interstellar tones transport Sun Ra offworld

But in reality, it is the inherent failure of representation, both in the visual and the political sense, that continually leads activist-artists to abandon their works and their familiar skills, and to dissolve once again into the intersubjective processes of society’s self-transformation.

This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the capacity for a movement to appear, to intervene and to disappear again, before changing names and recommencing the same struggle in a different way. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 185)

Exodus is a movement — defection from the State, exit from the state of things, toward the formation of a “new republic” (as Paolo Virno puts it). While Virno and other Italian-based theorists of the Autonomia/Operaismo movement have traced exodus as a response to the factory regime of Fordist labour that saw its dismantling in the ’70s and ’80s, Brian Holmes has placed exodus within the artistic lineage of interventions and occupations, in which the fluidity of art, and of art as an occupation or role offers an exit strategy from institutionalized engagement. Holmes’ historical references are those of the alterglobalization movement, notably the public sonic occupations of Reclaim the Streets and the deployment of carnivale tactics in general, but also in specific art projects such as Nikeground. Here, art (and the artist) move through an interzone of activism and art, a zone in which intervention and representation are no longer distinct sides or sites of the work.

Significantly, Holmes writes how the passage toward exodus opens in the breakdown of representation. One can think such representation in (at least) two ways: the representative politics of the democratic order and the politics of representation of the object and identity, or rather the ordering of representation in which art is supposed to traffic (albeit at a distance). When representation fails, or rather proves itself inadequate through its persistent failure (some might say its planned obsolescence), then strategies of exodus come into play.

And quite literally — exodus as a myth of resistance is also a time of play, a site in which the play of representation can be remixed, through exit from its confines, into a new scenario. For the artist, exodus from an institutionalized art world changes the play of what it means to respond to a Call — no longer a competitive call for new works, but now a Call for collective action, in which art becomes the performative habitus for an alternative republic, a “non-state public sphere” (Virno).

Exodus is thus a spacetime of energies; a site of withdrawal in the gathering of force. Nor is this performed alone. Play takes at least a few, if not the many. Exodus is a collective gathering of experience:

…exodus seems to designate an existential reserve, that psychic space where fragments of artistic, poetic and musical refrains are inseparable from the wellsprings of action, but expressible only as a kind of myth. To touch this intangible space is the ultimate intervention on social material — something no individual can do, because it is only achieved through a collective experience, by a multiplicity that has no authority, no signature. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

At times, Holmes risks representing exodus as a near mythical or “intangible” sign — which is perhaps due to a received idea of engagement or rather perspective upon the appearance of engagement that remains within either declarative art (despite its activism) or activism (despite its  aesthetics). This is surprising given that exodus, as a withdrawal or disappearance, would seem to call into question the appearance of things, and consequently of of activistism and art as being the only hybridity that registers exodus’ passing. In some forthcoming work for Dancecult: Journal for Electronic Dance Music Culture, I have set out to think rave culture as an embodied, collective exodus that performs all the ambiguities of its play, from its sonic interventions to its interruptions of politics, within the broader schema of a worldwide alternative network of soniculture.

In short, exodus needs to be thought beyond or rather before the realm of myth. Exodus happens. It occurs; it is a strategy of the cultural unconscious manifest in collective and energetic desire. It organises and disorganises vast collective actions in tandem.

In this respect Holmes is entirely correct: exodus can only be experienced through collective passage. But to say this collectivity has no authority nor signature leaves many questions concerning its manifold of structures, signs and play. The multitude that is rave culture has its many signatures, even its signature of a soniculture, qua rave culture; and it too has its authors and its authorities. In this respect, exodus as the pure flight from authority or signature remains a myth – but as such a myth, it loses much of its efficacity. I am more intrigued by the taking-place of exodus on the ground, so to speak (and I might add, like Holmes, who spends much of his excellent book detailing “activist aesthetics” and delineating the heritage of the 20thC avant garde).

And so Holmes leaves us with:

Exodus is an expression of process politics. It points beyond the distorting mediations and structural inequalities of capitalism toward a strange sort of promised land for the profane, which is the immediacy of the everyday, the direct experience of cooperation with others. The carnival that sometimes breaks out in the midst of concerted political action is a way to celebrate the occasional reality of this powerful and persistent myth. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

I would like to reverse the proposition: it is protest that breaks out in the midst of carnival, it is political action in the realm of appearance that interrupts the exodus toward disappearance, it is the coming into the light of Reclaim the Streets that was the anomaly to rave culture’s occupations by night. Exodus has more to do with the collective unconscious of the everynight than the everyday — it has more to do with creating the alternative habitus of a place to sleep and to dream without fear, then to awake and, with a shit-eating grin, make that which is desired take place — regardless.

This reversal stakes out a different terrain. Exodus, or the exit strategy in general, is a priori to (as its qualifier phoneme suggests) representation. Exodus does not take its place after the fact; it is the escape which something has come to capture. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari were correct; even if the State is a priori (arising always), exodus is that which the State arises against.

Secondly, it reinforces my intuition that exodus, like Virno’s contentious theorisation of multitude (and much to Negri’s discontent), is without content. Exodus is the state of most States. Most “people of the State” are in a state of exodus; they do not vote, they do not participate. Rather, they flee to various safehouses and wait it out. Unfortunately, this form of exodus – properly, perhaps this is not exodus as liberty but as confinement – is not collective but individual, even as it is the dominant form of being-together of so many. The political apathy of overdeveloped nation states of the 21C is an expression of this collective exodus. So is the collective experience of consumption. However this exodus is not energetically collective; it is collective without connection, a disconnected exodus, a passive escape from exodus itself. Various traces of its potential are found here and there in technological infonetworks, particularly with data piracy (music, film, software, intellectual property). However few P2P downloaders have connected their bits & bytes to a connection with their peers in the flesh, or with an organised attempt at its force (such as open source, hacking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Pirate Bay – all of which signal the new republics of data and property).

In this respect, we might consider “downloadable data piracy” the capitalist answer to the challenge that remixing/sampling and rave culture provided to infotainment as a containment apparatus. By this I mean that data piracy, even with all the publicized hype surrounding its damage and its prosecution, is a contained strategy, or rather an attempt to contain what could express itself in a global cultural form and network of the likes we have not seen since the rave/alterglobalization convergence of the 1990s. (Music industry executives and the defenders of intellectual property will of course disagree with this premise, pointing out that infopiracy is truly a threat to IP; however in this respect capitalism itself is far ahead of them. Capitalism always cannibalizes its own.)

Third, exodus is a cultural strategy that has already shaped the 20thC. Though Italian Autonomist theorists such as Virno, Marazzi, Negri and others theorised exodus as a response to Fordism, I believe that its force was already well underway as a cultural strategy of transformation thanks to Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism as cultural exodus

Holmes mentions several key concepts in relation to exodus: myth, collectivity, transformation, metamorphosis, and the blend of direct action and art. Perhaps we should look no further than the mythical corpus of Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism plays out an abundance of interstellar exits from planet earth: alternative alien origin myths, the power of sound to transport us beyond prejudice and conflict (if not space and time itself), transforming the forced exile of the Middle Passage into an interplanetary and cosmic exodus.

Afrofuturism demonstrates that all humans are in some way or other fundamentally alien. What Marx thought through labour (like the Autonomists) Afrofuturist artists, musicians, poets, writers, sci-fi writers and prophets have lived through the exploitation and cultural memory of  of (post)slave labour. We are all alien in this alien nation. This is an accurate myth, precisely attenuated to the truth of a reality constructed upon the myths of racial origin and supremacy.

Afrofuturism has engineerd various exits (not the least of which is an exit from philo sophia – but this will have to wait for a future post). At the very least, we can speak of the Afrodiasporic exappropriation of technology and mutation of the cultural viruses of sound and rhythm that engendered jazz, hip-hop, techno, electro, disco and house – not as musical genres but as cultural interventions that changed the dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, autonomy, carnival, and liberation — up to and including the cyborg heteronymy of the human form itself, from becoming-alien (Sun Ra) to becoming-machinic (Model 500).

One can think the vastness of these interventions: within property (sampling, riffing, remixing, improvisation), white culture (the dance Twist, the disco fix, the funk phenomenon), politics (what is Afrofuturism other than the mythus to black power?). All the Greek conceptual categorizations (polis, mythus, tekhne) are remixed through Afrofuturism. In this respect Afrofuturism plays out an exodus from the default culture (whose colours until recently have been Imperial White). Afrofuturism is not constrained by soniculture, however. It has its articulation (Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, Alondra Nelson), its literature (Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler — only to name a few), its science fictions and phonofictions.

Significantly, Afrofuturism was an alterglobalization network before activist-artists, high on a rave culture directly engendered from black gay disco, Chicago acid house and Detroit techno, decided to bring electronic soniculture and carnivale into the light and name it as such in the 1990s.

Afrofuturism is a network from Jamaican dub to British ska-punk, New York hip-hop to disco, Chicago house to Detroit techno, dancehall to Dogon and Ngome ritual. And, of course — jazz and rock n’ roll, Chubby Checker and Little Richard, the blues and Dixieland. That said, it traces its historical appearance far beyond its  postslave / postcolonial cultures and the advent of recording technologies that echoed and intensified its force (in a manner which needs further explanation, technology is essential to Afrofuturism). Ron Eglash’s research into African fractals suggests that there is more Africa in the computer than Brian Eno thinks. Afrofuturism is the cultural evolution of black secret technology that underlies algorithms of computing technology. It arises at the same time as the invention of the computer as an exit from what Heidegger identified as technology’s apparent containment of being within en-framing. If the computer is the machinic materialization of African fractal thought, then Afrofuturism is the cultural anticipation of its machinic overcoding. Think on this. This is an entirely other and radical justification of sampling, remixing, open use, piracy, sharing networks, and otherwise collective exappropriation of technology. And not only a justification before the Law, but a rethinking of its basis.

Exodus, then, is vast, trans-epochal, interstellar. In its lineages it sustains both apathy and energy. Reconnecting or hooking-up apathetic exodus to its energizing variant – without burning out, as rave culture did – is a question of sustained and urgent consideration.

Beside itself: alterglobalization as alternative power

The parallel polis —

does not compete for power. Its aim is not to replace the power of another kind, but rather under this power – or beside it – to create a structure that represents other laws and in which the voice of the ruling power is heard only as an insignificant echo from a world that is organised in an entirely different way. (Václav Benda, quoted in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 180).

The alternative power grows within existing structures; like a weed it cracks the cement walls and foundations. But what has come of the strategy? Is it at all a possibility in the 21C, and what is its efficacity?

Perhaps, again, the question and its problem should be reversed. Not only is the parallelism of alterglobalization possible, it operates as the basis of existing distributions of power today. That there is no unification to power, no centralization of its control (and thus no conspiracy of the few over the many) is the secret hiding in plain sight — the purloined letter of alterglobalization. Alternative globalizations exist as the means by which attempts at militarized and economic centralization take place. In this sense, the strategy of the parallel polis has been well incorporated within military strategy; but this also only acknowledges that the terrain of its passage remains open.

./..

in the darkness the shapes of the light (thx to JBurke for this photo)

Excerpt from an unpublished missive — the mythus of the underground.

The outsider, insubordinate, and risk-laden character of dance, legitimated in this sense through its criminalization, provides participants with an outlaw or rebel identity forged in an ambiguous relationship with the law. — Graham St John, Technomad@20

The underground resonates with flights from the drudgery of everyday life into realms of secrecy and substance, where liberated encampments of rebel fugitives revel in the immediatism of autonomous existence…

What is the underground? A glimpse of the unfound country of the unknown. In its myth, the underground is a place otherwise than what exists all around, a place where what will and wants to be can take place without hindrance; and it exists at a far cry from the laborious processes of representative politics, petitions, and protests. In this sense, the underground is a mythic place; it is a distant and ever-receding horizon precisely because it is no secret. This is no more apparent than in the popular press, where the underground proclaims its mythic status as that fertile place from which the unknown emerges.

It appears hidden in plain sight.

The efficacy of the underground is oft discredited when viewed from the study of a particular cultural enclave. In the sobering reality of the 21C, the place of an imaginative rebellion, and of the entanglement of the avant-guarde with political organisation, or more precisely, the entwinement of politics and aesthetics, has been oft discredited since Benjamin attempted to distinguish the aestheticization of politics – which accordingly can only result in war – from the politicization of art. Myth is a form aestheticization; it is fiction given force. A myth may, or may not, be exactly true, but the veritas of its actuality is always unverifiable, and what is more true than its de facto accountability is the force of its suggestiveness, which is measured only by the limitations of its imaginary.

Disseminated throughout the 1980s in print and worldwide through online BBS networks and the early public internet in the 1990s, Hakim Bey’s communiques of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), a “guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it” (Bey 1991 TAZ@101), have catalysed generations of “happy mutants” (Frauenfelder, Sinclair, Branwyn 1995), be they ravers, anarcho-punks, drop-outs or neo-situationists and surrealists, through the “poetic terrorism” of the mythic underground. Reading the TAZ communiques as they were leaked from some safe haven of the mystic anarchist was in itself a transformative undertaking. Apparently communicating from the position of the TAZ, performing in his text the narrative of an experienced initiate in occult practices and mythic rituals of liberation, and writing with the uninhibited parlance of the poetic imaginary, Bey disseminated not only the mythus of immediatist autonomy, but put myth to work in its service. The legends of the Hashisheen, the invocations of ritual chaos, the dreams of pirates and corsairs…

The dream of the underground, as disappearance from overbearing social constraints and the accountability of the State, was sought through means as unreal as they were nearly possible. In Bey’s text, the practices of occult magick and symbolic surrealism offered creative resistance against restricted living that surpassed, through their jouissance, the sober methods of organised political representation. The use of myth hinged precisely on the moment when the unbelieveable elements of Bey’s text came into contact with possibility. That a symbolic tactic of, say, incanting a ritual spell against a corporation, might hold as much leverage as – if not more than – writing letters to governmental representatives demonstrates a coherent grasp of the power of symbols. For by deploying symbolic practices against a society drowning in advertising and marketing, and overflowing with such an abundance of surveillance data and harvested information that no possible aggregation could compute its many dimensions, spaces of slippage and misrepresentation could be opened in which something other could take place – and here is where Bey gestured toward an actual event, a liberation of place, a Temporary Autonomous Zone. A slippage between symbols, between map and reality, could be put to work to enact disappearance as a strategy in which the possibility of living otherwise could be put into place. To put it in Paolo Virno’s terms, the TAZ is sought by way of “engaged withdrawal” – withdrawal not as retreat, but as a means to clear new space – and where “Exodus is the foundation of a Republic”; and like Freud’s relation between Ego and Id (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden), where I shall be is where the State shall be not: “if Republic, then no longer State” (Virno Virtuosity 1996@197).

[...]

Full version yet to be published.

Voilà.! Some 5 years in the making, Circulation & the City.

With appropriate fanfare & deep bows, Will Straw & Alexandra Boutro’s edited volume entitled Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (McGill Queen’s UP, 2010) now graces the shelves. This book has been quite a few years in the works. The earliest drafts I have of work for the volume date back to 2005, and by the time we went to press, the final chapter I submitted on Henri Lefebre, rhythm, and revolution in the city had been transformed entirely from the words originally writ on rave culture and rhythm (funny thing: the new article I am finishing for Dancecult picks up on these earlier themes  – sometimes work must encounter different sets of theoretical concepts, and years of reflection, for the excavation of the intellect to yield its bounty). The book forms the third in a trilogy of publications from the Culture of Cities Project, a multi-university research endeavour that sought to unearth “the mix of universal and local influences in the everyday life of cities,” with research concentrated in Toronto, Berlin, Dublin and Montréal, and with researchers across Canada and the Continent. So, with the intent of lurking y’all into picking this up (or perhaps unwittingly scaring you off), I offer the introduction to my chapter “Cities of Rhythm & Revolution.”

Until August 2010, here be the 20% off code: enter BSTRAW10 at checkout through MQUP.

qork / o d d i ty | Vancouver 1998 |<ST> | photo: Tanya Goehring

Cities of Rhythm & Revolution

// tobias c. van Veen

The urban problematic, urbanism as ideology and institution, urbanization as a worldwide trend, are global facts. The urban revolution is a planetary phenomenon. – Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (2003, 113)

Like Seeds in a Sack: the State and Urban Revolution

A revolution happens somewhere: in a city, a springtime revolt, the unexpected uprising, the insurgency of the city against its occupiers, whether military or monetary – these are all the classic forms. In the violence, boredom and exhaustion of the 21C,[1] there are revolutions in product design, software, advertising and taste while the upheavals that remake the world are rarely granted the dubious privilege of ‘revolution’. Despite its broad application, or rather, the attempt to render its force banal by subsuming it to the language of consumption, ‘the revolution’ nonetheless maintains an exclusive meaning when it comes to the remaking of the world as such. And this remaking has had particular import by way of the City: it is the City that is the locus of the State.[2]

What is the City that it overwhelms the world with a concentrated force, that it, once expressed as ‘the urban’, a tendency of the city to globalize, becomes the engine of history? Such would be Lefebvre’s ‘urban revolution’, the city as the dominant global manifestation in which a new form of the social emerges: the “urban society” (Lefebvre 2003: 5). The urban supercedes the agrarian and overtakes not only the country but even the city itself – for once all is woven within the urban fabric, the city loses its particularity, its oppositional architecture to the country’s expanse: “The urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, ‘urban fabric’, does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country” (3-4). But what is the city? Society? The country? A dialectical comment by Deleuze and Guattari on the matter, writ around the same time as The Urban Revolution (1970, trans. 2003), teases out the ambiguity of Lefebvre’s hypothesis remarkably well:

It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode’. The last reasons for presuming a progressive development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a chance intermixing. The ‘state and urban revolution’ may be Paleolithic, not Neolithic…. (Deleuze and Guattari 429)

Deleuze and Guattari challenge the – traditional, Marxist, liberal, linear, etc. – narrative of humanity’s ‘progressive development’ (from nomads to cities, agrarian to urban) by arguing that the progressive timeline that would posit the emergence of the City-State at a specific moment in the ‘linear development of civilization’ falls prey to tautology in its quest for the origin and evolutionism of historical succession (427-428). Theses “on the origin of the State are always tautological” not only because they fall into tautology, but because the State is tautological. In fact, according to Lefebvre, it is because all “logics,” including that of the state and the law, commodities, the organization of space, the object, daily life, language, information and communication want “to be restrictive and complete, eliminating anything that is felt to be unsuitable, claiming to govern the remainder of the world,” that they become “an empty tautology” (2003: 35). This tautology, however, is not meaningless: its emptiness shares a common point in the accumulation of surplus value in the city. Thus Deleuze and Guattari “are always brought back to the idea of a State” – as an “apparatus of capture” – “that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the unconditioned Urstaat,” to which we might add its dimensional aspects: centripetal, circular, enclosing, inscribed in the corridors and walls of the polis (427). The City-State emerges with the origin of History itself:

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility… An evolutionary ethnology is no better… Nor an ecological evolutionism… All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. (Deleuze and Guattari 430)

Let us make quick work of this moment – for the radically anti-evolutionary, nondevelopmental thesis of a “coexistence of becomings” (against which “history translates into a succession”) (ibid.), is also to be found in Lefebvre. It is found in the complex interplay of the ‘urban’, wherein the urban anticipates its own realization as the ‘virtual’ horizon of its own becoming.[3] Lefebvre is quite aware of Simondon’s theory of transduction (2003: 5) which will later be incorporated by Deleuze and Guattari when encountering this exact problem: the virtual.

The urban, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Urstaat, always seems to have coexisted in the tension between city and country, as the fabric of their antinomy, though one might argue – as Lefebvre will – that the urban has now become the Ur-apparatus of capture, the overwhelming of all other becomings wherein both city and country dissolve within the urban fabric. And it is certainly the case that Lefebvre’s insistence on the urban as the global revolution – if not as the production of globalization per se – derails the dialectical succession of history and empties it of its content, for the urban revolution swaps out history’s engine, the relations of production, for an ambiguous and virtual fabric, Ur-becoming, that is the urban itself. This is one tendency of Lefebvre, and one which I shall insist on, to draw out its heterodoxy, to amplify all that it has to say, and to emphasize its precedent to Lefebvre’s later technique of rhythmanalysis. Not surprisingly, then, the samizdat concept that is the urban upsets the orthodoxy of teleological history: the virtual-urban, the becoming-urban, in-forms the present material reality.

Can the transductive logic of the urban, even if thought as synchrony, function within a linear development of history? Lefebvre insists upon the diachrony of urban history – a dialectical progression of the urban – all the while arguing that the ‘impossible’ barriers to the urban realization, erected on the horizon of the virtual object, must be torn down (2003: 7; 17). The impossible is reduced to a possibility to be overcome. The tension between becoming and historical succession, diachrony and synchrony, transduction and economic evolutionism develop a kind of rhythm – unresolved, impossible, aporetic, even – that is taken up at length in the complex thought of The Urban Revolution – and later in the problematic of rhythm itself, in Rhythmanalysis.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2000. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Boronno. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

–. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.

Endnotes

1. “21C” is here abbreviated to designate the binarization – or digital codification – of the historical timeline as the archives of humanity become accessibly only through complex technological systems. The soundbyte style of “21C” can be attributed to DJ Spooky’s defunct magazine of the same name (RIP).
2. “City,” as well as “State,” are here capitalized in accordance with the work of Lefebvre, where the signifiers attain a quasi-atemporal status, as if referring to a near a priori manifestation of human activity. Thus, at times, I refer to “cities” or a particular city in contrast to the City (a city’s ur-principle of centripetal control). Likewise for “the revolution,” which is marked by the near teleological destination of its pronoun, and later, Negri and Hardt’s deployment of “Empire” to demarcate an organisational command that exceeds the nation-state.
3. Lefebvre will write of the urban how “its complexity surpasses the tools of our understanding and the instruments of practical activity,” serving as a “constant reminder of the theory of complexification” (2003, 45). If our missive bows to such a theory, it is in part because any would-be Occam’s Razor would only prove that simplism empties itself out in reductionism. The law of parsimony (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate) should read: Reductio non est ponenda sine necessitate.

the pyramid of corporate cognitive labour

I recently came across a rather awesome analysis on Ribbonfarm that adds some much-needed complexity to the basic dichotomy between vertical and horizontal models of corporate control. These fantastic and well-writ posts (The Gervais Principle I and II) have been hit up on Slashdot and have circulated far & wide for good reason. Like Christian Marazzi’s work that deftly summarizes the significance of language to capital – the way language informs the fluctuations of the stock market and global economy (see Capital and Language) – Venkat analyses the way in which language is ab/used by particular players in corporate organisations. He deploys his deft analysis to unravel bureaucratic power principles as well as propose a theory of microclass. And he accomplishes this all by taking as his primary example the hit TV series The Office — Ricky Gervais’ brilliant satire of water cooler politics and management mediocrity. Venkat’s analysis, informed by his research into theories of corporate management, complements Marazzi’s observation that

In the post-Fordist context, in which language has become in every respect an instrument of the production of commodities and, therefore, the material condition of our very lives, the loss of the ability to speak, of the “language capacity,” means the loss of belonging in the world as such, the loss of what “communifies” the many who constitute the community. (Marazzi, Capital and Language: 131).

In his first post, Venkat complexifies the horizontal/vertical models with a theory of microclass. The Sociopaths (senior mgmt), Clueless (middle mgmt) & Losers (bottomfeeders) are constituted by their ability (or lack thereof) to learn, engage with, and ultimately ab/use corporate language for their own ends. In short, Venkat’s analysis jives with Marazzi, Virno and Berardi’s claims concerning not only the significance of language to contemporary labour conditions – insofar as linguistic affect structures fluctations of the stock market – but its operational effacity, insofar as linguistic competence structures the very field of labour. In short, one’s subjectivity under cognitive labour is structured by one’s ability to process the linguistic matrix of capital (which of course says much about education and class composition, among other things, but also about the linguistic seduction of capital – the great mass of all those who, to rephrase Spinoza, fight to remain slaves).

In Autonomist theory, this centrality of linguistic operations, interlaced and communicated by way of mobile and networked technologies, has been called the general intellect, insofar as the intellectualization of labour via technics constitutes the overall condition of cognitive labour. In this increasing technicization of labour, linguistic competence becomes the measure of labour itself: it is the brain that becomes the machine or engine of (cognitive) labour. As I think I’ll comment on in an upcoming post, mind you, I think the significance of a functioning brain is overrated in cognitive labour and it is a living-dead brain or zombie labour that still constitutes the scenario for the majority of the workforce (one is required to think, but not think too much). I think Venkat captures something of the zombie labour hyperthesis in his breakdown of the Loser class into two subclasses (becoming-Sociopath and Clueless Losers) and by analysing the seemingly lost Clueless as the middle manageriat, i.e., as those who believe the most in the conditions of their own enslavement.

In his second post, Venkat breaks down language into Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk & Gametalk, and details how it is ab/used by each class. Powertalk is the language of control and conquer used by Sociopaths; it works on multiple levels at once, communicating several meanings in discrete semantic utterances. Such communication is a poker game of words, where what is left unsaid determines the value of what is said, where parameters of the language game itself are relayed in the delivery of each utterance, and where ambiguity destabilizes erstwhile assurances. While the Clueless attempt to imitate Powertalk, they only fail to grasp the most superficial level of its meaning, and though they might deploy all the buzzwords, the Clueless can only speak Posturetalk – all copy and no depth, all bark and no bite. For Powertalk is only Powertalk if the speaker has table stakes — some actual informational capital to wager. In a similar way, Gametalk is what Losers like to talk to each other, which is basically showroom-style hot air; but as this is a language for Losers only, it holds no value, unlike the way in which Posturetalk signals that one is dealing with a Clueless class member. And in a truly brilliant move, Venkat outlines how Babytalk is not only what Sociopaths use to communicate with the Clueless – for the Clueless can’t grasp Powertalk – but Babytalk is also the language that Losers use to address their middle management superiors, which is why Losers are the breeding ground of Sociopaths as well as containing an exodus-class of what I will call “Carefrees” who know perfectly well the game but have no real interest in playing it. And in those rare instances where upper management Sociopaths talk directly to Loser minions, a variant form of Powertalk is used called Straight Talk — a direct and one-way command utterance with threatening overtones. Mind you it is also in such instances that a becoming-Sociopath Loser can demonstrate their knowledge of Powertalk and forge a path to senior management.

Venkat's Gervais Principle Language Model

Like all great fiction, The Office models only what is more real than reality, the world in its representation, in its vicious deployments of language and power. One moment I particular dig in this worthy read (which I cannot do justice to here – do go and devour it) is when Venkat contrasts The Gervais Principle with the Dilbert Principle:

Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the sociopath level. (Venkat, Gervais Principle)

Venkat adds a subtle flavour here, though he isn’t quite acknowledging that both principles appear to be operational and correct. The Dilbert Principle applies in general: middle management is composed of the Clueless. That said, the truly incompetent remain as Losers – those forever loyal to the company but who will never achieve middle management as quite simply they do their menial jobs too well (though it’s hard to say who is more incompetent: the Losers who never get anywhere or the Clueless who believe they have gotten somewhere by becoming middle management but are just being played by the Sociopaths as a buffer between the upper management and the lumpenLosers). Indeed, it is the deployment of the Clueless as the buffer between the harsh and vicious world of the Sociopaths and the lumpenLosers that marks Venkat’s insight – for it also opens the door to possible action. Remove middle management, and a classic class antagonism reveals itself in all its possible violence. As Venkat puts it, the Clueless mediate between an otherwise untenable master/slave dialectic.

What I also dig about Venkat is that the Losers aren’t just “losers” in the usual, derogatory sense but are often composed of the completely Careless who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this powergame – those coasting by who watch it unfold all around them and say to hell with it. The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.

The other strategy is, of course, to try and manipulate the system from the inside. And those with some sense of how to manipulate language (the Sociopaths) forge a path directly from Loserdom to senior management. Becoming-Sociopath Losers aren’t headhunted because they do their menial job well, but because they demonstrate (by subtle language signs) that they know that their job is worthless by the standards of other Sociopaths. By slacking in their work (getting others to do it for them or just plain deferring it) and putting the extra energy into getting ahead (manoeuvring and conniving), and taking advantage of risk-taking scenarios (playing the game), Sociopaths advance directly from Loser status to senior management — which does not necessarily imply that a Sociopath is bad. For if one is playing the powergame for different ends, such strategies are also the purview of the good. For this general assessment of power applies as much to NPOs and artist-run centres as it does to oil corporations and PR firms.

Check out how the way language plays into this sacking story recently sent to me (the author requested anonymity):

The most telling thing, in my 15-year design career, is I’ve never worked anywhere longer than two years. I’ve been made redundant once and been sacked one and a half times.

The first sacking came on a Friday evening completely out of the blue. It was at the end of the month, so it was nice and tidy for them. The boss had been out of the office all afternoon, walked in the office and asked to have a word with me outside the door. He simply said: “we’re going to let you go”— that was it. I walked away there and then. He did my colleague, the same way, 3 minutes later. Needless to say, it was ruthless and illegal. There was no dismissal process followed.

However, at the time, the job market was buoyant and I got a way better job (oxymoron) shortly afterwards. Needless to say, that company has been erased from my CV. It’s a futile act but it feels the most dignified response to how I was treated— walk away, shake the dust from your shoes and take back control.

The ‘point 5’ sacking was more gentle and evolved over the course of a month. It came to a head and can be summarised in one sentence. They said: “I think you need to move on”. I agreed and left at the end of the week.

*.*.*

So that’s the way we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that’s stolen from us – that’s snatched right out of our hands – even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. (Murukami, Sputnik Sweeheart 207)

…and in the Norwegian night sky, a spiral, lighting the heavens for over two minutes, what is this strange sight…

"the mysterious lysfenomen"

What gains greater notice — this spiral or the infelicities of Tiger Woods? The media attention is resolutely focused on the AfroAmerican groin as usual; the strangeness of the night sky passes us unnoticed. Perhaps because it gestures not toward what we already know – that Tiger, like 99% of us, thinks the confines of marriage a sham, and that human life be too short to not divest it among many – but toward what we don’t know. This light, the sky, these are unassimilable objects. Though reported and noticed as they do not escape all perception (that which does passes us by without a trace — perhaps), such events constitute a counter-event. A slip within symbolic systems. Such slips make possible all kinds of escapes and exit strategies.

Sputnik Sweetheart, the novel by Japanese writer Murakami, depicts an exit strategy. A novel not unlike Antonioni’s L’Avventura, it revolves around a missing character and an island. A missing loved one, but one loved without the return of affection. A nonreciprocal relationship. And then a search: the would-be lover missing. A third character involved, another woman, and the island itself. Unlike Antonioni, who traces the disintegration of empathy as the protagonist loses interest in his lost lover, quickly shifting his affections to another (the best friend of the missing woman), Murukami leaves us only with a disintegration of contact with the world itself. A Japanese man in Greece; the uncontact with the world is complete.

Contemporary labour has a touch of unreality about it. Its production incomplete, uncontact with a world that misses that which is most significant. When questions are replied with reprimands. Precarious labour has an existential taste of the immaterial to it; that one’s actions benefit an unseen master, with effects ultimately satisfying to no one, least of all to oneself. Missing is the substantial content of the work. Thought applied to work, to the possibilities of its overall transformation, is emptied of itself by way of negation from above. The workforce is kept impermanent by way of permanent threat of underemployment. And yet employment is all there is for the most of the many, in the strictest ontological sense.

find someone to hold hands with: remember this

Not posting here registers a kind of disappearance. Where have I gone? Am I working? What constitutes labour when it is non-present? Is a life unrecorded in the 21C a life lived? Does not the precariat, the precarious immaterial class, take as much time archiving as doing? What precisely is the measure of this distance between doing and recording, acting and archiving? A desire to be done with it, enough with it, competes against the same urge to document. We are all tourists now: tourists, becoming a tourist, was the first manifestation of pathological levels of documentation. All must be photographed, recorded; the lived experience is better — oh, but isn’t it — in the re-telling than the actuality. The banality of “postmodern” readings (and this remains the ugly legacy of postmodernism) celebrated the retelling over the actuality. What is the actuality? So easy to diss this concept of lived experience – but in the critical deconstruction of presence, what the imitators forgot was the actuality or lived experience of thinking without a master. Actuality is living without a master. Writing is living too — but without a master. The only master being the master to take apart within the self (yes: this be alterity, otherness). Postmodernism found the easy-way out by generating endless critique of the lived plenitude instead of seeking its own experience thereof. Lived experience as the repetition of plenitude and suffering is the basis of anarchic living: organisation without mastery. And this concept has much more to do with the deconstruction of presence than the mere dialectical reversal of retelling over doing.

A strange kind of permanence is the new pathology. All actions recorded: one’s loves, hates, connections, events, photos, videos, sounds, names. The Net is the new fear of lived presence in its final, accountable record. Peter at the Gates has been replaced by Google in the Search Bar. Your Life: in 50 odd pages of depth. The transient occurs over time as links die, websites condemned to oblivion (but even then, Archive.org and the Wayback Machine attempt to sustain posterity; Google copies the entire Internet). The initial objections to the Net’s transience are now inverted, reversed, as instead objection grows over data-harvesting, the impossibility of severance, of making a damn relation end, when the evidence is scattered everywhere. Permanence threatens us: it is there when we don’t want it, and when we want it, it is gone.

Don’t we dream of an electron bomb, knocking out all electrical systems, wiping all hard-drives. This collective wiping of memory that would liberate forgetfulness by not forgetting liberation. The greatest act conceived was put to film in Fight Club: destroy the records of the banks, the credit card companies, the insurers. Disappear the financial, put to death what Marazzi calls the “financialization” of the world. Down, down, down.

Hiding within Signs (Liu Bolin)

Disappearance as a strategy: to flee confinement by way of a slippage between sign and symbol. As enacted in space, through time. Rave culture enacts a level of disappearance, by slipping away from the usual concept of a counterculture’s visual opposition. The visual is switched for the sonic. The punk on the streetcorner for the raver in the warehouse. Rave culture switches day for night. It doesn’t disappear from the day as it was never there.

In the 21C, disappearance would mean to conduct something of a digital erasure of the archives. To disappear would mean to delete all traces of oneself. But such an absence only gestures toward its horizon: a hole where once there was the whole. Strategically, for disappearance to be effective — which is to say, unnoticeable — something of a blending operation must take place. A slippage between sign and symbol.

Bulldozed out of Vision (Liu Bolin)

Chinese artist Liu Bolin paints himself into the background. By statically inserting his body, he becomes integrated into his surroundings. He blends-in (and of course, plays all the stereotypes of Chinese conformity by doing so). Bolin’s strategy is not so much disappearance as it is the ineffective demonstration of camouflage coupled with the effective demonstration of symbolic disappearance. Camouflage has never been so ineffective as in the case of Bolin, where its illusion requires the precise placement of one’s body (without movement, viewed from one perspective only). Yet the failure of camouflage (even when its representation catches us by surprise as we search for his increasingly elusive body) foregrounds a greater strategy: the slippage between sign and symbol. The body as outline of the person is now clearly outlined as little more than it is, a surface of itself, a patina without depth, capable of reflecting its background, capable again of faking its own transparency. The body is not to be trusted; nor is the perspective of the viewer.

Disappearance as strategy, by way of slipping between sign and symbol, requires the unsettling of perspective while retaining its expected characteristics. If a generalized perspective, such as the map, cannot be trusted to represent the territory, than those items already on the map, many among the millions, might be discounted, along with so many others, as extraneous information. Data unlikely from which to proceed. “Hiding in plain sight” – Underground Resistance.

Choosing to truly hide within the perspective of the firing-range, to attempt to disappear by way of obfuscation, always results in disaster. Never choose obvious cover. Never hide (per se).

This post has been government funded (in part):

How Not To Be Seen (As Monty Python Sees It)

Edit — added:

One thing I did not mention (as it perhaps warrants another post) is that Bolin politically orients his work. According to Infoniac.com, his Beijing studio was shut down by the Government in 2005 which prompted his “Hiding in the City” series of photographs, all part of a shift from “dependence to revolting against the system” (Bolin’s words). Check it:

“I am standing, but there is a silent protest, the protest against the environment for the survival, the protest against the state. I wanted to photograph the reality of scenes of China’s development today.” – Liu Bolin