Mayor Moore's Go Go Bag

[Printed in Sydney Morning Herald 19/7/2007]

So Mayor Moore proposes the “Go Bag” to relieve Sydneysiders from their natural fear of impending doom. Is that like the “doggy bag”, or as they have in some US counties, the “to-go-cup”? All this on-the-go: coffee-to-go, breakfast-to-go, terrorism-to-go, a whole proliferation of options to keep my heart rate and cholesterol up.

I was managing my anxiety pretty well thank you very much until Ms. Moore decided that a black bag filled with beach-going / house-burgling peripherals was my only saving grace from Jihadist death from above.

Checklist: a black baseball cap, toilet paper, an AM/FM Radio, sunblock, a torch, spare batteries, spare keys, adhesive tape, disposable gloves, water, energy bars, runners and a notepad and pen. Should I pack-in a wrench too?

Get with the times Ms. Moore. We all have iPods. Whilst waiting to die form nuclear fall-out, I don’t need to be further aggravated by having to listen to the oral scatology of Allan Jones taking a bunch of call-ins from the (hopefully) radioactive wasteland that used to be Cronulla.

But at least, if the impending terrorist attack never occurs, we will be well prepared to go on a spur-of-the-moment manic murder rampage OJ style. Remember people, “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit!”

And what of a minor-emergency, like a citywide blackout, non-virgin inspired? There’s an image. How are the police going to react to anxious citizens geared-up on energy snacks, running around in the dark, consulting a tactical map with a flashlight whilst wearing disposable gloves, donning a black baseball-cap and arbitrarily taking notes and duck-taping members of the public to telephone polls?

And what’s with the sunblock? Are they merely merging two failed awareness campaigns – terrorism and skin cancer? And I was just getting the hang of “slap on a shirt, slip on a hat…” Oh wait, I f***ed that one up, didn’t I?

Truly though, I would prefer to be fornicating on doomsday, so let’s make it a “Go Go Bag”. Pack some stripper slippers, lube, condoms and we can make the apocalypse a real party, Sydney-style. Voila! Safe-sex awareness too!

Can I assume this new measure means that all the phoned-in advice from the “Keep Australia Safe” fridge magnets didn’t amount to much? I must admit, I did phone-in to my local MP Joe Hockey’s fridge magnet advice line, though not to implicate my neighbours, but to inquire as to the whereabouts of a decent Thai take-away in Hunters Hill. The response was insufficient for my next vote.

Surely the $200,000 that Clover is going to cough up would go to better use by actually preventing potential terrorist attacks. Maybe a monument donated by the city of Sydney to the parks of Damascus, Jakarta, Pyongyang… inscribed, “Sydney: The World’s Fifth Best City. Please don’t attack us.”

Far more effective, I think, than inciting “bloody hell”. Tourism 1. Terrorism 0.

Virgin Aura

Long are those days when we would cast out young women to society as debutantes, where the only place for a woman was in the work of childrearing and husband-caring, and where the essence of femininity was found in chastity and the sanctity of marriage. Most of those oh-so "natural" values, which we can largely blame on Victorian Romanticism, have been outmoded by – to name a few – subsequent waves of feminism, the free-love generation, riot grrrl punk-rock and Madonna's most unchaste discography. All that was left was for an attack on traditional marriage.

But nay. Eventually riot grrrl kicked it, raunch culture set-in, Madonna got married… twice and feminism was left wondering what went wrong. Even with all the push and shove between feminist culture and the "anti-feminist" raunch culture of Ms. Hilton's disciples, marriage and its sanctity has remained essentially untouched as a social standard.

Marriage is everywhere, in and out of churches and canonized by reality TV. Everyone wants it: heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, Anglican pastors and even kissing buddies Britney and Madonna. In the off-season, the fashion industry practically survives on bridal shoots and weddings literally have their own genre in magazine publishing. It's huge business and J-Lo told us so!

Let's put something straight. I intend to get married one day… and divorced shortly after I receive my green card. But whether you believe in it or not, it's difficult to separate marriage from the patriarchal implications of sanctity: feminine "aura", the marital bed, virgin bride and the whole contractual obligation thing.

"Marriage is sacred," they still tell us, suggesting that the whole arrangement has an "aura" about it that we usually accord to objects of art and religion. But thanks to the Romantics, the other great place we usually find "aura" is in the feminine. "Aura" was the elusive essence of femininity that masculinity just needed to get its hands on and to some extent still does. And what better way to catch it than to turn it into an exchangeable commodity by way of marriage.

Traditionally the arrangement was made between the suitor (potential groom) and the woman's father (executor of the estate). Together, they made a verbal contract stipulating the warranty of her virginity, her childrearing / husband-caring potential and any financial arrangements to boot. Hence, why daddy stands at the alter and "gives" his daughter away. So the woman's ownership is passed on and her "aura" becomes the sovereign product of dad's business buddy. And later that night, in the nuptial bed, the boy gets to test the goods, void the warranty and take purchase in his has-been virgin bride's "aura". Traditional non-unconditional love – how romantic.

But enough of that cold talk. Today, marriage is a celebration of love and not so much a tax write-off. Women choose their partners, plan their ceremonies and since Steve Martin's 'Father of the Bride', whether or not daddy cares is of little or no consequence. To top it off, prenuptial agreements are practically taught in year-nine business syllabuses and celibacy flew out the window faster than you can say "Spring Break" or "Schoolies".

If anything, celibacy is shunned by mainstream and alternative media. No more virginal "aura" for little boy blue. The purity of the white marital gown is more an ironic pun than any veritable symbol. We might say marriage is reclamation of the "aura" lost by our wayward ways (progress). When we get married (and this is not for everyone) we make a claim to our "now" intended monogamy and purchase any notion of the "aura" left in marriage.

My point is that marriage is not sacred. It stopped being sacred when the church started institutionalising divorce (for men first of course). It's not sacred unless we want to think of women as objects to purchase and to own. So any debate arguing on the sanctity of marriage – à la gay marriage – is preaching to a doctrine that sees women as objects of trade – commercial, sexual or otherwise.

YouTube, Politics and the (de)Fetishization of Art & Technology

"Human kind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached a point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism."
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')

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"The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are to evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses."
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')

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Writing these statements in 1939 in his third and final version of the essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ , Walter Benjamin proclaims his grave discontent with humanity, as well as his great expectations for art. It is art as a medium for political motivation that could prove mankind’s saving grace. Adversely however, the “aestheticization of politics” – the manipulation and concealment of undemocratic forces under the guise of art’s aesthetics – has the potential to undermine humanity’s ability to perceive and act accordingly.

Straddling his essay between these two axioms, Benjamin grounds his notion of art in another concerning matter, technology. Equally bipolar is the ambiguous fate technology has for man. The pendulum of technology sways between salvation and annihilation, poison and antidote. For Benjamin the question is (and perhaps always will be): is technology not a “fetish of doom but rather a key to happiness?” This fetishization of technology is what constitutes technology’s sacred bond with war, a relationship to which is “proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ.”

At the time of Benjamin’s writing, the twentieth century marriage between technology and art had progressed to produce the forms of film and television. Benjamin’s thesis posited that the rise of new forms of technologically produced art was related to what he justified as the de-aurafication of art. It was this de-aurafication, or defetishization of art by means of its technological reproducibility, that disclosed for Benjamin art’s potential to affect a political consciousness in the masses; one that could protect them against political manipulation of the arts.

Today, we find art’s union with technology in a not so dissimilar fashion as it was in Benjamin’s era, with film, television, radio and print still making up the mainstay of its offspring; however a new prodigal son has emerged – the Internet. The Internet, not so much an art form in itself, is the transformation of all these other mediums – film, television, radio and print – into one comprehensive network of media sites operating in one mode, the digital. One of the sites that represent wholeheartedly this transformation is YouTube – an online compendium of digital videos that exponentially expand the distributive possibilities of film and television, and hence, in terms of Benjamin’s notions on art, affects their potential political ramifications.

The question thence becomes: how do today’s art mediums of technological reproducibility, specifically YouTube – as a prolific remediator of audiovisual content – come to affect the political consciousness of the masses, by way of the further de-aurafication of art? In order to do this, it is necessary to trace Benjamin’s original thesis, in terms of the notion of art’s de-aurafication and the subsequent effect it has on the political perception of the contemporary public. I will analyze YouTube’s potential in assisting to create an apperception – through its breakdown of traditional hierarchies of meaning-formation and capital control – that allows man to better engage in political life; specifically his ability to form a political consciousness, mediated by Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious”. Through this discussion, we will come to see how technology can become absorbed into the subject’s ontology, that is his being, in such a way, that propagates his ability to critically participate in society and hence, politics.

A Short Description of YouTube
Firstly though, due to its relative adolescence , it’s essential to illustrate in relevant detail, the Internet-based medium that is YouTube. YouTube is an online platform that allows for the uploading (by registered users) and streaming (by any user) of video content. The content that comprises its vast catalogue is a mixture of remediated material – digitized (and at times edited) from its original film, video or television source – and original user-produced material. Access, that is the uploading and streaming of content, is free of charge and need not take place within a particular time schedule; hence, viewing is asynchronous. Uploaders can create their own virtual channel, whereby subscribers to a particular channel are notified, through email and when logging-in to YouTube, of new content from that particular uploader. Videos are assigned tags , which are keywords that designate an association significant to the video. The search function on YouTube, thus corresponds search results in order of relevance to the tags supplied by the uploader. Another significant function is the ability for Internet surfers to embed YouTube’s videos in emails or other websites, such as Blogs, online forums, networking websites and personal homepages. YouTube facilitates this by supplying the particular hypertext so that a user can copy it and paste it in another website, (if the latter permits). The video however, even when remediated across other websites, will always have the YouTube emblem in a corner of the frame. Due to bandwidth, the limit of a video’s duration is ten minutes and the limit for data size is 100 megabytes (hence, these small forms of Internet video are often referred to as clips). What we see in this short description is a reconstitution of the relationship between author and audience – on the lines of meaning-formation and capital control – that I will flesh out below.

Aura and its Decline
To talk of the aura of an artwork is to attribute it a valuation in terms of its traditional and cultural authenticity. Authenticity derives from the artwork’s singularity, a presence delineated by space and time: “the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place… underlies the concept of its authenticity.” The “here and now” of the object and viewer contribute towards a sacred relationship between the viewer and the object. Benjamin, borrowing from Freud, refers to the object in this mode as fetishized. This underlies Benjamin’s perspective that art, in its first form, primarily manifested itself from cultish and religious expression. Such expression undermines the meaning of an artwork, ascribing to it a transcendental otherness that the everyday person cannot comprehend. By dissolving the sanctity of art, characterized by its singular presence, and hence, cultic and ritualistic value, technology brings art into the realm of the profane – the public. It is precisely technology by “replacing the work many times over” that it brings about a “publicization” of the sphere of art, facilitating public access, and hence, “substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.”
Benjamin’s definition of aura ascribes significance to the singularity of space and time in the artwork’s viewing, thus the mechanical reproduction of film and television breaks down the spatial and temporal logic of the aura. However I argue, that even in cinema and television, the logic is not entirely disposed of. Just as there is an authorial supposition of the painting’s exhibition space, there has to be something said about the authority of the cinema’s space, the photographer’s gallery, the habituation and ritualization of the living room television, and hence the petit-fetishization of these forms of media. Meaning becomes affected by the space; for instance laughter in the cinema has a knock-on effect, producing a stronger physical reaction in individuals in contrast to solitary viewing. Collective viewing affects meaning, to the degree that audience members see themselves as, what Benedict Anderson terms, an “imagined community” , having an unsaid affinity, on the basis of their simultaneous viewing. The same can be said of television, especially event television, such as sports, live concerts or election results. Commenting on the rise of Internet media, techno-scientist Nicholas Negroponte prophesized, “We'll all live very asynchronous lives… The idea that we collectively rush off to watch a television program at 9:00 p.m. will be nothing less than goofy.” This has the effect of greater individuation, as people learn to form meaning free of coercive externalities. For Negroponte’s idealism, this would culminate in the disappearance of whole collectives: “In the distant future, the need for cities will disappear… The evolutionary life of the nation-state will turn out to be far shorter than that of the pterodactyl.”

YouTube has the ability to nullify the aura of presence, by remediating content through the Internet directly to the individual private viewer. The specificity of a time and a place is forsaken for the ease of reception. All of the authorial encodings, which manipulate meaning, that are attached to an artwork’s exhibition – that is, the aura – are substituted for the user’s own personal and private time and space. Because streaming is instantaneous and at the user’s pleasure, viewing is asynchronous. The user isn’t limited by a TV schedule or a cinema’s timetable. Viewing can be repeated as many times as wanted, without the need of a recording device, and the time lag implicit in using one. Hence, unlike television or cinema, the user can scrutinize the image as much as he wants and conversely, as little as he wants.

The Publicizing and Politicizing of YouTube
This leads to the ability of YouTube to dislocate commercial intentions, which marks a key distinction between it and other technological mediums on and offline. Media theorist Michael Bugeja suggests that the progression of new media technologies has run parallel to the onslaught of new commercial target markets. Referencing Marshall McLuhan’s optimism for technology, Bugeja says, “[i]nstead of a global village, we inherited a global mall so divisively market-driven, that we brand ourselves by the companies (not the human company) we keep.” YouTube’s form however, doesn’t allow for the insertion of marketing material. The advertising that takes up television breaks and the beginning of cinema screenings is forgone. Hence, YouTube marks a discord from the usual commercial bombardment that constitutes the experience of virtually all other mediums. In a December 2006 article in Wired magazine, the owners of YouTube deemed that placing a commercial before or after the video streams would be “fatally intrusive.” The only option, which has not been implemented thus far, would be to place an advertisement to the side of the video, embedded in the webpage. However, according to Wired, because of the user-ability to place YouTube-hosted videos on other websites, the vast majority of stream counts do not actually originate from YouTube’s website. It is YouTube’s form that suspends the power of market-driven meaning, hence removing the commercial function prevalent in many contemporary mediums of art.

This leads us to the breakdown of another hierarchal structure, namely the capital one. Benjamin noticed the ease to which literate individuals could become published, given the space set aside for “letters to the editor”. Almost thirty years before Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” , Benjamin said, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character... [as] the reader gains access to authorship.” Technology functions to breakdown the author-public relationship. “Broadcast Yourself” is YouTube’s slogan – now everyone can. Alan Kirby, a professor of English, comments on this breakdown of authorship in the wider online community: “[W]hat is central now is the busy, active forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the viewer feels powerful and is indeed necessary.” What is relevant particularly to YouTube, is this transformation from viewer to author; not just for authors of user-generated content, and the uploaders of film and television content, but for the remediating users, the users that copy and paste hypertext, embedding videos in emails, Blogs, personal pages and MySpace comments . The user forges a path by which one can trace his independent activity. His consumption becomes a form of production itself. He becomes an author in his receptivity.

For Benjamin, this would account for the politicizing, or the publicizing of technologically reproduced art. The breakdown of the author-public axiom showcases the optimistic pole in Benjamin’s thesis for technology’s pseudo-Marxist fate – that is, as technology progresses, it deconstructs capitalist modes of production, opens up barriers to entry, and furthers the ability for the masses to produce for themselves. As we’ve seen, YouTube facilitates this breakdown to an enormous extent. However, one can read further into YouTube’s political charge as a failure in capital itself. Because YouTube is free for all users, employing its mechanism of dissemination places no burden of cost onto the user. In fact, due to the infringement of copyright, which may be involved, in the uploading of remediated television and film content, the burden of cost/loss is displaced unto the original owners of capital. YouTube hence, brings art out of its privileged capitalist hierarchal structure, just as film brought art out of the hierarchal system of religious meaning and bourgeois social values. Ownership becomes liquid. However, this is not to take away from the apparent legal implications involved in MySpace’s remediation of copyrighted material. But, as one online journalist noted:

"YouTube is a stage for everyone, including traditional media companies, filmmakers, record labels, movie studios, comedians and more. With the shift happening in digital media entertainment and a new clip culture evolving, professional content creators are recognizing the potential of promoting themselves and their programming on YouTube to reach a vast, new audience. As such, YouTube has evolved into a powerful monetization and promotional platform."

YouTube is forcing the leaders of media industry to rethink their philosophy on authoritative ownership and distribution towards a more publicly driven doctrine. The politicization of the structures of old media, along with the de-aurafication of art’s mechanisms of meaning-formation, open up a space to discuss the implicit effect this has on the public’s apperception.

A New Apperception
In order to place art within a wider political discourse of public apperception, Benjamin emphasizes the totalizing effect that these structural changes in form and meaning-formation can have on the very faculties of perception: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.” As we’ve seen, by removing the fetish of aura imposed on the meaning-formation of an artwork, a new object relation is born, whereby the object castrated from the realm of the sacred, is primed for critical scrutiny. This mode of perception manifests itself in the desire to “get closer”:

"[It is] the desire of the present-day masses to 'get closer' to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction."

This process of assimilation – the bringing of the artwork into the order of technology and science – deepens in the subject an apperception, habituated out of a critical stance towards experience. YouTube exemplifies this facet of reproductive technology, where every conceivable video past and present, is brought into the digital and disseminated for close inspection. A key to this new experiential mode is found in film’s ability to “distract”. In his essay ‘Reception in Distraction’, Howard Eiland focuses on this impression of technological media:

"[T]he cinema is the authentic Übunginstrument, or training device, for the sort of reception in distraction which is coming into being in all areas of contemporary art, and which is symptomatic of a new kinetic apperception, one opened out and agitated, as it were, jolted."

The potential for YouTube to distract is exemplary. According to the technology consultancy firm Accenture , 38% of Americans want to create and share online content. The mass integration of YouTube into the public media sphere, allows the masses to absorb a technological fairground of attractions and distractions, where the user can play out virtually any conceivable theme or ride for up to ten minutes, and then move-on. This “reception in distraction” leads to an enhancement of Erfahrung, a type of experience whereby perception becomes integrated into the individual’s experiential framework. Erfahrung is contrasted to Erlebnis , which is a psychic response to shocks , that causes the subject to reject any experiential material, alienating him from a deeper understanding of his relationship with technology and art. “Reception in distraction” and Erfahrung are something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect [verfremdungseffekt], whereby the audience members are jolted into active reception, as opposed to lulled into passivity. YouTube’s formal structure castrates the audience from the traditional logic of passive reception. The ten-minute limit makes for content that is specifically distractive and a-repetitive in nature. The YouTube user is no longer consumed, as he is by the banal narratives of Hollywood cinema, but forces the image to comply with his own faculties of reason and experience. If not, he will simply switch it off and find a new distraction. In a sense, he forces the art and technology to comply with his own being, the full extent to which “involves [his] whole sensorium, as illuminated by memory (for the experience in ‘intoxicated experience’ is long experience – Erfahrung).” YouTube, deployed over time, is a collection of “intoxicated experiences”, whereby the user’s memory is furnished with multiple distracted and engaged viewings. As mentioned above, the embedding of hypertext allows the user to create digital footprints across the Internet. A user’s digital footprint within YouTube’s website actually materializes itself in the function “Viewing History”, which catalogues the history of videos streamed by a particular user; a far cry from having to save ticket stubs and archive TV guides.

The Optical Unconscious
This new engagement of man’s apperception with art underlies what Benjamin calls the “optical unconscious”:

"[I]t is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. 'Other' above all in these that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to space informed by the unconscious… It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious."

Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” is an evolutionary mediation of the ancient faculty of mimesis. Mimesis was “the gift of producing similarities and therefore also the gift of recognizing them” . We imagine the child, or the native of an animistic culture, as having a highly developed mimetic faculty, being able to find similarities and transcendental meaning in all objects, such that there was an aura-filled relationship with all objects, not just artworks . However, such an ability brought about in the subject a sense of “cosmic being” – oneness with the universe and an understanding of things in relation to all other things. Benjamin’s argument is that the ancient human faculty of mimesis has been transmuted into technological mimesis – that is, technological reproducibility; and hence, technology, in the way it has changed man’s apperception, can potentially disclose to him an understanding akin – however technologically adapted – to that developed by the highly mimetic native – the “optical unconscious”. Michael Taussig, in his highly idiosyncratic essay, ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, develops this notion of the “optical unconscious” in its relation to “profane illumination”:

"This capacity of mimetic machines to pump out contact-sensuosity encased within the spectrality of a commoditized world is nothing less than the discovery of an optical unconscious, opening up new possibilities for exploring reality and providing means for changing culture and society along with those possibilities. Now the work of art blends with scientific work so as to refetishize, yet take advantage of marketed reality and thereby achieve 'profane illumination'."

Thus, the camera for Benjamin opens up a surrealist potentiality for technology, to penetrate the physiognomic qualities of objects, to bring that which was sacred into the realm of profanity, by dipping into the “optical unconscious” by means of "profane illumination"

YouTube manifests itself as the digital semblance of this “optical unconscious” – an unconscious encyclopedia of imagery that extends infinitely into time and space, precisely because it does not exist in time and space. Like the image matrix that constitutes the individual’s memory, specifically deep memory [Erfahrung], YouTube constitutes a vast network of monads that lie in association with one another. Pulling at the thread of one image illuminates the trace of an infinite number of others. By highlighting a tag and streaming a video, YouTube’s search mechanism brings into the foreground a plethora of other associated images, just as Freud’s unconscious reveals itself by means of word-association. An unconscious word-image constantly tempers the individual’s ability to form meaning, to scrutinize art, and reaffirm its own potentiality. YouTube, as a corpus of memory, attends to the mystical third-eye, “[the] hallucinatory eye, a roller-coastering of the senses dissolving science and art into a new mode of truth-seeking and reality testing.” YouTube, perhaps, makes space for a techno-mystical sense of oneness with the world, where one’s being is constituted by one’s ability to sift through the online unconsciousness.

Conclusion
How does this expression of experience affect the public’s political consciousness? What are the implications of YouTube’s form, in the way that it demolishes aura, deconstructs experience and meaning, and altogether brings about a relationship between man, art and technology that is somewhat surreal? Krzysztof Ziarek’s essay, ‘Artwork in the age of Electronic Mutability’, depicts the de-aurafication of art in the context of the wider political project of art “after aesthetics”. He stresses the significance of art’s form in order to bring about a rethinking of art in the political:

"[I]t is form understood as the inscription and reconfiguration of social antagonisms that make it possible for art to be socially critical. This form is not simply differentiated from content or themes, but, instead, must be seen as tracing itself upon both formal and the material aspects of art, making both the work’s content and its formal organization the scene of the reinscription, and thus of the critique, of social praxis."

YouTube facilitates a reinscription at both the level of form and content. The hierarchal structure of production and dissemination has been dissolved to the point that the traditional organizers of capital have had to rethink for themselves the economic, artistic and social configurations of their mediums. The content is becoming increasingly user-generated, breaking down traditional barriers of entry based on the binary of author-public. The public is becoming its own author, even unintentionally so, through placing digital footprints across the Internet. Both of these distinct reconfigurations converge to undermine the authority of meaning-formation and the experience granted by media consumption, by reshaping the relationship between the public, art and technology. Part of this relationship, is the revelation of technology operating at art’s core, the disclosure of art as tekhne, the ancient Greek locution that means both art (as artifice) and technology (as artificial); and hence the possible opening up of a ontological-technocratic potentiality for art. What I infer by this is in the way that man now absorbs tekhne into his ontology, increasing his ability to produce art publicly, as well as his perception and experience of art, thus enhancing his faculties of reason and conversely his ability to be political. As Ziarek points out, “the instant of art’s liberation from the strictures of its aesthetic formation coincides with the possible disappearance of art’s distinctiveness and its progressive merger with technology.” Art’s political potentiality comes from its ability to remove itself from the hierarchy of capital, thus inscribing in the social, a new logic of capital production and in the individual, a new experience of meaning-formation.

To go back to Benjamin’s quote at the beginning of this essay; Benjamin premised that it was the failure of individuals, that necessitates a reliance on art to ”tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses.” In the context of my argument for YouTube, the work of art is coming to prove, not just Benjamin’s hopeful project for art, but also his fatalistic trust in technology. In the context of art’s convergence with technology, we come to see YouTube as extending arts diminishing aura and producing in man, “matur[ity] enough to make technology its organ” – a maturity that will allow man to absorb art in such a way as to use it for social and political praxis and stave of the dual threats, in Benjamin’s mind, of fascism and annihilation. However, technology is always both antidote and poison. So the question becomes: what remnants of art’s and conversely technology’s fetish remain?


Bibliography

Alan Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Philosophy Now, Anja Publications, London, Nov/Dec 2006

Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, New York, 2005

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1983

Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willet (tr.), Hill and Wang, London, 1978

Bob Garfield, ‘YouTube vs. Boob Tube’, Wired, Issue 14.12, Dec 2006, [Internet] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003

Michael Bugeja, ‘Electric Cabaret’, Ecologist, London, Dec 2006/Jan 2007

Michael Taussig, ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, in Mimesis & Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses, Routledge, New York, 1993

Miguel Helft, ‘Google Calls Viacom Suit on YouTube Unfounded’, New York Times, May 1 2007 [Internet] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/technology/01google.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]

Nicholas Negroponte, ‘Beyond Digital’, Wired, Issue 6.12, Dec 1998, [Internet] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/negroponte.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]

Samuel Rose, ‘YouTube Politics’, Smart Mobs, [Internet] http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/11/03/youtube_politic....html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]

Simon Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory: in the service of the machine?, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 56

Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, reprinted in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Edmund Jephcott (tr.) and Peter Demetz (ed.), Schocken Books, New York, 1986

Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, 1929, available online [Internet] http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism.htm [Date Accessed: 17/5/2007]

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Edmund Jephcott (tr.) Third Version, reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003

The American Century: An Apocalyptic Denouement

Prologue – America, Violence and the Other
“The Apocalypse is coming”, shouts the unshaven hippie, the soul bastion of a free empire. The wailing grounds, the blooded soil; everywhere in America is a killing field: in Echo Park, in Santa Monica, the Castro, out in the burrows, the ‘burbs, the city ghetto, the broken boulevards, the back alleys, the airports. Everywhere has the geometry for violence, the blueprint for annihilation. Apocalypse is inscribed in the logic of memory.

I believe it. Our day in the sun, the American century is over. The heat of a thousand suns illuminated and forgotten in a flash: the bomb, fascism, neo-fascism, communism, neo-communism, Reaganism, Pearl Harbour, D-Day, the Marshall Plan, the Crash, The Depression, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Nixon, JFK, Bush Senior, Bush Junior, Agent Orange, the Civil War, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Dresden, the World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, the smart bomb, the (dumb) BOMB, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the BOMB, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI!

“I learnt a new word today: ‘atom’ bomb.”
(J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun)

The bomb – the unforgivable act: the beginning and the end of the American century. The memory of ascendance, the moment of crowning, the sovereignty of a superpower, is written in the same logic as that of its future downfall. The moment of triumph is, and already is, a question of denouement.

Where was morality in 1945 when the heat of a thousand suns set upon the Earth, melting the asphalt, the trees, the sky? Roads, buildings, cities annihilated; fisheries, crops, the earth polluted; three generations of food, of wildlife, of human foetuses born malformed and raised malnourished – the retribution of an uncivilized humanity in the name of justice. Inequality done in the name of justice! Violence done in the name of justice!

Isn’t all war ‘in the name of justice?’ The just, the unjust; the civilized, the uncivilized; the West, the East; the North, the South; the rich, the poor; the First, the Third; the developed, the undeveloped; the white, the black, brown, red and yellow; the male, the female; the Christian, the Moslem; the American, the un-American; ego and the Other.

The jurisprudence of the just and victorious always becomes the universal law by which we discern between the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. All patriarchal institutions demand the otherness of the Other, not least the national institution. The nation excludes in order to include. The nation enslaves in order to empower. Power relies on the existence and subordination of the Other: the woman, the black, the poor, the immigrant, the foreigner, the alien, the inhuman, the Other.

America’s Other has always been the world beyond its boarders. We see this in its foreign policy and its legacy of global subordination, however the Other lies deep within the Self also. Descartes taught us that the ego can never fully comprehend the complexities of another’s and mind. Freud taught us that the ego can never even fully comprehend its own mind. America’s ego is splintered, cracking under the weight of itself. The Other reveals itself within the ego, momentarily like an unconscious dream leaving its aftertaste in conscious memory. The black, the woman, the poor, thrust forward across the dividing line illuminating themselves and the truth of an époque. However like a dream, all is forgotten, refused, mistaken, denied. America is not very good at dream interpretation.

…And everywhere the bums will shout, the children rebel; villages, towns, churches, communities, cities and nations; a generation of change in a single moment, a messianic coming. Let the bells ring, in the name of justice, for the democracy to come! For what tomorrow comes!?

“Entire cities rise up in anger…against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain races against other races, against the inequality set forth as a principle by certain classes against other classes.”
Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Introduction: The excess of apocalypse
The denouement, the last twist, the final season of the American Dynasty. How did we become so beleaguered, marinating in our own intoxications of excess and success? How did we simulate, imperialise, colonize so much of the Other? How did we do such an excess of violence to the woman, the black, the Earth, the Other? The logical end of excess is apocalypse, where all coefficients simultaneously extend towards infinity and nullification.

The promise of apocalypse is relegated to few discourses: religion, politics, economics and the environmental sciences. It arrises from the problem of sustainability: in the sustainability of ecology and psychology. However sustainability is always a weary afterthought – a repentant hangover from excess. (And we drink when we’re winning.) Without sustainability the human psyche crumbles – emotion is substituted for an excess of violence, just as in ecology the environment is substituted for an excess of consumption.

Dual symptoms: excess and repression = freedom and prohibition = transgression and taboo
The Pleasure Principle leads us to strive after that which pleasures us. The logic of pleasure binds us to it and that which provides it. We are addicted to that which pleasures us and that addiction brings upon an ailment of excess. Like the addiction of the drug, we want more of that which makes us forget our own mortality. However the morning-after always brings back that discomforting fact. There is only one solution, more and more, until excess drives away the fear of death. “Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.”

Utter and total repression, however, is not the answer, for that brings upon a parallel set of problems, which Christianity has all too well exemplified. Abstinence is a mechanism for violence in itself, as excess too derives from the stalemate of repression. In repression, violence needs a cathartic push, just as in sexuality there needs a cathartic orgasm. The repression of sexuality, the repression of free will can sublimate into an absolute act of violence, just as the repression of the atom in nuclear fission can bring about a force so extraordinary as to level entire cities.

America’s diagnosis is just this: it is simultaneously excessive and repressive. It tells you, do what you want, but don’t do this”; “say what you will, but don’t say this”; “be who you are, but don’t be like this”. Freedom is lined with prohibitions.

America’s excess is not rooted in perversity, but in neuroses. Fear of God and fear of the Other lead to the neurotic. When excess is shrouded by the possibility of death ¬– a cultural exchange that it refuses – it can do no more than peal further into it, like pealing away the layers of the self in order to open it up to pain. “Out, out damned spot!” What begets violence but violence? “More and more weapons lead to more and more weapons until the world is a grenade with a fuse in it.”

Neuroses and paranoia are further fuelled by repressive taboos, put in place in order to keep social anarchy at bay. Repression marks the traditional Christian form in all its maxims and guidelines, whereas excess marks the new religious consumerism, founded under the guise of traditional religion. Consumerism is religion branched out, diversified and horizontally integrated in post-Fordist economics.

The new religion
Human being as a complex existante, imposed with self-consciousness and self-reflection has always been about religion, spiritual connectivity, whether it be found in the reflection of the self, the fulfilment of consumption, the transgression of repression or the totem and taboo. In the 21st century it spreads like a plague, a mystical pestilence upon the mass consciousness. The religion of consumption, the religion of violence, the religion of sexuality, the religion of God: they all have two modes, excess and repression.

The body, the first and a priori symbol of exchange, the most and the least valuable of all commodities was always given in excess, in sacrificial exchange, to the Gods, to the Kings, to the wars. The lover gives her/his body in excess to that which may confer upon it sensuality, a duality with God and transcendence from material existence. However the church represses the culture of the flesh, thus violence is sublimated unto the body and the mind. Violence is given in excess, to the bodies of man and woman; first and foremost to woman from man, because she was the pillow man bit and scratched at, at night lost in his own frustrations, his own impotency in reaching divinity. Violence, excess and religion have always been intertwined.

Today, the indisputable forces of religion, politics and Keynesian economics lay siege to the world of order and reason, claiming their own World Order powered by man’s lust for spiritual, commercial and ideological fulfilment. The shopping mall is more a religious domain than the altar ever was. “The medium is the message” and the new medium has brought about a religion only daringly dreamed of in the exegeses of Marx and Saint Paul. Marx was right: religion is the sedative. It is the opiate. However Nietzsche is wrong. God is not dead. God is a hydra, and cutting off his head merely creates a bastard child.

Just as man has complicated his perversity with the ruse of civilization, religion has complicated itself, has hidden its guise from us amongst our most profane arts and objects. It seeks us out in our most unholy of moments and depletes our inner most beings, calling us to worship in the message, whatever it may be. “The medium is the message” and the message is always religious, thus the medium, religion. TV is the religion. Sports is the religion. Consumption is the religion. The United States of America represents the perfect union between God and a late night shopping channel. Salvation can be grasped for $10.95 plus shipping. The ancient totems; the crucifix, the crescent, even the swastika have been realigned into a new consumer ideology, amalgamating with new symbols of commercial culture.

The rest of the world is to blame also. They have followed suit in the hope for their own salvation from the oppressive violence done to them. The nations of the world have learnt the sermons of excess all too well. The killing fields litter the global highways, inspired by the flashes of red, white and blue. Kim Jung-Il and Saddam loved American cinema but loathed American hypocrisy, so they fashioned an efficient tyranny – religion without totemism. American tyranny is founded in aesthetics, an aesthetics of violence. They have taught the world, the need for the totem: the flag, the Unknown Soldier, the anthem and the just cause, all in order to do violence. The new religion has fashioned the ancient totemism with the nouveau materialism.

The new apocalypse
With every new religion comes the promise of a grandiloquent apocalypse. The disillusioned Marxists, liberalists, atheists, vegetarians and environmentalists look on, pensively eyeing the apocalypse on the horizon; but if only anyone would believe them. But of course they do. They accept this. What is apocalypse but the zenith of a culture of excess? Apocalypse is the most extreme form of excess; exchange taken to its most infinite value, and within it a culture may both define and annihilate itself.

However the concept of apocalypse is old. It arrises every generation, vehemently spouted out by, or to, the irrational and credulous agents of power. It has been with mankind since the beginning, for any comprehension of a beginning comes with that of an end. Birth and death are irrevocably intertwined. Every beginning has an end, every birth a death, and every genesis an apocalypse. Let us trace the etymology of the word ‘apocalypse’:

From the greek word apokalupsis, derived from apokaluptein, which divinely translates as (apo = un; kaluptein = to close/cover) ‘to uncover’, ‘to discover’, ‘to unclose’ and finally ‘to disclose’. That is, ‘finally to disclose’ – to reveal truth.

‘Apocalypse’ is the final disclosure, the end of argument, the end of discourse and simultaneously the revelation and annihilation of truth.

Discourse begins and ends with death. Discourse (from the Latin discursis: ‘running to and fro’) is but the to and fro tennis match of knowledge, life, time and truth. Everything is logos, the search for truth: the word, the idea, the reason. The end of discourse is the end of the end. So at the moment of apocalypse all will be revealed, and alas forgotten, sent to the oblivion of a thousand suns. Truth is disclosed at the moment of its annihilation.

A violent uprising – the logic of dynastic decline
We are finally learning. The American Dynasty is unveiled as the secret plans and malevolent truths are squeezed from the tortured corpse. The corpus of history: a corpus of knowledge, a corpus of violence: violence done to and by itself.

A body is bruised from the outside and the superpower has received its fair share of bruising. However America’s wounds reveal a domestic savagery, a domestic battery, from the inside out. The type of battery that is so predominant in the familial structure, the primordial and a priori¬ (so they tell us so). The structures of power are failing and falling, disintegrating upon the weight of their towering flags. The zeitgeist is crumbling. The body of a nation unravels itself from the inside out like that of a Francis Bacon portrait, yearning to escape its own axes, its inherent aporia; yearning to escape its own birth and death, but whilst ever accelerating towards both.

In Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith taught us that every nation is born out of an act of extraordinary violence, and that every nation is defined by such an act. It stays in the gene pool, the unconscious memory from generation to generation, a memory of the past, present and the future. The bomb: the repressed memory, like the ghost of Christmas future, it haunts the American psyche, reminding it that its day will come. “[Nostalgia] remembers the future and dreams the past”, said Gore Vidal. The dreams of the past have been spun and woven into a thick blanket covering the American consciousness from its true legacy. However the blanket is patchy and the threads are coming apart.

The nation, as the human, is born out of a violent surge, a moment of discontinuity. Only such a violent act can call for the undoing of this discontinuity. The undoing is occurring, the unravelling, the unveiling, the unclosure, the disclosure, the final disclosure, the apocalyptic truth. Steadily America is rounding out its legacy of violence, getting closer and closer to the final act, the final bomb – the penultimate act of excess. The synthesis of excessive violence and consumption will bring upon us an extraordinary act, an extraordinary coming, an extraordinary Other.

For what tomorrow?
Alas, let this not be some scathing demonology on America and the world as is. We’re here to hope, to inspire and to transcend discourse in all its forms and amalgamations. Apocalypse is upon us, yet we’ve so many unresolved issues. We have not resolved the inequality between man and woman. We have not resolved the inequality between white and black, white and brown, white and yellow. We have not resolved the conflict between science and religion. We have not resolved the conflict between religion and religion.

But something is coming, brewing, and rising up from the tides of violence and consumption, from the infinite exchange of flesh and commerce. The Other is coming. The Other is rising. But the Other need not be a man. It need not be an act of violence, a person, or a prophet. The Other is an event, a time, a place, a moment, a memory of the future. Like a messiah, the Other comes, from beyond the horizon, from beyond our own calculability. It takes an unknown form. It could be human, inhuman, technological, scientific, political, environmental, economic, or religious. It could herald the new beginning or mark the end in the heat of a thousand suns.


List of thinkers
J.G. Ballard
Georges Bataille
William S. Burroughs
Jacques Derrida
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Margueritte Duras
Sigmund Freud
Michel Foucault
Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Emmanuel Levinas

San Francisco - "Fuck Hate & Go West!"

The oscillating hills of San Francisco mimic the Acid Wave that hit here in the late ’60s. Scattered bodies, like the ocean’s debris, litter the streets, displaced along the hills and highways where the wave hit and rolled back in. Far from the ocean’s mouth opening up across the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco has been afflicted my a very different disaster; namely a human one – addiction and poverty.

The common analysis of a lot of drug counsellors is that drugs do not discriminate. However in America, such a statement is loaded and visually untrue. Take any American city, and one usually only needs to cross the river, transcend the (in)visible line into no-man’s-land and discover hoards of chalked blacks, Latinos; the unwanted yet needed others of the American dynasty. (Why are they needed? Someone has to take the butt for capitalism to work.)

The point is that, in San Francisco, the economics of poverty and the psychology of addiction really don’t discriminate. The bums are of all colours; a union of cultures (which seems appropriate since the United Nations Charter was signed in San Francisco): the blacks are represented, as too are the whites, the Chinese, the Chicanos, the Latinos… It’s a real pluralist congregation on every street corner. Who would have thought man would find his common bond in the needle and the acid tab? Well, certainly all those hippies did as San Francisco is their (il)legitimate child, their present to the liberal world, their Trojan Horse to the conservatives and patriarchs of the new millennium.

The Beats were here too and they were world travellers, sexual deviants and bug-powder vein pushers. The Beat Museum sits happily on a busy cross street in North Beach, appropriately sandwiched between a sex-shop and a tavern. But the Beats are now dead, gone, forgotten and overused. Literary critics couldn’t rescue much meaning out of their scatology in the end. Very few survived the prowl of academia. The museum is but a flagrant memory, a shrine to a generation of misogynists, drug abusers and perverts, who probably didn’t care nor believe that what they were doing was either right nor decent (except for Ginsberg. He was high and mighty until Burroughs shot him too (he shot and killed his wife)).

San Francisco should annex itself from the United States – the world’s first gay-friendly nation with the pride flag hanging high, mighty and multicoloured. Bill Burroughs’ infamous saying “Fuck Hate” could be the national motto and the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”, the anthem. Who would wage war on the fags and bums, except for maybe America? Homosexuality as a terror upon the American family! San Francisco as a part of the Axis of Evil, led by Speaker of the House, San Franciscan resident, Nancy Peloski. We could restart civilization from Northern California. We have everything we would need in abundance: seafood, drugs, the Napa Valley, City Lights bookstore and Francis Ford Coppola. The bums can even stay too (they’re so friendly anyway). We could even bring Castro back (there’s actually a suburb named after him).

I want to move to San Francisco. I want to ski down its blocks and boulevards. However it doesn’t snow here, which is probably a good thing, as everywhere pedestrians would be tripping and cracking their heels. It is one of the few American cities where you can actually walk in, and the most worthwhile to do so too, as every now and then the climb to the peak of a block pays off as you peer down the backside of a mountainous city (They should line the pavements with T-Bars).

Ah, San Francisco. We’ll always have San Francisco to keep the conservatives at bay, or rather away from it. And if they breach the hills and valleys, we can always head west across the Pacific (China is calling – the future is coming). Right Wing political ferret Bill O’Reilly called San Francisco “a liberalists’ paradise”, like that was supposed to insult. Either way, it is queer-friendly, female-friendly, black-friendly, Latino-friendly, Chinese-friendly; they even let some conservative pigs hang around Nob Hill. They have special visas.

Here’s to the revolution. Fuck hate and go west!

Atlanta - Looking for Blowjobs in Boarders

Atlanta is where the ghost of conservatism confronts the new America. What is that exactly? The emergence of the hip-hop generation? The aspiring black man and woman? The re-resurrection of church and state? The nouveau riche? The old rich? Whatever it is, one hallmark stays the same – a culture of excess.

Huge lots of land extend their reach further and further, converting pastures, forests and streams into the satellite malls and highway restaurants of another urbanized and gentrified generation. Everything converges into concrete: rows and rows of shopping malls, fast-food chains and pump stations. An unconscious council mediates the omnipotence of simulacra. East Berlin had more individualism in Trotsky’s day. Perhaps that is the great irony of capitalism: everything is more of the same.

The lights of downtown hum in the night. Omnipotent black motor-carriages drift listlessly by on Atlanta’s nine lane highways. Downtown actually makes Atlanta a pretty city. Someone got the distribution of highway and high-rise right, or wrong for that matter. There are virtually no busses in Atlanta. The public transport system is reduced to a couple of scattered lines in order to limit the mobility of lower-income earners. The MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rail and Transit Authority) has been disturbingly re-coined to infer the “Moving of Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, which is more or less its resulting function.

Like in almost all American cities, segregation farms a disturbing dual personality across the lines of East and West, black and white, rich and poor, possibility and death. East Atlanta is a free-market crack den. However, there is potential here, shunted along by the procession of capitalism. Entrepreneurs are welcome to the grim streets. Gentrification is converting, composing and covering-up. Cross-sections of downtown seem to have been implanted with Walt Disney’s DNA, sprouting legions of designer streets and boulevards. Other parts mimic the old South, the French and the Spanish architecture prettied up for the likes of me.

However culture is still rooted in simulacra. If you want a book in Atlanta, you go to Boarders. If you want a coffee, you go to Starbucks. If you want a blowjob, you go to church. I went to Boarders.

Savannah - Salt, Sex & Death

I want to die in Savannah. I want to be a 19th century ghost.

An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.

A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.

Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.

It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.

They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.