Atemporality/Marx: a Brutalitarian Feature

This is totally a Brutalitarian article. It wasn't even planned to be a blog post but then got too long, like many articles that eventually head over there. But, because it is crucial to my ever-increasing musings on atemporality and cyber-time, I thought, you know what, why not cross-post it to the blog? More people read my blog. They can look at my other fun stuff here. And then, if they really like it, they can head over to Brute Press to download the free PDF and ODF version of the article. So here ya go, a Brutalitarian article on Welcome to the Interdome.

There is also another new article on The Brutalitarian, also semi-related to matters of time and space, but more about poetry. This one will NOT be posted here. So you gotta go to the source for that one. Like, click here man. Enjoy--if anybody does enjoy this sort of thing other than me.

Atemporality and Marx's World-History

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

Oct.1st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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“No matter whose books we've read, we're the children of capital; the love of speed is ingrained in us.”

- N+1

Certain things are appreciable whether or not we've really stopped to study them in detail. The days pass into days, whether we are asleep or awake. But there is mistrust of the progressions, an alienation from the day-to-day pattern of metered movement. We become detatched from time, from history, from others, and from ourselves. Perhaps we can get back on the spinning circle, but there will always be that separation. The segments change their length, or we perceive them to do so, whether we study them carefully, measuring them with complex physical instruments or simply with our untrained eye. Sometimes it seems nothing will ever meter out correctly, return when we expect it to, or take as long or short a time as we wish.
But then other times, we feel as if everything is precisely right. We pick up speed, and with this intensity we feel ourselves oscillating correctly. We couldn't put a number on the speed, or measure it relative to anything. It becomes an irrelative sense of time, relevant to itself and everything we see, but focused in our perception rather than our natural systems of measurement and thought. There is speed, and then there is the sensation of speed. These happen again and again, throughout our lives, and throughout history.

“Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis around which the door turns. Cardo, in Latin, designates the subordination of time to the cardinal points through which the periodical movements that it measures pass. As long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinate to movement: it is the measure of movement, interval or number. This was the view of ancient philosophy. But time out of joint signifies the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is now movement which is subordinate to time. Everything changes, including movement. We move from one labyrinth to another. The labyrinth is no longer a circle, or a spiral which would translate its complications, but a thread, a straight line, all the more mysterious for being simple, inexorable as Borges says, 'the labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant'.”

- Deleuze, preface to “Kant's Critical Philosophy”

Kant defined time as one of the foundations of transcendental idealism, the other being space. By having these ideals built into the framework of our consciousness, we were able to comprehend and perceive individual objects within time and space. Time was not something simply to be measured, to count in units of seconds and minutes. Time was an infinite length, the passage of which could be divided into units, but only as small subsets of a particular mental acuity. You must feel timeliness, in order to measure the passage of time. In human consciousness, there is a feature of time sensation, which must first exist purely, and then may be quantified. No extent occasion of time exist without it being a fragment of the ideal timeliness. In this way, 12:12 PM on December 21st, 2112 cannot happen more than once, because if you exist at that point in time, you would not confuse that moment with any other moment in history. (A tongue-in-cheek example, to be sure.) Space works in the same way; by every instance of physical, three dimensional space being a portion of the overall concept of space, you can be sure that two solid objects cannot exist in the same time and the same place.
From these transcendentally ideal concepts, we are able to measure the sequence of time and space in ideal units. Because we can think of the extension of a moment into a precise length, which we call a second, we can then measure one second succeeded by the next, and so forth. We can think of the extension of space in a precise length, which we call an inch, and then we can measure one inch succeeded by the next, and so on.
Through Kant, we can see that whereas we naturally think of movement—the measure of space in conjunction with a measure in time—actually requires the ideal concepts of space, and more importantly, time, before it can be perceived. We think of a ball traveling through space requiring physical space as its fundamental requirement for motion. But in actuality, before we perceive it in space, moving or not, we first require within us the sensation of time, because time is internal to us, as much as space is external. Things must be existent in duration, before they can exist in space.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

-Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, XI

Movement is change, our way of noticing difference over time. Difference over time, as we make note of it and remember it for ourselves, is history. Marx was interested in history, and specifically, interested in rescuing it from the tradition of German Idealism, born out of thinkers like Kant, who drove us to look internally for our interpretations of the world. Marx wanted us to look back to the outside world, to society, and to history, but naturally he could not completely leave behind the internal world of our transcendental faculties.
Marx's four fundamental conditions of history are simple, and take root in such material idealisms as basic as time and space to the world of perception and intuition. There are human needs, and with human needs, develop more specific needs. Then there are humans themselves, each existent and fundamentally differentiated from each other as they reproduce; and then more humans, as they run into each other and interact. These humans and their needs must arrange themselves as they seek to fulfill themselves, and so end up with a system of relations between needs, the diversification of needs, humans, and the co-operation between them to negotiate this historical sphere, which we call society.
A need is an attachment to a particular thing more than it is a hole to be filled, as we tend to think of it simply. We may have a hunger for food at a particular time, but the need itself is a desire for food, refracted into beams of light, each shining at a particular time when bent off from the whole of desire. Certain things are illuminated, and then darkened again, but the desire continues within us. We form connections, and then they break off, and perhaps form again in another location or time, driven by the engines of desire constantly running. These connections may be with food itself, or with the land required to grow the food, or with the other humans whose help we require to grow it. This network of connections is constantly oscillating, breaking and then renewing itself, as we travel over our known territories in the material world, moving through physical space and time. Marx calls the connections relations, and equates them with the ideality of language, something appearing only in our consciousness. In his day he assumed only humans (or as he writes, men) had the capacity for communication, and while with idealized communications he may be correct, we have since learned that even bacteria communicate with each other to co-ordinate their needs in space and time. There are millions upon millions of interactions and connections breaking and re-establishing between the teeming life on this planet, all of them furthering the cause of material life.
But Marx wants to juxtapose the material relations with the social relations, because as he sees correctly, there is a distinct breakage occurring between these two, a rhythm that cannot seem to re-establish itself, a timing perpetually out of joint. Nature, the physical world opposed to our mental worlds, “appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which they are overawed like beasts,” (German Ideology, 51). Nature and the physical world, does not always adhere to our mental conceptions of it, because our understanding of our ideal faculties is an ongoing process. As such, we oppose nature as a force opposed to our knowledge of it, and we seek to master it as best we can. We develop natural religions, using magic and fetishes and other forms of esoteric knowledge in the attempt to affect the world as best we can. Our desires are routed through our limited knowledge of the stars and the seasons, and blood and other vitreous humors, and the basic social arrangements of the family, the village, the power of humans over humans, and what other sorts of relations as we can devise. We re-territorialize ourselves to our land and each other, organizing our relations through ideas, and our relations with ideas, hoping to somehow overcome this alien force.
And this is simply the beginning. In our effort to reterritorialize, we split our mental and physical efforts into categories, breaking our inherent knowledge of space and time from our measures of physical space and time, separating our needs from our actual work to procure the responses to these needs, and dividing humans and their labors from each other to create new regimes of desires, territories, production, spaces, and times. The division of labor as Marx would have it, but as we are beginning to see, it is something much more cosmologically complicated than that.
Very cosmologically complicated, and of course, we get confused. In the arising regimes of relations, the alien sensation of Nature becomes dislocated, de-territorialized, and routed through different stations and pathways. The productions of product, desire, ideas, and relations become more complicated, and difficult for our minds to hold on to. “The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arise through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labor, appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these,” (German Ideology, 54). The social forces have supplanted the minds which brought them about, and its controlling regime is more powerful than those who invented it. Our measures of space and time, and production and people, and desires and relations, are now more powerful our own interior, fundamental concepts of these things. What matter is your sense of time if you are late for work? Who cares about where you consider home if your mortgage is due? What difference does your skill make if you cannot find a job? What is suffering in comparison to GDP? What is sex in relation to society? Who are our friends, next to the power of our enemies? We are alienated from ourselves mentally, and therefore physically, because we cannot orient ourselves to a world that refuses to acknowledge us. Our ideals will never catch up with the physical world, because our conception of the physical world will not allow itself to be caught.
It was a natural religion which first attempted to change the regimes of ideals to match the natural world. Then, it was the State, which for convenience sake, absorbed all territoriality to itself. The it was Capitalism, and the market, which proved itself more efficient and lucrative than even the State. Will we ever catch up? Is it possible to catch up? Or should we listen to Marx, and try to find a new sort of rhythm?

“Capitalism is a bet about tomorrow—and it's always the same bet. Tomorrow will be “better” than today. More wealth will be created, more resources will be used, and, excepting recessions, the economy will continue growing forever. The bet takes the form of credit and investment—you lend or invest a sum today to get back a larger sum tomorrow, because tomorrow there will be more of everything (except oil, old-growth forest, et cetera).”

- N+1

Few, other than the lovely N+1 publication of course, are actually interested in review the ideal relations we have regarding our material conditions. It is a big project of course, and there is little way to tell when we are right in diagnosing a neurotic pathway of our consciousnesses, forever banging its head into some material wall because of something territorialized wrongly in one of those less-than-conscious pathways and relations. We can tell when we're banging our heads of course, but why? And what will make it stop? Who knows, right?
But on the other hand, we have no trouble keeping up with the speed of the times. Change is constant, and we're on top of that. We can adapt to the newest technologies without batting an eye, and we can be the early adopters, who go out and write long treatises and tutorials for our friends, with no motivation other than helping everyone out, and helping us reterritorialize to a new geography of ideas, spread over a material network moving at an incredible rate of speed. We can make social-tools of connection and communication a radical part of our lives, for whatever benefit there might be. Is there a benefit? Who knows, but we certainly won't be left behind when we all find out. We'll be there, and be on the forefront, in the vanguard of... what is it? Ah yes, an archaic term—history. We will be the ones making a change, and we won't even have to change, because change will become what we are, moving at the speed of thought.
But this is not real movement. This speed we think we are feeling is just an ideal increase of our time ideal. It is a sensation of always being in the present, and of history increasing its speed, and of us hanging on for dear life. But we are not moving. Society is much the same as it ever was, and it is only our relative sensation of speed which has decreased. As we shrink our quantitative segment of time, we assume, according to our material model of the world, that we are speeding up. We are not going faster, only our world is getting smaller. We are completely ignoring our acuity for ideal timeliness, and focusing on the passage of quantitative time segments before our eyes. We have rejected the ideal realm completely, and look to society for what we should think and feel. We have thrown away the idealism of Kant, instead trusting our most basic empiricism, as dictated to us by societies regimes. Society says Twitter is new, Twitter is fast, and Twitter is hot. But does it ever say why? Some completely ignore this toy train, but others grab a hold of it, shrieking with delight at the speed they are told they are feeling.
Marx would be appalled that we have become so propertyless, and yet our consciousnesses tell us we are rich. We have less, and are told it is more. History is stretched out to the breaking point, and we are told we are moving faster than ever before. We are so used to being deterritorialized, and having our world dragged out from under us, that we barely wake, instead just rolling over and going back to sleep.
And yet, the world is changing. We have new realms for society to inhabit, electronic realms that are virtually infinite in size. Our ideal concept of space itself becomes irrelevant to these sorts of connections and relations. Our ideal concept of time is left at the station, unable to feel any sort of time in relation to instant communication. Perhaps it is a state of constant deterritorialization, except that there are all these connections being made. All of this progress—perhaps not in a direction, or with any measureable rate of change, but change all the same. There is something happening, but we are not sure what. We connect, and others connect, and we engage, and we share, and we co-operate, and we produce, to what? What sort of production is this? The division of labor has grown into a division of cosmology, and one industry of cosmological progress cannot unify itself with the others.
The history, left confused and spinning in the dust, catches onto a gear and is pulled again into the machine. It is spread out, stretched, and multiplied, found in the strangest of places. In an article off in a corner of the Internet, an unnamed author calls out a particular social relation, explaining how it is a dirty trick, taking advantage of its participants for the benefit of a few individuals. Elsewhere, in a multi-party discussion on a web page, conclusions are offered about the future of a particular technology for connecting individuals across the world in archivable discussion. And then somewhere else, a particular person discovers a way to broadcast her personal opinion to a large number of people from her cell phone. She does so, serendipitously mentioning these two previous things, which she just so happened to witness unfolding on the Internet. Then, in a month, when the previously mentioned technology becomes available, someone searching for information about it happens across the old posts, and sees the evidence of the social injustice, and begins to test a third-party app for protesters to use with the new technology. The rest, as they say, is history.
But what sort of history is this? A history that is taggable, multi-user, archivable, constantly evolving with new uses and new developers, the very accessible fabric of which is constantly under revision, restructuring, retirement, and rerouting. Every person whose thought is routed through these series of connections becomes a part of this history instantly, though in what quantitative measurement, and to what isolated, casual effect is impossible to say. But there is an effect, there is no doubt about it.

“The real intellectual wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.”

- Marx, in The German Ideology, 55

We always seem to return to our history. Only now our history is globalized, but split into fragments, not determined by the national and local lines of our previous history. It is stratified, but its stratification is one of connections, not of divisions. Our connections will not unify our history, but they can make a divisive rift impossible to maintain. Once the center could not hold, but now it is the splits and segments that will always shatter. The network is always on, and always connecting. Access is the principle, rather than the exception.
Our ideal concepts of time and space may just return, once the quantitative segments we have replaced them with in our minds refuse to stay ideal. Those primary principles will help us form territorializations and connections rather than needing to be paved over. What is the day to a world constantly online? What is a border to an anonymous chat? The real ideals may return, and we will remember than time is anything contemporaneous, and space is anything simultaneous, and with ideal time and space, flows ourselves. We will no longer feel society condensing us to singularities of infinite speed, but feel ourselves expanding to moments of pure totality, as far as we can reach. We can't connect with everything it the world, but we will have occasion to connect with the right things, the positive things, and that which can help us all, cooperatively. The infinite will return to its proper place inside us, and we will be free to engage with the finitudes of space and time in the world. We can deal with finite needs, finite desires, and finite space and time in which to affect them. We can make the proper connections and territorializations, not simply unified or totalized connections with regimes of control. The ideal will be brought back into proper relation with the material, and while it will never be a unified partnership, the alienation will stop shifting from one side to the other, and can be parceled out as it should be. There will be no moment of eternal, ahistorical self-consciousness, but rather a continuous unfolding and production of timeliness against time, and existence against space, and world-historiality against the tragedies of history.
It remains on the “real ground of history,” the surmounting of ideal and material obstacles by human beings. It is production, and relation, and resolution, and consumption combined into movement, the pure movement of ideal space over ideal time, and therefore, material space over material time. It is a passing-over, a constant presence of returning, a timeliness in atemporality, and a existential nonexistence in our spaces and bodies. By feeling the speed within us, we can properly measure it outside of us, not for a unification of quantitative segments with any particular regime, but to build from the segments something we can use.
But, Marx and Kant both knew its not something that exists apart from us. Technology dramatically changes the world, but only inside our heads can we really change ourselves. And then, once we have become the change in ourselves, perhaps there will be material change we can notice.

No, Not Illegal Aliens, But All the Other Kinds

Okay--you're going to love this one.

Well, I'm going to love it. I don't know what you're going to do.

Alien. Yes, you all know it, you've all see it, (You haven't? What the hell is the matter with you? Get your ass to a video store.) you've all analyzed it.

I mean, there are just so many different directions to take.

-The sexual aspects of the film

-The bio-mechanical aesthetic of Giger, and the other designers

-The literary allusions to Conrad, and others

-The religious (especially the Book of Job, and Genesis--Kane is the one to birth forth the monster, remember?)

-The late seventies, and the noir/industrial/organicism trifecta

-The good old horror movie cross-genre critique

But these aren't any of the routes I'm going to take to introduce you to one of my favorite movies of all time. Oh no.

Prepare yourself for the Marxian, Proletarian-Organic Revolution of the Means of Production Critique of Alien.

This would be a perfect opportunity to excuse yourself back to YouTube or wherever, if you have not done the course reading.

It's long been a desire of mine to write a punk/hardcore song, with lyrics from the point of view of Engineer Parker. The man simply wanted to discuss the bonus situation, and now he is being chased by and un-holy organic horror around the spaceship he has barely managed to weld back together, only to be eviscerated by it. Do you think his benefit plan covers biomechanical terror-organisms? I doubt it. That is real proletariat rage, there.

But seriously--we are well aware of HR Giger's brilliant design of the aesthetic of one angle of the film's antagonist. But what about the other antagonist? The one we never see at all, not even leering at us behind multiple jaws in the dark? This antagonist is Weyland-Yutani, the corporation they all work for, and on who's directive they are taken to the planet, and on who's programming Ash, the android science officer, exposed them all to the alien.

In SF since Alien, the megacorporation is always an instant fall back for an antagonistic enemy, with all the powers of deux ex machina a writer can dream up. Alien was not the first story to make use of such a trope (we see it to some degree in almost every PKD story), but it brought it to the fore, and made it the standard. Imagine if a "dark side" of some "force" had become the trope, such as the specious concept launched in some forgettable movie released two years earlier? Oh, some unfeelable badness? How many movies could you really pull out of that? The corporation, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of modern devil any audience can readily get behind, because if we haven't had a conversation with it at some point in our modern lives, we certainly have met its agents--the professionally-ruled social arena, the backfiring commodity, the insidious brand, the corporate mission statement, and the faceless bureaucracy.

But when we look into Alien, we see more than the consumer-oriented antagonism we experience at the mall, on the interstate, or in the office. We see in the film a unique depiction of the worker, the organic, the corporate, and the technological, all coming together in a situation from which no one will escape alive.

Now, the dry part, which I will attempt to streamline as much as possible. If you could all *cough-cough* please turn Part IV, Chapter XV, Section 1 of your edition of Capital, Vol. 1. *shuffle-shuffle-shuffle* Does everyone have the International Publishers edition? No? Does some one have the page number? Page number anyone? Yes? Okay, let's begin.

Anyone who has taken an undergraduate class on Marx is probably familiar with the idea of his "problematic" view of technology. He is not a fan, because technological advances are often used to increase the relative surplus labor the bosses can withdraw from good ole Buddy Proletariat. In other words, you get a machine that can make twice as many Homborg Hats per hour, the worker gets the same pay, and the boss pockets the extra money made from the extra profit. And the worker might even get exposed to greater danger from the machinery, without being compensated for this risk, nor for the learning s/he had to do to operate the complicated machine.

But like anything Marx discusses, (the book is over 700 freakin' pages long) it is rarely as simple as what he says in the introductory paragraph. And, if it is some fact of capitalism, it stands inthe theme of the project that there is a major aufhebung just waiting in the wings to swing the good to the bad, with a little bit of revolution of the means of production.

Surplus value takes place by alienating the labor from the worker and the relationship between him/her and his/her product. You make it, but for X/hour, and all the product is the property of a boss who never touches it. Classic alienation.

Machinery does the same thing, even if it not the boss itself. Marx, living in the age he lived, connects work to the person via the line of "man as motive power". It all comes back to the hands, in other words. You make something with your hand, or a tool held in your hand, and you are the power, the root of the motion and action, and the laborer.

Here's another, algebraic/vector way of putting it:

Hand (power) x tool (direction) = labor

This is what Marx calls handicraft: work owned by the worker. Now, once the tool has been removed from "man as motive power" and is attached to a water wheel, or a horse, or some other power, the tool has been alienated into an "implement", controlled by a mechanism.

Mechanism (power) x implement (direction) = work

Because, who owns the water wheel? That's right, Herr Boss. In this way, the relations of the production have been slid another inch towards the controlling hands of the capitalist. You, the worker, have even less control over the product, because you now have to come to the factory, use the master's tools, and can't even leave a sweaty finger print on the item by way of signature. You are one step closer to a simple cog in the machine.

Now of course, workers are still totally necessary to run the machines. When a worker is a cog, it means s/he is inserted among a bunch of other cogs. These cogs are both the machinery, and the other workers. All pieces are necessary, within a certain set of relations of the larger, metaphorical machine, for the individual, actual machinery to function. You couldn't get to the factory without the bus driver, you wouldn't get paid without the cashier, and you couldn't run your machine and get paid if the mechanic didn't keep it working. This is the division of labor, which also adds to the steps at which relative surplus value can be extracted (you ever pay a check-cashing fee? or any other bank fee to access your own money?). The larger the machine is, both the larger, societal division of labor or the local hat press you work at, the more diverse the division of labor becomes. Each cog spawns other cogs, which must mesh with other cogs, and etc. To take a biological metaphor, each organ of production now develops its own intra-organs, from town, to factory, to union, to shift, to floor, to position, to hat press.

Marx points out in a footnote, that this is not really a new way of understanding things at all. In footnote 2 of the above mentioned chapter, he states:

"Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? [...] Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them."

This is why I love Marx; it may be the most fertile philosophical ground ever. Just look at that last sentence! What a can of worms! Each piece seperated by a comma, of which there are four, could be its own book, and this is just one sentence of a footnote!

Let's pay a little equal attention to human organs, as well as the organs of material production. Marx already has--remember man's motive power links back, through a functioning net of tools, to his/her hands, or feet as well. These cogs must link in a productive relationship for the production to take place.

In mechanical machinery, when we have separated the tool from the power of the hands, this does not mean the links to the human's productive organs has been severed. Of course, the hands still play a role by throwing switches and levers, but another organ begins to come into play, in a dramatically increasing role. This organ is the brain--the source of a human's motive knowledgeable power.

Of course, it wasn't until the facts of material production became readily aparent in the latter part of the 20th C that any student with a little touch of the prole poesis could raise a fist and say, "knowledge is power!" Of course, Marx gets it (it's all over this book), but he's not raising a fist. In this chapter, it's easy to see; new forms of production simply require a shift in the productive relations, and the intellect takes the fore as the organ of power for the worker.

Naturally, capitalism isn't going to take that sitting down. There are sorts of ways, via extending the division of labor in the productive relations, to take advantage of this. There is the non-disclosure agreement, which doesn't go so far as to call your brain Company Property, but pretty much implies it. There are the publishing and copyright relations of major corporations and universities, telling you if you are on the clock, any original and profitable thought you have is also on the clock. There's Intellectual Property--to make sure you aren't sneaking out of the office with some tasty tidbits for the kids. And the EULA, so all those division-of-labor attorneys can make sure you as the consumer (a very important element of the productive relations indeed) aren't thinking about a product in any sort of illegal way, which might inhibit the Boss' ability to make a profit on it. As production extends into the organs of intellect in both directions, into the worker and the producer, there are many people hard at "work" to ensure surplus value can still be milked from your labor.

Lucky for us workers, materialism is on our side. (hooray!) For one thing, the Boss has worked him/herself into a corner with Intellectual Property. It may be the biggest industrial mistake since slavery--doomed to fail by its logical inconsistency. Also, while they can scan our email, they can't get into our brains (yet). We can glean our own surplus labor back from them, by thinking on company time. Also, our skill, which is a major cog in between our brains, hands, and our tools, is growing in importance as its own source of labor. Seated in the intellect, this is the one tool they can't make us leave at the factory. Proprietary mechanisms try to put a chastity belt on the brain, but again, these divisions of the machinery can't fully separate something so laterally networked as intelligence.

But the glorious worker's future is not here yet. Still lots of work for us to do, comrade. Division of labor, while being a necessary fact of societal existence, is still a source of power for the Bosses--their own anti-production, keeping us working in neat little rows. This is a much more endemic division than the old rhyme of Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Studies Professor. It is in the productive relationship, not just our college major. Plenty of people make their money on the fact of tertiary industries--the meta-labor middlemen. This is not simply to scrape a little off the top; it also serves as a stratification, an ossified layer of industry that is unwilling to change, and difficult to do so. Labor organization is difficult, because it is so easy to set workers against each other. The machine operators may get their contract, but what about the security guards? Or the bathroom attendants? Or the cafeteria workers? These are the sorts of seperations ripe and ready to be plucked by those who wish to consolidate control, or at least make it inaccessible to the worker. The industries are developed along these lines, vertically, or at least in a monocultural view, without considering the vast network of the societal division of labor as a ecosystem, within which all components, machine, human, and mind, must work together, for prosperity, the future, the glorious singularity, whatever.

So what was I talking about?

Oh yeah, Alien!

The first character to speak in the film is technology. In a cold and dark spacecraft, looking already burnt out by some sort of industrial accident, causing all signs of life to evacuate, a computer switches on, and begins to click and hum, making intellectual calculations. After some minutes, a human is born from a white womb of light (or is it a coffin?), and the workers are born.

This is a workplace, after all, and we are quickly introduced to the stratification of labor. There is a commander, an executive officer, a science officer, a warrant officer, a navigator, and couple of engineers. There is some disagreement about pay, but no, let's discuss that later! We have a mission here. This is the greatest element--we never really find out what the "bonus situation" entails, other than that Parker and Brett are getting less than everyone else, though they seem to be doing a lot of the work.

In fact, it seems as if the amount of work done is inversely related to the crew's standing. The captain spends a lot of time chatting with the computer, called, "Mother", interestingly enough. The science officer broods a bit, speaking of "research", Ripley flies the ship with the navigator, but also is saddled with the task of bitching at the engineers for not working fast enough, and continuing to make trouble about the "bonus situation".

In the end, we find out the truth, which is that the entire crew was lied to. The corporation, via their proprietary computer, and their own scabby plant of an android, invented a situation in order to grab at a potential profit, putting their workers at horrible risk. The computer system is alligned with the antagonists to the last, presenting a danger of being lost in space if not expelled into a vacuum, faulty diagrams and systems allow the alien to stalk them more effectively, and even sabotage, the only weapon Ripley has at the end to trap the beast, becomes a liability as the countdown goes out of her control.

But how exactly does this technology wind up at odds with its users? Because, it is divided from them, clearly property of the bosses, and therefore easily set against the workers forced not simply to use the equipment, but live within it. It is protected from their access by chains of command and secret codes, and even infiltrates their relationship with their own bodies in the form of the simulacrum, Ash. This is technology working against them--invasive, alienating organs, not implements they can graft to their own bodies, extending their own motive power. (Speaking of invasive organs, how about the scene when logical conundrums send Ash spiraling into a living-blender of synthetic organs? How gnarly-awesome is that!)

And then, we are left with the biomechanical fetish symbol in the room: the alien. When the corporation has set workers against workers, installed dangerous prototypes, and insinuated proprietary psychological warfare against its employees, it is not enough. The biologic-horror enters, right out of the stomach.

The alien is the singular point of contact with the alienated system these workers have been born into--it is not its metaphor, so much as its defining moment, its quintessential attribute, and the axis of the web of control the corporation has woven. There is no hope for the crew against such an enemy, and alienated as they are, they have no fate but to die alone, one after the next.

It is a biological entity, a parasite, an organ working against the network of organs, for its own benefit. And what is its own prime motive force? It's destiny to be commodified and sold as a weapon. A biological weapon, its function too horrible to be conceived by those forced to work with it. It incubates in the belly, the negative space of the worker, which s/he works to fill, and it the pinion point of the bosses' shackles since time immemorial. It is the danger, the death, and the suffering, lying dormant in the warehouse until tapped by the employer for production. Each worker is converted into a machine, extrapolated to the final extent of his or her body, exploited mechanically until the limits of pain cause them to slip into death. From the remains is borne a new alien, which will stalk, ensnare, and kill another worker, until every worker everywhere is gone. Once they are all consumed, it simply goes dormant again, until the next time the relations of production allign, and it can leap from its egg, and begin again. In this film, it is the mining industry. In the second, the army. The third, the prision-industrial complex. In the fourth, scientists and mercinaries, the line quite thin.

So what's next? Not sure. I had an idea for a SF film once, which pitted machines against humans, but also had a third set in the equation of cyborgs, who never really won any battles, but never really lost any either. Call them the anarcho-syndicalists of the anti-capitalist SF universe. I had a pretty good cosmos drawn up for the story. But it's one of those things, you know, who wants to hear a story about politics? I swear though, I had some pretty kick ass vehicles conceptualized, as well as some great body-mod ideas for the cyborgs. Not just lens eyes or claw hands, either. I'm talking about losing your bipedalism. Take that, Vitruvian Man!


Stay-tuned for our next episode of Hollywood Critique/Self-Critique - Outland: Connery and the Cops of Capitalism!

Of 140-character-matology

So, yeah: there was this thing in Texas, and well:

TWITTER

That pretty much covers it. Maybe it's alive, maybe it's dead; but you can be effin' sure that it's Twitter.

I've been conducting my own Twitter experiment for a little over four months now and I've learned a lot of things (and yes, SOMEWHERE on this page is the hidden link that will let you share in the joy of my micro-blogged arteries).

The foremost point: like just about everyone else who has tried it, I like it. After getting a good group of people to subscribe to, the feed is easy and addictive to read. I'm not sure if folks enjoy my posting or not (I have at least 15 or so non-spam followers) but I imagine the readership is somewhat like this blog--a bit random, perhaps sparse, and yet strangely, half-dedicated at the same time. Posting is fun, easy, and provides opportunity for a bit of silly, 140-character word play.

I already expounded upon some of the semiotic ramifications of a 140-character communication medium, so I won't repeat that here. Also, just about anyone who knows anything about the Internet, and who likes to tell you what they know about the Internet, will tell you how important Twitter is to the Internet. So, I think I'll leave that one well enough alone too.

But here's something you might not have heard: there are many, many people who have no idea what Twitter is.

These are people who blog. These are people who can find the best gay club in a new city with Google and a quick twitch of the wrist (well, at least one of them can). And these are people in the publishing industry. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, I off-handedly mentioned Twitter, and this group of six mid-twenty year-old's did not know what I was talking about. Half said, "what's a Twitter?" and the other half said, "so what is that, anyway?"

I have no reason to thinking poorly of these people; after all, at the time I was only three months ahead of them in the Twitter-verse. But this is something I believe many 'Net-Theorists are not fully-recognizing: this revolution in communication going on is only among a vanguard.

So, one might argue, has every new chapter in this new internet saga. Throughout the last twenty years, the Internet has met the different members of the human race one by one, and in different times and places. Some have yet to make its acquaintance. And every single one came into the fold at a different stage in the game.

I'm not a technology guru. I understand the technology behind the Internet and its means of transmission and its interfaces only marginally better than the average person, and certainly not well enough to operate any of them as anything more than a user (though I am currently enrolled in the Computer Programming course at Wikiuniversity!)

But what I do understand, and actually have some professional and theoretical training in regards to, is methods of communication, language, and human psychology. I am seeing something occur here--and although you may have heard this about 100 times in the past year (and 20 of them since SXSW), I believe it is true: this is something that has never happened before.

One can talk about the digital revolution through any number of metaphors relating to other advances in information technology in the past several millennia. I'm not going to. I'd rather talk about what we are doing now.

And this is it: we are conflating our language with our method of transmission. In other words (duck your head while the theory comes past), we have seized our means of communication by creating a productive unity between the product (meaning/symbol) and the production (expression/transmission).

Or rather, we are seizing it. Not all have done so, and those who have begun are not nearly finished, even if there was such a final state.

Let me say it over again, but simpler, because I really think this is an important point.

The method of digital production (the networked computers and communication lines we commonly refer to as the Internet) has dropped the cost of producing, distributing, and consuming information to practically nothing. Furthermore, along with the spread of end-user information such as news and media, comes the spread of the knowledge of how to manipulate, and further seize and shape the technology of digital production. I can learn programming on the Internet for free (or at least in theory--as I have yet to actually do so). A real example: a child of nine in Southeast Asia can become a certified Help Desk technician. Another example: a person using the Internet can invent, create, and promote their own communication client, with little-to-no actual investment of materials used, other than the computer they already had.

Open-source, APIs, and so forth. But here is the other interesting part: through word of mouth, networking, and good old trial and error, one Internet user's programming project becomes an Internet start-up. This start-up becomes a business. This business project changes the way the entire world communicates. One does not change the relations of production by oneself, but does so in concert with a dedicated and involved group: a network. Crazy, no?

None of this is news, really. But it's still pretty awe inspiring when you step back and look at it. Back in the old days, inventors used to die broke, sick, and alone. They were persecuted by the Church, and the children in the village would hurl fruit at them when they would step outside to rake the gravel outside their hut. These days all you have to do is read a lot, practice, and then you sell your craft project to VC, move to California, and write your own biography. Crazy!

Here's what's really crazy: the pace has sped up for the users as well. They are part of the network; they are both the means of production as well as party to the relations of production, and they work uncontrolled by any boss. Therefore, mass adoption is only possible when the masses themselves undergo a revolution in production. But even though a critical mass may be joining a particular revolution in production, they are leaving people behind. And this is totally okay, but strange, in the face of the pace of technology. Most people don't even know how Twitter works, let alone why its good. But now, simply knowing what Twitter is, and updating your status isn't enough. You have to use a good client, with search capacities, TwitPic, and a URL-shrinker all combined. You have to Trend. And you can't even just Trend! This past weekend one had to construct crazy Boolean search constraints just to find out where the tacos where at. Just wait until you have to write your own App on the fly at an event to handle the ever evolving and expanding data stream pouring out of the API.

Try explaining #SXSW to someone who doesn't use Twitter, but only uses Facebook. It barely makes sense to someone who hasn't shifted their means of production along with the revolution in the network. It's not enough to know how to use the Internet--you have to own the interface. Communication is not a matter of being about to read, or even operating a card catalog. Ever try to explain how to Google something to a person unfamiliar with a search engine? You have to be a skilled operator of the means of communication to be able to communicate. Pretty soon you might have to have a Library Science degree just to figure out what you're missing.

This is not simply literacy. This is an ability to critically think on the fly--to creatively craft information and symbols, and interpret, in a constant productive and consumptive process. The old Rhetoric and Speech classes of yesteryear will be replaced with Reg. Ex. and Javascript.

I'm looking at my browser window right now. Firefox. I have five tabs open. One is my iGoogle page, with news, RSS Reader, Twitter, and Email widgets all included. I'm glad I can fit them all into one page. I have my blog edit screen open, two half-read articles, and another blog post open for reference. I have a full bookmark bar at the top, but I hardly use these anymore. I have Javascripts for Google Notebook to handle my evolving collection of links and notes. I have Javascript button to subscribe to an RSS feed, and a button to post a page to my Shared Item page (part of Google Reader). I also have a link to my off-line TiddlyWiki, where I am compiling notes for a writing project. I play mp3s through FoxyTunes, and I have just installed Ubiquity, so I can jump to certain tasks like Twitter or Email with a hotkey and a typed command.

And with this personalized Interface, I am barely keeping up! Several of my RSS feeds are devoted to sources to keep me abreast of the new formats and apps reaching the market. I have to know what's going on, just to maintain the struggle to know what's going on!

This concept, the ongoing technological revolution in means and relations of production, is whispering to me. It is whispering to me about a future for the Internet (cough and head for the exits, its prophet-brain-dump time!):

[starry-eyed, swirly, white-out fantasy bells...]

Twitter will meet Ubiquity or another semantic web program half-way. Using some bastardization of Javascript, mutated by downloaded user-customized commands and uniquely-hacked libraries, Internet users will message, email, search, read, and archive data using these complex 140-character commands. Most of the text sent back and forth between users will not resemble written speech--it will be a hybrid of scripts and links, slangs and references. There will be pockets of written text at fixed URLs--the remnants of today's blogs and wikis. Everything will be accessible with XML or some derivative (though probably not fully "semanticized"), so it can be searched, compiled, subscribed, shared, and archived via the TwitScripts. "Privacy", in terms of personal data, will break down as a concept. You will not have a password--you will have a registered device. You will log on to a single user-name (perhaps a seperate for business) and launch your TwitScripts from an open and readable timeline. The data must flow...

[...trauma-inducing crash back to reality.]

But this is only one possible future, for certain users who are adept and interested enough to learn TwitScript. For those who are not interested in this particular technological revolution, other interfaces will become popular. For instance, there is also the MySpace future.

MySpace is AOL. There--I said it. It is a portal to media content. To be fair, the user-generated element of MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook are much more interesting (due to their variously-shifting standards of user-control) than AOL's portal ever was. But the goal is the same--a controlled (and heavily advertised) environment in which users can log on and roam about, never having to learn anything new or create an interface from scratch. Profiles, skins, centralized app access--it's the trading card game of the web.

But this appeals to certain people--especially young people. It is easy, and the community is ready-made. Sign on, and join your school first. Then, form other groups from that. This will be the media-tized Internet of the future. Note: not the future of Internet media, but the future of the Internet as a media channel. Imagine--Microsoft buys MySpace or Facebook, make a few connections and software upgrades, and all of sudden the Xbox is the WebTV kids actually want. For people who are not interested in learning the means of distribution, these media portals are the perfect product.

And then there is the regular old Internet as well. I think of a guy I know at work--he loves Craigslist. He struggles with Mapquest, but is on Craigslist almost every day, looking for deals. He has that one interface down, but doesn't have a need to learn anything else. There are people who are the same with eBay, or their favorite news/discussion sites. Or even just Google--find my movie times, and I'm out. The capacity of the user to learn the means of communication dictates how far he or she will choose to go, and more importantly, how far the technology will go with them.

My TwitScript conception of the future (for the record, this term is, along with the rest of this blog, under CC license as of now [is he joking? or serious?]) is the direction in which I imagine those pushing the limits of the technology will take it. To deal with the increasing amount of information available in protean distribution formats, we will need to become literate in the mechanics of information distribution--this includes text mark-up languages, browser mechanics, and the new consumer info "packet": the Tweet (more about the power of the 140-character set in that earlier post I alluded to). The line between the cutting edge users and the programmers will diminish, just because of the rapidity of the pace. The designers will be the beta testers, the early adopters, and the constituency. They will be the only one's that matter, from the Twitter-verse's perspective. Think about it: when you are Twittering, what else really matters? You are communicating with other users, for other users.

Here is a post by Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) for a day or so ago:

RT @elisabethrobson: Interesting stats from the iPhone 3.0 preview yesterday: (via @iphoneschool) http://cli.gs/nL1yJ5 #iphone

Look how far we are already! Only 85 characters of this are actually readable text! The rest are hyperlinks, short-hand, tags, and citations. And in fact, because it is a Re-Tweet, none of it is his original words. This is an index; it points in a direction through the network, distributing information even though substantially, it itself says almost nothing. And it doesn't need to, because by utilizing the method of internet indication (the hyperlink) Tim is giving us more information than 140 characters ever could. He is linking us into the network, and insinuating us into a pattern of unlimited knowledge in a yet reasonable and understandable gesture.

I promised that I actually had some theory for you regarding semiotics and psychology, or other such nonsense. If you are not interested in such things, feel free to skip out now, taking the conclusion: Twitter is the beginning of a revolution in the means of communication, to a conflation of content and expression. But, for those who read my Marx-between-the-lines, and desire more, here is a deliciously (or perhaps annoyingly, depending on your preferences) difficult description:

The signifier, as the point of expression for meaning (the signified), has been receiving an altogether privileged place in our understanding of language. Whether it be the Holy Word, the unattainable signifier of Lacan, or even the juridico-discursive power of the "I" point in modern testimony, the moment and form of expression (I think therefore...) is seen to be the cutting-edge of the language tool.

While this signifier is hardly diminishing in its psychological position (consciousness demands a position for the "I"), our evolving technology of expression is reducing its sacred position over the signifier/signified duality. The psyche, as a technological realm of semiotic expression, is not in itself shifting; but in our current relations of production, in which our minds are interfacing with digital networks, we are ironically becoming "unwired" from our binary (the basic two digits) understanding of our own communication. We are not just signifying now, we are manipulating the way we signify as part of the signification.

The role of the author is shifting. The power of attribution to a fixed, historical "I" is less important than the information to be understood. Understanding, and hence, expression, is less reliant on the signifier as a perfect concept of content production. Misspellings are common, and ignored. If anyone is asked, of course the signifier still plays a role, but as the signifer grows in scope to encompass not only the privileged identity between word and speaker, but also between a choice in language, distribution network, semantics, time, and distribution, the signifier is becoming more meaningful as a material object. We are bringing the signifier back down to earth, muddying it with the effluviance of the signified phenomena, and enacting a phenomenological semiotic, rather than a formal (Platonic, Hegelian, etc) semiotic. To appropriate Merleau-Ponty, our words are again made flesh. To appropriate Marx, our commodities are returned to the realm of production and use-value. To appropriate Freud, our fetishes are no longer abstracted neuroses of our unconscious investments, but properly sublimated transferences: well-oiled psychic machinery.

When we type hypertext, we are not only indicating, we are expressing the act of indication. This is not only "something to see", but "something I want you do see". Please click on this. The signifer now has supplementary value as a signified. The signified and signifier meet again, not through a reduction of the difference, but by a meeting of the two aspects in a properly material plain--abstraction is conquered (aufhebung alert!) by a reevaluation and redeployment of the means of this semiotic production: scripting is a proletarian consciousness of digital writing.

Now: the sense in which the two terms "signifier" and "signified" are used shift between every philosopher's iteration, and even within each author use (somebody should be able to say something significant about that). To draw out this complicated dynamic and really treat the two terms fairly, I could read you the entirety of Of Grammatology, but I think we would all be relieved if I did not. (And certainly Derrida's own confusing play with the shifting meaning of these two words are indicative of his own philosophy. I imagine one could agree with that statement whether one appreciates him or not!)

However, I will simply Derrida a bit, to close my thoughts for now. With the caveat, of course, that my use of the two terms here are not exactly the same as his--but I believe the point holds true for both of us.

If, we wish to push our ability to write and express meaning beyond our current means, we must seek to unravel, and perhaps "de-construct" the nature of our current system. I cringe while saying so, but we must "hack" our language. Perhaps "script" is a better verb, not sounding quite as cliche, and closer my idea of what we should actually be doing: using and adapting pieces of our language as a material code for better interfacing with our language. A book is an excellent material technology, but we cannot use a book as our model of communication after considering our new, and vastly more "scripted" material technologies of signification:

"The good writing has therefore always been comprehended. [...] Comprehended, therefore, within a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, or the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality unless a totality constituted by the [material] signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, agains its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general. If I distinguish this [un-totalistic, scriptable, material] text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary."

-Derrida, Of Grammatology, "The Signifier and Truth"

How I spend my precious evenings...?

UPDATE: In case you figured I was just being dramatic when I accused the democrats of invoking ideology to gain political power on the back of a tragedy bigger than 9/11: here's an article that is also dramatic.

I just got home from an eleven hour day at work, and now I'm listening to Greenspan's testimony today in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

What the hell is wrong with me?

Anyway, it's really cute to hear Greenspan "discover a flaw" in his free market philosophy. He makes it sound like a spelling mistake.

We "discovered a flaw" in this handgun; rather than shoot a bullet in the direction it is aimed, it triggers a fission reaction. Damn, if only we didn't see this sooner.

But seriously.

The most interesting part to me is the introduction by chairman Henry Waxman and the "response" statement by ranking Republican Tom Davis. It is nothing really out of the ordinary; Democrat praises regulation, Republican blames big government for the problem from the beginning.

But their rhetoric is most interesting. In fact, it reminds me of rhetoric I've heard before. See if you can guess what it is.

D: "In each case, corporate excess and greed enriched company executives at enormous cost to shareholders and our economy." - blaming a isolated class of villians, attributing destructive actions to moral turpitude

R: "No one is minimizing or defending corporate malfeasance, and we share the outrage most Americans feel at the greed that blinded Wall Street to its civic duty to protect Main Street. But this Committee can take a broader view of the patchwork of federal financial regulators built by accretion after each cyclical crisis, and artificially subdivided behind Congress’ jurisdictional walls. No single agency, by action or omission, caused this crisis and no existing agency alone can repair the damage or prevent the next, some believe inevitable, boom and bust. " - pleading to not reduce the discussion to knee-jerk reactions, expressing a realist interpretation over populist ideology

D: "The Federal Reserve had the authority to stop the irresponsible lending practices that fueled the subprime mortgage market. But its long-time Chairman, Alan Greenspan, rejected pleas that he intervene. The SEC had the authority to insist on tighter standards for credit rating agencies. But it did nothing despite urgings from Congress. The Treasury Department could have led the charge for responsible oversight of financial derivatives. Instead, it joined the opposition. The list of regulatory mistakes and misjudgments is long, and the cost to taxpayers and our economy is staggering. The SEC relaxed leverage standards on Wall Street. The Offices of Thrift Supervision and the Comptroller of the Currency preempted state efforts to protect homebuyers from predatory lending. And the Justice Department slashed its efforts to prosecute white collar fraud." - blaming the opposition party's support of the transgressor for the transgression, and painting them as traitors

R: "The words “regulation” and “deregulation” are not absolute goods and evils, nor are they meaningful policy prescriptions." - please, let us think logically rather than morally! We aren't criminals for trusting them!

D: "But this deregulatory philosophy spread across government. It explains why lead got into our children’s toys and why evacuees from Hurricane Katrina were housed in trailers filled with formaldehyde." - not only are our enemies evil, they hate children and black people!

R: "In this political season, the search for villains is understandable and in some respects, healthy. While we’re at it, we might ask ourselves why this Committee didn’t convene these hearings last March, when market turbulence first turned toxic. There’s plenty of blame to go around as we try to unravel the wildly complex tangle of people, private companies, government agencies, and market forces that is choking modern capitalism. We’ve all played a part in this crisis, and we’ve all learned invaluable lessons." - can't you see, we're the reason this happened! You and me, Waxman! Aren't we, Americans, the one's who are really to blame?

D: "But the issues we are examining are of immense importance to our nation. I am proud of the work we are doing and especially the contributions of the members of this Committee." -finish up with a good ol' 'god bless us, everyone!' That unity shit really drags 'em in.

R: "But retribution needs to be tempered by wisdom. [...] We’re learning some expensive lessons, and we should put them to good use." - for god's sake, think with your head and not your asshole!


Get it? Political party uses catastrophe beyond anyone's imagination as a spectacle to attain political ascendency, where they will make a lot of noise, but generally fuck things up for eight years until it's time to do it again.

And before you question my taste in making such a comparison, think: which event will cost the most lives and well-being--the war on terror or the collapse of the world economy (far worse in the third world than here, obviously, in both cases).

And for goodness sake, I'm not republican! I just hate the obvious use of ideology, especially right out of the playbook of those to whom you are supposed to be in opposition! It's just so obvious, it makes me want to puke.

At least the liberals are seizing their moment, and not letting it pass them by. The only thing that the average american hates as much as people of another race is rich people. I guess the environment and peace are kind of wussy causes, whereas, attacking rich bankers is like shooting... well, rich people.

All kidding aside, I would really hate it if this crisis in the economy became the liberals' 9/11. What we are witnessing is perhaps one of the most profound, real-world economics lessons for which one could hope. It is the true-to-life failure of surplus value! The one thing economists always say about Marx--real ecnomists that is, because they have read Marx, even if they disagree with him; just being rich and hating communism doesn't make you an economist, sad to say--real economists say that the theory of surplus value is not in line with the realities of venture capitalism. In other words, the theory of surplus value doesn't explain how you can make money from nothing.

Now, I'm not an economist, (but not because I haven't read Marx) but it seems as if the continuous expansion of debt economics into an endless series of derivatives shows the fallacy of investments based on surplus value. You are abstracting the future; the "promise to pay". Abstracting, and quantifying. However, as we have seen, the promise to pay often does not equal the eventually payment. Surplus (being the benefit of the contractor at the expense of the contractee) that was valued as something is actually nothing, and the large-scale evaporation of supposed "value" makes a venture just a scam. It's like in the cartoons when someone is hanging off the edge of a cliff on a rope, and the person holding the rope hands it to another person who hands it to another person who hands it to no one--everything hangs it mid-air for a second, and then the person and the rope fall down the cliff.

These are the sorts of conversations that we should be having--why is the economy fucked? Because it is an economy of debt--it is an economy where contracts create surplus value (it's called usury) from nothing, and then sell this nothing to someone else. The worker is just another contractee. And if you can't sub-contract what you sold into contract, i.e., if you've got nothing other than your hands and your boot beneath your feet, then you are the real person that suffers.

Neither Waxman nor Davis seem interested in following up that at all. Then again, it doesn't seem that either of them have ever worn workboots in their lives.


[full text of Waxman's introduction here]
[full text of Davis' comments here]
[text of other testimony from the session]

How much for that fetish in the window?

UPDATE: I added a section. I thought about it more after I posted and decided some thoughts weren't quite complete.

Mental image of the week: classicist Charlie Campbell scrutinizing an ancient document on a late-night desk by candlelight; upon reaching a particular passage, he wags his bearded face and utters a disgusted commentary: "these ideological presumptions are repulsive!"

But seriously- his recent blog post on prostitution and art (sexy, sexy!) covers some interesting ground. The question: is it wrong to use a sexual relationship to further one's artistic endeavors? I was first struck by his argument in that he begins by making the equivalence of ideological and sexual purity, at least when it comes negation: to sell sex is like selling out a cause. (The true equivalence of the Left!) It seems at first that he is drawing a connection between economics of body (sex is a fair, willing exchange) and purity of purpose (art should not cater to exchanges, but represent a fair pursuit of truth). Not that this is an undesired view point; it is a nice counter from the typical liberal view that sex as an exchange is a violation of truth prima facie. In other words, in his first view prostitution or sex is not immoral, it simply should be separated from ideological/aesthetic process.

But then he continues, to say that this is not always true, which is quite valid, I think. Purity of truth is clearly as much of a fallacy as purity of body and morality. You conclude that "transcendent aesthetic meritocracy does not, and will never exist," and I agree.

I might push it further though, and say that Trotsky's point about aesthetic value "not being reducible to class-struggle," (in Mssr. Campell's words; I do not know of Trotsky's own words) is somewhat misleading--it seems to take an easy out along the lines of Marxian super-structure. That is, to parenthesize aesthetics as some kind of sideline structure; so don't worry about that little exo-structure, focus on the structure (class relations).

On the contrary, I think a certain material analysis of art might show something interesting. To cut to the chase: it's all sexual, isn't it? The aesthetic desire to view a particular piece is not much different from sexual desire. From where do our fetishes derive? A complicated question, but not very different than the question of the source of our aesthetics (and how sexy the response is depends on who you're asking).

These pathways of desire, then, that distribute art and make it desirable for owning or viewing (a sexy metaphor, that), are not much different than the strange pathways of human relations. If the way that artists and patrons sleep around (paid or not) don't resemble the vicissitudes of popular taste, I don't know what would. Is art any more than a representation of desire? Is the art world anything other than a club for sluts? Or any other so-called "humanity"? Writers, scholars, and even ideologists co-mingle their fluids almost as much as their work (and the evil twin of sex, prudery, often rears its head in these venues as well). Did you hear that Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power are hooking up?

So if you can live with my little pet theory--humanities = the pursuits of humans = the sordid lives of sex addicts--then there is only one point left to ponder. The other unfortunate truth of being human: the daily necessities of food, clothing, shelter, wine, and admission to the hippest parties. In other words, good old Darwinian success, of which artists are known for being holes to.

But, let us not forget... well, um, Claude Levi-Strauss. Structures of kinship, etc. I won't delve into it here. Did you know that in five weeks Levi-Strauss will be one-hundred years old? Amazing!

The point: that humans form bonds, often sexual bonds, to help support each others search for human necessity. Not very complicated. Artists do the same thing. In fact, if you want to talk about sacrificing oneself for art, the best place to look is at some of the spouses of our more eccentric artists. Is this wrong? Probably, in some ways. But so is marriage itself, especially when it is utilized as indentured servitude. But sometimes it is not. I don't want to say I'm a model to be followed, but take my marriage for example. My wife's job earns a lot more money than mine, and she gets good health care. (It is my opinion that any one who is anti-labor union has never known how wonderful it is to actually be in a union.) So, because she cares about my well being, we had our relationship blessed by the State so that I could also have adequate and affordable health care. In addition, we have also discussed our artistic pursuits. At some point, each of us is willing to support the other with our day jobs so that the other can pursue art (my writing, and her painting). This is really no bigger than the daily agreements that make up our kinship system: I cook, she does laundry, rent is split down the middle, etc.

So what is the sexual world of art if not a much more complicated, largely unspoken, anarchic kinship system? Rarely, rarely is it the fetishized, one blow-job = one painting hung on a gallery wall. As Charlie noted in some of his examples, it is much more complicated. Artists have relationships with patrons, and then they move on to other artists and different patrons. The choice of whom-with-whom is often bizarre, often judged to be unwarranted, and feelings are hurt. But who can say it is prostitution? I send an author $15 if I wish to own a copy of his/her book and I feel the work is deserving. I might take an interesting artist out to dinner in exchange for the pleasure of his/her company and conversation. If my interest in someone's work has sexual components, why wouldn't I sleep that person? I can say honestly, if I thought a person was not creative, my attraction to them would diminish. I think my wife's art is wonderful, and it is part of the whole of my attraction to her. It doesn't mean we exchange sex for art, company for short stories, and home-cooked meals for clean laundry, but then again, we do sort of exchange these things. Or if you ask Levi-Strauss, we definitely do.

I think the problem, as with most problems regarding value, occurs under commodification. Prostitution is the epitome of the commodification of sex. The sex is reduced to a menu of acts, and the price is firmly set in exchangeable counters. Now, this is not the problem itself; the problem is that when these securitized acts are commodified, it is much easier for oppression to occur. Perhaps the giver of the act has to agree to a price that s/he did not set; perhaps the act includes violence or power relations that would not ordinarily be securitized with the act under desired circumstances; or perhaps there is a capitalist involved who takes profit merely for packaging and marketing these securities. My metaphor here is not in topical jest; I think this is the problem. The problem with commodities from Marx's perspective: surplus value. What are you paying that you are not compensated for? In general prostitution, sometimes it is as simply as your parent's morality. Sometimes it is as dire as your bodily integrity and personal safety.

Art very rarely has these dire consequences; I have never heard of an artist being beaten for his/her art and left to die, infected on purpose with an incurable, deadly disease. I think it is disrespectful to sex workers to make the comparison.

But, to return to the subject at hand, I think that the point of contention for sex and art is not that certain exchanges occur; the point is that commodity of desire into packaged securities can give and take surplus value where it is not due. It can be capitalized. Warhol, for instance, was able to create the impression of value in his mass-produced art, where I think it was not warranted. There was a certain sexiness built in to his work via his persona, which was not only not due, in my opinion, but perhaps was accumulated at the expense of those working in the Factory (the metaphor here, is simply not a metaphor). Did the unseen, anonymous "production assistants" receive any compensation for the notoriety Warhol achieved with Blow Job?

Of course, commodification exists in varying degrees in a market that, as a point of pride, claims to despise commodification. And, as I stress over and over, I do not believe that commodification is simply alienating abstraction (nor do I believe that Marx intended commodity to be thought of in this way, despite what others may think about him). But, it is true that when something as esoteric as human desire, and its partner, value, are compartmentalized into objective units, they make themselves available to capitalization, just as an open-minded, nubile artist's assistant is party to suggestion. I joke, but that is the power of the commodity of words: to imply, to suggest, to connote, and to willingly arouse.

I think one of the biggest complaints about the combination of the art-world and sex lives comes from the point of view of fairness. If one is sleeping with a gallery owner, one has an avenue to submit art to be considered that one not sleeping with the owner does not. This is a valid complain, but at the same time, it also comes from an egalitarian, democratic perspective. The supposed conclusion to be drawn from the complain is that everyone should be considered equally. Hence, blind submissions processes. There is an episode occurring in the writing world now about this very concept; it seems that certain renowned poetry and fiction prizes are actually insider popularity contests.

But then again, so what? Art is, nearly by definition, subjective. At least any superlative qualifier is subjective. And doesn't the gallery owner have to right to choose which art is hung in his/her gallery? Why not? Of course, if one gallery develops a reputation for only hanging the art of the particular tartlet that the owner is currently housing, then that is only fair.

I think that art "communities" or circles are definite popularity clubs anyhow. It's all pop these days. I might mention my wife's art on my blog, but if I wish to be known for having a fair opinion, then I would include one of those cute little "full disclosure" notes stating, 'yes, this artist and I have had our relationship blessed by the State.' Or if I wish to showcase my friends, then I could do so, but if somebody didn't like "The Interdome Set", then I could be sure that s/he would start a blog to talk shit about me. In fact, this behavior is encouraged: it's called "networking". And a network is only a social market, that (most of the time) doesn't have anything to do with sex (as much as anything can have nothing to do with sex).

And this--the commodification, and the social relations--is what we call the market, or the "Structures of Kinship", or the relations and means of production, or the scene, or anything else. Fairness, purity, and higher notions of truth upon which the work or product or relations are based, are largely bullshit, or only utilized to fool someone into doing something.

And this exegesis on markets? What is it designed to do? What is my secret objective in entering the marketplace? Well, to entertain perhaps (fat chance!), or to spell it out so that maybe one's negotiations within such a market aren't confused and befuddled in the currents and eddies. Because of course, theory is itself an art. It can be produced, commodified, and utilized to align one's reasoning in various ways and purposes. Is it true? Not necessarily, not unless it works. Right now this theory has taken up some space on this blog, and maybe occupied some of your day, if you've read all the way to the bottom. Maybe it will illuminate the human markets a bit; mostly, I hope that it just doesn't do any harm. But perhaps this is disingenuous; I do hope that it would make those who complain in the harshest of tones about how they are not "getting any" in the art/literary/culture world to maybe think twice before opening their mouths. If there is one thing I can't stand, it is people complaining about their lack of sex life: obliquely via their other inadequacies, or directly.

I can promise one thing: this blog post is in no way designed to convince anybody to sleep with me. Purity of intent by way of boring diatribe! Success!

The Electro-Fascism Genre and anarchiTunes

Erik Davis is a writer on a large field of topics, including dark metal, information theory, mystic energies, iPods, and paranoid delusions of popular science fiction authors. His website, Techgnosis, is a compendium of sorts for columns and musings that he publishes in various places. It's also in my Google Reader list. Recently, he wrote a column for Arthur Magazine, "Archive Fever". In which he discusses the way that certain folks archive their digital music collection. Digital music and its access is a topic he has discussed elsewhere, and I've found it an interesting focus. Everybody knows the common story on how "Napster changed everything," but these sorts of story lines run in a very generalized sense, as in, how the commercial market is changed. Davis' articles provoked thoughts of my own on how the individual's interaction with the media is changing, both through a connection with digitized media and also through mobile technology. Since I happen to be on a bent of discussing mobile, digital technology and its effects on individual consumption, and I also stumbled into a huge increase in my collection of digital music, I collected some notes, by way of the fact that they are related, yet find a slightly different conclusion than Davis about the urge to fiercely manipulate the way one catalogs one's digital media.

In the past year, through situations I don't really understand, I've become a "DJ" of the sort that does not have any art to it. Rather than co-mingle the latest tracks on the dance floor for the new digital underground, I am hired to set up stereo equipment and a playlist for weddings, alumni events, and other horrible things that seem to occur every day behind closed banquet hall doors. The point is, that through this, I was able to get my hands on roughly 200 gigs of new music (or about 50,000 songs) to add to the 50 gigs (12,000 songs) that I already had. Most of it is complete crap, not even having the interest of cultural artifact that pop music has. However, there is a considerable number of oldies, motown, doo wop, and other forgotten mini-genres that would be lovely to have, and now have fallen into my lap. I'm guessing, however, that I will probably end up deleting about half of the volume before I wrangle it into any sort of usable library, by deleting misnamed, duplicate, and racist country songs (they listen to weird stuff at weddings in oregon).

This is a major databasing task, merely to get the data into the right order to begin to pick and choose what I want. I can tell you that I am also an anal-retentive freak when it comes to my music collection, not unlike Cory Doctorow, as discussed in Davis' column. My track info in iTunes (my music player of choice, perhaps unfortunately) is immaculately maintained--I like to have artist, title, and album info all perfectly correct and relevant to other tracks by the same artist. In addition, I also try to make sure the year of recording is also correct, and I have thoughtfully genre-fied my music into a specifically-small set of 17 genres. Being presented with this horde of poorly-cataloged music is a great source of anxiety for me; I have gone so far as to only work with it under terms of quarantine--I have set up a separate iTunes library for working with it, so that its files cannot be released into my general population. I believe that the ability to form separate, disparate libraries with iTunes was introduced in iTunes 7; I only say so because it seems many users aren't familiar with the ability (hold down shift, or possible the option key with a Mac, while you click and open the iTunes program. A prompt will be launched to allow you to create or select a new library to work from).

I can tell what you're thinking (can I?): I am suffering just the sort of massive commodity hysteria that Davis' referenced. The ability to reduced so vital an art form as music to bits of data has created a new neurosis; now we "own" rather than "listen". I see it a different way. This, is an unbridled opportunity to actually interact with what we are doing, and seize control of our own relations of desiring-production. This is nothing less that anti-fascism, in Deleuze and Guattari's sense.

Here's how I see it: information, regardless of media, is a sort of "literary" substance to our culture. Just sort of take that as is for a minute. Now, if we also consider that "those in power" throughout the centuries have also tried to control other people through their use and control of information, we can see that this information substance is molded, shaped, distributed by those who use it to maintain certain power structures and relationships. Almost like they produce it. Post-structuralism, post-modernism, etc. We've heard it before. At any rate, nobody will really argue that Gutenberg's press wasn't a giant victory for the little guys. And radio as well; the ability to transmit information to a large population near instantly had a profound affect on the way governments and others wielded their information substance. As a result, powerful entities tried to regulate these new technologies. The internet and net neutrality, is the modern incarnation/incantation of this dark necromancy called "freedom of information". But this is all basic history, and hardly anyone would disagree.

What is both different, misunderstood, and related to Deleuze & Guattari's philosophy (ha!) is that we are dealing with the aspects of what they discuss in the plateau of Thousand Plateaus entitled, "A Geology of Morals". Beyond all the distinctions of form, substance, content, etc. there is a crystallization of information that is it's strata, its very existence by way of its molecular structure. Even beyond molecules, because they certainly were not after desire as a new atom; you can always push the zoom one lens deeper (if a visual metaphor even applies). What is being released now, very quietly, is the ability to change the data for ourselves. How do we change it? By altering the structure in which it is produced, and used (consumption-production, if you will).

With Napster, they tried to threaten us. "If you keep downloading music than artists won't make any more money on it and then they won't make music anymore." A pathway that anyone with a job (or a boss) can understand. As if the millennia-old aspect of homo sapiens that creates art in the auditory realm will up and stop because the money does. What were they really saying? "If you behead the boss, then he can't pay you anymore." Or, "if you like Metallica, you better stop, because Metallica likes being rich, and they won't make music if you don't make them rich." The idea that music could be easily stolen en masse was one thing: the RIAA was going to lose their lock on the pattern of distribution; their control over production, their power, was being threatened. In 200 years the idea of the RIAA having the right to control music production and sue to protect it will be as strange as the idea of the Catholic church having the right to censure all books. Well, maybe 400 years.

But the "stealing" thing was only the face of the battle, depicted for (again) media consumption in order to win control in the moral structure of the courts and public opinion. I think the real battle was about the form, the digital music file. Not only is it easily copyable, it's also mutable, in a way that no other art form has been. Remixes and mashups aside, with programs like Winamp and iTunes the control of music listening itself has been taken away from the distribution networks. Radio is no longer necessary; just look at the glut of "HD Radio" ads to see how the radio industry has recognized its own twilight. Music stores, and the harsh distribution control networks behind them (ask any indie record store owner how much money they get from the sale of a cd) are no longer necessary, even for legally sold music. And, relevant to this discussion, more abstract methods of control like "critics", "acclaim", and "genre" are becoming defunct.

This is all about distribution. There are literally, millions of songs out there. But how do you know which to listen to? No money will flow if the track isn't played. Hype, airplay, word-of-mouth, are all very important, and until recently, these could be controlled, i.e. bought and sold, by those powers that made music "popular". This Band Could be Your Life is a well-known saga of the compiling of these sorts of distributive indicators, these cultural markers, what in a more Marxist tongue could be called the means of production and distribution. Casey Casem is out, and even your little sub-culture is not so important outside of its figureheads; now the blogs are in, and the individuals who publish them.

Personally, I think mp3 blogs are great. It isn't Napster; I don't get what I want when I want. Instead, I have to search until I find some individuals who are interested in similar things to myself. Then, via their posted downloads and my comments, we communicate and share. Overall, its a highly lucrative (music-wise) and non-pretentiously rewarding system. Also, a great resource for archiving music that is out of print, nearly unheard of, or both (if that is what you're into).

This, along with the rise of RSS feeds, is what I think the next generation (in the low-gestation period that is the web's reproduction) will be. First it was info, plain and simple. Then, it was user-generated content, out of the control (almost) of "content providers". Now, it is the customization, the cataloging, and the seamless access of such content. Using an RSS reader like Google Reader, or any number of other free web apps, I can customize my flows of information directly to my desires, to conform to my day to day whim. In five minutes I can create my own custom newspaper, with sections for news, arts, entertainment, economy, conspiracy theory, agitprop, personal ads, or whatever else I deem interesting.

And this (at long last I come to my point!) is what the categorization and genrefication of mp3s is all about. Doctorow, myself, and other "geeks" are not just clamping our bureaucratic sphincters closed on our informative flows, we are wielding them. With my smart playlists, and my immaculate data keeping, I can get the computer to play me what I want to hear, when I want to hear it. Of course, when I write or do other work there are certain albums I want to hear, or, certain genres, or time periods. But often I can relinquish that direct choice to a semi-intelligent algorithm that will bring me "songs that I've listened to once per month but not more that five times in the past week." I hear something I didn't expect, but I didn't hear my mp3s of Ginsberg reading "A Supermarket in California". Randomness is good, randomness is bad, but algorithms are me. It's not typing, its not banging my head against the keyboard; its cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop. It is decidedly anti-fascist (in terms of the lesser, micro-fascisms) because all control is given to the user, who can then define his/her own level of control. Doctorow rates his tracks with the star system; I don't, because to conform my various subjective rating systems to a five-star system is too hard for me. I use the "times played" counter as my most significant metric, because I find it to be the most true. If I like a song, I've listened to it. If I don't like it, I don't. Easy enough.

However, there are problems. I first started heavy digital music cataloging after I worked as music director for my college radio station. I was interested in statistics and databasing, and this seemed like a fun little project. I was, however, distraught at various elements of iTunes. The "times played" count is not tallied until the song has played completely through, leaving un-counted half plays, which is especially disheartening in the case of "secret tracks", when the last track of an album contains some 10-15 minutes of silence so there can be a last song right before the CD runs out of capacity. There are also limited ways to programs the relationships between data types in the smart playlists, no way to view statistics as a whole outside of through the song lists, and no easy way to edit information or transfer information outside of the linked relationship between the iTunes library and the literal song folder. I sent Apple an email detailing all this a while back. Some things have been made better (there is now a "grouping" data type in addition to "genre") but others haven't (the proprietary iTunes library language).

And this is a big problem. iTunes, through its clean, white browser, easy compatibility with Apple devices, and its iTunes store, is quickly becoming the standard. The users, even the power users, are still left with a lot of the "power" not in their hands. Winamp has similar but different problems; a dearth of choices and compatible content providers makes the hands-on control also quite hands-off, and despite improvements, I still think the software has running issues. I have faith though, because thanks to "ubergeeks", there is no technology that can be created that cannot be reverse-engineered, and no proprietary software that cannot be replaced with open-source. This is what the modern "geek" is, s/he is the cyberpunk, that can unlock doors that other people see. Of course, this power can be used for good or for bad (like all power), but it is heartening the way that those very knowledgeable about information systems and programming languages seem as drawn toward anarchic distributions of that power as corporations and commodifiers have been drawn to control. It makes me think that perhaps all of this post-structuralist liberation stuff about overcoming the hegemony of signifiers, the commodification of desire, etc. might actually not be an idealistic dream. Perhaps Marx's dreams of contradictions leading to capitalisms downfall are not as outdated and they are outmoded. iTunes may not be the Hitler Youth yet; but I think of it more like liberal democracy. There are elements of freedom, but still a very certain, very deliberate control (supposedly, the algorithm behind the generic "shuffle" is one of Apple's most closely guarded secrets). Music is a very personal experience, and while music is not exactly the same as syndicalized production, if you can't have anarchic information relations, it seems unlikely that you could have an anarchically liberalized production environment. In many dystopic tales of authoritarian regimes, they certainly don't forget to include the wide proliferation of public-address systems that cannot be turned off. Collection of information (surveillance and reporting) is certainly kin to the distribution of information (publication and broadcasting).

Hopefully I won't freak out while trying to add 200 gigs of music to my collection. Slow additions is the key, I think, rather than a general merge. Much the same could be said for bureaucracy; a general goal to catalog a certain area of life with data can easily fail or cause more problems then it starts. But if it is a rotating view (a databasing term that means the axis of reference can be switched out easily for another) with good data organization, one can really own one's data. And if control of oneself rather than submission to ulterior organization isn't revolutionary, I don't know what is!