SRD: Cartographic Projections

Alfred Kkorzybski coined the expression ‘the map is not the territory,’ referring to the realization that humans do not experience the world directly, but through abstractions derived from language and the nervous system. Systems of classification are not out there objectively, but rooted in experience. Humans do not have access to absolute knowledge of reality, but to a set of beliefs built up over time.

There’s absolutely nothing even remotely newish about this philosophical concept of no direct access to reality for us human beings. We know that our eyes are actually extremely poor optical devices and force our nervous system to take their relatively poor raw data and shape it into something cohesive which is what, when we are seeing, we actually see. Experiments in using video equipment to feed data into our optic system may prove useful, in addition to the restoration of functional sight to the blinded, a useful step in studying the way we perceive and the degree of fabrication that takes place. Will they see what the camera sees or will another level of perception mapping take place within the brain?

Part of the evolutionary survival of our species is rooted in the ability to pass down a socially constructed map of reality as opposed to relying on personal experience of reality to determine what is safe/unsafe or what the best means for hunting or otherwise procuring food are. The flipside, of course, is that the same transition allowed us to turn reality itself into an abstraction that could be manipulated and controlled through the advancement of technology which has ultimately led us to our current point of ecological crisis.

The question for the “aesthetic terrorist” or counter-culture then becomes how to create noticeable disruptions in the reality-map vs. reality-reality interactions of the populace while they themselves are still caught within the inescapable symbolic abstract order of things. The aesthetic tradition of hacking one’s own brain to cast expressionistic shadows on the wall of the real has a long standing tradition whether through drugs, mystical rites, sex, or other means. Subversion of the senses helps call attention to their degree of artificiality.

SRD: Buried Alive

Centuries ago, the proliferation of print, allowing large-scale copying of leaflets and announcements, was not well received by authorities.

Distributing of information is always bad news for authoritarian power which controls largely by dominance the dominance of authority itself and the suppression or discrediting of subversive voices. The rise of electronic information systems is both a boon and an injury to any “counter-culture” movement.

In one sense, the ability to rapidly and cheaply disseminate literature/information across a broad geographical spectrum allows any such movement to quickly and easily expand its base of operation, but on the other hand the democratic distribution of authority present within electronic networks allows whoever speaks the loudest and most often to gain a strangle hold on the questions of truth and legitimacy. Whereas in the past those seeking or holding power were forced to use top-heavy means of distribution to get their message out (often suspect to suspicion by a thinking populace), now power can simply rely on its followers to individually combat subversion through personal statement and testament. Counter-culture elements then are faced not only with debunking the authority of mass media but a whole army of unconnected individuals loyal to the systems of control in deed and in thought who come to its defense without external prompting thus throwing up the illusion of autonomy.

After the invention of the printing press, the introduction of copyright was in essence a privatization of censorship. To keep down revolts and revolutions taking advantage of the new medium, the Queen Anne Statue of 1710 licensed copyright monopolies to printing companies and booksellers.

The real flattening threat of digital technology is the rendering irrelevant of music labels, movie studios, and publishing houses and thus their ability to control through subsidization the creative dialog on the national stage. The insistence that digital devices rely on proprietary formats and DRM technology helps not only to stabilize profits but also to control access and continue to censor what content is allowed to see large-scale distribution.

For years, the movie studios chose to censor themselves rather than be subject to external legislative control, and they also did their part to mobilise popular support for any number of wars throughout modern history (as did comic books, television, etc.). The idea that mass distributors cater to public demand ignores the fact that the same distributors control what the majority of the public can access. Only within this narrow field of socially acceptable options does a “discriminating public” have any power. People cannot choose what they do not know exists or what they do not have the ability to choose.

To some extent digital networks flatten this field, but even Go ogle’s ranking system gives authority to those that have the most links pointing in their direction, to that which is the most talked about and that which has received the most widespread attention. In this way large-scale distributors can still manipulate the system to their advantage by using traditional channels to develop a populist buzz by which individuals then proceed to become literal extensions of a marketing campaign simply by discussing the marketing campaign itself. Even criticism that mentions a product by name or provides a link to the source will actually help further the promotion of the product by increasing its Googleability.

Technologies of restriction management are built on the patterning of exits and entries across thresholds rather than a clumsy impermeability of boundaries. What passes and why, what rate to what effect, are the variables defining regimes of exclusion. Beyond the task of making believe, as in the spectacle of representation, power is increasingly about imposed silence.

There is a reason that CNN does not have a blog roll. That major label artist have a web paged provided by the label that is often separate from the artist’s choices or even their own self created site (which will not necessarily be linked to from the label’s page). How often do you think of a link as a political tool? Yet with the dominance of Google’s authority based search formula it, by nature, can and is used as such. It is entirely within the realm of possibility for a search for McDonalds to turn up a list of their abuses before their corporate site.

I have frequently been struck by the uselessness of many searches veering towards more radical ideas and how they do not turn up what I would consider to be the most important results. For example Googling “autonomy and self-reliance” pulls up a number of academic papers and Google books, thesaurus entries, and a site offering to sell essays on Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” though notably not the original essay itself even though it is now in the public domain and freely available. All of these scholarly articles are also, of course, for sale not freely available.

While there is a plentiful bounty of useful and philosophically relevant reading to be had through the Internet regarding revolutionary political and social ideas, this is not helpful if people do not know how to find it or access it. I am increasingly lead to believe that different factions and topically related webmasters have a responsibility to help create networks within networks with their own thresholds and entry points, many of which may, out of need, be indirect and through buffer zones to evade the attention of corporate crawlers.

SRD: Bounded Irrationality

Replacing civil society and taking over the legacy of state and institutionalized religion, corporations turned into a dominant force in consumer democracies.

Even though who thinly cling to the idea of anti-consumerism, for the most part, are willing participants in propping up the corporatocracy that our country and most of the Western world has become which functions not only as a new form of authoritarian power but also as and idolatry. Even the simple favoritism of a brand of beer based on a preferential taste gives this system wind beneath its wings. I can still remember being repulsed by the taste of beer but, in the end, being seduced by its price and availability.

The markets replacing governments are not democratic: the logic of business lies in coercion, monopolies and the destruction of the weak–but not in creating universal choices, services, affluence or the benefit of humanity.

In crushing the weak, markets mirror evolutionary structure. The dominant business survive by using whatever strengths and powers their development has mutated to crush all competition. As a society, we cannot help but morally favor biological diversity regardless of the evolutionary cost, because the other path leads to the power of life and death being placed in the hands of ego and ideology (see: the Holocaust). In economic ecosystems, we see no value in letting diversity, including those entities born with decencies, to continue to survive. The logic follow that if a greater diversity of options were desired then a greater diversity would flourish to fill these desires.

Using rhetoric’s of change that veil issues of inevitability and agency, business colonized culture and replaced politics as a force of transformation.

This transition seems to have occurred sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s. Political protests and violent outbursts led to the end of much of the institutional racism of the past (much of which was later reinstated in a different form). Now Pepsi is just a likely to push forth new ideas about race, sexuality, and culture than a March on Washington (such as endorsing a version of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”). Chilli’s is building hospitals with your donations.

Human agency is reduced to the idea that people express themselves through markets and consumer choice, the binary agency of buy and sell and the bipolar order of mood swings. The myth of brands is part of the everyday consumer experience, every product brand a potential investment into a mindshare, a part of the brain.

I think that it’s hard to deny at this point that our society is extremely polarized and increasing psychotic. We have stopped representing ourselves as ideas and started representing ourselves as commodities. To buy (into) a brand is not just to purchase a good but is also to become a part of a collective. Intention is irrelevant to this experience, because even if you claim no part in a community of brand-loyalists it will not stop them from claiming you. Also, the implicit thoughts that some brands are superior to others surfaces during every consumer experience. When buying electronic equipment, I often find myself thinking of a Sony product as superior to a JVC product and based on this thinking I am willing to pay more for the quality associated with the brand.

Consumer democracy imagines individuals as fully rational economic actors only as long as they stay within the belief system of market doctrines. Otherwise they are exposed as despicable fools and irrational brutes driven by insidious alien influences. To protest the cult of the invisible hand is to exclude oneself from the family of mankind.

Anyone off the grid is doing so, obviously, for criminal and/or degenerate reasons, because they practice a system of life that violates the norms of society at large. In reality, people making alternative economic choices in their engagement with society are ostracized precisely for the choice to reject the idea of the free-market, yet even today people, in ironic tones, are still referred to as long-haired godless communist pinkos.

If art is in the business of exploring paradoxes, here is a biggie. How do you critique the system without ostracizing yourself from it? Irony is a starting point, since it can give the appearance of glorifying the system while subtlety undermining it. Bald-faced politics is out of the question, thus the failure of the majority of most political art to amount to anything outside of ideological masturbation. I am brought back, as I often am, to Andy Warhol who said, “Business is art. Making money is art.” Warhol was his own brand. The Factory was a brand, but these brands contained within them a reflection of the shallow, plastic emptiness at the heart of the market system. Could it be that aesthetic celebration of markets and brands with no intent to accumulate wealth but, instead, to simply add fuel to the fire of the celebration could, in the long run, result in a reactionary swing on the right towards the regulation of art markets? A small victory perhaps.

SRD: bionic spectacle

Receptiveness for spectacle lies embedded in a human desire for excitement, adventure, stimulation, sensation, and the construction of self-esteem.

Of course, the alternative to the spectacle is always actually living life and finding the above list through genuine experience and passion rather than the empty imagery of the spectacle. I wonder if it’s possible to provide an alternative to the spectacle or if any attempt to service the entertainment desire for experience that doesn’t come from the individuals own desire ends up being just another brick in the wall of the spectacle.

Augmented reality, then, could serve to literally superimpose graphic representations of the spectacular over the senses in every waking moment, almost fully replacing the “real world” with the hyperreal. If the switch between “real” reality and augmented reality can be controlled by a remote location and ends up being planted directly in our optic biology then it will literally become possible for reality to be manipulated both by authoritarian power and by pirate broadcasters hacking people’s perceptions.

Intensity of affect is directly correlated with depth of disorientation, so the more vital structures are impacted, the stronger the effect. Contextual security parameters of relativity safe environments allow one to appreciate these disorientations as hedonism instead of discomfort and panic.

We, as human beings, enjoy having our boundaries pushed and our sense of reality disorientated, but only within a comfortable setting with safe words in place. One of the tips to success in memetic manipulation then is to contain your disruptive and insurrectionary ideas within a framing narrative that falls entirely within the bounds of the most familiar cliches. Thus one can hijack the hedonistic impulse to imprint changes in the name of pleasure.

SRD: Authentic Falsification

The technological ability to make copies that are indistinguishable from, or even better than, the original undermined the distinction between the counterfeit and the real.

…and helped lead to the Neoist movement who brought with them all sorts of challenges to the idea of the “creative act” and how useful or wanted that act is from a societal perspective.

The Foolish People have also tackled this question of creativity in the Age of the MegaCopy through their ritualized theatre.

Aesthetic works can no longer be appreciated solely for their originality and newness which leads me (and hopefully any readers can follow) to an aesthetic of experience.

Since on a long enough timescale, there will be no way of determining whether the real Mona Lisa is the one hanging on the wall or if it is stashed in a vault somewhere or if it is in the house of a private collector as part of a bid to pay off debt.

This creates significant problems for the art object as commodity which relies on its one-of-a-kind nature to some extent to instill it with value.

…which is a good thing! Democratization is always a good thing!

It was a common practice in ancient times for an anonymous author to write in the name of someone famous.

Neoism strikes a chord again here.

I’ve written in the past about personal identity and ownership a little bit. We already live in age where replication of identity (also known as identity fraud) can be pretty easily achieved, but especially from the perspective of publishing in, say, a literary journal there is virtually no way of authenticating identity unless the editors have a personal relationship with the “victim” of theft.

I like the idea of names and identities in the public domain that can be tried on and used for specific projects.

Indeed assuming a false identity as creator can be a great way to confront questions of authenticity and identity themselves which obviously have a great deal of relevancy in contemporary society.

The subtle distortion of reality and the corruption of ideas that are introduced through the skillful subterfuge of the fake have been compared to the danger of undetected aliens living among us. Not just another posture of insurrection where population segments are efficiently kept in line by irrational cults of illusory rebellion dancing before the monuments of power. An uncontrollable invasion of alien doubles subtly infiltrates and alters cultural codes.

…because it calls into question the very idea of authority. The authoritative text, for example. One of the fears of publishers with regards to the scanning and piracy of books is that the pirates are making subtle alterations to the text itself to leave their mark on the original work.

Cloning is the eventual endpoint to this thoughtline whether its accomplished through cybernetics or genetic engineering and accelerated growth.

Literal aliens, fake humans walking amongst us indistinguishable in all ways from the original.

Electroshock

Been reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, and her basic premise is that at times of psychological/emotional/political/etc. shock that bodies whether individual or collective are more easily erased and/or transformed.

Her book makes the case the neoliberal/neoconservative movements have opportunistically used these tactics/moments to impress their agenda on a body to weak/terrorized to refuse.

It also hints as some pretty nasty collusions between the US Government and the CIA w/r/t South America in the 50’s/60’s/70’s.

All of this has me pondering though how fear can manipulated for aesthetic purposes. If states of panic and confusion can be raised in the viewer/audience’s psyche then they will by extension become more impressionable and open to the latent message of any aesthetic work.

Obviously, nothing inside a gallery can truly terrify outside of the reactionary spooking of sudden figures looming out of the darkness, so this must be accomplished in a “normal life” space.

I am thinking something along the lines of a middle-eastern looking wax statue at the bus stop with explosives peeking out from underneath his jacket.

A fake sniper on a rooftop.

Flyers left in every mailbox in a 5-6 block radius warning that they have recently been exposed to a dangerous substance during a military exercise gone wrong.

When later revealed for what they are (by means of media, which these kind of stunts are likely to attract for their sensationalism), people are asked, implicitly, to reflect upon their own fear and the ease with which it can be manipulated.

SRD: Artificial Resurrection

Combat simulations, violent army training software and online frag arenas allow instantaneous resurrection where millions get killed every second, only to respawn again into a virtual world. In the cultural logic of the digital, what can be sequenced, scanned, or encoded can both be put to death and raised from the dead.

Capital punishment taken to an entirely new level in the “post-Singularity” world, if such a thing ever exists. Criminals uploaded into the computer and sentenced to die over and over again at the hands of their victims. Countercultural heroes respawned from the archives when their moment ceases to be threatening to the status quo.

Completely desensitized to death.

I don’t know that a critique, aesthetically, would be possible.

The cult of death and resurrection finds its origins in our deep past.

Already cartoon games in which infamous public figures can be punched, shot, or otherwise attacked exist in plentiful numbers, and not as aesthetic critiques of the death-cult mentality but as celebrations of it.

How many oppose warfare in the political realm, but celebrate it on the home console?

How can this paradox find representation?

Gamer.

Maybe.

SRD: Affective Images

So, in light of my new purpose (see last post), I am going to begin a series of posts in which I try to unpack some meaning and understanding from The Strategic Reality Dictionary.

I am going to quote extensively, because the book actually encourages me to pirate it.

This is mostly for my own benefit, since by extrapolating on the text I will likely gain a deeper understanding of it, but perhaps others will gain something from this exercise as well.

Humans construct events to confirm the sentiments they have about themselves and others. People tend to reconfigure the perception of the identity of other or solves only if they cannot sustain these attitudes in a present situation.

Confirmation bias is the norm.

If an aesthetic work can provide any sort of genuinely transformational role on the part of the viewer, then it must, by extension, provide a paradox of reality and existing social constructions. Without this paradox, no amount of subversive content can hope to make any impact whatsoever since it will simply be distorted and manipulated by the viewer to fit their existing reality-tunnel.

Rhetoric, visual or otherwise, will only succeed in reinforcing what is already believed to be true.

Propaganda, on the other hand, can be effective since it creates an alternate reality where there is no other truth other than the truth it extorts and creating the potential for a paradox between the world of the content and the world of the viewer.

To monopolize the flow of language and images through legal and technical means is to control the transmission of affect in social bodies.

So, by extension, to increase the multiplicity of language and media can be defined as an act of rebellion against authoritarian power and a move towards individual emotional self-expression. Meaningful self-expression and genuine pleasure and motion in non-imaginary life stands, in fact, at the heart of any meaningful rebellion.

I, actually, think about the tea-party protests, and the reaction from the left. The push of fascism approaches from both sides. A reactionary right combined with a left that would deny them the freedom to be reactionary under the guise of reason. The left reacts as such because the confusion of “facts” undermines their legislative power.

A more useful and tactical response would be to confuse the debate even further by mobilizing their base to attend the same rallies and yell radicalized unreasonable slogans even louder, but this response dies under the banner of respectability and intellectual superiority.

The artist or revolutionary thinker should celebrate the ability of nonsensical rhetoric to play an important role in state decision making as it underlies the instability of state power on both the right and the left.

Changing Gears

After giving it some thought and poking inside my own skull, I am going to narrow the focus of this project to a semi-specific microrealm, because I love posting my random thoughts of the moment onto the Internet but I need to narrow my own mental focus a little bit to the thing most relevant to my current interests.

THEREFORE.

This place now and forever more will primarily exist to deal with question of aesthetic politics and how creativity can stand in opposition to consumer democracy. Of course, tangential material will probably pop up as there are other relevant things that intersect with this premise such as changes in distribution channel for media/ideas, copyright, the nature and methods of consumer democracy itself, and thoughts towards aesthetics themselves and how art/society interact.

This was, I think, my original premise, but I got lazy and/or too broad.

STAY ON TARGET.

The Fringe of the GOP and the Safety of Democracy

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that antigovernment militias and white supremacist groups have strengthened in recent years, responding to an increasingly diverse population and what they see as an expanding government.

A center study released in August found a nearly 35 percent growth in racially based domestic hate groups since 2000 – from 602 to 926. The center concluded that opposition to Obama’s election has only increased the phenomenon.

“A key difference this time is that the federal government – the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy – is headed by a black man,’’ the report said. “One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.’’

From the Boston Globe.

…and, of course, even some of the more moderate elements of the right are not afraid to fuel the fire a little bit if it helps generate political noise against the big healthcare monster in the center of the room that everyone continues to talk about.

No conservative pundit can realistically get on stage and say to the American people that their government is not the enemy, that Obama is not the enemy. This contradicts the party line these days that government is out of control with its spending and that Obama is trying to socialize America and in the process destroy our economy.

Considering what I’ve seen Nick post, I’m guessing that the socialists don’t really agree with the GOP here.

This uneasy alliance between the militant right (birther, tea party, etc.) and the unofficial (and sometimes official) GOP talking points mouthpieces may serve the GOP for the moment, but I think they are going to have a scary moment at the end of the day when this is their base. Trying to win an election means winning the center which are not likely to be attracted into the fold by the presence of men with assault rifles at rallies.

I’m reminded of Jesus Camp and the idea of training a Christian Army to fight the Islamic threat, but what about the threat at home of secular humanism and atheism?

What a great irony will there be if the Christian right at some point joins in with the militia crowd and we see domestic terrorism attempting to end the corrupt morality of our nation and restore America to Christendom!

In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates.

They watch on cable TV as illegal aliens walk into their country, are rewarded with free educations and health care and take jobs at lower pay than American families can live on – then carry Mexican flags in American cities and demand U.S. citizenship.

They see Wall Street banks bailed out as they sweat their next paycheck, then read that bank profits are soaring, and the big bonuses for the brilliant bankers are back. Neither they nor their kids ever benefited from affirmative action, unlike Barack and Michelle Obama.

They see a government in Washington that cannot balance its books, win our wars or protect our borders. The government shovels out trillions to Fortune 500 corporations and banks to rescue the country from a crisis created by the government and Fortune 500 corporations and banks.

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

Pat Buchanan.

Tough break.

The winds of change, slowly and surely, sweep us all out from the spotlight and into the wings.

By all accounts, despite making a lot of noise, the right still has very little clout when it comes to the electorate which might explain why many of them are considering and moving towards acting outside the democratic process.

The GOP, from an electoral standpoint, would be wise to distance themselves from this idea.