
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.

