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March 03 2012
little objects of self-love
Alex Monea’s paper “Guattari’s on Facebook?! Affects, Refrains and the Digital Cloud” [here & here] made me think what perhaps I have not been thinking because I’ve been doing. It made me think about the possibility for thinking about what I have been doing. Whether I can. Or whether in fact I need to complete the doing, to have done – with it – before I am in a position to engage in critique. Because I do think it is a question of critique. A critique that goes so far as creation:
- what’s wrong that I feel I have to say something? – and think?
- where does it come from? the problem?
- what new way to go about it is there? to deal with the problem, with what was wrong in the first place?
The problem was always to do with what had been done, what had been done so that the solution looked the way it did, did the things it did, and still does, to the people connected to it, to whoever and whatever it encounters. It damns my eyes, for example. It is reductive, reducing people to marketable microsegmentations: microsensations come to substitute for and eventually replace affects.
The problem was always therefore to do with a way of thinking that could give rise to what Alex Monea calls the digital cloud, but which is really the network – in part; it is also actually the graph. Their effects. The management of their effects. The cynical sometimes, sometimes unwitting manipulation of those effects for personal gain, where personal also naturally includes the psychopathology of corporations, or corpocracy.
Who thought it? Cyberneticists thought it. And ecologists thought it. (See Adam Curtis’s beautifully suggestive three-parter All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace where some of these lines are teased out.) But equally and coincidentally it was being thought by mathematicians and complexity theorists: it was a thought presiding over the birth of the internet in the ARPANET in all its duality: where individuals from diverse – how diverse will become clear when I list the names – backgrounds and disciplines, spheres, were inducted into the military-technological complex – into little rooms therein – to experience the joys of communication mediated by computation, by communicating computational machines:
- 1975 – Marcel Broodthaers, Jane Fonda, Ronald Reagan & Edward Said;
- 1976 – Samir Amin, Steve Biko, Francis Fukuyama & Minoru Yamasaki;
- 1976 – Joseph Beuys, Juan Downey, Rosalind Krauss & Henry Moore. [here]
You can already see that there is another spirit presiding here, an idealistic one, perhaps a utopian one: it is egalitarian. But it is also based in an apprehension of the neutrality of the communicative medium. The machines facilitating the connection of Jane Fonda, Marcel Broodthaers, Ronald Reagan and Edward Said are mathematical, mathematized or anaesthetic – that is, insensible. Affect-less. The real connections constitute a network; the actual connections make up a simple graph, a pattern of connectivity that is scalable – but affect-less, however affective it might be. However much affect – a good feeling about bringing together such a heterogeneous collection of people – might have played its part and still does play its part. But not in the set-up: in the crime itself.
To consider the pattern for a moment, how does it work? Of course it is the mathematical model which is neutral and in its aesthetic overlay makes the underlying configuration anaesthetic, invisible: it hides it. What is happening is that points are surrogating for persons at terminals; another overlay or whitewash makes those terminals interminate – they become throughchannels not endpoints: points on a line connecting endlessly.
The thing the model finds interesting however is the proliferation of lines – on which there are points. And the model valorises these lines. It ascribes power to them, in fact. Network power. Insofar as a quantitative principle is brought to bear on the point as a multiple throughpoint: the greater the number of lines or vertices or edges crossing and therefore connecting that point, the greater the value it has to the network. The point becomes a node. It presupposes both connectivity and the numerical multiplicity of other nodes. Let there be many!
Submitted to this mathematization, we can see in ARPANET a glorious precursor and a banal presumption: difference can be celebrated at the same time as it is nullified; and at the same time as the numerical values drawn from the model come to have statistical significance those quantitative signifiers or quanta supplant the mere atomes of the communicating persons, who are anatomised. Connectivity over connection, links over nodes.
This already latent valorization is actualised and exploited in the commercialization of the social graph. The gain is obvious: if we are dealing with throughpoints then we are dealing in throughput, productivity, or production-line affect, where each piece has entity, need only be counted and need never be reconstituted as the desiring or communicating body in a social configuration. Because it should also be clear that what the graph does is as much a-subjective as it is asocial. But it is objective. Objects are made. And it is to objects that asocial subjects return.
Here is the crime: in the mechanism. Or, put otherwise, the machine in the ghost. What Alex Monea calls a cloud might really be a proliferation of small machines with nothing more or other than numerical value. Of people reduced to quanta who freely choose to identify with these the smallest possible units of their online consumer status. Little objects of self-love.
Contrary to Alex, I don’t think of a becoming-cloud in anything other than these critical terms, unless I am thinking of the distributed and or virtual processing called cloud computing, which opens a whole new range of options.
January 27 2012
December 30 2011
Once Upon A Time – Life: the entry so narrow; the exit so wide as to be everywhere around… the ‘utopias’ of ‘never again,’ Houellebecq on Houellebecq on William Morris: a fairy tale (illustrated by some of the Morris-like works of David Mabb painted by Rajendra Sharma)
- from the painting Blue Engineering Object by David Mabb (2001). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
People’s voices never change, no more than the expressions in their eyes. Amid the generalised physical collapse that is old age, the voice and the eyes bear painfully indisputable witness to the persistence of character, aspirations, and desires, everything that constitutes a human personality.
- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, trans. Gavin Bowd, Heinemann, London, 2011, p. 152
A few seconds can be enough to decide a life, or at least to reveal its main direction.
- Ibid., p. 158
- based on a Photograph by Mikhail Kaufman, David Mabb in William Morris Fruit Suit, photograph by Robin Forster (2002). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘It’s the market,’ Pernaut said with a wide, beaming, rancourless smile, going so far as to pat him on the shoulder.
- Ibid., p. 159
- from the painting Fruit by David Mabb (2000). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
Sexuality is a fragile thing: it is difficult to enter, and easy to leave.
- Ibid., p. 163
- from the painting Morris Blue Willow/Popova Untitled by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘William Morris, according to all we know about him, was someone quite extraordinary.’
…
‘William Morris didn’t lead a very happy life, according to the usual criteria,’ Houellebecq continued. ‘However, all the accounts show him to be joyful, optimistic, and active. At the age of twenty-three he met Jane Burden, who was eighteen and worked as a painter’s model. He married her two years later, and considered going into painting himself before giving up this idea, not feeling gifted enough – he respected painting above all else. He built a house according to his own plans, in Upton, on the banks of the Thames, and decorated it to live there with his wife and their two young daughters. His wife was, according to all those who met her, a great beauty; but she wasn’t faithful. In particular she had a liaison with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the head of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. William Morris had a lot of admiration for him as a painter. At the end he came to live with them, and basically supplanted Morris in the conjugal bed. Morris then made the journey to Iceland, learned the language, and started translating the sagas. After a few years he came back, and decided to have it out with them. Rossetti agreed to leave, but something had broken, and never again was there any real carnal intimacy between the couple. He was already involved in several social movements, but he left the Social Democratic Federation, which appeared to him too moderate, to create the Socialist League, which openly defended communist positions, and right until his death he gave all his energy to the communist cause, with countless articles, lectures, and meetings.’
…
‘He wanted to abolish school, thinking that children would learn better in an atmosphere of total freedom; he wanted to abolish prisons, thinking that remorse would be sufficient punishment for the criminal. It’s difficult to read all those absurdities without a mixture of compassion and dismay. And yet, and yet … ‘ Houellebecq hesitated, searching for his words.
- from the carpet design United Colours of Benetton by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘Paradoxically, he had a certain success on the practical level. To put into practice his ideas on the return to artisanal production, very early on he created a firm for decoration and furniture; his employees worked much less than those in the factories of the time, which were nothing other than labour camps, but above all they worked freely and each was responsible for his task from start to finish. The essential principle of William Morris was that design and execution should never be separated, no more than they were in the Middle Ages. According to all the reports, the working conditions were idyllic: well-lit, well-aired workshops on the bank of a river.
- from the montage Transitional Monument by David Mabb (2004). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
All the profits were redistributed to the workers, except a small percentage which served to finance socialist propaganda. Well, against all expectations, success was immediate, including on the commercial level. After carpentery they became interested in jewellery, leatherwork, then stained-glass windows, cloth and tapestries, always with the same success: the firm Morris & Co. was constantly in profit, throughout its existence. This was achieved by none of the workers’ cooperatives that proliferated in the nineteenth century, be they the Fourierist phalansteries or Cabet’s Icarian community: not one of them managed to organise the efficient production of goods and foodstuffs. With the exception of the firm founded by William Morris you can only cite a succession of failures. Not to mention the communist societies that came later …’
…
- from the painting Head of a Peasant by David Mabb (2002) based on Kazimir Malevich’s Head of a Peasant. Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
‘What can undoubtedly be said is that the model of society proposed by William Morris certainly would not be utopian in a world where all men were like William Morris.’
- Ibid., pp. 173-175
- from the carpet design Lietuva by David Mabb (2005). Painted by Rajendra Sharma. [here]
I was reading Houellebecq speaking through his character Houellebecq when William Morris came up in a completely different context. Adam Curtis, the film-maker responsible for All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, mentions Morris. But where? Is it in reference to Fourier in his blog article “Dream On” [here], or in the second of the Little Atoms audio interviews conducted with Curtis following the release of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace [here]?
And I am sure William Morris’s name came up a third time, in the same time frame, in connection with Félix Guattari.
I did find this Independent article by Sheila Rowbotham, however, which, along with having her delightful name to recommend it, contains the excellent phrase: “Both men reach out to the edge beyond what Morris called “Nowhere”.” [here]
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