
THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE

  Critical Art Ensemble

 Part 1 of 7

Published by Autonomedia

ISBN 1-57027-006-6

Critical Art Ensemble would like to thank
Jim Fleming and all the members
of the Autonomedia Collective who helped
bring this project to fruition.  We would
especially like to thank Steven Englander,
who editorial assistance was invaluable.

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Chapter 1  ]]>  Introduction  ]]>  The Virtual Condition


The rules of cultural and political resistance have dramatically
     changed.  The revolution in technology brought about by the
     rapid development of the computer and video has created a
     new geography of power relations in the first world that
     could only be imagined as little as twenty years ago: 
     people are reduced to data, surveillance occurs on a global
     scale, minds are melded to screenal reality, and an
     authoritarian power emerges that thrives on absence.  The
     new geography is a virtual geography, and the core of
     political and cultural resistance must assert itself in this
     electronic space.

     The West has been preparing for this moment for 2,500 years. 
     There has always been an idea of the virtual, whether it was
     grounded in mysticism, abstract analytical thinking, or
     romantic fantasy.  All of these approaches have shaped and
     manipulated invisible worlds accessible only through the
     imagination, and in some cases these models have been given
     ontological privilege.  What has made contemporary concepts
     and ideologies of the virtual possible is that these
     preexisting systems of thought have expanded out of the
     imagination, and manifested themselves in the development
     and understanding of technology.  The following work, as
     condensed as it may be, extracts traces of the virtual from
     past historical and philosophical narratives.  These traces
     show intertextual relationships between seemingly disparate
     systems of thought that have now been recombined into a
     working body of "knowledge" under the sign of technology.


Chapter 2  ]]>  Nomadic Power and Cultural Resistance


The term that best describes the present social condition is
     liquescence.  The once unquestioned markers of stability,
     such as God or Nature, have dropped into the black hole of
     skepticism, dissolving positioned identification of subject
     or object.  Meaning simultaneously flows through a process
     of proliferation and condensation, at once drifting,
     slipping, speeding into the antinomies of apocalypse and
     utopia.  The location of power--and the site of
     resistance--rest in an ambiguous zone without borders.  How
     could it be otherwise, when the traces of power flow in
     transition between nomadic dynamics and sedentary
     structures--between hyperspeed and hyperinertia?  It is
     perhaps utopian to begin with the claim that resistance
     begins (and ends?) with a Nietzschean casting-off of the
     yoke of catatonia inspired by the postmodern condition, and
     yet the disruptive nature of consciousness leaves little
     choice.

     Treading water in the pool of liquid power need not be an
     image of acquiescence and complicity.  In spite of their
     awkward situation, the political activist and the cultural
     activist (anachronistically known as the artist) can still
     produce disturbances.  Although such action may more closely
     resemble the gestures of a drowning person, and it is
     uncertain just what is being disturbed, in this situation
     the postmodern roll of the dice favors the act of
     disturbance.  After all, what other chance is there?  It is
     for this reason that former strategies of "subversion" (a
     word which in critical discourse has about as much meaning
     as the word "community"), or camouflaged attack, have come
     under a cloud of suspicion.  Knowing what to subvert assumes
     that forces of oppression are stable and can be identified
     and separated--an assumption that is just too fantastic in
     an age of dialectics in ruins.  Knowing how to subvert
     presupposes an understanding of the opposition that rests in
     the realm of certitude, or (at least) high probability.  The
     rate at which strategies of subversion are co-opted
     indicates that the adaptability of power is too often
     underestimated; however, credit should be given to the
     resisters, to the extent that the subversive act or product
     is not co-optively reinvented as quickly as the bourgeois
     aesthetic of efficiency might dictate.

The peculiar entwinement of the cynical and the utopian in the
     concept of disturbance as a necessary gamble is a heresy to
     those who still adhere to 19th-century narratives in which
     the mechanisms and class(es) of oppression, as well as the
     tactics needed to overcome them, are clearly identified. 
     After all, the wager is deeply connected to conservative
     apologies for Christianity, and the attempt to appropriate
     rationalist rhetoric and models to persuade the fallen to
     return to traditional eschatology.  A renounced Cartesian
     like Pascal, or a renounced revolutionary like Dostoyevsky,
     typify its use.  Yet it must be realized that the promise of
     a better future, whether secular or spiritual, has always
     presupposed the economy of the wager.  The connection
     between history and necessity is cynically humorous when one
     looks back over the trail of political and cultural debris
     of revolution and near-revolution in ruins.  The French
     revolutions from 1789 to 1968 never stemmed the obscene tide
     of the commodity (they seem to have helped pave the way),
     while the Russian and Cuban revolutions merely replaced the
     commodity with the totalizing anachronism of the
     bureaucracy.  At best, all that is derived from these
     disruptions is a structure for a nostalgic review of
     reconstituted moments of temporary autonomy.

     The cultural producer has not fared any better.  Mallarme'
     brought forth the concept of the wager in _A Roll of the
     Dice_, and perhaps unwittingly liberated invention from the
     bunker of transcendentalism that he hoped to defend, as well
     as releasing the artist from the myth of the poetic subject. 
     (It is reasonable to suggest that de Sade had already
     accomplished these tasks at a much earlier date).  Duchamp
     (the attack on essentialism), Cabaret Voltaire (the
     methodology of random production), and Berlin dada (the
     disappearance of art into political action) all disturbed
     the cultural waters, and yet opened one of the cultural
     passages for the resurgence of transcendentalism in late
     Surrealism.  By way of reaction to the above three, a
     channel was also opened for formalist domination (still to
     this day the demon of the culture-text) that locked the
     culture-object into the luxury market of late capital. 
     However, the gamble of these fore-runners of disturbance
     reinjected the dream of autonomy with the amphetamine of
     hope that gives contemporary cultural producers and
     activists the energy to step up to the electronic gaming
     table to roll the dice again.

In _The Persian Wars_, Herodotus describes a feared people known
     as the Scythians, who maintained a horticultural-nomadic
     society unlike the sedentary empires in the "cradle of
     civilization."  The homeland of the Scythians on the
     Northern Black Sea was inhospitable both climatically and
     geographically, but resisted colonization less for these
     natural reasons than because there was no economic or
     military means by which to colonize or subjugate it.  With
     no fixed cities or territories, this "wandering horde" could
     never really be located.  Consequently, they could never be
     put on the defensive and conquered.  They maintained their
     autonomy through movement, making it seem to outsiders that
     they were always present and poised for attack even when
     absent.  The fear inspired by the Scythians was quite
     justified, since they were often on the military offensive,
     although no one knew where until the time of their instant
     appearance, or until traces of their power were discovered. 
     A floating border was maintained in their homeland, but
     power was not a matter of spatial occupation for the
     Scythians.  They wandered, taking territory and tribute as
     needed, in whatever area they found themselves.  In so
     doing, they constructed an invisible empire that dominated
     "Asia" for twenty-seven years, and extended as far south as
     Egypt.  The empire itself was not sustainable, since their
     nomadic nature denied the need or value of holding
     territories.  (Garrisons were not left in defeated
     territories).  They were free to wander, since it was
     quickly realized by their adversaries that even when victory
     seemed probable, for practicality's sake it was better not
     to engage them, and to instead concentrate military and
     economic effort on other sedentary societies--that is, on
     societies in which an infrastructure could be located and
     destroyed.  This policy was generally reinforced, because an
     engagement with the Scythians required the attackers to
     allow themselves to be found by the Scythians.  It was
     extraordinarily rare for the Scythians to be caught in a
     defensive posture.  Should the Scythians not like the term
     of engagement, they always had the option of remaining
     invisible, and thereby preventing the enemy from
     constructing a theater of operations.

     This archaic model of power distribution and predatory
     strategy has been reinvented by the power elite of late
     capital for much the same ends.  Its reinvention is
     predicated upon the technological opening of cyberspace,
     where speed/absence and inertia/presence collide in
     hyperreality.  The archaic model of nomadic power, once a
     means to an unstable empire, has evolved into a sustainable
     means of domination.  In a state of double signification,
     the contemporary society of nomads becomes both a diffuse
     power field without location, and a fixed sight machine
     appearing as spectacle.  The former privilege allows for the
     appearance of global economy, while the latter acts as a
     garrison in various territories, maintaining the order of
     the commodity with an ideology specific to the given area.

     Although both the diffuse power field and the sight machine
     are integrated through technology, and are necessary parts
     for global empire, it is the former that has fully realized
     the Scythian myth.  The shift from archaic space to an
     electronic network offers the full complement of nomadic
     power advantages:  The militarized nomads are always on the
     offensive.  The obscenity of spectacle and the terror of
     speed are their constant companions.  In most cases
     sedentary populations submit to the obscenity of spectacle,
     and contentedly pay the tribute demanded, in the form of
     labor, material, and profit.  First world, third world,
     nation or tribe, all must give tribute.  The differentiated
     and hierarchical nations, classes, races, and genders of
     sedentary modern society all blend under nomadic domination
     into the role of its service workers--into caretakers of the
     cyberelite.  This separation, mediated by spectacle, offers
     tactics that are beyond the archaic nomadic model.  Rather
     than a hostile plundering of an adversary, there is a
     friendly pillage, seductively and ecstatically conducted
     against the passive.  Hostility from the oppressed is
     rechanneled into the bureaucracy, which misdirects
     antagonism away from the nomadic power field.  The retreat
     into the invisibility of nonlocation prevents those caught
     in the panoptic spatial lock-down from defining a site of
     resistance (a theater of operations), and they are instead
     caught in a historical tape loop of resisting the monuments
     of dead capital.  (Abortion rights?  Demonstrate on the
     steps of the Supreme Court. For the release of drugs which
     slow the development of HIV, storm the NIH).  No longer
     needing to take a defensive posture is the nomads' greatest
     strength.

As the electronic information-cores overflow with files of
     electronic people (those transformed into credit histories,
     consumer types, patterns and tendencies, etc.), electronic
     research, electronic money, and other forms of information
     power, the nomad is free to wander the electronic net, able
     to cross national boundaries with minimal resistance from
     national bureaucracies.  The privileged realm of electronic
     space controls the physical logistics of manufacture, since
     the release of raw materials and manufactured goods requires
     electronic consent and direction.  Such power must be
     relinquished to the cyber realm, or the efficiency (and
     thereby the profitability) of complex manufacture,
     distribution, and consumption would collapse into a
     communication gap.  Much the same is true of the military;
     there is cyberelite control of information resources and
     dispersal.  Without command and control, the military
     becomes immobile, or at best limited to chaotic dispersal in
     localized space.  In this manner all sedentary structures
     become servants of the nomads.

The nomadic elite itself is frustratingly difficult to grasp. 
     Even in 1956, when C. Wright Mills wrote _The Power Elite_,
     it was clear that the sedentary elite already understood the
     importance of invisibility.  (This was quite a shift from
     the looming spatial markers of power used by the feudal
     aristocracy).  Mills found it impossible to get any direct
     information on the elite, and was left with speculations
     drawn from questionable empirical categories (for example,
     the social register).  As the contemporary elite moves from
     centralized urban areas to decentralized and
     deterritorialized cyberspace, Mills' dilemma becomes
     increasingly aggravated.  How can a subject be critically
     assessed that cannot be located, examined, or even seen? 
     Class analysis reaches a point of exhaustion.  Subjectively
     there is a feeling of oppression, and yet it is difficult to
     locate, let alone assume, an oppressor.  In all likelihood,
     this group is not a class at all--that is, an aggregate of
     people with common political and economic interests--but a
     downloaded elite military consciousness.  The cyberelite is
     now a transcendent entity that can only be imagined. 
     Whether they have integrated programmed motives is unknown. 
     Perhaps so, or perhaps their predatory actions fragment
     their solidarity, leaving shared electronic pathways and
     stores of information as the only basis of unity.  The
     paranoia of imagination is the foundation for a thousand
     conspiracy theories--all of which are true.  Roll the dice.

The development of an absent and potentially unassailable nomadic
     power, coupled with the rear vision of revolution in ruins,
     has nearly muted the contestational voice.  Traditionally,
     during times of disillusionment, strategies of retreatism
     begin to dominate.  For the cultural producer, numerous
     examples of cynical participation populate the landscape of
     resistance.  The experience of Baudelaire comes to mind.  In
     1848 Paris he fought on the barricades, guided by the notion
     that "property is theft," only to turn to cynical nihilism
     after the revolution's failure.  (Baudeliare was never able
     to completely surrender.  His use of plagiarism as an
     inverted colonial strategy forcefully recalls the notion
     that property is theft).  Andre Breton's early surrealist
     project--synthesizing the liberation of desire with the
     liberation of the worker--unraveled when faced with the rise
     of fascism.  (Breton's personal arguments with Louis Aragon
     over the function of the artist as revolution agent should
     also be noted.  Breton never could abandon the idea of
     poetic self as a privileged narrative.)  Breton increasingly
     embraced mysticism in the 30s, and ended by totally
     retreating into transcendentalism.  The tendency of the
     disillusioned cultural worker to retreat toward
     introspection to sidestep the Enlightenment question of
     "what is to be done with the social situation in light of
     sadistic power?" is the representation of life through
     denial.  It is not that interior liberation is undesirable
     and unnecessary, only that it cannot become singular or
     privileged.  To turn away from the revolution of everyday
     life, and place cultural resistance under the authority of
     the poetic self, has always led to cultural production that
     is the easiest to commodify and bureaucratize.

     From the American postmodern viewpoint, the 19th-century
     category of the poetic self (as delineated by the Decadents,
     the Symbolists, the Nabis School, etc.) has come to
     represent complicity and acquiescence when presented as
     pure.  The culture of appropriation has eliminated this
     option in and of itself.  (It still has some value as a
     point of intersection.  For example, bell hooks uses it well
     as an entrance point to other discourses).  Though in need
     of revision, Asger Jorn's modernist motto "The avant-garde
     never gives up!" still has some relevance.  Revolution in
     ruins and the labyrinth of appropriation have emptied the
     comforting certitude of the dialectic.  The marxist
     watershed, during which the means of oppression had a clear
     identity, and the route of resistance was unilinear, has
     disappeared into the void of skepticism.  However, this is
     no excuse for surrender.  The ostracized surrealist, Georges
     Bataille, presents an option still not fully explored:  In
     everyday life, rather than confronting the aesthetic of
     utility, attack from the rear through the nonrational
     economy of the perverse and sacrificial.  Such a strategy
     offers the possibility for intersecting exterior and
     interior disturbance.

     The significance of the movement of disillusionment from
     Baudelaire to Artaud is that its practitioners imagined
     sacrificial economy.  However, their conception of it was
     too often limited to an elite theater of tragedy, thus
     reducing it to a resource for "artistic" exploitation.  To
     complicate matters further, the artistic presentation of the
     perverse was always so serious that sites of application
     were often consequently overlooked.  Artaud's stunning
     realization that the body without organs had appeared,
     although he seemed uncertain as to what it might be, was
     limited to tragedy and apocalypse.  Signs and traces of the
     body without organs appear throughout mundane experience. 
     The body without organs is Ronald McDonald, not an esoteric
     aesthetic; after all, there is a critical place for comedy
     and humor as a means of resistance.  Perhaps this is the
     Situationist International's greatest contribution to the
     postmodern aesthetic.  The dancing Nietzsche lives.

In addition to aestheticized retreatism, a more sociological
     variety appeals to romantic resisters--a primitive version
     of nomadic disappearance.  This is the disillusioned retreat
     to fixed areas that elude surveillance.  Typically, the
     retreat is to the most culturally negating rural areas, or
     to deterritorialized urban neighborhoods.  The basic
     principle is to achieve autonomy by hiding from social
     authority.  As in band societies whose culture cannot be
     touched because it cannot be found, freedom is enhanced for
     those participating in the project.  However, unlike band
     societies, which emerged within a given territory, these
     transplanted communities are always susceptible to
     infections from spectacle, language, and even nostalgia for
     former environments, rituals, and habits.  These communities
     are inherently unstable (which is not necessarily negative). 
     Whether these communities can be transformed from
     campgrounds for the disillusioned and defeated (as in late
     60s-early 70s America) to effective bases for resistance
     remains to be seen.  One has to question, however, whether
     an effective sedentary base of resistance will not be
     quickly exposed and undermined, so that it will not last
     long enough to have an effect.

Another 19th-century narrative that persists beyond its natural
     life is the labor movement--i.e., the belief that the key to
     resistance is to have an organized body of workers stop
     production.  Like revolution, the idea of the union has been
     shattered, and perhaps never existed in everyday life.  The
     ubiquity of broken strikes, give-backs, and lay-offs attests
     that what is called a union is no more than a labor
     bureaucracy.  The fragmentation of the world--intonations,
     regions, first and third worlds, etc., as a means of
     discipline by nomadic power--has anachronized national labor
     movements.  Production sites are too mobile and management
     techniques too flexible for labor action to be effective. 
     If labor in one area resists corporate demands, an
     alternative labor pool is quickly found.  The movement of
     Dupont's and General Motors' production plants into Mexico,
     for example, demonstrates this nomadic ability.  Mexico as
     labor colony also allows reduction of unit cost, by
     eliminating first world "wage standards" and employee
     benefits.  The speed of the corporate world is paid for by
     the intensification of exploitation; sustained fragmentation
     of time and of space makes it possible.  The size and
     desperation of the third world labor pool, in conjunction
     with complicit political systems, provide organized labor no
     base from which to bargain.

     The Situationists attempted to contend with this problem by
     rejecting the value of both labor and capital.  All should
     quit work--proles, bureaucrats, service workers, everyone. 
     Although it is easy to sympathize with the concept, it
     presupposes an impractical unity.  The notion of a general
     strike was much too limited; it got bogged down in national
     struggles, never moving beyond Paris, and in the end it did
     little damage to the global machine.  The hope of a more
     elite strike manifesting itself in the occupation movement
     was a strategy that was also dead on arrival, for much the
     same reason.

     The Situationist delight in occupation is interesting to the
     extent that it was an inversion of the aristocratic right to
     property, although this very fact makes it suspect from its
     inception, since even modern strategies should not merely
     seek to invert feudal institutions.  The relationship
     between occupation and ownership, as presented in the
     conservative social thought, was appropriated by
     revolutionaries in the first French revolution.  The
     liberation and occupation of the Bastille was significant
     less for the few prisoners released, than to signal that
     obtaining property through occupation is a double-edged
     sword.  This inversion made the notion of property into a
     conservatively viable justification for genocide.  In the
     Irish genocide of the 1840s, English landowners realized
     that it would be more profitable to use their estates for
     raising grazing animals than to leave the tenant farmers
     there who traditionally occupied the land.  When the potato
     blight struck, destroying the tenant farmers' crops and
     leaving them unable to pay rent, an opening was perceived
     for mass eviction.  English landlords requested and received
     military assistance from London to remove the farmers and to
     ensure they did not reoccupy the land.  Of course the
     farmers believed they had the right to be on the land due to
     their long-standing occupation of it, regardless of their
     failure to pay rent.  Unfortunately, the farmers were
     transformed into a pure excess population since their right
     to property by occupation was not recognized.  Laws were
     passed denying them the right to immigrate to England,
     leaving thousands to die without food or shelter in the
     Irish winter.  Some were able to immigrate to the US, and
     remained alive, but only as abject refugees.  Meanwhile, in
     the US itself, the genocide of Native Americans was well
     underway, justified in part by the belief that since the
     native tribes did not own land, all territories were open,
     and once occupied (invested with sedentary value), they
     could be "defended."  Occupation theory has been more bitter
     than heroic.

In the postmodern period of nomadic power, labor and occupation
     movements have not been relegated to the historical scrap
     heap, but neither have they continued to exercise the
     potency that they once did.  Elite power, having rid itself
     of its national and urban bases to wander in absence on the
     electronic pathways, can no longer be disrupted by
     strategies predicated upon the contestation of sedentary
     forces.  The architectural monuments of power are hollow and
     empty, and function now only as bunkers for the complicit
     and those who acquiesce.  They are secure places revealing
     mere traces of power.  As with all monumental architecture,
     they silence resistance and resentment by the signs of
     resolution, continuity, commodification, and nostalgia. 
     These places can be occupied, but to do so will not disrupt
     the nomadic flow.  At best such an occupation is a
     disturbance that can be made invisible through media
     manipulation; a particularly valued bunker (such as a
     bureaucracy) can be easily reoccupied by the postmodern war
     machine.  The electronic valuables inside the bunker, of
     course, cannot be taken by physical measures.

     The web connecting the bunkers--the street--is of such
     little value to the nomadic power that it has been left to
     the underclass.  (One exception is the greatest monument to
     the war machine every constructed:  The Interstate Highway
     System.  Still valued and well defended, that location shows
     almost no signs of disturbance.)  Giving the street to the
     most alienated of classes ensures that only profound
     alienation can occur there.  Not just the police, but
     criminals, addicts, and even the homeless are being used as
     disrupters of public space.  The underclass' actual
     appearance, in conjunction with media spectacle, has allowed
     the forces of order to construct the hysterical perception
     that the streets are unsafe, unwholesome, and useless.  The
     promise of safety and familiarity lures hordes of
     unsuspecting into privatized public spaces such as malls. 
     The price of this protectionism is the relinquishment of
     individual sovereignty.  No one but the commodity has rights
     in the mall.  The streets in particular and public spaces in
     general are in ruins.  Nomadic power speaks to its followers
     through the autoexperience of electronic media.  The smaller
     the public, the greater the order.

