|
|
|
Liberation and Control: Disobedient Connections in Contemporary Works
- an article by Bojana Kunst
- Theoretical Perspective; Leonardo Journal, Leonardo, Vol 38, No. 5
- © MIT Press, October 2005, USA
- wPack
Connection has attained a very ambivalent status today. It exposes the liberating potential of the connected ways of public participation, which also changes our understanding of political and intimate life. At the same moment there is also a strong fear at work, that exactly this potential can be turned up into an even more rigid form of contemporary life. Connection as understood in this article, is always something procedural but at the same time disobedient to its own procedure. This disobedience can be concretely observedd with some contemporary artistic works, for example with the project wPack from Intima Virtual Base.
Introduction
With the incessant increase of mobile communication and networks, 'to be connected' has become the main feature of different aspects of our lives. On the one side we can frequently hear that being connected has become one of our basic needs: every break of connection is associated with deep fear. Being disconnected seems to pose one of the biggest threats in today's world, be it in the economic, social, intimate or private sphere. On the other side -- as so accurately described in novel Noir -- the notion of connection acquires an entirely opposite meaning. (1) Connection is here used as a swearword, people curse at each other with expressions like 'connect you mother connector', or 'get the connect outta here'. In other words, you have fucked-up entirely if you are connected. Consequences of both sides are equally overwhelming: they do not only evoke a global economic catastrophe, but also a disaster in the intimate spheres of life. It seems thus that connection has attained a very ambivalent status today. It exposes the liberating potential of the connected ways of public participation, which also changes our understanding of political and intimate life. At the same moment there is also a strong fear at work, that exactly this potential can be turned up into an even more rigid form of contemporary life. The fear of disconnection and the fear of excessive connection, both have somehow the same origin: that connection is not only multiplied, inflated and constantly produced, but it is also owned, exploited and territorialized. This can be also linked to the more general observation by Latour that mediation never really fully entered contemporary public life. (2) Somehow connection never breaks up from its servile function, which has understood connection primarly as a technical or anatomical procedure, which can be organized in the hierarchical order, a procedure that has to be owned and regulated by power.
The Threat of Disconnection
Connection as understood in this text, is always something procedural but at the same time disobedient to its own procedure. This can be also observed in the history of modernity where connection -- when being perceived outside the black box of scientific laboratory and entering public life -- was a source of the uncanny meeting between man and machine, woman and man, nature and culture, life and non-life. Numerous stories from the history of modernity are related to the strange connection between human beings and machines, where people became suddenly frozen when meeting the machine, with the disappearance of their reason, they began to behave as machines themselves. The difference between the machine and the human being is no longer clear and their connection has to be ontologically redefined. The uncanny supplement thus undermines the very foundation of the connected parts, more precisely: it disconnects the human being from humanity and the artificial being from artificiality. It seems nowadays, as connections have become our main mode of being, that the uncanny supplement is being demeaned by increasingly sophisticated procedures that enable us to participate in the world of excessive connections and at the same time to redefine ourselves constantly. What is nonetheless worth noticing is that identical symptoms are at work when dealing today with the contemporary fear of disconnection: in the eventual collapse of contemporary connections there are also no longer clear divisions. This ultimate situation of being disconnected also represents one of our main fears, therefore it has to be constantly prevented with the careful regulation of the role of connections in our public and participatory life, with no space for procedural disobedience and parallel protocols (like the anticopyright movement, Napster, Etoy etc., to name the most well-known examples). This is particularly evident from the permanent regulation of the enormous productivity and intellectual potential of today, from the permanent distribution of immaterial work, which has to progressively submit to the transparent organizational forms, management procedures and protocol networks.
The main imperative logic of this threat -- 'when the connection gets broken, there will be chaos' -- therefore does not take into consideration that connection is never a hierarchical procedure but the very possibility of the disobedience, the very core of the ambivalence. The productive hypertrophy is namely one of the results of the omnipresence of contemporary connections and with its hypertrophic materiality endangers the manageable transparency of the connecting procedure itself. It is the arrangement of the intermediary, the pact with the mediation, the very production of disobedient modes of being, placing connected parts constantly under redefinition. What really produces the threat of disconnection is therefore not the connection per se, but its alleged uncanny supplement, residing today in the incestuous location of connections, in this supplement which is added as the overall strict procedure: the chaos is exactly the effect of the precarious control and incestuous care of the located centre. What we have here is a clearly paranoid situation, persistently hiding its own cause by giving the cause the disguise of the effect; therefore by giving the potential of the productive hypertrophy the disguise of the chaotic and fearful disconnection. The threat of being disconnected is therefore the result of the excessive familiarity and territorialization of connection as a procedure (which can be found in corporations, monopolies, incestuous power structures, producers of imagination, etc.). It is no wonder that this procedure and its protocols are becoming more and more privatized, that all the productive hypertrophy and intellectual creativity have become increasingly centred around strict protocols of ownership, that even emotional tonality of connections have become more and more tuned with the corporations for imagination.
If the threat of connection lies in its collapse, that means that connection is in advance understood as a hierarchical procedure, with no potential for disobedience. In this understanding of connection the divisions are still very clearly at work, even if it is all the time visible in public life, it doesn't necessarily change our ways of participation. The threat of disconnection could be then described as a disguised reactionary response to the mediation entering the public and political life. It is a response to the more serious problem that the power has nowadays with the arrangement of the intermediary, with the hypertrophy of productivity, which calls for new ways of connected participation.
The Threat of Connection
Let us now briefly consider the other side of the contemporary ambivalent status of connections in a popular debate, with connections being understood as the main threat. What kind of uncanny supplement can we uncover in the completely connected world, where being connected is the worst that can happen to you? The world of Jeter's novel Noir is the world of a merciless morality, where every connection has to have a monetary value. The threat of excessive connection becomes increasingly topical with contemporary economic demands more and more immersed in our desire to be connected. "So this is what it means to live in a network society. (...) You can get it right here and right now. All you have to do is pay the price. (...) But this also means that what you get is never quite what you paid for. It is always a tiny bit less." (3) A tiny bit less, which can be also described as the future investment to come for more, or more precisely, as promotion for our main desire to always have a tiny bit more. Here we have a perfect relationship where economy and our desires go hand in hand. The uncanny supplement of connection is therefore precisely this 'mysterious nothing' that transforms the pure procedure of the connection into the surplus value. To put it differently: the mysterious nothing that becomes the value for our economic, political, or even, most intimate relationships.
In the history of modernity, no one is more close to such understanding of connection as philosopher Leibniz from the 17th century. To comprehend the early modern world's collapse into divisions, Leibniz developed a meticulous philosophy of connections where the world was described as a very peculiar orchestra: "The orderliness of things, as I understand it, quite resembles that of various orchestras and choirs; while playing their parts, they are located thus that they can not see or hear each other, and yet, each following its scores, they can play together in a perfect fashion. Thus, anyone present in any of the two choirs, could gather from it what the other choir is playing at that time, and could train oneself (especially if we presuppose that he can hear his choir without seeing it, and see the other choir without hearing it) so that his fantasy would further the unheard more and more, and that he would no longer think of the choir he himself stands in, but of the other." (4) What we have here is the buzzing and also intolerably noisy world abounding in connections, which, at the same time, is also the completely silent world of endless mirroring. The entire magnificence of playing has changed into the sheer connecting procedure, which is passionately dedicated to endless transfers from one choir to another, to ceaseless listening and observation. But this overwhelming connecting procedure is very dependent on its own uncanny supplement; from the procedural laws of harmony and music, which are all the time regulating the connection as laws of composition and order.
Exactly this uncanny supplement of the efficient procedure is today also the one giving the value to most of our public or intimate relationships. In the novel L'Eve Future by Villiers de L'Isle Adam, a French 19th century writer, we can already observe how the understanding of the connection changed, with a meeting between a man and a machine (which was not by coincidence an artificial woman) turning out to be the meeting between desire and commodity. After Edison's (inventor of the artificial woman) disclosure of the mechanism of the artificial Eve, Lord Ewald is curious to know how one will be able to speak with her. "Here, you will never have to fear not being understood, as would be the case with the live one: you will only have to learn to pay attention to the time pressed between her words." A link with the artificial woman produces no misunderstanding, and more even: "You won't even have to articulate any words yourself! Hers will be a response to your thoughts, your silence!" (5) We could say that the relationship between commodity and desire is always that the commodity loves us a little bit more than we can handle, but at the same time we cannot behave differently than always desiring a little bit more love.
The new understanding which is at work here is a kind of permanent anxiety: with desire increasingly becoming the core of our connection, it is namely impossible to disconnect. The only way out is irrational destruction of the desire, which is also becoming more and more characteristic for resistance to our globalized orchestra. It attacks the flows and movements of the city, the urban networks, the major machines of western desire. But at the same time exactly this destruction of desire goes directly against disobedience itself, it destroys exactly the potential of connection for disobedience and public participation.
wPack and Connected Disobediance
It appears from the ambivalent relation towards connection that our being in the world is today continuously partitioned and shared, and yet we have to persistently fight for the participation and the right to be partitioned. Both of the threats still want to regulate connections in the traditional way; they prevent change to the ways in which we participate in public and political life. Just how connections are being regulated by means of privatized protocols, can be very clearly noticed with cyberspace, which was still in the beginning of the nineties understood as a potential for constructive disobedience and direct participation. Today cyberspace has become owned and exploited by protocols and growingly incestuous connections. It can be even compared to the Leibniz image of the busy and loud orchestra, which is at the same time doomed to silence.
However, connection can be understood also in a different way: with no regard to the procedure enabling the connection, the connection is not only about the procedure itself. The most important consequence of connection entering public life is precisely the arrangement of mediation, non-hierarchical relations and new forms of public activity. Here supplement is not an empty uncanny excess of the connection (which has to be regulated and controlled), but instead an active possibility for the enormous hypertrophy of productivity. In this mediation, the relation between 'production and ethicality, structure and superstructure, technologies and emotional tonalities, material development and culture, a revolutionising of the work progress and sentiments' is visible and can be put to work. (6) This relation can be concretely observed with some contemporary artistic works, especially when they deal with the disobedient connections, like, for example, in the work of Igor Stromajer and his Intima Virtual Base. His decision for low-tech protocols, the emotional tonality of his links, the way that he produces the empty supplements of connected desire, all these decisions are very much in the frame of disobedient connections, which perfect the procedure, but nevertheless always stay conscious about what they produce with this efficiency. How his work is not only about the procedure of connection but also about opening a possibility of disobedience, can be revealed with the help of his project wPack (2004). wPack is a project specially made and designed for mobile wireless protocols -- WAP and WLAN. In a wireless packages distribution centre "packages are compressed, packed, ready-to-use units, emotional files, exploring frustrations, traumas and emotion. This is where the basic communication starts". (7) In the project wPack disconnection is the main characteristic of the connecting structure. The packages of this wireless distribution centre are delivered with difficulties, fragmentarily, with a lot of procedures and sometimes also without any intention behind. Some packages with utopian names like history, revolution, north, no mercy, are full of various supplements, which could be also read as impossible political futures yet to come into our world of overwhelming connections. Beside them there are also packages, which are irrational, hard to encode, ludistic, they deliver back to us the files that we already have in our computer (different operating system files) or are 'exe files' which of course someone rarely dares to install. The packages, when delivered, reveal the problematic economic, intimate and political contexts: who would trust the artist and run an 'exe-file' on his computer, the file for which in this case you don't even need to pay, which has no commercial value? This is exactly the mediation, the real 'mysterious nothing', the possibility to be about something. It is revealed to us through procedures, consequent but not efficient, skillfully done, but non-servile; he uses the protocols and procedures but only to disclose the emotional, intimate, irrational tonality of the connection. The connections here can be redundant, but still very much operational, without the efficient power, regulated transparency and efficient management, but as some kind of a remains, fragments of meditation, memories and histories. The Wireless distribution centre is the centre where we can deliver the packages, which nobody would like to have, where we can also play with the desire residing in the connection.
wPack is connected but at the same time disobedient to the procedure which enables the connection, it is not servile to the protocol. The strategies here are similar to the contemporary civilian disobedience, only that in this case this can be defined as protocolary disobedience in the form of connected resistance. "Civil disobedience represents, perhaps, the fundamental form of political action of the multitude, provided that the multitude is emancipated from the liberal tradition within which is encapsulated. It is not a matter of ignoring a specific law because it appears incoherent or contradictory to other fundamental norms, for example to the constitutional charter. In such case, in fact reluctance would signal only deeper loyalty to state control. Conversely, the radical disobedience which concerns us here casts doubts on the State's actual ability to control." (8) What this disobedience attacks is not the incoherence of the law, but the preliminary form (protocol) of obedience without context, which always presupposes the law: this unconditional presupposition of controlling power. If I transfer this to the problem of contemporary connection: what we should attack is the preliminary form of connection as a procedure, the connection without the mediation.
With the entrance of connection in contemporary public life, there the potential for mediation should be always kept. Otherwise public political life will be more and more reduced to the battle of transparent interests incessantly systematized and regulated, where also misunderstanding, disobedience, uncivil gesture and exterior will be defined by a strict protocol. That's maybe the main reason for the connected disobedience today, but it has to be done with a very clear awareness of not repeating the traditional threats. Maybe one of the ways is to venture into the mediation of connection by means of as Brian Holmes said, unstable, difficult and at times, uncultured mimicry. (9) By using and delivering uncultured packages as in wPack, by exposing the supplement of connection, the supplement which can be also performed and given back to the emptied procedure. It can be at the end also a kind of jouissance, but always demanding something more: constant productivity, non-conforming, constant resistance to divisions of work and activities, permanent resistance to be transparent and represented as one of the contemporary procedures.
References
(1) Jeter, K. W., Noir (New York: 1998). I'm grateful for this reference on the novel Noir to Steven Shaviro.
(2) Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Massachusetts: 1993) p. 123.
(3) Shaviro, Steven, Connected or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: 2003) p. 249.
(4) Leibniz, G. W., In: Holz, Hans Heinz: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, eine Monographie (Leipzig: 1983) p. 56.
(5) Villiers de L'Isle Adam, Auguste de: L'Eve Future (Paris: 1997) p.240.
(6) Paolo, Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: 2004) p. 84.
(7) www.intima.org/wpack
(8) See Virno (6) p. 69.
(9) Holmes, Brian, Hieroglyphs of the Future (Zagreb: 2003).
Igor Štromajer Intima Virtual Base Virtualna baza Intima Igor Stromajer www.intima.org Igor Štromajer
|
|
|
|
