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[divinecuration]

The question concerning technology / Latour's agential symmetry / alethic vs normative modality

As Martin Heidegger tells it, the received story is that a technology is a means to an end, the passive instrument or neutral conduit of human intentions. In this story intentions are understood as independent of and conceptually prior to their means of realisation. Challenging this naive instrumental view, Heidegger raised the possibility of the technical mediation of human purposes, casting doubt on the separation of human ends and their technical means. 

The heart of Heidegger’s argument is that instrumentality rests on causality, whose essence is a certain taking of responsibility for what is revealed. Revealing in this sense is a movement from the implicit background to explicit foreground [1], while responsibility refers to the particular sort of rational responsibility associated with explanation. Explanation is always also explication, Heidegger emphasises, never just an account of something already present in the foreground.

The hydroelectric dam is, by these lights, not only a means for unleashing power from the river---its presence as a technology reveals the river as something from which power can be unleashed. It is not just a means to some prior end, in a sense it brings about the end itself. The river could not be viewed as exploitable power until the hydroelectric dam made it viewable as such---once it did, it is impossible not to view it this way. Technology brings about this attitude of seeing the river as exploitable resource, and once it has done so we cannot not see it that way. This attitude is what Heidegger identifies as the essence of technology, what he calls enframing. It is a certain foregrounding of the world as an exploitable resource, i.e. as something whose end is to be a means. Technology, then, is not a set of instruments, it is a process by which we come to regard the world as pure instrumentality, including, ultimately, ourselves. Once it has done so it hides its tracks, splitting into active subject and passive object---this is how it appears to us as passive means to our ends. To put it another way, technology masks its agency.

Heidegger presents enframing as one possible mode of revealing, contrasting it with poiesis, the mode of revealing he associates with the arts and pre-industrial handcraft. Heidegger’s own account of the difference between the pre- and post-industrial technology is not particularly convincing [2], a point which Bruno Latour picks up on, arguing that there is no such difference in kind (the only difference between pre- and post-industrial technology, he claims, is an increase in the number of mediations). We are not, according to Latour, “instruments for no other ends than instrumentality itself”, as he glosses Heidegger’s view. But Latour’s own strategy, while adhering to the rejection of agency as metaphysical fact about individual humans [3], takes the further step of positing agential symmetry between humans and nonhumans. But this symmetry, while taking seriously the fact that functions, are, like social roles, normative statuses, effectively flattens the difference between them, leaving Latour unable to account for the diminishment of agency involved in the subjection of one set of interests to another. The wholesale socialisation of objects admitted by Latour’s theory seems to blind it to processes of objectification within the social (for example in slavery). While Heidegger may not offer an account of the difference between poiesis and enframing, the intuition that such a distinction exists persists, and is not answered by Latour’s symmetric theory.

The distinction Heidegger wants to draw is confused by his discussion of Aristotle’s four causes, in which he claims that efficient causality serves as a model for material, formal, and final causality. In doing so it seems to me that he doesn’t do justice to the normative character of final causality. Later on he identifies the advent of modern physics in the 17th century as the moment in which enframing became the dominant mode. However he fails to note that what this corresponds to is the reduction of final causality to law-governed efficient causality in scientific explanatory practice. The transition from Aristotelean to modern science saw the strengthening of efficient causality via the concept of natural laws which specified the dispositions of entities in the world. In Aristotlean science things are the way they are because that is how they should be. In modern science they are so because given the way they were there is no other way they could be. The assimilation of final into efficient causality represents a shift from representing the world in terms of normative modality to representing it in terms of alethic modality: from facts about how things should be to facts about how they reliably behave. This, it seems to me, picks out the significant distinction between poiesis and enframing. Poiesis is an attitude which takes normative statuses to be part of the world---there are facts about the way things should be, and as such our attitude to nature is one of responsibility and obligation. This is reflected in the artisan, who is in some quasi-mystical sense duty bound to tease out the forms immanent in their materials. Enframing renders a world stripped of telic finality, and hence of obligation--what is left is its dispositional essense, how it will behave when subjected to certain stimulating conditions.

What is interesting about Heidegger’s analysis is that he understands this attitude of enframing---which can be seen enshrined in the scientific metaphysic as dispositional essentialism, that things just are what they do reliably---as a technical operation, one that is created by and depends on the technologies we coexist with. If enframing is a foregrounding operation which strips the world of telic finality, then this operation is technical (as opposed to solely metaphysical), one whose apparatus retires into the background out of necessity, as the camera retreats when one looks into the viewfinder. Technology is the background supporting the foreground rendered in enframing. This stripping of telic finality from the foreground is matched by the injection of normativity into the background, in our tacit ascriptions of correct functioning to the technologies that surround us.

Notes

Peter Sloterdijk would call this explication.

For example, “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging , which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind's blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.”

The line of thought flowing from Wittgenstein’s sceptical paradox and private language argument seem to me to offer the best reasons for this rejection. 

[divinecuration]

A meditation on The Master’s Tools / Bakhtin and the carnivalesque / Baudrillard’s speech with response / Dronestagram

Taken at face value, Audre Lorde’s injunction that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is strangely ambiguous. If instead it were “the master’s stones will never break the master’s windows,” it would ring false. “The master’s techniques will never undo the master’s plans” feels like an improvement, but still leaves many questions unanswered. The sense of insight lingers, yet its formulation remains elusive.

The ambiguity appears to be built into the very concept of a tool. A tool is something with both material and normative aspects; it is on the one hand an object, on the other a set of social conventions establishing the object’s function as tool. The same object can be a different tool in different contexts: a rock can be a table in one context and a brick in another. If ‘tool’ is held to refer specifically to the material aspect, then this is when Lorde’s dictum takes on its false sense. The master’s mallet can indeed break down the master’s door---why couldn’t it? But if this is the case, then there is another sense in which the master’s mallet is no longer the master’s mallet: it has become the villager’s weapon. It is under this stricter sense---in which ‘tool’ is held to refer specifically to the normative aspect---that Lorde’s dictum takes on its meaningful sense. On this interpretation it says that the master’s practices, institutions, codes, or norms, cannot be used to undermine the master’s power. In other words, the master cannot be beaten at his own games. Why might this be the case? If it is, does it apply to all such practices, or just to some? If to only some, then which? 

If certain practices play constitutive roles in power relations, then the point becomes clear: participation in such practices can never achieve anything other than a consolidation of power. In Lorde’s original address the point was targeted at the academic conference as a platform for furthering feminist politics. This platform represents a set of social relations, codes, and interests Lorde took to be controlled by the very power this particular conference sought to challenge. Her argument was that these interests and codes automatically and systematically bias the platform toward points of view that do not represent meaningful challenges to its underlying power structure. The platform therefore reproduces the structures of exclusion merely by being occupied. The tools themselves are not neutral conduits, as the term ‘platform’ suggests. Their norms of use inscribe the master’s power. “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

The form of the problem is similar to that presented by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. The medieval carnival, according to Bakhtin, represented a temporary reversal of the feudal power structure, during which the villagers were permitted to engage in all the transgressive behaviour typically taken to threaten the social order---including ridicule and criticism of the feudal lord. The catch is that that the carnival goes ahead only with the permission of the feudal lord themselves. In this sense the temporary freedom enjoyed by the villagers during the carnival functions as a mechanism of control: the villagers are free for one day a year only to provide them with the illusion of transgression, a tactical concession to undermine their will to mobilise against the oppressive normality. Criticism of the master is tolerated by the master when and only when it is communicated through the platform of the carnival, because the very exercise of the platform underwrites the master’s power.

Both Lorde’s conference and Bakhtin’s carnival can be considered as mediums governed by norms. In both cases the contention is that when the norms governing the form of the medium are controlled by power, the medium cannot bear any message carrying a serious challenge to power, just because the norms themselves encircle, modify, and strip the message of its critical force (often via a tokenistic concession). Considered as mediums, both of these situations testify to Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that the medium is the message. According to this formula the form of the medium---the norms determining which messages are permitted when, and how they can be presented, and so on---has a communicative content which takes precedence over any particular contents. Insofar as the form is controlled by power, this power is ultimately what is communicated. 

Mediums are embedded inside other mediums, which enclose and modify their norms. A message is always modified by a stack of norms corresponding to each layer of embedding. An environmental activist makes an address at a conference; the film is uploaded to youtube and watched by millions. The original medium is embedded within an academic institutional platform, which is then re-embedded in a commercial video sharing medium governed by its own interests and the norms instituted by those interests. 

To what extent can the process of embedding affect the critical force of a message? It might be argued that it cannot. The content of the message is, after all, still the content of the message. But this objection fails to recognise that the mode of reception of a message can be modified independently of its content. In the case of the carnival, it is not suggested that a satire of the feudal lord, which may have genuine transgressive force outside the carnival context, has somehow changed its content when performed at the carnival. The content remains the same. What changes is that the implicit endorsement of the carnival as legitimate channel of communication amounts to a prior ceding of power. (Much as to interpret one’s own behaviour as naughty is to implicitly acknowledge the authority of the rule it disobeys.) It is not that the message is no longer a message whose content challenges power, it is that it is has been prevented from reaching its receiver until they have already endorsed the power structure. As such the critical force of the message has been lost. Its challenge to power is no longer a challenge, but a simulated challenge. It is the difference between playing poker for real and for fake money---the hand and play may be the same, but in the latter case the stakes have already been abandoned, so there is nothing to be won.

Wall E is a film with an anti-consumerist message, packaged and delivered as a consumer product. That people will absorb the critical portrayal of future humans reclining in a junk food induced haze of idle spectacle, while doing more or less the same thing themselves, is not a contradiction that passes unconscious. A certain awareness of these kind of contradictions is already built into the practice of receiving a blockbuster film (and producing it---the makers of Wall E were surely aware that they were implicitly ridiculing their audience). So when some youtube critic points out the contradiction, their message is received in exactly the same register, i.e. we pay them for the laugh and move on, changing nothing in our actions. In both forms of critique---Wall E’s critique of consumerism, or the metacritique of the consumption of the critique of consumerism---the norms of reception are the same. These norms are, at root, social practices coextensive with and instituted by the mediums via which these messages are received. A medium is never only a neutral platform, it always institutes a social practice implicitly containing and materialising its norms of reception. 

Practical reason can be thought of as the linguistic medium through which we trade, request, and acknowledge the authority of reasons to act. If the Wall E phenomenon provides an example of a strange divorce of reasons from actions, then this is just to say that the medium in which the rational content (the anti-consumerist warning) is received is not that of practical reason. But we already knew this---its medium is not practical reason but the consumer film, with practical reason partially embedded inside it. The difference is as great as between seeing someone drowning in a river and seeing a video of someone drowning in a river. Wall E’s anti-consumerism does not arrive as a reason to act, it arrives as an object of consumption made from a reason to act separated from the practice of committing to act. It will no more provoke action than watching a video of a person drowning would provoke the watcher to dive into a river. If no contradiction is felt by Wall E’s audience, it is because there is none. 

The capacity of communications technology to institute power relations is expounded by Jean Baudrillard in Requiem for the Media. His key point is that media such as television replace forms of reciprocal exchange with unilateral transmission. In a reciprocal exchange such as an unmediated verbal conversation, it is never simply a case of trading messages, there is always also a continual renegotiation of the terms of the conversation itself---meanings themselves are always up for grabs. What this represents is a kind of democratic control of the norms governing the medium, which according to Baudrillard is precisely what breaks down in the case of unilateral media. As a television viewer your freedom extends as far as choosing which channel to watch, but never to respond:

“TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself. There is no need to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everyone’s private life---the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other, that they are definitively isolated in the fact of a speech without response.”

The quote illustrates the link between the power relation and a practice of receiving---the form of the medium (literally, the screen in a room playing images and sounds on a limited selection of predefined channels) institutes a practice of watching which undermines a different kind of communication. Even when a medium does allow for response, if the norms of response are not controlled by participants then it amounts not to reciprocal exchange, but to reversible unilateral transmission. And since the power relation is instituted by the breakdown of reciprocity itself, according to Baudrillard, this amounts to the same thing. 

Unilateral transmission is linked by Baudrillard to the observation that power in human societies often belongs to whoever has the capacity to give but not to be repaid. This recalls the scenario with the medieval carnival: the master gives the villagers the power to challenge power, but by accepting the gift the villagers tacitly ratify the underlying power relation, and thus abandon the stakes of the challenge. In this idealised case there is a simple identification of the intentions and interests of the feudal lord. But power structures can and do exist without their beneficiaries having any explicit intentions to institute or sustain them. The tension between interests and intentions, and the possibility of their divergence, is at the heart of Lorde’s idea. Her point does not depend on any intentional manipulation of the platform to the advantage of a particular group. The point is that since a differential privileging of those interests is built into the platform itself, it makes no difference at all what the intentions are of those who use it. 

Even if those intentions are explicitly hostile to the power relation. The paradox in Lorde’s critique is, of course, that it is delivered on the very platform it claims can never be used to mobilise an effective critique. If the critique is correct it can never be successful. If it succeeds it proves itself wrong. This is an oversimplification---a single address does not exist in a vacuum---but it speaks to a peculiar tension unique to critical practices which disseminate their findings via the very mediums and institutions they implicate.

James Bridle’s Dronestagram project, an Instagram account collecting google earth satellite images of sites of US drone strikes between 2012 and 2015, illustrates the tension. Bridle’s own presentation of the project portrays its critical message as one of straightforward earnest: GPS and other technologies are facilitating new kinds of atrocities, here’s how we can take publicly available GPS tech and turn it back on itself. The curatorial operation of the Instagram interface itself is not mentioned, and is implicitly recruited as a neutral or positive conduit of the project’s findings, passively facilitating the raising of awareness and visibility.

Writing about the project, Nishat Awan gestures towards a different reading. It’s worth quoting at some length:

“The images that Bridle uses are readily available for anyone to access through Google Earth, part of an ongoing attempt to map and visualize every place on the planet, to make it hypervisible. Yet these images that are apparently so readily available for anyone to access are also completely inaccessible, as they are difficult to find and hardly anyone chose to look at them. They are somehow rendered consumable by Bridle, allowing us to see the reality of the places that the United States and its allies might claim were remote outposts, hamlets consisting of a few buildings, but were also places where people lived out their daily lives. Of course, there were other sources of information, other narratives that we could have chosen to listen to had we the appetite. Tribal leaders and ordinary people from the affected areas were telling of the exact toll that the bombings were taking. Herein lies the ambiguity and critical force of Bridle’s work. He is well aware that the remotely sensed images from satellites count for much more than the testimonies of tribal leaders, brown bodies whose truth the West was not yet ready to hear.”

What is curious about this is that it makes a point which on first glance seems critical of Bridle’s project, then calls it a strength. How the images were rendered consumable is no mystery (as the ‘somehow’ suggests): rendering a series of images into a consumable unity is exactly what the Instagram interface is designed to do. And as someone who is encountering an Instagram account, you are in the first instance a person who is consuming a series of images as an aesthetic object---you have tacitly signed up to this role already. The argument that the project ‘raises visibility’, and that this is by default a good thing, fails to take into account that there are different forms of visibility, each corresponding to a different normative milieu, a different practice of seeing instituted by different media and their value spaces. Indeed, this is exactly the point implied by Awan when he says that we take technologically originating images more seriously than victim testimony. 

Putting all this together, it is difficult to see how Bridle’s project does anything other than contribute to the problem that Awan claims it offers a forceful critique of. There is, of course, no reason why it cannot both contribute and critique. But if this is the case then how can it ever be a forceful critique? According to the above line of thought, it can at best offer a simulation of critique, just because by rendering the tragedy consumable it ensures that it is received in a mode of consumption. And a simulated critique is ultimately just an alibi. It is not surprising that these kind of projects generate engagement in the sense of views and followers---they do so because consumption as a mode of engagement (that is, as a practice) does not require you do anything other than receive. And what could be meant by a forceful critique, if not one that provides a reason to act?

On the normative reading, Lorde’s dictum can be seen as saying that political dialogue, communication, and agitation conducted via a medium whose norms are controlled by the interests of the status quo cannot hope to achieve meaningful change. If this seems pessimistic, it is just because it speaks to the extent to which media spaces have been captured by commercial and other interests. All public subversions that use them are just confirmations in disguise, affirming the existing order through its controlled inversion. 

If there is any hope to be salvaged, it must lie in the false materialist reading. Even if the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, their material openness at least ensures they can always become other than the master’s tools. If subversion proves a hopeless strategy, then there is still room for appropriation. It may not be possible to beat the master at his own games, but perhaps it will be possible to hijack the deck and start playing something else.

[divinecuration]

The soundsystem as space production technology / Burial / narrative interiority and solidarity

It could be said that a sound system is a technology for producing space. It operates by consolidating and autonomising local time, neutralising it through the obliteration of metronomic difference. Rhythm is both dissolution of temporality and resolution of narrative interiority, a becoming-time of space at its edges, a conversion protocol between space and its other. Time is the becoming-extensive of intensive space, the crust that contains and defines it. Leaving the club is always an encounter with temporality experienced as a loss of shared space.  

The fragmentation of rhythm and foregrounding of the medium in Burial’s music conveys this temporality as shattered. Mark Fisher describes it as a mourning for the lost futurism of rave, “Ravers have become deadbeats, and Burial’s beats are accordingly undead.” The loss of a global temporality (future and past) is a side-effect of the loss of shared narrative spaces produced by the sound system in its local cancellation of the present. Burial’s music can equally be read as a striving for a reassertion of this lost space, a paradoxical attempt to recover the sound system’s collectivity in the solipsistic locale of headphones. (If Sloterdijk is right that spatial mitosis is an immunological response, then headphones are surely its frontline antibody.)

Fisher emphasises the continuity of Burial with dub’s phono-centric sensibilities, its granting of a “privileged role to voices under erasure.” The denarrativised voice is the source of the undead in Burial’s music, of its spectrality and mourning: the presence of a humanity stripped of agency. But it is not the beats that are undead, per se---in Burial’s disjointed rhythms there is something different, a presence which is resolutely nonhuman in origin. Each percussive element is defiantly autonomous, a clattering material process in itself. Rhythmic unity in Burial operates according to principles of solidarity and contingency, never identity and necessity. Elements are poised to disperse, yet hang together nonetheless. It is this sense of narrative contingency in the inanimate, a certain agency in nonhuman matter, which replaces the absent human agency and reestablishes a sense of narrative space. The drainage of virtuality from the human sphere prompts a rediscovery of virtuality in nonhuman matter. It crystallises in the socialisation of the inanimate, in the yearning of urban debris and the pathos of machines.

For Fisher, the slow cancellation of the future testifies to a naturalisation of the dyschronia Frederic Jameson saw as characteristic of the postmodern. No longer experienced as jarring or eerie, there has been a flattening of the ironic dimension in pastiche and its anachronistic remixing of past forms, which is now presented with the full revolutionary earnest that modernism reserved for the formally innovative. Irony gestures to the impossibility of an imaginable real; when it is no longer possible to imagine the real anxiety over its absence disappears with it. It is the closure of Baudrillard’s simulatory envelope, final elimination and replacement of the real by its reproduction. 

This closure, according to Baudrillard, is always a process of ambivalence resolving into transparency, a reduction of a symbol whose referent is hidden and unknown to a sign exhausted by its differential relations to other signs and the code that governs their exchange. This reduction is an exorcism of unknown virtualities and their replacement by a relational essence, of the substitution of open particulars by closed universals. If there is any possibility of a realism in Baudrillard it lies in the recovery of ambivalence and the antagonism of the hidden. The inorganic agencies that crowd together in Burial’s rhythms are thick with unknown virtualities and hovering antagonisms. Their frail alliances are always ambivalent in their contingency, and it is because of (not despite) this that the space they inhabit is fundamentally social. Empathy is only possible across difference, and solidarity lies in the alignment of purpose between actants that could be doing otherwise. The electricity of garage lay in its antagonistic yet solidary unification of a single human and a single machine agency. In a landscape haunted by the traces of lost human agency, Burial reclaims narrativity by multiplying antagonisms in the nonhuman. 

[divinecuration]

The decay of the aura according to Walter Benjamin / the curatorial mapping / the presence of hiddenness in subculture and Berghain

In 1935 Walter Benjamin compared the performances of the stage actor and the film actor. He found two differences:

the screen performance is less unitary than the stage performance. It can be stitched together from different takes and repeat performances, incorporate real life footage, be altered, edited, etc. Unlike the organic unity of a stage performance, it is a patchwork of fragments sewn together into synthetic unity.

a screen performance is more readily susceptible to critical engagement. It can be rewatched by an audience many times over, slowed down and reversed, examined in its minutiae.

Both are products of the intrusion of the camera as mediating interface between actor and audience, restructuring the normative field on both sides. (Technical mediation is always normative restructuration. The poiesis of the artisan is conditioned by obligations to matter itself; the technics of industry is conditioned by obligations to the machines that operate on matter.) One reciprocal relation is replaced by two unilateral relations. The film actor, according to Benjamin, is not tested on their representation of a character but on themselves as a representer, on their capacity to depict and represent. (The question of realism was never important to theatre; for cinema it becomes central.) The camera is a surgical tool, dissecting for inspection. At the same time it removes the audience from the performance space, denying the actor their source of feedback and masking the criterion of inspection. The new anxiety of the film actor, likened by Benjamin to the feeling of standing before one’s image in the mirror, is the product of a technical operation which both imposes a regime of testing and obscures its own criteria. The attitude of the audience to the stage performance is modulated from involvement and reciprocity to unilateral scrutiny. The camera tests; the audience test with it. The performance is assessed on its traces of authenticity, even as its production for reproduction is necessarily an act of artifice. 

The screen performance is transmittable and reproducible. The stage performance, an organic unity of heterogeneous components tied to particular presence and audience, to accidents of circumstance, therefore untransmittable, is multiplied, dissected and resynthesised into a new, transmittable unity---which is then scrutinised for exactly those particularities and presences destroyed in its creation. The public gaze is always forensic, an interrogation of a scene for the fading traces of what is always-already gone. For Benjamin as with Baudrillard later, the transformation in perception is equivalent to a mutation in the law of value structuring social reality. In the age of communications technologies and media saturation the unique and individual is still what is valued, but valuability itself is always subservient to the principle of reproduction. The anxiety described by Benjamin is a product of the contradictory imperative to be reproducibly unique.

Benjamin understood this mutation in terms of a libidinal drive towards closeness. The aura is described as “the unique phenomenon of a distance”, with its decay attributed to “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly.” But the analysis is tangled. We are told the aura is both presence and distance, and the bringing-close that mechanical reproduction makes possible (the surgical close-ups of the camera, the hypervisibility of far off things) also results in loss of presence. Closeness and presence are set in opposition, yet Benjamin never unwraps this paradox. But it can be understood if ‘closeness’ is held to refer to aesthetic closeness and ‘presence’ to normative closeness, which is just involvement, participation, interiority. The production of aesthetic proximity is an operation of framing that severs obligations (in the broad sense of an attunement to act in relation to, as in the obligation you have to pay attention to the rattlesnake you’re in the tank with). Normative decontextualisation is the molding of exteriority, the division of a social space by transparent membranes that explode involvements and multiply viewpoints via the same mechanism. The drive to closeness then is a drive towards a kind of aesthetic disentanglement, a clearing away of obligations towards things in order to get a better look at them. The libidinal drive towards closeness is in fact a striving for liberation from obligation, from the labour implied by a commingling of narratives.

Benjamin’s analysis of ritual value yields a similar puzzle. The aura of an artwork is grounded in ritual, its decay relating to the privileging of exhibition value over ritual value. In the case of ritual objects, the absence of mass visibility is a clue to their true nature. Their value and function—whether aesthetic, magical, devotional, or archival—is internal to their lifeworld, the concrete social context that produced them. To this extent they can never exist purely for display. Embeddedness within a lifeworld ensures that they are always infused with a residue of the social symbolic, the concrete and particular human relations that are their telos and referent. It is this quality of concrete embeddedness which is the distinctive mark of the aura. Perceived hiddenness is just a consequence of the fact that there is no need for exhibition in the case of an embedded object, since its audience already belong to its lifeworld. And so it is that that which remains embedded is rendered invisible in a world that registers as visible only that which has been abstracted for reproduction, that which has been placed in a frame for transmission and scrutiny. The framing operation---always a technical operation---is just that which de-embeds an object, an event, a message, a person. It is a violent foregrounding which translates particularity into the abstract universality of a media space. This is always a threefold process:

the decomposition of a complex particular into heterogeneous parts.

a selective and exclusionary mapping of parts into a new medium which homogenises them under a common characteristic.

the resynthesis of the mapped parts into a new unity bound by an identity which essentialises the new characteristic. 

A particular building is composed of material properties, shapes, spaces, locations, histories, intentions, perspectives, air flows, warpings, movements of shadows---decomposed as a series of photographic details it is rendered as an aesthetic object in the Instagram interface, each detail mapped to a square image of a specific size, saturation and hue unified by filters, a similarity in camera angles and distances, etc.---whatever is required to make the series hang together as a grid of square images. Whitespace is never innocent. The synthesis of the new unity both maps the mappable to a homogenous space, and excludes whatever is too bound to particularity to be mapped (the memories, the histories). What is excluded is condemned to technical invisibility, which is always equivalent to metaphysical unreality. Excluded particularity never goes anywhere; it remains present while sentenced as unreal. Benjamin’s anxiety is just the haunting of exalted ghosts by the discarded living.

The real is reclusive---the reality principle ensures it. Photographs of subculture always seem tacky, for no other reason than that their scenes have not been contrived for camera. A definition of subculture might be: a subset of culture with its own practice of value denying the criterion of reproducibility as mark of the real. Artifacts of subculture are always infused with ritual value tied to concrete people, histories, places, times, events. Tackiness, or the unaesthetic, is the product of placing a ritual object in an exhibition context. The internet is full of photographs and videos of free parties, but they are mostly lame. Good parties don’t photograph well, because all energies are directed into the production of unreproducible particularities. As far as the value logic of media space goes, they end up hidden without ever trying to be, the invisibility of the uncurated.

Meanwhile Berghain makes a policy of hiddenness. The ban on photography ostensibly serves to protect its authenticity, but really it functions by deflecting from the fact that if people were to take photos in there, most would be bad: it is all noise and darkness. The worry is not that photographs would undermine authenticity, but that they would reveal the wrong kind of authenticity (the authenticity of the familiar and unaesthetic) and discharge the mystique. Hiddenness as policy is a protection of aesthetic visibility as a virtuality. The active hiddenness practiced by Berghain (which would be pointless for any genuine underground) is a tactical move which has the opposite effect of its stated aims: it is both artificial creation of a gap in media’s reach and the aesthetisation of this very gap. Protection of authenticity is an alibi for the protection of the reproducibility principle. All this amounts to is an extension of the logic of media space into the gap, into physical reality itself. In its aesthetised hiddenness Berghain becomes hypervisible in potentia. Free parties are happening everywhere, yet they are nowhere to be seen.

[divinecuration]

A rant on the theme of frozen dialectics / the foaminess of affect / the real and the logic of value / gripes with Extinction Rebellion

Anger is socially heavy, and thus morally impossible. It must always be muted, contained, restricted, choked; sublimated into contempt. It is required of all affects that they resolve into their lightest equivalent. There is always a folding of relations of interiority into exteriorities, lighter because interiority implies a weight of involvement. Interiority is involvement, and involvement is nothing other than labour and risk. There is a fractal decomposition of social reality into separate compartments, the residue of this exothermic mitosis harvested by technocapital as fast as it can be solicited. Nowhere is lighter than outer space.

The dialectic of anger and guilt is switched for a non-synthesising dialectic of contempt and shame, a closed and self-stabilising circuit constrained to the plane of affect. The link between thought and action is undermined at its centre. Belief is rendered impossible as thought becomes mandatory. Thought remains but is no longer participated in, since participation depends on affective substructures always-already immobilised. What’s left is an aesthetisisation of thought: the Idea receives its gilded frame, encircled and beautiful, liberated from risk. Recursive thought short-circuits motive outputs, each categorical diffracting into a non-completing series of hypotheticals. Critical theory impresses itself with its capacity to create space for the last word, even when it does so faster than the space can be filled. Discourse is free to proliferate without the embarrassment of judgement. Careers are made this way.

Contempt is light, and thus morally permissible. Anger is only possible between those who share social space (those who cohabit an interior). This is the precondition of anger’s generative function as affective motor in the synthetic and reconciliatory process traversing guilt and empathy. The immanence of the series—the conjunct of both its interiority and its intensity—constitutes both its reconciliatory potential and its heaviness. Its simulated double is seductive because it is light. But in seduction it is missed that where there is no risk there can be no opportunity, just as where there is no difference there can be no change. Affective economies of the present are grounded on the principle of equilibrium, never resolution.

Contempt is lighter than anger. Where anger echoes in the hollow of a social interior contempt is silent, demanding nothing: it simply cleaves social space in two. Anger is despised because it betrays a lack of mindfulness viz. the ability to form a relation of exteriority with regard to oneself. (To relate to anger from the third person is to no longer possess it—by now we all know this mantra.) Those who express anger are held in contempt precisely for their insistence on the existence of a shared interior. The reactive guilt which confirms it becomes a cause for self-castigation; contempt turns back on itself and metabolises into shame. The call to lightness everywhere imposes relations of exteriority, an outsideness with respect to one another and finally oneself. Total aesthetisation: the placement of every aspect of social and material existence into a viewing frame, the modulation of perception into an optics excluding all that is not safely behind perspex.

Peter Sloterdijk says modernity is a foam. The separation of subjectivities into distinct spheres seems less important than that it has been invited, on account of the membranes being a. transparent and b. pressed close against one another. Separation (for Sloterdijk an immunological technique) combined with transparency and the closeness of exteriors facilitates a voluntary and mutual amplification of a gaze which is in the first place aesthetic, turned on one another—a gaze necessarily attenuated in contexts of participation. (The rattlesnake’s tail cannot be admired from inside the tank.) The intervention of the membrane amplifies both aesthetic access and remoteness of involvement. Hypervisibility and normative detachment are born in the same process. What is left is a simulation of closeness, at once backlit with fascination and stripped of all history, exchangeable for any equivalent but incapable of growth.

Critics of irony call it stagnant critical detachment, a strategy of evasion enumerating all problems and absolving all responsibility in the same breath. Irony is self-absolution—a means of protection and immunisation—the ironist never reveals, and never becomes vulnerable. Intrigued by everything; fascinated by nothing. Irony functions by foreclosing all possibility of risk, and it is on these grounds that it is ultimately disavowed as too timid. Heralded as the antidote to irony’s fatal self-reflection is naïveté, and a return to intention as validator of action. Suspicious of irony’s privileging of thought naïveté calls one to act from the heart. It says: thought will leave you bound up in paralysis—stop it. Apathy is the greatest sin of all. Pure intentions, etc. It will not work---it instantiates the same structure in a new variation, this adjustment in the rationale of action orthogonal to the corresponding adjustment in social morality that replaces happiness with lightness as its core virtue.

In taking irony as their culprit, heralds of naïveté confuse symptom with cause. Jean Baudrillard said of irony that it is our last hope of perdition in a world which has become obscene. What Baudrillard meant by the obscene is nothing other than the dominance of the aesthetic mode in a foamy world. Irony is deployed as a coping strategy, response within thought to the aesthetisisation of everything---the systematic erasure of both risk and opportunity from all aspects of life. Once irony was a response to the necessity of action in the absence of possibilities for thought, the absence of any rational criteria for deciding action (so it was for Shakespeare). Now the laugh is saved for the impossibility of action in a world overflowing with thoughts fed endlessly back into themselves. This is the foamification of irony, its aesthetic and ouroboric inversion, futile response from within thought to the aesthetisisation and consequent immobilisation of thought itself.

Foamy irony is in the process of being replaced by foamy naïveté: futile response within action to the total aesthetisation of action. Foamy naïveté is complicit in the production of homeostatic deadlock for the same but inverted reasons, digging the ravine from its other bank. Regulated inaction is unstable, so it mutates into a theatre of action, action-for-its-image, action exchangeable for social capital. Action without risk, action designed for a camera. If participation seems amplified it is because it leverages risklessness: to participate in a political protest is just to perform a political thought, never to take part in a political act (which was only ever to stake something that matters). What is called political action is instead predicated on its costlessness, i.e. the act is not political at all. Insomuch as it can be referred to as action it is more apiece with consumer action (we should say rather activity, since its direction is illusory). What has been lost in all this is the political itself. If things are hopeless make a self-ironising aesthetic out of the tragedy; or simulate utopia in the name of action—both consolidate power via the same mechanism, and both photograph beautifully. Extinction Rebellion and mumble rap: same thing.

Extinction Rebellion successfully aestheticised the political. This is how it generated its engagement at the same time as undermining its own capacity for generating structural change—aesthetisation itself undermines the political. Participation in the sense of the political is to stake something, to put something that matters on the line. If arrest either costs you nothing or gets you something it cannot be a political act.  The accusation that it is a movement of and for the privileged was not really a charge that it enclosed direction action such that only those who could afford arrest were able to act politically by its lights; the problem was the opposite, perpetuated by both accusers and accused: that only those who could be arrested without risking politics were able to participate fully in the XR identity. In other words, that it was an exclusive brand masquerading as an inclusive brand. That this was conveyed as a limiting of the political inclusivity of XR only served to bolster the illusion that XR was ever anything like a political movement. That it generated large amounts of engagement is no mystery—it did so by ensuring engagement need not be political. Political engagement is costly, involving personal risk for collective struggle. Consumer engagement is cheap, requiring only the performance of ideology in return for symbolic self-realisation.

A recent advert for Squarespace ran with the tagline “a website makes it real”. It is this sense of the real that dominates the logic of value in foamic space. The real is a cipher for a highly specialised yet socially distributed optics of value whose operation renders unreal all that is not curated, that is: coded in the form of an identity synthesised from salvaged fragments of whatever (literally whatever: value is entirely synthetic, brought into being in the act of curation itself). The essentially exclusionary mechanics of curation serve two purposes: i. removing all elements that overstep and thus threaten the implicit norms constituting the identity (heterogeneity is nominally welcomed, even expected—but only within strict confines imposed from above. True heterogeneity is impossible, since difference is generative and inherently dispersive, a force that fractures identities) ii. masking the violence of fragmentation and salvage, making both them and their victims literally invisible, because unreal ie. passed over by the optics of value (ie. doesn’t have a website). The primacy of curation over creation is characteristic of foamy culture, its trend the inevitable absorption of the latter by the former. Technologically facilitated curatorial practices seep through all media, which by now includes physical reality itself. Everywhere organic unities are shattered and replaced by an artificial synthesis of the fragments. This is the curatorial operation: authenticity bent to the constraint of seriality, as Baudrillard once put it.