REFLEX - Cheap, Fast and Out of Control
By Tim Druckery (Honestly!)

20 JAN 1998
 
http://www.adaweb.com/context/reflex/

Towards the end of December, a series of fraudulent postings
appeared, and were redistributed, by several mailing lists
(7-11, nettime, Rhizome). The essays of these works appeared
with under the authorship of Mark Amerika, Peter Weibel,
Josh Decter, and Timothy Druckrey and included "legitimate"
e-mail addresses indicating that they had been posted from
trusted sources. Those responsible are the subject of both
speculation and investigation. Surely this "prank" cannot be
ignored by the critical net community for its consequences,
no less its perpetration, cross into the territories of
defamation and fraud.

Reflex is initiating a forum concerned with this issue. We
are in the process of organizing responses from those
affected and soliciting legal opinions. To this end, we are
investigating the use of reasonable security measures to
insure the reliability and accuracy of the materials posted.
We encourage your participation in this process. Other
responses will be posted next week.

  "External progress; internal regression. External
  rationalism; internal irrationality. In this impersonal and
  overdisciplined machine civilization, so proud of its
  objectivity, spontaneity too often takes the form of
  criminal acts, and creativeness finds its main outlet in
  destruction." -- Lewis Mumford

Evoking the pivotal essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "The
Aporias of the Avant-Garde," seems necessary in a time
compulsively destabilized by its woeful lack of interest in
critical history and its dubious fascination with cynical
history. It explains why pleonasm and redundancy haunts too
much of an emerging and seemingly rootless artistic
generation weaned on glib "negative dialectics," virtual
"one-dimensionality," and hip cyber-technics. Unwilling, or
unable, to invoke sublation within the politics of
representation as an act of differentiation, the lure of
"the culture of the copy" (to use Hillel Schwartz's phrase)
seems to hook its adherents into hustled solipsism and faint
theory. Unwitting casualties of the de-ethical surfaces of
the present, they inevitably skid into cultural memory
erased as rapidly as the refresh rate of their screens or
the release of their "send" keys. Aporia, though, isn't just
a signifier of implausible or reactionary dialectical
unresolvability, but one of permanent contradiction negating
the reciprocity uselessly delimiting decidability (no less
creativity). In this regard, Enzensberger's essay is clear:
"The argument between the partisans of the old and those of
the new is unendurable, not so much because it drags on
endlessly, unresolved and irresoluble, but because its
schema itself is worthless...The choice it invites is not
only banal, it is a priori factitious." Yet a facetious
discourse persists in the guise of faux subversion,
indifferent mischief, opportunistic fraud, deconstituted
history, or irresponsible defamation perpetrated through
vain electronic deconstructions of identity 'theorized' in
nonsensical notions of schizophrenaesthetics more deluded
than deleuezian, more subjectivized by pathologies of smug
hubris than by ingenious sabotage. To this end, the
"avant-garde," as Enzensberger observed, "must content
itself with obliterating its own products."

And even if, as is obvious, the notion of the "avant-garde"
is only summarily relevant to issues of electronic media, it
does evoke a set of historical issues about artistic
production, its presumptions and the long discredited
bourgeois tendency to tolerate adversaries in the service of
the culture industries. It's surely evident that there is a
stark difference between "necessary ferment" and critical
practice. This issue is well approached in Paul Mann's book,
The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, and has been exposed
over and over and over again by the trendy retailing of
subversion. Mann writes:

  "There has never been a project for delegitimating cultural
  practice that did not turn immediately, or sooner, into a
  means of legitimation. The widely disseminated awareness of
  this unlimited legitimacy has eroded the ruse of opposition.
  The death of the avant-garde might thus be the most visible
  symptom of a certain disease of the dialectic, a general
  delegitimation of delegitimation. One might call it a crisis
  were it not for the fact that it announces an end to crisis
  theories of art. The crisis-urgency of the avant-garde
  repeated itself so often, with such intensity and so little
  in the way of actual cataclysm, that it wore itself out. We
  are now inured to the rhetoric and market-display of crises."

Even though the 70s, 80s and 90s have demonstrated
persuasively that the commodification, deconstruction and
engineering of dissent are not disassociated from the
marketplace of ideas, the persistence of a futile, and
perhaps complicit, neo-avant-garde suggests that the lessons
of art-world theory and economy haven't really been learned
as they spill into electronic media in increasingly tidal
waves.

Indeed, the politics of subversion as intervention and the
aesthetics of promotion share a fuzzy border that is crossed
more frequently than admitted. Indeed one might suggest that
an aesthetic of subversion shadowed modernity's hopeless
fascination with avant-gardism and now has been
transmogrified into a game of ego fulfillment played out in
the spectacle of fictionalized, illusory, purloined, or
cyberized identities, a kind of triumph of "The Data Dandy"
whose presence was articulated in the Adilkno essay:

  "The data dandy surfaces in the vacuum of politics which was
  left behind once the oppositional culture neutralized itself
  in a dialectical synthesis with the system. There he reveals
  himself as a lovable as well as false opponent, to the great
  rage of politicians, who consider their young pragmatic
  dandyism as a publicity tool and not necessarily as a
  personal goal. They vent their rage on the journalists,
  experts, and personalities who make up the chance cast on
  the studio floor, where who controls the direction is the
  only topic of conversation...The dandy measures the beauty
  of his virtual appearance by the moral indignation and
  laughter of the plugged-in civilians. It is a natural
  character of the parlor aristocrat to enjoy the shock of the
  artificial."

Related issues have emerged in the writings of The Critical
Art Ensemble (particularly The Electronic Disturbance).
Unhinging the fictions of authority, they write cogently
about rupturing the "essentialist doctrine" of the text
while their interventions (some might say performances) into
the sacrosanct territories of authority represent a
provocation directed at both the worn traditions of public
sphere cultural politics and a reckoning with the
accelerating implications of technologies for a generation
inebriated with virtualization. But to the point of
reactionary or regressive trends they write:

  "Cultural workers have recently become increasingly
  attracted to technology as a means to examine the symbolic
  order... Its is not simply because much of the work tends to
  have a "gee whiz" element to it, reducing it to a product
  demonstration offering technology as an end in itself; nor
  is it because technology is often used primarily as a design
  accessory to postmodern fashion. for these uses that are
  expected...Rather, an absence is most acutely felt when the
  technology is used for an intelligent purpose. Electronic
  technology has not attracted resistant cultural workers to
  other times zones, situations, or even bunkers used to
  express the same narratives and questions typically examined
  in activist art."

The spheres of activism are not driven by insidious
ingenuity, but by clearly delineated opposition. Nor are
they sustained by incognito egos cloaked behind imperious
and ambiguous intentionality. Activism, in short, is
concerned with visibility and not subterfuge. This lesson
hardly seems understood by wanna-be hackers whose trail
might prove untraceable but who, nevertheless, (and in utter
disregard of hacker integrity) leave forged evidence to
certify or publicize their intrusions. Less politics than
gloating narcissism, this behavior seems all too symptomatic
of the roguish (is that voguish?) appeal of the rakish
criminality in Natural Born Killers, Trainspotting, Gangsta
Rap, or perhaps the ultimately pathetic imperatives revealed
in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.

It is difficult too to ignore Peter Sloterdijk's irksome,
but in this case useful, positioning in the Critique of
Cynical Reason. In the introduction Andreas Huyssen poses a
series of questions emerging in Sloterdijk's brooding work:
"What forces do we have at hand against the power of
instrumental reason and against the cynical reasoning of
institutional power?...How can we reframe the problems of
ideology critique and subjectivity, falling neither for the
armored ego of Kant's epistemological subject nor for the
schizosubjectivity without identity, the free flow of
libidinal energies proposed by Deleuze and Guattari? How can
historical memory help us resist the spread of cynical
amnesia that generates the simulacrum of postmodern
culture?..." But Sloterdijk's argument is far more
pertinent: "Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It
is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which
enlightenment has labored both successfully and
unsuccessfully. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment,
but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into
practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this
consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of
ideology; its falseness is already buffered." "Cynicism," he
says in the chapter titled "In Search of Lost Cheekiness,"
prickles beneath the monotony."

While itself invoking an enlightenment ethic, Sloterdijk's
paean to moralities and tradition nevertheless stands as a
form of diagnosis of the yet uncomfortable discourse of
modern and postmodern positioning. Theorized in so many
ways, the issues that seem most pertinent in the continuing
(and now perhaps dated) opposition mostly concern a
radically altered subject -- one not merely at the reception
end of authority. But the inverted hierarchy of
subject/authority is erroneous. And with the intervention of
electronic media (with, among so many other things, its
reconceptualization of both subjectivity and identity), the
issue has often lapsed into virtualized sociologies of sadly
presumed notions of the self transgressed by "life on the
screen." This, to use Huyssen's term "schizosubjectivity,"
lapses into re-essentialized categories by failing to
understand the difference between identity and subjectivity,
no less between the self and its anecdotal other. This
astonishing disassociation leads into the possibility of a
fugitive digital ethics whose contemptuous naivete seems
more reckless than subversive, more pessimistic than
productive.

But the oscillations between self and other also suggests
the avoidance of consequential psychological issues deeply
affected by the development of electronic technology and its
history. It is here that the distinction between
schizophrenia and "schizosubjectivity" can be considered in
terms of behavior. While there is little doubt that the
unified notion of subjectivity collapsed in the hierarchies
of modernity. What emerged are fragmented identities not
salvaged in political nationalism, muddy text-based
otherness, or in the abandonment of subjectivity and the
acceptance of questionable notions of agency and its
relation to avatars. This sort of dopey refusal (perhaps
sublimation), well articulated in Slavoj Zizek's recent
writings (and particularly in the chapter "Cyberspace, or,
The Unbearable Closure of Being," in the just published The
Plague of Fantasies and in Enjoy Your Symptom), is
articulated in fraudulent, deceptive, or preemptive
strategies that only serve to further discredit the politics
of the politics of subversion. "Insisting on a false mask,"
he writes, "brings us nearer to a true, authentic subjective
position than throwing off the mask and displaying our 'true
face' ... (a) mask is never simply 'just a mask' since it
determines the actual place we occupy in the intersubjective
symbolic network. Wearing a mask actually makes us what we
feign to be ... the only authenticity at our disposal is
that of impersonation, of 'taking our act' (posture)
seriously." This fundamental position cannot be trivialized
by phony realizations or outlaw aesthetics. Extended into
the public sphere, there is nothing worse, or more revealing
in cyberculture, than a hypocrite revolutionary whose
relationship even with opposition has to be invented.

Brecht wrote a great deal about "refunctioning," shifting
the authority of extant material to expose its ideologies.
Surely this political mimicry, joined with the Benjamin's
loftily ambiguous and hopelessly redemptive aesthetic, fits
into the trajectory of art - from Dada to Pop to Post-Modern
- by rationalizing various forms of reproducibility,
repetition and appropriation as legitimate approaches that
were both reflexive and creative. But these strategies were
rooted in a form of 'critical' consumption that clumsily
persists in electronic culture.

No doubt that these strategies have also mutated into the
cut-and-paste techniques (no less the cut-and-paste
identities) of far too many artists involved with media.
Very few of these techniques are confrontations whose
parodic or satiric intent outdistances or demolishes its
sources. Isn't the goal of parody sublation? But the
weakness, and sad pervasiveness, of a cavalier position does
little to suggest that the shift into fragile digital
communication technologies raises the stakes of far more
than such worn notions of creativity as will perpetuate
themselves by evolving their own development. Nothing could
be less interesting in a time of monolithic operating
systems, algorithmic aesthetics, and the politics of
virtualization than a shiftless, hollow, and finally selfish
positioning of the artist as a hapless subversive or, worse,
the subversive as a hapless artist. Indeed, the link between
cultish anonymity and subversive presence strikes me as a
pitiable attempt to sustain vaguely modernistic notions of
subjectivity behind the electronic veil of deconstructed -
or better destabilized - identity or perhaps, more
pathetically, self-styled celebrity.
 
  "There has never been a project for delegitimating cultural
  practice that did not turn immediately, or sooner, into a
  means of legitimation." -- Paul Mann

  "The dandy measures the beauty of his virtual appearance by
  the moral indignation and laughter of the plugged-in
  civilians." -- Adilkno
  
  "The spheres of activism are not driven by insidious
  ingenuity, but by clearly delineated opposition."
  
  "What emerged are fragmented identities not salvaged in
  political nationalism, muddy text-based otherness, or in the
  abandonment of subjectivity and the acceptance of
  questionable notions of agency and its relation to avatars."
  
Reflex is an on-going series of reflections about the still
nascent - yet persuasively poised - discourses of electronic
media.

REFLEX is copyright 1997 by Tim Druckrey and Šda 'web