Steven Craig Hickman As I was reading an article on the supposed hidden ideology underlying the rise of the Smart City on e-flux blog: The hidden ideology behind the “smart city” I kept thinking to myself: Look at New York City for a model of the coming Smart City as total ubiquitous control, and then think John Twelve Hawks Fourth Realm trilogy. Already NYC is becoming the mecca for such ubiquitous smart worlds seamlessly enclosing its citizens in a web of intelligence that will think for them – watch them, protect them, imprison them for their own good… the Nanny Corporate City of the Future will do for you what you want do for yourself. A sort of Progressive City of Ethical Control bound only by the Imperialism of Economic Neoliberalist Stocks and Algorithmic Governmentality. Sadly this collusion of the Establishment Left/Right in Washington and in such corporate cities as NYC will become addititve – adding such smart devices and upgrades over the coming decades. While in China or other sites it will become part of the galloping rise of all new cities. This notion that we can intervene and shape this future seems iffy at best, because the very government that could intervene and do that through reform and regulation has as we see here in the U.S.A. vanished… with the divorce of Capitalism from Democracy (or, as here, the Federal Republic) the world will look more like China with a group of Oligarchic Overlords pushing agendas and guiding capitalism toward intensified obsolescence even as they marginalize humans for machinic life. He says: “We will need to demand that the engineers who will craft the code that determines all the million material ways in which the networked city interacts with the people who live in it, and give it shape and meaning, are able to consciously articulate the things they believe (even, at the very most basic level, whether or not they conceive of the distribution of civic goods as a zero-sum game).” Problem here is that engineers work for fascist neoliberal corporations that rule as autarchies with top-down control over products and services, controlling through middle-management the very engineering process that has an in built design process that controls every aspect of what an engineer can and cannot do. The old days of a singular engineer enabled to change things is gone, now we live in multiplex teams that are defined by a well-organized neoliberal nexus of command and control techniques over every aspect of an engineers life at work. One would have to change the system that regulates the whole process of software development not the engineer, and to do that would mean a complete transformation of the Corporation as an entity and engine of neoliberal work and ideology. That’s not going to happen overnight, and governments can’t control that process nor even have the intelligence to know where to begin… After 40 years in the biz as a developer, systems analysts, and software architect I’ve seen this process modified, adapted, revised, and honed down to a smooth working machine in most major corporations to the point that in-house development runs like clockwork – like a machine. This would be a hard nut to crack and change, and I doubt politics could do it even if it had the impetus to want too. And, this begs the question of those who like Parag Khanna tell us in the coming decades, global competition will punish the sentimental. A society that could do something better but doesn’t is either stupid or suicidal—or both. For political systems this means less emphasis on democracy and more on good governance. Success is measured by delivering welfare domestically and managing global complexity, not by holding elections. Such pragmatism opens the door to fruitful conversation over improving governance rather than presuming one end-state. Governance is more than a race to efficiency, but no Western government would be worse with a bit more emphasis on technocratic substance over democratic style.1 For Khanna the Info-State – and, I would reduce that to the Parametric Assemblage – will more and more depend of expert decision making as the central motif of its overall capacity to compete on the world stage, along with provide the intelligence to overcome both environmental pressures and the typical problems of war, famine, and catastrophe. So the notion of the Technocracy as Info-State, an informed city of smart devices and AGI assemblages is coming to the fore in debates. As he puts it: “Direct technocracy is the superior model for 21st century governance. It combines Switzerland’s collective presidency executive and multi-party parliament with Singapore’s data-driven and utilitarian-minded civil service: A blend of technocracy and democracy, assisted by technology.” Patrik Schumacher, who has promoted what he terms “parametricism,” not merely as a useful tool, but as the enabler of an entirely new kind of architecture, a new aesthetic sees society as a heterogeneous field of opportunity, saying: “The task is to develop an architectural and urban repertoire that is geared up to create complex, polycentric urban fields, which are densely layered and continuously differentiated.” Parametricism refers to a type of design process characterized by the interrelation of design variables (or, parameters) through computational tools and techniques; a definition that allows it to encompass the work of other well-known figures and firms as well as emerging practitioners in contemporary architecture and design. Beyond this very general technical definition, however, parametricism has also accrued currency to refer to a whole variety of ideas that animate design culture today, from those concerned primarily with aesthetic questions, to others that are more philosophical, and yet others with strong political agendas.2 Schumacher says of himself: “I myself was a Marxist from about 1985 to the late 1990s when I gradually started to shift more to the mainstream centre under the influence of Habermas, Luhmann and through my originally Marxist-inspired interest in postfordist socio-economic restructuring and new forms of business organisation. My writings from the late 1990s are still Marxist in bent but already betray my enthusiasm for the new business protagonists and processes and the new economic dynamism of postfordist capitalism. While the events of 2008 inspired many to turn against capitalism and to return to Marx, I was looking for new answers and discovered Austrian economics, i.e. the political economy of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek was a key intellectual who helped to turn the ideological tide against socialism and inspired Thatcher’s neo-liberal project of privatization. The political ideology and programme of Anarcho-capitalism envisages the radicalisation of the neo-liberal roll back of the state.” He envisions the cities of the future as self-sustaining environmental assemblages based on parametric design (The Parametric City): Our technologically based world civilization has expanded its power of wealth creation to the point where it becomes its own barrier. We are finally compelled to recognize the finitude of our planet. Our world has shrunk to this single, fragile, shared “spaceship planet earth”. Every new enterprise must now involve an additional reflective loop about its potential ecological consequences. Cities are a crucial conduit of our global consumption of energy, air and water. Buildings consume energy and pollute during their life cycle as well as during their fabrication and construction. The ecological sustainability of our civilization depends upon our ability to find more intelligent and light-footed ways to harness and utilize the finite resources of our natural environment. This necessity imposes a new constraint upon the design of our built environment, not only in terms of new technology and innovative engineering solutions, but also in terms of the architectural order and stylistic expression of the built environment. However, the imperative of energy saving must not imply that the shutters are coming down. The task is to create cities that sustainably adapt to the natural environment without arresting the progressive, developmental thrust of our civilization. Cultural advancement has to continue. This is not only an end in itself but the sine qua non of our continued survival on spaceship earth. Continuous technological innovation is a necessary precondition for our ability to ascertain our ongoing ecological sustainability. Therefore the tightening of ecological constraints that impose themselves upon the design of cities must not constrain the vitality and productivity of the life processes they accommodate. Cities must continue to provide the living conditions that are favorable to innovative work. Thus before we can fully address the question of how to optimize our cities in terms of environmental engineering we must answer the question which urban patterns and architectural morphologies are most likely to vitalize and advance the productive life and communication processes everything else depends upon. Parametricism, he tells us, is gathering momentum to become the first new global, unified style that can and must replace Modernism as credible epochal style. Parametricism confronts both, the remaining vestiges of Modernist’s monotony, and the cacophony of the urban chaos that has sprung up in the wake of Modernism’s demise, with a complex, variegated order inspired by the self-organising processes of nature. The premise of Parametricism is that all urban and architectural elements must be parametrically malleable. Instead of assembling rigid and hermetic geometric figures – like all previous architectural styles – Parametricism brings malleable components into a dynamical play of mutual responsiveness as well as contextual adaptation. Key design processes are variation and correlation. Computationally, any property – positional, geometric, material – of any architectural element can be associated with – made the “cause” or “effect” of – any other property of any other element of the design. The designer invents and formulates correlations or rules akin to the laws of nature. Thus everything is potentially made to network and resonate with everything else. This should result in an overall intensification of relations that gives the urban field a performative density, informational richness, and cognitive coherence that makes for good legibility, easy navigation and thus quick, effective participation in a complex social arena where everybody’s ability to scan an ever-increasing simultaneity of events and to move through a rapid successions of communicative encounters constitutes the essential, contemporary form of the cultural advancement. In the above all the current ideological underpinnings of the neoliberal vision are incorporated and transformed by a vision of the coming informational society. As Adam Greenfield tells it “once you’ve accepted the fundamental terms of this bargain, there’s not a whole lot of scope for the expression of values. You endorse the belief systems implicit in the loyalty scheme by participating in it, and your opportunity to reject those belief systems begins and ends with the right of refusal. In the case of the smart city, though, as with virtually all facets of metropolitan experience, the ambit of behavior and response is hugely more complicated. And this is where the largely preconscious values and conceptions of urban life held by such a system’s designers come into play.”3 These informational environments of the future, these “smart cities” will become more and more spaces of imaginal life, ones in which artificial-intelligence (AI) applications perform many tasks better than we can. As Floridi explains it we are becoming like fish in water, digital technologies are our infosphere’s true natives, while we analog organisms try to adapt to a new habitat, one that has come to include a mix of analog and digital components. We are sharing the infosphere with artificial agents that are increasingly smart, autonomous, and even social. Some of these agents are already right in front of us, and others are discernible on the horizon, while later generations are unforeseeable. And the most profound implication of this epochal change may be that we are most likely only at the beginning of it. The AI agents that have already arrived come in soft forms, such as apps, web bots, algorithms, and software of all kinds; and hard forms, such as robots, driverless cars, smart watches, and other gadgets. They are replacing even white-collar workers, and performing functions that, just a few years ago, were considered off-limits for technological disruption: cataloguing images, translating documents, interpreting radiographs, flying drones, extracting new information from huge data sets, and so forth. Digital technologies and automation have been replacing workers in agriculture and manufacturing for decades; now they are coming to the services sector. More old jobs will continue to disappear, and while we can only guess at the scale of the coming disruption, we should assume that it will be profound. Any job in which people serve as an interface – between, say, a GPS and a car, documents in different languages, ingredients and a finished dish, or symptoms and a corresponding disease – is now at risk. These Neoliberal Utopias or Cloud Cities (i.e., total wireless environments or ubiquitous computing environments connected to the Cloud 24/7) will possess a fully integrated infrastructure, with smart transportation services (including autonomous vehicles), internet and communication systems, water services, and electrical and power grids all connected and unified. Such a massive, city-wide system will undoubtedly require significant upgrades in infrastructural computing power just to process the massive amounts of raw data. New algorithms and AI programs will each have their roles to play, and — like something out of an old science fiction novel — the largest cities may really come to have something like a “central computer,” either distributed or localized.4 These neoliberal utopias will for the upper-classes seem like dreamlands, while for the workers and migrants to these smart oasis things may be quite different. Stephen Graham in Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers envisions a world of privately controlled and surveilled archipelagos that secede from the street system, leaving it – metaphorically and, where the new system is raised up, physically – as a lower-status environment populated by those excluded from the new interior city.5 As one architect argues that these ‘second-tier’ cities with hyperfunctional connectivity over a plane vertically separated above or below the traditional street works to ‘create an extreme form of stratification in a context better suited for mixture, the integration of people from all different races and classes.’ Poor urban minorities, Terranova writes, have often been relegated to residualised and exteriorised street levels ‘where retail has tended to languish and reserving the walkway system for white-collar workers.’ (Vertical) As Graham states it such vertical environmental contrasts are compounded by the ways in which private, vertically segregated pedestrian systems can become progressively delinked from surrounding sidewalks. Actual access from the public street often becomes increasingly tenuous as the self-perpetuating logic of extending interiorised commercial walkway systems grow horizontally over time. Entrances to the walkway system from the street below are mediated by access to securitised corporate office buildings, elite condominiums or upmarket hotels. Commercial imperatives and a politics of fear, in other words, can result in pulling up the ‘ladder’ connecting the skywalk city to the street system. Linkages to the street, often already unsigned or inconspicuous, are closed, built over or replaced by connections through retailers or auto garages. Security guards and CCTV cameras provide intensified controls filtering flows between outside and inside. (Vertical, KL 3681) In such a world the class divisions will become such that one imagines J.G. Ballard’s High Rise which was a parodic take on the rise of 70’s inner city condominium lifestyles. As Laing the main character in this satire admits “people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them”.6 And, as if already predicting the coming age of Smart Vertical cities Laing becomes aware of his predicament and nightmare: As usual, though, the dimensions of the forty-storey block made his head reel. Lowering his eyes to the tiled floor, he steadied himself against the door pillar. The immense volume of open space that separated the building from the neighbouring high-rise a quarter of a mile away unsettled his sense of balance. At times he felt that he was living in the gondola of a ferris wheel permanently suspended three hundred feet above the ground. (Ballard, p. 14) This sense of Vertical and Vertigo go hand in hand as the elite are forced ever upward in a maze of endless clouds and skyscrapers, while the workers like rats in a dark labyrinth are forced into the underworlds of such endless tunnels where populated to the max they begin to feed off each other in cannibalistic delight of consumer life without end. In such a realm the natural world has disappeared, even the occasional plant or tree is circumscribed and lifted high into the top-tiers where sun can still fall amid the chromium enclaves of the rich. But for the new urban peasantry all that remains is the slime molds of some strange undiluted acid pit in the unkempt streets far below the pyramids of light. Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962) opens in a post-apocalyptic future where surviving humans inhabit cramped underground spaces beneath destroyed cities in permanent exile from daylight. The authorities in this near future are desperately experimenting with primitive forms of time travel to locate help for their beleaguered existence. Part of the crisis is the deterioration and failure of memory in all but a few individuals. The protagonist, and subject of the experiments, has been chosen for the tenaciousness with which he has been able to retain an image from the past. Clearly, La jetée is not a story of the future but a meditation on the present, in this case the early 1960s, which Marker portrays as a dark time, shadowed by the death camps, the devastation of Hiroshima, and torture in Algeria. Like contemporary work by Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour), Jacques Rivette (Paris nous appartient), Joseph Losey (These Are the Damned), Fritz Lang (Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse), Jacques Tourneur (The Fearmakers), and numerous others, the film seems to ask: How does one remain human in the bleakness of this world when the ties that connect us have been shattered and when malevolent forms of rationality are powerfully at work? Although Marker’s answer to such a question remains unspecified, La jetée affirms the indispensability of the imagination for collective survival. For Marker, this implies a mingling of the visionary capacities of both memory and creation, and it occurs in the film around the image of the unsighted, blindfolded protagonist. Although most of the film, in its narrative context, consists of remembered or imagined images, one of its original premises is this model of a seer whose normative visual abilities have been deactivated in circumstances evoking the torture and inhumane medical experiments of the war and in the years that followed.7 As Crary defines it we are being re-ontologized, revised and remodeled by these very neoliberal processes that make up a 24/7 consumer society. He argues there is a broad remodeling of the dream into something like media software or a kind of “content” to which, in principle, there could be instrumental access. This generalized notion of accessibility derives from elements of popular culture that emerged in the mid 1980s in cyberpunk fiction, but which quickly saturated a broader collective sensibility. In various ways, there was a development of figures for new types of interfaces or circuits in which the mind or nervous system effectively linked up with the operation and flows of external systems. The idea of an actual neural connection to a global grid or matrix was, in most cases, a valorization of heightened states of exposure, whether to streams of images, information, or code. One effect of this imposition of an input/output model is a homogenization of inner experience and the contents of communication networks, and an unproblematic reduction of the infinite amorphousness of mental life to digital formats. Richard K. Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon (2002) can stand for a large category of current fiction in which individual consciousness can be digitized, downloaded, stored, installed in a new body, and have the ability to interface with boundless reservoirs of data. At the same time, narratives detailing such delirious levels of exposure are usually constructed as fables of empowerment, in spite of the extreme asymmetry between the individual and the inconceivable scale of “the grid.” The lesson, in different guises, demonstrates how an entrepreneurial heroism is capable of surmounting this asymmetry and leveraging its incommensurabilities to one’s individual benefit. The problem here is not to be construed as the permeability between some undefiled “inner life” and external techniques and processes. Rather, it is one sign of a larger tendency to reconceive all facets of individual experience as continuous and compatible with the requirements of accelerated 24/7 consumerism. Even though dreaming will always evade such appropriation, it inevitably becomes culturally figured as software or content detachable from the self, as something that might be circulated electronically or posted as an online video. It is part of a larger set of processes in which everything once considered personal has to be recreated and deployed in the service of adding dollar or prestige value to one’s electronic identities. (Crary, KL 1131-1147) As the outer and inner spaces change places, as we become more and more real in our external mirror worlds and our bodies de-materialize into dividual gleams of a neoliberal consumer machine where surplus labor and value give way to a 24/7 entertainment complex that extracts profit from our dreams rather than our physical work we will become literalized phantasms and copies of our cloned lifestyles, losing our grip on humanity and devolving into digital fragments of a totalized void. In such a world the original human gets lost in translation as it fragments into bits of data-foam which enters into new relations and mediations based not of reality but of the fantastic needs of a Smart City more real than the Real. In the end Homer has his revenge of Plato as the cave swallows both the sleeper and the awakened one in a cold dark chamber of absolute abstract light. The difference between night and day having been spliced out in an eternal now of cloudscapes of energetic animations. Utopia/Dystopia? Depends on which floor of the bad infinity one finds one’s self. But then again, will one have a self to find?
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by Guy Debord But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity 1. The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. 2. Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudoworld apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of imagesoftheworld finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of nonlife. 3. The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated and precisely for that reason this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation. 4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images. 5. The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm a world view transformed into an objective force. 6. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very heart of society's real unreality. In all its specific manifestations news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment the spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life. It is the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself. 7. The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world, of a global social praxis that has split up into reality on the one hand and image on the other. Social practice, which the spectacle's autonomy challenges, is also the real totality to which the spectacle is subordinate. So deep is the rift in this totality, however, that the spectacle is able to emerge as its apparent goal. The language of the spectacle is composed of signs of the dominant organization of production signs which are at the same time the ultimate endproducts of that organization. 8. The spectacle cannot be set in abstract opposition to concrete social activity, for the dichotomy between reality and image will survive on either side of any such distinction. Thus the spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product of real activity. Likewise, lived reality suffers the material assaults of the spectacle's mechanisms of contemplation, incorporating the spectacular order and lending that order positive support. Each side therefore has its share of objective reality. And every concept, as it takes its place on one side or the other, has no foundation apart from its transformation into its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and underpinning of society as it exists. 9. In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood. 10. The concept of the spectacle brings together and explains a wide range of apparently disparate phenomena. Diversities and contrasts among such phenomena are the appearances of the spectacle the appearances of a social organization of appearances that needs to be grasped in its general truth. Understood on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance. But any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle's essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself. 11. In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and whatever forces may hasten its demise, a few artificial distinctions are called for. To analyze the spectacle means talking its language to some degree to the degree, in fact, that we are obliged to engage the methodology of the society to which the spectacle gives expression. For what the spectacle expresses is the total practice of one particular economic and social formation; it is, so to speak, that formation's agenda. It is also the historical moment by which we happen to be governed. 12. The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear." The attitude that it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances. 13. The spectacle is essentially tautological, for the simple reason that its means and its ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory. 14. The spectacular character of modern industrial society has nothing fortuitous or superficial about it; on the contrary, this society is based on the spectacle in the most fundamental way. For the spectacle, as the perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself. 15. As the indlspensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced, as a general gloss on the rationality of the system, and as the advanced economic sector directly responsible for the manufacture of an evergrowing mass of imageobjects, the spectacle is the chief product of presentday society. 16. The spectacle subjects living human beings to its will to the extent that the economy has brought them under its sway. For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers. 17. An earlier stage in the economy's domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human endeavor. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective "having" must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d'etre from appearances. At the same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power and completely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character. Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear. 18. For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to presentday society's generalized abstraction. This is not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is perceptible to the naked eye even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule. 19. The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tradition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. 20. Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Not that its techniques have dispelled those religious mists in which human beings once located their own powers, the very powers that had been wrenched from them but those cloudenshrouded entities have now been brought down to earth. It is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that have become the most impenetrable and rarefied. The absolute denial of life, in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected onto the heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself. The spectacle is hence a technological version of the exiling of human powers in a "world beyond" and the perfection of separation within human beings. 21. So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modem society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. 22. The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from itself and established itself in the spectacle as an independent realm can only be explained by the selfcleavage and selfcontradictoriness already present in that powerful practice. 23. At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom the most archaic. 24. By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of selfpraise. The spectacle is the selfportrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment. But the spectacle is by no means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural; on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle understood in the limited sense of those "mass media" that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics. If the social requirements of the age which develops such techniques can be met only through their mediation, if the administration of society and all contact between people now depends on the intervention of such "instant" communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially oneway; the concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division. 25. Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. Religious contemplation in its earliest form was the outcome of the establishment of the social division of labor and the formation of classes. Power draped itself in the outward garb of a mythical order from the beginning. In former times the category of the sacred justified the cosmic and ontological ordering of things that best served the interests of the masters, expounding upon and embellishing what society could not deliver. Thus power as a separate realm has always had a spectacular aspect, but mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for a poverty of real social activity that was still widely felt to be a universal fact of life. The modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts what society can deliver, but within this depiction what is permitted is rigidly distinguished from what is possible. The spectacle preserves unconsciousness as practical changes in the conditions of existence proceed. The spectacle is selfgenerated, and it makes up its own rules: it is a specious form of the sacred. And it makes no secret of what it is, namely, hierarchical power evolving on its own, in its separateness, thanks to an increasing productivity based on an ever more refined division of labor, an ever greater comminution of machinegoverned gestures, and an everwidening market. In the course of this development all community and critical awareness have ceased to be; nor have those forces, which were able by separating to grow enormously in strength, yet found a way to reunite. 26. The generalized separation of worker and product has spelled the end of any comprehensive view of the job done, as well as the end of direct personal communication between producers. As the accumulation of alienated products proceeds, and as the productive process gets more concentrated, consistency and communication become the exclusive assets of the system's managers. The triumph of an economic system founded on separation leads to the proletarianization of the world. 27. Owing to the very success of this separated system of production, whose product is separation itself, that fundamental area of experience which was associated in earlier societies with an individual's principal work is being transformed at least at the leading edge of the system's evolution into a realm of nonwork, of inactivity. Such inactivity, however, is by no means emancipated from productive activity: it remains in thrall to that activity, in an uneasy and worshipful subjection to production's needs and results; indeed it is itself a product of the rationality of production. There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is banned a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. So what is referred to as "liberation from work," that is, increased leisure time, is a liberation neither within labor itself nor from the world labor has brought into being. 28. The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions and each time in a more concrete manner. 29. The origin of the spectacle lies in the world's loss of unity, and its massive expansion in the modern period demonstrates how total this loss has been: the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction. The spectacle divides the world into two parts, one of which is held up as a selfrepresentation to the world, and is superior to the world. The spectacle is simply the common language that bridges this division. Spectators are linked only by a oneway relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness. 30. The spectator's alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere. 31. Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own alienated products accumulate. The spectacle is a map of this new world¥a map drawn to the scale of the territory itself. In this way the very powers that have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us in their full force. 32. The spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic growth corresponds almost entirely to the growth of this particular sector of industrial production. If something grows along with the selfmovement of the economy, it can only be the alienation that has inhabited the core of the economic sphere from its inception. 33. Though separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically is he cut off from that life. 34. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. excerpt from the book: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
by Steven Graig Hickman
The hyper-industrial state of fact takes what Deleuze called control societies, founded on modulation by the mass media, into the stage of hyper-control. The latter is generated by self-produced personal data, collected and published by people themselves – whether knowingly or otherwise – and this data is then exploited by applying intensive computing to these massive data sets. This automatized modulation establishes algorithmic governmentality in the service of what Johnathan Crary calls 24/7 capitalism.1
—Bernard Stiegler, Automatic Society
In its profound uselessness and intrinsic passivity, with the incalculable losses it causes in production time, circulation, and consumption, sleep will always collide with the demands of a 24/7 universe. The huge portion of our lives that we spend asleep, freed from a morass of simulated needs, subsists as one of the great human affronts to the voraciousness of contemporary capitalism. Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.
—Jonathan Crary, 24/7
In the opening sections of Das Capital Karl Marx would utter the strange and terrifying truth about capitalism: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” We are mere cattle upon which the machinic assemblages of Capital cannibalized and expulsed as excess and extraneous waste. The notion of sleep has been used by poets and Gnostics alike throughout time as the leitmotif of ignorance, bliss, and innocence. Asleep in one’s ignorance goes the saying. To be asleep is to be so immersed in the normalization process of the worlds ubiquitous systems that one no longer has that critical acumen to be able to step away, step back, step out of one’s environment and see it for what it is: an artificial construct within which one is imprisoned. All the Zombie films from Romero’s classic to the latest edition have one theme: the mindless hunger and desire of the consumer for its next meal ticket, the endless feeding frenzy of a mindless horde in search of filling the emptiness of its depleted flesh, its desiring machininc life. Like sleeping zombies we move to the puppet strings of invisible codes and algorithms that supplement, decide, and program our lives within a 24/7 dreamworld constructed to fulfill our deepest desires.
Without even the slightest thought we are being slowly but surely integrated into a machinc civilization that will in turn feed on us until it has no need for us at all. As Stiegler remarks:
It is this complete integration of the technical system, via the digital, that enables the functional integration of biological, psychic and social automatisms – and it is this context that has seen the development of neuromarketing and neuroeconomics. This functional integration leads on the side of production to a total robotization that disintegrates not just public power, social and educational systems, intergenerational relations and consequently psychic structures: it is the industrial economy itself, based on wage labour as the criterion for distributing purchasing power, and for the formation of mass markets capable of absorbing the ready-made commodities of the consumerist model, which is in the course of dis-integrating – becoming functionally insolvent because fundamentally irrational. (AS, KL 2455)
No longer individuals with a private life untraceable except in the public sphere that we expose our selves too, we now exist only as ‘dividuals’ – as so much data in the eyes and under the gaze of the machinic code and algorithmic programs that continuously 24/7 feed on our digital lives. For in this world the exterior human no longer exists, only its trace in the digital empire of the networks society that we’ve all created together. For better or worse we have vanished into our networks in anticipation of that day when our flesh will be left behind like so much dead weight. All or the metaphysical dreams of the philosophers and the religionists of a literal beyond or Other World have been invented in the very automatic systems of this machinic civilization of the Digital Empire.
In ‘Optimism, Pessimism and Travel’, Deleuze’s letter to Serge Daney about control societies and the new powers of control that make them possible, he stated that we must ‘get to the heart of the confrontation’. This should consist in an inversion: ‘This would almost be to ask whether this control might be inverted, harnessed by the supplementary function that opposes itself to power: to invent an art of control that would be like a new form of resistance.’3
The Art of Control: Invention, Resistance and the Supplement
For Stiegler what is missing in Deleuze, as in all philosophy, epistemology and most of so-called aesthetics, is an understanding of the stakes of what he terms tertiary retention, that is, of technics. “But this absence is also found among jurists, and is yet more common among economists – and even anthropologists. It is towards conceiving the role of tertiary retention in the formation of knowledge, and doing so starting from the crucible constituted by total dis-integration, and towards thinking the quasi-causal inversion that all this requires, that we must now devote ourselves – and sacrifice (time).” (AS, KL 2250)
Stiegler’s work centers on the question of time and time’s relation to technology through what he calls tertiary retention, a notion that completes the circle of Husserl’s theory of retentions (memory) and protentions (perception) (Stiegler 1998). The tertiary retention is the technically captured trace as well as support of both primary retention (e.g. the melody that is retained in our mind) and secondary retention (e.g. the melody that we can recall tomorrow). For Stiegler the tertiary retention is a supplement (Derrida) as well as “exteriorization” of memory (in the words of French paleoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan) through which he attempts to re-read the history of European philosophy as a history of the suppression of the question of technics – as a response to Heidegger’s critique of the forgetting of the question of Being in Western metaphysics. The history of technology for Stiegler could be described as the history of grammatization, a term coined by the French historian and linguist Sylvain Auroux, in which the organic and inorganic organs are configured and reconfigured according to the progress of technological invention (e.g. alphabetic writing, analog writing, digital writing).4
In Stiegler’s world the first great cinematographers were the shamans of southern France who in several Paleolithic Caves first projected images onto the walls through which were enacted magical flickering rituals of light and dark where sacrifice and the endless parade of animal and plant life was presided over by ancient forces of the earth. From that time we have imprinted our memories, our desires, our need to control the uncontrollable elements of the exterior environment through this image making faculty of memory and perception. Plato would see in such a supplement a world of dreamers so immersed in their dream that they’d forgotten their real home in the realms of pure Forms (Ideas). So there has been both those who have sought to escape the cave, and those who pursued its wonders into our current cave worlds of the network society arising around us. Like citizens of some vast cinematic wonderland we are so immersed in our artificial environments that we’ve even begun to forget the natural world around us out of which were spawned. Like fish in a vast seething sea of images we cannot know otherwise, and live among our fabricated and invented worlds as if they were and had always been. The infinitization of the false and fabricated, the artificial realms where our desires are captured and controlled by alien intelligences built out of code and algorithms that have as Stiegler will put it “grammatized” us, rewritten our lives as artificial beings led to the slaughter.
The machine knows me only as a profile – the carefully registered script of statements set up within several online chat or social connection sites, where a user will expose aspects of his/her public or avatar personae. It does not matter whether we tell the truth or create a fiction, we become profiled by the sea of algorithmic matching systems that will spread us across the oceans of Big Data where the hiveminds of corporate AI’s will feed on us like so much fodder to be stripped, analyzed, segmented, catalogued, codified, differentiated, and reprogrammed for the prosumer systems that will then feed back in a loop to us as echoes of our desires. It’s like the degradation of that old experiment in which a dozen people are asked to pass on a simple phrase or sentence to the person sitting next to him until it finally comes back to the originator. As we know such experiments show how a message becomes more and more degraded and entropic to the point that the original phrase is lost and something new emerges in its place. We are that something that is ultimately replaced by the false squandering’s of a million bits of code transforming, analyzing, massaging, filtering, categorizing, and implementing and activating new profiles that become the hypernormalized image of our dividual life on the network.
As Stiegler suggests by producing their ‘profiles’ on the basis of their reticulated activity, and by ‘personalizing’ them – beyond the statistical calculation of phrases, requests and other linguistic acts that Google produces – the traceability industry leads to their functional integration as consumers in ‘24/7 markets and a global infrastructure for continuous work and consumption’. After the organization of production facilities into three daily eight-hour shifts in the early twentieth century, and then the connection of worldwide stock exchanges operating twenty-four hours a day in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘now a human subject is in the making to coincide with these more intensively’. (AS, KL 2878) As he remarks: “By means of this synchronization operating through functional economic integration, full and generalized automatization is directly sustained by psychic individuals themselves, at the cost of social disintegration…” (AS, KL 2887)
Social networking has brought about a seamless integration into the echo chamber of a completed nihilism in which the dividual rather than the individual is incorporated, profiled, imaged, modulated, and attuned to the endless 24/7 feedback systems that cater to their every need while at the same time excluding the extraneous and disturbing worlds of thought and image. We are becoming so normalized or even, hypernormalized (Adam Curtis) that we cannot know the difference. Theory is mute, thought is dead, and all our decisions are taken care of by algorithms of which we know nothing. In fact as Stiegler comments: All political questions are dissolved into economics, since ideology is no longer about collective choices but about ‘individual’ relations to products: ‘There is an ever closer linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded.’ These programmed relations give rise to dividuation in Guattari’s sense, that is, to the destruction of in-dividuation in Simondon’s sense – which forms the basis of ‘algorithmic governmentality’. (AS, KL 2994)
This Article is taken from:
by Bert Olivier One of the most promising and exciting developments in recent thought has been the emergence of the “posthuman” as a distinct field within, and simultaneously transcending, the humanities. It comes from within this disciplinary field insofar as thinkers working in humanities disciplines such as philosophy and literary departments have contributed to what can perhaps be called the field of the posthuman. At the same time it comes from beyond the humanities too; in Rosi Braidotti’s words, from “science and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth-sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory, primatology, animal rights and science fiction” (Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013, p. 57-58). This means that the posthuman is also post-anthropocentric because the work being done in these disciplines demonstrates that, to be understood better than before, human beings have to be inscribed in contexts that include other creatures such as animals and plants. Part of the reason for humanities (and social sciences) being increasingly perceived as being out of touch with the contemporary world is precisely that few humanities scholars are willing or able (or both) to step outside the familiar terrain of their inward-looking discipline to rethink it in terms of insights gained in and through the sciences mentioned above. In this respect Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were exceptions (as demonstrated in A Thousand Plateaus), as was Jacques Lacan before them and are Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel Castells and John Bellamy Foster, among others, today. The problem faced by such adventurous, bold humanities thinkers is that of communication: they have to find an understandable language for communicating their insights to the rest of humanity. This partly explains the difficulty many people have with their writings. What does posthumanism entail and why has it arisen? From what was said above it is already apparent that poststructuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and particularly Deleuze and Guattari have contributed substantially to a posthumanist mindset by “removing” human beings from the centre of things and inserting them in broader cultural, ontological and ecological contexts in distinct ways. Further, in historical-philosophical terms one might say that its appearance as an identifiable field of thought marks the end of humanism as well as of anthropocentrism, which is something to be welcomed. As Braidotti points out (2013, p. 13), humanism’s roots go back to the ancient Greek sophist, Protagoras’s observation, that “man is the measure of all things” (which is accurately formulated, because the judgment of women did not count for more than two millennia, except in isolated places like ancient Sparta and ancient Egypt). It was only really after the theocentric (God-centred) Middle Ages, however, more specifically since the Italian Renaissance, that humanism really developed on a large scale. Referring to Leonardo Da Vinci’s familiar graphic image of “Vitruvian man”, Braidotti elaborates on its significance (p. 13): “That iconic image is the emblem of Humanism as a doctrine that combines the biological, discursive and moral expansion of human capabilities into an idea of teleologically ordained, rational progress. Faith in the unique, self-regulating and intrinsically moral powers of human reason forms an integral part of this high-humanistic creed, which was essentially predicated on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century renditions of classical Antiquity and Italian Renaissance ideals.” It was Hegel’s 19th-century philosophy of the development of universal Mind/Spirit, Braidotti further argues, that represents the cultural culmination of this humanist conception of human beings. What it implies is that not just those in Europe, but all human beings, can share in the universalistically conceived attributes of the (human) mind in developmental terms. Hegel’s dialectical (thesis>antithesis>synthesis>thesis>antithesis>synthesis) model of historical development also implies the dialectics of self and other, including the stage of master and slave, or as one knows it in 20th-century terms, of self and other, where “other” (as woman, other race, gay person, etc.), more often than not, is a pejorative term, marking cultural, racial and gender inferiority — so persuasively demonstrated in Edward Said’s Orientalism regarding the cultural/racial other. Humanist colonialism has always gone hand in hand with the violent imposition of (mostly European) power on the colonial other, of course (Braidotti 2013, p. 15). Its history is not straightforward, however, but complicated by the fact that the very notion of humanism used to justify patronising colonial policies has also been the source of tremendous hope and striving for political liberation and independence on the part of oppressed peoples. Its “longevity” should be understood in the light of this inherent ambiguity (Braidotti 2013, p. 16). This ambivalence notwithstanding, it is no surprise that since the end of the Second World War humanism has been subjected to one anti-humanist critique after the other, emanating from feminism, postcolonial studies, anti-racism, anti-nuclear, pacifist and animal rights movements, among others. The historical contortions of humanism in the complex relations between liberal individualism, 20th-century fascism, Stalinist communism and socialist humanism do not concern me here (see Braidotti 2013, p. 16-18); suffice it to say that Nazi fascism dealt a severe blow to the major traditions of critical theory in Europe by forcing the expatriation from Europe of Frankfurt School critical theory, (neo-)Marxism and psychoanalytic theory, until their value was re-asserted by the likes of Michel Foucault in his radical genealogical (posthumanist) thinking. Anti-humanist thinking was given a boost in the United States by the opposition to the Vietnam War, which was also linked to a growing awareness that the “timeless” humanities as taught at university were largely irrelevant to such life-changing historical convulsions (Said, quoted in Braidotti 2013, p. 18-19). It is no accident that the American civil rights movement, the American counterpart to the European student rebellion and the women’s movement were fuelled by the anti-imperialist (and therefore anti-humanist) tenor of anti-war sentiments. Add to this the impetus given to anti-humanism, mainly in France, by the reception of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later by the emerging generation of poststructuralist thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, despite the earlier status enjoyed by the humanist existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Foucault’s extended critique of humanist, anthropocentric thinking in his monumental The Order of Things of 1970 epitomises the poststructuralist contribution to the dismantling of humanism and anthropocentrism. The final thing to mention in this limited space is the advent of the Anthropocene, or geological period following the Holocene, dated around the European industrial revolution of the 18th century, when humankind developed the capacity to change the very planetary conditions under which all living creatures exist. The word “Anthropocene” already stresses the centrality of humans — or rather, “man” — in this scheme of things, because it was “his” technological inventions, themselves made possible by “his” science, which have been responsible for the anthropogenic climate change, ocean acidification, diminution of the nitrogen content of the atmosphere and excessive increase in species extinction, among other things, that we face today. Hence the emerging posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism that one witnesses in many disciplinary practices globally, can also be understood as a response to the devastations of the Anthropocene, in addition to the reasons referred to earlier. The challenge facing the humanities, taken up by the thinkers and critical theorists mentioned above, is — as I have already pointed out — to devise ways of revitalising their disciplines in the form of a cross-pollination between the latter and disciplines such as the bio-sciences, where the continuum between the human and the non-human (or natural) other is demonstrated, for instance in the self-organising capacity of living matter. In the face of such evidence no one can cling to the belief in human exceptionalism any longer, in the place of which the continuity between all living beings (and even beyond) has to be affirmed, even in the humanities. The Author: Bert Olivier is Professor of Philosophy at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He holds an M.A. and D.Phil. in philosophy, and has held Postdoctoral Fellowships in philosophy at Yale University and a Research Fellowship at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He has published widely in the philosophy of culture, of art and architecture, of cinema, music and literature, as well as the philosophy of science, epistemology, and psychoanalytic, social, media and discourse theory. In 2004 he was awarded the Stals Prize for Philosophy by the South African Academy for Arts and Sciences.
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Steven Craig Hickman - The Intelligence of Capital: The Collapse of Politics in Contemporary Society
Steven Craig Hickman - Hyperstition: Technorevisionism – Influencing, Modifying and Updating Reality
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April 2020
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