Theory will be Applied!

Yes. This is just a short announcement of my solo concept exhibition in Berlin at Wohnlabor in Friedrichshain. The installation integrates one screen of conventional DVD video, one screen of generative database video, generative database recombinant soundtrack, watercolours in frames, and some 'Raumgestaltung' using elastic bands, repurposed steel and some wooden objects (depends how many I get finished by Friday). Opening is Saturday, March 20th at 19hoo the show goes on until May 15th.

The work explores many of the themes dealt with here, and, I suppose, most of all, what kind of art can be made using high technology instruments which are also weapons.

more information on my website

monitoring processual art

[this is the slightly redacted text of my presentation at a panel on processual art, moderated by Susanna Jaschko on the 4th of February 2010, at the transmediale10].

Many people speak today of a global crisis. But it is not so much a global crisis as a crisis of globalism itself. Brasil, India, Korea, many developing countries in Africa are doing quite well. What has happened is not a global crisis, but apocalypse, in it's original sense of uncovering, revealing the crisis that was, is and always will be.

The Cold War provided for us in the 'developed world', as Susanna Jaschko said today "the illusion of stability". It is well known that the Cold War was very hot in many locations where proxies of the two dominant systems of the time (called ,we remember still, communism and capitalism) battled for the exotic and scarce materials which would provide the coming technological age.

After the end of the Cold War we are going though a period of apocalypse, where the true complexity and unresolvable chaos, crisis and conflict of our common lives on this planet are no longer deniable. Processual art provides many approaches for traversing the endless volumes of data flow produced by and in our increasingly real-time consciousness of this state of endless crisis.

I will attempt to provide certain Begriffe (1) and certain systemic metaphors which may serve useful in our discussions and in our contemplation of processual art.

With the ever-present spectrality engulfing us, the ghost which remind of our own mortality, our culture's response is to tell us to visit the doctor regularly, repeatedly to monitor our health.

And if the body is perceived to be in crisis it is immediately surrounded by monitors. The monitors, now form part of the cyborg medial attention, monitoring the health of the patient.

Monitor is derived from the Latin verb monere which means originally "to admonish, warn, advise". Lev Manovich in his landmark book: Language of New Media, described the first tele-vision, the first real-time monitor which was the radar screen. Here, the connotation of warning is obvious.

On the screens and monitors are visualizations of what are considered the 'Vital Signs' of the patient. By reading these signs, even the uninitiated can imagine what is going on inside the patient.

Nowadays, as society is stripped bare of its traditional, unifying beliefs & faiths, and the citizen is particle-ized by personalized and variegated media experience-spaces, we have a growing sense of the complexity of the globalized system in which we exist, and of which we are inextricably, a part.

So here, the metaphor is that, with the monitors, we are monitoring (can one say the health of) the body of society, or even that of our civilisation, such as it can be conceived to be, for signs of various kinds.

We get warnings, but we also get information we need or want or like, but most of all, the screens tell us that the body of society is still alive and being monitored.

But more significantly, there is a stand in, an avatar for the body of society and that is the electrical and, increasingly, the communications grid, the condition of which the monitors display.

This is why computer-generative art is so appropriate for public screens, it is public notice of the health of the system. The health of the infrastructure part is verified at the refresh rate of 50 or 60 times a second (the oscillation rate of electrical current), but also and implicitly, the ongoing process of civilization's complex social and economic systems, which are always incomplete and ongoing are monitored. A comforting illusion of social constancy is also thus generated.

Failing other, earlier notions of faith, monitor screens promise us we are making technological process. What appears on the monitor screen is a kind of elaborate progress bar by which we monitor trends to fruition, the anticipation of which may be just as enjoyable as is their brief consumption.

Two examples of the implementation of processual art on public media facades.
- Korea: the progress of modernity/modernization, technologies of fairness overwhelming the creeping mustiness associated with old beliefs. Fairness = equanimity. The line between art and design and social engineering is almost non-existent
- Europe: technological progress is also monitored but also our ethical and moral progress in the traditional function of art

Processual art provides visions, visualisations of civilization as an incomplete fragmented process, going on in myriad directions at once, a glorious 4-dimensional filigree of causeways of various breadths.

But underneath, and fundamental to these real-time patterns and figures on the screens, is a kind of urgency which makes this kind of processual work so compelling and also so exhausting.

It is the diminishing wegsehbarkeit (2) of the injustice on which our civilisation, and even more, of the technology of our glorified society monitoring systems are predicated.

These are unfair relations of labour, here at home, and elsewhere, the persistence of slavery & indentured labour (the Yes Men do a nice take on this), and, especially the lack of parity in the league of nations, in living standards, and, most importantly for me, this is not just in words, it is in the materials of technology itself.

Jaromil excellently described some of the problematic deep material relations of high technology utopias in a presentation at last transmediale, in the so-called conflict minerals trade.

We must acknowledge the hardware beholdenness of all our technological art. That this hard ware is produced through hard facts: where and when the materials which become the technology must be (have been) extracted from the earth somewhere before they can be refined into these exquisite processual instruments.

This extraction from the earth of metals and minerals and other necessary ingredients for high technology must be brought out of the earth by particular individuals at particular locations at particular stages of their particular lives.

At the mine head where the Bauxite comes from for the aluminum, essential for all the finest technology in this room, there are hundreds of men with parents and families doing another day's work for peanuts right now.

They have no choice. Some even work at gunpoint. Their government, in many cases has been completely bought out by ours, because we cannot and will not do without aluminum.

Dadis Camera, former president of Guinea (central to the Bauxite trade) castigates the German Ambassador
von Nzwamba

Camara was a controversial leader. Usually not my favorite type of leader, a throwback to old-school African nationalists from the early 'independence' period. For the purposes of this post, he did one thing that really got the high-tech producing countries angry, he re-evaluated all of his countries mining contracts signed by the previous west-friendly governments, for which he would suffer greatly.


I have a phrase for this "Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely."

This is why we must monitor the consequences of our abstract, hardly articulate faith in the noble cause of technological progress and its incipient industry.

The men standing around the mine from which the materials are abstracted from the earth, with their personal individual histories and needs are at work right now perpetually inside these monitoring screens.

The screen, you may, know, etymologically comes from the old French escran "écran" which was originally the wire mesh which was placed before the warming fire - to block the sparks which could set the house on fire.

So we watch this processual art like a warming fire, glorious patterns of immolation from which we derive a pleasant angenehm (3) warmth.
Standing around the ancient campfire, it is a scene reminiscent of our tribal past, a previous, pre-literate time Flusser often described where human consciousness was dominated by images and the magicians who understood and channeled their power.

Flusser described two future societal modes possibly generated from technical images: a totalitarian techno-magical consciousness dominated by techno-magicians, or a new form of literacy in the constitutive codes of technical images, a textual interpretability he might call techno-historical. Flusser would concede of course that these two consciousnesses would probably co-exist antagonistically.

To conclude, I would like to recall another etymological sense of 'monitor: "to admonish". The monitor is there to keep us in line, as a society, as a civilization. To keep us on the course. The monitor on which we enjoy (angenehm) processual art, you see, has its own agenda.

-----

(1) We don't have quite the right translation of the German word 'Begriff'. In English, we use the word 'term' which has it's roots in 'termination' i.e. 'definition'. But, Begriff is built on the word Griff which in English would be 'grip' or 'handle'. So, unlike terminating a concept in a definition, we can, in German, get a handle on the concept while it is still alive.

(2) I made up this word, which doesn't exist in English either, the closest would be 'look-away-ableness' or 'disregardability'.

(3) this is best translated as 'pleasant' but angenehm also has the connotation of acceptance 'an-nehmen', to take on.

Computational Bio-politics

"It has been clear for several centuries now that, if we want to understand the world, it is not sufficient to describe it by words, it is necessary to calculate the world. "
- Vilém Flusser (from a soon-to-be-released DVD of interviews with Miklós Peternák)


Our age is lauded for the unprecedented modes of social functionality enabled by new technologies, especially by the internet. This appears to be the realization of egalitarian Enlightenment humanist aspiration, embodied in many of the so-called Universal Human Rights. This is an egalitarianism of info-beings predicated on the de-emphasis of materiality.

Material bodies are not equal, but minds, at least, can generate such generalizing agendas. We don't hear from the UNCF that "A body is a terrible thing to waste", a body is a necessary evil. Increasingly, our age is one of a spiritual human collusion of minds, released from the fleshy shells in which they gestate. The body is becoming extensible, replaceable, expendable, redundant. All technology points to a future of the prevalence of the mind over the materiality of the body.

Of course, as McLuhan observed, as one technology becomes obsolete, society generates reactionary cultural forms. The artists, as usual, are the most sensitive to this. Stelarc & Orlan began announcing the obsolescence of the conventional figure of human form decades ago, this has since become almost mainstream. For these artists, their bodies, far from being irrelevant to their social presence, become central, this is also increasingly the case for pornographic actors, vanguard subjects of body transformation. As most of us lead increasingly discorporate social lives, our body culture becomes ever more cliinical and artificial.

The social forms generated by discorporating bodies seem unprecedented, but they are not. This is evident in how political discourse has revealed its true impotence. Vilém Flusser, at the dawn of the PC-age, warned about the coming age of electro-idolatric society. "Thinking is anti-image" he warned, the rule of images will not bring about democracy, but a new form of magical terror. A society in the thrall of the magical power of images.

The only antidote to this, according to Flusser, would be politics, based in the rational, linear processes of text. Text makes historical consciousness which is directed against the image. But the problem today is that electronic text is every bit an image as is an image. Projected from data into text-like manifestations on the screen, the text is not text in a classic sense, but electromagnetic data, which could manifested as easily as a sound or an image or a movie.

this blog post as an image

This text is an image projected by computing, cycling machines. This text is 'kept alive' on the screen at the rate of your local electrical current (50 or 60 times a second, but recently, parallel processes can multiply this). All the exciting new ways we can interact and contact eachother today are so much spontaneous swirls and algorithmic fractals, projected on beguilingly luminescent material, bound in the minerals and metals of satellites and cables, the exotic alloys of the circuit-boards and chips, as much as the tables and toilets of the factories where these were assembled with such precision, the wells and rivers which washed and wet them.

And all along the material course from gravity-sodden earth to speed-of-light peta-flop circuit, is a choreography of human bodies writhing back through history, single file and cavalcade, rhythmically and momentarily themselves — this reality of technology is flesh, bone, muscle and blood of human beings with feelings and needs throughout history.

There is a common industrial history to the text on this screen and the clothes on your back and the fibers of your seat — and here we have a possible reversal: now that text is, itself, an image. Technical images, products of textual codes,  may still provide something to fulfill the political role of text.

In this sketch from Kommunikologie, Flusser attempts to systematise his theory of meaning. In the diagram, the image alienates people and engenders in them magical consciousness, text, alienates from the thrall of images and engenders historical or political consciousness, and he is not yet clear what is engendered by the techno-image. At the end of his chapter "How the codes function", where this diagram appears, he indicates two (although not mutually exclusive) possibilities.

The first, as I mentioned before, is that we will enter into a new magical era dominated by the image, what one might call a techno-magical era, in which Flusser seems to encounter Virilio in describing as mania, madness "Wahnsinn". The second possibility is that we somehow discover how to understand the codes of the techno-images.

"Eine Möglichkeit ist, in einer bedeutungslos werdenden, sich nunmehr sich selbst bedeutenden kodifizierten Welt ein sinnloses Leben zu führen. Das ist die Zukünft als Totalitarismus. Díe Alternative dazu besteht darin, die Codes des Technobilder in der Griff zu bekommen und gemeinsam eine neue Art von Bedeutung zu projizieren." (Kommunikologie, p.110)
"One possibility is to live a meaningless life in an increasingly meaningless codified world, which, from now on, has meaning only of itself. This is the future as totalitarianism. The alternatives depend on us coming to terms with (literally gettinga handle on) the codes of the techno-images and together thereby projecting a new type of meaning." (my translation)

Flusser does not consider the techno-image an image in the classic sense, he considers it a 'project' projected from inside the technology. Thus, when he refers here to projecting new meaning, he is speaking of accomplishing this with the techno-images. The notion of meaning here is clearly Enlightenment Humanist, and the emancipation of the human spirit from the totalitatrianism of the techno-image is an imperative only possible through operations on the level of code.

"Entweder wir leben in den undurchdringlichen Wänden bedeutungsloser Bilder oder machen aus diesen Bilder Brücken zur Welt. " (ibid, p.110)
"Either we live in (sic) the impermeable walls of meaningless images, or we make, out of these images, bridges to the world" (my translation)

Here Flusser closes with the hope that the techno-image can lead us back to knowledge in the world. Paradoxically the techno-image is our greatest threat and only tool to escape this threat.

Flusser says, in a soon-to-be-released (now released!) interview with Miklós Peternak at the Osnabrück New Media Festival in 1988, "I am impressed by the fact that one of the most important dimensions of the present cultural revolution, linguistic communication, both the spoken and the written word, are no longer capable of transmitting the thoughts and concepts which we have concerning the world..it is my firm belief, that if you want to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words."


Vilém Flusser on Synthetic Images from b gottlieb on Vimeo

We must not only use synthetic or techno-images to communicate about the world, computer-based images (and by this I also mean text, video and audio) are the only possible means we have to communicate meaningfully today about images. If fact, it is at the image level itself that we can best start our discourse, a discourse into the persistent materiality of the techno-image.

History is made today, not at the level of text, but at the level of techno-images beholden to computer codes, which are bound in, and the historical documents of, globalized industrial processes. The reality of these processes, which is the reality of the material manifestation of this text on your screen right now, such as it is, is the true political reality of this age. A reality only modellable and navigable by figures of computation.

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'.

Public Emotion!

Paul Virilio is the velosopher, the philosopher of speed...

He is the one who best described how photography accelerated the way we think by allowing us to access the microchronology of daily life, until we were industriously and industrially speeding up production process to keep up with our accelerated consciousness. When, WWI shocked everyone over the scale of slaughter which mechanized ideology could execute, the machines seemed to, as Flusser would say, "spout" history.

As the smoke began to clear, they plowed the war dead into neat memorial garden rows, and claimed "we humans are better than that", cried "never again!" and they believed it. And there was a socialist bouillonnement in Europe which tried to take care of the root problems and misconceptions which allowed simple scientific truth to be so misapplied.

Yet some how, it happened again, and this time around the world, and this time including that which is most offensive to anyone who implicates himself in the least notion of humanism, the industrial death camps of the Germans, and the instantaneous mass slaughter, of the atomic weapons dropped by Americans.

Western thought has never recovered from the shock, but technology can't help itself, nobody dares to pull the plug. Technology causes more problems than it solves, but it does solve them all eventually, except the one that it causes more than it solves, and that these problems seem to be increasing in destructive power.

Public Emotion from b gottlieb on Vimeo.

catastrophe
1540, "reversal of what is expected" (especially a fatal turning point in a drama), from Gk. katastrephein "to overturn," from kata "down" + strephein "turn" (see strophe). Extension to "sudden disaster" is first recorded 1748.

"Le progrès et la catastrophe sont l'avers et le revers d'une même médaille"- Hannah Arendt, oft quoted by Paul Virilio "Progress and Catastrophe are two sides of the same coin", we won't get one without the other. Virilio insists that he does not proclaim the apocalypse, and sees only hope in the finitude, the limits, mortal, and other, of humanity which are revealed with every catastrophe. We expect the best, but suddenly, there is an accident, and this reveals the real best, different but as good as that which we expected.

__what follows is an excerpt from from an interview with Virilio published in Le Monde on February 2nd, 2009

Gérard Courtois et Michel Guerrin: Croyez-vous, comme certains, que le capitalisme touche à sa fin ?

Paul Virilio : Je pense plutôt que c'est la fin qui touche le capitalisme. Je suis urbaniste. Le krach montre que la terre est trop petite pour le progrès, pour la vitesse de l'Histoire. D'où les accidents à répétition. Nous vivions dans la conviction que nous avions un passé et un futur. Or le passé ne passe pas, il est devenu monstrueux, au point que nous n'y faisons plus référence. Quant au futur, il est limité par la question écologique, la fin programmée des ressources naturelles, comme le pétrole. Il reste donc le présent à habiter. Mais l'écrivain Octavio Paz disait : "L'instant est inhabitable, comme le futur." Nous sommes en train de vivre cela, y compris les banquiers.

Gérard Courtois et Michel Guerrin: Do you believe, as do some, that capitalism is coming to an end?

Paul Virilio: I rather think that it is the end which is coming to capitalism. I am an urbanist. The Crash shows the earth is too small for progress, for the speed of history. From which [we get] the repetitive accidents. We used to live in the conviction that we had a past and a future. But the past doesn't happen, it has become monstrous, to the point where we no longer refer to it. Whereas the future is limited by the question of ecology, in the programmed end of natural resources, like oil. This leaves only the present for us to live in. But the writer Octavio Paz said "the immediate is uninhabitable,as is the future". We are living this now, the bankers included.

PS. corollary in today's Wall Street Journal from Granta's John Freeman. The fact that this call to eschew email and forgo all indulgence in the increasing panoply of light-speed communication is being published in the WSJ must mean that it is (and perhaps Granta itself (representing literary traditional intellectual/left critique) has become)not only hopelessly out of touch, but probably, likely through their trust-fund investments, so hopelessly ensnarled in the thing they wish to critique that they can only produce counter-intelligence for the disaster management industry. We probably need more of this.
Or this.

Berlin Street Life:: Poster Politics

It is elections season in Berlin and the streets, more than ever are the locus for a great battle for the hearts and minds of Berliners. The democratic system appears in full bloom with posters of the dozens of parties festooning every available lamppost and boulevard. (click on the images for larger size)

The CDU (Christian Democratic Union) is reigning chancellor Angela Merkel's party, They seem to be running as the 'safe bet in times of crisis'. Indeed the word 'Sicherheit' (safety, but also, security) is very present on their posters. If you feel a panic coming on because of the immigrantsmuslimsunemployedneonaziboozerworkerpinkocommies coming down the street at you, the CDU are your safe bet.

Here's a poster where they are promising not just Security, but also Leisure time, obviously for the well-dressed man in the first class train seat. This image was taken in the fairly upscale area of Mitte.

On the Karl-Marx Allee on the other hand, deeper in the former East Berlin, the CDUs posters are almost all defaced. Here, someone has spraypainted 'keine Wahl' (which translates either as 'no choice' or 'no election').

The slogan 'Business, with good reason" - says smiley business guy. On the lamp post on the right you can see a modest poster from the Marxist-Leninist party which is here imploring "no more short-term work and firings - a 30-hour week with equal wages for all!"

For contrast, here is a defaced CDU poster in West Berlin. The vandal even bothered to enclose their vitriol in a somewhat weather-resistant plastic sleeve. I got a bit arty with the superimposition here, look through the larger version of the poster to the establishing shot... This brusque slogan on the original poster simply says "We have the strength" with the We on a German flag. So according to the defacer, do the Power Rangers have the strength. The interventionist is evidently irked at the notion that the Rangers have to share the strength with the reeking-sense-of-entitlement CDU (they are in power now, after all, or, in German "Wir haben die Macht!") In small print the dissident continues plaintively, "how much longer are you going to make us endure this crap?"

Back in the East again The CDU is not the only party which is submitted to massive-billboard-scale humiliation. Both the SPD (German Social-democratic Party) , CDU's arch-rivals, something similar to the American "Democratic Party", Business with a human face, reason trumping out and out greed, etc. and the FDP (Free Democratic Party) libertarians both must submit to the vandal's spray and splatter.

Someone obviously went to the trouble of mixing up some flesh coloured paint to blank out the faces of the 'real voters' portrayed in the SPD ads. The text in this one reads "Education should not depend on parent's bank accounts. And that's why I am voting SPD" Yes very reasonable you unbelievably modest-looking middle-of-the-road elitoid.


Again, for comparison, here is a pristine SPD poster in West Berlin. The slogan goes "This is how we respect quality labour: Decent wages for the people" and then subscript "Our country can do more". Hmmm... very... restrained and reasonable, you are breaking my heart SPD with your fusty know-it-all properly measured concern.

Meanwhile, back on Karl-Marx Allee...

Not far from the CDU poster, the FDP seems to be mixing the Ron Paul backyard brew of nationalism and libertarianism. Note the lack of any visilble minorities in the crowd and the background made out of the colours of the German standard promising untold acres of Germanness beyond. Schmarmy crop-head business school tyke gets a kkklown nose here, CDU and FDP are, in our cursory survey, evidently both sprayed with the same can.

I mentioned in my previous post the quintessential post-war german notion of being 'konsequent'. Definitely the SPD are the standard-bearers of 'konsequent'-ness. Here they are, deep in the East, fighting Nazis with konsequent-ce.


You will notice a different quality to this poster, it has a kind of minority-party look, actually having been pasted on a piece of press-board, as are perforce all the posters of the lower-budget parties. You are educated and are thus naturally have anarchist leanings but you don't want to throw away your vote, now, do you? ("there is nothing so anarchic as the bourgeois ideal"- Georgio Agamben (paraphrased by Slavoj Zizek))


The Piratenpartei, on the other hand... write in what you'd like us to be for or against...hmm extreme idealism? This can only come from an extreme sense of entitlement. Of course, with regard to internet they are the most informed and advanced, if only the internet was made purely of thought. Pirateparty the party of sci-fi justice.

What's this? Socialist Tramp Stamp? now that's change I can believe in.
It doesn't matter really what it looks like though for these new generation SED (Sozalistiche Einheitspartei Deutschland, the former ruling party of East Germany) what's important are the IDEAS . These people from Die Linke (the Left) are even more konzequent than the SPD they are so konsequent they want to change the world not just the government! Lot's o luck with that. But really, they are one of the best-established firmly left-wing parties in all western democracy, so they are pushing the envelope.

Die Linke leader Gregor Gysi (also the last leader of the SED during the early post-wall re-unification period) seems to be advocating a rather radical educational reform to combat poverty. Note that the website is fuer-gerechtigkeit.de (for justice, for correctness, for fairness) (see my previous post, especially the last paragraph).

The Green Party, so konsequent that they have forgone completely the wasteful and expensive large billboard ads and restrained themselves to modest curbside posters (no doubt printed on recycled paper)


This poster compares a possible coalition of the CDU (Schwarz) and FDP (Gelb) to nuclear waste.

The nuclear issue was understandably very volatile during the cold war drawing many pacifists and alternative lifestyle practitioners to the Green Party. The Greens were the only party in West Germany who could catalyze and sustain large-scale grassroots anti-government protest, and even influence policy on numerous occasions. But now, in the internet age, their attraction is fading. It is hard to reconcile their back-to-the-earth roots with the globalized industrial demands of today's generation of twittering alternative culture jammers.

Greens muscling in on Pirate Party turf in a grungier area on the edge of Mitte and on the issue of internet privacy. Stencil type guy warning you "you are under suspicion!" Jah Man! The Pirate Party poster below is 20 degrees cooler "you already know what we are about, we just need to tag some crap and put it up".


Here we can see the Pirate Party's open-access model in full effect. The poster asks passers-by to write in the white space what they would like from their party. The response (looks authentic) "more support for the Greens!"

The amazingly broad reform platform of the Green Party is perhaps due to the fact that they are actually two (or even four) parties. Their official name Alliance 90/The Greens comes from a reunification era union with three dissident (but very gerecht) East German political parties. The result is a party that tries to please everybody. They are the kind of party that invites people like me to speak at their meetings (they have!).

The headquarters of the Green party glowing green in the Berlin evening. Evidently powered using only wind and biomass. Their slogan "It's about everything!"

Nice to see the old hard-liners are keeping up the fight. Berlin is where Marx and Engels honed their chops back in the day so I guess it is understandable that this is one of the last places one can still see them on election posters. The slogan reads "Our Crisis Advisers".

Of course there are those who will conscientiously refuse to take part in the ceremonies of our civil society, they will refuse to vote, pay taxes or otherwise deign to acknowledge the endemically hypocritical and flawed personalities of their parents, erm, I mean the institutions of the state.
Though their earnest protest certainly strikes a chord with me, I wish they would have found a more inventive way around the problem of how to disseminate their idea than by having it printed on a state-of-the-art, made by slave labor printer with conflict mineral inks designed on their conflict mineral computers run on hard-core institutional power grids.

In the modestly smaller print in German they exhort "We seize back the public space!" Sounds inappropriately militaristic, and something we should already be aware of an not have to read it off a garbage can. What are you going to do with the public space you've seized, make it private? Yah yah this just a temporary solution until we take POWER!

The problem is, there are only stop-gap solutions in today's democracy, it is almost taboo to speak about a long-term political program in our advanced media-accelerated political sphere. Vilém Flusser, in a soon-to-be-published DVD of late interviews and lectures, claimed that the invention of photography was the beginning of the end of the linear concept of history. The photograph does not need the photographer to take photos. The persistent presence of the photographer serves only to impede the normal functioning of the apparatus (this word also refers to state apparatus). "Revolution no longer is a political event. Politics are then over. Revolution becomes an inversion of the intention of the apparatus."

Biographical Berlin part 1

Berlin is my second home. The order and the 'correct' procedural quality of daily life here allows for an enormous amount of radical and experimental culture to thrive. This correctness also extends to the way Berlin deals with it's difficult past. Liebeskind's brilliant Museum of German Jewry and Eisenmann's excellent Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe are two remarkable examples of successful memorial architecture on a grand scale. The Topography of Terror memorial to the victims of the SS and the publicly visitable Stasi archives testify to a studied earnest approach to dealing with difficult memories.

In Germany, find out the proper procedure and follow it exactly, and everything will work very smoothly. Everyone should be 'konsequent' (there is no direct translation, but it means something between considerate (of the consequences of your actions, i.e. do unto others... )and consistent, and everything should be 'gerecht' (fair, just, correct). Yet there is always space for dissent and even anti-sociality and difference.

The city is bankrupt and has been for a long time and is searching in the most efficient way possible to find a raison-d'etre in this world where the action is gradually shifting east and south.
This may be one of the reasons that the streets of Berlin have become such vibrant spaces of autonomous expression.



Anarchism has a strong tradition in Berlin, the current phase of which originated in the 'special status' laws from during the divided Berlin period which attracted thousands of German pacifists to the city in the 70s and 80s (compulsory military service was waived for residents of Berlin).


The 'Coming Insurrectionists' have come to Berlin. They are uncontrobable, they are so uncontrobable the sheer power of the insurrection is like a tidal wave crushing semantic conventions. UNCONTROBABLE! yes that is exactly what you are!

Someone, perhaps the same 'Coming Insurrectionists' launched a big messy splat on the cooly low-res-graphicked exterior of our new 'Temporary Art Hall'. This swinging splash is an exquisitely inarticulate oath. The Temporary Art Hall represents all that is bad and good in Berlin's contemporary art scene. Good, there is relatively a lot of money for new art, and the funding agencies are willing to try new and daring institutional concepts, bad, once the funding has been secured the same old power plays and in-group mentality stymie anything really exciting from taking place. The current show is so inauspicious they have had to drop all admission charges. With the trend towards privatization of all public services, art institutions increasingly have to compete with Reality TV.






Turning around 180 degrees, and what do we see?

an empty field with the TV tower in the distance? What is the name of this place? This is the site of two willful demolitions. In 1950, 5 years after World War II and 1 year after the capital of West Berlin was established at Bonn, the communist authorities tore down the slightly damaged Stadtschloss (City Palace) which for 500 years had been the symbolic of seat power in the region.

In its place they erected the 'Palast der Republik" (Palace of the Republic), one of the the most successful public buildings of the GDR, popular with East Berliners for it's bowling alleys, dance halls, as well as being the location of the parliament and administrative functions such as issuing marriage licenses. The Palast der Republik became a strong symbol of what was positive in the social experiment of East Germany.

The Palace was shut down in 1990 amid claims that asbestos had been found in the construction.
Some groups appeared to lobby for the reconstruction of the City Palace. in 2007, it was decided that the City Palace would be rebuilt in Italian Renaissance style.

On the site, today, awaiting the start of construction, the city has created a veritable tabula rasa. Neat swaths of green with tidy wooden walkways and not the slightest trace of the Palast der Republik. For me, it is ironic that the City which is so concerned with facing and preserving it's past should treat the memories of half of its citizens with such evident antipathy. Berliners are by no means unanimous in their support for the 'City Castle' project, and, due to the current financial strictures, the project seems to be going into storage mode.




This reminds me of the peculiarity in German, retrieved from Nietzsche by Derrida in Specters of Marx (p. 30) between the homonyms gerechte (correct, fair, just (see above)) and gerächte (avenged).

In the GDR, Berlin, city of Hitler, was re-baptised "Berlin Stadt des Friedens" (Berlin, city of peace). The slogan, accompanied with the customary dove, once emblazoned across the socialist capital, is been progressively removed during the 20 years since reunification. Evidently, city leaders would prefer to see the history of East Berlin as an exceptionally forgettable error. Soon, apparently, Berlin will retrieve an earlier identity: symbolic center of imperial Germany.

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 Hyperbole of Justice (Derrida SOM pt. 1)

Research for my current work "a PEotST" and its upcoming manifestation in Ji Yoon Yang's radical new exhibition project "NOW WHAT" has lead me deep in to Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International which, I have found, much to my humbling satisfaction, has not only a beautifully written thesis, but also several direct points of confluence with Gratitude for Technology and "a PEotST". I started here with some ideas about the notion of justice and I hope to follow up in the near future with a post on the notion of the specter.

"The Electronic Revolution has not yet found its Marx" wrote Wolfgang Schirmacher in his prescient article "Net-world from the inside" in 1997, but what Marx could the current 'revolution' possibly require?

At the dawn of the age of Quantum Computing and the exponential acceleration and miniaturization of many of the essential industrial processes on which our daily life is based, it is clear that the social-critical position customarily embodied in the left, seems to have reached an impasse. What is left of the left today but a resistant force to the propulsive force of capitalist progress? Would the death of the Socialist Party in France, as envisaged by Bernard-Henri-Lévy herald the emergence of a radically more effective form of political mobilization for social justice?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
MBA Ethics Oath
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Indeed even the viability of the notion of a party, of party politics itself is being held up for re-evaluation. "Now, as one can see foreshadowed, it seems, everywhere in the world today, the structure of the party is becoming not only more and more suspect(and for reasons that are no longer always, necessarily, "reactionary", those of the classical individualist reaction) but also radically unadapted to the new - tele-techno-media - conditions of public space, of political life, of democracy, and of new modes-or representation,( both parliamentary and non-parliamentary) that they call up." Derrida writes in "Specters of Marx", powerfully problematizing the state-party relation which has dominated global politics for the last 200 years.

"...liberal democracies, constitutional Monarchies, Nazi, fascist or Soviet totalitarianisms. Not one of these regimes was possible without what could be called the axiomatics of the Party. "(p.127)

Central to Derrida's meditations in the book is the notion of justice, justice, which he offsets, in his accustomed punny methodology with the notion of justness, justesse correct- or exactness (de justesse means just barely) approaching with the engineer's ruler the infinitesimal convergence-point of truth, to which any application of justice must ascribe.

"Specters of Marx" is a radical text, more radical than Marx alone could be today and too radical for Derrida to imagine writing while the Iron Curtain still divided the world in two. I was startled to see we make a similar call for a thoroughgoing, indiscriminate and nonjudgmental reckoning and acknowledgment of the 'whole truth' of a given political manifestation, integrating illegal, black/grey market and otherwise prohibited-though-persistent sex and drugs, body parts and slave dealing modes of social organization active in every society.

"How can one ignore the growing and undelimitable, that is, worldwide power of those super-efficient and properly capitalist phantom-States that are the mafia and drug cartels on every continent, including the former so-called socialist States of Eastern Europe? These phantom-States have infiltrated and banalized themselves everywhere, to the point that they can no longer be strictly identified. Nor even sometimes clearly dissociated from the processes of democritization (think—for example—of the schema, telegraphically simplified here, that would associate them with the history-of-a-Sicilian-mafia-harrassed-by-the-fascism-of-the-Mussolinian-State-thus-intimately-and-symbiotically-allied-to-the-Allies-in-the-democratic-camp-on-both-sides-of-the-Atlantic-as-well-as-in-the-reconstruction-of-the-Italian-Christian-democratic-State-which-has-today-entered-into-a-new-configuration-of-capital, about which, the least on can say is that we will understand nothing of what is happening if we do not take account of that genealogy). All these infiltrations are going through a "critical" phase, as one says, which is no doubt what allows us to talk about them or to begin their analysis. These phantom-States invade not only the socio-economic fabric, the general circulation of capital, but also statist and inter-statist institutions."

(p.103 my emphasis).

Whereas the politics in  "Gratitude for Technology" is grounded in a material-economic understanding, Derrida's is polemic and prophetic.   In the Communist Manifesto there is always the problem of the persistence of an intellectual elite layer in what should be a completely egalitarian paradigm: that of the Communists who serve the function of the guiding imagination of the proletariat "The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement." (C.M. II(2)) Even in Derrida's New International, we must assume a judgmental intellectual hegemony as a moderating and visionary force leading the world toward justness. Since this campaign will not be consummated in the foreseeable future, what we need (to be satisfied with) are (operating) principles.

Only through embracing and understanding the complexities of our current age can we hope to cultivate satisfying activities which will hearten us and engage us as in a world of economic production under just conditions (as opposed to the current regime of "maximum profits (and/)or bust"). The New International hopes to supplant or supplement earlier teachings, rituals, strategies, such as those of the Bible scriptures and church service,  with more prosaic ones which call citizens to actively engage with and question their own reality. The Specters of Marx, thus regularly confronted and encountered, would seem to necessitate an institutionalized scholarly rigour in a mode akin to that of the Chassidim or other orthodox faithful who regurgitate to re-metabolize their scripture at every social juncture.

The prospects seem dim for the cultivation of what would be the requisite appetite of 'learning for society's sake' among the general populations of our contemporary states where education is merely one of the many discouraging processes necessary for the formation of the contemporary political subject, indoctrinating, assimilating and domesticating the pupil, stripping it of its confidence and of its just conviction.