McKenzie Wark on Thu, 3 Oct 2002 00:45:18 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Geert Lovink's Dark Fiber |
Geert Lovink, Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 2002 ISBN 0-262-12249-9 US $27.95 Reviewed by McKenzie Wark The book is becoming a residual art-form. Like carving in stone, it is a way of presenting information for ritual occasions that might more easily be conveyed in other ways. In his new book Dark Fiber, Geert Lovink is well aware of the anachronistic quality of a book about net culture. "Scholars are stuck between print and online forms of knowledge hierarchies", he writes. But while official book culture is in media limbo, the freelance intellectual has the liberty to approach the problem more artfully. Lovink uses this book-based mix of his online writings as a way to get "text crystals" to move differently. The internet is good for getting words across space, but nobody knows how it will work out as an archive. The book is the empire of time. Too many books of net journalism grow obsolete even before they are printed. Unlike the more feverish apostles of the virtual, Lovink comes to print at a more reflective moment. "Cyberspace at the dawn of the 21st century can no longer position itself in a utopian void of seamless possibilities." While Dark Fiber is very much of its time, it will be a valuable resource, many years into the future, for understanding that weird time between cyberspace utopia, dot.com mania and the pale triumph of media business as usual. Lovink has a unique trajectory in the net criticism world, as he is across the heavy scholarship of German media theory, the ludic pragmatism of Dutch media activism, and has taken the time to figure out how to translate those worlds into English. His approach draws on the work of Friedrich Kittler and others, who dissented from critical theory's reduction of media to the social, cultural or economic domains. Media is above all a technical medium, in their view. Lovink lightens the scholastic-bombastic German approach with the stylistic flair of his maverick predecessor, Willem Flusser. In moving into the English language, Lovink draws on the pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Lovink espouses a "radical pragmatism", somewhere between the desire for utopia, the will to negation, and the practicalities of carving out spaces for creation. He identifies the problem of synthesizing tactical media with strategic theory, a union that is "easier said than done." Lovink's pragmatism is an attempt to break new ground, at some remove from the three bodies of thought that elsewhere inflect and infect net criticism. In Lovink's view, Parisian high theory is in decline: "If the Gulf War did not take place, the Jean Baudrillard no longer exists either." Marxism has lost the plot of its revolutionary subject: "With one eye on streaming financial data, another on the Financial Times at the breakfast table, Negative Marxism without Subject has reached its highest stages of alienation." The intellectual poverty of American cyberutopian effusions is all too obvious: "The consensus myth of an egalitarian, chaotic system, ruled by self-governing users with the help of artificial life and friendly bots, is now crushed by the take-over of telecom giants, venture capital and banks and the sharp rise in regulatory efforts by governments." When writing in Dutch or German, Lovink and his fellow theorists in the Adilkno collective favored a strategy of theory as rhetorical overkill. The group's pet topics included the colors of boredom, electronic solitude, collective forms of disappointment. They were the Sam Becketts of theory, acting out the ritual of its impossibility, but persisting with the effort, nonetheless. Adilkno's problem was finding a way to write within a spectacle that no longer aroused any cultural friction. "This is the unbearable lightness of the exploding media universe: more channels, less content, less impact." They settled for "Negative dialectics 2.0 used as a tool for anti-cyclic thought." In their book Media Archive, they exploited the rhetorical possibilities of turning media theory against itself with a cool hand. Dark Fiber is a very different book to Media Archive, and partly the difference is attempting to come to grips with the possibilities of English, both as a language and a cultural tradition, and one with a more powerful grip on the invisible spatial empires of the net. Hence, pragmatism: "A net pragmatism requires vigilant efforts to articulate the net with materiality." This approach is less optimistic for what theory can achieve, but more optimistic about what it has acheived -- the ability to make more or less good descriptions of the world. And so much of Dark Fiber is taken up with dispatches from attempts all over the world to bring together artists, theorists and activists with the technicalities of creating networks. "Cyberspace is still a work in progress", Lovink writes, and he details many of the setbacks as well as the much fabled successes in building an open net culture. Central to Lovink's trajectory is the recognition that you can't get new thinking out of old institutions. New media practices require the integration of new thinking in new kinds of organization. "Today's challenge lies in orchestrating radical intercultural exchanges, not in closed monocultures." He has always taken his distance from opportunist academic programs in 'new media studies' as much as from speculative business models. One of the real treats of Dark Fiber is the case studies. The Digital City project in Amsterdam gets a preliminary assessment here, as does Berlin's Internationale Stadt, Public Netbase in Vienna and Ada'web in New York. It's curious how the same problems keep coming up. Not many attempts at building alternative networks ever really embraced a participatory democracy that included its users. With roots in artist's collaborations or activist projects, the problem is often a lack of formal structure, which could lead all too easily to a management takeover or privatization. There's a lot still to be written about the experiments of the 80s and 90s in alterative networked economies, polities and cultures. There's a taste here of European experiments to set alongside experiments more familiar in the US such as The Well and Lamdamoo. Dark Fiber also includes travel reports from Taiwan, India and Albania, and an account of Serbia's B92 radio, giving the book a wonderfully cosmopolitan range. Lovink is aware that whether one comes from theory, art, or activism, what counts is the ability to combine attributes of all three. From the politics comes the art of compromise, of addressing different people directly about things that affect them, and working with people within an autonomy that respects differences without fetishizing them. From the art comes the politics of how languages work, of how to seed awareness of communication, and to do it in appropriate forms. From the theory comes both the art and politics of relating the conjunctures of the moment to history, the point of contact between the particular and the abstract. By examining this problem from different points on the globe, Lovink provides test cases for any theory, any practice, with pretensions to an ability to be generalized. For example, in the Balkans, 'tactical media' has to come to grips with the limitations of working in a local way during wartime. Locality is no longer a virtue when it means you can be shut down and cut off from your audience. By looking at places like Taiwan, where computer hardware is manufactured, or India, where programming and service support are becoming proletarian industries, one gets a reality check on global cyberspace fantasies, be they from left or right. What Lovink invents here is a practice of negotiating how to describe things in the emerging vectoral world. A particular treat is Lovink's account of the early years of Nettime -- the New Left Review of the digital post-pomo politico set. Nettime evolved a "a dynamic beyond the internet itself." It was a mailing list, but it was also a series of meetings, and publications in different formats. It had what noncommercial networks need to survive: "a vision, a groove and a direction." What that was depended on who you asked. It thrived on the positive confusion of the aims of its participants, all of whom could think of it in their own way and imagine everyone else concurred. Started in 1995 by Lovink and others, Nettime arose out of the discontents of critical theory. It found a negative semantic terrain in its hostility to Wired magazine, the Rolling Stone of new media sellouts. Nettime positioned itself against the "unbearable lightness of Wired" Confronting the full blown ideology of a free market digital utopia, Nettime was a negative consensus around the need for a countervailing theory. "The pretense that American technoculture would lead the rest of the world is kindly refused here." As such it was way ahead of its time. Always a fragile mix of writers, artists, activists, techies, Nettime was the venue for the collaborative invention of the practice of "collaborative text filtering", and experiments in how to express textual information for different media vectors -- as listserver, online archive, photocopied collation, fullblown publication or free newspaper. It is still going, one of the most viable legacies of Lovink's past collaborations. His version of its past could be a useful tool for thinking about its future. Nettime embodies a wider phenomena: "A meta techno intelligentsia is on the rise, transcending the primitive social Darwinism with its winner-loser and adapt or die logic." But it has yet to grow beyond the fragments from which it arose. Perhaps what's needed is not tactical media, but strategies, logistics, but ones that build on, rather than ignore, the gains and lessons of new forms of local and contingent work. Again. it's easier said than done. Ever the pragmatist, Lovink identifies the material conditions for moving forward: "What is needed are new spaces fore reflection and critique, free zones where researchers of all kinds can work without the pressure of sponsors and administrators." Lovink has experimented successfully with temporary media labs, but perhaps its time to think about longer durations. "What is badly needed are autonomous research collectives that critically examine the social, economic, and even ecological aspects of the information technology business." They exist around questions like food or sweatshops -- so why not the net? So called 'tactical media', which Lovink had a hand in promoting, has been an enormously enabling rhetoric, but it has its limitations. It's interesting just how much semantic freight Lovink tries to get this term to carry. Tactical media is to "combine radical pragmatism and media activism with pleasurable forms of nihilism." But it is also " into questioning every single aspect of life, with 'the most radical gesture'." Tactical media plays with "the ambiguity of more or less isolated groups or individuals, caught in the liberal-democratic consensus, working outside the safety of the Party or Movement, in a multi-disciplinary environment full of mixed backgrounds and expectations." It is also "about the art of getting access, hacking the power and disappearing at the right moment." While "Tactical media are opposition channels, finding their way to break out of the subcultural ghetto" it is also " a deliberately slippery term, a tool for creating 'temporary consensus zones' based on unexpected alliances." "What counts" with tactical media "are temporary connections between old and new, practice and theory, alternative and mainstream." But it is also "a question of scale. How does a phrase on a wall turn into a global revolt?" Tactical media may intervene within a movement, but it may also link a movement to social groups. Or perhaps it is even a "virtual movement", with no existence outside of its network expression. Then again, "Perhaps we are just a diverse collection of wierdos, off topic by nature." The most tactical thing about tactical media is the rhetorical tactic of calling it tactical. Curiously, this deployment of language tactically turns out to be a consistent Lovink strategy. There's a big difference between the Adilkno texts and Lovink's travel reports, but both use language within the context of the net vector as something meant to work within a given dispersal of space and time. By not being too specific, by not exhausting a rhetoric to the point of implosion, as for example in cyberutopian writing, Lovink keeps open the sense of possibility within net discourse -- the possibility of possibility. "Here comes the new desire." Above all, Dark Fiber is a freeze dried sampling on acid-free paper of a certain kind of practice, traces of this exemplary intellectual's attempts to work in (and against) the world. Commissioned by rhizome.org ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net