I cite

Response to Luke Mergner

Public Seminar deleted my response to Luke Mergner's review of Crowds and Party. 

The review is critical -- so critical that the author doesn't even get the title right. Nor does he get the title right of one of my other books that he mentions.

Here is my response (fortunately, a Facebook friend was able to recover it):

Hi Luke, thanks for the thoughtful review. My 2009 book is called Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

As you know, definitions are not always useful since most of our concepts have histories. The concept of the crowd that I use comes primarily from LeBon (a temporary collective being) and is expanded via Canetti (especially with respect to the egalitarian discharge). Crowds don't have to be spontaneous; they can be organized and produced. I talk about mobs on pp. 7-8, and refer briefly to some of that literature. As I note, the 19th century opens up the discussion of whether a crowd is a mob or the people. This is a political question, a matter of struggle and debate. This struggle is always necessarily situated -- what is opened up, what is possible? Some commentators always mistrust the people, always render the crowd as a mob. Others find possibility.

I don't deconstruct the idea of individual interests because I am more interested in rejecting the individual form altogether. You write: "Dean wants to argue that intelligible interests can be attributed to collectives" -- that description doesn't ring true to me since I don't use the language of interests. Instead, with respect to the crowd I use Canetti to speak of the discharge as the moment of equality that gives the crowd its substance.

You say I don't give concrete historical examples of the party -- but chapter 3 discusses Lenin's account of the party and chapter 5 talks about experiences of members of the British and US communist parties.

Where you really misunderstand (or misrepresent) what I'm doing is when you say that "the party form, like the crowd, provides a mechanism for the individual to find meaning and reinterpret their identity." This isn't accurate because the first two chapters of the book dismantle the individual form. Even the quote from me that you use to support your point doesn't work because in the quoted passage I refer to communists in the plural. My point involves the way that the Party is a site of collective belonging that works back on the collectivity. There is no rediscovery of individuality -- the long section on Kristin Ross should make that clear. At any rate, my point is not that "its the ability to subsume individuals into a collective" that links crowd and party; it's that the party is the form that organizes fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By organizing this fidelity, it can hold open the gap opened up by the disruptive crowd event (and of course not all crowd events are disruptive).

Also, notice: it is not just participation in a crowd event that disrupts the interpellation of the subject as an individual. Rather (as chapter 1 argues), it is already the case that commanded individualism is over-burdening the fragile individual form. The extremes of contemporary capitalism are too much for individuals to bear (as I explain via the account of the changes in the individual form). So there are material reasons for the dissolution of this form today that should be understood not as pathologies (ala Turkle) but as indications of real contradictions.

I'm not sure what's at stake in your claim that I engage few contemporary authors other than predictably European ones. I'm tempted to think that you read in a different archive and I didn't refer to the people you like to read. But, the first chapter talks about a number of contemporary sociologists, I talk about Sherry Turkle, Kristin Ross, Judith Butler, John Holloway, Hardt and Negri, Eugene Holland and, yes, Althusser, Dolar, Zizek, Badiou.

You say I don't mention political science or any of the literature on parties - -there is an extensive discussion of Michels and notes to political scientists' commentary on Michels. You have a general dismissal that says looking at the literature on representation, democracy, and parties would benefit my scholarship. But you don't say how or in what way in would change my argument. It's interesting to note that by misstating the title of my 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, you actually omit reference to a book where I do engage work in democratic theory. Again, I'm left thinking that basically you are just signaling that your archive is different from mine.

You mention that I reject identity politics. You don't mention my argument -- which is that identity today is fully saturated. It can't ground a politics. The claim for or attribution of an identity tells us nothing about a person's -- or a group's -- politics. (I'll add here that my first book was Solidarity of Strangers: feminism after identity politics, 1996). I emphasize as well that "the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side."

It seems to me that you have one criticism: Dean rejects individuality. Yes, I do.

And then you end with an anti-communist gesture -- one that you link to recantations part of the history of anti-communism. But of course that does not sum or capture communism or anti-communism, so it strikes me as an odd kind of ideological signal.

 

 

 

Crowdwork

From here

"This online piecework, or “crowdwork,” represents a radical shift in how we define employment itself.

The individuals performing this work are of course not traditional employees, but neither are they freelancers. They are, instead, “users” or “customers” of Web-based platforms that deliver pre-priced tasks like so many DIY kits ready for assembly. Transactions are bound not by employee-employer relationships but by “user agreements” and Terms of Service that resemble software licenses more than any employment contract.

Researchers at Oxford University's Martin Programme on Technology and Employment estimate that nearly 30% of jobs in the U.S. could be organized like this within 20 years. Forget the rise of robots and the distant threat of automation. The immediate issue is the Uber-izing of human labor, fragmenting of jobs into outsourced tasks and dismantling of wages into micropayments.

In the U.S. and overseas, crowdwork payments can mean the difference between scraping by and saving for a home or working toward a degree. But as Riyaz Khan, a 32-year-old from a small town in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh in India, discovered, doing work on spec posted by someone you'll never meet and who has no legal obligations to you has serious disadvantages.

My team at Microsoft Research spent two years studying the lives of hundreds of American and Indian crowdworkers like Khan to learn how they manage this nascent form of employment and the capriciousness that comes with it. Khan, when we met him, had spent three years finding work on Amazon Mechanical Turk. AMT is one of the largest online marketplaces that connect “providers” from around the world like Khan with “requesters,” typically U.S. or European businesses or individuals. He did tasks for companies as big as Google and as small as neighborhood print shops.

On good days, he made $40 in 10 hours — more than 100 times what neighboring farmers earned. He soon found more tasks than he could complete himself. So he hired locals to work with him out of his living room. In exchange for a cut of their pay, Khan helped his crew create their own accounts, taught them how to complete tasks efficiently, and ferreted out tasks that best matched his workers' skillsets. He also handled any final queries after the completed task was submitted. They called themselves Team Genius.

the disappearing individual

On a commes de garcon fashion show:

"The theme for her show was “Invisible Clothes.” And in seeming contradiction to that idea, she offered some of the most outsize, extreme and extraordinary notions: kilts that were as enormous as a tent, trousers that could hold a veritable crowd within a single leg and a giant hood that took on the proportions of a sarcophagus. This wasn’t so much a line of clothes destined for your closet as it was a statement for the season — for the times."

"There were elements to these clothes that recalled past Kawakubo collections, such as their flatness, which reduces them to two-dimensions, their almost monstrous size and the sheer discombobulating nature of them. They are not, in literal terms, invisible.

In these enormous creations, you can often make out the silhouette of the body even as the garments extend far beyond it. It’s as if a child has pulled the bed sheets over his head and declared himself invisible even though the shape of his body can be seen beneath the blankets."

 

Not Me, US

(my essay in the Battle of New York broadsheet distributed in NYC)

Transcript from interview discussing Crowds and Party

Excerpts from my interview on This Is Hell talking about Crowds and Party:

CM: You were saying that the left denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?

JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.

On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.

But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places.

“I think holding on to the word ‘communism’ is useful, not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make socialists seem really, really mainstream. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what we should have at a bare minimum.”

CM: You mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?

JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.

Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.

The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.

"There's a special place in hell for criminals who launch hedge funds"

Holly Wood in the Village Voice -- best millennial writing on Bernie:

There seems to be no shortage of bizarrely sexist assumptions as to why I, a Millennial feminist, am not voting for Hillary Clinton. But speaking as a Millennial feminist, let me assure you: None of them is accurate. Granted, the span of my political biography is only as long as it took Howard Dean to go from human rights crusader to insurance lobbyist. But the reason for my political disaffection is plain: I've spent my entire Millennial life watching the Democratic Party claw its way up the ass of corporate America. There's no persuading me that the Democratic establishment — from where it sits now — has the capacity to represent me, or my values.

And I'm not alone. According to a 2013 poll by Harvard's Kennedy School, three out of five of my peers now believe politicians prioritize private gain over the public good. When young people open opensecrets.org to gauge just how cheaply our futures trade these days, are we being cynical, or just realistic?

If Millennials are coming out in droves to support Bernie Sanders, it's not because we are tripping balls on Geritol. No, Sanders's clever strategy of shouting the exact same thing for 40 years simply strikes a chord among the growing number of us who now agree: Washington is bought. And every time Goldman Sachs buys another million-dollar slice of the next American presidency, we can't help but drop the needle onto Bernie's broken record:

The economy is rigged.

Democracy is corrupted.

The billionaires are on the warpath.

Sanders has split the party with hits like these, a catchy stream of pessimistic populism. Behind this arthritic Pied Piper, the youth rally, brandishing red-lettered signs reading "MONEYLENDERS OUT." If you ask them, they'll tell you there's a special place in Hell for war criminals who launch hedge funds.

...

f anything concerns me at this pivotal moment, it's not the revolutionary tremors of the youth. Given the Great American Trash Fire we have inherited, this rebellion strikes me as exceedingly reasonable. Pick a crisis, America: Child poverty? Inexcusable. Medical debt? Immoral. For-profit prison? Medieval. Climate change? Apocalyptic. The Middle East is our Vietnam. Flint, the canary in our coal mine. Tamir Rice, our martyred saint. This place is a mess. We're due for a hard rain.

If I am alarmed, it is by the profound languor of the comfortable. What fresh hell must we find ourselves in before those who've appointed themselves to lead our thoughts admit that we are in flames? As I see it, to counsel realism when the reality is fucked is to counsel an adherence to fuckery. Under conditions as distressing as these, acquiescence is absurd. When your nation gets classified as a Class D structure fire, I believe the only wise course is to lose your shit.

The reason Wall Street is dropping zillions of quarters into Hillary's Super PAC-Man machine isn't because it wants change — it's because Wall Street sees revenue in her promises of keeping things much the same. Under Hillary, our prisons will continue to punish for profit. Our schools will continue to be sold off to private contractors. And despite 87 percent of Democrats standing behind universal health care, Hillary insists it will "never, ever come to pass." Not from her, I guess, since she's taken over $13 million from the health care industry.

We really can't, America, says Hillary. Nope. Not ever. We are a powerful nation, kids, but one run by the Great Market God. Leave your moral gag reflex at the door. Close that pesky Overton window, won't you? And be a doll and bolt those tables to the floor. You'll love the moneylenders, dear. I do. Hell, my daughter married one!

The poverty of the US working class

Excerpts from an important article in the Atlantic. Read the whole thing here.

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Susan Case and Angus Deaton. Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

Meanwhile, other recent research has piled on the bad news for those without college degrees. A Pew study released last month found that the size of the middle class—defined by a consistent income range across generations—has shrunk over the last several decades. In part, this is because high-paying jobs for the less educated are vanishing. The study builds on other recent research that finds that almost all the good jobs created since the recession have gone to college graduates.

...

As organized labor in this country has withered, an extreme individualism has stepped in as the alternative—a go-it-alone perspective narrowly focused on getting an education and becoming successful on one’s own merit. This works well for some, but for others—especially the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree—it often means getting mired in an economy of contract work, low pay, and few, if any, benefits. These prospects suggest that this is an age of diminished expectations for the working class.

...

Yet there is clearly more to the despair of the working class than empty wallets and purses. Patches of the social fabric that once supported them, in good times and bad, have frayed. When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too). This trend is troubling, given that social isolation is linked to depression and, in turn, suicide and substance abuse.

...

The religiously unaffiliated are not necessarily secular in their outlook. Many of them are spiritually inclined but skeptical of organized religion—especially its intrusion into politics. However, in the absence of any other source of social support and collective meaning (say, unions), there’s less in the way of psychological protection from the slings and arrows of American society.

This sort of isolation was common among the people I talked to. Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work. For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community. For example, one of the workers I interviewed said that being out of work for so long had filled him with a constant rage. To calm his mind, every night he would pick up his Bible and read a dozen verses. He had given up on the church and what he described as its superficial ways. “I want to go to hear the Word—I don’t want to go to see what you’re wearing,” says the man, 53 and from Flint, Michigan. The other way he copes is going outside for a smoke.

For this man and many like him, there is no one to talk to, no one to rely on. “Nowadays, you got people you really can’t trust, man,” he says. “You can’t call everybody your friend.” As the ties that bind them to others have unraveled, the working class has become an ever lonelier crowd.

...

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame. They should have gotten more education. They should have been more prepared. On this score, too, the U.S. deviates from other wealthy nations. America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too. White Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

In Stayin’ Alive, his powerful history of the “last days” of the working class, the historian Jefferson Cowie describes how the proud blue-collar identity of previous generations disintegrated during the ’70s. “Liberty has largely been reduced to an ideology that promises economic and cultural refuge from the long arm of the state,” he writes, “while seemingly lost to history is the logic that culminated under the New Deal: that genuine freedom could only happen within a context of economic security.” As working-class solidarity receded, an identity built on racial tribalism often swept in.

Campus protests: struggle and safety

This post is a result of frustration with Todd Gitlin's editorial in today's NYT. I can't stand his self-serving invocation of '68. No student protests or radical political efforts since '68 ever measure up to his rosy-tinted glory days and he is always happy to tell us why. This time it is because the protesters are complaining about vulnerability and movements don't win unless people are strong. Gitlin's basic move is bizarre: the students at Missouri won. Their football team put their economic power in the university to work as political power. Students all over the country this week put their universities on notice, occupied spaces, opening up another round of discussions of racism in colleges and universities . This doesn't seem like a story well-described with a headline about protesters' fear.

That said, the rhetoric of safe spaces, vulnerability, and civility does seem part of the current moment. Why? Gitlin too quickly dismisses political economic considerations -- the enormity of student debt, diminished economic prospects, loss of rewarding work, and intensified financial insecurity facing this generation of students. He notes, only to discard, the surveillance part of contemporary life. I think these political economic factors are more important than Gitlin allows. They establish the terms through which the students are voicing their critique. Students frame their opposition in a language of safety and vulnerability because that is the language available to them after forty years of neoliberalism and in the second decade of the war on terror.

The new left stood on the shoulders of the old left they sought to defeat. Available to them was a rhetoric of class struggle, equality, strategy, and solidarity. Contemporary students come into a different university, one focused, first,  on profits, individual success, efficiency, and the victory of the strongest and, second, on safety, security, and comfort. They are taught that what matters is their individual psychic, physical, and emotional health. They have to defend themselves, take care of themselves, listen to themselves. If they don't no one else will. So they are pushing back against a university system that they experience as hostile, damaging, unhealthy.

Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is  stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.

The university concentrates the tensions of the larger society: competition v. security, profits v. comfort. When every space is a site of struggle -- to get that job, that A, that recommendation, that attractive mate, that sports victory -- no space is safe (that students in Texas can carry guns is an extreme illustration of this point). The university tries to promise to its customers a safety it cannot provide because it's impossible, particularly under capitalist conditions. Capitalism requires losers, victims, an exploited underclass, a reserve army of the unemployed, and, more pointedly, those who ruthless enough to cut, fire, and coerce.

When every course or offering requires an economic justification (the proliferation of "leadership" as a buzzword is one odious example), cultivating reflection, respect, understanding, and the languages of critique seems an expense few can afford. The university either cuts them entirely or the students in these courses realize the fundamental tension between the course and the university itself: will getting a good grade in theories of social justice make a difference in the job market?

Students are using a vocabulary of safety and vulnerability because that is the one that registers in contemporary culture. Since 9/11 they've seen that it works. Need resources? Highlight a security threat. There's always money for weapons and police.

The critical language of too much of the academic left amplifies the appeal of a critical language of vulnerability: grievable lives, mourning, melancholia, exclusion, failure, the rejection of power, the potential of any term, act, norm, or demand to harm and exclude. 

What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.

That said, there is a risk in the current struggles-- and it has nothing to do with a threat to free speech as the liberals would have it. The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.

I don't think the current wave of protests will end up in this position for two reasons. First, such protection is impossible -- it exceeds the boundaries of the university. From the changing climate to the barbarous economy, the university can't shore itself up against the society it includes and reproduces.  The more it tries, the more caught up it gets in the contradictions of struggle and safety. Second, and consequently, efforts to meet students' demands by strengthening administrative authority reveal the impossibility as the incompatibility between capitalism and the promise of a decent, humane life on which the university relies. Decent, humane life, equal life, solidary life, responsive life, requires remaking the university, using it as a base camp in a struggle for society against capitalism -- in other words, cultural revolution.

Jayne Wilkinson: politics of visibility

from here

The endlessly visible glut of information online has not disciplined us. As online subjects we have not been afraid of being tracked, even as we become more aware of who and how our metadata is being collected, and this lack of fear has not produced disciplined subjects. Artist Hito Steyerl articulates with striking insight how relentless the drive towards online presence has become. As we increasingly produce endless amounts of visual and verbal statements to validate our digital existence, we are

… realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight; you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface⁴³

It seems certain that even if it were possible for images to truly reveal something about their referents, the aspiration toward transparency is a trap. The Internet has wrought a kind of “opacity in broad daylight” as Steyerl claims, where anything we want to see is visible but meaningless. How then does such a critique of the assumed transparency of the public sphere press itself into artworks, and photographic practices specifically? The concern is not for artworks that attempt to visualize the invisible or hidden but that must address the problem that visibility itself is an ideology, one powerfully tied to the contemporary global order. A critique of transparency then seems possible only when artworks are considered beyond the formal, aesthetic frames of the image.

In the years following 9/11 questions around the limitations of visual representation have been widely addressed, and the role and power of images interrogated.⁴⁴  However, the parameters of this inquiry seem to now be shifting. As photographs are increasingly freed from their role as representational objects and are now digital processes, images have become an important component of global networks of communication and dissemination that are operative beyond vision. Image production now happens automatically, or sometimes algorithmically. Images that we might think we have ownership over are no longer truly ours; we have relinquished our rights to images for the ease of transmission and communication offered by image-based social networks. Within a hyper-visual environment, the ways in which images are used and engaged has shifted so definitively away from the tangible, material of a printed photograph that we can no longer think of the photograph as a representation, as an index of an event or place.

....

Whereas Rancière’s longstanding examination of the intersection of aesthetics and politics places him within a discourse that firmly roots questions of representation within questions of political violence,⁴⁷  for Galloway the impossibility of representation is precisely that neither political nor aesthetic representation is ever possible. He identifies that “one of the key consequences of the control society is that we have moved from a condition in which singular machines produce proliferations of images, into a condition in which multitudes of machines produce singular images.”⁴⁸  One camera does not produce many images, but many cameras (or computers, or smartphones) produce one image. This is a situation where photography no longer records an event but is instead a process or accumulation of many microevents; it does not track a unified point in time, it opens onto many. Photography is not the actual or metaphorical click of the shutter but is instead the instantaneous uploading, tagging, geotagging, searching, facial recognizing, networking, sharing, and filtering of images. This networked image landscape is one where innumerable machines produce not individual, varied, differentiated images but singular images, images that conform to societal codes and conventions.⁴⁹  For Galloway this proves that “adequate visualizations of [the] control society have not happened. Representation has not happened. At least not yet.”⁵⁰

Representation has a constitutive relationship with its mode of production, and such production is no longer based on a creator–apparatus–viewer relationship. It is increasingly evident that to make something or someone visible, to produce or make public from multiple sources a singular image is not to produce or generate power. In contrast, Galloway argues, “the point of unrepresentability is the point of power. And the point of power today is not in the image. The point of power today resides in networks, computers, algorithms, information, and data.”⁵¹

This is an unusual position since historically vision has been tied to representation through the image. But Galloway’s is an argument against the possibilities of visualization full stop. Where Butler and Azoulay might argue that the signs in the image cannot be considered in isolation from each other, that is they cannot be considered free-floating or unmoored from their referents and that they must actually mean something even if they do not appear to. For Galloway the signs, symbols and imagery that we use to attempt to make data visual, to attempt to make visual sense of so much unending, infinite data, can only appear to forge a relationship with any determined meanings. For him there seems to be little or no power in images, despite their massive proliferation. The generation of power resides in the notion that the image is a screen, which is a front for real power that exists in networks, algorithms, data sets, and relationships of information. These systems of power are yet to be made visual or visible in any meaningful way, and the attempt to make visual systems of power is indeed a pressing one. The question remains not only whether representation is possible, but also whether it can locate and visualize power at all, particularly when political and visual representation is being continually denied across many discourses.

....

Returning to photographic art practices, it is clear that for Simon’s and Paglen’s projects to be made comprehensible in scope, there must be a way for the images to carry signification. As such, both Paglen and Simon use extended, detailed captioning to direct viewers outside the framed image by pushing against the very limitations imposed by the frame. To see one of their images without an understanding of the context of the project would be to reduce the image to aesthetics only, since the fuller and external spaces of the image would not be legible. Is one possibility for overcoming the failures of photographic representation to navigate between images and texts? Might the use of language also help to articulate questions around data, where language is once again achieving a place of primacy as users learn increasingly various coding languages in order to access different layers of digital communication software? For both Simon and Paglen, without the grounding of extended or specific captions the viewer would be speculating at the research, labour, or people that preceded the image. With the addition of the caption, the limits of each project become less abstract and more concrete. While resisting didactic meaning, both artists are navigate a line between revelation and concealment, between opacity and transparency and it is through the caption that this negotiated border becomes most discernable. Indeed, the troubling of the relationship between image and text is one that both Paglen and Simon hinge their practices on, since without the texts or captions, it would be impossible to assign meaning to these largely abstract images.

Photographic theorist and historian Geoffrey Batchen claims that the “interactive combination of text and photograph is typical of Taryn Simon’s work; it, rather than photography, is her true medium.”⁵²

The tiny texts crafted to accompany the images are intentionally placed to be read in conjunction with the image, so that the two have equal weighting. This strategy “shifts the burden of assigning that meaning from the artist to a viewer, making us all complicit in the act of signification, and indeed in the histories we are asked to witness.”⁵³  This is no small burden for the viewer, and this is precisely the type of responsibility in viewing that Azoulay’s civil contract of photography calls upon us to acknowledge. If the viewer is, as Batchen suggests, obliged to become complicit in the act of signification, then the question of what is knowable and seeable is an urgent one. The image reveals its contingencies not because the viewer can read anything into it, but it is a contingency based in part upon an individual being able to navigate between visual and linguistic texts. What results is “a photography that proffers transparency [and the] utopian promise of liberal democracy, but then renders that transparency opaque, even reflective.”⁵⁴  Paglen and Simon may both “proffer transparency” in their working methodologies, but their highly aesthetic images hypnotize us with a luminous glow, obscuring more than they are able to reveal. It is precisely this dialectic between transparency and opacity that is operative in the negotiation of image and text. The caption must bring with it the political motivation of the image.

How then can we visualize subjects as wide ranging as border policing, surveillance systems, drone attacks, economic inequality, environmental catastrophe, late capitalism, global finance? This is the overarching question with which Paglen and Simon concern themselves, in projects that interrogate the limits of photography and representation during a contemporary moment where the definition of photography, as a medium, a practice, and a process, is in continual flux. While the images of such subjects come to be largely symbolic, when we attend to the images in context, through language or texts that point to outside sources, we begin to address the contingency of the image without being didactic. The questions addressed throughout this paper may appear specific to photography as an aesthetic and artistic practice, but ultimately they have much broader implications in an era that privileges communicational transparency to the point where certain freedoms and values are being severely limited. As visual forms of communication become the most prevalent forms of social media–and the trend towards imagesharing sites like Instagram and Tumblr offer evidence of this shift–the currency of this form of exchange is the ability to store and manipulate data in ever expanding, seamless, and seemingly invisible sites. How information is presented, represented, and understood in a networked era are questions only beginning to be fully addressed.

 

Hito Steyerl: politics of post-representation

from here

Hito Steyerl Let me give you one example. A while ago I met an extremely interesting developer in Holland. He was working on smart phone camera technology. A representational mode of thinking photography is: there is something out there and it will be represented by means of optical technology ideally via indexical link. But the technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data. The link to the thing in front of the lens is still there, but there are also links to past pictures that help create the picture. You don’t really photograph the present, as the past is woven into it.

The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see. It is a bet, a gamble, some combination between repeating those things you have already seen and coming up with new versions of these, a mixture of conservatism and fabulation. The paradigm of representation stands to the present condition as traditional lens-based photography does to an algorithmic, networked photography that works with probabilities and bets on inertia. Consequently, it makes seeing unforeseen things more difficult. The noise will increase and random interpretation too. We might think that the phone sees what we want, but actually we will see what the phone thinks it knows about us. A complicated relationship — like a very neurotic marriage. I haven’t even mentioned external interference into what your phone is recording. All sorts of applications are able to remotely shut your camera on or off: companies, governments, the military. It could be disabled for whole regions. One could, for example, disable recording functions close to military installations, or conversely, live broadcast whatever you are up to. Similarly, the phone might be programmed to auto-pixellate secret or sexual content. It might be fitted with a so-called dick algorithm to screen out NSFW content or auto-modify pubic hair, stretch or omit bodies, exchange or collage context or insert AR advertisement and pop up windows or live feeds. Now lets apply this shift to the question of representative politics or democracy. The representational paradigm assumes that you vote for someone who will represent you. Thus the interests of the population will be proportionally represented. But current democracies work rather like smartphone photography by algorithmically clearing the noise and boosting some data over other. It is a system in which the unforeseen has a hard time happening because it is not yet in the database. It is about what to define as noise — something Jacques Ranciere has defined as the crucial act in separating political subjects from domestic slaves, women and workers. Now this act is hardwired into technology, but instead of the traditional division of people and rabble, the results are post-representative militias, brands, customer loyalty schemes, open source insurgents and tumblrs.

Additionally, Ranciere’s democratic solution: there is no noise, it is all speech. Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear. There are a lot of brightly lit glossy surfaces, yet they don’t reveal anything but themselves as surface. Whatever there is — it’s all there to see but in the form of an incomprehensible, Kafkaesque glossiness, written in extraterrestrial code, perhaps subject to secret legislation. It certainly expresses something: a format, a protocol or executive order, but effectively obfuscates its meaning. This is a far cry from a situation in which something—an image, a person, a notion — stood in for another and presumably acted in its interest. Today it stands in, but its relation to whatever it stands in for is cryptic, shiny, unstable; the link flickers on and off. Art could relish in this shiny instability — it does already. It could also be less baffled and mesmerised and see it as what the gloss mostly is about – the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.

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MJ You have provided a compelling account of the depersonalization of the status of the image: a new process of de-identification that favors materialist participation in the circulation of images today.  Within the contemporary technological landscape, you write that “if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation. And then it perhaps ceases to be identification, and instead becomes participation.” How does this shift from personal identification to material circulation — that is, to cybernetic participation — affect your notion of representation? If an image is merely “a thing like you and me,” does this amount to saying that identity is no more, no less than a .jpeg file?

HS Social media makes the shift from representation to participation very clear: people participate in the launch and life span of images, and indeed their life span, spread and potential is defined by participation. Think of the image not as surface but as all the tiny light impulses running through fiber at any one point in time. Some images will look like deep sea swarms, some like cities from space, some are utter darkness. We could see the energy imparted to images by capital or quantified participation very literally, we could probably measure its popular energy in lumen. By partaking in circulation, people participate in this energy and create it.
What this means is a different question though — by now this type of circulation seems a little like the petting zoo of plutotechnocracies. It’s where kids are allowed to make a mess — but just a little one — and if anyone organizes serious dissent, the seemingly anarchic sphere of circulation quickly reveals itself as a pedantic police apparatus aggregating relational metadata. It turns out to be an almost Althusserian ISA (Internet State Apparatus), hardwired behind a surface of ‘kawaii’ apps and online malls. As to identity, Heartbleed and more deliberate governmental hacking exploits certainly showed that identity goes far beyond a relationship with images: it entails a set of private keys, passwords, etc., that can be expropriated and detourned. More generally, identity is the name of the battlefield over your code — be it genetic, informational, pictorial. It is also an option that might provide protection if you fall beyond any sort of modernist infrastructure. It might offer sustenance, food banks, medical service, where common services either fail or don’t exist. If the Hezbollah paradigm is so successful it is because it provides an infrastructure to go with the Twitter handle, and as long as there is no alternative many people need this kind of container for material survival. Huge religious and quasi-religious structures have sprung up in recent decades to take up the tasks abandoned by states, providing protection and survival in a reversal of the move described in Leviathan. Identity happens when the Leviathan falls apart and nothing is left of the commons but a set of policed relational metadata, Emoji and hijacked hashtags. This is the reason why the gay AKP pornstar bots are desperately quoting Hobbes’ book: they are already sick of the war of Robbie Williams (Israel Defense Forces) against Robbie Williams (Electronic Syrian Army) against Robbie Williams (PRI/AAP) and are hoping for just any entity to organize day care and affordable dentistry.

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But beyond all the portentous vocabulary relating to identity, I believe that a widespread standard of the contemporary condition is exhaustion. The interesting thing about Heartbleed — to come back to one of the current threats to identity (as privacy) — is that it is produced by exhaustion and not effort. It is a bug introduced by open source developers not being paid for something that is used by software giants worldwide. Nor were there apparently enough resources to audit the code in the big corporations that just copy-pasted it into their applications and passed on the bug, fully relying on free volunteer labour to produce their proprietary products. Heartbleed records exhaustion by trying to stay true to an ethics of commonality and exchange that has long since been exploited and privatized. So, that exhaustion found its way back into systems. For many people and for many reasons — and on many levels — identity is just that: shared exhaustion.

MJ This is an opportune moment to address the labor conditions of social media practice in the context of the art space. You write that “an art space is a factory, which is simultaneously a supermarket — a casino and a place of worship whose reproductive work is performed by cleaning ladies and cellphone-video bloggers alike.” Incidentally, DIS launched a website called ArtSelfie just over a year ago, which encourages social media users to participate quite literally in “cellphone-video blogging” by aggregating their Instagram #artselfies in a separately integrated web archive. Given our uncanny coincidence, how can we grasp the relationship between social media blogging and the possibility of participatory co-curating on equal terms? Is there an irreconcilable antagonism between exploited affective labor and a genuinely networked art practice? Or can we move beyond — to use a phrase of yours — a museum crowd “struggling between passivity and overstimulation?”

HS I wrote this in relation to something my friend Carles Guerra noticed already around early 2009; big museums like the Tate were actively expanding their online marketing tools, encouraging people to basically build the museum experience for them by sharing, etc. It was clear to us that audience participation on this level was a tool of extraction and outsourcing, following a logic that has turned online consumers into involuntary data providers overall. Like in the previous example – Heartbleed – the paradigm of participation and generous contribution towards a commons tilts quickly into an asymmetrical relation, where only a minority of participants benefits from everyone’s input, the digital 1 percent reaping the attention value generated by the 99 percent rest.

Brian Kuan Wood put it very beautifully recently: Love is debt, an economy of love and sharing is what you end up with when left to your own devices. However, an economy based on love ends up being an economy of exhaustion – after all, love is utterly exhausting — of deregulation, extraction and lawlessness. And I don’t even want to mention likes, notes and shares, which are the child-friendly, sanitized versions of affect as currency.
All is fair in love and war. It doesn’t mean that love isn’t true or passionate, but just that love is usually uneven, utterly unfair and asymmetric, just as capital tends to be distributed nowadays. It would be great to have a little bit less love, a little more infrastructure.

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Essentially I think it makes sense to compare our moment with the end of the twenties in the Soviet Union, when euphoria about electrification, NEP (New Economic Policy), and montage gives way to bureaucracy, secret directives and paranoia. Today this corresponds to the sheer exhilaration of having a World Wide Web being replaced by the drudgery of corporate apps, waterboarding, and “normcore”. I am not trying to say that Stalinism might happen again – this would be plain silly – but trying to acknowledge emerging authoritarian paradigms, some forms of algorithmic consensual governance techniques developed within neoliberal authoritarianism, heavily relying on conformism, “family” values and positive feedback, and backed up by all-out torture and secret legislation if necessary. On the other hand things are also falling apart into uncontrollable love. One also has to remember that people did really love Stalin. People love algorithmic governance too, if it comes with watching unlimited amounts of Game of Thrones. But anyone slightly interested in digital politics and technology is by now acquiring at least basic skills in disappearance and subterfuge.