- text by Bojana Kunst
- Lecture at the Conference: Ohne Schnur, Art and Wireless Communication (Cuxhaven, Germany, 3-4. April, 2004).
# reference:
|
wPack wireless packages ][ distribution center project by Igor Stromajer, intima | virtual base, April 2004 Ohne Schnur - Art and Wireless Communication, Cuxhaven, Germany |
Visit kunstbody.wordpress.com for updates.
I.
If we lay out the main characteristics of our life in the contemporary post-capitalist society one of the most important is definitely being wireless. With the continuous increase of mobile communication, Internet connection and global economic networks, 'to be wireless' becomes the main feature of different aspects of our contemporary life, being private or public. But to really understand the consequences of the wireless mode of being we have to ask ourselves the following question: what does it exactly mean to be wireless? We cannot be wireless if not at the same time fully connected. This ambivalent feature is revealing to us how being wireless on one side means disclosing the immateriality and virtuality of multiple and parallel ways of communication, revealing its abstract and fluid potentialities. Such an utopian feature was very much at stake with the avant-garde fascination in technology at the beginning of the 20th century. But on the other side connection today is becoming a more and more highly elaborated procedure, which has to be done with perfection by the military, economical and political power structures. Connection is more and more the only real 'wire', which links our globalised world together. In its abstract potentiality and fluidity it paradoxically bears at the same time the most monolithic and the most fragile materiality. Therefore there is no wonder that today we can frequently hear that connecting has become one of our basic needs: every invisibility, every break or absence of connection is associated with deep fear. Being disconnected seems to pose one of the biggest threats in today's world, be it in the economic, social, intimate or private sphere.
Nevertheless, in K. W. Jeter's science fiction novel Noir (1999), the notion of connection acquires an entirely opposite meaning. #1 Connection becomes something ugly, something to be dismissed, and is used in a very particular sense – as a swearword. People curse at each other with expressions like 'connect you mother connector', or 'get the connect outta here'. In other words, you have fucked up entirely if you are connected. In the world of Noir, where businessmen walk with "swarms of e-mails buzzing around their heads [...] tiny holo d'images yatering around them for attention" #2, it is of course not hard to imagine why the word connection is a very handy swearing. Imagine, for example, a world full of so-called 'blurbflyers' (as in Jeff Noon's novel Nymphomation #3) - artificial insects whose buzzing songs transmit advertising messages. When those insect messengers come calling, it is impossible for you not to respond. You may of course swat or chase away one fly, but more of them will always show up. But this enormous inflation and almost 'biological' presence of connection (which takes the form of our natural surroundings) is not the only cause why connection becomes a dirty word. Every connection also has its price, "Reach out and touch someone? It's the worst thing that could happen to you. Every connection has its price; the one thing you can be sure is that, sooner or later, you will have to pay." #4 The connection is therefore not just multiplied and inflated, it is not only turning our surroundings into the always connected surroundings; it is also owned, exploited, produced, with somebody always making a big profit out of it. It is always structured like a constant flow. But there is also a very important threat to this overwhelming flow: connections everywhere also mean that there is always somebody who, similarly as in Manuel Castells's description of the contemporary ruling elite #5, lives and works comfortably in a network society but does not want to become part of the flow himself.
II.
Today the notion of connection has become quite unspecific; it is not so easy to pinpoint it at all.
Not only is connection a major characteristic of contemporary media and information society; it has also become our main mode of being - the core of ontology of our wireless world and being. Contemporary being could be namely understood as mediation par excellence; it is characterized today by ceaselessly connecting and blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, life and non-life, man and woman, the produced and the non-produced, man and machine, me and other, location and dislocation, utopia and dystopia. Today, human and non-human identities are served together on the tables of palimpsest and multilayered contemporary cuisine. Our being is becoming more and more partitioned and shared, or as Ollivier Dyens said: "We are both unique and multiple, organic and inorganic, scientific and irrational. A human being is a wave on the ocean of the world, a fleeting and unstable, yet perfectly visible form of uncertain origin, a form whose borders are constantly shifting and whose ontology is nothing but the visible traces of its own primordial origins. Within us exist times and spaces of thousands of preceding biological realities, realities that have formed, deformed and reformed us." #6 In such processes, we are becoming deeply interdependent, with our materiality becoming the result of skin, ideals, organs, machines, cultures, etc. Besides this evolutionary and almost ontological concept, which has enormously expanded the concept of connection, there is also another observation to consider. Without it, every evolutionary optimism is namely very quickly doomed to inert predictability. The observation is a part of the talk about the changes brought by the omnipresence of connections in our contemporary political and economic reality. This perspective is dealt with by the French philosopher Bruno Latour and can be found in many materialistic positions, which are deeply aware that there is a big change happening in the public sphere today. #7 Latour observes how mediation entered the public and political life in the previous century, how connection became more and more visible in the political and public life. What Latour shows is a specific decay of the old regime of modernity, which shifted mediation and connection from the public life to the scientific and technological territories. #8 There was always a great divide, Latour says, in the history of modernity: political territory was a place of purification and division, but in the scientific laboratories, the invisible proliferation of monsters continued. #9 Although welcomed and allowed in the black box of the scientific laboratory, or in artistic imagination, connections are avoided in the realm of the social, political, representative, constitutional.
With the omnipresence of the contemporary connections the main question today however is how, with all these connections penetrating our contemporary life, the non-human object should be legitimised and given representation. As Latour says, the problem is how to slow down, reorient "and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially. Will a different democracy become necessary? A democracy extended to things?" #10 With the politics turning into biopolitics in every aspect of life, this perspective is becoming more and more interesting and generates big questions.
At this point it is challenging to observe the different ways, how connection is entering our contemporary life and how it is still represented as a threat to our daily political, social and economic reality. On one hand there is a constant threat at work of being disconnected, on the other there is a conviction that - as K. W. Jeter said in Noir - being connected is the biggest threat. In any case the political consequences of both sides are radical and overwhelming: they evoke not only a global economical catastrophe, but also a disaster in the intimate and private spheres of life. I would like to examine this two understandings more closely and show what kind of procedure connection is becoming in our contemporary life and what are the paradoxes at work when we are talking about politics of connections.
III.
When in the history of modernity connection entered public life, this mostly resulted in the uncanny (unheimliche) meeting, which could very clearly be observed for example by the meeting of man and machine. What is interesting here is that some of the traces of this historical uncanny meeting can be found precisely in the contemporary fear of being disconnected. The belief that being disconnected represents one of our main economic, political and even intimate fears, veils some old threats: in this fear of being disconnected, there is again a wish for the big Other at work, for location and control, for division and regulated differentiation, for non-stop regulation of the enormous productivity and intellectual potentiality of today. The productive hypertrophy is namely one of the results of the omnipresence of contemporary connections and is with its hypertrophic materiality endangering the manageable transparency of the connecting procedure itself. What we have here is a clear paranoid situation, persistently reinterpreting and hiding its own cause by giving the cause the disguise of the effect. If we go back into history, we see that disconnection has always been an effect of the uncanny meeting with connection; it has been the first terrifying sign of the ambivalent in-betweeness that reveals in this meeting. People suddenly become frozen when meeting the machine, their reason disappears, they are physically immobile, there are suddenly located and facing their own disappearance in the mirror of the artificial creature, they are silenced and behave as if they were dead.
The fear of being disconnected is then not a new fear; it is a transformed version of our old fears of the fluidity and disappearing of the borders between the natural and the artificial, life and non-life, me and the other. The main imperative logic of this threat - 'when the connection gets broken, there should be chaos' - does not take into consideration that connection is not a hierarchical procedure but the very core of the aforementioned ambivalence. It is the arrangement of the intermediary, the very arrangement of the in-betweenes. What really produces the threat is therefore not the connection per se but the so-called impossible location of connection: the chaos is exactly the effect of to precarious control and care of the real or imaginary centre. The threat of being disconnected is the result of excessive familiarity and territorialisation (which can be found in corporations, monopolies, power structures, producers of information, imagination and entertainment etc.). What is really endangered here is thus exactly the hardcore centre, which however always presents itself as fluid and light and disconnection as overwhelmingly chaotic. If the constant internal threat of connection lies in its collapse, that means that connection is in advance understood as centred and hierarchical procedure: only in this case, the big Other can enter the scene. What is really threatening here is then not the omnipresence of connections, but the power of the invisible hand, which constantly has to produce ambivalence and chaos to carry on with the state of exception. This is also the only way in which it can suddenly descend to bring order to its dispersed and chaotic individual atoms. The threat of disconnection could be then described as a very dangerous and reactionary reaction to the mediation and connection entering the public and political life. Dangerous also because it does not allow for any other counterstrategy such as good old Freudian resistance, which, as resistance, always already presupposes its own target. When the territories of life were still divided and the political field was mainly about division between different territories of life and the representation of this division, such resistance was still somehow productive. Today - when this division is so hidden in the omnipresence of global connecting - the resistance has no other way as to disclose its own target in a completely irrational (disconnected) way. The only possible resistance today is dead resistance, which - with many casualties and indiscriminate killing - is becoming the main characteristic of contemporary terrorism. The threat of disconnection is thus a disguise of a much more serious problem, which the invisible hand has nowadays with the arrangement of the intermediary, that is with the uncontrollable productivity, which calls for new political issues and new political ways of being active.
IV.
Let us now consider the other side of the contemporary connections, where connections are understood as the biggest threat. What are the characteristics of the moment when connection becomes a dirty word, when being connected is the same as being fucked, as K. W. Jeter reveals very well in Noir? What kind of politics can we find in relation to this bizarre understanding and what would be the counterstrategies, if we do not except that the only action we can take is swearing? The world of Noir is not only a completely connected world, but also discloses a new morality of the time. It is a dirty morality of merciless world, where every connection has to have a monetary value and the role of profit making. #11 Of course, we could say that what we are dealing with here is only another face of the old fear: if not the threat of disconnection, then there is this threat of excessive connection, which will dislocate us entirely and turn us into the receptor machines for merciless and never ending advertising, the big Other is here returning in a more shiny disguise.
This threat of excessive connection, the fact that you are fucked if connected, is becoming increasingly topical with the contemporary economic demands, which are more and more immersed in our desire to be connected. "So this is what it means to live in a network society. We have moved out of time and into space. Anything you want is yours for the asking. You can get it right here and right now. All you have to do is pay the price. First of all you must pay a monetary price, since money is the universal equivalent for all commodities. But you also have to pay the informational price, since information is also a universal equivalent. Information is the common measure and the medium of exchange for all knowledge, all perception, all passion, and all desire. The universal equivalent for experience, in short. In the network society, experience will be digital or not at all. But this also means that what you get is never quite what you paid for. It is always a tiny bit less." #12 But if we know that our main desire is to always have a tiny bit more, that we will always come back for more, then what we get is a perfect relationship where economy and our desires go hand in hand, with the production being precisely about the surplus value of the 'mysterious nothing', as Steven Shaviro said. Corporations know more and more of our dirty little secrets, for which we are getting more and more certain that they (because of our individual and monadic independence) could never be revealed. The reality of connection is therefore precisely this 'mysterious nothing', which is very similar to Leibniz's description of the world as a very particular orchestra already in the 17th century: "The orderliness of things, as I understand it, quite resembles that of various orchestras and choirs; while playing their parts, they are located thus that they can not see or hear each other, and yet, each following its scores, they can play together in a perfect fashion. Thus, anyone present in any of the two choirs, could gather from it what the other choir is playing at that time, and could train oneself (especially if we presuppose that he can hear his choir without seeing it, and see the other choir without hearing it) so that his fantasy would further the unheard more and more, and that he would no longer think of the choir he himself stands in, but of the other. He would actually perceive his own choir as a sole echo of the other, prescribing himself but some particular intermezzos in which certain laws of harmony which could be deduced from the other choir, would not be visible; or he could ascribe melodic movements to his choir, such that, judging from his side, could follow a certain rule, and then – because of the internal connection in the art of music – think that the other choir takes over this same rule, although he does not know that the musicians from the other side play something suitable precisely because they follow their own scores." #13
What we have here is the buzzing and also intolerably noisy world abounding in connections, which, at the same time, is also a harmonic and completely silent world of endless mirroring. The entire magnificence of playing has changed into the sheer connecting procedure, which is passionately dedicated to endless transfers from one choir to another, to ceaseless listening and observation, with nobody hearing or seeing anyone; and only with this connecting and mirroring inflation, we could reach our global happiness. The absurdity of this situation, when the connection is becoming one of the main characteristics of economic profit and therefore turned into the superficial inflation, forgetting the intermediary which is the basis of connection, could be also described with a short part from the novel of Villiers de L'Isle Adam, a French 19th century writer. His novel L'Eve Future offers one of the first descriptions of the changes in the meeting between man and machine, which is increasingly becoming a meeting between desire and commodity (this issue was taken over later by surrealists). The meeting between man and machine is revealed in the dialogue between Edison (inventor of the artificial woman) and Lord Ewald. After Edison's disclosure of the mechanism of the artificial Eve (Ms. Alicia Hadaly), Lord Ewald is curious how one will be able to speak (connect) with her. "With the Alicia of the future, the true Alicia, the Alicia of your soul, you will no longer have to put up with these sterile discomforts […] She will definitely answer with the expected word, the beauty of which will depend on your own suggestion! Her "consciousness" will no longer be a negation of your own, but will become the kindred of a soul more appealing to your melancholy. In her, you will be able to evoke the joyous presence of your only love, this time without the fear that she might take in your dreams! Her words will never be a disappointment to your hopes. They will always be so sublime […] that you will be able to awake them with your spirit. Here, you will never have to fear not being understood, as would be the case with the live one: you will only have to learn to pay attention to the time pressed between her words." In a dialogue with a real live woman, there is namely always some dissonance at work: one never achieves perfect harmony but "some other word dictated by her nature, one that will make your heart sink." A link with the artificial woman, however, produces no discontinuity, no misunderstanding, and more even: "You won't even have to articulate any words yourself! Hers will be a response to your thoughts, your silence!" #14 We could say that the relationship between commodity and desire is always that the Other loves us a little bit more that we could bare, and we cannot behave differently than always demanding a little bit more love.
In this relationship, every move and every action seems doomed to recurring emptiness, triteness and simulation. The new morality which is at work in Jeter's novel is a kind of permanent political anxiety: with desire increasingly becoming the core of our connection, it is namely impossible to resist. The only resistance possible is again dead resistance, which is also becoming more and more characteristic of our contemporary globalised orchestra. It is attacking the flows and movements of the city, the urban freedom and its complicated networks, the main big machines of western desire, which are becoming producers of our global happiness.
V.
So how are we to produce a counterstrategy and avoid dead resistance? How are we to participate in the connections, which are becoming our main mode of being and yet resist to the monolithic reality of the connecting procedure? How are we to get out but, at the same time, always be active and stay alive? Our being in the world is continuously partitioned and shared, and yet we have all to constantly fight for the right of this sharing and for the right to be partitioned. Both the threats – the overwhelming disconnection and the excessive connection - still want to regulate connections in the traditional way. In order for the disconnection and excessive connection to be prevented from being part of public and political life, they should always be regulated, calculated, economized, divided into territories. They are always regulated by very subtle and transparent protocols, which are becoming the main organizations of power today (and it is no wonder that political, technological and scientific protocols are becoming more and less the same thing). If, as late as in the nineties, the connection and networks were still recognized as a universal signifiers of political resistance (Levy's virtual agora, for example), this hope today seems more and more a certain metaphysical perspective, very similar to Leibniz's image of the busy and loud orchestra which, at the same time, is doomed to silence.
There is another point of view, however, which has become much more important and which we must consider when dealing with the connections of today. "In the middle, where nothing is supposed to be happening, there is almost everything." #15 What do I mean by that? The most important result of connections entering public life is precisely this arrangement of the intermediary: the way how this 'nothing', which, on the one hand, is the basis for the terrible uncanny stillness, and on the other hand, for the dynamic surplus value, is increasingly turning out to be about something. In the middle, we can find an enormous hypertrophy of productivity, with connection always already a possible relation. The field in the middle is precisely where today's artistic work is entering the scene and displaying its wireless relationships, relationships as counterstrategies to the omnipresence and perfection procedure of connections. Or, as the Italian philosopher and activist Paolo Virno said: an immediate relation between production and ethicality, structure and superstructure, technologies and emotional tonalities, material development and culture, a revolutionizing of the work progress and sentiments. #16
How this immediate and non-hierarchical relation is not only about the procedure of connection but opens a possibility of counterstrategy, could be revealed with the help of the project wPack (2004), by Igor Stromajer (Intima Virtual Base - www.intima.org). wPack is a project specially made and designed for mobile wireless protocols – WAP and WLAN. It can be described as a wireless packages distribution centre where "packages are compressed, packed, ready to use units, emotional files, exploring frustrations, traumas and emotion. This is where the basic communication starts." #17 There is a continuous frustration at work in this wireless distribution centre: yes it is wireless but always under a threat of disconnection. It is accurate that the protocols used in the project are still slightly unreliable (especially in the economic frame of the art exhibition), but all these protocols are also predecessors of the more smooth protocols yet to come in the commercialised battle for the perfect connecting procedure. So this continuous frustration is not the consequence of unreliability of the protocols used in the project, or of the non-effectivity of the technology. wPack is namely applying the disconnection and failure to its wireless structure, disconnection is the main characteristic of the connecting structure of the very project. Project is not easy to present and therefore requestioning its connected position to the exhibition, or better its artistic contextualisation in the frame of exhibition. The packages of this wireless distribution centre are namely also delivered with difficulties, fragmentarily, with a lot of procedures and sometimes also without any intention behind. Some packages with utopian names like history, revolution, north, no mercy, are full of various impossible links, which could be also read as impossible political futures yet to come in our world of overwhelming connections. Beside them there are also packages, which are irrational, hard to encode, ludistic, they are delivering us back the files, which we already have in our computer (different operating system files) or are 'exe files' which of course rarely someone dares to install. The packages when delivered are revealing the problematic economical, social, intimate and political contexts: who would trust the artist and run 'exe-file' on his computer, the file for which you don't even need to pay, which has no commercial value? Stolen files, impossible fragments, useless data, superfluous files, irrational links, small emotional links, this is the structural organisation of the wPack. This is exactly the intermediary, the 'mysterious nothing'. It is revealed to us through procedures, consequent but not efficient, virtuous but non-servile. Immediate links between emotionality and technology, production and ethicality are those which are here revealed. Power is namely based in the efficiency and transparency, in the performing and management of the connections, which are mostly about the efficiency of procedure where disconnection is always a threat. But this project is revealing the irrational and real side of the connection as the perfect procedure: impossible links, superfluous packages, intermediary, which all have to be hidden if the connection wants to successfully operate. The Wireless distribution centre is the centre where we have to play and listen at the same time, and so discover many different layers, which are defining what and how we are connecting, delivering and relating.
So wPack could also be recognized as one of the ways, how to perform the non-servile virtuosity when fully connected, and thus demand the privileges of productivity and imagination. The strategies here are similar to the contemporary civilian disobedience, only that this can be in this case defined as the protocolary disobedience in the form of connected resistance. "Civil disobedience represents, perhaps, the fundamental form of political action of the multitude, provided that the multitude is emancipated from the liberal tradition within which is encapsulated. It is not a matter of ignoring a specific law because it appears incoherent or contradictory to other fundamental norms, for example to the constitutional charter. In such case, in fact reluctance would signal only deeper loyalty to state control. Conversely, the radical disobedience which concerns us here casts doubts on the State's actual ability to control." "18 What this disobedience attacks is not the incoherence of the law, but the preliminary form (protocol) of obedience without context, which is always presupposing the law: this unconditional presupposition of controlling power. If I transfer this to the problem of contemporary connection: what we should attack is the preliminary form of connection without content. The counterstrategy puts under the question mark the very validity of connection, which, in its procedure, has forgotten that every connection has a lot to do with a relation as well. How to react then, when like the contemporary economy, the public political life has also been reduced to the battle of transparent interests incessantly systematized and organized (structured) within the contemporary political life, which however, no longer allows space for misunderstanding, uncivil gesture, exterior? Maybe we should just venture (and here I'm borrowing the words of Brian Holmes #19) into this intermediary by means of unstable, difficult and at times uncultured mimicry. It is at the end also a kind of jouissance, which is always demanding something more: constant productivity, demanding and non-conforming, constant resistance to divisions of work and activities, permanent resistance to be transparent and represented.
Endnotes:
- Jeter, K. W. : Noir, New York 1998. I'm grateful for this reference on the novel Noir to Steven Shaviro and his book Connected or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Minneapolis 2003.
- Jeter, K. W: Noir, New York 1998, p. 18
- Noon, Jeff: Nymphomation, Corgi Books, London 1997.
- Shaviro, Steven: Connected Or What It Means To Live in The Network Society, Minneapolis 2003, p. 3.
- Castells, Manuel: The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Blackwell, Massachusets, 2000, p. 446.
- Dyens, Ollivier: Metal and Flesh. The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over, Cambridge, MA; 2001, p. 93.
- Cf. Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Cambridge, MA, 2000)or A Grammar of the Multitude, by Paolo Virno (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
- Science and technology were through the history always strongly separated from politics – take, for example, the initial debate between Hobbes and Boyle about the air pump, which marks the beginning of the dividing politics of early modernity. See also: Stephen Shapin & Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and Air Pump, Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton University Press, 1985.
- Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern, Massachusetts, 1993, p. 12.
- This modern attitude reaches its ironical and contra-productive end in the postmodernist phrase of differences, which has had to build an enormous bureaucratic differentiating apparatus to purify and include all the differences in their particularity. It is no wonder that postmodernist theories on politics have come up with the end of politics, or with the resigned attitude, the politics of simulacrum.
- Copyright violators are sentenced to life-in death - tortured in a way that only the brain of the offender remains. Finally, the offender is transformed into a trophy: the mass of his neurons and synapses – all that remains of him, is encased within a speaker wire, a vacuum cleaner, a toaster or some other common household appliance. The trophy is handed over to the artist whose copyright the offender has violated. In this condition, the violator faces a virtual eternity of pain: the essential brain tissue and the consciousness and personality locked inside the soft wiring can last for decades. And the artist is gratifyingly reminded of the violator's agony every time he or she listens to the stereo or makes a slice of toast. From K. W. Jetter: Noir, New York 1998, pp. 261 – 26.
- Shaviro, Steven: Connected or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, Minneapolis 2003, p. 249.
- Translated from german: Holz, Hans Heinz: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, eine Monographie, Leipzig, 1983, p. 56.
- Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Auguste de: L'Eve Future, Paris 1997, p. 240.
- Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern, Massachusetts, 1993, p. 123.
- Virno, Paolo: A Grammar of the Multitude, New York, 2004, p. 84.
- www.intima.org/wpack (20.06.2004)
- Virno, Paolo: The Grammar of the Multitude, New York, 2004, p. 69.
- Cf. Holmes, Brian: Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb 2003.
Translated by Urska Zajec