geert lovink on Tue, 2 Oct 2001 07:03:31 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> the civil wars of Empire (a dialogue) |
geert re: "Tiziana" <T.Terranova@btinternet.com> to: <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net> sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 12:46 AM subject: <nettime> the civil wars of Empire g: thanks for your posting to nettime. I really liked it. Specially the part where you ask how to combine the academic work you do with what's going in the world at large. I do think most of the academic work which is using biologicial metaphors (however complex and dynamic) is fairly naive and suggests balances and self-regulatory mechanisms which simply do not exist in the world of human society. I would therefor argue for a radical seperation of the discourses of science and society and stop to pretend that there any dialogue or similarity between the two. Increasingly there is none. t: thanks for commenting on the posting. I think it would be a huge mistake to further separate the discourses of science and society, because it is impossible to (the world does not distinguish between the human and the natural, it mixes them up all the time). I think the problem that we from the side of the social and human sciences have with the natural sciences is quite understandable: first of all most of us have very little knowledge of science, so we do tend to overlook the fact that the disagreements about the nature of the world (which includes humans and societies) are even stronger and more bitter than those we are more familiar with (that is there are different types of science); therefore we tend to identify science with those scientific discourses that are used to justify the unjustifiable. I think that the problem with the 90s evolutionists was that they had a very simple model of how the whole thing worked, and they separated their sciences a lot more than they suggested... I think that the work of re-starting a political dialogue between the two is more important than ever. g: I think academics and those working in the arts and culture have humiliated themselves far too long. I don't think it anymore useful to call for a dialogue and exchange between arts, science and technology (as is still so often heard in new media arts circles). It is time for confrontation and critique. Scientists and technologists are not gods and should not been seen as such. However this is increasingly how they are being portraited in the media - and also how they see themselves. Why I am calling to stop the dialogue is that the terms under which the so-called exchanges are being organized are fairly innocent, very often blurred by New Age discourses, avoiding topics such as the corporate takeover of research agendas. The point is: scientists are in fact only glorifying themselves and are very often only interested in religious ideas because only Gods are above them. We, the artists, theorists and critics with a humanities background are of a subhuman kind. Very often the collaboration between scientists and artists is bogus. Not real. The drama of of the human-machine interfaces and the poverty of graphic design are two concrete example. It is time to stop begging for attention. t: I don't know, it seems to me that sometimes it is those writers who are more directly critical of science that end up looking like they are begging for attention. Why blame the poverty of human-machine interfaces and graphic design on the collaboration between artists and scientists rather than on the premises that they both shared in their collaborations? I don't think one should look at science and scientists as either necessarily friends or foes. Even when it is more blatantly a technology of power, science is also always telling us something about the world, the different levels that compose it and the different forces that inhabit it. I have been reading stuff on artificial life, neural networks and the likes for years. It is very easy to do an ideological critique of the discourse of a-life. It's all on the surface really. You can tell students about the continuity between a-life discourses, social darwinism, and capitalist competition (using Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron's work for example...). Fine, they will get it. But it's much more challenging, and more upsetting for them, to tell them that what these people are doing is also engaging with levels of organization of matter/energy which are real, even if they are doing it only to find out how to control them in the interest of capitalist re-organization (which sponsors such research, nobody has any illusions about that either any longer...) And such knowledge can be turned against itself. Something always escapes or can be 'kidnapped'. If dialogue with dissident scientists is a by-effect of such involvement, fine, welcome. But dialogue is not the primary goal of such work. A counter-politics is its main 'goal', across all the strata of disciplinary divides... Why have you become so virulently anti-science by the way? How do you think we should understand the world then? g: What I am trying to say is related to a, in my view, failed project of cross disciplinary work within new media culture which suggests that arts, technology and science can have a dialogue. A lot of grants and festivals and foundations such a Langlois in Canada are based on this rather idealistic construct, thereby explicitly not working on the counter-politics, as you mentioned. This was also the topic of the protest Timothey Druckrey, I and a number of others against the ongoing uncritical (life) science agenda of Ars Electronica. It is fine to inform a broader audience about what's going on. There is excellent research-based journalism being done. What I am protesting against is the collective illusion that the arts are somehow part of ongoing scientific revolution. Tragically art has been sidelined over the past decade and is increasingly becoming part of the spectacle, the culture and entertainment industry. To claim an avantgarde position in such a bleak situation just means that we are fooling ourselves. I am not talking here about secondary forms of appropriation of latest scientific findings. That's always possible. And by the way, it is really hard to find critical literature which maps the continuity you were talking about between a-life discourses, social darwinism, and capitalist competition. There has been much technology critique like that in the nineties. Most of it comes from the gender and ecological perspectives. The techno oberman still rules within IT-circles and very few have so fast challenged IT-suprimacy from an insiders perspective (with an interesting exception of Sun's Bill Joy, who warned for out-of-control mirco robotics). T. I think I know what you mean... I remember a time, two or three years ago, when artists thought they had finally found a way to support themselves beyond teaching (teaching, in these days of restructuring, is more than a full time job, it is two full time jobs rolled into one for half the wages...). It did not seem a bad idea, that, as an artist, you had skills that for once had become marketable. It takes more than just good will to form such an alliance, reciprocal productive borrowing, resonances and so on... And the fact that lots of scientists are very immodest, in the sense that they forget how everything they say is a hypothesis that will eventually be challenged, at least conceptually, does not help either. The techno-uberman rules in IT circles, that's true, and it's very much of a Man. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on a big dot.com/technology fair in November 2000, and how scarce women were and how retrograde and masculinist the marketing stunts were, with 'booth bunnies' and grown up men behaving as if they were deeply unreconstructed, testosterone-driven fourteen-year olds. I find that sad and disgusting at the same time, but it's not just them. It is part of this 'men-retreating-into-their-essential-identity' or 'Men are from Mars' stuff that is just a quick, and hopeless, strategy to get out of the sexual confrontations that are going on at every level. Men don't come from Mars. They come from women, they are an evolutionary mutation, a potentiality of the female body (so women can become Martians too, I guess...) But I also think that the productive moment, the moment where you enter into alliances based on affinity, a difficult and conflict-ridden process, is more important than the critical one. I am not saying that you don't need to be critical. But criticism is so easily either absorbed or incorporated into the generalized liberal spectacle, where everybody has their saying and all positions are reduced to a matter of taking sides. I think that producing and disseminating different types of material/actions/ and perspectives should be prioritized to producing critiques. The critiques should be absorbed and dissolved into a different plane. This is what the autonomists referred to when they talked about the imaginative leaps that it takes for the working classes (a dynamic composite which is not necessarily based on one single type of labour) to swerve history out of its pre-determined trajectory, changing the landscape and upping the stakes... # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net