
THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE

  Critical Art Ensemble

 Part 5 of 7

Published by Autonomedia

ISBN 1-57027-006-6

=================================================================

          %Body without Organs% (second manifestation)

     BwO NOW.
     BwO NOW.
     BwO NOW.

     Imperfect flesh is the foundation of screenal economy.  The
     frenzy of the screenal sign oscillates between perfection
     and excess, production and counter-production, panic and
     hysteria.  Screenal space inscribes the flesh as the abject. 
     The screenal space seduces the flesh into the abyss of the
     surface.  The electronic body is the perfect body.  The
     Electronic body is the body without organs positioned in its
     screenal space.  It is both self and mirrored self.  The
     electronic body is the complete body.  The body without
     organs does not decay.  The electronic body does not need
     the plastic surgeon's scalpel, liposuction, make-up, or
     deodorant.  It is a body without organs which cannot suffer,
     not physiologically, not psychologically, not
     sociologically; it is not conscious of separation.  The
     electronic body seduces those who see it into the bliss of
     counter-production by offering the hope of a bodily unity
     that transcends consumption.  But the poor, pathetic,
     organic body is always in a state of becoming.  If it
     consumed just one more product, perhaps it might become
     whole, perhaps it too could become a body without organs
     existing in electronic space.

     The electronic body oscillates between panic perfection and
     hysterical aphanisis.  The electronic body inscribes the
     flesh as the abject.  At any moment the organic body could
     fracture and its surface could decay with sickness, ooze and
     squirt anti-social fluids.  The electronic body has shown
     %ad nauseam% that the spilling of guts, the projecting of
     vomit, the splitting of skin, the eruption of pus, or any
     sign of the organic in screenal space exists there only to
     instill fear, contempt, and embarrassment.

     BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
     BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
     BwO dreams of a body that never existed.
     BwO NOW.


=================================================================


Chapter 5  ]]>  Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality,
                and Electronic Cultural Production


Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural
     world.  Typically it has been viewed as the theft of
     language, ideas, and images by the less than talented, often
     for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige.  Yet,
     like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily
     inverted.  Perhaps it is those who support the legislation
     of representation and the privatization of language that are
     suspect; perhaps the plagiarist's actions, given a specific
     set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to
     cultural enrichment.  Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism
     was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas.  An English
     poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch
     and call it his own.  In accordance with the classical
     aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly
     acceptable practice.  The real value of this activity rested
     less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in
     the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it
     probably would not have appeared.  The works of English
     plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne,
     Coleridge, and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the
     English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this
     day.

     At present, new conditions have emerged that once again make
     plagiarism an acceptable, even crucial strategy for textual
     production.  This is the age of the recombinant: 
     recombinant bodies, recombinant gender, recombinant texts,
     recombinant culture.  Looking back through the privileged
     frame of hindsight, one can argue that the recombinant has
     always been key in the development of meaning and invention;
     recent extraordinary advances in electronic technology have
     called attention to the recombinant both in theory and in
     practice (for example, the use of morphing in video and
     film).  The primary value of all electronic technology,
     especially computers and imaging systems, is the startling
     speed at which they can transmit information in both raw and
     refined forms.  As information flows at a high velocity
     through the electronic networks, disparate and sometimes
     incommensurable systems of meaning intersect, with both
     enlightening and inventive consequences.  In a society
     dominated by a "knowledge" explosion, exploring the
     possibilities of meaning in that which already exists is
     more pressing than adding redundant information (even if it
     is produced using the methodology and metaphysic of the
     "original").  In the past, arguments in favor of plagiarism
     were limited to showing its use in resisting the
     privatization of culture that serves the needs and desires
     of the power elite.  Today one can argue that plagiarism is
     acceptable, even inevitable, given the nature of postmodern
     existence with its techno-infrastructure.  In a recombinant
     culture, plagiarism is productive, although we need not
     abandon the romantic model of cultural production which
     privileges a model of %ex nihilo% creation.  Certainly in a
     general sense the latter model is somewhat anachronistic. 
     There are still specific situations where such thinking is
     useful, and one can never be sure when it could become
     appropriate again.  What is called for is an end to its
     tyranny and to its institutionalized cultural bigotry.  This
     is a call to open the cultural data base, to let everyone
     use the technology of textual production to its maximum
     potential.

          Ideas improve.  The meaning of words participates in
          the improvement.  Plagiarism is necessary.  Progress
          implies it.  It embraces an author's phrase, makes use
          of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces
          it with the right idea. (1)

Plagiarism often carries a weight of negative connotations
     (particularly in the bureaucratic class); while the need for
     its use has increased over the century, plagiarism itself
     has been camouflaged in a new lexicon by those desiring to
     explore the practice as method and as a legitimized form of
     cultural discourse.  Readymades, collage, found art or found
     text, intertexts, combines, detournement, and appropriation-
     -all these terms represent explorations in plagiarism. 
     Indeed, these terms are not perfectly synonymous, but they
     all intersect a set of meanings primary to the philosophy
     and activity of plagiarism.  Philosophically, they all stand
     in opposition to essentialist doctrines of the text:  They
     all assume that no structure within a given text provides a
     universal and necessary meaning.  No work of art of
     philosophy exhausts itself in itself alone, in its being-in-
     itself.  Such works have always stood in relation to the
     actual life-process of society from which they have
     distinguished themselves.  Enlightenment essentialism failed
     to provide a unit of analysis that could act as a basis of
     meaning.  Just as the connection between a signifier and its
     referent is arbitrary, the unit of meaning used for any
     given textual analysis is also arbitrary.  Roland Barthes'
     notion of the lexia primarily indicates surrender in the
     search for a basic unit of meaning.  Since language was the
     only tool available for the development of metalanguage,
     such a project was doomed from its inception.  It was much
     like trying to eat soup with soup.  The text itself is
     fluid--although the language game of ideology can provide
     the illusion of stability, creating blockage by manipulating
     the unacknowledged assumptions of everyday life. 
     Consequently, one of the main goals of the plagiarist is to
     restore the dynamic and unstable drift of meaning, by
     appropriating and recombining fragments of culture.  In this
     way, meanings can be produced that were not previously
     associated with an object or a given set of objects.

     Marcel Duchamp, one of the first to understand the power of
     recombination, presented an early incarnation of this new
     aesthetic with his readymade series.  Duchamp took objects
     to which he was "visually indifferent," and recontextualized
     them in a manner that shifted their meaning.  For example,
     by taking a urinal out of the rest room, signing it, and
     placing it on a pedestal in an art gallery, meaning slid
     away from the apparently exhaustive functional
     interpretation of the object.  Although this meaning did not
     completely disappear, it was placed in harsh juxtaposition
     to another possibility--meaning as an art object.  This
     problem of instability increased when problems of origin
     were raised:  The object was not made by an artist, but by a
     machine.  Whether or not the viewer chose to accept other
     possibilities for interpreting the function of the artist
     and the authenticity of the art object, the urinal in a
     gallery instigated a moment of uncertainty and reassessment. 
     This conceptual game has been replayed numerous times over
     the 20th century, at times for very narrow purposes, as with
     Rauschenberg's combines--done for the sake of attacking the
     critical hegemony of Clement Greenberg--while at other times
     it has been done to promote large-scale political and
     cultural restructuring, as in the case of the Situationists. 
     In each case, the plagiarist works to open meaning through
     the injection of scepticism into the culture-text.

     Here one also sees the failure of Romantic essentialism. 
     Even the alleged transcendental object cannot escape the
     sceptics' critique.  Duchamp's notion of the inverted
     readymade (turning a Rembrandt painting into an ironing
     board) suggested that the distinguished art object draws its
     power from a historical legitimation process firmly rooted
     in the institutions of western culture, and not from being
     an unalterable conduit to transcendental realms.  This is
     not to deny the possibility of transcendental experience,
     but only to say that if it does exist, it is prelinguistic,
     and thereby relegated to the privacy of an individual's
     subjectivity.  A society with a complex division of labor
     requires a rationalization of institutional processes, a
     situation which in turn robs the individual of a way to
     share nonrational experience.  Unlike societies with a
     simple division of labor, in which the experience of one
     member closely resembles the experience of another (minimal
     alienation), under a complex division of labor, the life
     experience of the individual turned specialist holds little
     in common with other specialists.  Consequently,
     communication exists primarily as an instrumental function.

     Plagiarism has historically stood against the privileging of
     any text through spiritual, scientific, or other
     legitimatizing myths.  The plagiarist sees all objects as
     equal, and thereby horizontalizes the plane of phenomena. 
     All texts become potentially usable and reusable.  Herein
     lies an epistemology of anarchy, according to which the
     plagiarist argues that if science, religion, or any other
     social institution precludes certainty beyond the realm of
     the private, then it is best to endow consciousness with as
     many categories of interpretation as possible.  The tyranny
     of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as
     greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive
     costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking
     and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high. 
     Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should
     instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best
     suited to the social conditions of a given situation.

          It is a matter of throwing together various cut-up
          techniques in order to respond to the omnipresence of
          transmitters feeding us with their dead discourses
          (mass media, publicity, etc.).  It is a question of
          unchaining the codes--not the subject anymore--so that
          something will burst out, will escape; words beneath
          words, personal obsessions.  Another kind of word is
          born which escapes from the totalitarianism of the
          media but retains their power, and turns it against
          their old masters.

Cultural production, literary or otherwise, has traditionally
     been a slow, labor-intensive process.  In painting,
     sculpture, or written work, the technology has always been
     primitive by contemporary standards.  Paintbrushes, hammers
     and chisels, quills and paper, and even the printing press
     do not lend themselves well to rapid production and broad-
     range distribution.  The time lapse between production and
     distribution can seem unbearably long.  Book arts and
     traditional visual arts still suffer tremendously from this
     problem, when compared to the electronic arts.  Before
     electronic technology became dominant, cultural perspectives
     developed in a manner that more clearly defined texts as
     individual works.  Cultural fragments appeared in their won
     right as discrete units, since their influence moved slowly
     enough to allow the orderly evolution of an argument or an
     aesthetic.  Boundaries could be maintained between
     discipline and schools of thought.  Knowledge was considered
     finite, and was therefore easier to control.  In the 19th
     century this traditional order began to collapse as new
     technology began to increase the velocity of cultural
     development.  The first strong indicators began to appear
     that speed was becoming a crucial issue.  Knowledge was
     shifting away from certitude, and transforming itself into
     information.  During the American Civil War, Lincoln sat
     impatiently by his telegraph line, awaiting reports from his
     generals at the front.  He had no patience with the long-
     winded rhetoric of the past, and demanded from his generals
     an efficient economy of language.  There was no time for the
     traditional trappings of the elegant essayist.  Cultural
     velocity and information have continued to increase at a
     geometric rate since then, resulting in an information
     panic.  Production and distribution of information (or any
     other product) must be immediate; there can be no lag time
     between the two.  Techno-culture has met this demand with
     data bases and electronic networks that rapidly move any
     type of information.

     Under such conditions, plagiarism fulfills the requirements
     of economy of representation, without stifling invention. 
     If invention occurs when a new perception or idea is brought
     out--by intersecting two or more formally disparate systems-
     -then recombinant methodologies are desirable.  This is
     where plagiarism progresses beyond nihilism.  It does not
     simply interject scepticism to help destroy totalitarian
     systems that stop invention; it participates in invention,
     and is thereby also productive.  The genius of an inventor
     like Leonardo da Vinci lay in his ability to recombine the
     then separate systems of biology, mathematics, engineering,
     and art.  He was not so much an originator as a synthesizer. 
     There have been few people like him over the centuries,
     because the ability to hold that much data in one's own
     biological memory is rare.  Now, however, the technology of
     recombination is available in the computer.  The problem now
     for would-be cultural producers is to gain access to this
     technology and information.  After all, access is the most
     precious of all privileges, and is therefore strictly
     guarded, which in turn makes one wonder whether to be a
     successful plagiarist, one must also be a successful hacker.

          Most serious writers refuse to make themselves
          available to the things that technology is doing.  I
          have never been able to understand this sort of fear. 
          Many are afraid of using tape recorders, and the idea
          of using any electronic means for literary or artistic
          purposes seems to them some sort of sacrilege.

To some small degree, a small portion of technology has fallen
     through the cracks into the hands of the lucky few. 
     Personal computers and video cameras are the best examples. 
     To accompany these consumer items and make their use more
     versatile, hypertextual and image sampling programs have
     also been developed--program designed to facilitate
     recombination.  It is the plagiarist's dream to be able to
     call up, move, and recombine text with simple user-friendly
     commands.  Perhaps plagiarism rightfully belongs to post-
     book culture, since only in that society can it be made
     explicit what book culture, with its geniuses and auteurs,
     tends to hide--that information is most useful when it
     interacts with other information, rather than when it is
     deified and presented in a vacuum.

     Thinking about a new means for recombining information has
     always been on 20th-century minds, although this search has
     been left to a few until recently.  In 1945 Vannevar Bush, a
     former science advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed a
     new way of organizing information in an _Atlantic Monthly_
     article.  At that time, computer technology was in its
     earliest stages of development and its full potential was
     not really understood.  Bush, however, had the foresight to
     imagine a device he called the Memex.  In his view it would
     be based around storage of information on microfilm,
     integrated with some means to allow the user to select and
     display any section at will, thus enabling one to move
     freely among previously unrelated increments of information.

     At the time, Bush's Memex could not be built, but as
     computer technology evolved, his idea eventually gained
     practicality.  Around 1960 Theodor Nelson made the
     realization when he began studying computer programming in
     college:

          Over a period of months, I came to realize that,
          although programmers structured their data
          hierarchically, they didn't have to.  I began to see
          the computer as the ideal place for making
          interconnections among things accessible to people.

          I realized that writing did not have to be sequential
          and that not only would tomorrow's books and magazines
          be on [cathode ray terminal] screens, they could all
          tie to one another in every direction.  At once I began
          working on a program (written in 7090 assembler
          language) to carry out these ideas.

     Nelson's idea, which he called hypertext, failed to attract
     any supporters at first, although by 1968 its usefulness
     became obvious to some in the government and in defense
     industries.  A prototype of hypertext was developed by
     another computer innovator, Douglas Englebart, who is often
     credited with many breakthroughs in the use of computers
     (such as the development of the Macintosh interface,
     Windows).  Englebart's system, called Augment, was applied
     to organizing the government's research network, ARPAnet,
     and was also used by McDonnel Douglas, the defense
     contractor, to aid technical work groups in coordinating
     projects such as aircraft design:

          All communications are automatically added to the
          Augment information base and linked, when appropriate,
          to other documents.  An engineer could, for example,
          use Augment to write and deliver electronically a work
          plan to others in the work group.  The other members
          could then review the document and have their comments
          linked to the original, eventually creating a "group
          memory" of the decisions made.  Augment's powerful
          linking features allow users to find even old
          information quickly, without getting lost or being
          overwhelmed by detail.

     Computer technology continued to be refined, and eventually-
     -as with so many other technological breakthroughs in this
     country--once it had been thoroughly exploited by military
     and intelligence agencies, the technology was released for
     commercial exploitation.  Of course, the development of
     microcomputers and consumer-grade technology for personal
     computers led immediately to the need for software which
     would help one cope with the exponential increase in
     information, especially textual information.  Probably the
     first humanistic application of hypertext was in the field
     of education.  Currently, hypertext and hypermedia (which
     adds graphic images to the network of features which can be
     interconnected) continue to be fixtures in instructional
     design and educational technology.

     An interesting experiment in this regard was instigated in
     1975 by Robert Scholes and Andries Van Dam at Brown
     University.  Scholes, a professor of English, was contacted
     by Van Dam, a professor of computer science, who wanted to
     know if there were any courses in the humanities that might
     benefit from using what at the time was called a text-
     editing system (now known as a word processor) with
     hypertext capabilities built in.  Scholes and two teaching
     assistants, who formed a research group, were particularly
     impressed by one aspect of hypertext.  Using this program
     would make it possible to peruse in a nonlinear fashion all
     the interrelated materials in a text.  A hypertext is thus
     best seen as a web of interconnected materials.  This
     description suggested that there is a definite parallel
     between the conception of culture-text and that of
     hypertext:

          One of the most important facets of literature (and one
          which also leads to difficulties in interpretation) is
          its reflexive nature.  Individual poems constantly
          develop their meanings--often through such means as
          direct allusion or the reworking of traditional motifs
          and conventions, at other times through subtler means,
          such as genre development and expansion or biographical
          reference--by referring to that total body of poetic
          material of which the particular poems comprise a small
          segment.

     Although it was not difficult to accumulate a
     hypertextually-linked data base consisting of poetic
     materials, Scholes and his group were more concerned with
     making it interactive--that is, they wanted to construct a
     "communal text" including not only the poetry, but also
     incorporating the comments and interpretations offered by
     individual students.  In this way, each student in turn
     could read a work and attach "notes" to it about his or her
     observations.  The resulting "expanded text" would be read
     and augmented at a terminal on which the screen was divided
     into four areas.  The student could call up the poem in one
     of the areas (referred to as windows) and call up related
     materials in the other three windows, in any sequence he or
     she desired.  This would powerfully reinforce the tendency
     to read in a nonlinear sequence.  By the means, each student
     would learn how to read a work as it truly exists, not in "a
     vacuum" but rather as the central point of a progressively-
     revealed body of documents and ideas.

     Hypertext is analogous to other forms of literary discourse
     besides poetry.  From the very beginning of its
     manifestation as a computer program, hypertext was popularly
     described as a multidimensional text roughly analogous to
     the standard scholarly article in the humanities or social
     sciences, because it uses the same conceptual devices, such
     as footnotes, annotations, allusions to other works,
     quotations from other works, etc.  Unfortunately, the
     convention of linear reading and writing, as well as the
     physical fact of two-dimensional pages and the necessity of
     binding them in only one possible sequence, have always
     limited the true potential of this type of text.  One
     problem is that the reader is often forced to search through
     the text (or forced to leave the book and search elsewhere)
     for related information.  This is a time-consuming and
     distracting process; instead of being able to move easily
     and instantly among physically remote or inaccessible areas
     of information storage, the reader must cope with cumbrous
     physical impediments to his or her research or creative
     work.  With the advent of hypertext, it has become possible
     to move among related areas of information with a speed and
     flexibility that at least approach finally accommodating the
     workings of human intellect, to a degree that books and
     sequential reading cannot possibly allow.

          The recombinant text in hypertextual form signifies the
          emergence of the perception of textual constellations
          that have always/already gone nova.  It is in this
          uncanny luminosity that the authorial biomorph has been
          consumed. (2)

Barthes and Foucault may be lauded for theorizing the death of
     the author; the absent author is more a matter of everyday
     life, however, for the technocrat recombining and augmenting
     information at the computer or at a video editing console. 
     S/he is living the dream of capitalism that is still being
     refined in the area of manufacture.  The Japanese notion of
     "just in time delivery," in which the units of assembly are
     delivered to the assembly line just as they are called for,
     was a first step in streamlining the tasks of assembly.  In
     such a system, there is no sedentary capital, but a constant
     flow of raw commodities.  The assembled commodity is
     delivered to the distributor precisely at the moment of
     consumer need.  This nomadic system eliminates stockpiles of
     goods.  (There is still some dead time; however, the
     Japanese have cut it to a matter of hours, and are working
     on reducing it to a matter of minutes).  In this way,
     production, distribution, and consumption are imploded into
     a single act, with no beginning or end, just unbroken
     circulation.  In the same manner, the online text flows in
     an unbroken stream through the electronic network.  There
     can be no place for gaps that mark discrete units in the
     society of speed.  Consequently, notions of origin have no
     place in electronic reality.  The production of the text
     presupposes its immediate distribution, consumption, and
     revision.  All who participate in the network also
     participate in the interpretation and mutation of the
     textual stream.  The concept of the author did not so much
     die as it simply ceased to function.  The author has become
     an abstract aggregate that cannot be reduced to biology or
     to the psychology of personality.  Indeed, such a
     development has apocalyptic connotations--the fear that
     humanity will be lost in the textual stream.  Perhaps humans
     are not capable of participating in hypervelocity.  One must
     answer that never has there been a time when humans were
     able, one and all, to participate in cultural production. 
     Now, at least the potential for cultural democracy is
     greater.  The single bio-genius need not act as a stand-in
     for all humanity.  The real concern is just the same as it
     has always been:  the need for access to cultural resources.

          The discoveries of postmodern art and criticism
          regarding the analogical structures of images
          demonstrate that when two objects are brought together,
          no matter how far apart their contexts may be, a
          relationship is formed.  Restricting oneself to a
          personal relationship of words is no mere convention. 
          The bringing together of two independent expressions
          supersedes the original elements and produces a
          synthetic organization of greater possibility. (3)

