Noema’s Ideas and Radical Thoughts proposed by Marina Grzinic,
Ljubljana/Vienna
February 2007
Chaos TM and the Aesthetics of Active Passivity
Sefik Seki Tatlic
PDF [160 KB]
The global society, born from the contingent
spread of capital over new physical territories (Eastern Europe,
Southeast Asia), is not the result of capital spread over certain
geo-political lines (states, etc.), but of disappearance of the
very borders of these territories/states. The new territories
are not at all physical, but fields of science, communication
technologies,
cyberspace, art and culture, and, last but not least, the human
body. These territories allow the reproduction of capital primarily
onto the social field. Globalized societies are therefore a result
of the new logic of power reproduction that in such way obfuscates
and makes the effects of capital pretty much relative, but not
less dangerous!
The logic of flexible power (in the sense of supranational political
organizations being strongly connected with so-called free
market and culture) spreads over the whole social field and
is at the
same time local and global; it operates simultaneously. This
allows that mechanisms of crisis creation (from war in Iraq
to riots in
Paris suburbs) get simultaneously uncovered with mechanisms
of crisis “solution,” carried out by the same power bodies
that caused the crisis in the first place. It is exactly this bipolar
mechanism that is the “creative” potential, which results
in nothing else than in a mere reproduction of this same power,
of its own logic. This claim brings us closer to the notion of
chaos, which, as suggested by its own “name,” opposes
law and order; it is, as such, simultaneously, creative and destructive.
This new situation although pretty simple to comprehend, is
yet passionately undermined by imposition of concepts like
civilization
clash, “axis of evil,” battle for democratic values
and etc.; it inaugurates not only a completely decentralized
shape of global power, but reproduces concepts of power embodiment,
which
are no longer tied only to centralized forms of law, order and
the Constitution, along the centralized state repressive apparatuses,
but, on the contrary, to communication protocols of power negotiation
(within global power matrix) realized through mass communication
and/or networked societies.
The dominant paradigm of the networked society is that of
inclusion/exclusion. On the level of self-legitimization
of State-which-is-working-hand-into-hand
with multinational-corporations, as a tool of extension
of the state of exception, exclusion, is part of the binary
paradigm holy man/dead man (Homo Sacer); as developed by
Giorgio Agamben,
the
State, according to Marx, “as the executive bureau of global
capital,” realizes itself by practicing the monopoly over
bare life, with its suspension (in the First World) or by its
termination (in the Third World).
Therefore, it is necessary to analyze production of paradigms
of inclusion and exclusion, which allow chaos not only
to be created
but as well suspended!
Death Inc.
I will present three most exposed ways or levels that
illustrate the creation of chaos, and its suspension.
These processes
are made objective, i.e., truthful with the help
of info-communication technologies (ICT) and cultural codes.
The first is the subtle colonization of areas already
hit (or to be in the future) by natural catastrophes
or armed
conflicts
with
the aim of their reconstruction. The current US
president administration, according to Naomi Klein, created
an Office of Coordinators
for Reconstruction and Stabilization, which aims
to develop wide
plans for periods after conflicts. This body included
in its overview
an additional of twenty five countries, which are
currently not experiencing any kind of conflict (Klein: 2005,
thenation.com). It seems that more and more parts
of
the World are becoming
possible
sites for “active reconstruction” by well known players:
profit consultancy firms, building consortiums, big non-government
organizations, UN’s offices and international financial
institutions (Klein, 2005; thenation.com).
USA’s secretary of state Condoleezza Rice stated, immediately
after the Tsunami (in Southeast Asia) in January 2005 that this
is “a great opportunity” that opens way to profit
pretty well. (Klein, 2005; thenation.com).
This kind of disgusting statements should not
be seen simply as controversial, they are in
fact
part of the
method of
functioning of the whole industry of humanity,
which, on one side, masks
the
investments by first capitalist states in these
underdeveloped areas with its oversized propagation
of “help” to lower
classes (even in the form of cancerous “humanitarian” food,
as it has been the case in the Bosnian war), and, on other side,
simultaneously, it allows the formation of a sterile distance from “the
savages” far away, which receive, nevertheless, in the end
some help. The industry of humanity with its “help” policy
produces a “high class” in the endangered area (that
conducts as well the distribution of “help” on a local
level). The industry of humanity therefore does not really help
any one in the end, but serves as an empathic buffer zone, which
increases the significance of “help” mostly for the
First Capitalist World’s populations that are providing it. “Help” serves
to measure the global (tele)presence of international institutions
of humanity industry within specific region.
The second is the suspension of the Constitution
through mobilization of science for the creation
and justification
of growing technological
surveillance of population of the First Capitalist
World (see the example of the infamous American
Patriot Act – which practically
suspends the Charts of Democratic Rights). As emphasized by Hard
and Negri, »When the state of exception becomes the rule
and when war becomes the permanent state with no end in sight,
then, traditional distinction between politics and war gets blurred… war
itself becomes a permanent social relation.« (Hardt and
Negri, 2005: 12).
This permanent social relation is in correlation
with the de-territorialized effects of
war that, among other
practices,
results in the
surveillance of the first world population.
We had opportunities to see many
examples of these »treatments«. During the Republican
convention in Madison Square Garden in 2004, the New York police
held for three days with no explanation more then three thousand
demonstrators into a wired space of an asbestos infected building
on pier 57 in the New York docks. At the same time, the majority
of media did not report that people were imprisoned on pier 57.
As well as in other numerous cases of police repression, the
transfer of enormous power to the state repressive apparatus
results in
the systematic practice of suspension of rights to have ANY protest
(does not matter how much maybe naive this argument could be).
Not to mention the case of Guantanamo and
Abu Ghraib concentration camps, which
would require
much more
space here?
To contribute to a thesis of mobilization
of science for global capital need,
I can propose
two main
aspects. One
is covered
by militaristic projects, like the
one created by Pentagon agency DARPA (Defense
Advanced
Research Projects Agency,
whose project
Arpanet, eventually resulted in Internet
as we know
it today…),
or projects as the one known under the name »Seeing Battle
Zones«. It is a system of mass surveillance of movements
in urban environments of first world cities, which implies that
this sector of operations is not exclusively reserved for the third
world countries. The second aspect presents far more sophisticated
mobilization of science into law, economics and culture sectors
that provides the rights to access to informations, or present
a suspension of such rights. I mean here all the sophisticated
protocols that are attached to copyrights, software patent initiatives
in the European Union, future patents on parts of the human genome,
etc. This means that in the future we won’t only be forced
to buy licenses for software operation systems, but also we will
find ourselves in situations where corporations will sell us
licenses for the usage of ourselves in the sense that multinational
corporations
will patent their rights on certain information on certain parts
of the DNA sequence and to which the public access will be denied.
This highly dangerous menace to human kind as species of course
is not openly present in the public sphere, mostly because of
the so called Public Relation services.
The third is part of the machine of
media negotiations of meaning, adjustment
and
processing of “styles” within Public
Relation services (which include the whole mainstream media machinery,
as CNN, Fox etc.). Let’s just recall the case from 1997,
when Fox sustained the biotechnology company Monsanto, and did
not present (being supposedly under Monsanto pressure) the investigative
report on growth hormone Posilac and its cancerous effects on humans.
These fast processed and adjusted information, raw data and images
from the (battle) field, so-called embedded journalism that covers
anti-globalist demonstrations from police side – present
apparatuses of sterilization of information. This third level not
only produce ways that “allow” us to “objectively” accept
methods of direct exclusion of (dangerous or critical) social practices
that oppose the way of easy capital spread, but allow a naturalization
of these “post production” practices through numerous
police/detective/spy/crime scene investigation/forensic etc.,
TV shows.
The boom of number of secret police
and forensic style TV shows today
is compensation
for
the real incompetence
or
for the
lack of will to prevent the 9/11.
The “humane” faces of
many police actors are as well the “compensation” for
more and more repressive laws and extreme police outlaw services.
These TV shows make exclusion (in the sense of separation, repression
and destruction) objectively necessary. The 9/11 presents, pace
Baudrillard, the outcome of the role of God, which became suicidal
and declared the war to itself. This Baudrillard’s claim
that 9/11 was a kind of declaration of war by the West to itself
has to be read along his sentence that says that the horror of
dying in the Twin Towers is inseparable of the horror of living
in them (Baudrillard, 2003: 10).
Or, as jean Luc Nancy argues, the
claim that the world is being
destroyed is
not a hypothesis:
it
is a fact
by which
every
thought of the world is being
fed; however, we don’t know any more
what it means to destroy, and we don’t know as well which
world is being destroyed (Nancy, 2004: 20).
So, what we get in the end? We
get chaos as a totality of crisis
spread
on social,
political
and individual
levels mixed with
a number of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Africa and wrapped with bird
flu, the rise of fascism in Europe,
terrorism all around the world,
etc. Chaos is as
an institutionalized potential,
a threat
that
justifies not only wars, exploitation,
repression and similar, but the
production of life itself;
populations are seen
as
the mere conductor of power.
If we agree that any
relevant
positioning
today, especially in culture,
has to be the positioning
against the Empire, as a name
for a supranational power that
is made
as triangle model of “sovereign” states, global capitalist
organizations and global free market, then chaos has to be seen
as a tool which prevents, suspends the very potential of positioning
against the Empire.
Monopoly
In the case of recent protests
in France, via CNN we had
an opportunity to hear
comments that “plain” French people support
the protests, but condemn the “vandals” who use mass
gatherings to present their own agenda and to openly attack the
institutions of power. “Vandals” as elements that opposes
the “democratic” possibilities of demonstrations are
to be found on the opposite side, against masses of students, which
were worried only for their private status within the free market
system of labor exploitation. “Vandals,” as the obverse
side of otherwise “peaceful, civilized” protests, are
seen as an obstacle to partial solution of problems, set up by
the “civilized” protestors. The suspension of the destructiveness
of “vandals” shows that partial demands are creative
only for the system itself, which creates the crisis in a first
place.
To make it even more clear,
Empire’s democratic regimes not
only need acceptance, secured through mechanisms of voting and
the mass media support, but even more they need fragmented “protests” which,
by pointing out short circuits in the system even more calibrate
and reconfirm the flexible power of the capital itself; here it
is not about some DeVillepine’s or US administration government,
it is about democracy in general. If needed, they all will in the
end suspend the law in order to get rid of the “vandals.”
The key question is of
course, WHO has the monopoly
to produce
chaos,
i.e. to
profit
from its evolvement
or
the way how
to resolve it?
When Hardt and Negri
claim that war has
become a permanent
social
relation,
then,
in the
context of
a chaos contextualization,
I can state that war
has become one of the
manifestations
of
institutionalization
of chaos, i.e. of a
monopoly over
it, reduced, as well,
to
a permanent social
relation. Chaos, as permanent social
relation
(as we can
term the current situation
in Iraq, being
confronted with the
horror of the Western passivity),
is in fact a radical
illustration
of
the flexible power
of global capital to establish
monopoly over the definition
of a
threat (terrorism)
and over the way to successively
monopolize it, as a
model for
relativisation of chaos,
created by capital
itself. This does not
only imply
technological surveillance
of the population with
help
of info-communication
technologies,
and the mobilization
of
science for corporate
needs, which
results in
depoliticization
of culture, but
all have far
more dangerous
consequences. It creates
monopoly
over meaning of communication
codes,
changing
surveillance
within contemporary
biopolitics into a “bioveillance;” in such a situation
a population becomes the very conductor of processes that make
things objective,
as they supposedly “are” in
the realm of global
capital.
Metaverse
When Marina Grzinic
suggests that reality
should not
be read over
fiction, but
fiction over
reality, then
in the
context
of contemporary
glorified influence
of technology for “freedom” gaining,
we see a clear parallelogram in which capital flexible power (from
physical world) is being transformed through info-communication
technologies (ICT) in a platform for creating an illusion of involvements
in “democratic” processes. This illusion of participation
heavily conducted through cyberspace, as a reversal of what is
going on in reality, can be precisely understood through what Grzinic
further elaborates as the role of museums in the context of contemporary
arts; she suggests a reversal of the standard neoliberal question, “if
contemporary art needs museums?,” into “do contemporary
museums need art at all?”. (Grzinic, 2005: 110)
It is important to
acknowledge the
dynamics of overproduction
of concepts
like “creativity,” “cultural production” and
etc., because we don’t only witness to the strategy of (non)positioning
of “creative cultural scenes” (for instance in South
East Europe) by the ruling class in these regions, but we witness
to subtle strategies of imposition of the condition of “interactive
passivity,” that reduces the political, and contributes to
the overall fragmentation of the social. All what we get, as a
result of this process, is the aesthetization of processes of inclusion
and exclusion, of on’s and off’s that are deterritorialized
by new info-communication technologies.
As an example in
the matter I
propose Metaverse,
coined
by
Neal Stephenson
in his cyber-punk
novel Snow
Crash (1992). Metaverse
is a virtual
network that shows degrees
of development
of
Internet located
within the dystopian
vision
of USA in
the near future.
Metaverse that
is populated
by members
of middle
and high classes
is accessible
through
public
terminals as
well to lower classes,
but in these
cases the social stigma
is created
because
of low resolution
of rendered
avatars,
virtual representations
of users
in the physical
world, etc. In
order to
position oneself “well” in
the social structure of Metaverse, it is needed, as Stephenson
writes, to have an access to a privately owned terminal in the
world where centralized governmental power is reduced to minimum,
while the mega powerful corporations are those that fragment
the geo-political horizon. Although in Snow
Crash we can as well
access
online projects like There.com, Second Life or Active Worlds
and enter them for free, nevertheless we have to pay in order
to become
a citizen.
These claims
not only ties
Metaverse
to technological
improvements,
but ties communicational
coding
protocols to
cyberspace,
while bypassing
precisely the
social reality.
Stephenson
in his
novel sees
these protocols
as
software which
is used to
control masses.
But as we
know that
masses
are not
simply passive
and not only
controlled
by some excluded
entities, an
interesting
parallel to
Nietzsche’s claim between the primordial “I want,” / “I
will do it” and the actual freeing of a will, is possible
to be established here (Nietzsche, 1990: 54). A parallel in between
passive population, seen as not-able-to-liberate-themselves and
active population, seen as not-wanting-to-be-liberated is established
here, while we witness the evacuation of reality into cyberspace.
Stephenson’s Metaverse is a situation in which actually nothing
is going on (similarly to Grzinic’s “museums without
art”), but to what lower classes still wants to be actively
attached… Why?
As Nietzsche
noted, the
rebellion
of slaves, to
whom
rights to
properly react
(by
acting) has
been denied,
starts within
a moral
horizon with
resentment.
The “slaves” find compensation
only in an imaginary revenge …, in turning of a gaze. This
need to look outside instead to inside is what belongs exactly
to the realm of resentment (that needs an external stimulation
to act); here action is basically reaction (Nietzsche, 1990: 32).
Stephenson’s dystopian Metaverse and today’s cyberspace
are these external worlds that institutionalize resentment; that
is a reaction produced by active processes of chaos creation
along with the propagation of its suspension.
A counter
argument
to what
I stated
above might
be
that the
great majority
of the
world population
does
not even
have
an access
to running
water;
therefore it
is superfluous
to
mention
the outcome of
new info-
communications
technologies
in these
areas.
In short, they
cannot
be included
into
hi-tech
surveillance networks,
anyway.
But, communicational
codes
under which
surveillance
(whether
for
military
or corporation
needs – it’s hard to distinguish
anyway) is seen, presented as something “positive,” illustrate
precisely the role of new info-communication technologies in
the global World.
For instance,
in Bosnia
and Herzegovina,
in
which
only 6-8 % of
population
has an
Internet
access,
the mass
media
recently announced
that
biometric passports
and
ID cards,
that
contain an
amount
of administrative
and bio
data
of the
bearer,
will
start to be
issued.
Aside
the fact that
Bosnian
citizens
need
visa for
almost
every
country
in the
world,
which
is likely
not to
be changed
after
the biometric
passport
system
gets
installed, this
flagrant
announcement
of privacy
breach – (that will be paid by citizens of course,
because tax money goes in support of huge administrative apparatus
and imbecile spectacles) –, is by the wide public seen as “modernization.” It
should speed up integration of the country into Euro-Atlantic institutions!
It is exactly such “flexibility” of the population
that opens spaces for future exploitations of individual rights.
As a result, transitional societies will find themselves in a situation
where reality will be excluded in such a measure that lower classes
will be literally forced to live in the “underground,” finding
themselves fighting for those who created the chaos in the first
place. This is a possible future scenario, of course, if they
will wake up from ethnic based conflicts, and from illusions
that they
have an independent state, nevertheless upgraded with new info-communication
technologies (i.e. biometric passports).
The fantasy
of
prosperity hides,
according
to
Jodi Dean,
the
ways facts
and
opinions,
images
and
reactions, circulate
through
mass
streaming;
losing
all
their specificity,
they
appear
as
nothing else
but
contributions within
an
eternal
processes
of
content
streaming
(Dean:
2005,
14-15).
This
change
of
messages into
contributions
is
what Dean
regards
as
the basic
characteristic
of
communication in capitalism.
However,
I might
add,
that
it
is
not only
the
conversion of
messages
into
contributions
that
is
the basic
characteristic
of
networks in hyper
capitalism,
but
it
is as well
the
conversion
of
life itself
to
a contribution
within
communication
protocols
in
global society;
an
issue which
makes
the
stream of
content
running.
Chaos
fragments
into
extremes
the
totality
of
social
interactions;
it
simultaneously
institutionalizes
exclusion
of
unwanted
resistances
and
includes
Nietzsche’s
active
passivity
(slave
morality)
into
reproductions
of
power.
Therefore,
chaos
is
mobilized
for
the
constant
re-affirmation
and
reproduction
of
slavery
to
the
machine
of
hyper
capital(ism).
*
Text
edited
by
Marina
Grzinic
in
collaboration
with
Sefik
Tatlic.
References
 Baudrillard,
Jean, »La Violence du Mondial,« in Jean
Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée,
2002)
Dean,
Jodi “Communicative capitalism: circulation and the
foreclosure of politics” (in
Cultural
Politics I, pg.
51-74,
2005)
Grzinic,
Marina, Esthetics
of the
Cyberworld and
the Effects
of De-realization (Zagreb: Multimedijalni
institut mi2
and Sarajevo:
Centar za
kulturu i
komunikaciju Kosnica,
2005)
Hardt,
Michael/ Negri,
Antonio, Multitude,
War and
Democracy in
the Age
of Empire (UK, Hamish
and Hamilton
- Penguin
Group, 2005)
Klein,
Naomi, The
Rise of
Disaster Capitalism
(The
Nation,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050502/klein,
2005)
Nancy,
Jean-Luc, La
Création du monde ou la mondialisation (Paris: Galilée,
2002) Nietzsche,
Friedrich,
On the Genealogy of Morals,
trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R.J. Hollingdale (New York:
Random House, 1967)
Short
CV
Sefik
Seki Tatlic
(*1976, Bihac,
Bosnia and
Herzegovina). BA
at the
Faculty of
Political Sciences
in Sarajevo,
Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Enrolled
at the
doctoral program
for humanities
at the
University of
Zagreb, Croatia.
His main
activities are
research of
social implications
of alternative
copyright (copyleft)
licenses, open
source (Linux
like) software,
Creative commons
license and
the analysis
of global
capitalism
and new
technologies.
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