Enacting the Image

"We must be able to pass on to the coming generations --if not as the legacy of these times then as a kind of message in a bottle-- what computer technology meant to the first generation it affected." (Friedrich Kittler)

The signs are everywhere about looming crisis. The crisis of art, the crisis of the economy, the crisis of information, the crisis of the image, the crisis of the millennium, the crisis of identity, the crisis of mega-mergers, the crisis of confidence, the crisis of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the crisis of health, the crisis of modernity, the crisis of post-modernity, the crisis of cyber-modernity, the list goes on and on and on. For us in the field of media archaeology, the crisis is signified in many ways. The Fall line-up of festivals was itself a dizzying array of crisis aesthetics. Ars Electronica's Infowar, ISEA's Revolution and Terror, the Art and Global Media symposium, the upcoming DEAF98 festival "The Art of the Accident." And here we are in an emerging environment in which the siege of representation is taking place amid stunning conflicts and mergers in every field. Just in the past week the formation of the world's biggest financial institution (Deutsche Bank and Banker's Trust), the world's biggest energy company (Exxon and Mobil), the world's biggest internet portal (as AOL buys Netscape). This while the world's biggest software maunfacturer is in the midst of significant anti-trust litigation in Washington, this while the Russian economy is propped up by the World Bank. All these shocking reminders that the stability of our relationship with history, memory, politics, identity, and technology is itself under siege.

On the recent flight, there was an article in the International Herald Tribune about the misrepresentation of scientists in Hollywood. It said, in part, "Science is out of reach as perceived by the vast, vast, vast majority of people." It continued, "From Dr Frankenstein to Dr Strangelove, from the grave robbers of yesteryear to the clonners of today, scientists in movies are almost invariably mad, evil, antisocial, clumsy, or eccentric." The article reminded me of a remark made in a fascinating symposium in New York last year called "Technology and the Rest of Culture." Of the many aging luminaries on the panel (Langdon Winner, Leo Marx, Peter Gallison and others), there was a rambling talk by the great poobah of Artificial Intelligence, Marvin Minsky. His unintentionally (?) hypermedia (actually more incoherent than hypertextual) presentation was filled with zealous exaggerations. The most glaring was an almost passing characterization to the relationship between science and culture that still makes me wince with anxiety. In the midst of his talk he paused for a moment and said: "Culture ... is just bad science." It was a shocking sound bite that revealed the scope of a crisis that haunts the discourse between the allegedly unscientific disciplines of philosophy, sociology, or art. It was diagnostic -- and hence a sort of revelation -- in the most insidiously grandiose way. Yet Minsky's reckless (one assumes) comment comes while the 'triumphs of reason' that come with technoculture are again in the forefront of cultural studies. For Minsky culture is failure, failure to heed the legitmations of scientific method, of technical mastery masquerading as social logic, a kind of systems-ideology that is predominating the end of the millennuim debates about the role of technology as integrated not just into every single transaction we have in the world but in the speculative technologies that will enact the willed ---should one say programmed-- realities that will come in the near future.

The same Herald article cited a remark by Oxford geneticist Richard Dawkins, patron saint of the memetic frenzy that attempts to socialize a problematic reinterpretation of evolution as indistinguishable from computer programming and an idea that has spawned broad re-evaluations of the relationships between biology and culture. "The natural world," wrote Dawkins, "is fascinating in its own right...It really doesn't need human drama to be fascinating." Since the flight was long I also read a blurb in Wired by Hans Moravec who has published a new book on Robots. His speculative work certainly straddles the line between reason and conjecture and reminded me of the description I once heard about so-called visionaries --and especially the self-declared ones!: "A visionary is just a crackpot you happen to believe." His comment: "As a storage medium DNA has run its course. The iMAC doesn't have floppy disks; our descendendants won't have DNA." Classic dissociation and illogical affinity. And if the so-called science wars --where cultural theory is chastened for any foray into cultural readings of the unassailable realms of science--are any indication (as represented by the flippant and anti-social works of Alan Sokal, Gross and Levitt, and a growing chorus of scientific apologists), then a crisis of technological discourse is also emerging.

Deeply entrenched in systems-think, the new generation of cyber-crats nevertheless spend considerable time rationalizing a deeply flawed legitimation of evolutionary algorithmics as a historically viable evolutionary theory. In a growing literature, this ideas is being deconstructed as a cross between essentialism and universalization. Stephen Jay Gould is attacking Steven Pinker (author of How the Mind Works) in a series of essays in The New York Review of Books where the differences between biological and computational ideologies emerges as a central arena, one that is as much connected to the theme of this symposium as any I can imagine. "In [between] the images," between the "image" of analogy (on which so much of our relationship with representation stands) and the "image" of computation (on which the rendering of our relationship with representation stands). This is not so much a porous border as a desicisive one in which technology subsumes information into a cosmic data-base that itself assumes the role of an apparatus, an apparatus that is as entrenched in an evolving electronic totality as broadcast media was for the cold war.Yet, its language comes in the old, user-friendly terminologies of cyber-speak. The worn metaphors of Comand, Control and Communication (C3) has been extended. Communication Intelligence (COMINT), Electronic Intelligence (EINT) is evolving into Signal Intelligence (SIGNIT) in which Human Intelligence (affectionately known as HUMINT) is eclipsed by simulated intelligence (SIMINT). Knowledge and Game Theory merge. Information itself becomes militarized, the ideological state apparatus becomes the ideological SENSE apparatus. We face the spectre of the so-called "new sciences" of the artificial and its lexicon of the intentionally ambiguous: "the attention economy," "behavioral economics," "automatic execution," presumptions of "conscious hardware," "artificial insight,""epistemic warfare," the "secret sphere." "soft power..."

These reductive phrases come as signifiers of constant reminders of the anxiety diet that we too willingly partake in. The seductions of illusion, the often frustrated mnemonics of electronic memory, the faux correspondences between the so-call virtual and the so-called real world, emerge amid ever more complex and ever more speculative narratives that, as Jameson suggested as the essential condition of postmodernity, that we are narrating the end of narrative by means of narrative. (didn't we see some of this last night?). Comes with this a fascinating kind of retreat into the subjectivity less of reflection than of refuge. These virtualized refuges run the risk of of exposing some clear vulnerabilities in our public relationship with identity and technology. Indeed reductionism seems a welcomed consequence for a culture driven by individuated mechanisms that reinforce isolation and the vulnerability of information. George Stein, at Infowar, was very clear about this operational condition when he said: Information leads to dependency, dependency to vulnerability, vulnerability to defeat." So as we oscillate between the public and private spheres, there is a challenge to face the pathetic cyber-sociological end of material public sphere politics and the equally errie legitimation of "being Digital," of "Life on the Screen" or of an artificial life without its other. How this cleansed ideology of systems affects our perspective on history, memory of illusion is a tough question. Suffice to suggest, as does Regis Debray in Media Manifestos: "One will write 'society' in place of 'humanity,' and 'spectacle' for 'ideology.' Essentialist ontologies are obliged to wipe out everything discovered since 1848..."

How do we undo (in a world where limitless undo's or the undoing of the not yet done, as we heard last night) the kind of digital repressive tolerance, remain vigilant to the state of emergency that is so cogently referred to by both Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmidt. Benjamin wrote: "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'stste of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We Must," he continues," attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly recognize that it is ourr task to bring about a real state of emergency." Carl Schmidt extended this by saying "the one who controls the state of emergency is soverign." Debray reminds us too that "no more than there is any innocent medium can there be any painless transmission."

II.

Invisibility is a deception. Vulnerability is assumed. Passivity is expected. If we follow the logic of the electronic culture industries, the so-called 'virtual corporations,' the coercive and reductive mergers of telecommunications and the international information flow, or the erratic formation of telecommunications policy (or its history), it is clear that the regulation of civil life is driven not by the sustenance of political liberty, individual autonomy or the encouragement of serious cultural discourse. The signs of this are pervasive and range from the growing fields of genetic screening (more or less a form of diagnostic domination veiled behind medical mastery) to the erosion of the boundary between the public and private spheres.

The culture of Modernity, in which the universalization, moralization and mechanization of representation evolved, has been surpassed. A technological model has been usurped by a cybernetic model, telephobic modernity with telephilic postmodernity.

If there is a common denominator within the discourses of postmodernity, it is that the ascendancy of a system of scientific visualization and the loss of any totalizing model of either the "real" world or its representations can be put into place-even while the stability of representation is alternately established and disestablished by the social effect of the image (think of the fate of the Rodney King Video). The camouflage over the shaky epistemological foundation of representation has been effaced by the dual deconstructions of psychoanalysis and technology. The unrepresentable "Real," collides with the unreflected "virtual."And, as Zizek has remarked, "virtuality is already at work operating in the symbolic order as such to the extent to which virtual phenomenon retroactively enable us to discover to what extent all our most elementary self-experience was virtual." It cannot be a surprise that the panoptic metaphors of Bentham and Foucault are re-invented in the technosphere in the guise of electronic "agents," digital security systems, genetic screening, satellite imaging technologies with imaging capability of less than one meter resolution from 35,000 miles in "space," SkyCam news networks with robotic cameras surveying for crisis, in short more than a panoptic metaphor but a transoptic one in which the invisible threat of the gaze is welcomed as a symptom of containment and stability. Indeed, while issues of space dominated discourses of modernity, the related issues of presence and have come to stand within postmodernity as signifiers of a far more intricate situation. Worn traditions of the public sphere, the sociology of post-industrialization, the discreteness of identity, have been supplanted by a form of distributed imbeddedness-or better, the immersion-of the self in the mediascapes of tele-culture which must generate a communicative practice whose boundaries are mapped in virtual, transitory networks, whose hold on matter is ephemeral, whose position in space is tenuous, and whose agency is measured in acts of implication rather than mere coincidences of location.

...

"...one practical advantage of reality video (video that appears to replicate history) must be recognized -- its function as a democratic form of counter-surveillance." -- Critical Art Ensemble.

In the first hours after the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the broadcast media was saturated by video feeds that switched between images of individual victims and images of hundreds of citizens who mobilized rescue efforts. A day later the scene had changed drastically. Space became logistical and not civil. Victims were clearly secondary to evidence, the sites became armed camps. Mobilized intelligence and military forces 'secured' the site (as they have done in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Oklahoma City...). Immediately came the voices of both regret and accusation. The tropes are now part of the rhetoric of terrorist public relations ("No matter what it takes," "Justice will be done," "No limit to our resolve," etc,). In the aftermath, though, a new phrase emerged in the equivocal linguistic arena: "Soft Targets." Easily understood as sites with limited or lax security, the term Soft Targets comes enveloped in implications that extend beyond attainable terrorist objectives into the less concrete (literally) arenas of information and/or bodies. Formerly called "collateral," these 'soft targets' will increasingly be signified as casualties in information, biological or genetic conflicts.

Because the development and deployment of technology straddles the boundaries of the military and cultural industries, it seems necessary to reveal -- if not undo -- the forms of authority whose strategies circumscribe independence by evoking rationales of defensive order or international stability. Reactionary by necessity, these strategies contain radical innovation and maintain security. In this sense, it is clear, as The Critical Art Ensemble suggest, that a bunker ideology pervades the public sphere. and that "the continual disturbance of these sites is essential in the never-ending battle to maintain a degree of individual autonomy." (ECD 39) So between the protectionist technologies of sovereign power and the blissful information mythology of the cybersphere, crisis continually looms. Gilles Deleuze characterized it thus: "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure."

Bruno Latour remarked in a recent interview, "Images demonstrate transformation, not information." Though not so startling a position in a culture compulsively engaged in the assessment of representation, Latour's comment reminds us that the role of the image can no longer be comfortably enveloped in lingering phenomenological or simple semiotic traditions. Yet the stakes in the image have consistently grown in scope, principally because of the evolving technologies utilized in their production. Because of this, a reconceptualization of the formation, function and reception of the image seems urgently necessary.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger once wrote that "no avant-garde has thus called for the police to rid it of its opponents." Times have changed. The coy alliance between ferment and repressive tolerance has enveloped most of the creative practices of the 20th century. As is clear from even a casual understanding of the cultural, political, and creative practices of the past 20 years, the issues of technology and computing have generated responses ranging from euphoric desperation to heroic tele-modernities. In the accelerating environment of the past decade, the urgency of the staggering cumulative effects of techno-science and its consequences has hardly been conceptualized despite a growing literature of speculative, theoretical and pseudo-non-fictional assessments. In an era in which the inversion of avant-garde and corporate intention further blurs the already hazy legitimacy of any notion of the avant-garde, it comes as little surprise that politics, spectacle, technology, revolution, violence, and surveillance meet in a perverse ecological system in which the police, militias, terrorists, artists, corporate visionaries, and futurists join in survivalist tactics that are on the border between retroactive legitimation and terminal compromise.

The penetration of technology within the body and the socialization of simulated realities is more than a signifier of technological progress, it marks a radical transformation of knowledge, of biology, and of the cultural order in which knowledge is linked with ideology, biology, or identity in terms of a technological imperative not fundamentally connected with necessity. The consequence of genetic engineering (or perhaps more appropriately genetic therapies), of patented life-forms, of radicalized techno-medicine or techno-psychology, are among the sweeping ethical issues of our time. Indeed a discourse is emerging concerning the use of cosmetic genetics and cosmetic psycho-pharmacology to determine everything from a tendency to certain illnesses and the selectable gendering of children to the normalization of behavior through the use of psychotropic drugs which induce only the symptoms of normalcy. And you know how it goes-first symptoms of normalcy and then simulations of satisfaction.

As Herbert Marcuse wrote:

Art, as an instrument of opposition, depends on the alienating force of the aesthetic creation, on its power to remain strange, antagonistic, transcendent to normalcy and, at the same time, being the resorvoir of man's supressed needs, faculties and desires, to remain more real than the reality of normalcy.