
THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE

  Critical Art Ensemble
  
 Part 3 of 7

Published by Autonomedia

ISBN 1-57027-006-6

Planning a generic leftist documentary for PBS.  Subject:  The
     guerrilla war in ____________ (choose a third-world nation).

     1.  Choose a title carefully, since it is one of the primary
     framing devices.  It should present itself purely as a
     description of the images contained in the work, but should
     also function as a privileged ideological marker.  For
     example, "The Struggle for Freedom in ____________." 
     Remember, do not mention "guerrillas" in the title.  Such
     words have a connotation of a lost or subversive cause that
     could lead to irrational violent action, and that scares
     liberals.

     2.  If you have a large enough budget (and you probably do
     if you are making yet another film on political strife),
     open with a lyrical aerial shot of the natural surroundings
     of the country in question.  Usually the countryside is held
     by the guerrillas.  This is good.  You now have the
     traditional authority of nature (and the morality of the
     town/country distinction) on your side.  These are two
     foundational codes of didactic western art.  They are rarely
     questioned, and will create a channel leading the viewer to
     the belief that you are filming a populist uprising.

     3.  Dissolve to the particular band of guerrillas that you
     are going to film.  Do not show large armies, and show only
     small arms, not heavy weaponry.  Remember, the guerrillas
     must look like real underdogs.  Americans love that code. 
     If you must talk about the size of the rebel army (for
     instance, to show the amount of popular support for the
     resistance), keep it abstract; give only statistics.  Large
     military formations have that Nuremberg look to the them. 
     If at all possible, choose a band comprised of families:  It
     shows real desperation when an entire extended family is
     fighting.  Keep in mind that one of your key missions is to
     humanize the rebels while making the dominant group an evil
     abstraction.  Finish this sequence by stylishly introducing
     each of the rebels as individuals.

     4.  For the next sequence, single out a family to represent
     the group.  Interview each member.  Address their
     motivations for resistance.  Follow them throughout the day. 
     Capture the hardships of rebel activity.  Be sure to show
     the sleeping arrangements and the poverty of the food, but
     concentrate on what the fight is doing to the family.  End
     the sequence by showing the family involved in a
     recreational activity.  This will demonstrate the rebels'
     ability to endure, and to be human in the face of
     catastrophe.  It is also the perfect segue into the next
     sequence:  "In this moment of play, who could have imagined
     the tragedy that would befall them..."

     5.  Having established the rebels as real, feeling people,
     it is time to turn to the enemy, by showing for instance an
     atrocity attributed to them.  (Never show the enemy
     themselves; they must remain an alien abstraction, an
     unknown to be feared.)  It is preferable if a distant
     relative of the focus family is killed or wounded in the
     represented enemy action.  Document the mourning of the
     fellow rebels.

     6.  With the identities of both the rebels and the enemy
     established, you must now show an actual guerrilla action. 
     It should be read as a defensive maneuver with no
     connotation of vengeance.  Make sure that it is an evening
     or morning raid, to lessen sympathy for the enemy as
     individuals.  The low light will keep them hidden and allow
     the sparks of the return gunfire to represent the enemy as
     depersonalized.  Do not show guerrillas taking prisoners: 
     It is difficult to maintain viewers' sympathy for the rebels
     if they are seen sticking automatic weapons in the backs of
     the enemy and marching them along.  Finally, only show the
     action if the rebels seem to win the engagement.

     7.  In the victory sequence it is important to show the tie
     between the rebels and the nonmilitary personnel of the
     countryside.  With the enemy recently beaten, it is safe to
     go to town and celebrate with the agrarian class.  You can
     include speeches and commemorations in this sequence.  Show
     the peasants giving the rebels food, while the rebels give
     the civilians nonmilitary materials captured during the
     raid.  But most importantly, ensure that the sequence has a
     festive spirit.  This will add an emotional contrast to the
     closing sequence.

     8.  Final sequence:  Focus on the rebel group expressing
     their dreams of victory and vowing never to surrender.  This
     should cap it:  You are now guaranteed a sympathetic
     response from the audience.  The sympathy will override any
     critical reflection, making the audience content to ride the
     wave of %your% radical subjectivity.  Roll credits.  Perhaps
     add a postscript by the filmmaker on how touched and amazed
     s/he was by the experience.

In creating a documentary, one small adjustment could be made
     with minimal disturbance to the traditional model--to
     announce for a given work that the collection of images
     presented have already been fully digested within a
     specialized cultural perspective.  Make sure the viewers
     know that they are watching a %version% of the subject
     matter, not the thing in itself.  This will not cure the
     many ills of documentary film/video, since versions
     themselves are prepackaged, having little meaning in
     relation to other version; however, it would make the
     documentary model a little less repugnant, since this
     disclaimer would avoid the assertion that one was showing
     the truth of the matter.  This would allow the system to
     remain closed, but still produce the realization that what
     is being documented is not a concrete history, but an
     independent semiotic frame through which sensation has been
     filtered and interpreted.

     Take, for instance, documentaries on a subject regarded
     almost universally as pleasant and innocuous, such as
     nature.  It becomes readily apparent that nature itself is
     not the subject, nor could it be.  Rather, the simulation of
     nature is actually a repository for specialized cultural
     perspectives and myths that are antithetical to the sign of
     civilization.  Consider the following versions:

     1.  Aestheticized Nature.  This is a viewpoint common to
     most National Geographic documentaries.  In this
     formulation, nature is presented as the original source of
     beauty, grandeur, and grace.  Even the most violent events
     become precious aesthetic processes that must be preserved. 
     This is even true in the presentation of "exotic"
     racial/ethnic groups!  The world is reduced to an art museum
     that testifies to the cosmological and teleological
     perfection of nature.  Nature's highest function is to exist
     for aesthetic appreciation.  Both the aesthetics and the
     ideology that conjure this beatific version of nature come
     from a well-packaged nostalgic romanticism that determines
     both the documentary maker's expectations and the method for
     filming and editing.

     2.  Darwinian Nature.  This conception of nature is best
     represented by the series _The Trials of Life_.  In this
     treatment the Hobbesian universe comes alive, and the war of
     all against all is graphically depicted.  This blood-and-
     guts version of nature assembles the signage of survivalist
     ideology to represent the blind gropings of a cold and
     uncaring universe.  It is a remembrance of the fatality of
     the world prior to the order of civilization.  Such work
     acts as an ideological bunker defending the luxury of order
     produced by the police state.

     3.  Anthropomorphic Nature.  This interpretation revolves
     around the question of "How are animals like people?" 
     Typical of Disney documentaries or television shows such as
     _Wild Kingdom_, these films are insufferably cute, and
     present the natural order as one of innocence.  This is not
     surprising, since these presentations are targeted at
     children, and so the conflation of human beings
     (particularly children) with animals is regarded as a good
     rubric for "healthy" socialization.  These films concentrate
     on animals' nurturing behavior and on their modest
     "adventures," interpreting nature as a bourgeois entity.

     In all such readings, the viewer is presented with an
     artificially constructed pastiche of images that offers only
     limited possibilities for the mythic establishment of
     nature.  Nature exists as merely a semiotic construction
     used to justify some ideological structure.  Nature as code
     is kept fresh by showing animals and panoramic landscapes
     that are then overlaid with ideological interpretive
     frameworks.  Nature films have never documented anything
     other than the artificial--that is, institutionally-
     constructed value systems.  Much the same can be said about
     the political documentary, since only the contingent aspects
     are different.  The filmmaker then shows us people and
     cities, rather than animals and landscapes.

The various versions of the present that the documentary imposes
     on its viewers are refashioned by the film/video form into
     electronic monuments sharing a number of characteristics
     with their architectural counterparts.  Typically, leftist
     documentaries parallel the function of monuments and
     participate in the spectacle of obscenity to the following
     extent:

     1.  Monuments function as concrete signs of an imposed
     reconstituted memory.

     2.  Monumentalism is the concrete attempt to halt the
     proliferation of meaning in regard to the interpretation of
     convulsive events.  Monuments are not the signs of freedom
     that they appear to be, but the very opposite, signs of
     imprisonment, quelling freedom of speech, freedom of
     thought, and freedom of remembrance.  As overseers in the
     panoptic prison of ideology, their demand for submission is
     masochistically obeyed by too many.

     3.  The return of cultural continuity is what exalts the
     monument in the eyes of the complicit.  In its cloak of
     silence, the monument can easily repress contradiction.  To
     those whose values they represent, monuments offer a
     peaceful space through the familiarity of cynical tradition. 
     At the monument, the complicit are not burdened with
     alienation arising from diversity of opinion, nor with the
     anxiety of moral contradiction.  They are safe from the
     disturbance of reflection.  Monuments are the ultimate
     ideological bunkers--the concrete manifestations of fortress
     mentality.

     To be sure, there are differences between the architectural
     monuments of dominant culture, and the monuments to
     resistant culture, such as documentaries; those of resistant
     culture do not aspire to maintain the status quo, nor do
     they project a false continuity onto the wound of history. 
     The problem is that many of these monuments do aspire to an
     eventual dominance; they aspire to produce an icon that is
     above critical examination.  Thus far no sacred icons have
     been intentionally produced through the production of
     documentaries, but some have been accidentally produced
     through media spectacle.  The most notable examples are the
     Hill/Thomas hearings, and the Rodney King beating.  Certain
     images derived from these tapes have transcended the mundane
     to become sacred images for a broad spectrum of society. 
     Like any sacred image, these icons exhaust themselves on
     impact, and anyone who insinuates that meanings other than
     the one that immediately presents itself are layered into
     the image will be visited with a rain of punishment.  These
     images are so emotionally charged that they produce a panic,
     motivating a blind and vicious attack on any interpretive
     heresy.  They are to the left very much what the image of
     the aborted fetus is to the radical right.  If autonomy is
     the goal of resistant image production, the monumentality of
     the sacred must be eliminated from it.

One practical advantage of reality video (video that appears to
     replicate history) must be recognized--its function as a
     democratic form of counter-surveillance.  No matter how
     simple the video technology, it easily becomes seen as a
     threat.  It is perceived as a receptacle for guilt that can
     instantly replay acts of transgression.  As the perfect
     judicial witness, its objectivity cannot be legally
     questioned.  Yet as an instrument of intimidation against
     the transgressions of power, video functions only within
     limited parameters.  Its strict rational-legal power
     operates only in the context of exhausted meaning.  It is a
     useful defense in the legal system and in media spectacle,
     but it is detrimental to the understanding of media itself,
     as it promotes the authoritarian aesthetics of exhaustion.

     The supremacy of reality video as the model for resistant
     cultural production must be challenged by those who want to
     see the medium of video go beyond its traditional function
     as propaganda, while still maintaining resistant political
     qualities.  To eradicate reality video is unnecessary, but
     to curb its authority is essential.  This goal can be best
     accomplished by developing a postmodern conceptual structure
     that blends with video's postmodern techno-structure.  The
     fundamental contradiction of using 18th-century epistemology
     with 19th-century production techniques is that this will
     never adequately address the contemporary problems of
     representation in the society of simulation, just as
     medieval theology was incapable of addressing the challenges
     of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy.

     To resolve this contradiction, one must abandon the
     assumption that the image contains and shows fidelity to its
     referent.  This in turn means that one can no longer use the
     code of causality as a means of image continuity. 
     Preferably, one should use liquid associational structures
     that invite various interpretation.  To be sure, all imaging
     systems are mediated by the viewer:  The question is, to
     what degree?  Few systems invite interpretation, and hence
     meaning is imposed more often than it is created.  Many
     producers, for fear of allowing interpretation to drift out
     of control, have shunned the use of associational structures
     for politicized electronic imaging.  Further, associational
     films tend toward the abstract, and therefore become
     confusing, making them ineffective among the disinterested. 
     These problems prompt the eternal return to more
     authoritarian models.  The answer to such commentary is that
     the viewer deserves the right to disinterest, and the
     freedom to drift.  Confusion should be seen as an acceptable
     aesthetic.  The moment of confusion is the precondition for
     the scepticism necessary for radical thought to emerge.  The
     goals then of resistant nonfiction video are twofold: 
     Either to call attention to and document the sign
     construction of simulation, or to establish confusion and
     scepticism so that simulations cannot function.

The associational video is by its very nature recombinant.  It
     assembles and reassembles fragmented cultural images,
     letting the meanings they generate wander unbounded through
     the grid of cultural possibility.  It is this nomadic
     quality that distinguished them from the rigidly bounded
     recombinant films of Hollywood; however, like them, they
     rest comfortably in neither the category of fiction nor
     nonfiction.  For the purposes of resistance, the recombinant
     video offers no resolution; rather it acts as a data base
     for the viewer to make h/is own inferences.  This aspect of
     the recombinant film presupposes a desire on the part of the
     viewer to take control of the interpretive matrix, and
     construct h/is own meanings.  Such work is interactive to
     the extent that the viewer cannot be a passive participant. 
     S/he must not be spoonfed a particular point of view for a
     pedagogical purpose.  This characteristic often works
     against popular interaction, since strategies to break the
     habitual passive consumption of spectacle have not received
     much attention.  What is more unfortunate is that such work
     is often perceived to be elitist, because its use of the
     aesthetics of confusion does not %at present% draw popular
     support.  It should be noted that such commentary generally
     comes from a well-positioned intelligentsia certain of the
     correctness of its ideology.  Its mission is not to free its
     converts, but to keep them locked in and defending the
     bunker of solidified ideology.  It is disturbance through
     liquidation of these structures that resistant nomadic media
     attempts to accomplish.  This cannot be done by producing
     more electronic monuments, but rather, by an imaginative
     intervention and critical reflection liberated in an
     unresolved and uncertain electronic moment.


Chapter 4  ]]>  The Recombinant Theater and the Performative Matrix


In some cultures familiar with only modest imaging technologies,
     people believe that one should not allow oneself to be
     photographed, as this process steals a part of the soul. 
     This uncanny intuition perhaps shows an understanding that
     as representation of the self expands, the performative
     matrix becomes cluttered with simulated persona that can
     usurp the role of organic self-presentation.  The body as
     representation relinquishes its sovereignty, leaving the
     image of the body available for appropriation and for
     reestablishment in sign networks separate from those of the
     given world.  From a contemporary point of view, this is not
     necessarily negative, since it suggests the possibility that
     one can continually reinvent one's character identification
     and role to better suit one's desires.  In light of the
     possibility, we ought to surrender essentialist notions of
     self, personality, and body and take up roles within the
     dramaturgical grid of everyday life.  Yet there is always an
     uneasiness that accompanies this utopian possibility.  This
     anxiety arises less from the curious nonposition of having
     no fixed qualities, than it does from the fear that the
     power of reinvention lies elsewhere.  One senses that
     hostile external forces, rather than self-motivated ones,
     are constructing us as individuals.  This problem becomes
     increasingly complex in techno-culture, where people find
     themselves in virtual theaters alien to everyday life but
     which have a tremendous impact on it.  Abstracted
     representations of self and body, separate from the
     individual, are simultaneously present in numerous
     locations, interacting and recombining with others, beyond
     the control of the individual and often to h/is detriment. 
     For the critical performer, exploring and interrogating the
     wanderings and manipulations of the numerous electronic
     dopplegangers within the many theaters of the virtual should
     be of primary significance.

Consider the following scenario:  A person (P) walks into a bank
     with the idea of securing a loan.  According to the
     dramaturgical structure of the situation, the person is
     required to present h/erself as a responsible and
     trustworthy loan applicant.  Being a good performer, and
     comfortable with this situation, P has costumed h/erself
     well by wearing clothing and jewelry that indicate economic
     comfort.  P follows the application procedures well, and
     uses good blocking techniques with appropriate handshakes,
     standing and sitting as socially expected, and so on.  In
     addition, P has prepared and memorized a well-written script
     that fully explains h/er need for the loan, as well as h/er
     ability to repay it.  As careful as P is to conform to the
     codes of the situation, it quickly becomes apparent that
     h/er performance in itself is not sufficient to secure the
     loan.  All that P has accomplished by the performance is to
     successfully convince the loan officer to interview h/er
     electronic double.  The loan officer calls up h/er credit
     history on the computer.  It is this body, a body of data,
     that now controls the stage.  It is, in fact, the %only%
     body which interests the loan officer.  P's electronic
     double reveals that s/he has been late on credit payments in
     the past, and that s/he has been in a credit dispute with
     another bank.  The loan is denied; end of performance.

     This scenario could just as easily have had a happy ending,
     but its real importance is to show that the organic
     performance was primarily redundant.  The reality of the
     applicant was suspect; h/er abstracted image as credit data
     determined the result of the performance.  The engine of the
     stage, represented by the architecture of the bank, was
     consumed by the virtual theater.  The stage of screenal
     space, supported by the backstage data bases and internets,
     maintains ontological privilege over the theater of everyday
     life.

With an understanding of the virtual theater, one can easily see
     just how anachronistic most contemporary performance art is. 
     The endless waves of autoperformance, manifesting themselves
     as monologues and character bits, serve primarily as
     nostalgic remembrances of the past, when the performative
     matrix was centered in everyday life, and focused on organic
     players.  As a work of cultural resistance, the
     autoperformance's subversive intent appears in its futile
     attempt to reestablish the subject on the architectural
     stage.  Like most restorationist theater, its cause is dead
     on arrival.  The performance grid in this situation is
     already overcoded by the extreme duration of its history,
     and also suffers from the clutter of codes and simulated
     persona imposed by spectacle.  The attempt to sidestep these
     problems, by bringing the personal into the discourse, does
     not have an intersubjective depth of meaning that can
     maintain itself without networking with coding systems
     independent of the individual performer.  Consequently, the
     spectacular body and the virtual body consume the personal
     by imposing their own predetermined interpretive matrices. 
     As shocking as it may sound, the personal is %not% the
     political in recombinant culture.

     Such problems indicate powerfully that the model of
     production is thoroughly antiquated for performance (as for
     so much contemporary art).  Although in ancient times, the
     stage was the preeminent platform for the interaction of
     mythic codes, and although this status remained unquestioned
     until the 19th century, it has now reached a point of
     exhaustion.  The traditional stage in and of itself is a
     hollow bunker divorced from power.  As a location for
     disturbance, it offers little hope.  Rigor mortis has set
     in, and what used to be a site for liquid characters, who
     appeared simply by grabbing a mask, has now become a place
     where only the situations of the past or the simulations of
     the present may be replayed.

     Attempts to expand the stage have met with interesting
     results.  The aim of The Living Theater to break the
     boundaries of its traditional architecture was successful. 
     It collapsed the art and life distinction, which has been of
     tremendous help by establishing one of the first recombinant
     stages.  After all, only by examining everyday life through
     the frame of a dramaturgical model can one witness the
     poverty of this performative matrix.  The problem is that
     effective resistance will not come from the theater of
     everyday life alone.  Like the stage, the subelectronic--in 
     this case the street, in its traditional architectural and
     sociological form--will have no effect on the privileged
     virtual stage.

Consider the following scenario:  A hacker is placed on stage
     with a computer and a modem.  Working under no fixed time
     limit, the hacker breaks into data bases, calls up h/er
     files, and proceeds to erase or manipulate them in
     accordance with h/er own desires.  The performance ends when
     the computer is shut down.

     This performance, albeit oversimplified, signifies the heart
     of the electronic disturbance.  Such an action spirals
     through the performative network, nomadically interlocking
     the theater of everyday life, traditional theater, and
     virtual theater.  Multiple representations of the performer
     all explicitly participate in this scenario to create a new
     hierarchy or representation.  Within the virtual theater,
     the data structures that contain the electronic
     representation of the performer are disturbed through their
     manipulation or deletion.  In order for electronic data to
     act as the reality of a person, the data "facts" cannot be
     open to democratic manipulation.  Data loses privilege once
     it is found to be invalid or unreliable.  This situation
     offers the resistant performer two strategies:  One is to
     contaminate and call attention to corrupted data, while the
     other is to pass counterfeit data.  Either way, the
     establishment of the utopian goal of personal reinvention
     through performative recombination begins to take a form
     beyond everyday life.  Greater freedom in the theater of
     everyday life can be obtained, once the virtual theater is
     infiltrated.  The liberation gained through the recombinant
     body can only exist as long as authoritarian codes do not
     disrupt the performance.  For this to happen, the individual
     must have control of h/er image in all theaters, for only in
     this way can everyday life performance be aligned with
     personal desire.

     To make the above example more concrete, assume that the
     hacker is also a female to male cross-dresser.  In the
     performance she accesses h/er identification files, and
     changes the gender data to "male."  S/he leaves the stage,
     and begins a performance of gender selection on the street. 
     This begins a performance with desire unchained in the
     theater of everyday life.  The gender with which s/he
     identifies becomes the gender s/he actually is, for no
     contradictory data resource exists.  This performance is not
     limited to a matter of costuming, but can also affect the
     flesh.  Even biology will begin to collapse.  To give an
     extreme example:  Dressed as a man from the waist down, and
     using "masculine" gesture codes, the performer walks down
     the street shirtless.  S/he is stopped by the police.  The
     appearance of h/er breasts contradicts the desired gender
     role performance.  The police access the electronic
     information that validates the performer's claim to be a
     man.  The performer is released, since it is not illegal for
     a man to go shirtless.  This performance could easily have
     gone the other way with the arrest of the performer, but
     that is extremely unlikely, because such action would
     require perception to override the data facts.

     To say the least, a performance like this is extremely
     risky.  To challenge the codes and unleash desire is
     generally illegal, particularly as described here.  Hacking
     draws the eye of discipline quickly; it is the best way to
     destabilize the reality and practical structure of all
     theaters.  Yet these extreme examples outline the necessary
     steps needed for a postmodern theater of resistance. 
     Effective performance as a site of resistance must utilize
     interlocking recombinant stages that oscillate between
     virtual life and everyday life.  This means that the
     performer must cope with h/er electronic images, and with
     their techno-matrix.  It is time to develop strategies that
     strike at virtual authority.  As yet, there are none. 
     Performers have been too mired in the traditional theater
     and the theater of everyday life to even realize how the
     virtual world acts as the theater of final judgment.

