nettime: another obituary!

[xaf@interport.net (Jordan Crandall) (by way of Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>)]

        Geert writes that 'media' is too slow and mediated for the
speed and immediacy of the digital age, and McKenzie writes that
criticism, for similar reasons, is moribund.  These are both very
interesting observations of something that is perhaps even more
pervasive:  the death of distance as such.  'Media' and criticism are
both situated within the dominant model of identification as a
mirrorlike relationship, but this model is becoming increasingly
inadequate to explain the immersive aspects of new media (what
else to call it?), which, according to Margaret Morse, might better
be understood in terms of an oral logic.  In a sense, distance is
'swallowed up' leaving no reflective space.  (burp!)  One ingests--
takes something within one's own body--or injects oneself into
another body or space.  One engulfs, or is engulfed, in a continual
interfolding of inside and outside, miniscule and gigantic.  As such
identity is constituted not through a reflective distance--it does not
depend on similarity or mirrors--but by swallowing up or being
swallowed, in order to assimilate and transform.
        There is another very appropriate current that coverges
here.  Katherine Hayles might suggest that this crisis in distance as
such is part of a deep shift from a dialectic of presence/absence to
one of pattern/randomness.  Hayles suggests that the operative
transition is not one of radical separation (castration), but of
mutation, and this change is manifest not only in the material
substrate, but in the codes of representation.  So therefore we're
talking about an extreme convertibility, rather than a relational
constitution through difference.   I have some examples, dealing
with material form and the structure of signification, each of which
is indissoluably connected.  
        In the area of form, I'm thinking of Greg Lynn's 'blob
morphology' and Luce Irigaray's 'near solids.'  Lynn articulates the
following characteristics of blobularity:  blobs possess the ability to
move through space as if space were aqueous; their form is
determined through movement and they are often defined as a
trajectory; they have no ideal static form outside of a particular
context, which includes position and speed; they can absorb
objects as if they were liquified, and these incorporated objects
can 'float' in a deep surface without being ingested as such; they
are neither singular nor multiplicitous, neither internally
contradictory nor unified, but are characterized by complex
incorporations and becomings.  In short, they are assemblages
involving the fusion of multiple and different systems, which behave
like singularities while being irreducible to them.  These scenarios
involve massive changes in scale, from the tiny to the immense, and
foreground alternate conceptions of miniature/gigantic
interdependency.  Instead of relation through difference, we have
programmatic connection through protocol.  
        One could also think of some kind of cauldron operating
just below the level of form.  Something like the matrix figure as
theorized by Lyotard, which operates underground, in radical
rupture with the rules of opposition.  It is a transgression of the
very notions of distinctness upon which distance/reflection
depends.  It has no distinct places or modes, but has many places
in one place, superimposing, overlaying, or 'blocking' together
what is not compossible.  (This superimposing or layering is an
important metaphor, and which also disrupts the distance
necessary for the 'link' to function as such, and which I'll consider
below in terms of the phoroptor.)  It is thus entirely unassimilable
to the coordinates of external space.    
        If the changes summarized here are manifest not only in the
material substrate, but in the codes of representation, how is
signification constituted?  Not in terms of a direct, one-to-one
correspondence (a single marker on page) but a deep,
multileveled, and mutational space (a flexible chain constructed
through interior codes and interfaces, within which an agency
intervenes).  This is visible when one spends time developing web
pages or hypertext narratives, flipping back and forth between
artist and technologist, surface and depth, and the ways in which
one engages bodily with its contours, demands, and transportation
modes.  (The interface/dance floor as the seductive, fluctuating,
undulating, curve.)   
        What would replace 'critique'?  Going with McKenzie's
metaphor of plugging in to a situation (which sounds max Beavis &
Buttheadian--they could be critical if they only had distance!), it
might be a kind of atunement to the apparatus of the 'vehicle' (in
the sense of being both inside and outside of it).  Through this
atunement, we see that the evacuation of distance summarized
above is fundamentally an *illusion* sustained by the concealing
functions of the apparatus.  When you're strapped in a VR device
you are blinded to the physical environment, to your physical
body, and to the apparatus itself, in order to engage in a nearly
post-symbolic viewing, where the distance between symbol and
referent seems to collapse.  That the world you engage in is an
illusion sustained by these concealing and rerouting functions is all
too apparent to viewers outside the device as they encounter you
flailing your arms about like an idiot.  What they see is more like a
training regiment, as if you were installed in some kind of boot
camp, in order to make your sensorium adequate to these new
forms of vision and their corresponding realities.  This situation is
not specific to VR, but is a process everywhere at work as the
apparatus is increasingly dismantled from a mainframe and
immersed in everyday life, becoming less visible, modifying the
body through new gadgets tailored to fit it.  One doesn't critique
the vehicle so much as use it as a mode of inhabitation (riding into
immersive formations) while study how it operates (standing
'outside' it).
        In visual art, an atunement to the vehicle would replace a
critique of the frame.  As Geert suggests, aesthetics is bound up
within the technical, and should be repositioned in terms of the
technical determination of perception.  The contestatory site of the
visual is being restricted and augmented through new technological
apparatus which, together with cultural forces and practices, serve
to discredit the naked eye.  Rather than a certain brand of
modernism's fetishization of immediate, unmediated vision, the
figure that emerges here is the ophthamologist's phoroptor, the
device that endeavors to 'correct' misaligned vision through a
series of adjustments.  As these adjustments are intended to fool
the eye, the correction is founded upon a deception.  Divided and
conflicting fields are resolved, their disparities smoothed out, and
an otherwise contradictory vision is 'fixed' in accordance with a
norm.  Unlike the situation with the phoroptor, however, the
impulse is not to fit the viewing subject with permanent lenses, but
to open up a pliable space, within which body and visionary
faculty can be continually shaped and reconstituted, insuring
continued plasticity and convertibility.  This is accompanied by a
type of manufactured blindness, a mistrust of naked vision--which
must heretofore be augmented in order to be relied upon--and a
discrediting of the status of the eyewitness.  What is to be trusted
is a circuitous seeing, a highly mediated vision, which might take
the form of varying agencies within heterogeneous media,
generating a multiplicity of perspectives.  Through this circuit vision
is displaced and altered by way of new agencies within
manufactured spaces.  Trustworthiness is rerouted from the
subject's eye and channelled into objects and apparatuses, which
are imbued with agency.  As vision is dislodged from the body
proper and routed into new devices, the viewer is aligned in
accordance with this disembodied vision and re-embodied as a
function of those apparatus.  The traditional beholder vanishes,
while techniques are manufactured to foster the illusion that it is still
there.

JC



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