notes on media

We live in a society that is called a society of control, we are...

driftwork — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:01:04 +0100

We live in a society that is called a society of control, we are no longer entering but in…

sdv

when science ceased...

driftwork — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:17:12 +0100

Margaret Thatcher was initially trained as a scientist, a chemist, at Oxford University. “One might have expectd her to oversee an expansion of science… Thatcher’s hard-nosed policies on privatization and manufacturing led to a reduction in research activity in the UK…” ((New Scientist April 13th 2013 - editorial)). They correctly recognize that her government was driven by a deep ideological commitment to the free-market, to neoliberal forms of capitalism rather than to science. But still this is not a good understanding, for they fail to understand that Thatcher’s government was the first in the UK to place the media on the same level, as central to issues of sovereignty, power and governance as at one time religion had been and later in the decades before she was elected science had been… In Thatcher’s time the media was central. That the editors of a popular science magazine don’t grasp that the spectacle is closer to the state and power than science is not surprising though it is sad and disappointing…

sdv

Spectacular Changes (2) community unhinged and empty...

driftwork — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:01:02 +0100

I think I initially misread the Roberto Esposito text Communitas (The Origin and destiny of community), for I imagined when i began reading it that the text was going to be, in a sense, a counter-text to the to the notion of community as broken, as inoperative in the face of the spectacle. Which is to say that I imagined it as presenting a case for community, for the commons against the control society.

But instead what is discussed is yet another splitting “… community isn’t incapacitated , obscured, or hidden by no-thing but instead is constituted by it. This means simply that community isn’t an entity, nor is it a collective subject, nor a totality of subjects, but is rather the relation that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their identity with a line, which traversing them alters them: it is the with, the between, and the threshold where they meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with others to the degree to which it seperates them from themselves…” With recognition that “the being of community is the interval of difference…”

So then its clear how this is not counter-text to “… only lucidity and imagination, freed at once from aging ideologies and a liberal-spectacular credo, can restore mankind to the space of their cities….” a notion in which the entirety of the modern notion of community vanishes, shrinking back into the aging ideologies. Anyway its not the counter-text as I initially imagined it to be, as you may have intuited from the above. Instead what is argued for is the problem of community posed and as with all philosophical concepts, ultimately left unresolved, until the moment when the concept(s) vanish into insignificance.

The absence of community is a lack and void caused as Esposito proposes on the one side by the globalization of nihilism (which is inevitable with capitalism) and the utter failure of communities to be be able to struggle against this global society. The spectacle and control society is this nihilism which commodifies everything and anything, and which refuses to obey the rules imagined for it - ‘everything is commodified’ means exactly what it says. There is nothing which cannot produce exchange value, surplus value, and community belongs within this, in the same way as the relationships you have with your children. With your partner, the air you breathe, water, images, speech, anything and everything can be commodified.

But let us not forget how communities left to their own devices are structured; in Jock Young’s words, “The desire to demonize others is based on the ontological uncertainties’” of those who exist within communities and cultures. An inclusive community would be (and is) a contradiction in terms. Communities are founded on the violence of exclusion, as Bauman puts it “Communal fraternity would be incomplete, perhaps unthinkable but certainly unviable, without that inborn fratricidal inclination….” There are worse things than commodification.

“…Never was the word community used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense became hard to find in real life…” The logic is that “Men and Women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain…” (Hobsbawm). A more direct and simpler version is to say as Jock Young did “… Just as community collapses, identity is invented…” We may say that the community of the communitarian gospel is not the pre-established and securely grounded Gemeinschft known from social theory but a cryptonym for the zealousy sought yet elusive identity… (plagerised from Bauman (2000)

But here, pause, Esposito refers to many great works of infinitude and finitude, the Hegelian globalization of the world, the declaration of the inoperative community, the coming community - which tries to resolve this - without addressing the the thing, which will try and turn, if it hasn’t already, community into a commodity. Into something less than consumptive capital itself - for the IS its merely commodity.

sdv (note version for for PL as requested)

Spectacular changes... 'how to avoid it in the modern world?'

driftwork — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 10:43:13 +0000

This is the short response to that question…

In the present as they are about to impose a new aspect of the spectacle into our lives, from the image, through language and now plastic manufactories into your home. This it seems to me is one of the rare moments in which a philosopher who speaks in a language that is yours is worth recognizing, a mere nod, a gesture of solidarity is sometimes enough… In this case what is being thought is what is to be done… (‘how to avoid it in the modern world?’ was the latest variant on this eternal question..) But lets be clear for me the concepts of the integrated spectacle and the control society are totally interchangeable. I would, in person, refuse rather forcibly anyone who tried to argue that the two concepts are not equivalent, are not speaking of the same, but since this is a text you’ll just have to accept that the two concepts are speaking of the same current default mass-consumptive capitalism and its management and maintenance.

Giorgo Agamben says that philosophy is engaged in discussing the possible rather than the actual. Perhaps in 1993 we can understand that his engagement with these things was about the possible, but twenty years later we are not looking at the possible but the actual. A moment in the liquid modern the very idea of a community, of a politics founded on identity politics (race, gender or any other identity) doesn’t seem at all possible in the face of the integrated spectacle/control society… So where do we begin to engage with the eternal question of what is to be done…? But let’s begin with the possible and watch it become actual.. ”…In the sphere of spectacle the media present a language that has been drained of meaning… The problem then lies in how we might liberate the means of communication so that they do not fall prey to this isolation and separation…. The integrated spectacle is so widespread and complete that we have become aware of the mediums (analog and digital) themselves perhaps for the first time. ”we are the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language…” which wlll be extended “…thought finds itself for the first time, today, confronted by its tasks without any illusion and without any possible alibi…” (Agamben).

What does ‘without any possible alibi’ mean in this context ? I think we can say that people are already without the security of their social imaginaries, that identity, home, race, class, gender are already beyond use and supply no alibis…. (as can be seen in a number of the available texts on Agamben) What this can be understood as meaning is that in the context that the (integrated spectacle/the control society) provides we have no possibility of refusing to exist within these social structures, opportunities. Perhaps this does enable us to understand the possible re-evaluation of the ends and means of history for there is no ‘point of departure for any discourse of ethics’ founded on any essentialism, not even, perhaps least of all one founded on the human species.

Let us not forget the sheer extent to which political discourse has been impoverished by the ever increasing reliance on the spectacle, the situation is dominated by commodification, sound bites, public relations, twitter phantasies and other commentariat based social media(ocraties). That this is a crisis for for all human (and non-human) communities is clear, that it suggests a different nature of the crisis of the commons is also clear. What categories are left for us when the traditional identities are not available in our political landscape. How to submit our ideologies and discourses to a renovation that will enable us to resist the (mis)appropriation, the instrumentalisation of everything and the further destruction of the commons (commonality…)

This is dependent on the change that the spectacle produced from the situation of humanity having an estranged communicative essence, founded on the presumption that we shared a common foundation, whereas after the establishment of the society of the spectacle in the 20th Century this is no longer true, (even less so in the now completed migration to the integrated spectacle/control society) for the very generic essence of human communication itself language, image, data, 3D printing and not to forget the sundry objects of mass consumption, is now separated into an autonomous sphere. (We are split subjects) What now hampers communication is communicability itself; humans are seperated by what used to unite them. “Journalists and mediacrats are the new priests of this alienation from human linguistic nature…”

So let’s then complete this mutated paraphase of Agambens work from the possible to the actual with this … ”..contemporary politics is the/this devastating experimentum linguae that all over the planet unhinges and empties traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities. Only those who succeed in carrying tit to completion - without allowing what reveals to remain veiled in the nothingness that reveals, but bringing language to language - will be the first citizens of a community with neither presuppositions nor a State, where the nullifying and determining power of what is common will be pacified and where the Shekinah will be stopped sucking the evil milk of its own separation…..”….(83/66 The Coming Community).

Hence the importance, the centrality of ethics… for what else can question the various regimes that constitute the various ‘democratic-spectacular’ regimes which are migrating from the neoliberal (phase) ideologies and discourses as fast as their little legs will allow them to…

Why the merging of the integrated spectacle and the control society ? Written across the strange gulf of the hegelian-marxist logic and the anti-hegalian, well for Deleuze philosophy is not tied to an identity - marked by the concepts of truth, essence, grounding, reason — and these are the grounds which are equally unhinged as those examples above. Perhaps for you this isn’t a nice glass brick aimed at the heart of the spectacle, and you imagine that your identity, your community (etc) can survive some never quite arriving catastrophic end, but you’ll have to take it on trust that for the experiment to be resolved, for what is possible to become actual has to start in this crisis with the consequence that the next one is the last. No immeidiate strategies and tactics because after all you are reading this in the spectacle….

sdv (on a friday morning in march for Paul L.)

"The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like..."

driftwork — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:00:54 +0000

“

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

”

- Opinion: The Internet is a surveillance state - CNN.com (via new-aesthetic)

Important post by Bruce Schneier,

we know what he is talking about but seldom think about it

one important question comes to mind, “what can we do about it?”

(via tsparks)

The integrated spectacle …

parislemon: Stated a bit more clearly: Samsung makes more money...

driftwork — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 11:20:23 +0000

parislemon:

Stated a bit more clearly: Samsung makes more money off of Android than Google makes from all of their businesses combined.

This simply does not seem like a tenable situation.

Why is this not tenable… ? Seems perfectly tenable within capitalism…

Franciose Dastur ... Note 6...

driftwork — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:01:12 +0000

…Then when i ask Heidegger what language will ever be capable of expressing this ecstatic Denken:

- A very simple language, he replies. Einie ganz einfache Sprache, whose rigour will consist less in the verbiage (Gerede) of an apparent technicity than in the absolute nakedness of expression. And Heidegger adds with a smile:

-in the future philosophical books will no longer be very large books…

(Francoise Dastur quoting Roger Munier, in Stele pour Heidegger…

Francoise Dastur ... Note 4...

driftwork — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:30:41 +0000

… the ‘dictatorship of the public realm’ to which whoever desires celebrity is entire subjected, to the point of having the feeling of total annihilation of their being when the public’s favor is list…The impasse to which this extreme form of alienation (comparable to what leads to the frantic search for power in the games of finance, of the political, or of seduction) testifies to the illusory character of all attempts at the neutralization of death. Though human being has admirably tried very hard to lie to itself, there is always that moment when the veils of illusion are torn asunder, and human being is summoned to accept its mortal condition…. (Dastur p31)

Francoise dastur ... note 2...

driftwork — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:00:37 +0000

Hegel gave philosophical form to what appears to be an anthropological constant in his famous dialectic of master and slave by showing that in the struggle in which each puts his life at stake, whoever goes furthest in their disregard for death attains self-consciousness… (Dastur p29)

Francine Dastur ... note 3

driftwork — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:01:02 +0000

Our epoch is characterized by an ‘obsession with the other’ because it is profoundly marked by the development of individualism. There is an apparent paradox in this: the relation to the other becomes obsessive only when it is self-evident, only when a being-in-common or existence shared with others appears no longer as a factual given, but rather as a problem to resolve or a task to accomplish. We must add to this the increasing disappearance from our societies the dimension of transcendence…. We must certainly recognize as Hannah Arendt did, that appearing is an essential dimension of existence and that ‘nothing and nobody exists in the world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator’ (Arendt) But it is not sufficient to be looked at in order to be; on the contrary, it is because existence makes itself visible that it offers itself to the gaze. The case is entirely different in ‘the society of the spectacle’. In which there is no other possibility for being except in the gaze of others, which is an extreme form of alienation, that is, of becoming foreign to oneself. Yet this is what is obscurely sought in celebrity: self objectification, identification of the self with one’s public image in order to be alleviated of the burden of one’s finitude. As Sartre - who was the first to grant a capital importance to the gaze, going so far as to claim that ‘the other is in principle the one who looks at me…’ Dastur p30/31

Francoise Dastur... note 1....

driftwork — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 14:12:36 +0000

Humans use their bodies differently depending on their societies, which attests to the fact that the body is not any way reducible to its merely biological functions…. The objectification of the body has been carried to its highest point in our hypertechnological societies… we ought not be surprised to see the idea of the supernumerary body appear in the mileu of cyberculture… the body is simply eliminated in order to allow a total immersion in a virtual reality freed entirely from any obstruction attached to corporeality … (Dastur p26/7)

"‘Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see..."

driftwork — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 09:38:47 +0000

“‘Amazon is predominantly a virtual company where you don’t get to see the people. You don’t see brick and mortar,’ says Robert Fronk, executive vice-president of reputation management at Harris. ‘For them to first of all have the highest reputation, but more importantly to be the company with far and away the highest emotional appeal, is amazing.’ Harris defines emotional appeal as trust, admiration and respect, not whether you get weepy when your package arrives.”

- Hating Amazon Is Not a Thing. Facebook on the Other Hand … (via courtenaybird)

stuffkeynessaid: Keynes’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the...

driftwork — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:55:08 +0000

stuffkeynessaid:

Keynes’s diagnosis of what went wrong in the international monetary system in the 30s. Striking how much of this is happening again today

"we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it..."

driftwork — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:47:23 +0000

““”we think any society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place, and it’s very interesting to try and follow the lines of flight taking shape at some particular moment”“”

- Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”.

http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
(via rykalski)

Multinational Corporations and the Control of Culture 2012

driftwork — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:30:18 +0000

The control of Ideology and discourse is rather complex…

Hewlett-Packard

Verizon Communications

Apple

International Business Machines

Microsoft

Boeing

PepsiCo

United Technologies

Intel

Amazon.com

Lockheed Martin

Coca-Cola

Cisco Systems

Walt Disney

Google

Honeywell International

Ingram Micro

Oracle

General Dynamics

Internet culture spawned The Language of new media (Manovich), particularly the first generation of...

driftwork — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:01:14 +0000

Internet culture spawned The Language of new media (Manovich), particularly the first generation of 1990s web culture. What this means is that the book is a product of a specific sliver of history when the production and distribution of knowledge were rather different than they are today. What was once a subversive medium is now a spectacle playground like any other… Galloway…

We cannot continue to maintain the delusion that a (new) medium is revolutionary in itself… In truth such a position has never been tenable and it’s still a mystery to me how anyone can reproduce such an understanding.

sdv

“… culture is history in representational form…“ (referencing Jameson) and...

driftwork — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 14:02:26 +0000

“… culture is history in representational form…“ (referencing Jameson) and ” I might propose a new name for this project, the control allegory…” (obliquely referencing Deleuze). Galloway preface to The Interface Effect…

"With the achievement of economic abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible,..."

driftwork — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:57:48 +0000

“With the achievement of economic abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to the appearances that are now that labor’s primary product. Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.”

- Debord, Society of the Spectacle 50 (via rykalski)

emergentfutures: THE END OF SMARTPHONES: Here’s A Computer...

driftwork — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 10:39:18 +0000

emergentfutures:

THE END OF SMARTPHONES: Here’s A Computer Screen On A Contact Lens

Over in Belgium, scientists have finally taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses.

Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens.

Full Story: Business Insider

Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle part 1 …. enjoy...

driftwork — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:02:15 +0000

Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle part 1 …. enjoy this historical memory.