Grief

We have not yet learned to mourn in the era of multitude. Grief makes us One but it also makes us Subject. And it happens spontaneously. Not the London bombings, not Oklahoma. Monuments to these are merely pious. The media did not perpetrate it: we need to grieve. Real grief in the 21st century is mass, spontaneous and under the yoke.

If only this were a displaced mourning for the species, habitats and populations we have lost.

Post-Cartesian Community, Post-Kantian Cosmopolitanism

Strikes me that the immense sprawl of the working paper After Tolerance will detain people too long: here's the conclusion to save on download time: as Brian Holmes smartly expressed it, the idea of the piece is to give ANT a push witth the help of Rancière

Rancière's concept of the political as constituted by its exclusion points to just the same phenomenon of incompleteness, of non-identity of the putative universal, which draws market traders to the market's lack in being. But because culturalists, sociologists and political philosophers cling to the concept of identity – gendered, regional, cultural, ethnic, sexual but always already biological – they have deep problems understanding the radical challenge posed by environmental politics, which not only challenges where the political ends, and what constitutes the universe of universalism, but the founding difference which claims their loyalty, the difference between humans and anything else whatever. The cost of constructing human identity is the refusal of political, social, cultural existence to what is different: the machinic and natural phyla. As a result, we have no basis on which to recognise or dialogue with the world, only a vaguely felt and expressed desire to take responsibility for it, to speak in its place, to represent it. In this we succumb to that politics of 'raising awareness' which Jodi Dean (2005) has so assiduously shown to be a sham form of communication under conditions of communicative capitalism.

The only way to rid politics of its foundational evil is to open it to the non-human. In this alone is there hope for a political economy which is truly different from the present, and only in such difference is there the possibility of hope. The post-Cartesian community, stepping beyond both identity and the rule of private property which it derives from and supports, is the basis for a post-Kantian cosmopolis, one where the destiny of growth is not pre-destined, because the cosmopolis is not exclusive to any one species, any more than it s to any one identity, even that of the universal law, universal knowledge, or a universal God. A cosmopolis of differences that make a difference, and in difference creating the possibility that there may be some later state of affairs. In the first instance, the challenge for internet political economy is to reveal and release the natural and technical (ancestral) participants excluded from both wealth and citizenship. Only in such radical steps will the possibility of a human future be made possible, and a goal beyond the tyranny of instrumental reason and cash. We might begin with the only tribe who have a passion equal to Knorr Cetina's traders, the hackers celebrated by Parikka (2007) and Mackenzie (2006). We have yet to discover the passion that will make the green world integral to the problem of a new political economy of the internet.

A fundamental question, in this framework, is whether the play we witness in social networks constitutes a demand for a political subjectivity, or indeed, extending the argument by analogy to the economic sphere, for an economic subjectivity. The peer-to-peer movement is clearly articulated as a new economics, and intrinsically a new politics, but in instances like Facebook it would appear not to be. A condition of subjectivity is to be aware – aware of the relations one has entered into. Such awareness may not be a property of immersion into social networks (just as loss of self-awareness is characteristic of immersive experiences (since at least the dawn of silent reading memorialised in Augustine's Confessions [1961: Book 6, Chapter 3, 113-5], when the students hesitated to disturb the deeply ruminating St Anselm, immersed in the texts of the Fathers of the Church. Such stillness is, in Rancière's terms, a turn away from action and the political, and perversely an acceptance of the chaos from which it withdraws). Awareness is characterised by demand: by a demand for something which is not on offer. The demand for inclusion is only part of this: the demand is for a realignment of the Good for the purpose of which the political exists in the first instance. This demand is not, one suspects, integral to facebook, but is integral to P2P networks, and to the SLOC (small, local, open, connected) model proposed by Ezio Manzini (2009). Such models, to the extent that they are practiced already, are gateways, not roads: the whole point about the future is that it is unknown (unlike the present we know and the past we know about). An administered future – of risk management and five year plans alike, is no future at all. A political future is not constituted by 'emerging markets' (what else might they emerge as?) but by the unforeseeable demands of the excluded for a new polity, which must be achieved in the context of struggle with the old that renews, radically, its presuppositions, including its ethical basis. Since we cannot help but think ahead, we plan, but plan for what is genuinely unknown and unforeseeable. So a future which is imaginable, but not administered out of existence. Imagine: a world of communication between the phyla . . . .

Workplace media

Our key media of the 21st century are fundamentally spatial. Though it is still a truiism of film and video studies that the mainstream media are dominated by narrative and illusion, the truly dominant media of the early 21st century are geographical informatio systems (GIS), spreadhseets and databases. These workplace media operate by spatialising time. Where once voyagers recorded their journeys as narratives, the early imperial navigations turned to a more schematic system of recording space, turning to the grid of longitude and latitude to create a globe which already contained the unexplored regions of the Southern hemisphere. This level of control increased incrementally, through the Ordnance Survey's addition of contour lines among other features, until, with the introduction of ZIP codes in 1963, mapping could be associated not only with physical but with sociological information. This basic zoning tool could then be associated with such other datasets as census returns, and the move to geographical information systems commenced. The history of the spreadsheet is a denser one but covers a similar history. The critical move came in the migration from the double-entry ledger to the electronic spreadsheets, which no longer carried the residual chronological ordering that paired accountancy with narrative. That move had been achieved rather earlier in bureaucratic record keeping, with the invention of the vertical filing cabinet by Edwin Seibels in 1898 (and the slightly earlier innovation of horizontal filing systems). Again, the ledger had retained some aspects of temporal ordering, especially in terms of how searches were to be conducted. The filing cabinet spatialised these searches, allowing quasi-random alphabetical and numerical searches, as well as the use of 'metadata' such as labelled drawers to isolate files of particular interest. Te database completed this spatialisation of data, separating, for example, biographical from geographical, financial from medical records, but allowing for cross-referencing. These three instruments, GIS, spreadsheets and databases, express and enable the managerialisation of society noted by Foucault and subsequent scholars. These spatialising tendencies correspond with the arithmetic drive in digital media. The grid, and the arithmetical nomenclature for colour distinctions, identify points rather than continua, ideally replicable entities excluding both semantic reference and temporal change.

Snatched from a chapter drafted for Resolutions 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces edited by Ming-Yuen Ma & Erika Suderburg.

The draft chapter has discussions of some favourite video and animation work of the last few years. It argues that these and other examples from Robert cahen, Daniel Crooks and Susan Collins among others escape the confines of the cartesian grid and begin to create new orderings of space, or disturb the grid by bringing in time. Those with a good web presence are:
458nm, Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Tom Weber, Filmakademie Baden Würtenberg / Polynoid, Germany, 6 mins 54 sec, 2006, http://polynoid.org/polynoid_458nm.html
Asparagus, Suzan Pitts, US, 20 mins, 1979, http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/animation/watch/v6336800ArqyhghK
Ryan, Chris Landreth, National Film Board, Canada, 13 mins 54 sec, 2004, http://nfb.ca/film/ryan/
The Tale of How, The Blackheart Gang, South Africa, 4 mins 29 sec, 2006, http://theblackheartgang.com/the-household/the-tale-of-how/

If a lion could talk . . .

This is how eco-horror enters the dialogue, by asserting that the exclusion of the green world from democratic politics destroys the claims of every democracy to universality. Asserting meanings which, in their non-human origins, appear as horrifying, they assert the broken nature of any claim to universality derived from an exclusion. While the Deep Ecology movement's use of direct action is alluring, in the same way that contemporary Hollywood is deeply tied up with narratives of revenge, revenge too has the feeling of a politics which has no part for dialogue, and to that extent is no politics at all. In later writings, Wittgenstein argued 'If a lion could talk, we would not understand him' (Wittgenstein 1968: II, xi, p. 223). The world not only speaks but roars in our ears, in a tempest of storms, collapsing glaciers, forest fires, mudslides . . . and yet we do not understand. Wittgenstein's point concerned the incommensurable nature of different modes of language. That this is integral to public life is clear from the example of politicians unwilling to engage in debate, and devoted instead to persuasion, to communicating a policy, to raising awareness: effectively to solipsism. While linguistic philosophy might hold this as a permanent and universal condition, political philosophy cannot. It must undertake to find ways to bring the human and the lion into dialogue.

From a chapter submitted to ECO-TRAUMA CINEMA: Technology, Nature, and the End of the World ed Neil Narine

Cultural Identity

On the one hand, indigenous and migrant cinemas point towards the significance of cultural identities, especially in settler nations like Aotearoa and Australia. On the other, it is in general cultural identity which must bear the brunt of the question as to why films from one culture are so frequentl;y difficult to export to people of another. Sadly, it appears that increasing levels of communication – in terms of both access and sheer numbers of images – enabled by the growth of internet communications and digital film equipment have not made our cultural diets more varied. On the contrary, the evidence is that self-reinforcing groups consisting of users who generate content for other users like themselves are producing homogeous but mutually discrete cells of lifestyle demographics which, while they pass for culture, more frequently act as the targets for marketers who can micro-target advertising for the in-group. While cultural identities survive beyond the communicative capitalism of the 21st century, within it, that is within the domains of digital film, they have been supplanted by IDs, the expression in a database economy of indioviduals and their groups as aggregations of data (age, postcode, gender, shopping and browsing preferences . . . ). The database economics of a fundamentally arithmetic recording of both media and audiences drives towards a mass market for hypercapitalist cultural goods, and micro-markets for specialised consumers. In such conditions, cultural identity is at once a spicy addition to the cultural mix, and a desperately needed addition of novelty from outside the self-reproducing system of a market capitalism no longer capable of generating its own invention.

From a piece submitted to the digital issue of Studies in Australasian Cinema

Internet as Factory and Playground

Tthe draft of my paper for the Internet as Factory and Playground conference is onlie at Trebor Scholz's invitation. The slides are available, and so is the talk itself. (The version on Slideshare was an earlier draft version of the talk but I've left it there for the moment).

It is rather different from the abstract, but that is a result of the discussions on iDC list, which have been searching and challenging and all other good things

It now looks at the question of identity as human identity, arguing from rancière's discussion of the origins of politics in the forced inclusion of excluded others, that human identity, as the universal principle governing both Cartesian subjectivity and group identification, is prey to non-identicality. This non--identicality can be understood as a contradiction driving towards a new polity in which the excluded nonhuman actors - critically technological and 'natural' – have the potential to rejuvenate a self-enclosed system of political economy.

Interview

In the course of recording interviews for the Genealogies of Digital Light project, I got interviewed myself. Terry Flaxton included a two-part interview in his Verbatim History of High Definition Technology and Aesthetics. Seeing Terry's artworks in hi-def was a real highlight of the trip: see the Somerset Carnivals and Glastonbury Portraits documentation on his site, and check his blog, High Definition - No Mercy, listed on the right.