Fwd: RHIZOME_RAW: mccenzie wark review of CAE book

[+ lo_y. +]

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>Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 12:40:33 -0400
>Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: mccenzie wark review of CAE book
>From: Rachel Greene <rac...@rhizome.org>
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>Reply-To: Rachel Greene <rac...@rhizome.org>
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>hi -- important -- the review that i redirected to raw before, by mckenzie
>wark, and appearing to be from him, was a garbled version of his brilliant
>essay. apologies to mckenzie -- the version below is the polished one i
>intended to post. -- rachel
>
>
>
>
>Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical
>Media, Autonomedia, New York, 2002 reviewed by McKenzie Wark
><mw...@nyu.edu>
>
>Even a cursory scanning of Critical Art Ensembleąs website
><http://www.critical-art.net/> reveals a distinctive and distinguished
>body of work that boldly restates the possibilities of working in the
>Śavant gardeą tradition, while connecting it to the latest practices in
>low-tech tactical media. Digital Resistance, their fourth book, collects
>some recent papers by the group, and includes the best statement yet of
>their overall approach to the nexus of theory and practice.
>
>In making such a statement, I play into what Critical Art Ensemble (CAE)
>call the "haunting problem of the archive" ­ namely, the restriction of
>the open potential of the work to generate new challenges to the status
>quo, by defining a space for it alongside once challenging movements,
>now safely dead. While I recognize why CAE might want to avoid too
>strong an identification of their work with a current movement or
>historical precursor, perhaps one can look at this the other way around.
>We have taken on faith the self-interested remarks by art-market
>publicists in the 80s and 90s that the Śavant garde is deadą, and hence
>no longer look to it as a source of ongoing attempts to negate the
>self-evident rightness and normality of the world.
>
>Moreover, in considering complete the avant garde tradition that runs
>from Dada to the Surrealists, Situationists, Art and Language group and
>beyond, the analyses of commodified culture and reified life offered by
>those movements becomes the last word. No new critique emerges if there
>can be no new cultural-political-media practice. The value of CAE might
>well be that they embark on a new kind of critical art, and in the
>process develop a new critical theory. Or at least some elements of such
>a theory, as we shall see I think it incomplete.
>
>Digital Resistance contains a now-famous contribution to the debates on
>tactical media, which it critiques the established practices of
>triggering media spectacle, and proposes instead to bypass the media and
>establish clandestine practices of subversion. CAE contend that "The
>indirect approach of media manipulation using a spectacle of
>disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing
>proposition."
>
>There was a time, they recognize, when this worked. The Civil Rights
>Movement, for example. But they claim that the examples where working
>through the media is effective are mostly instances in which the
>movement in question is at least in part furthering the interests of the
>development of capitalist society, rather than opposing it. To the
>extent that the Civil Rights Movement was a challenge to the archaic
>social order of the American South, it could effectively work through
>triggering media reactions. When it moved on to a deeper critique of
>capitalism, and the racist order of the north, this strategy failed. CAE
>also acknowledge examples from the underdeveloped world. The use of
>media feedback loops by the Chinese Democracy Movement in Tiananmen
>Square (which I examined in my book Virtual Geography) might be a
>seminal example.
>
>CAEąs position is a pessimistic one, and seems to me to generalize an
>American experience, where it is a cultural given that the critical is
>marginal. It might not be appropriate for those parts of the world where
>the historic social movements are alive and more or less well. All the
>same, thereąs something bracing in CAEąs pessimism, which forecloses
>nostalgia and obliges one to think again about how to engage with the
>present: "But what do we do now˛? they ask, łhaving reached the point
>where visible, diversified ideologies in the West no longer exist, and
>history is nothing more than a homogeneous construct that continuously
>replays capitalist victories?"
>
>The kind of tactics CAE advocate seek to work outside the mediaąs echo
>chamber and engage directly with the communication practices of
>institutions. "The infighting that already occurs within and between
>government and corporate institutions makes them a self subsidizing
>target." They admit that such "a fully developed covert approach" is a
>long way off. Actually, I think it is not so far off in places where
>there are surviving historic social movements, which tend over time to
>acquire stakeholder status within institutions. The pristine
>oppositionalism combined with insider effectiveness that CAE dream of
>seems to me a fantasy, peculiar to the culture of the American left.
>
>What is more interesting than this somewhat notional theorizing about
>tactical media is CAEąs discussion of how to speak "semi publicly". In
>an era in which social movements become NGOs, and NGOs develop marketing
>campaigns, closing the circuit back to normality, it is timely to read
>proposals for avoiding self-representations that lend themselves to
>business as usual in the media. To avoid becoming fodder for the Fox
>News cycle, "all that is necessary is to make it 'bad copy'." There is a
>role for theory as a language of general models and hypotheticals in
>keeping certain things unsaid. Thereąs a long tradition of this poetics
>of political speech, from Hegeląs elusive philosophical language to the
>terse epigrams of the Situationist Guy Debord.
>
>CAEąs antipathy toward working through the media rests not just on a
>bleak assessment of tactical worth, however. In their analysis, the
>media space has lost its centrality as a locus of power. "The control of
>spectacular space is no longer the key to understanding or maintaining
>domination. Instead, it is the control of virtual space... that is the
>new locus of power."
>
>Digital Resistance contains a very suggestive statement of CAEąs
>underlying philosophy. They argue that a łnew cosmology˛ is emerging,
>which will replace the analog principle (order from chaos; chaos from
>order) with a digital one (order from order). In the feudal order, the
>analog predominated; capital, on the other hand unleashes the digital.
>This paradigm shift eventually changes all aspects of life.
>
>The tension between analog and digital expresses itself under capitalism
>in the ambiguous attributes of the commodity. On the one hand, what has
>most value is the analog ­ the art object for example, unique product of
>the artistąs Śgeniusą. On the other, the foundation of capitalist=
value
>is mechanical reproduction. łThe consumer wants the assurance of
>reliability provided by digital replication, and on the other hand,
>desires to own a unique constellation of characteristics to signify he/r
>individuality.˛
>
>With the development of the computer, communication and media
>industries, the digital principle inherent in capital reaches its
>fullest expansion and ­ while CAE do not develop this point ­ surely=
the
>clearest point of internal contradiction. The digitization of
>information at one and the same time advances capitaląs goal of making
>the commodity completely abstract and interchangeable, but also
>threatens to undermine its value by removing any connection to a unique
>material object.
>
>The analog/digital divide is also a stratification principle for the
>workforce. Mass industrial labor is pure digital slavery. Any worker can
>substitute for any other. With capital able to traverse the whole space
>of the globe, the price any laborer can get for their labor is pushed to
>or even below subsistence.
>
>On the other hand, among the laboring elite, the specialization that
>results from the division of labor, particularly in science or the
>culture industries, is in CAEąs terms Śanalogą because it is all=
about
>differentiating workers on the basis of unique abilities, and
>attributing the value of their work to their Śgeniusą. Everyone expects
>a bonus at the end of the year just for being Śspecialą.
>
>CAEąs art confronts this (mostly) western version of everyday working
>life with a digital practice that devalues authorial genius with
>strategies of copying and counterfeit. The digital may have its
>apocalyptic side in the Satanic Mills erected across the underdeveloped
>world, but it also has its utopian side. Were CAE to develop more fully
>the relationship both the digital and the analog have to private
>property in the commodity economy, this aspect of their very suggestive
>use of the analog/digital concepts might be more useful still.
>
>The digital may be the principle of mass production, but the very
>repeatability of the object devalues it. We live in an everyday world
>where commodities which that are more and more interchangeable try to
>present themselves under the aura of analogic singularity through
>elaborate marketing strategies. The thing is supposed to be intimately
>connected to a brand that at one and the same time guarantees unique
>(analog) value and (digital) repeatability. The Śdigital aestheticą is
>under these conditions mostly a denial of the digital, and in a double
>sense. The origins of the thing in the 'sweatshop digital' factories of
>the underdeveloped world origins of the thing are erased by a
>fetishizing of the aura of its designerąs signature. The origins of what
>the commodity appears to mean in the 'Photoshop digital' world of PR
>origins of its Śbrand valuesą are erased by presenting the material
>essence objecthood of the thing as the unique bearer of these otherwise
>purely virtual qualities. The trace of material history is hidden in the
>image; the fetish of the image is hidden in the material thing.
>
>And so there may indeed by a value in a digital aesthetic that
>emphasizes the utopian potential of the copy, as something that escapes
>at least the second kind of fetish, if not the first. And as CAE show,
>this utopian digital aesthetic has a history.
>
>łPlagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It presses after an
>authorąs phrase, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it
>with a correct one.˛ So wrote the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont,
>favorite poet of the Surrealist and Situationists movements, those two
>great 20th century expressions of the organized avant garde. Critical
>Art Ensemble (CAE) give Lautréamontąs maxim a 21st century twist: "In
>three sentences, Lautréamont summed up the methods and means of digital
>aesthetics."
>
>In an essay he wrote with Gil Wolman, Guy Debord saw in Lautréamontąs
>phrase the basis for a łliterary communism˛. If the łauthorąs=
phrase˛
>can be detached from the authorąs proprietary control, it becomes common
>property. Perhaps, after the failure or retreat of attempts to socialize
>material property, perhaps a socialization of intellectual property is
>the best we can hope for. However, by focusing on the digital and the
>analog, rather than on the way they become embedded in property,
>particularly the emerging role of intellectual property, CAE limit the
>power of their analysis.
>
>This emerges a little more clearly in the other candidates CAE nominate
>for a counter-history of the digital aesthetic tradition. As they say,
>łDuchamp is the avatar of the digital.˛ He attacked the analog value of
>the art object with his readymades, which reveal how the value of the
>art object under capitalism is really only produced by its context.
>Warhol further develops this aesthetic of łno more unique objects˛.=
Both
>Duchamp and Warhol play upon the contradictory nature of the commodity,
>its analog value of singularity and its digital value of repeatability.
>But they donąt quite push this contradiction as far as Debord and
>Wollman intuit that it can go, once the cultural commodity is on the
>same digital basis as the literary text, and literary communism becomes
>the utopian promise of a digital culture of free information.
>
>Like all CAE books, Digital Resistance is available as a free download ­
>a gesture toward the freeing of information from the commodity form. Yet
>in the main, CAE understand the digital aesthetic as it applies to their
>own practice as an avoidance of specialization and the division of
>labor. By making this an attribute of the digital, they are able to open
>a dialogue with a body of work not usually seen as part of the
>counter-history of radical art ­ what they call the Śtheater of=
everyday
>life.ą
>
>Judith Malina and Julian Beckąs Living Theater might stand as the best
>known example, particularly their late 60s performances of Paradise Now,
>which attempt to turn the audience into participants in a process of
>achieving their own collective liberation. CAE draw a useful connection
>between the theater of everyday life and Alan Kaprowąs Śhappeningsą,
>which are usually treated separately as belonging to the art world
>rather than the theater world. CAEąs practice is nothing if not
>Śinterdisciplinaryą, and indeed is a critical reminder of the limits of
>what usually poses as boundary breaking under that name.
>
> From the theater of everyday life, CAE take the principles of
>łparticipation, process, pedagogy and experimentation.˛ One of the best
>qualities of CAEąs work is the consistent thinking through of their
>practice both in terms of what happens Śinsideą the group and its
>projection into a world Śoutsideą. Digital Resistance contains a
>thoughtful justification for working in nonspecialized Śdigitalą=
groups:
>"Collectives reside in that liminal zone -- they are neither an
>individual nor an institution." They can avoid the egoism of the former
>as well as the bureaucracy of the latter.
>
>CAE advocate working in a cellular structure, in groups of limited size.
>This allows for a floating hierarchy, with different members taking
>responsibility for different projects. Their model is one of coalition,
>not community. "CAE is unsure who really wants community in the first
>place." In keeping with the preferences of the tactical media approach,
>they favor tools over rules. The group structure also solves the problem
>that Art & Language group member Ian Burn identified: the artist as the
>brain power of a work that others, not allowed the exalted title of
>artist, have to carry out. "By working in a group, CAE members are able
>to resist the Warhol syndrome of factory production with underpaid
>laborers."
>
>All of these proposals reflect a knowledge of the troubled history of
>avant garde groups of the past, from Dada and Surrealism to the
>Situationists, the Living Theater, and Art & Language. One problem such
>groups encounter is in their internal organization, which can easily
>come to reflect the power relations of the outside world. The
>hierarchical and dictatorial practices of the Surrealists and
>Situationists are a case in point. The other problem is external, in the
>sense that the discovery of the group by the media leads to its naming
>and defining by outside forces, which in turn starts to turn the groupąs
>activities toward a reactive practice of responding to the shadow of
>their own image in the media. Dada and the Living Theater both
>experienced this problem.
>
>This awareness of the past history of avant garde follies, of
>capitulation to internalized notions of Śanalogą authority, or external
>pressures to become reactive, colors CAEąs tentative embrace of the
>Śtactical mediaą label. It is best to work outside the framework of
>labels that people can either feel ownership towards within the group,
>or which can have their meaning altered by publicity.
>
>Tactical media, CAE suggest, enters into a period of decline precisely
>as it becomes popularized. "Its recuperation by capital is almost
>inevitable." Names have to be treated tactically too, rather than as
>sites of long term investment. CAE found themselves łcomplicit with this
>categorizing process just so we could start conversations with people
>uncomfortable with the unnamed." Even the most carefully anonymous
>practices end up leaving their traces in the archives. Or in other
>words, the representation of something is an essential part of turning
>it into property. What is named can be owned.
>
>With those protocols acknowledged, CAE stake out a position on tactical
>media that sees it as a form of "digital interventionism". It starts
>with the plagiarism of the everyday itself. "The already given and the
>unsaid are the material of a tactical media event." In keeping with
>their views on organization, they recommend a pragmatic approach to
>tools: łBy any media necessary.˛
>
>If there is indeed a new cosmology at work in the world, the best and
>most frightening expression of it is the rise of biotechnology. While
>physics remains for CAE the analog science par excellence, biology has
>stepped boldly into the digital realm with the discovery of genetic
>coding and its exploitation for commercial medicine and food production.
>
>The problem for CAE is how to take the marginal cultural practices of
>the digital aesthetic and the theater of everyday life and use it to
>combat the new cosmology of biotech. When many other avant garde groups
>are still fighting rearguard battles against the power structures of the
>20th century, CAE have embarked on a more forward looking project of
>contestation. Thereąs not much point in repeating the Dada gestures of
>attacking art or the church.
>
>The limit to the theater of everyday life is that it cannot escape the
>politics of everyday life. What CAE want to add to its practices is a
>more conceptual approach to the abstract forces of power at work in the
>world. łGlobalization has created a new theater that bursts the
>boundaries of the theater of everyday life. We now have a theater of
>activism that has emerged out of the necessity of taking material life
>struggles into hyperreality.˛
>
>The point where CAE will work in digital culture is Śanalogousą to the
>point that digital science has reached en route to its full
>commodification: the point where the abstraction of the digital meets
>the singularities of the analog. All that seems to be missing is a
>recognition that the concept of property is precisely what lies at this
>juncture, in both culture and science.
>
>CAE are highly critical of most uses of the new technology in theater,
>however. So called Śvirtual theaterą merely represents the łworst
>elements of the disembodiment of the technocratic class.˛ The much
>ballyhooed virtual communities are for CAE merely examples of what Guy
>Debord called łenriched privation˛.
>
>Confronted with a theater of everyday life trapped in a pattern of
>engaging in local struggles, and a virtual theater reproducing the
>alienating aspects of consumer technology, CAE look for a practice of
>looping the virtual into the real. łThe body is still the key building
>block of theater˛, they say, but the task is to explore ­ in
>collaboration with a fully participating audience ­ how digital biology
>is abstracting the analog body into digitized commodity value.
>
>What CAE advocate is a łrecombinant theater˛. It is analogic in that it
>is aimed at opening up łmultiple lines of desire˛, exploring both the
>rational and irrational investments of the participants. Yet it will use
>digital technologies in combination with a digital aesthetic to
>undermine the analogic hierarchy of value on which the authority of the
>scientific (or cultural) Śexpertą rests.
>
>In a challenging remark, CAE note that łeugenics is an invisible social
>dynamic that is quietly emerging out of the pancapitalist institutions
>of the economy of excess and the nuclear family.˛ While they donąt
>expand on this point, their notion of the tension between the analog and
>the digital could be useful for exploring the bizarre ways in which
>genetic science is producing commodified life. On the one hand, genetic
>manipulation undermines the analogic value of singularity and
>uniqueness. On the other hand, it offers the analogic value of the
>expert geneticist as a valuable resource for reengineering the organism
>for increased productivity.
>
>"If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form of being,
>it becomes a monstrous mechanism of control for the class that regulates
>access to it and mobility within it." Itąs a challenging remark, and it
>can be seen to apply to both the culture industries and the emerging
>biotech industries. What both have in common is an ability to use the
>state to turn intellectual property into an absolute private property
>right, within which to Śtrapą the virtuality of both culture and=
nature.
>CAE want organic being in the world to be established as the locus of
>reality ­ and here we find, underneath the very contemporary language
>CAE deploy, the old desire of the romantic revolutionary avant garde ­
>the desire for a life without alienation.
>
>But it is just possible that what scares CAE is not the virtual as such,
>but the virtual as it appears under the control of property ­ the
>virtual in the service of commodification. CAE never really specify just
>who the ruling class are or how they rule, and yet everything in their
>provocative work around biotechnology points toward the possibility that
>this is not your grandfatherąs capitalism they ­ and we ­ are
>confronting. The practice has outrun the theory. CAE discover the
>positive potential of the virtuality that the digital unleashes, not
>least in the avant garde tradition. So it is not the virtual that is the
>enemy here. Rather, it is what becomes of the virtuality of the digital
>when it is trapped within the confines of the emerging property regime
>that may well be the foundation of a class beyond capital as we know it.
>But what if we were to re-imagine the utopian dimension of the avant
>garde, as something beyond the mere overcoming of alienation? What would
>the power of the virtual, particularly the virtual released by a digital
>paradigm, be like were it freed from commodification and class rule?
>
>
>McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto
>http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html
>
>+ tripe

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