Specificity of the Virtual-Actual Dialectic in the Instance of a 'Colour'

At once physical and experiential, therefore unrepeatable, spectral colour as conjuncture proposes an infinity other than the 16,581, 535 colours of hexadecimal. Modulations too intense for capture. This is its actuality, ie. to call it 'insubstantial' is incorrect. The analogy with infinitessimals: there will always be another hue between this one and that one, to be achieved by casting this shadow from that surface under this light source under these conditions of refraction. As in the tones of sunset, any tone is always on the brink of becoming another. So far so physis.

This colour – magenta spray under cars at a Sydney crossroads in the rain under sodium arc lamps 20.09.07 around 9.00pm – is unrepeatably specific and actual. The attempt to capture it will a) reduce it to mathematical identity but b) demonstrate that such capture is inevitably poorer which c) can lead to new colours, new techniques

This is notably the case with black, which is 'not a colour', 'the absence of colour', but which, like evil, is an absolute that never achieves purity, the purity of actual existence. Black has the specific quality of being only ever virtual. Like silence, black is physiologically impossible (Cage, Goethe). [Brecht speaks of 'the strain of being evil'].

Our attempts at black are magical: formulated from the remains of fire in charcoal and lampblack. The alternative, especially in film and electronic imaging, has been to achieve maximum contrast, that is to use the wisdom of colour combinations to persuade us that the greys of the screen are blacks. If black is always unreachable as ideal absence, these formal allocations of blackness to greys are equally virtual, an expression of the destiny of certain tones in systems reliant on projected or backlit images, cathode ray tubes: Becoming black.

The Duty of Care

Carol Gilligan makes the argument that a feminist ethics is peculiarly and particularly an ethics of care. There is some parallel with Levinas' ethics of the face-to-face encounter with the other, in which the incompleteness of the Ego is demonstrated to it. What became apparent in discussions of indigenous ethics, or the ethical problem posed by indigeneiry – its particular claim to 'culture' or 'identity;' in ways unavailable to westerners – is the extraordinary generosity, noted by Barry Barclay among others, of indigenous people with their knowledge, their depth of knowledge, and their time, in every sense of that word. In this instance, the instance of the danger of ventriloquism, of speaking as if from the position of the Other and on behalf of the other, a demand peculiar to the media, where acess to both the technological basis for recording and editing, and more particularly of transmission, is in the hands of the coloniser, in the case of ventriloquism based in an ethic of care, something peculiar about the ethic of care becomes clearer.

The duty of care can only be exercised in the presence of an Other who gives themselves openly for care, like the weeping child (as everyone knows, you cannot comfort a child who refuses to be comforted).

This is the pojnt of Kant's delimitation of the cosmopolitan ethic of hosptality: that we must not treat the stranger as an enemy unless they come in the guise of an enemy.

Care extends to pariahs like the torturers of Abu Ghraib if and only if they offer themselves to care.

(They alone can judge whether their prisoners came to them as enemeies or as strangers)

Syriana

Under conditions of 'the abyss of total freedom' among the datastreams we used to use for meaning-making, what of representation?

It has moved from depiction to data-gathering. Scientific and socio-technical apparatus collects such m,assive quantities of data, the significance of the individual datum shrivels to insignificance. Swamped by statistical likelihood and trends, the datum itself is without significance, without meaning, meaningless. Picturing remains, but lives a sad afterlife. Its ideological function today is to try to persuade us that it is possible to picture experience, and that experience matters

The irony is that it does: experience matters to the extent that it is the residual real omitted from the circulation of data. This residue is that element of embodied life that escapes regimes of health, fitness, education and programmed entertainment. Its poverty is precisely that it is embodied, in an era in which each body is rigourously demarcated as the boundary of the personal, so that the best we can hope for is the interpersonal, never the social.

It is the social that forms the true boundary of a system which comprises the binary of data and experience: information and embodiment are two sides of a single coin. The real relations between people today appear to them in the fantastic guise of a relation between data systems and irreducibly individual experience.

It remains to make apparaent the lost relations of the real. At first this art will take the form of tragedy, the tragedy of coincidence – though that is an oxymoron. Coincidence because causality can oly reduce the social to conspiracy; tragedy because conspiracy and coincidence alike are experienced as fate.

How might realism re-emerge as intimation (making intimate) of the social, without presenting it as something already fated? How reverse the trend, apparent since the end of privacy in the era of cookie technology, towards the publication of intimacies? How to imbue the intimate with pubicness?

why the revolution hasn't started

The concept of the general intellect is a utopian one in Marx (pages 690-711 of the Penguin edition of the Grundrisse): product of and produced by internal contradictions which he believed must ultimately lead to the collapse of capital. To argue for the increasing virtualisation of the general intellect is to argue that this utopian element is becoming more utopian, the more it is propelled by the increasing contradictions of capital's long, slow diminution of living labour as the universal producer and measure of value. If today it is hard to forecast a revolution, or to believe that a unified historical action can bring the downfall of capital, this is not exclusively because of capital's ability to cope with innovation. In the influential work of Lawrence Lessig (2004) and Yochai Benkler (2006), liberal proponents of 'régime change' in intellectual property law and economics respectively, the failure of capital to respond to the potential of user-generated innovation and the open nature of content creation can be healed through the adoption of new modes of regulation, and new business models. Similarly in the analysis of convergence between internet and telecommunications, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 'lock-in' business model of the telcos is incompatible with the open standards of the internet, and that the use of proprietary technical standards to retain customer loyalty is actively damaging the potential of the telcos to maximize revenues on their investment in bandwidth. More radical theorists of network cultures like Richard Barbrook (1998), Tiziana Terranova (2004) and Alex Galloway (2004) project more radical outcomes, though few of them look like revolution. The observation that capital failed to collapse according to classical Marxism must then be considered alongside analyses that suggest that it is constrained to change in ways which strategic sectors like telecommunications, pharmacology and media industries deeply dislike and distrust. Most importantly, the prediction of revolution, insofar as it is a prediction, is an attempt to control the nature of the emergent future. Commentators as politically opposed as Matthew Fuller (2003) and Eric von Hippel (2005) share a belief that the emergence of the radically new is dependent on maintaining the virtuality of the present, that is, its capacity to become in future other than it is now, a capacity which is deeply damaged by contemporary property laws, crucial instrument of the extraction of surplus value today; and equally by the processes of planning in which the regulation of the future by the present reduces its ability to be different As Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno once agreed, utopia can have no content (Bloch 1988). The processes through which the future emerges as different from the present, and thence any hope we might have for a better future, can only be stymied by prediction

Sensation

Sensation lies at the interface of the world as given and the moment of perception, the moment of being-in-the-world, save only that it is not (yet) a matter of being but of the mutual becoming of sensory apparatus and the manifold, a chill moment of whatever we might call the opposite of recognition. Aesthesis as sensation is prior to perception (which is far closer to recognition, the typical, indeed the ordinary, and to that extent the ideological hypostasis of the manifold as a collection of givens). The task of specifically aesthetic perception is to distinguish not the banal, but such factors as the dimensional, material, energetic or informational qualities of both what is sensed and of the act of sensing. This implies an estrangement (ostranenie) in the objectivation of objects, a Peircean firstness equally engaged by aesthetic, scientific and philosophical endeavours which share this process of making-virtual from the raw material of space-time, matter-energy, entropy and emergence.

This is the kind of look at the world which fails to recognise it, and in that moment of confusion discovers the radical alterity of the sensory moment of aesthesis, the privileged moment at which world (inclusive of social and communications worlds) and sensorium interact and are for that brief moment as one. Actualisation of the virtual that occurs in the aesthetic work is that discovery of the discrete tendencies of the phenomenon, distinguishing its qualities, not necessarily to name them but to translate into other materials, a process which can be clearly seen in Pisarro's canvases, where each dab of colour corresponds to a fragment of the real scene. Much of this process of translation is however rule-governed, and those rules themselves inscribed into the technological capabilities of the devices to hand – palette, lens, film stock etc – and of the inevitable presence of the perceiver.

notes towards the politics of wonder

I cannot deny that I pursue this path for the sheer pleasure of it, for the virtuous (not to say smug) enjoyment and communication of one of the great joys, one that in its intensity, its commonness, its wealth and its equality is moreover an emblem of hope in a dark enough epoch. I am aware of the utopian diension of this work, and of the criticisms that can be and should be aimed at such high-minded and impractical imaginings. This project started in the rocky paths of negative dialectics. It is an attempt to develop a more positive, and to that extent practical way of thinking through the implications of materialism. My ambition is then to write towards an ontology of light, in the spirit in which Adorno writes, a propos the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, that metaphysics stands

against scientism, for example Wittgenstein's position that fundamentally consciousness has to do only with that which is the case. That might call forth another definition: metaphysics is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or is not merely the case, and yet must be thought, because that which, as one says, is the case, compels us to do so (cited in metaphysics: 196)

I believe the analysis of practice, and the remaking of the idea of form as informaing, are the royal road to this mode of ontological thought about media. The dream of the architect, as Gael Turnbull writes, depends on the patience of the bricklayer. Before demanding that patience, we should first attempt to recognise it, and then attempt to share the dream. The resulting edifice will only be the better for it.

on freedom

The problem dogs Western philosophy. Kant's moral philosophy for example rests on an antinomy between the laws of nature on the one hand, and freedom as the ability to instigate an action which is not caused by them, even though the act itself and its consequences must abide by those laws as well as their own motivation. Thus Kant can argue that freedom is rooted in causality; that both abject obedience to nature and absolute freedom would produce chaos; and that order depends on the restraining power of freedom over the blind determination of physics. Commenting on these antinomies in his lecture series of 1961 (2000: 71), Adorno notes that the resulting rigour of the categorical imperative derives from Kant's embrace of freedom, so defined, to the exclusion of all other contenders for the title of 'the good'; and that as a result, perhaps, Kant's reason is condemned to being 'reasonable', to the exclusion of contradiction. So much so, indeed, that Arendt could argue, with reference to the categorical imperative, that it is 'as though the one and the same imperative , "Thou shalt not contradict yourself" is axiomatic for logic and ethics' (Arendt 2003: 153). For Kant natural causes will always be 'subaltern', says Adorno, which is a contradiction firstly because both causality and freedom are 'unmoved movers', that is absolutes, despite the fact that natural causes are supposedly subaltern, and yet freedom is obliged nonetheless to obey them. Moreover, as Adorno observes, Kant may be right to see the infinite regress of causes as an absurdity; but diminishing each natural cause to subalternity doesn't leave enough causation to cause everything. In Marx, we might feel constrained to add, the proletariat's historical destiny acts like a law of nature, and one with enough causality to produce the social; but that it is the freedom of the bourgeoisie that paradoxically stops its from effecting its goals. I start with this problem of freedom because it is far from clear that freedom is a Good in the moral sense, and that it may be neither source nor goal of the aesthetic. In fact, to the contrary, I take it as axiomatic that communication, which I take to be the central issue at stake in the relations between aesthetics and power, is both subject to the laws of nature and is in many respects a law of nature itself.