t byfield on Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:01:50 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Cybernetics and the Control Society |
In general, arguments like Wendy Chun's (as David summarized it, since I haven't read her book) are a useful ~antidote to the understandable tendency to totalize technics whose complexity makes them impossible to understand. At the same time, that kind of argument also carries a whiff of self-importance: not her own, of course, but rather the philosophical tautology of older models of subjectivity in which conscious ideas about a conscious "will" are thought to have much impact. It's hard to see how individual or even collective choices to "ascrib[e] a power...that may be potential but are not yet actual" will hinder or advance the developments that Brian talks about. For now, these technics are focused on the most obvious 'sites' of uncertainty: politics, stores, and wars. But, really, the only thing preventing them from being directed at less potent areas of human activity -- arts and letters -- is cost: eventually, derivatives of these technics will be made available to consumers. I'd argue that the rise to prominence over the last several decades of ratings, polls, and all their baroque micromanifestations (Firefly, Alexa, Google, the casual profilings that pervade "social networking," etc) have been doing just that: slowly transforming sociability into a smorgasbord of predefined options, toppings, and accessories, and delegating to the individual the task of assembling a peculiar constellation which passes for an identity. So maybe the danger lies less in giving too much credit to technical systems of surveillance and control than in mistaking the coordinates these technics rely on for the substance of subjectivity. Of course, that argument (which may in fact be what Chun argues in her book -- again, I haven't read it) is equally susceptible to my skepticism: to assume that *freedom* lies in an overly totalizing dismissal of how these technics grasp or represent subjectivity. The rub is obvious enough: do you (or we?) want to interpret these boggling transformations under the sign of oppression or of freedom? On a list like this, which from the beginning defined itself against the "dominant euphoria" and (less often, IMO) the "cynical pessimism" surrounding networked communications, it's easy to see how the continued euphoria these technics inspire among joyless would-be masters of the world might invite pessimism. But in announcing that nettime's project was first and foremost to develop an alternative to the "dominant euphoria" that gave rise to dotcommery, we may have screwed up -- by accepting the then-dominant *commercial* euphoria as the *only* euphoria. Surely, there were -- and are -- others legitimate forms. Freedom is a very mutable idea because it describes very mutable phenomena. From my (generational) perspective, what I understood to be freedom is waning: it seems and feels as though there's less, and that its grounds have been redeveloped. But, Brian, let me ask a simple -- and maybe stupid -- question. You wrote: Our society's obsession with controlling the future -- and with insuring accumulation -- has at least two major consequences. The first is the organization of a consumer environment for the immediate satisfaction of anticipated desires, with the effect of eliminating desire as such, and creating an atmosphere of suspended disbelief where entire populations move zombie-like and intellectually silent beneath exaggerated images of their unconscious drives. The second consequence, as we have seen with such violence in recent years, is the simple removal of those who might trouble this forcibly tranquilized landscape with any kind of disturbing presence or political speech. What results in both cases is a dampening of voice, a muffling of desire, an insignificance of critique... I wouldn't say you're wrong; but is this an adequate description of everything that's happened? And that the past seven years are the prologue for the next seventy? Obviously, if you thought so utterly, absolutely, and irrevocably, there'd be little point in tapping out a requiem for no one to read; but it seems to me that you could equally pick out four other "Cardinal Points" that point toward very different models of freedom we're only beginning to glimpse. Cheers, T # 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@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org