Theodicy of Communication

In a talk at the Digital Aesthetic 3 exhibition in Preston, Peter Campus, speaking of the emergence of what Lévi-Strauss would call pensée sauvage, suggested that the world of primal mediation is hell.

Underlying this perception is the principle that mediation is indeed primary, and that communication is a special case of mediation. Mediation belongs to the concept that everything mediates: that mediating one thing to another is the nature of reality, the essential connectivity of everything. Communication builds out of mediation the nodes which we then learn to see as subjects and objects, as senders, messages, channels and receivers.

Mediation, the intimate ecology of everything, had to be ripped apart to constitute communication. Communication is thus at a first moment the means by which domination and expropriation are secured. At the same time, however, communication makes explicit, precisely by separating, the interdependence of people, but to the exclusion of things, of the environing world (techné and physis.

As automation expands from the factory (organisation of humans and ancestral intelligence) to the internet of things, it strives to complete the universality of the commodity form and probabilistic management of populations. But the vast statistical warehouse of indifferent data begins to yield to the specificity – irreducible and im-mense (unmeasurable) – of the anecdote: the reconnection of the riven parts, the new mediation – peer-to-peer no longer as property of population but as crowd, as particles aligned in the magnetic field of their shared and mutual desire.

Against the immanence of primal mediation, the emergent mediation has learnt from the disconnect of communication the absence of the object of desire. It is now that something more which the commodity always evoked in its false promise of satisfaction, but freed from its bogus anchorage in commodity exchange.

Anecdotal Evidence (first pass)

The dominant models of truth (and knowledge more broadly) in the 21st century do not include anecdotes. Anecdotal evidence is down-graded in common parlance, current affairs, and the neo-liberal university. Data (especially 'big data'), statistics and (with exceptions) models are more trusted. The anecdote, as the prized tool of humanities research, should not be cast as an inherited practice whose archives should be protected: it should be valued as a uniquely powerful method (and site) of analysis and interpretation. At some future date I want to do this properly, with chapter and verse from key concepts like Geertz's thick description, looking back to the vicissitudes of testimonio in Latin American literature, poring perhaps over the use of exempla in early modern literature, and the place of the anecdote among the ancients. Here just the beginnings of a thought.

In an earlier post on happiness, I cited Adorno's principle that 'the greater good' is always a means to defer, displace and deny the happiness of the here and now. We could also mention Derrida's idea that an ethical act only occurs when there is no code of ethics operating to instruct us: when, that is, we have to act on our own resources in the face of a specific situation. Whatever the place of rules (such as the laws of physics or the statistical likelihood of a utilitarian benefit), both happiness and ethical action occur in unique moments. Tolstoy's principle (Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way) should also reflect that happy families have their own uniqueness. Humanities research concerns itself, at least in part, with the unique constellation of happiness and unhappiness, and the unique moments of ethical action. My model here is Bresson's Au Hasard Balthasar.

In law, witnessing calls up the untrustworthy character of the witness. The anecdote must be told. It involves
the event observed
the observation
the recounting
and the situation of the recounting – its position in arguing a case

Thus there is a degree of performativity in the anecdote, at least as much as there is indexicality: its truth concerns both fidelity to the event and the observation, and to the account (the aesthetic form) and the situation of the account. The anecdote concerns the event, recasting an old event in terms of its importance to a new situation, one where an evaluation or decision is in process of being reached. The anecdote has the power to move through time – this is its ontological ground as fidelity.

We might be better thinking of photography – especially cinematography – as anecdote, rather than as datum.

We might be better placed considering a cultural moment (Geertz's example of a wink) or an artwork as an anecdote, whose meaning – whose relation to both past event and present situation – is not permanently fixed, not because there was no initiating event to be witnessed, but precisely because there was.

Net.control, climate politics and a defense of angels

Isn't it wonderful what goverments can do when they set their minds to it? The UK govenrment (Tory wing) are stumbling over their dif for net surveillance while the BRICK countries move once more to get the ITU to take over the running of the internet (ITU being a UN body is responsible to nation-states; but given the deregulation of telecoms is now also subject to the will of corporate members). For some details check New Scientist, the daring if clumsily named WCITleaks and internet governance consultants nxt who have published the restricted documents from the discussions. Avaaz have also started a petition, and there are more links from their site. So there is always the possibility of getting political movement when enough power is brokered through UN agencies. But what about issues where nation states don't want top change? The Doha meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change just broke up with almost nothing to show for istelf: a pitifully small fund, marked by foot-dragging in actual payments, for poor regions devastated by weather whose probabilities are reckoned to be increased through emissions from the welthy. And, er, that's about it. The Irish Times has a suitably downbeat account from one campaigner: “We lobby and campaign so hard to move things forward, but all we get are crumbs from the table.” Apparently more US citizens believe in the existence of angels than accept the reality of climate change. They may have something there. The internet may not be the engine of wisdom we once hoped it might be; but an internet censored by the Saudis will be an engine of stupidity. We might need some angels: our politicians are clearly failing at anythng useful, wise or good.

Bathwater

The oil rush precipitated by the lowest levels of Arctic ice-fields on record: you might as well warm up the bathtub by slitting your wrists. Except it is our wrists that are bleeding to warm the jacuzzis of the mega-wealthy.

The Hour of the Great refusal

from a talk at the Digital Aesthetics 3 event held in Preston earlier in October 2012. The talk was an angry rant about waste in digtial media which gradually turned into a meditation on the intense, poetic essay that is John Akomfrah's film The Nine Muses.

Digital media, and perhaps especially digital visual media, are time-based arts. The shutter opens, light pours in, but from that moment on the CCD and CMOS chips organise light by sampling and sub-sampling, organising the emitted electrons in channels before applying the clock-function to drain them into store. Like the scanned display, the electronic image is already temporal; but unlike older tube cameras, the Red One and similar HD digital cameras operate like film in the first instance – the open shutter, the chemical reaction to the presence of photons – and like film has its moment of latency when the tiny electrochemical response is amplified. But then the new internal temporality of the frame distinguishes them: there is no complete image in electronic media.

This incompleteness is beautiful. It denies the wholeness of the unified commodity, embracing the unstable movements of demand. The ancestors inhabiting the machine crowd out wholeness. As In his recent book on What Cinema Is, Dudley Andrew approvingly cites Serge Daney: 'The Cahiers axiom is this: the cinema has a rapport with the real, and that the real is not what is represented. And that's final'. Unlike some film scholars, he does not distinguish on the basis of digitality, but on the ambition to capture realia that do not give themselves to vision, like the holocausts haunting Resnais' Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Electronic images are incomplete so that they can escape the universal: they must inhabit time.

. . .

The intimate ecology of everything which I call mediation had to be ripped apart to constitute communication. Communication at this first moment is the means by which domination and expropriation are secured. At the same time, communication makes explicit, precisely by separating, the interdependence of people, albeit to the exclusion of things and world (techne and physis). As automation expands from the factory organisation of humans and ancestors to the internet of things and the ubiquitous surveillance of natural processes, it begins to reopen the world closed by the universality of the commodity form and probabilistic management of populations. The vast statistical warehouse of indifferent data begins to yield to the specificity – irreducible and im-mense (immeasurable) – of the anecdote. The new crowd is no longer population as indifferent mass but peer-to-peer mutuality of singularities, particles aligned by the magnetism of their shared desires.

The Nine Muses never suggests that “the immigrant” is a viable category of knowledge or experience: each fragment opens onto another world, another story. The specificity of each is maintained, but without sacrificing what is common to them. To stand in a world that refuses, and yet which is home; to travel hopefully.

happiness

The eudaemonist believes in happiness as a good, indeed the Good. The judicious eudaemonist Aristotle weighted various claims and decided that the life of the mind was the greatest happiness. We might like to say: beauty, love, the contemplation or cultivation of plants, animals and landscapes . . . Our happinesses are idiosyncratic, but everyone recognizes that some are more trustworthy or (not necessarily the same thing) longer lasting. Things we buy rarely make us happy in the same way dappled shade or embracing your beloved do.

Politics should be no less than the quest for happiness, for the conditions of happiness. The US Constitution backs down here: the right to the pursuit of happiness is not the same as happiness as the pre-eminent goal of the polis.

How are we to be happy? The question has two terms: who is this 'we'? And what is this common happiness (or should it be happinesses?)? I take from Adorno the principle that neither I nor we have the right to demand that anyone – not I, not we, not, certainly, they – should sacrifice happiness for some higher goal: there is no higher goal. We should suffer no unhappiness in ourselves or in others, no matter what pretense of greater or deferred good.

Happiness is not a right but a duty. Something we must strive for. Happiness as Agamben notes in his little essay on Magic (in Profanations) is never deserved or earned. It comes to us by luck or by magic, but it never comes if we – this still mysterious we – remove the condition of its possibility. One of the myriad ways we can do that is by destroying our environments, urban or natural, or for that matter cultural. A poisoned environment reduces the chances of happiness, and for that formal reason alone is to be fought against.

Happiness is not a personal goal. The persona is a mask, a performance for an audience – for mother, lover, child, boss, employee, student, teacher . . . Today we perform our multiple personae on blogs, microblogs, social media sites, SMS . . . each performing a facet and perhaps some kind of truth about our selves leaks out, but we know that in each instance we do not and cannot put out into the world everything we are, have been and can become. We are traversed by joys and fears that are not our own: a sporting win, a fiscal crisis. We are perpetually other than ourselves, and so cannot be selfish in looking for happiness.

Nor can we be happy in the presence of pain. Though we have inured ourselves to beggars, and learned to triumph at another's cost, the toy snatched form another child is always a poisoned chalice, and we scarcely know how to enjoy what we fail to share. If each of us is equipped with instinctual drives to survive, reproduce and shape the immediate environs to our comfort, we have learned that these ends are worst achieved alone: in this at least Hobbes was right. Our happiness is framed and formed in the need for the other, to make babies, prepare food, and build worlds, and as the necessary audience for our performances of self. Happiness is framed and formed again by our participation in the other's survival, reproduction, comfort and performance. The illimitable demand of the Other is not ethical, as Levinas stipulates, but political: the polis of the human that requires absolutely the happiness of others in order to find the happiness that is mine.

Our desires are not ours alone. Great tides of need sweep us up, sweep through our very veins and synapses. The same forces that make us individual make us social. Each of us is a nexus of the same needs and desires that forms and frames our fellows. This is that becoming-human which, severally and in unison, we embark upon with our first cries, and which maps out the task of the polis, of politics as conducting towards the Good Life, and the associations and movements we create in pursuit of it.

Alas. The institutional politics of actually existing polities are machines for defining exclusively the 'us' who deserve happiness. Since happiness cannot be deserved, this mode of polity – ours, based on wealth as privation (property as the right to deprive another of the enjoyment thereof) – therefore both destroys happiness and makes it impossible (because such polities pretend that happiness is possible only for an 'us' at the expense of a 'them'). Debt is the invention of a future absolutely dependent on the past. To that extent, our economic system is designed to kill the future as the open possibility of magic and therefore to kill the very possibility of happiness.

Happiness cannot exist in the abstract but only in the concrete, specific instance. We give only 'selves' to surveillance and to electoral politics: performances couched in clichés that lend themselves to management. Such selves and their efficient aggregations define human yearning, joy and suffering as norms and deviations. But we live in unique situations and events, not averages. Whenever the study of people takes on a scientific style (taxonomic psychologies, the pseudo-science of economics divorced from politics) it fails in its duty to happiness. The only truthful evidence is anecdotal, just as the only credible ethics is one that decides each act on its own conditions, not those of a rule.

Redefining the 'us' so that it includes non-humans redefines the human and the nonhuman, and happiness as what can only be achieved in common, in future, and in particular. We do not save a forest by starving its inhabitants; nor do we save the inhabitants by destroying the forest. Unlike freedom, which Mandela claimed to be indivisible but which is everywhere divided between the freedom of the rich and the debt-slavery of the poor, happiness is indivisible; but it is also (unlike freedom) multiple. As long as the happinesses of the forest and its inhabitants are mutually exclusive, we have failed.

This is where the real work begins

Going for Goldsmiths

It is the First of August 2012 and the official start of my new post as professor of film and television in the School of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I'll be teaching on the MA in Film and Screen Studies, working on PhD admissions, and developing new and old research avenues with colleagues across the best centre for my kind of work in Europe, and one of the best in the world.