Geert Lovink on Sat, 18 Jan 97 12:34 MET |
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nettime: M.Fuller/Eating Disorder, part 1 |
Eating Disorder the story of a shape By Matthew Fuller ----- part 1 ----- This is a story that begins a while ago when I was approached by this bloke with a more than somewhat dubious moustache. He had heard of some software and wanted to know if I could crack it for him. The programs he was after were either a piece of US military software used for advanced cartographical modelling and real time navigation, or the version of it that has trickled down to corporate and high-end academic levels. Basically he wanted to get into a company that used the software and pirate a copy. Well, in fact, he actually wanted someone else to do it. According to him, this software was incredibly powerful. It could automatically update its global image from satellites via a cellphone modem, store information, zoom in from the scale of a continent to that of a house and map features in both 2d and 3d (including information such as the location of power lines, sewerage tunnels and potentially, movements of people and vehicles). It was an amazingly powerful piece of work. Needless to say, there were plans for this software once it had been liberated and his eyes glistened as he rapturously described the possibilities of crusty street warriors equipped with top of the range laptops going into riots dialling up an anarchist mainframe somewhere to find out the latest satellite information on police movements in the area. It was a tool that would make every man his own Lenin. Somewhat unlikely, but, as an omnipotence fantasy, one only matched by that of the police themselves If you've read Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' you'll recognise the similarity to the application he describes called 'Earth'. Whilst maybe not quite having the fantastic level of detail, resolution and clarity, of 'Earth' one of the pantheon of programmes that this guy was dreaming about, Terra-Vision, produced by the German company Art+Com reportedly does make 'the transition between data from different sources as seamless as possible - from satellite images captured from hundreds of miles above the earth's surface, through aerial photographs, down to computer models of streets or buildings with recognisable features only a few centimetres in size' (1) Somewhat hubristically , Joachim Sauter of Art+Com acknowledges, "We realised the earth is larger than any hard disk."(2) In this text fantastical claims will be made for relationships between the model of perpetually reiterated, perpetually appended 'windows into information' of much contemporary computer interface ; the development of dysfunctional bureaucracy as institutional form; and those neobiological representations of the market as entering a new 'heroic' phase, against which no borders must be allowed to stand. This gruesomely dumb anarcho-omnipotence fantasy provides a clue. Control is mutating. The solar disco ball shooting rays of pure immanence transcendentally charged with overwhelming velocity and pin-point coercion has reconfigured into an infinite field of immanence. A Sierpensky's Sponge - a mathematical object produced by removing an infinite number of increasingly small parts from a three dimensional object such as a cube - a structure that has infinite surface area yet zero volume. The utopian moment of control to be everywhere yet unlocatable, transcendent. The fractalisation of control is not merely the cosmically hued figure of cloudy softness and enveloping smoothness, slimy and warm as a cum greased shit, but also one of absolute routines clicking into place in a predatory dynamic where - in a psychedelic anschluss - everything is connected to everything. Fractal control is a progressively constricting peristalsis, in which at every iteration, something is on your back and biting. - senseless products are the most desirable In this best of all possible worlds, there are many capitalisms: the capitalism of off-brand instant noodles; the capitalism of being able to afford full-colour printing for your magazine; the capitalism that sees the nets as a gigantic and glorious job-creation scheme - for other, stupider people; a capitalism where there is no society, just neighbourhood patrols and armed individuals; a capitalism where everything comes with the option to 'buy it today or loose it forever' (3); pathetic, violent and glorious, capitalism 'encompasses multitudes.' It is the multitudinous, what it means to be many, to be multiplied, that is at stake. And it is the dynamics of encompassment, not only in the sense of enclosure, (the hyperintense capitalism of the farm) nor only in Whitman's sense - egomaniacal yet voluminously democratic self-composition; but also in the badly punned sense of producing the compass - the navigational apparatus - which, like 'Murdoch, Geffner, Eisner and Turner' struggle to 'fabricate the materials with which the world thinks'(4) and which constitute the fields in which this stake is both repelled and attracted. Within this field of attraction and repulsion, money can itself be treated as a medium. A good example of its transmitting capabilities is given in this extended section from 'Hackers': "The unforgettable next two years were indeed marked by unprecedented growth in the industry that was almost unwittingly started by the hardware hackers. The hackers in Homebrew either went into business, trotted off to one of the new companies forming in the opening stages of this microcomputer boom, or kept doing what they always been doing: hacking. The planners, those who had seen the advent of the small computer as a means of spreading the hacker spirit, generally did not pause to evaluate the situation: things were moving too fast for contemplation. Left by the wayside were purists like Fred Moore, who once wrote in a treatise entitled "Put Your Trust in People, Not Money" that money was "obsolete, valueless, anti-life." Money was the means by which computer power was beginning to spread, and the hackers who ignored that fact were destined to work in (perhaps blissful) solipsism, either in tight, ARPA-funded communities or in meagre collectives where the term "hand-to-mouth" was a neat analogy for a "chip-to-machine" existence."(5) Money does have an often powerful role in the production and circulation of singularities. The other Sunday in Vauxhall market, South London - a sprawling, messy mix of professional market traders and families flogging things out the boots of their cars - you could find amongst the other stalls, a couple of guys working out of the back of a van who, alongside the more usual fake silverware, mosque shaped digital alarm clocks, splinter-packed cricket sets for toddlers, toxic aromatherapy candles, blank tapes and plastic flowers, were selling a battered crateload of high quality polyester fleece Iguana Ponchos in a range of three south of the border colours - an item made in San Luis Obispo, California, that comes complete with a forty inch leash and mini straw sombrero. That such a truly avant-garde product could find its way to such a market perhaps says more about human optimism than it does about the 'laws' of supply and demand. "Like any other good citizen, I dream of nothing more than leveraging myself over the years into the position of running a luxurious pay-toilet during a perpetual plague of diarrhoea. " - Money as Media Money is in particular a medium for systems in search of the material for their realisation. But, just as money has the power to transmit, it also has variable qualities of transmission.(It also works as an anti-medium, white noise, signal blockade). Just as Capital has always been utterly dependent on the reproductive powers of unwaged 'social' work and Mutual Aid - dynamics which it parasites in order to keep staggering on, the design flaws in money demand its consistent reinvention. Manuel DeLanda makes the distinction between, "the small buyers and sellers in a real market, who are price-takers (that is, they buy and sell at prices that set themselves)"(6) and oligopolies, antimarket forces that "create prices by adding a mark-up to the cost of production". Following Fernand Braudel, DeLanda distinguishes a tripartite hierarchy in economics: the material conditions of life; authentic markets, which are, "the dynamics generated by many interacting small producers and traders (where automatic co-ordination via price does occur)"(7) where commodities are spontaneously allocated via price; and thirdly, capitalism, which "as far back as the thirteenth century, and in all the centuries in between"(8), has been "engaged in anti-competitive practices, manipulating demand and supply in a variety of ways"(9) in which the regulatory force of the market is countervailed or replaced by, "rigid planning by a managerial hierarchy"(10) where, "prices are increasingly replaced by commands as co-ordinating mechanisms."(11) Looked at through this optic, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of The Market is replaced in 'authentic' markets by thousands of smaller hands that, as a result, you merely can't see. In their insistence that a single variable - the price - is used to regulate all the other variables of resource allotment these arguments double those of Frederick Hayek, and other economists in the 1920's Austrian School, whose writings are favoured bedtime reading for those putting into place the sadistic economies that we enjoy so much today. In these actual existing markets, external fields such as the gravitational drag of transnational corporations, the state, landowners and others are at times both evaded and reinforced. Though should things get out of hand, and self-organisation starts to migrate to the wrong part of the market equation, when people rather than capital become autonomous, the threat of violent paramilitaries is there to keep you 'feeding the beast'. As the EZLN Zapatistas make clear in one of their first statements, in the marketplace of San Christabal de las Casas in the Mexican state of Chiapas, "here you can buy or sell anything except indigenous dignity. Here everything is expensive except death."(12) This is the present day, where for many peasants in Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement is a nothing less than a sentence of death. Set this role that is refused in an ongoing historical context of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, against Spanish colonialism, then North American Imperialism leading up to internal dictatorship. Apologists for the market using neobiological metaphors to describe it as seductively Out of Control end up in the duplicitous production of a Cyborg Lysenkoism in order to avoid dealing with the reality of the Outer Control that money entails. In an era of predatory globalisation to talk of pure, untainted markets is more than a bad joke. The advantage of money as a medium is that it allows the transmission of a wildly fluctuating heterology of capitalisms. Each one highly adaptive, personally tailored, even allowing a little feedback now and again. "In this, its creative, revolutionary phase; slave morality calculates by means of subsuming all economic exchange under the mercantile contractual relationship between creditor and debtor. Everything has its equivalent. Everything can be paid for. Somehow, everything will be paid for."(13) Moving into an urban context of a temporally and spatially dispersed market, Chester Himes writes of Harlem looked down at from an analogous height of purified abstraction: "Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church, perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the Hudson River, in a valley far below, waves of grey rooftops distort the perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface in the murky waters of fetid tenements, a city of black people who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning of millions of hungry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating their own guts. Stick in a hand and draw back a nub."(14) Surely, this isn't what you find writhing underneath the surface of the screen of a computer running economic modelling software? This doesn't sound like Sim City. These people don't sound like Rational Actors! - the tumults within a system that help to maintain it: philosophy moves from state thought to managerial thought There are very real projects of domination embodied as money, but also very real projects of victimisation embodied in romantic, political fetishisations of powerlessness that are actually most often the ones used to deal with capitalism. Foucault writing with what he called 'the great Marxist obedience'(15) as a historical backdrop states: 'We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts' it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth."(16) Foucault should perhaps have at least known better than to have not ceased ceasing once and for all but the point stands. Money is a forcing device, like a keyhole that demands that the key be moved along a specific axis in order for the locking mechanism to be put into motion. It necessitates and implements certain types of relationships. As an abstract unit of exchange it negotiates a synthesis between the sides of what Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi call the 'dialectic of transcendence and immanence.' Writing about the body of the despot, the emperor, the president they observe that: "Each move to a higher unifying substance requires the new Number One to subsume all preceding terms. That substance must subsume in one way or another its own conditions of emergence. Every image of unity contains within it a trace of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence that produced it. Since the dialectic takes the form of an alternation between a lack and an excess inscribed in the unifying substance, images of that substance will also alternate between these two poles."(17) Money is the best attempt so far at such a unifying substance, like that yellowish stuff in your sandwich it holds things together and pushes them apart, in their place. For devout food technologists, awareness of the two unifying poles of transcendence and immanence could also be called class consciousness. The conditions of emergence that money is required to subsume is the direct connection to its old general equivalence, gold. As a self-organising system, 'capital becomes autonomous by domesticating the human being'.(18) To misparaphrase Prigogine and Stengers: in equilibrium money is blind, but in far-from-equilibrium conditions it begins to be able to