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.