<nettime> defeatism digest [flagan|hagenlocher|hunsinger|MWP(x2)|hwang]

["nettime's_|<0u||+3r-.*" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>]

     Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism
Are Flagan <areflagan@mac.com>
Curt Hagenlocher <curth@motek.com>
jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu>
MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 10:51:36 -0400
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism
From: Are Flagan <areflagan@mac.com>

On 7/30/02 3:07 PM, "Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com> wrote:

> But they are
> certainly not the first to have insisted that a revolution requires a
> "distinctive and recognizable aesthetic." [7]  Hitler certainly did as well.
> So did Stalin.  So did the Taliban.  No one will ever agree on what is more
> aesthetically preferable, nor on which sexual mores are truly liberating,
> nor on what practice is the more spiritually fulfilling.  That's why making
> such things an integral part of politics is, as Walter Benjamin wrote and
> history shows, a recipe for war.  Aesthetics and sexual mores should be left
> out of politics for the same reason that religion should be.
> 
> The reason why humanity never seems to live up to this truth is that finding
> one's own way is hard.  That personal task, not politics or revolution, is
> the true role of creativity, artistic expression and identity formation.
> But a "tactical" aesthetic of consumption, of criticism, of refusal, of
> opposition is the very opposite of this.  It's a lot easier than finding
> your own way.  It takes no real work at all.  It's the aesthetic of a slave,
> a parasite, and a vandal. [8]  And if you seek its monument, look around.
> 
> Kermit Snelson


K,

What seems to be forgotten in this exhaustive *timeline* is that each
aesthetic move have had its countermove - what has become key moments of
political remove in the concept of an artistic avant-garde: constructivism,
AIZ, etc. It seems that over the course of the same *history* people have
found it necessary to wage war on aesthetic terms, precisely because, as it
is noted, they are ruled by an aesthetic (which always implies a politics).

It should be noted that after the recent *liberation* of Kabul, TIME
magazine ran a celebratory feature that showed people carrying TVs out of
hiding and a group of men leering at a deck of pornographic playing cards.
The cost of such *aesthetic* pleasures (aka political freedoms): thousands
and thousands and thousands of dead. (Yoy tell me if endless reruns of
*Friends* is worth it.)

It seems to me that K is proposing another version of the bubble that has
passed for genius in some  circles and the quest for Nirvana in others; the
way (just add light and you have the Biblical quote). But by removing
everything from something, you are perhaps not left with essence but
possibly nothing. Arguably aesthetics, sexual mores and religion actually
compose what we term politics and are inseparable from our concepts of what
rules and governs, even constitutes, creativity, artistic expression and
identity formation. How can one approach these entities without taking their
dominant definition(s) into account, as K suggests? Well, already the
sublime, the avant-garde (which is both of its time and ahead of its time),
heaven et al get top marks for promoting a personalized liberation from our
earthly preoccupations, but alas they always return to fundamentally support
what they seek to remove. What remains of K's pursuit is an ancient
conundrum and a personal/aesthetic/political blunder.

God bless America,

-af

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From: Curt Hagenlocher <curth@motek.com>
Subject: RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 10:49:23 -0700

Mark P wrote:

> You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps, but freedom and imagination?
Please!
> These guys sit at computers and blindly type strings of random words into
> unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of
reward.
> They are glorified carnival chickens. Give me a break.

You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps but freedom and imagination?
Please!
These guys sit at easels and blindly dab gobs of random paint into
unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of
reward.
They are glorified carnival chickens.  Give me a break.

You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps but freedom and imagination?
Please!
These guys sit at pianos and blindly mark circles of random size onto
unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of
reward.
They are glorified carnival chickens.  Give me a break.

You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps but freedom and imagination?
Please!
These guys sit at desks and blindly scribble strings of random words into
unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of
reward.
They are glorified carnival chickens.  Give me a break.

You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps but freedom and imagination?
Please!
These guys sit at large stones and blindly chip away random flakes into
unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief moment of
reward.
They are glorified carnival chickens.  Give me a break.

--
Curt Hagenlocher
curth@motek.com

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 18:59:29 -0400
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism
From: jeremy hunsinger <jhuns@vt.edu>

>
we should be clear here as is Plato, he rules out poetry and art because 
he admits that the majority of humans are ruled by their passions, which 
is the second in his heirarchy of reason-passions-desires.  He plainly 
sees that the only way to arrive at the rule of reason is to rid one of 
the rule of the passions, the poets-fictional writers-artists, and rely 
on the philosophers.  However, as we know in Plato, the philosophers to 
possess reason need access to the transcendental plane(the sun outside 
the cave) to derive their truth, so as far as I know, we'll never have 
his truth, given there is no transcendental as far as i can tell, i 
looked for the cave exit and found a metaphorically plush velvet 
wall;).  Thus, give me well reasoned passions any day, following 
Feenburg, let poetry rule the streets...  for  poets or their respective 
mediated contemporary incarnation in the hearts and minds  of the people 
still, and probably always will rule.  The question then becomes, who is 
the contemporary incarnation, the poets, or....





> In Book 10 of the _Republic_, written in the fourth century BCE, Plato 
> notes
> that the "quarrel between poetry and philosophy" was already 
> "ancient."  He
> then has Socrates go on about the ontologically inferior status of 
> artistic
> production.  So it's no surprise that when Plato finally pronounces on 
> the
> controversy as to whether poets or philosophers are the natural rulers 
> of
> the human polity, he decides, famously, in favor of the philosophers.
>




jeremy hunsinger
jhuns@vt.edu
on the ibook
www.cddc.vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy
www.dromocracy.com

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 15:32:25 -0700
From: MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
Subject: RE: <nettime> how to defeat activism

This counters KS's comments, I hope:

Aesthetics has been a dead issue in art since the 20s. Contemporary art
is not involved in making aesthetic objects. Political art is not
aestheticized politics. (If it must be anything, it is politicized
aesthetics, which is the obverse of fascism, as Brecht has shown.) Art
deals primarily with issues of art, and aesthetics is no longer an issue
in art that anybody outside of the philosophy departments thinks is
interesting.


(I could elaborate, but I have another posting forthcoming that is too
long already!)

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 16:46:18 -0700
From: MWP <mpalmer@jps.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism x

[IN RESPECTFUL RESPONSE TO TJ'S COMMENTS. . .]

Whoa! Are we talking about real hackers here (Mitnick etc.), or about
groups that emulate the motions of hacking within an artistic context
(Rtmark etc.)? There is, I believe, a distinct difference, which I
thought was the point of the original statement I was challenging,
namely, that artists have somehow become passe/ and hackers are now
filling the void left in their wake. Possibly some of us are indulging
in metaphoric excess here and seek to imbue hacking with meanings that
lie beyond my modest interpretation. If so, then I guess we will simply
have to disagree about the scope of its significance and take separate
paths.

I can't imagine anything more oxymoronic than the notion of a hacker
"culture." Culture serves to circumscribe a common ethos within society.
Hackers are by nature antisocial and anti-groupthink. (Not all, but
many.) Magazines like 2600 strike me as being intended less to create
secure social bonds between like-minded individuals than to pass along
various tricks of the trade such as how to crack a payphone or
something. Whatever culture might tentatively emerge from such (for me)
tedious and silly pranks is ephemeral at best, and remains part of an
uncharted underground that can vanish as quickly as it arises. If you
want to call that a culture of sorts, go ahead, but to me it lacks the
staying power and solidarity - not to mention abiding legacy - of truly
transformative cultural energies such as was once to be had in various
art movements like Cubism, Dada, etc. and that continues - albeit
spottily - in the art movements of today. Hacking is more an inchoate
form of anti-culture, if you will, and a somewhat valid if woefully
marginal form of social protest. But even to call it protest is probably
to give it more of a positive patina than it deserves. Perhaps we should
see hacking more as merely a form of idle noodling at the computer by
youthful malcontents who otherwise would be masturbating all day. In
sum, not everything we do in defiance of our world contains enough yeast
and vitamin-energy to rise to the level of cultural dissent, and thus
bring progress (in Benjamin's sense of the word) and growth to an open
society. I think we need to make this distinction clear if we are to
give these ideas their proper weight.

<< And I suppose writers are glorified dictionaries. . . >>

Writers aren't glorified anything. They just write, - hopefully well
enough for others to want to read them. I guess what I really am
objecting to in the statements I was criticizing is the notion of
glorification itself as a way of assigning status within the culture (or
without), as it implies a disavowal of critical thinking. Down with
glory, guts and god!

Cultural status is arrived at due to consensual assent and assimilation
rather than mystical glorification. This is true, say, of a work of art
that once may have been shocking to the public but eventually becomes a
highlighted inspiration point of the common cultural landscape. Such a
hypostasis occurs, not because the work is somehow glorified into
notoriety, but because its provocations no longer rub against what the
culture allows within its bounds of acceptability. Hacking has already
become somewhat of a mainstream cultural activity, with large
corporations even hiring hackers to ferret out internal weaknesses,
sabotage copyright violators etc. Hacking hardly threatens the social
order in any big way anymore (if it ever did). At worst a few hundred
credit card #s might get pilfered now and again, causing capitalism to
burp slightly in releasing the gas of greed that has been building up
inside of its toxic bubble. Art, by contrast (borrowing Blanchot's
distinction), remains a force that lies astringently outside of culture,
threatening to undermine it by exposing its contradictions and defining
where it is most self-destructively undermining itself. I know of no
other way to do this, other than through political violence. That even
the most intransigent of art inevitably reverts back to culture over
time is not a strike against it, but an acknowledgment of its abiding
potency and value. Art lives on, indeed prevails, if only because
culture keeps refusing to believe in it.


Freedom is a slippery word. I frankly don't know what it really means
within the context of cultural dissent. I guess I will let you have that
one, if you want it. Or maybe I will ponder it at greater length, once I
can find the freedom to do so within my own petty life of boundaries and
limits.


Sorry for these disorganized comments! I may have let my enthusiasms on
this topic carry me beyond the limits of ordinary reason. Ah, well. Ah,
well. Nothing new in that!


MP

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 03:20:10 -0400
From: Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>
Subject: Re: <nettime> how to defeat activism

MWP wrote:

>David Garcia wrote:
>
>  > > ...the artist's iconic status as imaginative outlaw and 
>exemplar of freedom
>  > and the imagination has been replaced by that of the hacker.
>
>You've got to be kidding! Outlaw, perhaps, but freedom and 
>imagination? Please!
>These guys sit at computers and blindly type strings of random words into
>unforgiving blank spaces all day in anticipation of that brief 
>moment of reward.
>They are glorified carnival chickens. Give me a break.

Right. Meanwhile artists blindly fling paint at unforgiving blank 
canvases all day in anticipation of ... what, exactly?

I'm not down with David's formulation either -- it's a big world, so 
there's room for artists and hackers -- but let's be fair. Any 
vocation can sound petty if you decide to describe in completely 
inaccurate terms.

Francis
-- 

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