THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE Critical Art Ensemble Part 2 of 7 Published by Autonomedia ISBN 1-57027-006-6 The avant-garde never gives up, and yet the limitations of antiquated models and sites of resistance tend to push resistance into the void of disillusionment. It is important to keep the bunkers under siege; however, the vocabulary of resistance must be expanded to include means of electronic disturbance. Just as authority located in the street was once met by demonstration and barricades, the authority that locates itself in the electronic field must be met with electronic resistance. Spatial strategies may not be key in the endeavor, they are necessary for support, at least in the case of broad spectrum disturbance. These older strategies of physical challenge are also better developed, while the electronic strategies are not. It is time to turn attention to the electronic resistance, both in terms of the bunker and the nomadic field. The electronic field is an area where little is known; in such a gamble, one should be ready to face the ambiguous and unpredictable hazards of an untried resistance. Preparations for the double-edged sword should be made. Nomadic power must be resisted in cyberspace rather than in physical space. The postmodern gambler is an electronic player. A small but coordinated group of hackers could introduce electronic viruses, worms, and bombs into the data banks, programs, and networks of authority, possibly bringing the destructive force of inertia into the nomadic realm. Prolonged inertia equals the collapse of nomadic authority on a global level. Such a strategy does not require a unified class action, nor does it require simultaneous action in numerous geographic areas. The less nihilistic could resurrect the strategy of occupation by holding data as hostage instead of property. By whatever means electronic authority is disturbed, the key is to totally disrupt command and control. Under such conditions, all dead capital in the military/corporate entwinement becomes an economic drain--material, equipment, and labor power all would be left without a means of deployment. Late capital would collapse under its own excessive weight. Even though this suggestion is but a science-fiction scenario, this narrative does reveal problems which must be addressed. Most obvious is that those who have engaged cyberreality are generally a depoliticized group. Most infiltration into cyberspace has either been playful vandalism (as with Robert Morris' rogue program, or the string of PC viruses like Michaelangelo), politically misguided espionage (Markus Hess' hacking of military computers, which was possibly done for the benefit of the KGB), or personal revenge against a particular source of authority. The hacker(*) code of ethics discourages any act of disturbance in cyberspace. Even the Legion of Doom (a group of young hackers that put the fear into the Secret Service) claims to have never damaged a system. Their activities were motivated by curiosity about computer systems, and belief in free access to information. Beyond these very focused concerns with decentralized information, political thought or action has never really entered the group's consciousness. Any trouble that they have had with the law (and only a few members break the law) stemmed either from credit fraud or electronic trespass. The problem is much the same as politicizing scientists whose research leads to weapons development. It must be asked, How can this class be asked to destabilize or crash its own world? To complicate matters further, only a few understand the specialized knowledge necessary for such action. Deep cyberreality is the least democratized of all frontiers. As mentioned above, cyberworkers as a professional class do not have to be fully unified, but how can enough members of this class be enlisted to stage a disruption, especially when cyberreality is under state-of-the-art self-surveillance? (*) "Hacker" refers here to a generic class of computer sophisticates who often, but not always, operate counter to the needs of the military/corporate structure. As used here the term includes crackers, phreakers, hackers proper, and cypherpunks. These problems have drawn many artists to electronic media, and this has made some contemporary electronic art so politically charged. Since it is unlikely that scientific or techno-workers will generate a theory of electronic disturbance, artists-activists (as well as other concerned groups) have been left with the responsibility to help provide a critical discourse on just what is at stake in the development of this new frontier. By approaching the legitimate authority of "artistic creation," and using it as a means to establish a public forum for speculation on a model of resistance within emerging techno-culture, the cultural producer can contribute to the perpetual fight against authoritarianism. Further, concrete strategies of image/text communication, developed through the use of technology that has fallen through the cracks in the war machine, will better enable those concerned to invent explosive material to toss into the political-economic bunkers. Postering, pamphleteering, street theater, public art--all were useful in the past. But as mentioned above, where is the "public"; who is on the street? Judging from the number of hours that the average person watches television, it seems that the public is electronically engaged. The electronic world, however, is by no means fully established, and it is time to take advantage of the fluidity through invention, before we are left with only critique as a weapon. Bunkers have already been described as privatized public spaces which serve various particularized functions, such as political continuity (government offices or national monuments), or areas for consumption frenzy (malls). In line with the feudal tradition of the fortress mentality, the bunker guarantees safety and familiarity in exchange for the relinquishment of individual sovereignty. It can act as a seductive agent offering the credible illusion of consumptive choice and ideological peace for the complicit, or it can act as an aggressive force demanding acquiescence for the resistant. The bunker brings nearly all to its interior with the exception of those left to guard the streets. After all, nomadic power does not offer the choice not to work or not to consume. The bunker is such an all- embracing feature of everyday life that even the most resistant cannot always approach it critically. Alienation, in part, stems from this uncontrollable entrapment in the bunker. Bunkers vary in appearance as much as they do in function. The nomadic bunker--the product of "the global village"--has both an electronic and an architectural form. The electronic form is witnessed as media; as such it attempts to colonize the private residence. Informative distraction flows in an unceasing stream of fictions produced by Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and CNN. The economy of desire can be safely viewed through the familiar window of screenal space. Secure in the electronic bunker, a life of alienated autoexperience (a loss of the social) can continue in quiet acquiescence and deep privation. The viewer is brought to the world, the world to the viewer, all mediated through the ideology of the screen. This is virtual life in a virtual world. Like the electronic bunker, the architectural bunker is another site where hyperspeed and hyperinertia intersect. Such bunkers are not restricted to national boundaries; in fact, they span the globe. Although they cannot actually move through physical space, they simulate the appearance of being everywhere at once. The architecture itself may vary considerably, even in terms of particular types; however, the logo or totem of a particular type is universal, as are its consumables. In a general sense, it is its redundant participation in these characteristics that make it so seductive. This type of bunker was typical of capitalist power's first attempt to go nomadic. During the Counterreformation, when the Catholic Church realized during the Council of Trent (1545-63) that universal presence was a key to power in the age of colonization, this type of bunker came of age. (It took the full development of the capitalist system to produce the technology necessary to return to power through absence). The appearance of the church in frontier areas both East and West, the universalization of ritual, the maintenance of relative grandeur in its architecture, and the ideological marker of the crucifix, all conspired to present a reliable place of familiarity and security. Wherever a person was, the homeland of the church was waiting. In more contemporary times, the gothic arches have transformed themselves into golden arches. McDonalds' is global. Wherever an economic frontier is opening, so is a McDonalds'. Travel where you might, that same hamburger and coke are waiting. Like Bernini's piazza at St. Peters, the golden arches reach out to embrace their clients--so long as they consume, and leave when they are finished. While in the bunker, national boundaries are a thing of the past, in fact you are at home. Why travel at all? After all, wherever you go, you are already there. There are also sedentary bunkers. This type is clearly nationalized, and hence is the bunker of choice for governments. It is the oldest type, appearing at the dawn of complex society, and reaching a peak in modern society with conglomerates of bunkers spread throughout the urban sprawl. These bunkers are in some cases the last trace of centralized national power (the White House), or in others, they are locations to manufacture a complicit cultural elite (the university), or sites of manufactured continuity (historical monuments). These are sites most vulnerable to electronic disturbance, as their images and mythologies are the easiest to appropriate. In any bunker (along with its associated geography, territory, and ecology) the resistant cultural producer can best achieve disturbance. There is enough consumer technology available to at least temporarily reinscribe the bunker with image and language that reveal its sacrificial intent, as well as the obscenity of its bourgeois utilitarian aesthetic. Nomadic power has created panic in the streets, with its mythologies of political subversion, economic deterioration, and biological infection, which in turn produce a fortress ideology, and hence a demand for bunkers. It is now necessary to bring panic into the bunker, thus disturbing the illusion of security and leaving no place to hide. The incitement of panic in all sites is the postmodern gamble. Chapter 3 ]]> Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries The medium of video was born in crisis. This postmodern technology has been shoved back into the womb of history with the demand that it progress through the same developmental stages as its older siblings, film and photography. The documentary--the paramount model for resistant video production--gives witness less to the endless parade of guerrilla actions, street demonstrations, and ecological disasters than it does to the persistence of Enlightenment codes of truth, knowledge, and a stable empirical reality. The hegemony of the documentary moves the question of video technology away from its function as a simulator, and back to the retrograde consideration of the technology as a replicator (witness). Clearly technology will not save us from the insufferable condition of eternal recurrence. Recall file entitled "Enlightenment." Enlightenment: A historical moment past, which must now be looked upon through the filter of nostalgia. Truth was so simple then. The senses were trusted, and the discrete units of sensation contained knowledge. To those ready to observe, nature surrendered its secrets. Every object contained useful pieces of data exploding with information, for the world was a veritable network of interlocking facts. Facts were the real concern: everything observable was endowed with facticity. Everything concrete merited observation, from a grain of sand to social activity. "Knowledge" went nova. The answer to the problem of managing geometrically cascading data was specialization: Split the task of observation into as many categories and subcategories as possible to prevent observational integrity from being distracted by the proliferation of factual possibility. (It is always amazing to see authoritarian structures run wild in the utopian moment.) Specialization worked in the economy (complex manufacture) and in government management (bureaucracy); why not also with knowledge? Knowledge entered the earthly domain (as opposed to the transcendental), giving humanity control over its own destiny and initiating an age of progress with science as redeemer. In the midst of this jubilation, a vicious scepticism haunted the believers like the Encyclopedists, the new social thinkers (such as Turgot, Fontenelle, and Condorcet), and later, the logical positivists. The problem of scepticism was exemplified by David Hume's critique of the empirical model, which placed Enlightenment epistemology outside the realm of certainty. The senses were shown to be unreliable conveyers of information, and factual associations were revealed as practical inference. Strengthened by the romantic critique developed later under the banner of German Idealism, the argument became acceptable that the phenomenal world was not a source of knowledge, since perception could be structured by given mental categories which might or might now show fidelity to a thing-in-itself. Under this system, science was reduced to a practical mapping of spatial-temporal constellations. Unfortunately, the idealists were unable to escape the scepticism from which they had emerged. Their own system of transcendentalism was just as susceptible to the sceptic's arguments. Science found itself in a peculiar position in regard to the 19th-century sociology of knowledge. Since it did produce what secularists interpreted as desirable practical results, it became an ideological legitimizer even on the ordinary level of everyday life. Within the sceptic's vacuum, empirical science by default usurped the right to pronounce what was real in experience. Sensible judgement was secure in the present, but to judge past events required immediate perception to be reconstituted through memory. The problem of memory was transformed into a technological problem because the subjective elements of memory led to the decay of the facticity of the sensible object, and written representation as a means to maintain history was insufficient. Although theory and method were mature and legitimized, a satisfactory technology had yet to emerge. This problem finally resolved itself with the invention of photography. Photography could provide a concrete visual record (vision being the most trustworthy of the senses) as an account of the past. Photography represented facts, rather than subjectively dissolving them into memory, or abstracting them as with writing. At last, there was a visual replicator to produce a record independent of the witness. Technology could mediate perception, and thereby impose objectivity upon the visual record. To this extent, photography was embraced more as a scientific tool than as a means to manifest aesthetic intent. Artists from all media began to embrace the empirical model, which had been rejuvenated by these innovations in replicating technology. Their interest in turn gave birth to Realism and literary Naturalism. In these new genres, the desire for replication became more complex. A new political agenda had insinuated itself into cultural production. Unlike in the past when politics generally served to maintain the status quo, the agenda of the newly- born left began to make a clear-cut appearance in empirical cultural representation. The proponents of the movement no longer worshipped the idealistic cultural icons of the romantic predecessors, but fetishized facticity--tendencies that reduced the artist's role to that of mechanical reproduction. The visual presentation of factual data allowed one to objectively witness the injustice of history, providing those eliminated from the historical record a way to make their places known. The use of traditional media combined with Enlightenment epistemology to promote a new leftist ideology that failed relatively fast. Even the experimental novels of Zola, in the end, could only be perceived as fiction, not as historical accounts. The Realist painters' work seemed equally unreliable, as the paintbrush was not a satisfactory technological means to insure objectivity, while its product was tied too closely to an elitist tradition and to its institutions. Perhaps their only actual victory was to produce a degraded sign of subversive intent that meekly insisted on the horizontalization of traditional aesthetic categories, particularly in the area of subject matter. By the end of the century, having nowhere else to turn, some leftist cultural producers began to rethink photography and its new advancement, film. The first documentary makers intended to produce an objective and accurate visual record of social injustice and leftist resistance, and guided by those aims the documentary began to take form. The excitement over new possibilities for socially responsible representation allowed production to precede critical reflection about the medium, and the mistakes that were made continue as institutions into the present. The film documentary was a catastrophe from its inception. Even as far back as the Lumiere brothers' work, the facticity of nonfiction film has been crushed under the burden of ideology. A film such as _Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory_ functions primarily as an advertisement for industrialization--a sign of the future divorced from the historical forces which generated it. In spite of its static camera and the necessary lack of editing, the function of replication was lost, because the life presented in the film was yet to exist for most. From this point on, the documentary proceeded deeper into its own fatality. A film such as _Elephant Processions at Phnom Penh_ became the predecessor of what we now think of as the cynical postmodern work. The documentary went straight to the heart of colonial appropriation. This film was a spectacular sideshow that allowed the viewer to temporarily enter a culture that never existed. It was an opportunity to revel in a simulated event, again isolated from any type of historical context. In this sense, Lumiere was Disney's predecessor. Disney World is the completion of the Lumiere cultural sideshow project. By appropriating cultural debris and reassembling it in a means palatable for temporary consumption, Disney does in 3-D what Lumiere had done in 2- D: produce a simulation of the world culture-text in the fixed location of the bunker. The situation continued to worsen. Robert Flaherty introduced complex narrative into the documentary in his film _Nanook of the North_. The film was marked by an overcoded film grammar that transcendentally generated a story out of what were supposed to be raw facts. The gaps between the disparate re-presented images had to be brought together by the glue of the romantic ideology favored by the filmmaker. In a manner of speaking, this had to happen, since there were no facts to begin with, but only reconstituted memory. Flaherty's desire to produce the exotic led him to simulate a past that never existed. In the film's most famous sequence, Flaherty recreates a walrus hunt. Nanook had never been on a hunt without guns, but Flaherty insisted he use harpoons. Nanook had a memory of what his father had told him about traditional hunting, and he had seen old Eskimo renderings of it. Out of these memories, entwined with Falherty's romantic conceptions, the walrus hunt was reenacted. Representation was piled on representation under the pretense of an unachievable originality. It did make an exciting and entertaining story, but it had no more factual integrity than D. W. Griffiths' _Birth of a Nation_. It is unnecessary to repeat the cynical history of the documentary oscillating along the political continuum from Vertov to Riefenstahl. In all cases it has been fundamentally cynical--a political commodity doomed by the very nature of the technology to continually replay itself within the economy of desire. Film is not now nor has it ever been the technology of truth. It lies at a speed of 24 frames a second. Its value is not as a recorder of history, but simply as a means of communication, a means by which meaning is generated. The frightening aspect of the documentary film is that it can generate rigid history in the present in the same manner that Disney can generate the colonial meaning of the culture of the Other. Whenever imploded films exist simultaneously as fiction and nonfiction they stand as evidence that history is made in Hollywood. The documentary's uneasy alliance with scientific methodology attempts to exploit the seeming power of science to stop the drift of multifaceted interpretation. Justifiably or not, scientific evidence is incontrovertible; it rests comfortably under the sign of certitude. This is the authority that the documentary attempts to claim for itself. Consequently, documentary makers have always used authoritarian coding systems to structure the documentary narrative. This strategy relies on the complete exhaustion of the image at the moment of immediate apprehension. The narrative structure must envelop the viewer like a net and close off all other possible interpretation. The narrative guiding the interpretation of the images must flow along a unilinear pathway, at such a speed that the viewer has no time for any reflection. Key in this movement is to produce the impression that each image is causatively linked to the images preceding it. Establishment of causality between the images renders a seamless effect and keeps the viewers' interpretive flow moving along a predetermined course. The course ends with the conclusion prepared by the documentary maker in constructing the causal chain of images, offering what seems to be an incontrovertible resolving statement. After all, who can challenge replicated causality? Its legitimation by traditional rational authority is too great. A documentary fails when the causal chain breaks down, showing the seams and allowing a moment of disbelief to disrupt the predetermined interpretive matrix. Without the scientific principle of causality rigorously structuring the narrative, the documentary's legitimized authority dissipates quite rapidly, revealing its true nature as fictional propaganda. When a legitimation crisis occurs in the film, the image becomes transparent, rather than exhausting itself, and the ideology of the narrative is displayed in all its horrifying glory. The quality documentary does not reveal itself, and it is this illusionistic chicanery--first perfected by Hollywood realism--that unfortunately guides the grand majority of documentary and video witness work that leftist cultural workers currently produce in endless streams. This pitiful display is particularly insidious because it turns the leftist cultural workers into that which they most fear: Validators of the conservative interpretive matrix. If the fundamental principle of conservative politics is to maintain order for the sake of economy, to complement the needs and desires of the economic elite, and to discourage social heterogeneity, then the documentary, as it now stands, is complicit in participating in that order, even if it flies the banner of social justice over its ideological fortress. This is true because the documentary does not create an opportunity for free thought, but instills self- censorship in the viewer, who must absorb its images within the structure of a totalizing narrative. If one examines the sign of censorship itself, as it was embodied, for example, in Jesse Helms' criticisms of Andre Serrano's _Piss Christ_, one can see the methods of totalizing interpretation at work. Helms argued that a figure of Christ submerged in piss leads to a single conclusion, that the work is an obscene sacrilege. Helms' interpretation is a fair one; however, it is not the only one. Helms used senatorial spectacle as an authority to legitimize and totalize his interpretation. Under his privileged interpretive matrix, the image is immediately exhausted. However, anyone who reflects on Serrano's image for only a moment can see that numerous other meanings are contained within it. There are meanings that are both critical and aesthetic (formal). Helms' overall strategy was not so much to use personal power as a means to censorship, but to create the preconditions for the public to blindly follow into self-censorship, thereby agreeing to the homogenous order desired by the elite class. The resistant documentary depends upon this same set of conditions for its success. The long-term consequences of using such methods, even with good intentions, is to make the viewer increasingly susceptible to illusionistic narrative structure, while the model itself becomes increasingly sophisticated through its constant revision. Anywhere along the political continuum the electronic consumer turns, s/he is treated like media sheep. To stop this manipulation, documentary makers must refuse to sacrifice the subjectivity of the viewer. The nonfiction film needs to travel other avenues than the one inherited from tradition.