geniuses and auteurs,
tends to hide--that information is most useful when it
interacts with other information, rather than when it is
deified and presented in a vacuum.
Thinking about a new means for recombining information has
always been on 20th-century minds, although this search has
been left to a few until recently. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, a
former science advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed a
new way of organizing information in an _Atlantic Monthly_
article. At that time, computer technology was in its
earliest stages of development and its full potential was
not really understood. Bush, however, had the foresight to
imagine a device he called the Memex. In his view it would
be based around storage of information on microfilm,
integrated with some means to allow the user to select and
display any section at will, thus enabling one to move
freely among previously unrelated increments of information.
At the time, Bush's Memex could not be built, but as
computer technology evolved, his idea eventually gained
practicality. Around 1960 Theodor Nelson made the
realization when he began studying computer programming in
college:
Over a period of months, I came to realize that,
although programmers structured their data
hierarchically, they didn't have to. I began to see
the computer as the ideal place for making
interconnections among things accessible to people.
I realized that writing did not have to be sequential
and that not only would tomorrow's books and magazines
be on [cathode ray terminal] screens, they could all
tie to one another in every direction. At once I began
working on a program (written in 7090 assembler
language) to carry out these ideas.
Nelson's idea, which he called hypertext, failed to attract
any supporters at first, although by 1968 its usefulness
became obvious to some in the government and in defense
industries. A prototype of hypertext was developed by
another computer innovator, Douglas Englebart, who is often
credited with many breakthroughs in the use of computers
(such as the development of the Macintosh interface,
Windows). Englebart's system, called Augment, was applied
to organizing the government's research network, ARPAnet,
and was also used by McDonnel Douglas, the defense
contractor, to aid technical work groups in coordinating
projects such as aircraft design:
All communications are automatically added to the
Augment information base and linked, when appropriate,
to other documents. An engineer could, for example,
use Augment to write and deliver electronically a work
plan to others in the work group. The other members
could then review the document and have their comments
linked to the original, eventually creating a "group
memory" of the decisions made. Augment's powerful
linking features allow users to find even old
information quickly, without getting lost or being
overwhelmed by detail.
Computer technology continued to be refined, and eventually-
-as with so many other technological breakthroughs in this
country--once it had been thoroughly exploited by military
and intelligence agencies, the technology was released for
commercial exploitation. Of course, the development of
microcomputers and consumer-grade technology for personal
computers led immediately to the need for software which
would help one cope with the exponential increase in
information, especially textual information. Probably the
first humanistic application of hypertext was in the field
of education. Currently, hypertext and hypermedia (which
adds graphic images to the network of features which can be
interconnected) continue to be fixtures in instructional
design and educational technology.
An interesting experiment in this regard was instigated in
1975 by Robert Scholes and Andries Van Dam at Brown
University. Scholes, a professor of English, was contacted
by Van Dam, a professor of computer science, who wanted to
know if there were any courses in the humanities that might
benefit from using what at the time was called a text-
editing system (now known as a word processor) with
hypertext capabilities built in. Scholes and two teaching
assistants, who formed a research group, were particularly
impressed by one aspect of hypertext. Using this program
would make it possible to peruse in a nonlinear fashion all
the interrelated materials in a text. A hypertext is thus
best seen as a web of interconnected materials. This
description suggested that there is a definite parallel
between the conception of culture-text and that of
hypertext:
One of the most important facets of literature (and one
which also leads to difficulties in interpretation) is
its reflexive nature. Individual poems constantly
develop their meanings--often through such means as
direct allusion or the reworking of traditional motifs
and conventions, at other times through subtler means,
such as genre development and expansion or biographical
reference--by referring to that total body of poetic
material of which the particular poems comprise a small
segment.
Although it was not difficult to accumulate a
hypertextually-linked data base consisting of poetic
materials, Scholes and his group were more concerned with
making it interactive--that is, they wanted to construct a
"communal text" including not only the poetry, but also
incorporating the comments and interpretations offered by
individual students. In this way, each student in turn
could read a work and attach "notes" to it about his or her
observations. The resulting "expanded text" would be read
and augmented at a terminal on which the screen was divided
into four areas. The student could call up the poem in one
of the areas (referred to as windows) and call up related
materials in the other three windows, in any sequence he or
she desired. This would powerfully reinforce the tendency
to read in a nonlinear sequence. By the means, each student
would learn how to read a work as it truly exists, not in "a
vacuum" but rather as the central point of a progressively-
revealed body of documents and ideas.
Hypertext is analogous to other forms of literary discourse
besides poetry. From the very beginning of its
manifestation as a computer program, hypertext was popularly
described as a multidimensional text roughly analogous to
the standard scholarly article in the humanities or social
sciences, because it uses the same conceptual devices, such
as footnotes, annotations, allusions to other works,
quotations from other works, etc. Unfortunately, the
convention of linear reading and writing, as well as the
physical fact of two-dimensional pages and the necessity of
binding them in only one possible sequence, have always
limited the true potential of this type of text. One
problem is that the reader is often forced to search through
the text (or forced to leave the book and search elsewhere)
for related information. This is a time-consuming and
distracting process; instead of being able to move easily
and instantly among physically remote or inaccessible areas
of information storage, the reader must cope with cumbrous
physical impediments to his or her research or creative
work. With the advent of hypertext, it has become possible
to move among related areas of information with a speed and
flexibility that at least approach finally accommodating the
workings of human intellect, to a degree that books and
sequential reading cannot possibly allow.
The recombinant text in hypertextual form signifies the
emergence of the perception of textual constellations
that have always/already gone nova. It is in this
uncanny luminosity that the authorial biomorph has been
consumed. (2)
Barthes and Foucault may be lauded for theorizing the death of
the author; the absent author is more a matter of everyday
life, however, for the technocrat recombining and augmenting
information at the computer or at a video editing console.
S/he is living the dream of capitalism that is still being
refined in the area of manufacture. The Japanese notion of
"just in time delivery," in which the units of assembly are
delivered to the assembly line just as they are called for,
was a first step in streamlining the tasks of assembly. In
such a system, there is no sedentary capital, but a constant
flow of raw commodities. The assembled commodity is
delivered to the distributor precisely at the moment of
consumer need. This nomadic system eliminates stockpiles of
goods. (There is still some dead time; however, the
Japanese have cut it to a matter of hours, and are working
on reducing it to a matter of minutes). In this way,
production, distribution, and consumption are imploded into
a single act, with no beginning or end, just unbroken
circulation. In the same manner, the online text flows in
an unbroken stream through the electronic network. There
can be no place for gaps that mark discrete units in the
society of speed. Consequently, notions of origin have no
place in electronic reality. The production of the text
presupposes its immediate distribution, consumption, and
revision. All who participate in the network also
participate in the interpretation and mutation of the
textual stream. The concept of the author did not so much
die as it simply ceased to function. The author has become
an abstract aggregate that cannot be reduced to biology or
to the psychology of personality. Indeed, such a
development has apocalyptic connotations--the fear that
humanity will be lost in the textual stream. Perhaps humans
are not capable of participating in hypervelocity. One must
answer that never has there been a time when humans were
able, one and all, to participate in cultural production.
Now, at least the potential for cultural democracy is
greater. The single bio-genius need not act as a stand-in
for all humanity. The real concern is just the same as it
has always been: the need for access to cultural resources.
The discoveries of postmodern art and criticism
regarding the analogical structures of images
demonstrate that when two objects are brought together,
no matter how far apart their contexts may be, a
relationship is formed. Restricting oneself to a
personal relationship of words is no mere convention.
The bringing together of two independent expressions
supersedes the original elements and produces a
synthetic organization of greater possibility. (3)