Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production

I haven't put together a live performance work since Habeas Corpus in 2008, and the theme hasn't really changed, but the approach and scale have. On Sunday in Berlin, with up to 100 performers we will present the "Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production", a labour model of the creation of the building we will be performing in front of.

 No lights, no speakers, no microphones, only a small mass of humanity, a few instructions 5 or 6 analogue clocks and handfulls of ballpoint pens. Come and join in (arrive around 1pm) or come just to watch (arrive at 3pm).

 Here's an introduction in German (with thanks to Ruth and Christine)
 “Biographische Entstehungschronik” von Baruch Gottlieb
 für das “Oral Syndicate”
produziert von Francesca Ciardi

Eine Performance-Veranstaltung für 100 Darsteller Die Performance beschäftigt sich mit der uns umgebenden und von uns geschaffenen Wirklichkeit. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet ein beliebiges Industrieprodukt - in diesem Falle ein Gebäude - und 100 Menschen, die durch ihren Arbeitseinsatz an dessen Entstehung beteiligt waren. Die Bühnenauftritte der einzelnen Darsteller bemessen sich proportional zu der geleisteten Arbeit ihrer darzustellenden Figur und variieren zwischen drei Sekunden und drei Minuten. Dabei wird der individuelle Arbeitseinsatz durch Gesten, Töne oder rein pantomimisch auf der Bühne dargestellt. Die übrigen Darsteller erzeugen hinter der Bühne eine kontinuierliche Geräuschkulisse indem sie einzelne Töne singen, sprechen, mit den Füssen scharren, aufstampfen oder auf der Stelle treten.

 Die Performance soll eine Erkundung der (Entstehungs)Geschichte eines industriellen Erzeugnisses sein, welches wir normalerweise nur in seiner physischen und gewöhnlichen Form wahrnehmen. Sie soll die gesamte Komplexität eines Enstehungsprozesses vermitteln, d.h. das Unermessliche, das Ungelöste, das Verstrickte: Beziehungsgeflechte verschiedener Individuen, deren Anstrengungen und gemeinsames Streben.

 Here is the English call as seen on FB:

 Baruch Gottlieb and Francesca Romana Ciardi are looking for 100 people interested in becoming a part of a unique site-specific and monumental performance, manifesting the living history of industrial architecture. Set in the unusual and suggestive setting of exRotaprint, a former printer factory in Wedding, the Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production retraces the stories of the people who produced the world we live in today. Using a model of the construction of the ExRotaprint factory, participants will re-present the workers originally involved in the construction of the building over 60 years ago by appearing 'on stage' for a time proportional to the the historical person they are representing. This time 'on stage' will generally be quite short, on the average 5 seconds at a time...The rest of the participants, when not on stage or getting ready to go on stage, will produce background sounds 'back stage' for the performance. The sounds will consist of physical sounds like shuffling feet and vocal sounds like whispering, murmuring and humming. The performance will take place on the outdoor grounds of ExRotaprint in Wedding, on May 27th 2012 at 3pm and will finish at approximately 330pm.

Participants are requested to arrive on location two hours before the showing, at 1pm, for a run through. No previous performance experience necessary but a genuine desire to be part of a unique project that daringly traces the collective histories and memories of people and their labour. If you want to be part of Biographical Chronicle of Industrial Production please follow this link and fill out the online form on that page: 

The Spectres of Messianic Justice (Derrida's SOM part 2!)

It has been months since I wrote the auspiciously subtitled Part 1 of my reflections on Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx. When I first bought the book I thought I knew what the spectres of Marx would turn out to be, but of course, first I had to finish the whole book¹ and ascertain to what degree Derrida and I were on the same track. This, some of you familiar with Derrida's work will understand, took some time. And then other urgencies intervened, and vacillation began its orbits.

The spectres of Marx appear for Derrida in the first sentence of the Communist manifesto. “A spectre is haunting Europe, it is the spectre of Communism”.²

Derrida asks about this spectrality, right at the outset of one of the most influential documents of the 19th & 20th centuries. Are these spectres the spectral beings traversing Marx and his oeuvre, or, are they the spectral legacy of Marx and his oeuvre, the legacy of a certain manifestation of the worker which built for us this technological age?

Derrida explores both of these interpretations, spending much more time on the Messianic implications of transcendental haunting invoked by Marx's use of the word spectre. “Can one conceive of an atheological heritage of the messianic?” (p.211). The atheological messianic notion of a justice to come “beyond right and law”(p.220), central to this book, remains so through his subsequent writings, which he comes to call Messianicity.³

Thus Derrida likes one French translation of spectre: 'revenant' (the returning/returner), and works at length to articulate how the inexorable revenant may lose its ominousness and become more of a companion, eventually pleading with Marcellus in the first act of Hamlet “thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio.”

The inevitable revolutionary rhythmicity of the revenant builds up resonance, a murmuring echo in the psyche of the subject. It is not memory of lived experience, it is an experience which transcends our time and is not totally 'of it'. As implied, the revenant is returning for justice. Can we say that, upon its visitation, we, who cannot provide such justice feel guilty? Is it possible to describe a haunting which traumatizes all people, and is it possible to speak to this?

“if right or law stems from vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does – before Nietzsche, before Heidegger, before Benjamin – can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance?”(p.25)

Are Derrida's revenants the resonance of things we have actually encountered, i.e. there was a time then the revenant was not merely returning (echoing) but actually together, gathering us, 'with us' in time and space? Ensemble, French for together, has the root for resemble, semblable, similar. Can we say that the revenant is like us living today, that it was once an actual person who lived? Is the spectral here the combined resonances of people's lives lived in the world?

What is the notion of justice but that of the wronged revenant?

The ineluctable spectral resonance builds up an awful, stultifying wallah which threatens even the Marxist ego. Derrida dedicates the last chapter to Marx's (and comparing Stirner's) efforts to expunge the ghosts haunting them. Marx's unwillingness to cohabit with the spectral may explain why he so categorically denied any sort of meaning an industrialized worker may have in his work.

"Labour to earn a living involves: 1) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the subject who labours; 2) estrangement and fortuitous connection between labour and the object of labour; 3) that the worker's role is determined by social needs which, however, are alien to him and a compulsion to which he submits out of egoistic need and necessity, and which have for him only the significance of a means of satisfying his dire need, just as for them he exists only as a slave of their needs; 4) that to the worker the maintenance of his individual existence appears to be the purpose of his activity and what he actually does is regarded by him only as a means; that he carries on his life's activity in order to earn means of subsistence." - Karl Marx 1844 Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique

Marx is himself too haunted, has not learned how to speak to the ghost which coalesces before his criticism. Perhaps most frightening is that these ghosts may be perceived lacking the very thing which made them useful (to Marx, and to Capitalism) in the first place, their bodies.

Everyone knows there is nothing so terrifying as a nobody, but it is precisely this persistence of the spectral body of the worker, individual and inexorably part of the revenant, which resonated most strongly in the capitalism. Capitalism, Marx is rightly canonized for being the first to painstakingly and incontrovertibly point out, accumulates wealth by institutionally alienating workers from the value they create. But this notion of alienation is merely economic and, unacknowledged by Marx, the worker cannot help but invest, even if only slightly, with human sensibility and care, in the actual carrying out of his work.

The body experience of the worker is recorded in the object of his labour, and this object will continues to serve as a resonance of the worker who made it's spectrality as long as it exists. If, conversely, technology is the skills and knowledge necessary to produce the technological object then, technology is also stored in the worker's body.

Marx takes the Cartesian (after de la Mettrie) man-is-a-machine hyperbole and hyper-industrializes it. But if we extrapolate from Chomsky's principle of the innate faculty of language and turn the man-machine hyperbole around, we can say that a machine always has something human-like about it and that this humanity in the machine is in part a residue of the body labour and body knowledge that went into producing it, and not just ideas and instructions.

If we can see the industrialized world, not only as dominated by alienating principles and processes but rather as persistently inhabited by sentient bodies, we will begin to recognize another spectrality, that of the physical body resonance of past generations which bequeathed to us the surfaces of modernity. When we thus return to the spectral its acoustic dimension, we may begin to consider the problem not to be that the ghosts appear, but that they leave too quickly before we can echo them detectably.

Disconcerting is not that we, in industrialized convenience, traverse (and are traversed by) a realm of discorporate human spectrality, but rather that the spectres we come across retain their individual integrity with faces and bodies. This is the experience of modernity as a traversal of myriad minute instances of integral, resonant, individual spectral remains, swirling around us like innumerable snowflakes in the shapes of human beings, each an autonomous revenant.

But here, Zizek would allow, Derrida and I are both mis-appropriating Marx, and Engels, for they spoke not of spectrality or of spectres but of THE spectre of Communism.

In English, this spectre is a looming thing, like the "spectre of unemployment". In current usage, the spectre is usually a bogey man summoned when fear is required. In that it is destined always to return again, it is a Derridian messianistic revenant, yet this spectre's return is always invoked, it returns on call and retires until called again.

This means the spectre of communism is always immanent, and, as Marx and Engels affirm, the revenant will soon be here to stay. But we have seen that even Marx and (real existing) Communism are haunted by spectres, “untimely spectres that one must not chase away, but sort out, critique, keep close by and allow to come back” (p.109)

1Slavoj Zizek nimbly danced around a tricky question at his recent lecture in Helsinki “What does it mean to be a Communist Today” when asked how familiar he really was with das Kapital. His response was. “ To really believe ideology you shouldn't know too much about it.”, giving examples such as Stalin, who certainly hardly read and never read Lenin or Marx, or Marx himself who misunderstood Hegel, who in, turn misinterpreted large parts of Kant. Zizek's disconcerting response shows that misappropriation, purposeful or otherwise may be far more politically effective (and interesting) than strict knowledge of and adherence to a text, if indeed this is even possible.

2 In German it is „Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus“. The word Gespenst has a wonderful craftsman-related connotation from its root in the verb 'to span' as in to span cloth over a hoarding. It harks back(or forward) nicely to Marx's famous 'length of cloth' example in Capital. So we have a spectrality which spans Europe goes through it an also goes around it, defining it.

3 an interesting article which integrates some thorough exploration of Derrida's notion of the messianic is in Prof. Dr. Lieven De Cauters The Tyrant as Messiah

For further Reference: (for those who speak French or Italian, unless someone wants to prevail upon me to translate this) Here is an interview of Derrida by Enrico Ghezzi in which he elaborates on the various notions of spectrality in his book 'Spectres of Marx'.

Gratitude for Technology

Gratitude in etymology (Derrida cautions about this "abuse of etymology that serves as explanation, play on homonyms (he should know about this one), privileging of nomination, autonomization of language, and so forth"- Specters of Marx, p. 167)

gratitude c.1500, from M.L. gratitudo "thankfulness," from L. gratus "thankful, pleasing" (see grace).

grace from L. gratia "pleasing quality, good will, gratitude," from gratus "pleasing, agreeable," from PIE base *gwer- "to praise, welcome" (cf. Skt. grnati "sings, praises, announces," Lith. giriu "to praise, celebrate," Avestan gar- "to praise").

etymology from the amazing etymonline

In this book I wish to create a manifestation of the legacy of human care and effort that coalesces in the contemporary surface. This manifestation, of the intricate webs of human relations intertwining back through history, all the way to the flint knife and before, is proposed to be a media object, a digital media modeling of documentary/historical traces, that should serve as contemplative resonator for gratitude for technology.

Rather than being an object of our contemplation it is a Flusserian project projected from processes inside the apparatus which is modeling the history of human collaboration recorded in the document of the contemporary surface. This work requires an infinite labour:

1. of research, to compile records towards a comprehensive documentary legacy of the human history of technology,

2. of mimetics, to re-enact and reembody all the events of this legacy

3. of modeling, developing categorization and cross-referencing protocols and the algorithms to traverse these, creating recombinant documentary sequences and inter-associations with intuitive subjective sense of perspective and movement..

My friend Steven Augustine has challenged my use of the notion of gratitude as implicitly religious. Seeing as even the secular humanist modernist tradition is redolent of judeo-christian learning, this charge is hard to defuse. Without god, utterly without god, we really only have each other, and we will have to start dealing with that fact with the earnestness it deserves.

*

Today, while editing, I heard a scratchy squeaky rhythmic something coming from the park beneath my window. There were a few young voices obviously enjoying this racket very much. I finally figured out that it was

“Das Geht ab” (it’s starting) by Frauenartz (Gynecologist) and Manny Mark coming out of a cellphone speaker. I thought about what I was doing, trying to make something sublime, but the cell-phone makers know just what functionality the kids need. Kids today, as back when I was, are desperate for anything that will give them hope that this technological future world will be worth it.

People are grateful for technology which transports them, away from their bodily and existential uncertainty into a fantasy space where everything responds to them, and offers them an intoxicating taste of complete control. We suspend ever longer this technological fantasy through drugs , through media, it seems the future will be one where people will be transported from cradle to grave without ever having a moment unmediated by technology. There will be no slowing down of technology no crisis just an ever surging yearning thrust towards fusion with automated processes.

the morality of pure science

In late June, I went to visit Otto Rössler to talk about human scale in relation to the size of atomic particles. I also wanted to discuss the role that visualization plays in the experimental process. Atomic particles are almost exclusively data, generated by the invisible particle flitting through a sensor array. It is hard to separate the energy of the particle from the energy of the data, there is a lot of overlap of reality and simulacra in the visualization of particle physics, especially since the "reality" is generated though a controlled experiment.

I knew Rössler had more urgent matters to discuss, however. Besides being known for the eponymous Rössler Attractor, a formula used in chaos theory mathematics, Rössler famously has issued a public warning on Spiegel TV that the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have a chance of creating stable micro black holes (mBHs) which could put the world at risk.
With his self-deprecating humour only barely masking his concern, he told me the chances were 1 in 6 the world would be destroyed when CERN begins operations again in September, Russian Roulette.

His claims have been solidly discredited by many eminent physicists, including Stephen Hawkings, yet, he says many also support him but are unwilling to do so publicly for fear for their careers. Indeed, I found at least one other prominent scientist voicing a similar warning.

With the date of the restart of the LHC approaching, Rössler is forcefully calling for a scientific safety conference to be held whereby the public can be informed of the true risk and the actions being taken to prevent any disaster. In the clip below, he relates a conversation he had with CERN physicist Rolf Landua where they discussed an experiment which could test whether Rössler's calculations were correct or not. Such an experiment would significantly postpone the riskier experiments for which the LHC was built. Claiming all he wants is to be proven wrong, Rössler seems to be employing a stalling tactic similar to that described by Leo Szilard in his "Mark Gable Foundation".

Szilard, with Einstein, one of the essential geniuses of the atomic bomb, had to watch impotently in horror as his brainchild was exploded over a civilian population, despite his and Einstein's protests to then President Truman. Szilard became catalyzed into an activist and writer, who worked to slow down the pace of scientific progress.

Rössler invokes the repented sins of Szilard, Oppenheimer and Einstein, and claims that the pursuit of the LHC experiments as planned, without additional safety considerations, would be a sin against science. Rössler might feel himself responsible for innovating some of the mathematics which have found their application in the LHC. Most poignantly, Rössler is calling here for what appears today an anachronistic sense of scientific morality, one that places the value of truth above all.

One look at the genealogy of today's technologies will reveal that business interests (or their national proxies, states and their militaries) have accompanied every technological discovery. There is no knowledge untainted by lucre, just as there is no literature and no art devoid of the existential realities of the material survival of the artist. It is time we acknowledge these concurrent forces in the works we admire and integrate these in our appreciation.

Can scientists be held accountable for the adverse realisation of their theories? We can see with nuclear physics, the research has provided the full range of effects from the beneficial to cataclysmic. Today we live in a world where not a day goes by without some global crisis over "Nuclear Proliferation". Science is the new god, providing for our wildest desires and deepest fears. But, as Bruno Latour pointed out in his book Laboratory Life , science is a social product, and scientific results must also be considered with attention to the contexts under which thy were produced.

In the next blog, I would like to explore the notions of absolute and relative good and bad in the frame of Derrida's discussion of Marx in "Specters of Marx". For now, I will leave you with the question. If we cannot determine good or bad, what does it mean to plunge forth unmitigated into post-humanizing scientific revolution? Rössler raises the same conCERN at the end of the clip above. If CERN goes online on schedule in September without additional safety questions addressed, it will be "a proof they didn't care about risk, even though they know it exists".

UPDATE: 31.07.09 Looks like CERN is experiencing more leakage problems with the cooling units which may push the start of experiments up to November or even later!

UPDATE 2: 4.08.09 New York Times reports today that, due to system electrical faults, CERN may not reach full operationality for years if ever!

additional resources:

CERN's LHC FAQ with lots of good basic information about the project

A Rational and Moral and Spiritual Dilemma
by Otto E. Rossler

P.M. - Wie gefährlich ist das CERN-Experiment? (how dangerous is the CERN Experiment?)
Interview in German with Rössler with countervailing responses from Rolf Landua

In depth interview with Dr. Rössler and a long forum conversation in which he is forced to rebut many arguments

Some good references in this report on the European Court Case to impose stricter safety tests before CERN begins full operation

Book is Out!

My new book on Atropos Press "Gratitude for Technology" has started appearing on online booksellers today! Barnes & Noble was the first, so I am linking to them, Amazon should come online soon.

The book is the result of about two years of work trying to articulate the radical premise of my media art: in order to access more meaning in the technological surfaces all around us, we need to engage with the physical material of that surface, and trace back the historical processes of how it came into being.

If we look carefully, we will see that inside every technological surface are matrices of human relationships stretching back through history. These matrices of related activity formed the materials of the earth into the technological surface. If we can somehow find a way to model and manifest these webs of relationships, this utterly human cosmology, (we may need some quantum mathematics!) we will have something which we can use to develop a more substantial connection between our selves and the technological surface.

I access a wide variety of sources to explore my argument, philosophy, art, design, performance, science, contemplating the historical value of labour and the origin and structures of meaning. and more. I am very excited to finally put into book form many of the concerns that have been going on in, and unify my work since my feature film "Proposal for Dog Brain" was completed in 1995.

Now, as I start promoting this book, I have begun preliminary editing on the first installment of my video-performance series "A Political Economy of the Smallest Things" starring Paul Virilio and Otto Rössler and yours truly. This takes the themes from (especially the last chapter of) "Gratitude for Technology" even further into the infinitesimal production of leptons and bosons at CERN near Geneva. I will upload some short clips shortly, until then, please leave a comment and say hello!