Publicity and Surveillance |
4.26.2002
Final Paper:
Machine Vision... part Deux! "Revenge of The Mechanical Eye"... Along time ago... In a State of mind far,far, away... I wrote a paper that tried to answer the question of "whats at stake /w machine vision"... To that end... I did not completely succeed... why? because I was not focussed enough on some of the basic concepts to ground my paper to certain key theoretical texts... I originally used my own understanding of Machine Vision which, due to my considerable amount of visual film theory, elided the fundamental role algorithms and AI play in any notion of Machine Vision ( i focused on the camera, and the historical analysis of cinematic representation... as i thought this alone, fundamentally, constituted a realistic understanding of machine vision)... Thus the main focus of my next paper will be to use a definition of machine vision that has a much more technical scope... such as: Machine vision is the ability of a computer to "see." A machine-vision system employs one or more video cameras, analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), and digital signal processing (DSP). The resulting data goes to a computer or robot controller. Machine vision is similar in complexity to voice recognition. Two important specifications in any vision system are the sensitivity and the resolution. Sensitivity is the ability of a machine to see in dim light, or to detect weak impulses at invisible wavelengths. Resolution is the extent to which a machine can differentiate between objects. In general, the better the resolution, the more confined the field of vision. Sensitivity and resolution are interdependent. All other factors held constant, increasing the sensitivity reduces the resolution, and improving the resolution reduces the sensitivity. Human eyes are sensitive to electromagnetic wavelengths ranging from 390 to 770 nanometers (nm). Video cameras can be sensitive to a range of wavelengths much wider than this. Some machine-vision systems function at infrared (IR), ultraviolet (UV), or X-ray wavelengths. (this is from www.whatis.com... maybe not the best source... but the right idea... P. Chun.. i couldnt find the definition you used... as the OED didnt return any results for Machine Vision... maybe i need to be more specific?) Through detailed readings of Foucault, Virilio, Keenan, Bazin, Heath, and Dienst, I plan to unpack the various understandings of the relationship between light, gaze, representations of 'the real', and ultimately hope to answer the question of whats at stake in machine vision (i'm not sure if i will have to focus the answer of this question primarily on Virilio...) anyways... i'll have an outline with key passages from the texts i plan to cite on Monday. have a good weekend. peace out! -manu
For my final paper, I'd like to take a closer look at the association of the private space with sexuality. This entails not only an examination of the role of sexuality in the sculpting of a private sphere, but also how privacy (specifically secrecy) seems to make sexual that which is contained within its bounds.
Foucault's discussion of the repressive hypothesis will be focal in this argument, defining sexuality as the illusionary truth, the expression of the true self. Privacy functions similarly, in as much as that which is private is thought to always be the “space” in which the true self can be realized, an illusion that correlates identically to the repressive hypothesis. This results in a fetishizing of the private sphere, a desire to become private, a desire to know the privacy of others, and a general opinion that that which goes on in private, particularly in secret must be of more importance than that which is presented to the gaze of the public. Thus is the creation of the “sexual private”. The issue of surveillance as a breach of the private comes into play as well, as a sexual intervention, that which would be used to protect the public from the violation of the sexual unseen operating under the assumption that that which escapes the gaze must be taboo. Surveillance as a spying technique is appropriate here as well as an uncovering of the truth. I will have this outlined a bit further over the weekend. Dave
Is the paranoid person representative of a certain state as the hysterical female represents the victim of the bourgeoisie? What is the “certain state” in the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries?
Is paranoia a response to a panoptic gaze, a network of permanent observation? Is it a response to “ethical utilitarianism” in the form of the panopticon and therefore, an internalized surveillance gaze instilling discipline? Under this gaze, reference points of self perception have changed… Is paranoia the result of identification in a multimedia space that as Frohne posited, “creates a compulsion to conform to an image,” in an image addicted public? Everyone is trained to look for this conformity and the paranoid feels the weight of observation intensely. What does disciplinary and regulatory power produce in terms of paranoia? Especially if as we have discussed, discipline is a paranoid logic. As Dora’s hysteria was an unconscious effort to interrupt her exploitation in the kinship circle her father and Herr K constructed, does the paranoid person have a sort of subversive agency? Is paranoia a productive force? Furthermore, is that a paradoxical question? If not and if paranoia is in fact productive, then what does it produce? I want to approach these questions with a reading of Freud’s “The Case of Schreber” and “Dora: A Case History,” also Santner’s My Own Private Germany, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Additionally, I would like to explore The Conversation and look into Schreber’s original text.
Final paper topic: PRIVACY
I want to pursue the question that was raised in the class lead by Amy Kapcynski: Why do "we" (Americans, Western civilization) want/demand/claim the right to privacy? This is sort of a complementary paper to Chris Knight's question about our demand for publicity. Broadly, and very preliminarily, I will consider: - theories of the ontology of the private sphere + Foucault's history of power as a move from monarchy to panoptically-bred discipline, with a resultant change in privacy as a privilege of the King to property that all men "have" + Foucault's history of sexuality (and subjectivity) and the creation of "personal secrets" as a result of the creation of knowledges which demands confession of those secrets + Keenan's (and perhaps Lacan's) idea of the private self as an effect of the intrusion of the Other + legal definitions: Vanna White, Kyllo v. US + the connection between privacy and commidification - perceived threats to the private sphere + Carnivore, Echelon and the Internet + machine vision (surveillance cameras of all sorts, facial recognition software, national ID cards) + centralized Gaze (Big Brother) vs. decentralized gazes (Little Brothers) + censorship (freedom of speech as a personal right) + The Conversation and Enemy of the State are good sources of mythology - techniques for protecting the private sphere (from the "public", in all its forms) + cryptography (becoming unreadable) + TAZ, sovereign media, tactical media (becoming invisible/disconnected) + Law (depending on a ruling power to prevent intrusions) + detournement, surveillance camera players, Bit Plane (subverting technologies (physical and symbolic) to make them less readable) + consumerism reinforces our individuality ("Be you, drink Pepsi") - the stakes of these theories, threats and techniques (how they construct the private sphere as they rely on it as an "obvious" concept) + threats and techniques of protection reveal what is essential about privacy that needs to be protected * cryptography implies COMMUNICATION is essentially private * The Surveillance Camera Players imply that your IMAGE is essentially private * resistance to Carnivore implies that some amorphous entity called PERSONAL INFORMATION is essentially private + what is relied upon by the ideas of privacy * subjectivity * a public * a relationship between the public and private - the effect of the media/technology + panopticon embraced: Big Brother et. al. + the line between public and private becomes blurred (is watching TV public or private? to whom is the news addressed?) + new spheres which offer new forms of subjectivity and interaction with other people (the Internet, most obviously) This is a wide sweep of ideas. I will probably narrow it to focus specifically on the way that computers and the Internet have affected our expectations of privacy. I am particularly interested in the implications of cryptography and the subjectivity that is constructed by "personal computers". There is a very interesting article by Jodi Dean, "From Technocracy to Technoculture" in the on-line journal Theory & Event (recommended as a journal by Keenan during the discussion; it's very good, I re-recommend it to everyone as a possible source of interesting material), which I will use as a basis for my considerations. I anticipate that Foucault will be very useful to me, as well as May, Bey, and Lovink. I guess this is the end of my last post to the blog. I really enjoyed pursuing "enlightenment" (or maybe just a small patch of light to read by...) with you guys. Enjoy your temporary autonomy, Nick
Shawn Greenlee
Final Paper Proposal – Publicity and Surveillance April 25, 2002 Adorno and Horkheimer state in “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reducing the world of every-day perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover of the sound film. Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.” (126) For my final paper, I will explore the concept that the mechanical reproduction as witness or impetus for an event helps facilitate the blurring of “worlds”, between screen and real life and between public and private. It will be necessary to distill various positions on this issue. I wish to explore Adorno and Horkheimer’s thought detailing the effect of the culture industry as one of impeding independent/autonomous thought, of encouraging conformity through mass deception. Also critical to this investigation will be a further look at Virilio, specifically his notion of the objectiveness of the camera and how it presents the opportunity for hyper-realism. “Eyewitness accounts have been devalued, it is now possible to do away with their body too, for we now have something more than their image: we have their real-time telepresence.” (Virilio, 44) Through Virilio’s text, “The Vision Machine”, and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, I will investigate the linkage between the culture industry and its use of media in creating a substitution for the real through publication, and how this is the inherit problem/advantage to mechanical reproduction. I will also use Keenan’s essays as points of reference on the effect of substitution and how this effect may re-inform the issue. The following questions will guide the paper: Does the resistance/fear of the uses of the camera come from a panoptic notion of always being watched (fear of instant recall of transgressions)? And/or is this fear one that manifests in mediation, a forcing of conventionalized modes of behavior? Do the changes in our society that impact our notions of public/private threaten or advance an older establishment? What are the modes in which threat or aid manifest? Lessig had quoted Machiavelli, “Innovation makes enemies of those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.” Lessig was making the point that the Internet has the potential for reclaiming some of our autonomy that the culture industry has taken from us. Are all innovations destined for corruption by the culture industry? Partly relevant: I cannot help but wonder how innovation impacts the theorists who in turn write about it and to what extent that threat informs their opinions. Virilio had quoted Jean Cocteau, “I’m giving up making films since technological progress means anyone can do it.” The role of critic may be necessary to evaluate.
For the most part, I plan to build on the structure of my extra response from Monday to create the body of my final paper, so I will not reiterate too much. However, the following is perhaps a more coherent articulation of the framework I want to employ.
Foucault begins "The Order of Things" with an analysis of a now much-cited seventeenth century painting, Velazquez's "Las Meninas." While Foucault's essay functions as an illustration of the impossibility of representing representation itself, it effectively illustrates that split in the subject that becomes radicalized in the moment of looking. It is not, then, that the proliferation of optical apparatuses have progressively abstracted the viewing subject from some supposed intact Cartesian subjectivity. Rather, it is in Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon that he illustrates how the mobilization of disciplinary power requires the constant enunciation of that split. In the omniscience of the surveilling eye, in that unilateral flow of (blinding) light from the tower onto the body of the prisoner, the disciplined subject finds in his attempt to return the look the moment of his radicalized split. That is, because of the unverifiability of the Panoptic gaze, the subject must turn inwards and, it is in this turning that the subject internalizes the gaze as that constitutive element of his subjectivity. In the final paper, I want to use Foucault's "Las Meninas" as a structural device in order to argue that it is this split that functions as the site for the possibility of political intervention. As Keenan argues, "Publicity does not befall what is properly private, contaminating or opening up an otherwise sealed interiority. Rather, what we call interiority is itself the mark or the trace of this breach, of a violence that in turn makes possible the violence or the love we experience as intersubjectivity. We would have no relation to others, no terror and peace, certainly no politics, without this (de)constitutive interruption" (Keenan, "Windows", 134). As such, I will make a distinction between the notion of the annihilated spectator (Lacan) and the elision of subject (Foucault) in the moment of looking. I think it is in elaborating on this difference that perhaps we can articulate a productive space for the subject. At the moment, I plan to use this distinction between annihilation and elision to discuss how the various modes of resistance to the Panoptic gaze (laid out in the texts we have studied this semester) articulate this split in the subject--how the split must be alternately protected, eradicated, made exterior, etc.... In "Las Meninas", we are still dealing with a representational mode that can at least attempt to represent light--remember it is light itself that functions as that pure signifier that determines mediation. What happens, then, now that we have moved towards optical apparatuses that transmit messages/images at the speed of light? How does this reconfigure attempts to posit the presence of the viewing subject? Does the notion of presence itself become rearticulated? What is its relationship to attempts at immersion (Debord, Bey, etc...)? Texts that I plan to look at thusfar (of course, subject to change): Hakim Bey's "TAZ", Keenan's "Windows" essay, Foucault, Virilio, Debord, Dienst, Burgin, Santner, Zizek, Kyllo. Ultimately, I do want to take up exhibitionism as this cultural shift towards obsessive self-display that Zizek locates in the constant desire--nay, need--to be watched? Is Jennifer Ringley an exhibitionist or does her supposed exhibitionism simply derive from the absolute internalization of the Panoptic gaze, as the dependence on that comforting presence of the Other (once deemed alienating, disorienting)? In that sense, is this shift to spectacle really an inversion of Panoptic logic, or simply an inversion of the process by which the subject achieves his proper self-subjection so integral to his process of socialization? That is, has the subject internalized the gaze to such an extent that anxiety arises now from not being watched? If disciplinary power functioned according to the logic of production, in the accumulation of surplus labor, the production of a sum total greater than its separate parts, then what happens with this shift to exhibitionism? Have we experienced a cultural transition that now repositions the subject with respect to productivity (Foucault)? I would argue that Debord's notion of the spectacle is relevant here, as it invokes a new cultural logic of commodification and consumption that now seem to replace production as the site for human consciousness. Ultimately, what seems missing from many of these theorizations of the subject within a new technologically-produced spatiality is this discussion of commodification and exchange. Are we still in a society predicated on discipline, or have we entered a new space that operates by new rules? How does the cultural logic of spectacle impel the subject towards his own spectacularization? This is the part that I am still working out....
For your consideration: my final paper proposal.
I'm a little bit tentative on this, but I'd like to perform a close reading Hakim Bey's _The Temporary Autonomous Zone_. Namely, I'd like to focus on: what kind of power are subjects rejecting/escaping when they enter a TAZ; what is Bey's notion of politics; what political action is performed by his essay; is his notion of politics or the possibilities for political action naive; if so, how can we make it more complete; in light of a more complete/sophisticated notion of politics, what are the possibilities for political action; what does Bey want to accomplish; and finally, what might we want to accomplish taking our revised version of politics into account. I know that's a lot; I'm sure that only a few of the questions will end up being answered. However, I think that it's important, especially for me (as I was particularly taken with his essay), to read, discuss, critique and make commentary on his argument. I'm not interested in the question of the TAZ as such, but rather the underlying politics and political concerns of the TAZ; whether they're really possible; and whether they might be a legitimate political goal. Basically, it's an attempt to understand the political logic of his argument. And finally, part of this is a personal attempt at developing a notion of politics of my own, that I am comfortable with, and that sits well with me. I can't help it--I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to politics. Maybe I'd be better off jaded; but I'm not there yet. I'm going to miss you guys. Peace, --scott
For my final paper, I want to examine the different roles the gaze can play – a mechanism of control, or a means for exhibitionism. Surveillance works only on the basis that the gaze is powerful and can somehow catch you or hurt you, but what is different about the gaze (or the camera) when it is desired to perform before? How do these two kinds of gaze differ, how do they exist simultaneously, and can they? Do they contradict each other, or are they somehow intrinsically linked?
I haven’t worked out yet who exactly I’ll be looking at, but as a preliminary list: Foucault to explore the controlling aspects of the gaze, The Surveillance Camera Players (a point where the line is blurred between surveillance and exhibitionism? perhaps), Keenan (can the gaze induce action?), the Kyllo v. US case, The Conversation, Graham, Ernst, and Zizek (reality television).
Final Paper Proposal:
In many of the texts we’ve examined forms of technological mediation are premised as the field through which surveillance is exerted and publicity is made possible and furthered. For example, in Habermas, print media enable the publication of newspapers that allow a large body of people in potentially disparate locations to create a public sphere of people discussing the same issues. In Foucault, the Panopticon, originally offered by Bentham as a technological innovation, is a metaphor for an all-encompassing surveillance that wields an omnipresent gaze but is itself impervious from the gaze by hiding behind itself as apparatus. In Virilio, the gaze of surveillance as prosthetic eye and the machinization of vision is presented. In Keenan, the window is presented as a sort of technology that makes surveillance possible. We looked at the Internet as both a technology that imposes its publicity on users (i.e. through the omnipresence of pornography on the net) and the use of which is itself eminently susceptible to public interception (i.e. Echelon, packet sniffers), as well as a technology that offers a space in which to create a new definition of the private (i.e. the TAZ.) In one of the Supreme Court cases we looked at, the expectation of privacy itself was defined with respect to the degree to which a certain technological device was readily available to the public at large (in Kyllo v. US, the search was deemed unreasonable because the heat sensor was not a technology widely used.) The question then becomes what stake publicity and surveillance has in technology. Is technology a force that is merely employed in service of advancing certain notions of publicity and surveillance or are these latter two notions created themselves through the force of technology and the possibilities it creates? Or is technology intimately intertwined with publicity and surveillance as in a sort of dialectic, and if so what effect does this have on the way we perceive these latter two notions?
In his ‘Theory of Derive”, Guy Debord focused on the importance of disorientation through drifting, a movement he termed derive: “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psycho-geographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.” This type of aimless wandering was meant to displace the marked ideology, ‘break free’ of the traditional mould, and produce a radical subjectivity. In this context, Debord also emphasized the play of chance and progress, “Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favourable to our purposes.” In many ways, these notions of derive parallel last weeks readings of Hakim Bey- who discussed the TAZ as a ‘psychic nomadism’ and ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and also correlated this spatial expansion with the territory of the internet.
In the final paper, I would like to analyse these overlaps between ‘derive’ and ‘TAZ’, as well as investigate the material conditions of possibility, the structural impositions, and the ideologies that these two discursive practices reiterate. This discussion of freedom, anonymity, disappearance, and radical subjectivity will include references to two of the films: “The Enemy of the State” and “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?” Moreover, analyzing the visual-spatial metaphors of psycho-geography, psychic travel, and cognitive mapping provides a starting point for a discussion of the metaphors of internet navigation. In much the same way as Bey, then, I will analyze the production of spatial metaphors and possibilities of ‘travel’ in the discourse surrounding the internet. In the end, I hope this paper will pursue the spatial metaphors used when discussing radical subjectivity, freedom, and anonymity variously in Debord, the two films, Bey, and the internet.
4.25.2002
I want to write my final paper on the general question of the public’s right to publicity. For instance, it bothers us when we can’t see an event happen; newspaper reporters, whenever they’re being shoved out of some meeting always yell “The public has a right to know.” Why do we assume this to be true?
I don’t know if we’re supposed to mention any of the things that we’re going to consider in our arguments, but, right now, I’m thinking about at least looking at issues like Habermas’s ideas about the public “colonization” of the private sphere and the possible rights to know that this entails, Debord’s ideas about spectacle and looking at news or public information as spectacular, the Vanna White case, Frohne’s idea that the individual isn’t even created without being observed and the what I see as the somewhat complimentary ways that seeing is described as producing the further desire to see in both the indifference described by Keenan and Linda Williams’s frenzy of the visible. I’m sure I’ll cut the different elements down a little bit once I really get to writing.
4.24.2002
Final Paper Proposal:
How has the camera, mainly through image construction in film and television, shifted the idea of the panoptic gaze from a threatening one, to one which is actively sought after? In addressing this question I will explore Bentham and Foucault’s theories of the Panopticon and panoptic discipline, as well as theories of camera-based visuality posited by Virilio, Burgin, and Dienst. I will also speak to issues of celebrity, and image construction in reference to Graham, Ernst, and Zizek and their discussions of ‘Reality programming.’ My aim is to show that the camera is no longer a tool of mere observation, but a generative device which creates an event, and through which the celebrity is born. Film and television create and portray ideals which a viewing audience attempts to emulate. The viewer constructs his or her image in reference to these ideals, in an attempt to become as close as possible to the celebrity image. I will show that through some interesting panoptic methods and plays on the idea of reality, television now informs its audience that celebrity status is easily achieved, and that we are all that much closer to having the 15 minutes Andy Warhol promised us. It is for this reason that the gaze of the camera is desired rather than feared in the context of modern media. - Jamie Effros
4.22.2002
Manu Sawkar
Extra Post Transparency from OED transparent transparent trans,pee·rent (IPA tra:ns|pEerent), (IPA træns-), (IPA -|pær-), (IPA -nz-), a. (sb.) Also 5 -paraunt, 6-7 -parant. [ad. med.L. transparent-em, pr. pple. of transparere (= `pellucere' Du Cange), f. trans- + parere to appear, be visible. In 15th c. app. stressed transpa|rau·nt, after Fr. transparent (14th c. in Hatz.-Darm.).] 1. a. Having the property of transmitting light, so as to render bodies lying beyond completely visible; that can be seen through; diaphanous. c. That shines through; penetrating, as light. d. Apparent or visible through something. Cf. transpare v. b. Obs 2. fig c. Linguistics. Obvious in structure or meaning; that can be extrapolated from surface structure; of a phonological rule: that can be extrapolated from every occurrence of the phenomenon, in which every context implies the rule (opp. opaque a. 3 c). Foucault Bentham's dream, rephrased by Foucault, was of a "transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness" Bentham’s Panopticon -- the Greek neologism signified ‘all-seeing place’-- was all about vision and transparency, but vision and transparency operating one-way only... in the service of power. from: http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/fai/Faculty/Professors/Protevi/Foucault/OT_I.html (refering to F's Order of Things) "The relation of signifier to signified is now one of direct representation of one idea by another (63). In the ideal case, a sign is the relation by which a simpler impression on the mind represents a more complex impression. But there is an added requirement for the Classical sign: not only is the sign transparent, but it must represent, within itself, its representation of its signified: it must show its sign-ness. Here we see that "transparent and duplicated representation" as the being of the Classical sign. The sign-ness of the sign is not a third term: the sign "has no content, no function, and no determination other than what it represents: it is entirely ordered upon and transparent to it" (64). Nevertheless, the sign is duplicated representation (65): it is both indication (pointing to another) and appearance (it is itself an appearance, a sign, map, drawing, table). In a typical mid-60s French philosophy sentence, F writes: "From the Classical age, the sign is the representativity of the representation in so far as it is representable": the sign shows forth, in its appearance, its indicative function." Dienst "Television first offered a transparent world; later, it has wavered between the regimes of a governing state and a unified culture and at last it revolves around the exigencies of market". "telepresence : a feature of cyberculture generally, but initiated by tele-technologies more generally - inherent is the danger of disengagement or remoteness from the actual effects of the televisual image (which becomes remoteness from the effects of one's telematic agency) - telepresence provides us with an 'electronic skin' impervious to empathy." (check out this site... very strange http://telepresence.dmem.strath.ac.uk/telepresence.htm) T. May Transparent means visible to outsiders, perhaps those in law enforcement or the intelligent community. Opaque means not transparent, not visible. A poastcard is transparent; a sealed letter is opaque. PGP inventor phile zimmermann has likened the requirement for transparency to being ordered to use postcards for all correspondence, with encryption the equivalent of an opqaue envelope (envelopes can be openede, of course, and long have been). (p.68) Keenan: With the creation of a rich and increasingly robust global network of human rights monitors, and the ability to relay acts of witness and evidence around the world in near-real-time, something like this transparent world is increasingly real. "The media will carry the demand for action to the world's leaders; they in turn must decide carefully and positively what that action is to be," runs the axiom in its clearest formulation. (publicity and indeference)... (think back to Foucault and his notion about the transparency of the sign... Keenan sees that subjectivity/intersubjectivity requires light (or transparent language...) before there can be a gaze...)
It was hard to read Bey without thinking back to American history class in high school and the Fredrick Jackson Turner thesis of the frontier. The notion that Americans are descendant of people who grappled with the concrete and abstract ideas and realities of the frontier is an important point that differentiates the US from Europe. The break down of the class system in America and the mythologized presence of Horatio Alger stories of “bootstraps” (which Bey makes reference of twice) are the unique legacy of the land where the streets are paved with gold, the cornfields ’over the rainbow.’
The TAZ has much in common with the frontier in its intangibility and its animal desirability. Turner in 1893 saw the “American West” as the country’s ‘Safety Valve,’ an area that one can always go to and start over if things are not working out in the city. His hypothesis about what would happen when all of the unknown becomes known and ‘mapped out’ was that the human need for a potential space would “turn in on itself” in some manner for which Turner can only describe vaguely. This vagueness of the new frontier that Americans turn to seems well represented in the dark swamp of the TAZ. The desire that Turner saw as a desire to escape one’s own life into a new existence in the West seems to not only be a desire to seize and conquer but a desire to re-invent and thereby reclaim a certain level of Anonymity by entering a ‘zone’ of anonymity. When performing a Google search for Turner’s Safety Valve (specifically for Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Safety Valve History Text) an article about cyber-space by David Healy appears. The idea that this is America’s new frontier is cyberspace, and the methods for selling the house and packing up the wagon to embark on the trail to anonymity now involves entering the covered wagon of the encryption code. May’s Cyrpto Anarchy also talks about clipping the barbed wire, a wiring that original settlers would never have even come into contact with. But there were already Indians in the new world who had ways of owning the land that the white man couldn’t see with their eyes because not only were there no fences but they were not even similar ideologies about property rights. And those first settlers were colonizers because they were taking a pre-existing land and people and shaping it after themselves. They were imperialists, “magical imperialists” as Bey rightly invokes. And now America still re-colonizes the already colonized through corporate global imperialism, an economic colonization. Think of China who has just recently opened its doors to American frontiersmen as the TAZ that economists are looking for. New virgin economies, unspoiled by years of communism, ready to become the economic safety valve for chains of companies that need to expand to economically survive, to cigarette companies that need to hook x amount of new customers a day to turn a profit. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” – Rosseau. The turning in on itself is finally seen by Bey and May as a nostalgia that is exemplified by Julian Dibbell’s personal essay about steganography and 1992. The TAZ and the Frontier exist in the future, and I might argue that Turner’s observation, that without adequate frontier the American and his instincts turn back upon themselves in a detrimental fashion, might be the subversion of the abstract frontier as a place of the past. Dibbell’s notion that the TAZ in some way exists behind her is a sad notion. It is in someway a crippling notion that the abstract frontier has vanquished with out leaving a future and only space for stale nostalgia, and the throwing of pebbles of a rebellion which has been predetermined as fruitless at some impenetrable wall. The wall of thickly braided barbed wire boundaries? The wall of an liquid crystal display monitor the size of a Manhattan sky scraper? The wall of our own panoptic cells? The wall of our memory? It is an issue of freedom. an issue of potential and practice.
Michael Bernstein
"Extra" response/// sorry...posting late.. "What we obtain here is the tragi-comic reversal of the Bentham-Orwellian notion of the Panopticon-society in which we are (potentially) "observed always" and have no place to hide from the omnipresent gaze of the Power: today anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of NOT being exposed to the Other's gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera's gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being" (Zizek, "Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the eye"). As I reflect on the trajectory of this course, there is obviously much to digest and I find myself at pains to integrate (inevitably in a totalizing manner) the major theoretical concepts laid out by the headings of the syllabus. However, it seems that if there is one major referent that both our readings and class discussions continually invoke, it is Foucault's theorizations of disciplinary power--in particular, the notion of the Panopticon as that spatial configuration that comes to signify the basic parameters by which power is exercised on the modern subject. For Foucault, what the break from a society of coercive force (the unimpeded rule of the sovereign monarch) to disciplinary power entails is the omniscience of that surveilling eye, the substitution of the eye for light itself. It is precisely in that unilateral flow of light from the Panopticon's tower onto the body of the prisoner that disciplinary power finds its guarantee. Here we have entered into a strategem in which visibility functions as a trap: this field of the visible produced by the Panoptic gaze is not a space articulated by pure transparency, for the gaze registers its potency not in its verifiability, but rather in its omniscience: what the prisoner sees when he looks out at the tower is not the guard intently surveilling him or the space he inhabits, but simply light--the guarantee not of being watched at any particular moment, but the simple possibility of being seen, of always being made available to be seen. As such, it is not surprising that many of the texts we have studied this semester locate resistance in a return to the dark, to those spaces undetectable to the eye of the Giant. Indeed, as Santner seems to suggest in analyzing the case of Schreber, "overexposure" (to the modes of disciplinary power) may account for paranoia or other maddening effects in the subject. In this week's readings, Hakim Bey argues for the uprising, that mode of resistance that he identifies as a move away from presence, from Time, from anything reducible to visibility and permanence. That is, if, for Bey, the one-way model of transparency tied to panoptic power functions as the absolute objectification of the subject, the eradication of individual autonomy, then what hints at the promise of liberation is for him the disappearance of the user. Similarly, if, for the Situationists, detournement, the cultural reuse of existing artifacts, enables the possibility of critique, it is because it rests on the disappearance of the artist, or the disappearance of that type of presence tied to authoriality. If these resolutions are reactions to a crisis brought on by the proliferation of new technologies that tend to reposition the subject in a new spatio-temporal logic, the crisis is what Paul Virilio so thoroughly analyses in the emergence of a machine vision that now eclipses human perception, a type of vision that no longer functions according to a logic of augmentation (of human sight with another type of optical eye), but rather a vision that sees by and only for itself through a process of substitution (of one machine vision for another). The subject has disappeared in the Kantian sense. All these writings seem to exist as call and response to one another at least indirectly, for Keenan's post-structuralist response is to locate that breach of interiority as a constitutive element of our subjectivity. It is not that, then, that these technologies destroy some humanist ideal of the unified subject to which Virilio seems to cling, but that we would simply not exist without this opening to the Other: "Publicity does not befall what is properly private, contaminating or opening up an otherwise sealed interiority. Rather, what we call interiority is itself the mark or the trace of this breach, of a violence that in turn makes possible the violence or the love we experience as intersubjectivity. We would have no relation to others, no terror and peace, certainly no politics, without this (de)constitutive interruption" (Keenan, "Windows", 134). Let's remember that disciplinary power functions through the eradication of that public/private divide, in the subject's simultaneous interiorization (as self-subjection) and deployment of that surveilling gaze upon others. Indeed, to which side of that supposed binary did those "amorphous hot spots" of Kyllo's home belong (an entire juridical proceeding emerged from the need to recontain such a diffusion of this private/public boundary). If political intervention acquires its potentiality only in this always already public space, then how might Bey respond? It seems that it is not a continued investment in the unified subject that drives Bey's move to the interstices/margins of the visible, for his project deems as its ideological antagonist the desire for presence. And yet.... And yet what occurs in this cultural shift towards obsessive self-display that Zizek locates in the constant desire--nay, need--to be watched? Is Jennifer Ringley an exhibitionist or does her supposed exhibitionism simply derive from the absolute internalization of the Panoptic gaze, as the dependence on that comforting presence of the Other (once deemed alienating, disorienting)? In that sense, is this shift to spectacle really an inversion of Panoptic logic, or simply an inversion of the process by which the subject achieves his proper self-subjection so integral to his process of socialization? That is, has the subject internalized the gaze to such an extent that anxiety arises now from not being watched? If disciplinary power functioned according to the logic of production, in the accumulation of surplus labor, the production of a sum total greater than its separate parts, then what happens with this shift to exhibitionism? Have we experienced a cultural transition that now repositions the subject with respect to productivity? I would argue that Debord's notion of the spectacle is relevant here, as it invokes a new cultural logic of commodification and consumption that now seem to replace production as the site for human consciousness. Ultimately, what seems missing from many of these theorizations of the subject within a new technologically-produced spatiality is this discussion of commodification and exchange. Are we still in a society predicated on discipline, or have we entered a new space that operates by new rules? How does the cultural logic of spectacle impel the subject towards his own spectacularization?
In Hakim Bey’s essay on “The Temporary Autonomous Zone,” he appears to address the paradox wherein “The TAZ desires above all to avoid mediation, to experience its existence as immediate. The very essence of the affair is “breast to breast” as the sufis say, or face to face. But, BUT: the very essence of the WEB is mediation. Machines here are our ambassadors—the flesh is irrevelant except as a terminal, with all the sinister connotations of the term.” And “The TAZ agrees with the hackers because it wants to come into being –in part—through the Net, even through the mediation of the Net. But it also agrees with the greens because it retains intense awareness of itself as body and feels only revulsion for CyberGnosis, the attempt to transcend the body through instantaneity and simulation.” However, I don’t see how he is able to resolve this paradox if he does so at all. He says that the TAZ must exist in real space and time just as it exists virtually on the Web, the latter providing “logistical support” for the TAZ as a sort of “nomad camp,” serving to traffic information, but also to make it invisible. The computer mediated Web is a component of the TAZ at all, he seems to imply, because all physical spaces on the geopolitical map have already been staked out, whereas the information web offers a new terrain, which because of its “end to end coding” as Lawrence Lessig says, is inexhaustible and ripe to be secretly colonized and then abandoned. I am doubtful however to what extent this mediated TAZ can map onto real bodies and physical spaces, which Bey emphasizes as a crucial aspect of the TAZ, especially because anonymity seems to me to be such a primary driving force of the Web as well as the way they propose to use it. Can a movement premised on anonymity and privacy effectively be transferred to the real world of real people with real identities? I am not well-versed in cyberpunk fiction, but at least in the technofantasy of The Matrix the apotheosis of its computer-mediated fantasy/nightmare was that the character’s real life identity was subverted in the film when he entered the other realm under the new name and hacker identity of his computer handle “Neo,” leaving his matrix name aside. If crypto and steganography are ways to eliminate the subjection of panoptic society by achieving effective cover from the surveilling gaze, then surely its not the end of a subject positioning at all, but replacement by a new kind. If Bey insists the TAZ’s space on the Web can map onto real people and real spaces, then these must be new kinds of people and spaces informed by the technology they use and the way they use it. They become ‘hackers,’ ‘anarchists,’ ‘cyberpunks’ – subjects defined by the technology and the need to be invisible under duress. Even Hakim Bey writing under a pseudonym separates his writings and his role as cyberanarachist from the real writer/intellectual/person that he is when he conducts his everyday business under his real name. There seems to be a real romanticism to Bey’s TAZ for ‘living off the radar,” something we normally associate with garage-based metamphetamine labs and Unabomber-type psychopaths. Also there is something very separatist about the idea as well. As though to say, mainstream society is lost and opressive and the only way to deal with this is to set up a TAZ made up of like-minded individuals whose collective thoughts form a sort of spontaneous harmonic convergence and who can then live and operate harmoniously and collectively without having to deal with the aspects of society they don’t like. This strikes me as very different from the Situationist tactics or rtmark, who seemed to premise their actions on visibility and the public hijacking of culture – in the former, say defacing an ad on the subway, and the latter hijacking a very high-traffic website. But the TAZ shuns publicity, and once an uprising becomes public, it seems it is no longer part of the plan.
En route to conceding the inevitably of crypto-anarchy, May offers what he believes to be its “positive” implications being “the power of nation states will be lessened, tax collection policies will have to be changed, and economic interactions will be based more on personal calculations of value than social mandates” (p. 77). He contrasts these positives (which constitute, apparently, deeming crypto mostly a “good thing”) with the prospects of economic espionage and anonymous contract killings. Nevertheless, these don’t seem to be enough to dissuade May from the idealistic notion that crypto-anarchy and anonymous space is an embraceable trend.
May might be correct in his questioning of the need for identity on the Internet, promoting the use of pseudonyms, and even anonymity. He chalks this need up to a human psychological need for traceability alone, and not to a societal need for enforcement and accountability. However, in the wake of 9/11, with the possibility of terrorists making use of cryptography in order to carry out plans that would most likely fall under May’s list of negatives. An “autonomous zone” would allow for undetected, unattributable communications to occur, potentially resulting in catastrophic real-world events such as a bombing or a market crash. It seems a bit unreasonable then for May to take an optimistic outlook on crypto, since he willingly admits that he had the foresight to realize the criminal activity that could result from the absence of authorship, surveillance, and detection. What May failed to recognize is the connection between the cyber-world and the real world. Advocates of crypto-anarchy and autonomous zones fail to see the power of this system of techno-masking to manifest itself in crime worth preventing, even if it means giving up anonymity. With recent public awareness of the possibilities of Internet crimes making use of cryptography, it is likely May’s vision of the crypto-anarchy might not be realized. For most, this technology and its languages are foreign to the point of frightening, causing a potential easy embrace of stricter Internet surveillance. 2nd post to come Dave
Michael Bernstein
For Hakim Bey, the radical possibility of resistance (made possible by the democratizing gestures of the Internet--its deterritorialization of control) functions in the shift from revolution to the uprising. What is essential in his account of the uprising is that move away from strategies predicated on permanence, presence (in the Heideggerian sense), or the logic of Time or temporal mapping so integral to the nation-states' deployment of control and violence. For Bey, the uprising functions in a radically different way in that it bears with it the trace of the ephemeral, the invisible; the uprising materializes precisely in its refusal to be decoded, to be reduced to the visible: "The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away" (405). In this sense, bin Laden's tactics to devise that plan that culminated on Sept. 11 corresponded neatly to the logic of Bey's uprising. What was essential for Bin Laden to evade the highly developed surveillance systems of the United States and other Western governments was precisely the tactics of invisibility (encryption) and ephemerality. Should it be surprising, then, that his "means of fighting" operate through "fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy"? (quoted in Lisa Beyer, "Osama's Endgame"). What are these "light forces" other than the deployment of new technologies that, through their very own transmission at the speed of light, enable the possibility of communication without detection. But if bin Laden's "strike" against the imperialist forces of the West (the United States) achieved its success according to this logic of secrecy, invisibility, and constant movement, it did so only through his simultaneous engagement with the mass media. As Lisa Beyer writes, bin Laden is hardly "shadowy": "For a terrorist ringleader, he has given a remarkable number of interviews. He has even played host at a press conference. Bin Laden has talked articulately about his history, his outlook, his strategy to defeat the US..." If it was bin Laden's constant publicity that enabled his proliferation of support networks so integral to the success of his project, can we think of political interventions or "disturbances" achieving success in complete secrecy? In the absolute denial of presence? In the simple logic of "disappearance" so essential to Bey's celebratory attachment to the TAZ? If, for Sengupta, the operation of the on-line protest achieves its "disturbance" through transparency, by "linking virtual and street actions" in a way that must capitalize on the presence of the media to "advertise" its goals and points of protest, can we really imagine political intervention operating in the dark? What would it really mean to "withdraw from the area of simulation" (Bey, 405) when simulation now appears as the operative logic of culture? And if the absence of a centralized body of control in the Internet opens up the possibility of resistance, then how do we take into account the very fact that new systems of control operate through those very mechanisms of deterritorialization? That is, if disciplinary power once permeated the subject within spaces like the factory by "concentrat[ing]", by "distribut[ing] in space", "order[ing] in time", by compos[ing] a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces" (309), now in a society of control, "the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas" (310, Postscript on the Societies of Control", Deleuze and Guattari). Extended/extra response on the way....
Extra Response
The connection between vision and knowledge has come up over and over again throughout the semester. From the first essay by Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” we read of reason and knowledge in a language coded in the visual – one who is enlightened is one who is not afraid of shadow. “Humans, because they are essentially upright, first of all are seeing beings, seeing ahead, from their heads, and their actions are human to the extent that they derive and follow from what they see. What is elsewhere presents itself before the human subject for sight and cognition. Human knowledge stems from the gaze…” -- Keenan, “Windows: of vulnerability” p.126 If Keenan is correct, and human beings come to knowledge primarily through sight and visuality, then all subsequent actions based on knowledge are also based in vision. And Knowledge, as we are all well aware, is Power. Power and control seem to be intrinsically linked or rather, dependent on, knowledge (which is then largely dependent on vision). This, I think, especially holds true for Foucault. The Panopticon is based entirely on the gaze as a controlling force. Instead of dark prison cells which can protect and conceal with shadow, he takes Bentham’s model which depends on light and clear vision into the cells by the central tower (who knows who is in there), which then can know what each prisoner is doing and thus exercise control far more efficiently than other prison models. In History of Sexuality, Foucault talks at length about knowledge being crucial to implementing control over sexuality and sexual practices. Here he bases it in the Christian Church and the tradition of confession as a way to gain knowledge (ah – a different method of acquiring knowledge – that of speech. interesting). But here, and we can see this in Linda Williams’s “Speaking Sex” as well, there can be pleasure in this sexual knowledge. Williams talks about pornography “in its specific, visual, cinematic form,” and its ability to allow voyeuristic spectators see everything (but especially “the truth of sex”) without being seen themselves. It is interesting in the matter of pornography to go to famous quote, “I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it” by Justice Potter Stewart. He knows it when he sees it, but cannot define it. I’m not sure how the Supreme Court works in terms of definitions and rulings, although I’m under the impression that it is case-by-case – and if Justice Stewart can make a ruling against (undefined) pornography that he simply knows, then this is a perfect example of the connection between vision and power. Heidegger brings together vision and knowledge as well, in “The Age of the World Picture”. To reflect upon the essence of an age (in this case the modern age) is to reflect upon the world picture: “Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” Automatically knowledge and understanding are connected to the image. Further, it is that we consider the world as a picture which distinguishes this modern world picture from before. Debord in “Society of the Spectacle” talks of modern society as being bound up by images, formed by the visual. We do not know or experience the world through the lived but rather through the representation of things. Our readings for the past two weeks brought up issues of virtual reality and the screen’s relation to our knowledge – the Internet is a visual media, and it is primarily through vision (to a lesser degree, through sound) that we can gain access to the information. Bit Plane and Suicide Box both dealt with cameras which augmented our eyes and allowed us to see more, and therefore know more. But Bit Plane and the readings on reality tv shows start to deal with what we can know from what we see on a screen – if these cameras are aligned with entertainment and not necessarily trusted by viewers as real or truthful, how does that skew/alter the relation between vision and knowledge? Is it the camera which affects this change, or the element of performance by the subjects?
21 April 2002 – weekly response (extra response still to come)
The readings of this week pose the Internet as an alternative “space” for communities, interactions, actions, histories, etc. The Internet is a placeless place which belongs to nobody and everybody, the rules exist differently there and therefore the Net offers a vast range of possibilites and potentials in rethinking/challenging existing power structures. How does anything radical which transpires on the Internet cross over to the “real” world? The virtual sit-ins may be an example of how actions online can make a tangible difference, but even the interviewee, Ricardo Dominguez, says that in the end, it is not very effective on its own and needs the street interaction as well to really work. "...e-protest is a simple tactic - it will not resolve the issues that we all face today just because it is on the Internet. The Internet is not a way to some utopia or apocalypse - no one should place their hopes on it." But I feel that in defense of the Internet as a new “revolutionary” (using that term very cautiously, though) means or space, it is presented as inapplicable to existent pre-Internet structures/laws/orders – for example, in “The Internet Under Siege,” Lessig talks about various rulings made by Congress on online music or copyright laws: “On the surface both changes seem sensible enough. Copyright protection technologies are analogous to locks. What right does anyone have to pick a lock? …But intuitions here mislead. A copyright protection technology is just code…” Lessig seems insistent upon the fact that the virtual and digital are different from the real. If there is such a split between the two, how can Timothy May say something like, “The implications are, as I see it, are that the power of nation states will be lessened, tax collection policies will have to be changed, and economic interactions will be based more on personal calculations of value than on societal mandates.”? Those are awfully big statements with very resonant and heavy suggestions. He claims that this kind of political change will occur because of the increase of virtual communities and decreasing importance of geographic proximity. I agree with him to a certain extent, that this increasing new avenue for community building could change the way we form societies and the way they work. And he does say in his “How Likely?” section that these changes will not occur in the near future, nor are some of them even possible yet. But it seems that when the Internet needs to be defended (when it is in danger of being subjected to the control of pre-Internet laws), it is positioned as unique and unprecedented, unable to be compared with and therefore to be dealt with in the same manner as other things…and when the Internet is being held up as the next revolution (or node of uprising), the point of departure from the existent social and political hierarchies, it is necessary to be able to move smoothly from the virtual to the real, as if it is possible to do so without any glitches. -I think it’s interesting that, even when trying to defend the Net as unprecedented and revolutionary, we still have to talk about the Internet in terms of “place,” that we still need the rhetoric involved with architectural structures and spaces. What does this do to help or detract from the revolutionary potentials of the Internet? -Again (because I think the visual coding in our readings has come up many times before), it’s really interesting to note that this alternate space is created for us through visual means… all the Internet is, in a tangible sense, is images on a screen. It’s hard for us to conceive of it any other way, it is, for us, inherently linked to the PC. But somehow we’re able to make the leap from 2-d images into a 3-d “space”… (see above note) *sorry this is late, and while I’m doing apologies, sorry my extra response will be extra late.
sorry for the late posting, as usual. scott, who is always running late.
anyway, hakim bey is my brand newest hero. his article spoke to me the way theory did when i first started. it broke out of the "oh, god, i have to read this" and into the "i can't put it down. my reality has just shifted." so i'll just sort of ramble on that for a while. basically, what he means, but doesn't say, is that political possibility, or at least in the direction that he wants to go, lies in the radical rejection of representability. disappearance, invisibility, denial of simulation and mediation, etc. all seem to me to be ways of saying "reject representability." utopia might be a better word than he gives it credit for to describe temporary autonomous zones. his TAZs defy the map by existing in the interstices, breaks, nooks and crannies that aren't on the map. and inasmuch as the TAZ doesn't exist on the map, because it is unrepresentable (because of the necessity of 1:1 mapping), it is literally no-place. if it's not on the map, it ain't there. he doesn't say that, but well, he should. but this rejection of representability is something that is performative and not just done once and for all. "never coming back" isn't the state that we must be in. it's "always leaving," always going to Croatan, creating Croatan as we leave, and moving on from there. perhaps disappearing is better than invisible. because, eventually, anything becomes representable and therefore loses its radical political possibility. we don't want a revolution. we want an uprising in the temporality of always-already. we want to spend our lives up living. coherency = representability. incoherency = unrepresentability. we should therefore reject a coherent political program and live therefore by a metapolitics that guides us without telling us what to do, allows to understand politics without an injunction to rebel, without a fixed radical identity to follow, we're set free, rather than sticking to somebody else's political program. we're taught how to think, not what to think. we are able to either find, create, or stumble upon our own TAZs. it sounds sexy. isn't it a bit naive? those are the thoughts for the day. the whole-semester summary is going up on my webjournal, where i have a few theory/politics ramblings up. you will be able to see it here. i'm still working on it, but will finish before i go to bed. check real late tonight or tomorrow sometime. peace and temporary autonomy. /s
This week’s readings seemed to focus on anarchy mostly in the context of the internet. Many of the readings speak of the way that the internet has reshaped and will continue to reshape the politics of information ownership and trade, and just how deeply such issues can cut. Timothy May’s essay on “Crypto Anarchy and virtual Communities” really sets the tone for any discussion of these issues. The current trend of the internet seems to certainly point toward an even more open, more efficient playing field for information exchange and obtainment. In the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, May posits that developments in information exchange and cryptography “will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information a secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation” (62). Tracing the progression of current technologies in peer-to-peer interaction and sharing seems to certainly point us in such a direction.
In contrast to May’s manifesto, Lawrence Lessig’s piece, “The internet Under Siege,” seems naïve and a bit short-sighted. Lessig purports the collapse of the internet through legal partitioning and control. According to Lessig, networks for sharing information like Napster ultimately were a failure in their being hampered by the legal structure of “old information.” As we have come to see, this is blatantly untrue. In Napster’s wake came a deluge of peer-to-peer sharing networks which were non-server-specific, so that no central figure could be prosecuted for the illegal use or distribution of intellectual properties. Gnutella, Limewire, Morpheus, Kaza, and a whole host of others continue to improve their efficiency as well as their user numbers, and with no serious legal threats on the horizon. Both May and Lessig refer to the internet as a type of revolution. For Lessig, the internet is the revolution that was, and for May, it is the revolution that will be. This concept of revolution is taken up by Hakim Bey in “The Temporary Autonomous Zone.” Bey speaks of the dying-out of the revolution as an actuality, and it’s modern replacement with “uprising.” He is quick to point out how the term uprising is commonly labeled on failed revolutions, but Bey brings to light the benefits of uprising in how it pertains to our modern world. In regards to the internet, we can witness the phenomenon of uprising through things like Virtual Sit-Ins and Electronic Disturbances. The internet seems an ideal breeding ground for the uprising. In an age where information moves with unfettered speed, and secrets are difficult to keep secret very long, the idea of a revolution in the gradual, broad, organizational sense of the word seems nearly impossible. Resistance, disobedience, disturbance, or protest need to be delivered in hard and fast punches these days for a message to truly be heard. This is what is at stake in the uprising which Bey mentions. But with all the new positive light that Bey shines on the idea of uprising, it houses some frightening and all-too-real eventualities which the world has recently witnessed. Uprising, in the most extreme sense, takes the form of terrorism in a high-tech, overly informed, and connected world. If a message has to be made clear, a terrorist act displays it with all the immediacy and depth that is needed for communication today. Steven Levy talks about the terrorists’ use of the internet and cellular telephony in “Technology’s Double-edged Sword.” My question is, is it the technology which is creating the terrorism in the first place? Has the modern, connected world so hindered the concept of revolution to the point where singular, horrific acts have to bear the burden of an entire ‘repressed’ ideology? Terrorism has long been considered a staple of anarchy. If it is anarchy we are headed toward, we have already seen a grim prelude to what may come.
In Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon and the gaze as an effective technology of power, the central tower provides the site for hierarchical power relations. At the same time, however, Foucault also asserts that the these hierarchies are micropowers of biotechnology, asserting power not through overt and oppressive control but through the observance of minute details. These hierarchies and ‘central towers’, therefore, are not as centralized as the king’s body, but are effective in the power relations in the family, army, school, and hospital. In this sense, the power of the gaze is spread out over various different institutions. While I am not sure whether this entails a ‘decentering’ of power, it certainly reestablishes a hierarchy along different lines. The Revolution, therefore, did not dismantle the monarchy for the democracy, but rather substitute one form of power for another.
In many of the texts we have read, the disempowered ‘other’ has engaged the hierarchies with an attempt at decentralizing the structure of knowledge and information. Lovink suggested various tactics in ‘ABC’ and ‘DEF’; ‘BitPlane’ reversed the gaze and the control of information in Silicon Valley; Hackman fought against the NSA in ‘The Enemy of the State’; Guy Debord, the Situationists, and, in a way, Schreber, provided a completely radical critique of power relations; and most texts provided some criticism by exposing the relations of power which were inherent to the systems of surveillance. But, my next question would be if the critiques really decenter the current hierarchical power relations, or simply realign them in their own favor, or even, if there is a difference. In certain ways, however, the internet is always discussed as the most horizontal of these power structures—completely decentralized, international, and with no center of control. In this week’s reading response, I was trying to get at the relationship between this libertarian freedom on the internet and the material control of the production of the internet-- in the way that cable companies control the very flow of information between the peer-to-peer network. I wonder if the production and maintenance of the infrastructure of cables and servers will not always be a target of either demonstration (virtual or street). In other words, isn’t the colonization of the internet always to a certain extent focused on the physical systems rather than on purely virtual entities. Can there really be the libertarian ideal on the internet, and what would be the purpose of encryption without an eventual effect in the material world (in some sort of maintenance of boundaries and physical power relations). In some way then, the digital revolution is only reorganizing the material power structure and replacing old nation-states with new multinational powers. But can the internet create a radical decentering and horizontal power structure, or only replace the old hierarchy with a new one? Encryption may provide some sort of invisibility and anonymity for some axis of power—but that mode of escaping surveillance already exists in so many cases of hermitage like the Unabomber or Gene Hackman in ‘The Enemy of the State.’ Does escaping surveillance and the gaze have any purpose in itself, or are we really just talking about the very material control of information, publicity, and self-representation? And is this assertion of control of information in any way more decentralized, horizontal, or democratic—or just another realignment of hierarchies.
i'm not sure exactly how to say this... but it seems like the readings we had for
this last week of class seem sort of idealistic, in a manifesto sort of way... for the most part, the fundamental idea of duality, or the double edged sword of technology seems to be centered in most of the text. If that seems to be a bit of a reduction, i'm including the essays in the course packet that seem to be hampered by the sheer fact that time moves swiftly in our technologically inclined world. These articles read alot like EFF revolutionary cries and in some sense, are inherently doomed to fall flat. Has the revolution that crypto anarchy wrought been substantial, or has it been merely reduced to a pathetic whimper of annoyed net-users bitching about the DCMA making it hard to get .mp3's... or does this really even effect most people? Timothy May is optomistic that cryptography by its very nature will endure and keep the space of the internet ungovernable, for unless the nodes are removed, encrypted messages can roam effectively throughout the net. This postulation has basically been reduced to pure idealism by the sheer volume of legal rhetoric surrounding the internet. For years, the us govt has been trying to constrain the 'innovative' freedom that existed on the internet because its a threat to the status quo. You can trace the evolution of controll attempts from financial (think about the vague attempts on instituting a transaction tax) to content (we all remember the strong attempts to make censorship integral to the internet experience). With the passing of the DMCA and the consideration of its even more unnerving sister the SSSCA ( once known as the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, the newly named CBDTPA says that all "digital media devices" sold in the United States or shipped across state lines must include copy-protection mechanisms to be defined by the Federal Communications Commission (from http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51245,00.html) ) All this doesn't even take into consideration the tremendous changes of attitudes in the face of the whole 9/11 situation... who can still afford to be idealistic? In the end, every piece of electronic equipment is on some level a media device, and thus its ability to manipulate content is now solely regulated by the government. Lawrence Lessig makes the claim that legal closure will stiffle innovation... well it seems like that's already happened, all we need to do is read articles on EFF for the specifics. I can not believe that there has been such little protest towards the hard-line readings the courts have taken when interpreting these recently passed laws. It really feel like we are living in a post Communication Decency Act where all it will take is enough shouting and the first amendment will prevail... yet i was reminded that all of these hypothetical dillema's don't necessarily count for much in the real world. And since the issues surrounding the DMCA are primarily issues of capital and the exchange of copyrighted goods specifically targeted, dominant modes of distribution will have the muscle and the clout to win the battle. in the end, people seem to view the issue as a justified means of preventing privacy, and are blind to the notion that outlawing technology is a merely a feable gesture to erase a situation of shifting power. I guess we've entered an age of commodified information, and with this change, we must accept the dominant forces behind commodification.... those with the most money, have the most say. Reading the texts for this weeks seminar can only make me nostalgic for a period of freedom that at once seemed fixed and and temporary. -manu extra response is on its way....
CRYPTOGRAPHY
“Strong crypto provides new levels of personal privacy, all the more important in an era of increased surveillance, monitoring, and the temptation to demand proofs of identity and permission slips.” (May, 76) and “Strong crypto provides a technological means of ensuring the practical freedom to read and write what one wishes to.” (May, 77) My reading of cryptography: the translation of information into a private language, so that it is practically unreadable (invisible, unknowable) to anyone but those whom the Author of the information chooses to give access. Why “practically”? Because there is no Absolute guarantees on crypto: it relies on the inability of computers to solve certain difficult math problems in “reasonable” amounts of time (I don’t know the exact figures, but the time it would take to crack the RSA algorithm is pretty huge). So how does cryptography give us more privacy? The answer to this question is an effective definition of what it means to be private. We can communicate information that cannot be intercepted/observer/gazed-upon. Blind the Panopticon. The Subject can emit information (and thus induce any number of “real” consequences) without running any risk of being held responsible for that information. Cryptography buffers the Subject from the Other with practical guarantees of anonymity. The Subject cannot become the Object of any Gaze, of any Knowledge. The Other cannot construct the Subject through discourse. I would assume that since the Subject is on the Net, s/he can Gaze. So it seems that “privacy” is like being an invisible Eye; information does not flow out, only in. To be public is then to be readable; open for interpretation. An encrypted message is functionally equivalent to pure noise; any meaning that a viewer derives is probably just a hallucination. (Information theory describes the actual limits of turning information into noise. I do not, unfortunately, know very much about information theory). Human languages are inherently public because they are shared. An encryption algorithm creates a highly unique language that is only practically known to people who receive “keys” to the language. It is perhaps worth noting that in fact the people who “have the keys” still do not know the language; their computers know it. But it is equally true that most humans cannot read the stream of 1's and 0's that enter their computer as unencrypted email. A computer translates the bits (with a set of keys) and then displays them (another translation) on the screen for human reading. All languages require some amount of decoding. The defining aspect of cryptographic language is the limited number of speakers of a given encryption. I don’t think May is suggesting that the perfection of privacy is possible, though he seems to have a definite reverence for it. Several reasons perfect privacy is impossible: - The security of cryptography is relative; it depends on the sophistication of technology and the current horizon of the Gigantic. 128-bit encryption (correct me if I’m wrong) is currently in the realm of the Gigantic, which in the case of cryptography becomes a qualitative assurance of secrecy/individuality. Technology conspires with metaphysics to create increased privacy (more individuality?), yet the inevitable (definitional?) advance of technology continually threatens the same subjectivity that it helped to create. - We must translate encrypted messages into “common languages” before reading them; we still rely on shared networks of meaning. Can language ever be “private” if it is still to be called language? - A man sending encrypted messages to himself. This seems like the only possible case of absolute privacy. Yet we might question the idea of a “self” being private even “in itself”. As many a theorist has speculated, the Self and the Other are interdependent. As the man reads his messages to himself, the Other is implicitly present. Not that it is particularly surprising that there is no Absolute privacy...
4.21.2002
Between the May and Bey articles and the Internet readings, several thoughts/issues really jump out at me. 1. As protest, insurgency, or activism—use of the Internet as a grass roots effort is puts a technological growth on forms of subversion, a sort of digital fertilizer. (silly, I know) But the Net’s widespread accessibility allows unlimited dissemination of ideas in the ideal TAZ or pirate utopia. 2. While allowing this new access for positive consciousness raising for challenging the nation-state or examining policy, the Internet also allows for what Levy calls a platform for “evildoers.” Terrorists benefit as much from the tech explosion as anyone else. 3. As May points out, there is no way to legislate or monitor the web. For that reason, the web is truly democratic. There is no way to censor speech we find dangerous or potentially threatening to life. How could we prevent anonymous postings and TAZ’s that support causes like Osama Bin Laden’s? Furthermore, who decides what is truly dangerous, rebellious, and suppressible? Would the people of the world want to do so? Certainly governments of the globe would have a stake in suppressing terrorist speech as well as other forms that disagree with them. As May says the likelihood of contract killers is less likely to be as pervasive as the genocides perpetuated by Stalin and Hitler. The freedom to check such tyrants is more valuable in the web’s power than its dangers. 4. Crypto-anarchy works both ways, crypto-economics says that corporate networks can exclude and elude legislators and the public at large.
Where are the checks and balances in the web? The technological explosion has been impossible to control. From parents worried about their children accessing porn to governments fearing the exposure of strategic secrets and consumers worrying about their credit card numbers, how do we protect ourselves from a man-made invention? There is no governing philosophy in its construction, “But the Internet was born at a time when a different philosophy was taking shape within computer science. This philosophy ranked humility above omniscience and anticipated that network designers would have no clear idea about all the ways the network could be used. It therefore counseled a design that built little into the network itself, leaving the network free to develop as the ends (the applications) wanted.” (Lessig) Was this humility or was it naivete? There are two sides of the sword here. And is omniscience really even an option, as encryption strengthens and corporate needs for security get higher, exclusion is pervasive. As for the terrorist concern, Levy brings up several lucid if fright-inspired ideas, “The contrast dramatizes a long-recognized truism: modern technologies that add efficiency, power and wonder to our lives inevitably deliver the same benefits to evildoers.” (Levy) Have we unleashed a Frankenstein that now seeks to meet his maker? Scientia es potens. Knowledge is power. Is knowledge too dangerous or is it the key to freedom? “Should we be giving the Unthinkable more consideration as we drive technology ever further? The answer seems obvious. Yet it almost goes without saying that any safeguards we institute won’t be perfect. What assurance do we have that future terrorists will not feast on the contents of Pandora’s box? “Knowledge itself is dangerous,” says Joy. “Scientific information we pursue in an unfettered way is a weapon. And we’re not ready to deal with that.” Maybe after last week, we are closer.” (Levy) After September 11th it is easy to jump to conclusions about the dangers as well as the benefits of the web. Is this unfettered information more than we can bear even in a so-called freedom of speech society? Our civil liberties have changed significantly since that day…does our freedom to technology also stand to be altered? These guerilla activist strategies of the TAZ and crypto-anarchy ideal work both ways. “In the same treatise, bin Laden concludes that "it is wise in the present circumstances" that Muslim armies not fight a conventional war against the U.S. "due to the imbalance of power." Rather, he says, "a suitable means of fighting must be adopted, i.e., using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy. In other words, to initiate guerrilla warfare." (Beyer) Will guerilla subversion on the net work to his advantage? Can we risk that the good that guerilla TAZ might do by dismantling them? Truly, it is not a question. There is no way to do so that I can conceive. I think that a nice way to end the whole debate in my questions for now is this answer off “Virtual Sit Ins and Electronic Disturbances.” It reminds me of the idea of a powerful grass roots effort that might not be intended to harm, but to help. It perhaps oversimplifies all the implications of the Internet’s uses, but it does point out the agency it gives to the average Joe or Jane to changer life, laws, and help those who need it. “I don't think any type of activism wrong, be it virtual or real. What is important is that we attract as many different people to participate in the work and help with actions in whatever manner we can and whatever manner they can. E-protest can make our gatherings and actions glocal - not just local or global, but both at the same time. Also, sometimes, people who have families and need to work, or are homebound, or don't have enough money to travel to join the street action - can also participate and show their support - they should not be left out, because they can only join the e-action and not the street action. E-protest is just one more tool that we can add to our pile of tactics - it is not a strategy. E-protest is an active poster, an active puppet in the streets, or music to call the people to action - it is just a tool and nothing more or less than that.” (Virtual Sit-ins)
Since the digital sit-in does not have a material presence, it is in many ways more removed from the street demonstration in which a physical body might be imprisoned or tortured. In this sense, it is also more threatening or frustrating to those who try to exert control over the protesters. In the response to “Virtual Sit-ins and Electronic Disturbances,’ another author, Menso, affirmed that there should/could be physical repercussions to these online activists, “I am quite certain that legal action can be taken against these so called virtual sit-ins… the problem is getting proof”. Later, he suggests that ‘the government will have you arrested’ and even describes the possibility of the previous author, Suddha, ‘getting locked up forever.’ In any case, I thought it brought up the interplay between the virtual and the material, and the effect of one on the other. Menso did, however, make one positive suggestion for another form of online protest: instead of trying to slow a server down for providing certain types of news, or to silence certain types of media, you should simply produce your own media: “the beauty of the net is that for any site saying something you don’t like, you can start ten that say something the other site doesn’t like.” This idea of drowning out the corporate media voices is appealing in its active production of new alternative forms of media, but also slightly unrealistic. In order to produce media, you still need a fairly large infrastructure, as in the case of the wide dominance of the AP and Reuters. The central problematic seems to rest between the production of information and the destruction of another’s information.
Also, at numerous points in the interview, Ricardo Dominguez states that the purpose of the virtual demonstration is not to effect a physical change, but to accompany the street protest, as a tool or tactic to raise media awareness and coverage of the topic. In this case, Dominguez defines the importance of the production of information, “it is also important to leverage the media heat that e-protest creates by making sure that the issues and reasons for the protest are the dominant information that appears in the media.” In this sense, the virtual world may not be effective (‘the digital quality should be just a side issue and nothing more’) but helps in the control and production of representations. Even in the brevity of the article ‘Osama’s Endgame’, you get a sense of both the wide publicity by which Osama bin Laden fuels his campaign (press conferences with US media corporations, video-tapes, treatises, etc.) and his simultaneous need for secrecy, “using fast-moving light forces that work under complete secrecy”. In a way (similar to U.S. government control over the media in the Gulf War) bin Laden realizes and maintains an absolute control over the media representations of himself (in words, images, and video clips) though both production and encryption. Control of information and representation are the sources of this power. The Newsweek article, “tech’s double-edged sword,’ develops this theme further, defining the basic ‘duality’ of technology in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In this scenario, ‘us’ is, I suppose, a market-calculated middle-class American audience with access to cell phones and computer technology. ‘They’ is, of course, ‘the terrorists’. Levy notably describes technology as ‘our technology’, which ‘they’ simply use: “the sophistication of our technology also leverages the efforts of those who would destroy… the more powerful our tools are, the more dangerous they are when turned against us.” The image is clear: America produces a benign technology in the spirit of ‘what they see as progress’, but ‘our production’ actually benefits ‘the evil’. Of course, this dichotomy of between the producer and consumer assumes that a more informed and calculated production process (‘more consideration as we drive technology ever further’) will help re-establish an American hegemony. Lawrence Lessig brings up the same issue and the rise of corporate control on the internet ‘commons’. This control is both the material (“Cisco for example developed ‘policy based routers’ that enable cable companies to choose which content flows quickly and which flows slowly… ISP’s running cable services have exercised their power to ban certain kinds of applications”) and intellectual-- in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Julian Dibbel also brings this up in the forms of digital watermarking and encoding graphics, texts, video, and mp3’s. In both of these descriptions, the real infringement on the libertarian freedom of the internet ‘commons’ is not the terrorists or the hackers, but the corporate monopolies, “Rumors of terrorist applications notwithstanding, the majority of interest in steganographic techniques these days comes not from criminal and/or libertarian hackers… but from corporate researchers.” In these cases, the colonization of the internet is dominated by those same monopolies that control the flow of material capital. With all of these articles, hinging on the production, distribution, and control of the flows of information, I thought that May’s article might have been the most explicit. Rather than lamenting other forms of control, May suggests that he will be ‘the colonizer’ of ‘cyberspace’. I am not sure if this local attempt at seizing power is feasible—after all, he might be going against the entire nation state and a pre-existing infrastructure. Is his declaration of a ‘phase change’, then, in some way a call to revolution? I think the most important thing here, then, would be to start to examine just what the two factions are—who is he implying and denying in his final call to arms “we will be the colonizers of the internet”—and is this colonization going to be virtual, or is that a tactic and component of the larger strategy to take over the means of production of information?
The implicit problem that I see with Bey’s description of TAZs is that I feel that there is no true way to experience absolute autonomy. He claims (409) that just because it is planned does not make an event less spontaneous or less autonomous, anarchic in the definition that May gives. It seems intuitively obvious, that the “spontaneous” element of people actually coming is what makes a dinner party or a Be-in a success, but the planning fundamentally undercuts total autonomy. The attendees still appear at a time and place designated by someone. Perhaps the examples of pirate communities that somehow spontaneously appeared out of a shared need and word of mouth better exemplify his argument while the dinner parties are mere analogies to make the situation comprehensible to the reader. I just have trouble with the limits of the autonomy that he describes – just how autonomous is autonomy?
Somewhat based within this problem, on p 403 he writes that revolution always concludes with the reconstitution of the state into a more repressive apparatus. By the consolidation of the uprising, opportunities are sealed off and autonomy dissipates. But, and perhaps this is just my initial reaction to the word “construction” that he uses, he then discusses the creation of an autonomous Net “which will serve as the basis for a ‘new society emerging from the shell of the old’” (415). This seems to be precisely the problem that he identifies as the basis for the failure of revolution. If the counter-Net and the TAZ are “forms of struggle toward a different reality” (415) and not self-contained and implicitly limited, counter-societies that have no desire to extend their boundaries or to colonize civilized society, how can they be distinguished from revolutions? Doesn’t the construction of a society always necessarily entail the limitations of autonomy which metamorphoses the uprising into a revolution and produces the new repression that entails? I think that he fundamentally misreads the “temptation” of going to Croatoan. He maintains that the New World and the frontier offered the opportunity or constant temptation to go native and turn one’s back on civilization and that civilization’s disciplining of the frontier, the cartography of the outside, worked as repression to purge these elements from its society, like in The Searchers when Ethan Edwards tries to kill Debbie after she has gone native. But I think that what was wanted instead was a kind of interstitial space between the “hedonism” or “autonomy” represented by Croatoan and civilization. He uses the examples of the Boy Scouts and the Massachusetts radical who threw the Boston Tea Party as a case in which men and boys seek “to participate in their occult power, their mythic radiance” by “becoming an Indian” (424), but in both of these cases, and I believe it could be proven even in the pirate utopias, what was sought was not complete autonomy but a kind of new society or new individuality that synthesizes the best available in both civilization and Croatoan. That the society that emerged was not, actually, more repressive than its predecessors. Rather than abolishing one for the other, they take some of both, perhaps to create a more autonomous civilization, but nonetheless to create a kind of civilization. By arguing that all revolution creates a more repressive state, he cannot allow that such increased autonomy can exist within society, so he is forced to claim that absolute autonomy – an insupportable concept – exists wholly outside of all civilization when, in fact, autonomy cannot escape society or a kind of civilization.
Shawn Greenlee – extra response
For April 22, 2002 In Adorno’s “Culture Industry Reconsidered”, he states, “The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment…that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.” Over the course of the readings we have read many texts about and by those resisting surveillance. Surveillance is not actually control, but the threat of it and therefore effectively… control (if we take up the Panoptic/1984 interpretation of it). We have read how the presence of the surveillance device becomes an unreasonable search, a violation of privacy. The Surveillance Camera Player’s texts debunk the justification for the camera’s presence, even in light of 9-11. They describe the failure of surveillance to actually prevent crimes and posit the real motives for increased surveillance, “…they (Bush, Rumsfeld) are in fact not really concerned with fighting terrorism or crime, but instead with strengthening their hold on American society…their enemies are not “international terrorists,” but ordinary citizens of the putatively democratic society, people who already are or might soon become political opponents or domestic dissidents.” Critics of the PATRIOT act (the Chang article) openly address these concerns in regards to the negation of our civil liberties. In the Kyllo v. U.S. case it was ruled that when the Government uses a device that is not in general public use “to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment ‘search’ and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” We have to wonder as more and more observation devices become commonly known and used, become present in the imagination of the pubic, does this justify their use? Probable cause becomes a vague concept. To retain our right to privacy (and chance at being autonomous, independent individuals) are we forced into hiding from the gaze? Effectively does our defense become activism?…activism that is ever more dangerous as it coexists with the presence of terrorism. In the FBI’s 2001 statement on the threat of terrorism to the United States: “The FBI believes cyber-terrorism, the use of cyber-tools to shut down, degrade, or deny critical national infrastructures, such as energy, transportation, communications, or governmental services, for the purpose of coercing or intimidating a government or civilian population is clearly am emerging threat for which it must develop prevention, deterrence, and response capabilities.” Ricardo Dominguez (in the Virtual Sit Ins interview) said that an on-line demonstration is “a method of allowing a networked community to gather on a site…and create a disturbance of collective presence in a non-violent manner.” He goes on to state that they have gone up against the Pentagon, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Mexican Government. Although they never did significant damage (violence) to any servers, the significance was in the symbolism of trying to create the interference. Clearly the definition of terrorism is malleable in the hands of our government. Activism, Hacktivism, Crypto Anarchism, Steganography, etc. all become unpatriotic acts and riskier pursuits. I am reminded of Chris Burden’s 1973 performance piece, “747”, where he fired a gun at an overhead airplane. Is trying to shoot down a plane no matter how unlikely the success, still a criminal act –even in the context of activism, art, (or rather, creation of spectacle? The threat of systems like ECHELON, CARNIVORE, face recognition software, and encrypted locks/tracking mechanisms on intellectual property leave us with a truly paranoid vision of our society. We are confronted with the fact that we may always be observed. Therefore we are left with a sense of collapse between the private and the public and confusion about how to respond to surveillance. Wolfgang Ernst states, “Not only is the anonymous power of the surveilling eye no longer felt as a menace, but it is subjected to a kind of productive, reverse appropriation of power, seen as an opportunity to experiment with the location of the self.” Through the mass media desire is linked to being seen. Ernst states, “the omnipresence of cameras has surrendered its Orwellian menace to a kind of inverse voyeurism.” How does this sense of publicity (internal or external) impact our sense of an authentic life? If the authentification for our lives becomes linked with our sense of being seen then do we lose our independence? How large of a role does freedom have in the authentification of ‘being’. Adorno might say that the culture industry has truly tricked us into giving up autonomy. In “Culture Industry Reconsidered”, he states, “In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform…The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.” In the case of the Jenni-cam, Burgin links Jenni Ringley’s affection for her web-cam (the object that lets others see her) with Melanie Klein’s paper “On the Sense of Loneliness”. The idea being that despite presence of others there is an internal sense of loneliness that steams from a nostalgia for “the earliest union with the mother”. The toy or in this case web-cam becomes ”a transitional object and imaginary companion”. Perhaps the desire to be seen stems from this substitute for the parental eye, the desire to be dependent (or rather the fear of independence/nonconformity). So why resist? Hakim Bey states, “History says the Revolution attains ‘permanence,’ or at least duration, while the uprising is ‘temporary’. …Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day – otherwise they would not be ‘non-ordinary.’ But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of life.” This statement alludes to a sense of authentication that is received when one is part of a spectacle (if we understand spectacle as the non-ordinary). Activism, however warranted, may be a means of creating the spectacle, the temporary uprising. The non-ordinary nature of the event becomes a part of its efficacy. Guy Debord states in “Society of the Spectacle”, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” How to reconcile the conformity of ”everyone the star of their own TV series” desire (as discussed by Dan Graham in the article discussing TV show, “An American Family”) with the desire to create spectacle in order to upset conformity and regain consciousness? (This is an honest question.) |
