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THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE
Critical Art Ensemble
Part 1 of 7
Published by Autonomedia
ISBN 1-57027-006-6
Critical Art Ensemble would like to thank
Jim Fleming and all the members
of the Autonomedia Collective who helped
bring this project to fruition. We would
especially like to thank Steven Englander,
who editorial assistance was invaluable.
Anti-copyright @ 1994 Autonomedia & Critical Art Ensemble
This book may be freely pirated and quoted.
However, please inform the authors and publisher
at the address below.
Autonomedia
POB 568 Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568 USA
718-387-6471
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 1 ]]> Introduction ]]> The Virtual Condition
The rules of cultural and political resistance have dramatically
changed. The revolution in technology brought about by the
rapid development of the computer and video has created a
new geography of power relations in the first world that
could only be imagined as little as twenty years ago:
people are reduced to data, surveillance occurs on a global
scale, minds are melded to screenal reality, and an
authoritarian power emerges that thrives on absence. The
new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of
political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this
electronic space.
The West has been preparing for this moment for 2,500 years.
There has always been an idea of the virtual, whether it was
grounded in mysticism, abstract analytical thinking, or
romantic fantasy. All of these approaches have shaped and
manipulated invisible worlds accessible only through the
imagination, and in some cases these models have been given
ontological privilege. What has made contemporary concepts
and ideologies of the virtual possible is that these
preexisting systems of thought have expanded out of the
imagination, and manifested themselves in the development
and understanding of technology. The following work, as
condensed as it may be, extracts traces of the virtual from
past historical and philosophical narratives. These traces
show intertextual relationships between seemingly disparate
systems of thought that have now been recombined into a
working body of "knowledge" under the sign of technology.
Chapter 2 ]]> Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance
The term that best describes the present social condition is
liquescence. The once unquestioned markers of stability,
such as God or Nature, have dropped into the black hole of
skepticism, dissolving positioned identification of subject
or object. Meaning simultaneously flows through a process
of proliferation and condensation, at once drifting,
slipping, speeding into the antinomies of apocalypse and
utopia. The location of power--and the site of
resistance--rest in an ambiguous zone without borders. How
could it be otherwise, when the traces of power flow in
transition between nomadic dynamics and sedentary
structures--between hyperspeed and hyperinertia? It is
perhaps utopian to begin with the claim that resistance
begins (and ends?) with a Nietzschean casting-off of the
yoke of catatonia inspired by the postmodern condition, and
yet the disruptive nature of consciousness leaves little
choice.
Treading water in the pool of liquid power need not be an
image of acquiescence and complicity. In spite of their
awkward situation, the political activist and the cultural
activist (anachronistically known as the artist) can still
produce disturbances. Although such action may more closely
resemble the gestures of a drowning person, and it is
uncertain just what is being disturbed, in this situation
the postmodern roll of the dice favors the act of
disturbance. After all, what other chance is there? It is
for this reason that former strategies of "subversion" (a
word which in critical discourse has about as much meaning
as the word "community"), or camouflaged attack, have come
under a cloud of suspicion. Knowing what to subvert assumes
that forces of oppression are stable and can be identified
and separated--an assumption that is just too fantastic in
an age of dialectics in ruins. Knowing how to subvert
presupposes an understanding of the opposition that rests in
the realm of certitude, or (at least) high probability. The
rate at which strategies of subversion are co-opted
indicates that the adaptability of power is too often
underestimated; however, credit should be given to the
resisters, to the extent that the subversive act or product
is not co-optively reinvented as quickly as the bourgeois
aesthetic of efficiency might dictate.
The peculiar entwinement of the cynical and the utopian in the
concept of disturbance as a necessary gamble is a heresy to
those who still adhere to 19th-century narratives in which
the mechanisms and class(es) of oppression, as well as the
tactics needed to overcome them, are clearly identified.
After all, the wager is deeply connected to conservative
apologies for Christianity, and the attempt to appropriate
rationalist rhetoric and models to persuade the fallen to
return to traditional eschatology. A renounced Cartesian
like Pascal, or a renounced revolutionary like Dostoyevsky,
typify its use. Yet it must be realized that the promise of
a better future, whether secular or spiritual, has always
presupposed the economy of the wager. The connection
between history and necessity is cynically humorous when one
looks back over the trail of political and cultural debris
of revolution and near-revolution in ruins. The French
revolutions from 1789 to 1968 never stemmed the obscene tide
of the commodity (they seem to have helped pave the way),
while the Russian and Cuban revolutions merely replaced the
commodity with the totalizing anachronism of the
bureaucracy. At best, all that is derived from these
disruptions is a structure for a nostalgic review of
reconstituted moments of temporary autonomy.
The cultural producer has not fared any better. Mallarme'
brought forth the concept of the wager in _A Roll of the
Dice_, and perhaps unwittingly liberated invention from the
bunker of transcendentalism that he hoped to defend, as well
as releasing the artist from the myth of the poetic subject.
(It is reasonable to suggest that de Sade had already
accomplished these tasks at a much earlier date). Duchamp
(the attack on essentialism), Cabaret Voltaire (the
methodology of random production), and Berlin dada (the
disappearance of art into political action) all disturbed
the cultural waters, and yet opened one of the cultural
passages for the resurgence of transcendentalism in late
Surrealism. By way of reaction to the above three, a
channel was also opened for formalist domination (still to
this day the demon of the culture-text) that locked the
culture-object into the luxury market of late capital.
However, the gamble of these fore-runners of disturbance
reinjected the dream of autonomy with the amphetamine of
hope that gives contemporary cultural producers and
activists the energy to step up to the electronic gaming
table to roll the dice again.
In _The Persian Wars_, Herodotus describes a feared people known
as the Scythians, who maintained a horticultural-nomadic
society unlike the sedentary empires in the "cradle of
civilization." The homeland of the Scythians on the
Northern Black Sea was inhospitable both climatically and
geographically, but resisted colonization less for these
natural reasons than because there was no economic or
military means by which to colonize or subjugate it. With
no fixed cities or territories, this "wandering horde" could
never really be located. Consequently, they could never be
put on the defensive and conquered. They maintained their
autonomy through movement, making it seem to outsiders that
they were always present and poised for attack even when
absent. The fear inspired by the Scythians was quite
justified, since they were often on the military offensive,
although no one knew where until the time of their instant
appearance, or until traces of their power were discovered.
A floating border was maintained in their homeland, but
power was not a matter of spatial occupation for the
Scythians. They wandered, taking territory and tribute as
needed, in whatever area they found themselves. In so
doing, they constructed an invisible empire that dominated
"Asia" for twenty-seven years, and extended as far south as
Egypt. The empire itself was not sustainable, since their
nomadic nature denied the need or value of holding
territories. (Garrisons were not left in defeated
territories). They were free to wander, since it was
quickly realized by their adversaries that even when victory
seemed probable, for practicality's sake it was better not
to engage them, and to instead concentrate military and
economic effort on other sedentary societies--that is, on
societies in which an infrastructure could be located and
destroyed. This policy was generally reinforced, because an
engagement with the Scythians required the attackers to
allow themselves to be found by the Scythians. It was
extraordinarily rare for the Scythians to be caught in a
defensive posture. Should the Scythians not like the term
of engagement, they always had the option of remaining
invisible, and thereby preventing the enemy from
constructing a theater of operations.
This archaic model of power distribution and predatory
strategy has been reinvented by the power elite of late
capital for much the same ends. Its reinvention is
predicated upon the technological opening of cyberspace,
where speed/absence and inertia/presence collide in
hyperreality. The archaic model of nomadic power, once a
means to an unstable empire, has evolved into a sustainable
means of domination. In a state of double signification,
the contemporary society of nomads becomes both a diffuse
power field without location, and a fixed sight machine
appearing as spectacle. The former privilege allows for the
appearance of global economy, while the latter acts as a
garrison in various territories, maintaining the order of
the commodity with an ideology specific to the given area.
Although both the diffuse power field and the sight machine
are integrated through technology, and are necessary parts
for global empire, it is the former that has fully realized
the Scythian myth. The shift from archaic space to an
electronic network offers the full complement of nomadic
power advantages: The militarized nomads are always on the
offensive. The obscenity of spectacle and the terror of
speed are their constant companions. In most cases
sedentary populations submit to the obscenity of spectacle,
and contentedly pay the tribute demanded, in the form of
labor, material, and profit. First world, third world,
nation or tribe, all must give tribute. The differentiated
and hierarchical nations, classes, races, and genders of
sedentary modern society all blend under nomadic domination
into the role of its service workers--into caretakers of the
cyberelite. This separation, mediated by spectacle, offers
tactics that are beyond the archaic nomadic model. Rather
than a hostile plundering of an adversary, there is a
friendly pillage, seductively and ecstatically conducted
against the passive. Hostility from the oppressed is
rechanneled into the bureaucracy, which misdirects
antagonism away from the nomadic power field. The retreat
into the invisibility of nonlocation prevents those caught
in the panoptic spatial lock-down from defining a site of
resistance (a theater of operations), and they are instead
caught in a historical tape loop of resisting the monuments
of dead capital. (Abortion rights? Demonstrate on the
steps of the Supreme Court. For the release of drugs which
slow the development of HIV, storm the NIH). No longer
needing to take a defensive posture is the nomads' greatest
strength.
As the electronic information-cores overflow with files of
electronic people (those transformed into credit histories,
consumer types, patterns and tendencies, etc.), electronic
research, electronic money, and other forms of information
power, the nomad is free to wander the electronic net, able
to cross national boundaries with minimal resistance from
national bureaucracies. The privileged realm of electronic
space controls the physical logistics of manufacture, since
the release of raw materials and manufactured goods requires
electronic consent and direction. Such power must be
relinquished to the cyber realm, or the efficiency (and
thereby the profitability) of complex manufacture,
distribution, and consumption would collapse into a
communication gap. Much the same is true of the military;
there is cyberelite control of information resources and
dispersal. Without command and control, the military
becomes immobile, or at best limited to chaotic dispersal in
localized space. In this manner all sedentary structures
become servants of the nomads.
The nomadic elite itself is frustratingly difficult to grasp.
Even in 1956, when C. Wright Mills wrote _The Power Elite_,
it was clear that the sedentary elite already understood the
importance of invisibility. (This was quite a shift from
the looming spatial markers of power used by the feudal
aristocracy). Mills found it impossible to get any direct
information on the elite, and was left with speculations
drawn from questionable empirical categories (for example,
the social register). As the contemporary elite moves from
centralized urban areas to decentralized and
deterritorialized cyberspace, Mills' dilemma becomes
increasingly aggravated. How can a subject be critically
assessed that cannot be located, examined, or even seen?
Class analysis reaches a point of exhaustion. Subjectively
there is a feeling of oppression, and yet it is difficult to
locate, let alone assume, an oppressor. In all likelihood,
this group is not a class at all--that is, an aggregate of
people with common political and economic interests--but a
downloaded elite military consciousness. The cyberelite is
now a transcendent entity that can only be imagined.
Whether they have integrated programmed motives is unknown.
Perhaps so, or perhaps their predatory actions fragment
their solidarity, leaving shared electronic pathways and
stores of information as the only basis of unity. The
paranoia of imagination is the foundation for a thousand
conspiracy theories--all of which are true. Roll the dice.
The development of an absent and potentially unassailable nomadic
power, coupled with the rear vision of revolution in ruins,
has nearly muted the contestational voice. Traditionally,
during times of disillusionment, strategies of retreatism
begin to dominate. For the cultural producer, numerous
examples of cynical participation populate the landscape of
resistance. The experience of Baudelaire comes to mind. In
1848 Paris he fought on the barricades, guided by the notion
that "property is theft," only to turn to cynical nihilism
after the revolution's failure. (Baudeliare was never able
to completely surrender. His use of plagiarism as an
inverted colonial strategy forcefully recalls the notion
that property is theft). Andre Breton's early surrealist
project--synthesizing the liberation of desire with the
liberation of the worker--unraveled when faced with the rise
of fascism. (Breton's personal arguments with Louis Aragon
over the function of the artist as revolution agent should
also be noted. Breton never could abandon the idea of
poetic self as a privileged narrative.) Breton increasingly
embraced mysticism in the 30s, and ended by totally
retreating into transcendentalism. The tendency of the
disillusioned cultural worker to retreat toward
introspection to sidestep the Enlightenment question of
"what is to be done with the social situation in light of
sadistic power?" is the representation of life through
denial. It is not that interior liberation is undesirable
and unnecessary, only that it cannot become singular or
privileged. To turn away from the revolution of everyday
life, and place cultural resistance under the authority of
the poetic self, has always led to cultural production that
is the easiest to commodify and bureaucratize.
From the American postmodern viewpoint, the 19th-century
category of the poetic self (as delineated by the Decadents,
the Symbolists, the Nabis School, etc.) has come to
represent complicity and acquiescence when presented as
pure. The culture of appropriation has eliminated this
option in and of itself. (It still has some value as a
point of intersection. For example, bell hooks uses it well
as an entrance point to other discourses). Though in need
of revision, Asger Jorn's modernist motto "The avant-garde
never gives up!" still has some relevance. Revolution in
ruins and the labyrinth of appropriation have emptied the
comforting certitude of the dialectic. The marxist
watershed, during which the means of oppression had a clear
identity, and the route of resistance was unilinear, has
disappeared into the void of skepticism. However, this is
no excuse for surrender. The ostracized surrealist, Georges
Bataille, presents an option still not fully explored: In
everyday life, rather than confronting the aesthetic of
utility, attack from the rear through the nonrational
economy of the perverse and sacrificial. Such a strategy
offers the possibility for intersecting exterior and
interior disturbance.
The significance of the movement of disillusionment from
Baudelaire to Artaud is that its practitioners imagined
sacrificial economy. However, their conception of it was
too often limited to an elite theater of tragedy, thus
reducing it to a resource for "artistic" exploitation. To
complicate matters further, the artistic presentation of the
perverse was always so serious that sites of application
were often consequently overlooked. Artaud's stunning
realization that the body without organs had appeared,
although he seemed uncertain as to what it might be, was
limited to tragedy and apocalypse. Signs and traces of the
body without organs appear throughout mundane experience.
The body without organs is Ronald McDonald, not an esoteric
aesthetic; after all, there is a critical place for comedy
and humor as a means of resistance. Perhaps this is the
Situationist International's greatest contribution to the
postmodern aesthetic. The dancing Nietzsche lives.
In addition to aestheticized retreatism, a more sociological
variety appeals to romantic resisters--a primitive version
of nomadic disappearance. This is the disillusioned retreat
to fixed areas that elude surveillance. Typically, the
retreat is to the most culturally negating rural areas, or
to deterritorialized urban neighborhoods. The basic
principle is to achieve autonomy by hiding from social
authority. As in band societies whose culture cannot be
touched because it cannot be found, freedom is enhanced for
those participating in the project. However, unlike band
societies, which emerged within a given territory, these
transplanted communities are always susceptible to
infections from spectacle, language, and even nostalgia for
former environments, rituals, and habits. These communities
are inherently unstable (which is not necessarily negative).
Whether these communities can be transformed from
campgrounds for the disillusioned and defeated (as in late
60s-early 70s America) to effective bases for resistance
remains to be seen. One has to question, however, whether
an effective sedentary base of resistance will not be
quickly exposed and undermined, so that it will not last
long enough to have an effect.
Another 19th-century narrative that persists beyond its natural
life is the labor movement--i.e., the belief that the key to
resistance is to have an organized body of workers stop
production. Like revolution, the idea of the union has been
shattered, and perhaps never existed in everyday life. The
ubiquity of broken strikes, give-backs, and lay-offs attests
that what is called a union is no more than a labor
bureaucracy. The fragmentation of the world--intonations,
regions, first and third worlds, etc., as a means of
discipline by nomadic power--has anachronized national labor
movements. Production sites are too mobile and management
techniques too flexible for labor action to be effective.
If labor in one area resists corporate demands, an
alternative labor pool is quickly found. The movement of
Dupont's and General Motors' production plants into Mexico,
for example, demonstrates this nomadic ability. Mexico as
labor colony also allows reduction of unit cost, by
eliminating first world "wage standards" and employee
benefits. The speed of the corporate world is paid for by
the intensification of exploitation; sustained fragmentation
of time and of space makes it possible. The size and
desperation of the third world labor pool, in conjunction
with complicit political systems, provide organized labor no
base from which to bargain.
The Situationists attempted to contend with this problem by
rejecting the value of both labor and capital. All should
quit work--proles, bureaucrats, service workers, everyone.
Although it is easy to sympathize with the concept, it
presupposes an impractical unity. The notion of a general
strike was much too limited; it got bogged down in national
struggles, never moving beyond Paris, and in the end it did
little damage to the global machine. The hope of a more
elite strike manifesting itself in the occupation movement
was a strategy that was also dead on arrival, for much the
same reason.
The Situationist delight in occupation is interesting to the
extent that it was an inversion of the aristocratic right to
property, although this very fact makes it suspect from its
inception, since even modern strategies should not merely
seek to invert feudal institutions. The relationship
between occupation and ownership, as presented in the
conservative social thought, was appropriated by
revolutionaries in the first French revolution. The
liberation and occupation of the Bastille was significant
less for the few prisoners released, than to signal that
obtaining property through occupation is a double-edged
sword. This inversion made the notion of property into a
conservatively viable justification for genocide. In the
Irish genocide of the 1840s, English landowners realized
that it would be more profitable to use their estates for
raising grazing animals than to leave the tenant farmers
there who traditionally occupied the land. When the potato
blight struck, destroying the tenant farmers' crops and
leaving them unable to pay rent, an opening was perceived
for mass eviction. English landlords requested and received
military assistance from London to remove the farmers and to
ensure they did not reoccupy the land. Of course the
farmers believed they had the right to be on the land due to
their long-standing occupation of it, regardless of their
failure to pay rent. Unfortunately, the farmers were
transformed into a pure excess population since their right
to property by occupation was not recognized. Laws were
passed denying them the right to immigrate to England,
leaving thousands to die without food or shelter in the
Irish winter. Some were able to immigrate to the US, and
remained alive, but only as abject refugees. Meanwhile, in
the US itself, the genocide of Native Americans was well
underway, justified in part by the belief that since the
native tribes did not own land, all territories were open,
and once occupied (invested with sedentary value), they
could be "defended." Occupation theory has been more bitter
than heroic.
In the postmodern period of nomadic power, labor and occupation
movements have not been relegated to the historical scrap
heap, but neither have they continued to exercise the
potency that they once did. Elite power, having rid itself
of its national and urban bases to wander in absence on the
electronic pathways, can no longer be disrupted by
strategies predicated upon the contestation of sedentary
forces. The architectural monuments of power are hollow and
empty, and function now only as bunkers for the complicit
and those who acquiesce. They are secure places revealing
mere traces of power. As with all monumental architecture,
they silence resistance and resentment by the signs of
resolution, continuity, commodification, and nostalgia.
These places can be occupied, but to do so will not disrupt
the nomadic flow. At best such an occupation is a
disturbance that can be made invisible through media
manipulation; a particularly valued bunker (such as a
bureaucracy) can be easily reoccupied by the postmodern war
machine. The electronic valuables inside the bunker, of
course, cannot be taken by physical measures.
The web connecting the bunkers--the street--is of such
little value to the nomadic power that it has been left to
the underclass. (One exception is the greatest monument to
the war machine every constructed: The Interstate Highway
System. Still valued and well defended, that location shows
almost no signs of disturbance.) Giving the street to the
most alienated of classes ensures that only profound
alienation can occur there. Not just the police, but
criminals, addicts, and even the homeless are being used as
disrupters of public space. The underclass' actual
appearance, in conjunction with media spectacle, has allowed
the forces of order to construct the hysterical perception
that the streets are unsafe, unwholesome, and useless. The
promise of safety and familiarity lures hordes of
unsuspecting into privatized public spaces such as malls.
The price of this protectionism is the relinquishment of
individual sovereignty. No one but the commodity has rights
in the mall. The streets in particular and public spaces in
general are in ruins. Nomadic power speaks to its followers
through the autoexperience of electronic media. The smaller
the public, the greater the order.