nettime: C++ - Tim Druckrey

[druckrey@interport.net (Timothy Druckrey) (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>)]

                                       C++

                                Timothy Druckrey



        Aligned with the revolutionary shifts in media have come some
equally expressive metaphors: connectionism, parallelism, nanotechnology,
associative systems, fuzzy mathematics, chaos, distributed or ubiquitous
computing, immersion, interactivity, hypermedia, biocomputing, networking,
smart technologies, tele-fill in blank -an intelligent ambience of a set of
interfaces redefining a relationship with language, memory, the body,
aesthetics, politics, and communication. The promises and fallacies of a
cybersphere obstruct some of the essential cultural issues of digital media
in the yet vague hope that matters of access and meaning will fulfill
themselves in the future. This is a difficult presumption of technology and
creativity linked with the scientific view that a problem is not so much
surmountable as it is contingent and evolving. For so much work utilizing
electronic media, the characteristics (often seen as limitations) of the
delivery system represent a hurdle to be overcome rather than a form to be
interrogated. Digital media presupposes a communicative system that assumes
the assimilation of representation into the technosphere, the neurosphere,
and the genosphere. Responses to the stimuli of experiential phenomena are
being replaced by study of the neuro-reflexive activities of the
brain-as-operating system. In this system, representation is less
significant than rendering, agency is less significant than behavior,
cultures are less significant than connections.

The issues raised by the relationship between the development of
cybernetics, communication, urbanism, identity, and the network pose
stunning challenges to the traditions of culture. Simultaneously, these
issues once again accentuate the necessity to consider the whole function
of culture within the technological conception of connectionism and
distributed systems. It is clear that systems theories of communication,
intelligence, biology, identity, collectivity, democracy, and politics will
not fully suffice to encompass the meaning of electronic culture. If there
is a shift represented by these transformations in the late twentieth
century, it is not one effected by an attempt to resolve notions of
"closed" systems dialectically,  but to confront discursively constituted
networks: the biology network, the identity network, the culture network,
the political network, the communication network, the image network. Hence,
it is no surprise that a metaphor of connectionism has emerged to designate
the system of nodes in a circulatory system of telematic epistemology.

Theories of communication will need to be reconfigured in terms of
interactivity, dispersal, and technological representation. This public
sphere is taking shape amid tenuous cease-fires and the identity wars of
the past years. Zealously promoted, the technologies of networked
communication seem to offer remedies for the uprooted cultures of the first
modernity and confrontations with the return of the polis to the condition
of political affiliation and discursive collaboration. As much concerned
with ideology as with identity, the netopolis is more than a new
cyber-sociological issue. It stands as a possible location for the
establishment of historical identity in terms of the conditions of
dispersed affiliation and contingent power. The network breaks the grip of
point-to-point limitations of telephony and shatters the dominance of
broadcast media. In their place is a dynamic system in which the
abandonment of location in not a signifier of placelessness, and in which
representation is not a sign of the loss of the Real. Indeed, considering
the accelerated pace of research initiatives, the development of immersive
media are heading towards a rendezvous with neuro-cognition.


II.


"Is it a fact...that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has
become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of
time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with
intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but a
thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!" (Nathaniel
Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables)


Inspired, no doubt, by the telegraph, Hawthorne recognized the shifting
ecology occurring in the 19th century. Indeed the telegraph, fueled by the
development of the railroad, broke the limits not only of space but of
time. Unimaginable speeds of transmission across a vast web of sites
communicating in a language that precursed binary code surely suggested
"instinct with intelligence" and the end of "substance" as a signifier of
material presence. No small surprise that Marshall McLuhan would use the
remark by Hawthorne as a precedent as he evolved a communicative practice
riding on the problematic of technological progress as a measure of social
transformation. Political to the extent that the techno-logic of post-war
western economies seemed triumphant, the issues of the media/message bond
wasn't so much different than that of the linking of signifier and
signified in semiotics. Encoded discourse, afterall, is rooted in the
research environment of 19th century, whose "mastery" of nature was deeply
entwined in systems. These discourses-of representation, survelliance,
mechanics, medicine, physics, and communication-are the basis of the
theoretical frame that seems to haunt our relationships with the modern
world. And while the grand schemes of modernity were so allied with the
discourses of power politics and mastery, they both established and
dismantled the linear concept of progress they so blithely presumed.
Nature, linear and distributed, was no longer a suitable metaphor for
progress in an era surpassing biological evolution. And as the
industrialization of technology reached its first apex in the 1920s, it was
sundering the flawed principle of development it so relied on. Technology
reconfigured the equation between nature and culture. What we inherit from
the development of communication technology, visualization, and
representation is a legacy of empowerment rooted in expertise camouflaging
power. Deeply implicated in the systems structure of technoscience, are the
practices of domination that ground the various utopias of the cognitive.

        But the history of media technologies, with a few notable
exceptions, has been primarily focused on either the metaphor of the
observable (even while the model of "moral objectivity" has been dismantled
more than once in both scientific history-Heisenberg or Gšdel-or in
cultural assessments of scientific practice-Latour), or in the attempt to
resuscitate the culture industries in the tele-broadcast era. No patron
saint, Marshall McLuhan's iridescent rationale of imperialism as
globalization mirrored the multinational development that grounded the
merging media of the 1960s. Pithy slogans poised ideas on the tightrope
between morality and propaganda-precisely aligned with the advertising
logos (that's logos) that fueled the galaxy of fragmentation. Joining
televisual and informational technologies was the basis of a social
transformation in which broadcast media seemingly swept across the 'global
village' at the same time providing what Hans Enzensberger rightly called a
"reactionary doctrine of salvation"  rooted in the Goebbels' effort to
"retribalize" Germany using the new technology of the radio in the 1930s.
But the McLuhanization of media did not then, and will not now, salvage the
imperatives of the collapse of Modernity so much as it served as a patch
linking utopic dispersions of media with the broad corporate and political
objectives in which these technologies were developing. And let's not
forget that Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964) already unmasked
the potential effects of the superficial culture of the medium or that the
tactics of "repressive tolerance" shadowing the counterculture were
evolving as elements in the battle for communication and control. Not
surprising that the shift from the "cultural industry" to the
"consciousness industry," as Enzensberger articulates it in the essay
"Constituents of a Theory of Media," represents both new technology and new
strategies for their utilization. Against the backdrop of "resignation,"
an understanding of the reciprocity between production and reception
emerges in which
technology can be used directly as mobilization.

The effects of the dispersal of information, power, localized politics, the
refunctioning of military research and development into cybertechnologies
has led to renewed chaos in which virtualization supplants illusion and in
which the deployment of technologies (bio, neuro, info, geno) is again
masked as an communications revolution-with Mcluhan once again evoked as
the "ventriloquist and prophet" for the born-again 'global village'
sprouting in the tele-present totality of the world wide web. And if the
frenzied systems thinking of the network is not eclipsed by the
tele-fanaticism of the right or the tele-marketing of net commerce, there
is some fertile territory to populate. But considering the trend toward
regulation, signified most cogently (in the US) by The Telecommunications
Act of 1996, the incorporation of the net is imminent. Already, the
relationships between reception and behavior, morality and politics have
found common ground in the attempt to devastate networked imagination in
the name of fundamentalist cliches of ethics masquerading as the archetypes
of an ambiguous virtual ethics modeled on the speech-as-act theory. It
cannot be a surprise that the panoptic and oppressive metaphors of Bentham
and Foucault are re-invented in the cybersphere in the guise of "agents."

Yet lurking beneath the transformation of communication are the twin
concepts of reception: experience and the temporal. Indeed, as the
reassessment of 19th century technologies will reveal, the inflections of
technology into behavior suggest more than a cultural environment
increasingly surrounded by machines, but one in which the regulation of the
everyday were beginning to be formed within the technologies of
visualization offered by photography, the regulation of temporality offered
by the clock, and the complicated regulation of information increasingly
regulated by the collapse of the geographical boundaries.  Exchange,
transmission, mobility, were to be linked not only with the industrial
issues of production and capital, but to the notion of the self, the
legitimation of modernity, and the ramifications of representation.


If the social machine manufactures representations, it also manufactures
itself from representations...Decentered, in panic, thrown into confusion
by all this new magic of the visible, the human eye finds itself affected
with a series of limits and doubts. The mechanical eye, the photographic
lens, while it intrigues and fascinates, functions also as a guarantor of
the identity of the visible with the normality of vision.

This remark about what Jean Louis Comolli identifies as "the frenzy of the
visible," was concerned with the second half of the nineteenth century. By
1918, Dziga Vertov was writing: "I am the camera's eye. I am the machine
which shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today, I am
forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement...." The
machine and the body are joined as perception itself becomes "enframed" in
expression. What seems so clear is that the modification of the visual
world in modernity is characterized by the consolidation of the scientific
mastery over nature and a representational model wholly linked with
technology.

But while the essentials are comparable, the culture of Modernity, in which
the mechanization of representation evolved, has been surpassed. A
technological model has been usurped by a cybernetic model. If there is a
common denominator within the discourses of postmodernity, it is that the
ascendancy of a system of scientific visualization and the loss of any
totalizing model of either the "real" world or its representations can be
put into place. But even beyond the phenomenological approach that has
characterized most theorization of representation, a shift has occurred in
which the represented cannot be assumed to have a correlate in the material
world. Throughout the development of the 'virtualization' of
representation, its always shaky epistemological foundation has been
crumbling. The linear opposition of a presumed "real" against a presumed
"unreal," has perpetuated the pseudo-moral crisis of representation as
clearly as the materialist approach over-simplifies it. "We mistake," wrote
Deleuze on Bergson, "the more for the less, we behave as though nonbeing
existed before being, disorder before order and the possible before
existence, as though being came to fill in a void, order to organize a
preceding disorder, the real to realize a primary possibility." Simply put,
the reconfiguration of representation in the shift from recording to
rendering must be accompanied by a sustained assessment of the reciprocity,
in Lacanian terms, between the "symbolic" and the "imaginary." A
technological discourse of simulation has made this an urgent concern. As
Slavoj Zizek, invoking Lacan, remarked: "virtuality is already at work
operating in the symbolic order as suchÉto the extent to which virtual
phenomenon retroactively enable us to discover to what extent all our most
elementary self-experience was virtual."  In this computational system, the
'virtualization' of representation is deeply connected to the techniques of
the pivotal post-cybernetic agenda: the cognition industry.

Discourses of production and reception, principles of interface design,
theories of perception, trajectories of narrative, practices of
implementation, strategies of distribution...A litany of issues
reinvigorated by the consequences of digital media. The list of course
mutates continuously, altered by accelerated innovation and by virtually
unfathomable technical development. Incessant claims of revision and the
stakes of marketing ground so much of technoculture. Endless promises-the
kind of positivistic euphoria that haunted modernity-re-emerge in an
environment of almost tidal accessibility. Speculative consumption fills a
gap between the end of industry and the beginning of the virtual
corporation; a field of information driven by speculation.

        As reproducibility and the issues of mass psychology set the agenda
for a critique of culture during the 1930s, the technologies of
transmission and consciousness wound themselves into the broadcast era
after the 1950s. Joined by the tele-visual and the cybernetic, the
inexorable drift towards an information economy and the emergence of the
"consciousness industry" were recognized as pivots in the discourse of
transformed reproducibility. Cultural theory was embroiled in a dialectic
with the circulatory system of information while the next generation was
emerging with more interest in neurocognitive issues than in those of
perception and ideology. Indeed the spheres of electronic and genetic media
are heading towards a rendezvous with cognition.

 Indeed, while issues of space and duration dominated discourses of
modernity, the related issues of interface and narrative have come to stand
within postmodernity as signifiers of a far more intricate situation. Worn
traditions of the public sphere, the sociology of post-industrialization,
the discreteness of identity, have been supplanted by a form of distributed
imbeddedness-or better, the immersion-of the self in the mediascapes of
tele-culture which must generate a communicative practice whose boundaries
are not mapped in physical space. Instead, the technologies of new media
map a geography of cognition, of reception, and of communication emerging
in territories whose hold on matter is ephemeral, whose position in space
is tenuous, and whose presence is measured in acts of participation rather
than coincidences of location.


***

        "the explosion of causality that, according to the physicists, was
supposed to end tomorrow in a gigantic implosion of finality, a theoretical
or meta-theoretical construction capable of saving matter in the absence of
sense, of preserving the creation of a creator, a secret desire for
autonomy and for universal automation uniting all contemporary apocalyptic
trends, this revelation of the precariousness of the human will, this face
of hopelessness that is perfectly matched to the degree of ambition among
the sciences, this deception in which the idea of nature from the
enlightenment blurs into-and finally becomes confused with-the idea of the
real, left over from the century of the speed of light."  Paul Virilio

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