Charlie Gere

Community without community in digital culture

Acknowledgements Digitality The Theological Origins of the Digital Deconstruction, Technics and the Death of God Derrida, Nancy and the Digital Darwin after Dawkins after Derrida Slitting Open the Kantian Eye The Work of Art in the Post Age Non-Relational Aesthetics Luther Blissett Bartleby Off-line Exploding Plastic Universe Conclusion Notes and References Index

Genealogy of the computer screen

This article proposes that the modern computer screen is derived more from the radar screen rather than, as might be expected, the television screen, which has important ramifications for how the computer has developed and been understood. These ramifications are being obscured by the current drive towards the ‘convergence’ of television and computing. This article traces the modern computer screen back to the development of nuclear early warning systems in the 1960s (based on the British radar networks of the Second World War) and to the work of ex-radar operator Douglas Engelbart and his Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, both of which were instrumental in how we now understand and use computers as ‘real-time’ machines.

Breaking the time barrier.

This paper examines the cultural implications of the increasing speed and acceleration of technological operation and development. It takes its cue from the notion originally proposed by Ernst Junger and later taken up by Maurice Blanchot and, more recently, Bernard Stiegler, that we are ‘breaking the time barrier’. For Stiegler this is happening because ‘technics is evolving faster than culture’. This paper examines the beginnings of this idea in the work of Junger, Blanchot and others and traces its development in the work of Derrida and Stiegler, particularly in relation to the increasing power and ubiquity of digital networks. Finally it proposes that one response to this situation is to be found in the artistic avant‐garde and in the concept of ‘delay’ originally proposed by Marcel Duchamp and taken up by Jean Francois Lyotard.This paper examines the cultural implications of the increasing speed and acceleration of technological operation and development. It takes its cue from the notion originally proposed by Ernst Jünger and later taken up by Maurice Blanchot and, more recently, Bernard Stiegler, that we are ‘breaking the time barrier’. For Stiegler this is happening because ‘technics is evolving faster than culture’. This paper examines the beginnings of this idea in the work of Jünger, Blanchot and others and traces its development in the work of Derrida and Stiegler, particularly in relation to the increasing power and ubiquity of digital networks. Finally it proposes that one response to this situation is to be found in the artistic avant‐garde and in the concept of ‘delay’ originally proposed by Marcel Duchamp and taken up by Jean François Lyotard.

Slitting Open the Kantian Eye

In the second (and final) edition of the short-lived journal The Blind Man, an anonymous author, possibly Beatrice Wood, wrote about ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, accompanied by Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph of the urinal, ‘Fountain’, which Richard Mutt had submitted to the Society of Independent Artists, for an exhibition which would supposedly exhibit any work of art on the payment of six dollars. Mutt was, of course, the pseudonym adopted by Marcel Duchamp in order to sign and submit the urinal, and the controversy over Fountain is now regarded as one of the most important events in the history of avant-garde art. The author of the article pointed out that Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.1 Much has been, and will no doubt continue to be, written about Duchamp’s gesture and its meaning and implications for art. In his essay ‘From Blindness to blindness: Museums, Heterogeneity and the Subject’, the sociologist Kevin Hetherington discusses this gesture in relation to what he calls the ‘Kantian gaze of the connoisseur’. For Hetherington the emergence of this way of looking involves a disavowal of the heterogeneity of the world of things.

The Book at the End of the Book

Books reviewed in this article: Peter Weibel and Timothy Druckrey, (eds) net condition: art and global media Timothy Druckrey, (ed.) Ars Electronica: Facing the Future Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

Exploding Plastic Universe

There can be little doubt that we live in times of profound crisis, economic, environmental, political and social. For example, 2008 saw the near collapse of the world banking system, the implications of which are profound and frightening. The great temptation has been to ‘blame the bankers’ and to demand that they curb their earnings and, in particular, their bonuses. There is some justice to this demand, but it fails to grasp the more important aspect of this crisis, which is not driven entirely by either greed or stupidity. The crisis was caused in large part by the development of the means to, apparently, mitigate the risk of investment, or even to remove it altogether, thus producing a fantasy that the markets could be managed safely while still producing considerable profits. Such means involved the use of complex algorithmic techniques combined with digital technology to produce highly abstracted models of investment risk.

Bartleby Off-Line

The 1999 film Office Space is probably one of the best representations of the insidious experience of the workplace in technologized late capitalism. It is set mainly in the offices of Initech, a high-technology company in the United States in which some consultants are interviewing employees with a view to downsizing. The disaffected hero, Peter Gibbons, is put upon in a number of ways, including by his girlfriend having an affair with his hated boss, Bill Lumbergh. However, he has an experience of ecstasy which occurs after being hypnotized to cure his sense of misery, by a doctor who dies of a heart attack before he can bring Gibbons out of his trance. Following this, Gibbons decides to get made redundant by taking revenge on the various petty elements in the company that have annoyed him and by refusing to do any work, fulfilling his lifelong dream of ‘doing nothing’. In this, he is supported by his new girlfriend, who works in a fast-food restaurant chain in which serving staff are obliged to customize their uniform by wearing ‘flairs’, self-chosen decorative elements intended to present the restaurant as a place where fun people work and are encouraged to express themselves. One of the funniest exchanges in the film is between the waitress and her boss about her refusal to wear more than the minimum mandated number of such flairs.

Non-relational Aesthetics

Several decades ago, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan described ‘the “simultaneous field” of electronic information structures’ which ‘today, reconstitutes the conditions and need for dialogue and participation, rather than specialism and private initiative in all levels of social experience’. McLuhan had already famously observed in Understanding Media that [A]s electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.1 McLuhan’s idea of a ‘global village’ anticipates Walter Ong’s later notion of ‘secondary orality’, which compared the communications ‘sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices’ to the oral communications of preliterate societies.2 Something of the same spirit can be found on the website of the P2P Foundation, founded by Michael Bauwens with the aim of ‘researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices’.3 It ‘proposes to be a meeting place for those who can broadly agree with the following propositions’, which include the claim ‘that technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it’.4

Darwin after Dawkins after Derrida

One of the principle tropes in the Western religious imaginary is that of God as a master craftsman (or, alternatively, the idea of the demiurge). Such an idea is self-evidently the product of a culture or cultures in which handicraft is the main, if not sole, means of production. With the emergence of mechanistic philosophies, and mechanical means of production, this changed. In the section on the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in The Disappearance of God, J. Hillis Miller writes that ‘[H]aving created me and the rest of the world, [God] has apparently withdrawn from his handiwork, and lives somewhere above or beyond or outside, occupied with his own inscrutable activities. He is a God that hides himself. This is the religious situation in which many men of the nineteenth century find themselves ….’1 One result of this was the emergence of conceptions of the Universe as a machine designed and set off by God, similar to a clock or watch. Perhaps the most famous expression of the universe as a watch was by William Paley in his book Natural Theology: Or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity.

Theological Origins of the Digital

In his paper ‘Thinking Technicity’, Richard Beardsworth suggests that ‘one of the major concerns of philosophical and cultural analysis has been the need to reflect upon the reduction of time and space brought about by contemporary processes of technicization, particularly digitalization’. In this context, he describes what he calls Continental Philosophy’s ‘mourning’ of metaphysics.1 Beardsworth traces the beginnings of the oppositional logic of metaphysics to Plato’s ‘aporia of memory’ described in the Meno, which concerns the question of virtue and whether it can be taught. Meno responds to Socrates’ demonstration of the difficulty of defining the concept of virtue by asking how it is possible to look for something when you have no idea what it is. Socrates suggests that according to such logic, you cannot look for knowledge of anything, since you either already know what you are looking for, in which case you do not need to look for it, or you do not know what it is you are looking for, in which case how could you be looking for it in the first place. In the dialogue, Socrates has come to a solution to the problem of knowledge by way of a demonstration involving a slave boy. Socrates draws geometric figures on the ground and through questioning leads the boy, who has no prior knowledge of geometry, to work out the length of the side of a square of a certain area by reference to a previous example.