Anarchy and the Big Society Machine

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Anarchism in an electronic age defies definition and will always tend
towards sets of values or ways of thinking and doing that evolve from
tensions in the individual and collective process. We could say that
in this respect anarchism is defined as useful tension between
community (or state) and self. Correspondingly, any dogmatic attempts
to discuss anarchism are simply evocations of a dynamic process,
illuminating, infuriating and then discarded. But they are not without
purpose or an element of progression from one place to another, that
is to say in negotiating the behaviours of the individual and the
state.

We might think that the effect of the growth of electronic media has
been to dissolve the power of the nation state in our affairs and the
opposite in the case of China – the creation of what has become known
as ‘the Great Firewall’. The unregulated and unprecedented movement of
information has, as McLuhan predicted, decentralized our actions, as
we move from conventions of trade of goods and services to an
electronic world economy. The parcelling up of toxic debts within
electronically facilitated trading was estimated by the International
Monetary Fund in 2009 to be 4 trillion dollars. The consequence of
such spectacular meltdowns has been the reappraisal of financial
regulation throughout the developed economies. Neo-liberalised
economic processes have brought many states to the point of self-
destruction.

Negroponte in ‘Being Digital’ proposes the shift from atoms to bits,
as industrial production moves from the material to the digital. This
seems now techno-utopian and simplistic. Newsprint or the book, if we
follow this idea, are replaced by onscreen media navigated by
increasingly responsive interfaces. These interfaces can be
increasingly attendant and responsive to our patterns of behaviour,
reducing ‘wasteful’ search time. However these interfaces often reach
back to forms of representation of prior media, what McLuhan called
the ‘rearview mirror effect’. So in an iPad advert the user gestures
towards a virtual bookshelf.

But now attention has become money or commodity too, at the same time
that technological fetishisation or lifestyle technologies have become
symbolic of global culture. Bernhard Stiegler has written extensively
on the effects of mass media, the effect of which is the
homogenisation of culture and its messages, leaving no space for
transgression or alternative tempo or meaning.

The cultural supremacy and pervasiveness of computer generated movies
seems undeniable. Could we argue that Toy Story 3 is the ultimate
artistic statement of global neo-liberal culture? Its messages,
aesthetics and modes of production convey a complete set of values in
which the mass audience are emotionally tugged, puppeted and
entertained. We might compare this to North Korean propaganda films
(featured on YouTube) that take on a warped propagandisation of a dark-
side “axis of evil” state. Is there a collective amnesia and form of
control in CGI blockbusters?

McLuhan connects literacy with money. Work he says does not exist in
the non-literate world, because the ‘whole person’ is in fact a
hunter, fisher or even artist. They have no need for money because
their activity is directly connected to subsistence. It is within this
reduced or non-digital realm that everyday transactions become more
meaningful, rewarding and creatively transgressive. This compared to
the anxiety of the digital workplace where the extended self is locked
into a puzzling world of making and responding to electronic messages,
not necessarily knowing where priority lies.

Modern economies break down human activity into jobs and roles,
fragmenting this whole person and thus creating a co-determinacy or
dependency. McLuhan further suggests that the clock or means of
calibrating time promotes a commodification of individual labour.
Labour becomes subjugated to a time and motion study. McLuhan was
aware that as electronic media and networked extension increased in
the digital age, effectively knowledge would become the prevailing
currency. Hence automation, as he put it, becomes a way of programming
knowledge. We now live in what is termed as the ‘knowledge economy’.

The process of technics or technologisation can be seen as an open
prison, where the non-productive post-industrial workforce are
occupied in data entry and management of information. Then perhaps in
its promotion and optimisation. The trap in negatively portraying
digital culture is to imply some alternative ideologue or Eden of self-
sufficiency. In ‘Walden’, Henry David Thoreau has provided an enduring
example of the problems of disconnecting from the state and ‘the
machine’.

McLuhan gives us a resounding picture of where we are with online
culture. He says:

“In the age of instant information man ends his job of fragmented
specializing and assumes the role of information gathering. Today
information gathering resumes the inclusive concept of “culture”,
exactly as the primitive food gatherer worked in complete equilibrium
with his entire environment”. Our quarry, in this new nomadic and
“workless” world is knowledge and insight into the creative processes
of life and society.”

This is an intriguing point at which to assess what artistic practice
or production looks like in an extended electronic age. John Cage’s
‘Lecture on Nothing’ within his first book ‘Silence’ points towards
transgression and a reordering of the collapsed temporal-spatial modes
of new technology. There is an implicit understanding that breaths,
silences and events taking place in the world outside, will form a new
version – each time – of the creative work. As a form of resistance,
it serves to locate experience right in the moment, nuanced and
unrepeatable. It is in effect undigital, manifest and if you wish it
‘spiritual’.

Quoted here from John Cage:

I am here , and there is nothing to
say

If among you there are those who wish to get
somewhere ,
let them leave at any moment .

What we require is
silence ; but
what silence requires is that I go on
talking . Give any one
thought a
push : it falls
down easily ;

but the pusher and the
pushed pro-
duce that
entertainment called a
discussion . Shall we
have one later (now)?

What I’m saying is that art is often transgression.

———————

Simon Poulter 2011 (prepared for lecture at Goldsmiths College)
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