“…only that which can form a circuit, exists.” On that remark, and in his passing, I remember my studies with Prof. Dr. Friedrich Kittler with utmost fondness.  Kittler believed in the irreversibility of the flow of time.  And so, Kittler’s death itself – that is, the death qua death – and perhaps standing for all contemporary deaths from here on out, must not be lamented, for we can remember Rilke’s reflection in the Duino Elegies, “Not angels, not humans, and already knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”  This is to say: we all live in the shadow of a comet, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy puts it.

Kittler’s mastery of Technische Medien, and the history of technology, was most evident in the elegance with which he linked up the sweep of technological history: from the birth of human-harnessed electricity (the sparking amber brought back from Rhodes – the Greek word for amber is “elektron”), to Galvani’s discovery – although he was a vitalist – of the relationship between electricity and animation, or life (the bioelectric dead frog), through to the strange Pynchon-esque world of twentieth century warfare (the V-2 rocket, Kittler’s elegiac account of the tragedy of Turing, ).  Kittler lamented the cognitive gap between technicians and human beings being too human – which I unoriginally consider to be, at heart, the currently unresolvable parallax between techne and episteme – and in his analysis of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, observed that the role of the typewriter in the story as a controlled registration device of the medium of (the symbol of) man, renders us all “subjects of machine-based discourse processing gadgets and instruments.” This is in opposition to McLuhan’s notion of technology as an extension of man.  Kittler’s understanding of the continuum of technological autonomy led him to the grammatological conclusion that “there is no more writing,” since the miniaturisation of texts to the level of sub-micrometer sized chips commanding transistors to express differences between voltaic potentials, escapes the bounds of human perception of time and space.  To put it in other words, and in close relation to his famous aphorism “there is no software,” high-level programming languages and user interfaces obscure what at bottom, and at the most privileged access point concealed from users, are local manipulations of electricity.  Furthermore, the content of written media, for Kittler, is the symbolic, which in his reading of Lacan is based in symbols which can be exchanged for other symbols, and do not, as would be supposed, refer to an extra-symbolic real.  However, the radical distinction of technological media is that they ‘produce data that not longer refer to the symbolic world but rather to the material universe, or in other words, to that which cannot be encoded and fixed in writing in the symbolic network.’ (Sybille Kramer)

Many commentators apply a Foucaultian analysis to Kittler’s stance, whereby the power exists in the chip.  Indeed, media are techniques for reading and writing history, manipulating that which passes in irreversible time.  But this does not go far enough: the power, if it can be called that, is in matter itself, manipulated by thrown humans into integrated circuits and burnt silicon, which merely (which is to say magnificently) activate ontically extant possible functions of reality itself: the autoboot and the reset are base ontological functions, which manifest in genes, time, and culture.  Kittler insists on this in the declaration that after Church-Turing, nature itself can be understood as tantamount to a Universal Turing Machine.  In this ontology, data, regardless of human sensory experience, becomes the smallest unit of communication.  Kittler said at least once in interview, “Silicon is nature calculating itself!”  His mortal end leaves rigorously considered traces that can be applied to futuristic resolutions between technology, nature, and data.

Somebody, help me understand.

In January edge.org posed it’s 2010 Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” to 172 artists, technologists, and intellectuals.  Posing the question was John Brockman, the literary agent and impresario who has had a hand in bringing to the mainstream many of the house-hold scientific surnames of the last thirty years (Dawkins, Hitchens, Brand, Kurzweil, Dyson, Dyson…). In 1998, he picked up the idea of The World Question Center after the death of his friend and the project’s founder, the artist James Lee Byars.  Brockman wrote the following about the project in 1971, which did not come to fruition until 27 years later:

“James Lee inspired the idea that led to the Reality Club (and subsequently to Edge), and is responsible for the motto of the club. He believed that to arrive at an axiology of societal knowledge it was pure folly to go to a Widener Library and read 6 million volumes of books. (In this regard he kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished room, replacing books as he read them.) This led to his creation of the World Question Center in which he planned to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world together in a room, lock them behind closed doors, and have them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves.

The expected result, in theory, was to be a synthesis of all thought. But between idea and execution are many pitfalls. James Lee identified his 100 most brilliant minds (a few of them have graced the pages of this Site), called each of them, and asked what questions they were asking themselves. The result: 70 people hung up on him.”((http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wqc/index.html))

The 2010 iteration of the Annual Question, “how is the internet changing the way you think?” has largely been taken up by technologists in terms of cognitive processes, and as the Internet and its information-sharing model, the WWW, mature, this has been one of internet discourse’s main focuses.  Some examples: Jaron Lanier has long been concerned with ‘Digital Maoism’ and the risks of horde mentality defining knowledge on the web, wikipedia in particular.  Nicholas Carr worries that the externalization of knowledge facilitated by the web might be making us stupid (similar is George Dyson’s stance).  Carr is also concerned with the cultural phenomenon of Nowness, as is David Gelernter, claiming that “We are choosing nowness over ripeness” (and he’s not talking about Art Fag City or Modern Art Notes). Frank Schirrmacher thinks we are becoming ‘informavores’. Playwright Richard Foreman thinks we might be becoming Pancake People, spread wide and thin over networks at the cost of a dense inner core of personality and selfhood.

An interesting conversation ensued when I posted the Question as recommended reading to a philosophically oriented discussion group on Internet Studies as part of the grad school I attend.  One of my colleagues remarked on the paucity of philosophers on Brockman’s list, given how front-and-center the Internet is for many contemporary thinkers; where were Badiou, Zizek, Zielinski, Ettinger, Ronnell?  I’ll preface that I am not quite clear how the lines are drawn between philosophy and other overlapping but different practices, other than that Heidegger gave up philosophy to be a thinker (Noga Arikha was on the list; is she not at all a philosopher?), but I too took interest considering that Edge is also supposed to be founded in service of a ‘third culture’ (a concept John Brockman developed after being inspired by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture ‘The Two Cultures’), which would synthesize the ‘humanities’ and ‘sciences’ after their long period of communication breakdown and mutual ignorance/hostility (the fact that, for example, in the 1930s great mathematicians and physicists were not considered “intellectuals”).

However, it was explained to me that Brockman and the techie-culture contingent which he anchors seem to include the designation ‘philosophy’ in the territory of snobbish aloofness that for Brockman defined the literary world he witnessed the 1960s.  Artists, for Brockman, seemed much more attuned to the most relevant discourse, as when John Cage shared with him a book on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner.¹

It seems, according to critics of Brockman, that much contemporary philosophy often does not share the entrenched techno-positivism and fundamental optimism and/or complicity with techno-industrial culture, and so gets occluded from the conversation.  But aren’t there heretical arguments going on in this discussion, outside of academic philosophy?  Would the censorship advocating right-wing, for instance, constitute a heretical philosophical contingent?

Also, I bring this argument up often when I’m less than permissive about the arrogantly complicit honorific way many people talk about art AS THE default (like that art owns creativity but occasionally mere scientists are capable of it), but I have read in a few books, most memorably Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’, that given the wild complexity of much modern science and mathematics, especially since the early twentieth century, philosophy (and yes, visual art) has been ‘unable to keep up’ – to paraphrase Hawking – with the technical developments in many fields, and thus there is a difficulty in sharing the highest levels of discourse other than as cargo cult.  Sometimes this yields influential results, eg. Alain Badiou’s modeling after mathematics.  Maybe this just another techno-elitist stance, but it bears weight considering how very much beautiful  philosophically oriented writing is produced today from within laboratory-research communities.

1. http://www.brockman.com/press/2000.02.21.derspiegel.html [↩]

We don’t often re-blog, but today via the Deep Europe mailing list SPECTRE, we received an interesting and unsettling (but overall unsurprising) story from the web existentialists at moddr_labs in Rotterdam:

Rotterdam, 18th of February 2010

Facebook excommunicates WORM because of the Web2.0 Suicide Machine

It is with great sorrow that we announce that Facebook Inc. has decided that WORM, the producer of the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, will be excommunicated from Facebook.

The initiative to build the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine came from Moddr_, WORM’s media lab. By threatening WORM, Facebook is trying to take down the Suicide Machine.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine allows users of – among others – Facebook to commit ‘social network suicide’. Facebook threatens WORM with further legal action if WORM doesn’t stop targeting the FaceBook platform via the SuicideMachine. In addition, it has now also demanded that WORM immediately deletes its own Facebook profile (WORM_Rotterdam). According to Facebook and its lawyer, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine has violated Facebook’s Terms of Service and with that WORM has forfeited it’s right to keep using the platform. WORM does not want to engage in a fight over this matter with Facebook. The idea behind the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine was to be able to ‘unfriend’ in an automated fashion and to make users of social networks aware that they should always be in control of their own data. Facebook won’t allow for this control and is also not willing to enter into this debate. We are pretty much done with that and are left with no other choice than to commit online suicide ourselves. The conditions and attitude of Facebook leave no other option as far as WORM is concerned.

WORM deeply regrets the current situation. The web 2.0 Suicide Machine was never intended to target Facebook as such, but meant as a tool for people who, for whatever reason, are tired of their online life. Facebook wants all access to their service, personal data of their users included, to run via their own ‘connect’ platform. In this way, Facebook can set, interpret and change its own rules as it sees fit…

The excommunication of WORM illustrates that data freedom and net neutrality of users is merely an illusion on many social network sites. Not only is it not allowed for people to unfriend (in an automated manner), but companies also have the power to expel users they do not like. Facebook shows that a user only has the rights that Facebook grants it.

Facebook claims all rights. WORM does not want to continue living in this 2.0 world. Which is why we say goodbye to all our friends. We wish you all the best.

No flowers, no speeches.

moddr_labs,
WORM, Rotterdam
worm.org
moddr.net
www.suicidemachine.org

Seeing as we are interested in art as an expanded field which may or may not fairly be said to encompass other forms of production, I wanted to post this photo of Virgin Galactic’s milestone SpaceShipTwo, unveiled this week.  The shuttle represents a milestone in their “quest to develop the World’s first commercial space line providing private sector access to space using an environmentally benign launch system for people, payload and science.”

Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic’s founder, called the ship “a work of art.”  While he likely did not mean this in the sense of art as an expanded field, it seems an interesting angle into the question, which has been asked at Yale University’s online forum What is Art and Why Does It Matter, “Has science far surpassed art, or vice versa?”