Syndicate: Valery Savchuk on the 'information society'

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

[during the performance 'Bad English Today and Postinformation
Communication Tomorrow', which Dimitrij Pilikin and Valery Savchuk did at
the Hybrid WorkSpace, Kassel, 30.7.97, Savchuk presented the following
discourse:]


Valery Savchuk

What do we understand by the phrase 'information society'?

Living in a so-called information society, we in fact dwell in an age of the
 surprising lack of information.  When we talk about the fact that we live in
 an age of total communication, the mass mediafication of the consciousness
and the amplified rate at which the subject is assembled and disassembled,
in the final analysis all that is said on this account comes down to two
channels of information -- the audio and the visual.  And when we speak of
the information society, we are in fact verifying that nowad
ys these channels are hypertrophied, inflated beyond all proportion.  They
have repressed all other channels for receiving information.  And,
consequently, what I understand by the phrase 'post-informational society'
is, of course, not a rejection of information, but a radical restructuring
of the significance of various forms of information and the recognition of
the growing value of non-audiovisual information.  I conjecture that in the
post-informational society displaced and repressed means of receiving
information and communicating with the other will be reincarnated.
Moreover, with these speeds, in these floods of information, in this
unfocussed sensuality, all of which do not allow us to enter into an
intimate relationship with that which is contemplated or presented in art,
there is already appearing today a recognition of the value of lacunae, of
the slow and thorough living through (experiencing) of the fragments of life.
Contemplating the left radicality of consciousness and, correspondingly,
 new forms in art, I have come to the conclusion that nowadays the individual
 is in greater need of pain,  psychological dependence, bodily contact with
the other, a defection from his own atomicness, than in the forms of
pleasure regulated by contemporary culture.  The individual aspires to that
place where power is personified, where relationships are stricter -- i.e.,
more personal -- where, finally, one can full-bloodedly experience
life's brevity.
One can, of course, live life symbolically, but the real life of culture
 itself shows us the spontaneous formation of places where one man causes
 another pain.  That is to say, man does not want to experience life
 symbolically.  There is an unsatisfied need for strong emotions and saturated
 experience.  A padded and distanced manifestation of power, adapted
 to political correctness and outfitted with humane traps, forces the body
 to rebel.  Perhaps there are people who can experience their vital needs
 symbo ically, without 'sticking' to the collective body, but 'mass' man
cannot live without periodically (cyclically) dissolving into the mass.  An
authentic tension is essential, even on the level of physical survival.  In
this mode vital mechanisms are released, mechanisms that impart meaning to
existence.
Civilization is sterile, culture is bloodthirsty.
The informational condition of society reveals a deficit of living
information, the post-informational society reflects the illusion of the
completeness of the inventorying of channels for the receipt of information
and its reconstruction in the technosphere, the new archaic project of
communication allows everything to be and happen.
Audiovisual information cliches and formats our consciousness and we
perceive everything in a mode of apathy towards bodily experience.  We even
perceive self-destructive performances or the real pain of another person ,
for example, as if we were watching a film.  Apathetically.  All attempts
to preserve the sensual incandenscence of the artistic message the whole
way from the artist to the spectator are in vain.  In order for this to
happen the message should affect the spectator not only through the audi
visual channel, but primarily through the tactile and olfactory channels --
i.e., through those senses which Kant called inner feeling.  Only then will
one be able to provoke contemporary man to participation, coexperiencing
and sympathy.  He should be given the chance to feel the pain of the other.
 If he wounds only himself, without affecting the spectator, the artist is
only solving his personal problems.  But what can affect the contemporary
individual, surfeited by the flow of audiovisual information which
pours out and is consumed with such speed that the capability of
emotional response is lost?  Nowadays we are dealing with a sterilized
spectator.  I have this idea for a post-informational or -- what amounts to
the same thing -- new archaic action:  'The pain of the other:  the limit
of identification.'  Perhaps it will give its participants the answer to
the question of whether they can share the pain of another.