Josephine Berry on Wed, 22 Aug 2001 19:21:51 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual Unconscious II |
M @ z k ! n 3 n . k u n z t . m2cht . fr3!: Antiorp and the Meaning of Noise A useful way of figuring the shift from the Freudian subject of modernity to the subject of biopower is to compare the surrealist emblem of the automaton with the post-human body of the cyborg. If the former speaks of the uncanny shock at the innervation of machines and the automation of man within a Fordist/Taylorist production paradigm, the cyborg is a far more ambivalent figure. As Donna Haraway explains in her foundational text 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (18) the (factitious figure of) the cyborg is the illegitimate child of 'militarism and patriarchal-capitalism' who far from falling prey to the 'border wars' over identity (crucially between human and animal, organism and machine and the physical and non-physical), takes pleasure in their confusion. (19) No longer troubled by the melancholy of a lost 'originary wholeness', the cyborg is "outside salvation history" and committed to "partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity".(20) In her manifesto, Haraway, who states at the outset that the cyborg is an 'ironic dream', fantasises a scenario in which the cyborg subverts the apocalyptic tendency of Enlightenment rationality and converts the destruction wrought by its categorical determinations into a post-Enlightenment utopia. Like Negri and Hardt who openly acknowledge the influence of her thinking, Haraway recognises that the 'binary thinking', against which postmodernists have long struggled, has ceded to a hegemonic mode of interconnectivity (i.e. Empire), and likewise predicates the possibility for social transformation on these flattened social networks. Tellingly, although somewhat evasively, Haraway poses the multiple, hybrid, centreless figure of the cyborg in psychoanalytic terms, equivocating that: "the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival."(21) Here, what Haraway describes as non-oedipal relates to what, in other places, she terms 'non-originary'. The cyborg, perhaps comparable to the Frankfurt School's notion of second nature, is not the result of any purely 'natural', biological genealogy or uniquely individual psychological development. If anything, its non-oedipal development refers to the explicitly historical (social/political/technical) conditions out of which it arises; conditions which cannot be reduced to the quintessential matrix of the family and its inescapable psycho-sexual repetitions. Haraway's suggestion of a 'different logic of repression' must lie closer to Benjamin's idea of an optical unconscious whose derepression can be similarly effected through technological developments. Haraway's combination of the cyborg and the non-oedipal narrative finds an important parallel in the recursive logic of computer programmes as well as the development of computer technology itself. The media theorist Friedrich Kittler has illustrated this principle through the transformation in the production process of microprocessors in the early 1970s. In order to design the architecture for the first silicon integrated microprocessor, Intel engineers had to hand draw the blueprint on 64 square meters of paper. This manual layout of two thousand transistors was then miniaturised to the same size as the chip and written into the silicon layers using electro-optical machines. After this momentous event, the hardware complexity of all ensuing microprocessors demanded that manual design techniques be dispensed with. Engineers thenceforth used computer aided design tools (CAD), relying on their "geometrical or auto-routing powers" to produce the blueprints.(22) This instance of the self-transformation of the means of production - a relationship of recursive or iterative development - goes some way to illustrating what Haraway might mean by non-oedipal narratives in the context of technoculture. In distinct contrast to the Oedipal moment in which the father intercedes within the blissful diad of mother/child to usher the child ineluctably into the socio-symbolic order, this postmodern non-oedipal 'child' totally recasts the socio-symbolic field as it enters it from a constantly mutating point of origin. This indeterminacy of origins or causality and, by consequence, the unpredictability of the future is a central aspect of chaos theory and one whose principles have spread into a wider postmodern social and cultural logic experienced as the destablisation of epistemological, hermeneutic and socio-political systems.(23) It is important to emphasise straight away that chaos theory proper does not replace the order of determinist linear systems with the model of 'anti-order' but instead, as N. Katherine Hayles explains, with the concept of 'non-order'.(24) That is to say that chaos theory, although certainly producing a break with the determinism of traditional Western science, actually posits a 'deterministic chaos': "Whereas chaos or random disorder simply negates determinism, deterministic chaos destabilises determinism without rejecting it."(25) In other words, although the subject of this chaotic episteme is no longer able to determine the causality of any event with any certainty, a determining structure can nonetheless be said to exist. It is this precise paralogy that the anonymous net artist, usually identifiable by the name Antiorp, Netochka Nezvanova or Integer(26), is attracted to, and which it approaches particularly through its play with natural languages and computer programming languages as well as its disruptive interventions in the text-based social environments of mailing lists. In 1998, Antiorp started a campaign of 'spamming'(27) on a wide variety of mailing lists ranging from nettime and 7-11, and those set up to discuss technical matters such as the MAX programming list.(28) Antiorp has, since this time, posted to these lists extensively in a specially developed language termed 'Kroperom' or 'KROP3ROM|A9FF'. This language, in part, relies on a logic of substitution to reformulate the Roman alphabet's phonetic system by including all the 256 different characters comprising the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), the lingua franca of computing. For instance, in the case of a Kroperom word like 'm9nd', the number '9' is incorporated into the word 'mind' such that the 'ine' in 'nine' takes on a phonetic role. But Antiorp's system also extends beyond purely phonetic substitutions. We can see the broader system of substitutions more clearly in Antiorp's conversion of the term 'Maschinen Kunst' into 'm@zk!n3n kunzt' (the term it uses to describe its oeuvre). Here, for example, the 'a' is substituted for the '@' character, the 'i' for the exclamation point, the 'sch' or 'shh' sound for a 'zk', the 'e' for a '3' and so on. Some of these substitutions, which remain fairly constant within Kroperom, involve finding a key which approximates the inverse of the original character, so that the 'i' becomes an '!' and the '3' replaces the 'e' or 'E'. In some cases these substitutions not only involve finding a close or inverted visual equivalent (e.g. '!' or @) but combine phonetic and visual substitutions in one (e.g. using '3' in place of 'E'). In these instances we can see how the naturalness of the - in this case - German language is infiltrated by ciphers and metaphors of computer code.(29) The exclamation point - which in its new role as the ubiquitous 'i' can dominate whole lines of text - lends Kroperom an emphatic quality and transvalues the whole logic of programming's executable command structure into the oppressive, if comical, tone of the spoken injunction: "do this! do that!". In the example 'm@zk!n3n kunzt m2cht . fr3!' not only do numerals and ASCII characters mix with alphabetic characters within the space of a word, but the unity of the phonetic system is broken by the logic of different character systems so that the reader is forced to employ a combination of strategies to decode the script. This heterogeneous style of encryption and language use not only destabilises the reading process, but triggers multiple lines of cultural, semiotic, and computational association. The act of reading becomes a pointedly self-reflexive and, in the terms of chaos theory, nonlinear experience with each word representing a junction of multiple systems. This point about self-reflexivity can doubtless be made of all textual production and consumption to a greater or lesser extent, but it is important here to emphasis that through, for example, the substitution of letters for numerals, the script starts to mimic the functional potential of a programme. In other words, textual self-reflexivity refers here especially to the computational environment. The idea that, in a different part of the computer, currently dormant elements of Kroperom might indeed perform a utilitarian function emerges, and with it the important question of redundancy or noise. If we define noise as the elements within a given system deemed non-significative (i.e. the opposite of information), then we can see Antiorp introducing noise into linguistic and social environments in various ways. In a strategy strongly reminiscent of Jodi's work, Antiorp includes literal fragments of programming languages into their numerous and lengthy mails, as well as adapting certain programming conventions and applying them to natural language settings. A mail might include the line numbering employed in programming to ensure that it can be easily located and executed in the correct sequence. Including the line numbers in a piece of written text then is, in one sense, superfluous and noisy because it does not convey any additional information which further elucidates the explicit content of the text. But obviously such an inclusion can be very evocative and, by creating friction against which the reader has to struggle to extract the meaning of the text, produces a heightened awareness of the conventions by which 'meaning' is produced and absorbed. If imagination, understanding and the mediation of ideas is based, in part, on the exclusion of certain things and the isolation of others - a violent act of separation or fragmentation of things which might otherwise by continuous - then the disaggregations of code can be said to bear a fundamental resemblance to this psychic activity.(30) In the case of Antiorp's inclusion of programming gobbledygook in email, not only is the (machinic) dismembering action of thought exposed through the pollution of what would normally be artificially presented as pure and self-consistent, but it also refers to the significance of what is excluded. In short, noise is only perceived as noise when the definition of information is kept narrow. In the following excerpt from a mail posted on nettime on 11th August 1998, a piece of BASIC code was enciphered such that neither the logic of the code nor the conventions of prose are kept pure: commands such as 'NEXT SIDE', 'PRINT' and 'POKE', instead of being paired with numerical or other programming values are answered, even contradicted by phrases such as 'aesthetic prejudice' or the simple inversion of the command itself: 100 NEXT SIDE %%%%%%%%%%%%|________|||||||||||EDIS|TXEN=001 110 PRINT "_" %%%%%%%%%%%|__________||||||||||"_"|TNIRP_011 120 POKE 36879,57 %%%%%%%%|_______________|||||75,97863|EKOP_021 130 FOR X = 1 TO 1000 %%%%%%|___________________0001|OT|1|=|X|ROF|0= 31 140 PRINT "SddS MANIFE$TO" %%%%%%|______________"OT$EFINAM|SddS"|TNIRP|041 150 NEXT X %%%%%%%%|_______________||||||||||||X|TXEN_051 200 DATA "NO IMPORTANCE OF ME%%%%%%%%%,"GNINAEM_FO_ECNATROPMI|ON"|ATAD_002 ,"NOISNETERP "MEANING IS%%%%%ECUDORP|OT_SI_GNINAEM"||||||||||||__=== == "AESTHE,"ECIDUJERP%A%ERA%SCITEHTSEA"|||||||||||__=== ==== "Societ DileD%enoizuliD%iD||teicoS"|||||||||__==== ===== Segnale__[sDDs]" |_________________|||||||||||||||"]sDDs[__elangeS 300 DATA "Non c' Deve DellI|aznatropmI_'nusseN|alleD|eveD|'c=noN"=ATAD= =003 SigniDiacitetsESignificat$$$$|______'L|errudorP|otacifingiS"=,"otacifingiS PretensiDnenoigileR $$$$$$|___||||||||||||||||||__anU=>"=,"noisnete= rP PrejudEHT ROFnYTEICOS", $$$$$$_||||||||||||||||||,"xirtaM=nU=>=ecidu= jerP DILUTION OF "LANGIS||||||||||||||||||__========= ===FO=NOITULID (31) This quasi-mirroring of the command prompts, while preserving the form of a sequence of code, subverts its efficacy and parodies the 'dumbness' of computers - the fact that computers, lacking consciousness and scrupulously rule-abiding, will automatically attempt to run even the most absurd sequences of data. However, the more significant effect here is produced by Antiorp's use of mirroring which collides semantic systems together through their mutual illegibility. Whilst the 'average' reader is only partially able to understand the albeit imperfect code, unlike the computer he/she is able to identify its inversion on the right hand side of the equation. Were the code to be run in a programme instead of existing within an email, the inverted values would be interpreted as pure nonsense. This complexification of the concept of noise or, rather, exposure of information's context dependency, is deepened by the discursive setting in which Antiorp's mail was received. As we can see at the beginning of the mail, the specific event to which it addresses itself is the following statement made by the French net artist Frédéric Madre on his own website Pleine Peau: (32) "1) hypermedia critics must do it the hypermedia way, or die. 2) forget 2.0: 0.0 is the right direction 3) moderation has to go" Madre's three proclamations can themselves be seen as a 'call to noise'. In the first, the demand is made for critics to include hyperlinks in their texts published online and thereby interrupt the singularity of the text - and by extension author - through their multiple indexing to other, alien texts. In the second, the call to preserve the prototype of a software design (implicit in the use of the numbering system 0.0, 1.0, 2.0 etc) with its inevitable 'bugs' or imperfections is a plea for the preservation of noise or a statement on the impossibility of excluding imperfections from any piece of programming. In the third, Madre's condemnation of moderation - the term applied to the act of filtering out 'irrelevant' or disruptive messages sent to a mailing list - is again a demand for another form of noise. Reposting these demands onto the stringently moderated environment of nettime (a list which Madre himself left due to his opposition to the principle of moderation ) could not in and of itself be considered an instance of noise. After all, the question of moderation had been an ongoing one on the list. However, the enormous length of the mail, its often inscrutable encodings, the use of Kroperom, programming fragments such as BASIC and HTML, as well as long sections of figurative ASCII design, both theorises and produces noise. The above excerpt from the mail includes an explicit statement about noise: "200 DATA "NO IMPORTANCE OF ME%%%%%%%%%, "GNINAEM_FO_ECNATROPMI|ON"|ATAD_002,"NOISNETERP "MEANING IS%%%%%ECUDORP|OT_SI_GNINAEM"||||||||||||__===" When converted into plain English and 'cleansed' of noisy additional characters, these lines include the statements: "data: no importance of meaning"; "meaning is to produce meaning"; "meaning is produce"; and the slightly anomalous word "Pretension". When considered alongside an article by Antiorp, also included in the mail, entitled 'The Science of Noise', his/her conscious exploration of the principles of chaos theory become explicit. According to these principles, since it is impossible to discover the precise sequence of factors which cause an event (say, the extinction of the dinosaurs), no contingent factor can be excluded as insignificant. Baudrillard takes up this point in The Transparency of Evil when, referencing chaos theory, he states that "we have substituted, for the reign of intelligible causes, no true chance but a more mysterious mechanism of interconnections."(33) This different order is ruled by 'esoteric affinities' or what chaologists call 'strange attractors' which initiate change in the behaviour of complex nonlinear systems. In light of these observations it is possible to understand the claim that data or information does not entail any 'importance of meaning' since it excludes the contingencies or noise which chaos theory holds as vital to the understanding of any event. In 'The Science of Noise' Antiorp makes several references his/her negotiation of a path through the highly instrumental nature of computer science on the one hand, and the nonlinear dynamics associated with chaos theory on the other. Defining the 'theory of computerisation' as "the system of control that equates contingency with noise" and whose ideal is "to eliminate contingency and maximize control by the system" he/she understands the role of Kroperom as "redefin[ing] noise structure as a locus of contingency, absence of subject and linguistic uncertainty".(34) In their concluding remarks, Antiorp, in contrast to Haraway, Negri and Hardt, characterises the logic of the current system as binary, and proclaims his/her own nonlinear stance to be 'anti-authoritarian', adding: "Clearly acknowledging the intertextuality that constitutes social and musical structures as a proliferation of linguistic instability giving rise to increasingly unintelligible tendencies, KORP3ROM|A955 is a radical non-centred work mitigating the suspect notion of freedom as the flux of desire." (35) In this last sentence we encounter the very nub of Antiorp's project, and are perhaps equipped to solve the conundrum of his/her aversion to linear or binary thinking on the one hand, and ambivalent play with ciphers of fascist ideology on the other. By this I mean that Antiorp uses the term "M@zk!n3n.kunzt.m2cht.fr3!" (Maschinen Kunst Macht Frei!) to trumpet his/her own project but also uses the term 'korporat fasc!zt' pejoratively, to describe fellow mailing list members - especially when they are deemed to be monetising their creative or intellectual labour. We are left with the question of whether the alternative to the repressiveness of binary thinking - nonlinear dynamics; noise; the 'flux of desire' - is really so liberatory after all. If the 'suspect notion of freedom' is rejected, presumably on the basis that it depends upon the legibility of history and/or the positing of a political telos, what alternative is offered? This quandary, which arises out of the rejection of Enlightenment thinking, has long been debated by postmodern theorists. Indeed, in 'The Science of Noise', Antiorp makes a tacit reference to Lyotard by admitting that Kroperom is a language game which "is incapable, like science, of legitimising other language games".(36) At the end of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard, demonstrates how knowledge systems or language games are unable to prove their own validity through recourse to any other language game but their own, and have thus fallen into a legitimation crisis. He concludes that any general, overarching consensus between language games depends upon an illusion whose price in the 19th and 20th centuries has been 'terror'. In defiance of the false totalisation of reality under repressive concepts, Lyotard advocates that social justice is far better served by a constant renegotiation of the rules of all the various language games: "A recognition of the heteromorphous nature of language games is a first step in that direction [the practice of justice]Š.The second step is the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the 'moves' playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favours a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives and is limited in space and time."(37) Antiorp, picking up where traditional science leaves off, has taken this 'crisis' as his/her truth moment - one that is darkly enjoyed. Unlike Lyotard, Antiorp does not appear to be optimistic about the ability for the contemporary epistemological crisis to provide us with a model of freedom or, at the very least, a guarantor of relative social justice. Hence his/her rejection of the 'suspect notion of freedom'. In Antiorp's play with linguistic and systemic instabilities, we can identify something similar to the short-circuiting between Id and Superego described by the Frankfurt School as the mechanism of repressive desublimation. Antiorp's disruption of social contexts and languages through the introduction of noise, the production and seeding of a rationale in which nothing can be excluded as non-significative, works to undermine the authority and closure of any system - and ultimately, the consistency of the Lacanian big Other. This sense of polysemic unraveling evoked by Kroperom can be compared to the increasing sense of social, scientific and political uncertainty encapsulated in Ulrich Beck's definition of the 'risk society', which is characterised by our increasing inability to make decisions based in common sense. The complexity and specialism of knowledge fields in this 'second Enlightenment''(38) combined with the logic of deterministic chaos means that it is impossible to know for certain whether, for example, we really are undergoing global warming and if indeed we are what we should do to prevent it. In his discussion of risk society, Zizek describes how it is impossible to gage an adequate response to such threatening possibilities - either a government or expert body is seen as scaremongering or covering up.(39) In this scenario we feel terrorised by the impenetrability, or possible absence, of the big Other: "the new opaqueness and impenetrability (the radical uncertainty as to the ultimate consequences of our actions) is not due to the fact that we are puppets in the hands of some transcendent global Power (Fate, Historical Necessity, the Market); on the contrary, it is due to the fact that 'nobody is in charge', that there is no such power, no 'Other of the Other' pulling the strings - opaqueness is grounded in the very fact that today's society is thoroughly 'reflexive', that there is no Nature or Tradition providing a firm foundation on which one can relyŠ" (40) Set adrift from Enlightenment rationality, we are now truly 'free' to make decisions without any external confirmation of what the right choice really is; a situation in which we are paradoxically not able to chose at all. In this climate, argues Zizek, choice becomes like an obscene gamble and destiny is no longer operative. When it becomes impossible to know what to do, one might as well do anything or nothing. Here we arrive again at the concept of the virtual unconscious in which the universe appears as some opaque set of discontinuous, semi-autonomous functions divested of any unitary, underlying causality or logic. Commenting upon the same condition of indeterminacy in which "destiny is absent", Baudrillard discusses how "we know only the signs of catastrophe now; we no longer know the signs of destiny."(41) In connection to the same idea he has also remarked that we "find ourselves in a paradoxical world where what is accidental takes on more meaning, more charm, than intelligible sequences."(42) In the absence of clear patterns or order, the universe's dynamics and the unconscious drives become uncannily consonant, the one ruled by a descent into disorder (the second rule of thermodynamics is that entropy never decreases) and the other by the death drive ("the aim of all life is death"(43)). Where the surrealists wished to free the drives of the Id - the alienated social content - in a bid to loosen society from its stays of repressive rationality, Antiorp are enthralled by the idea of a nonlinearity but reject the idea of freedom in favour of the flux of desire. In other words, although pitted against the repression of linear rationality, the experience of a big Other that seems increasingly to mirror the Id (also characterisable as deterministic chaos) appears to lead Antiorp to reject any actual possibility of freedom resident in the release of repressed desires. ____ 18) Donna Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesto', 1985, reproduced in The Cybercultures Reader, eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, (London: Routledge, 2000) 19) Ibid, p.292 20) Ibid, p.292 21) Ibid, p.292 22) Friedrich Kittler, 'There is No Software', Electronic Culture, p.331 23) See Ward's The Literary Appropriation of Chaos Theory 24) See Ibid 25) Ibid, p.7 26) Antiorp's failure to appear in person at public events such as The 3rd International Browser Day Competition, May 2000, Amsterdam or the Transmediale festival, Berlin, February, 2001, and provision of friends or colleagues to appear in his/her absence make it conceivable that 'Antiorp' is a multiple name. Signature domain names such as such as www.m9ndfukc.com,www.tezcat.com and www.god-emil.dk are also used as means of identification. 27) The Foldoc Free Online Dictionary of Computing gives the following as the primary definition of spam: "1. <messaging> (From the Monty Python 'Spam' song) To post irrelevant or inappropriate messages to one or more Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists in deliberate or accidental violation of netiquette." (www.foldoc.org). Spamming, as Foldoc also informs us, can entail the cross-posting (i.e. to multiple newsgroups) of the same message such that it is received on multiple occasions by people belonging to more than one. The term is also applied to the posting of irrelevant or commercial messages, or junk mail, on newsgroups. 28) See Michael Kieslinger's 'Who murdered Antiorp?', 1999, www.crd.rca.ac.uk/~michaelk/crd/essay/essay.html 29) Kroperom's underlying language is English, but is mixed together with words and phrases from other European languages such as German, French and Italian. Often a non-English word is used if it is consonant with the English word. 30) Hegel understood imagination and understanding to have a negative aspect - its 'activity of dissolution', by which they separate what once belonged to an organic whole into fragments. See Slavoy Zizek's discussion of Hegel in The Ticklish Subject, pp.28-31 31) '[madre, (someone), antiorp, madre]', (1August 12, 1998: nettime) op. cit. http://pleine-peau.com 32) Madre left nettime due to the censorship of certain posts he sent during the war in Kosovo. Private correspondence, (August 14, 2001) 33) Cited in Ward, The Literary Appropriation of Chaos, p.65 34) Antiorp, '[madre, (someone), antiorp, madre]' 35) Ibid 36) Ibid 37) Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.66 38) In contrast to the 'first Enlightenment' which sought to bring about a society in which the fundamental decisions ceased to be irrational and were grounded on reason, the 'second Enlightenment' demands that we make crucial decisions which may affect our continued survival without any proper basis in knowledge. 39) Slavoy Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, pp.334-47 40) Ibid, p.336 41) Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, p.92, cited in Ward, p.69 42) Jean Baudrillard, Fatality of Reversible Imminence, p.277, cited in ibid, p.69 43) Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, cited in Hal Foster's Compulsive Beauty, October Books, MIT Press, 1997, p.10 the divine diva of websites ->- www.metamute.com -<- has risen again * ->- www.ouimadame.org -<- * to follow _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold