Sociability, or sex, mental disorders and code

The basic teaching of The Social Network is, probably, more or less: people go to extensive measures in order to get sex. And The Social Network presents one of the most complex ways of achieving that (and if you think "sex" is here too blunt, just replace it with "achieving social recognition", "status", etc.): to write the most successful social media platforms till yet, and make it into a billion+ business.

More seriously, the key thing to understand about the film is that it is not about The Facebook website or the company, nor about the real people behind these networks which themselves have created a load of global internet life; not about mark zuckerbergs, sean parkers, eduardo saverins, or the usually the faceless/nameless (or first name basis only) coders and girls which seem to be essential to any successful internet company.

To me, and what I tried to see the film as, it is about how to think the mental ecology of informational and networked "social" capitalism of 21st century. What it succeeds in showing is how messy the supposedly immaterial, and logical-driven mathematical society, i.e. society of code/software, is, and how affective labour and social relations are not only the object of those internet business models, but also its driving force. Now that sounds quite anthropocentric, I admit, but actually I want to point out to the messy ontologies in which the supposedly nice and "we-all-agree-its-good-for-us" sociability is about.

After broadcast media as the driving force of 20th century media landscapes, and the at least partial message of the media system of, well, broadcasting and catering for as many eyeballs as possible (both in the advertising logic but also public broadcasting version of this logic), The Social Network seems to imply that a driving force of this system is a feeling of exclusiveness; embedded in a system of closed institutions, invitations, rank, privilege, The Social Network shows the cruelty and dark sides in celebrated utopias of open internet and celebrated social ties. Cultivating on the idea of "clubs" into a software platform and a form of high tech neotribalism suggests not only the affective logic that might be driving the addiction economy of such social media but also the exclusiveness in terms of code which suggests that there are the creative whiz-kids (elite, billionaire, white), and the end-users (hot girls with no name, or a first name, who are the psychotic end-users, but also end-products of this affective economy). Naturally such a division is far from truth, as the relations demanded by social networks aim to blur the boundaries of producers and consumers, which works towards even a more affective entanglement. Recently Jodi Dean has made interesting points about this entanglement in her Blog Theory, but earlier already Tiziana Terranova as well.

What The Social Network is consistently about is the mental ecology of sociability - and especially sociability in the age of technological networks. Code is being born of labour and money - of some people getting paid, and some not; of some people getting laid, and some not; and some people at the high end of the power law curve, some not. That is why the descriptions of affective states, and even more so the various mental disorders at the core of this film are such a clue of thinking it in terms of impersonal affects -- the affective landscape of capitalism not reducible to representational figures: paranoia, compulsion, psychosis, depression. "Social pathologies are first of all a communicational disorder", writes Franco "Bifo" Berardi in The Soul at Work, and understanding the compulsion of communication as a state where again affect and business models conflate is a key way to understand contemporary infoscapes. Look at the disorders of minds and tech, of social relations and software to understand fundamental elements of how internet and high-tech cultures in general work, and this is where the fundamental impersonality in terms of Zuckerberg-the-film-character might just become a crucial symbol of current social media capitalism in a similar manner as Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood (2007) is emblematic of capitalism through an understanding of its zombie-like, soulless man as the "vessel of Capital" of the industrial age, to borrow Steven Shaviro's words and insightful analysis.

Who broke the first window, David?

I am also despising and condemning these vandals, indeed intent on violence and destruction. Breaking glasses and windows, raising a riot, causing criminal damage and public unrest. And then they destroyed what was remaining of the university system, as well as the welfare system.

I was referring to the Bullingdon Club boys actually --- not the couple of hundred students of pretty much the same age as those ones attending evenings of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive invitation only dining and drinking club at Oxford University, in the 1980s incidentally including figures such as David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. Part of the rituals of the club was to hire a venue, get sloshed and thrash the place. Sounds familiar?

The same people were first to condemn the events in London on the Demo 2010-day, strategically (and with the help of most mainstream media) maneuvering the attention from the 50,000+ demonstrators against this cynical, in itself violent attack against the universities, students and the welfare benefits to the minority who in anger and frustration stormed the Millbank Tory HQ.

"Look, people who assault police officers or who smash windows or who break property they are breaking the law and, yes, those people I hope that they will be prosecuted. They should be.", were the words of Cameron himself on the next day commenting on such thrashings.

Yet, this smashing of windows or breaking things did not start yesterday; it started some decades ago in Bullingdon Club, and continued with the trashing of education, expectations of future for those who cannot pay the bill as conveniently as some can after breaking a couple of glasses, and those who are continuously being bullied by the such elites, that conveniently transfer that privilege from the old system of class based bullingdons to a neoliberal system of 21st century elitism. These boys are trying to live up to the Big Mother figure of Thatcher perhaps, but as K-Punk notes in his blog post on the parallels between 1980s and contemporary Tory-Lib Dem coalition , it's not that easy -- and won't happen if we can do anything about it.

Transmediale 2011 theory award nomination for Zombie Media

Slightly perhaps shadowed by the Nobel prize announcements, the nominees for the Transmediale 2011 theory award - the Vilem Flusser award - were revealed this week.

I happy and excited being one of them, for the piece we wrote together with Garnet Hertz: "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method". The text is a theoretical excavation into thinking such art methods as circuit bending as media archaeological, and hence, expanding the notion of media archaeology from a textual method into something more strongly connected to the political economy of clipped shut information technology and material digital culture art practices: tinkering with technology that is not meant to be opened, changed, modified. Hence we mobilize such key themes as "black boxes" which have of course been well thematized in Science and Technology Studies (STS), but now in a media archaeological and hacktivist setting. Hence, the name zombie media: not dead media, even if old, passed away even; we write in the conclusions: "media never dies. Media may disappear in a popular sense, but it never dies: it decays, rots, reforms, remixes, and gets historicized, reinterpreted and collected. It either stays as a residue in the soil and in the air as concrete dead media, or is reappropriated through artistic, tinkering methodologies."

Here the info from the Transmediale 2011-website:

Vilém Flusser Theory Award
Congratulations to the following four nominees of Vilém Flusser Theory Award 2011!
The Vilém Flusser Theory Award (VFTA) promotes innovative media theory and practice-oriented research exploring current and pending positions in digital art, media culture and networked society. The call was open to publications, positions, and projects from a broad range of theoretical, artistic, critical or design-based research that seeks to establish and define new forms of exchange, vocabularies and cultural dialogue.

Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method
Garnet Hertz & Jussi Parikka

GATHERINGS 1: EVENT, AGENCY, AND PROGRAM
Jordan Crandall

_Social Tesseracting_: Parts 1 - 3
Mez Breeze

Digital Anthropophagy and the Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez

Anna Munster talk at the CoDE-institute

The next CoDE-talk:

Dr Anna Munster on biopolitics, death and digital aesthetics

at Anglia Ruskin, East Road, Cambridge
Organized by Cultures of the Digital Economy institute, in collaboration with the New Network Politics-project
October 14, Thursday, 16.00-17.30
Room: Helmore 112


'Out of the biopolitical frypan and into the noopolitical fire: death and finitude as emerging trends in digital culture and aesthetics'

Abstract:
This paper tracks the emergence of a digital ethos that is cognisant of consequence, finitude and even death. On the one hand, sectors of the digital entertainment industry – specifically computer games developers – and new start-up industries are concerned with the question of how to m...anage ‘death’ digitally. On the other hand, death and suicide have become the impetus for creative expression. Bernard Stiegler’s analysis of technicity goes some way toward unfolding a political analysis of the relations between ‘life’ and ‘death’ in the recent and current aesthetics of digital code. Specifically, his more recent work is concerned with the over-reaching of biopower into what he terms ‘psychopower’ and with inventing a 'noopolitics' that can respond to this.

But I will also argue that his articulation of noopolitics fails to provide us with a way to conduct ourselves digitally in the light of the spread of technologies and cultures of cognitive capitalism. It does not take account of either the recuperative noopolitics of aesthetic practices in an economy of cognitive capitalism or the productive and differentiating potential of aesthetic practices of digital ‘coding’ that suggest lines of flight for contemporary technoculture. I focus upon the relation between recuperated and critical software practices and the constitution of provisional networked publics that transversally produce lines of flight toward a more transformative noopolitics for digital aesthetics.

Bio:
Anna Munster is a writer, artist and educator. She is the author of Materializing New Media (Dartmouth College Press, 2006) and one of the founders of the online open-access journal The Fibreculture Journal. Her theoretical and artistic research covers the politics and aesthetics of networks and media technologies, biopolitics and information societies, embodied perception and neuroscience. She is currently working on a database for generating dynamic concepts about contemporary media (http://www.dynamicmedianetwork.org/), and a book on how networks experience. She is an associate professor, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.

TOC for Media Archaeology

Some information on our forthcoming Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications-book that we edited together with Erkki Huhtamo, forthcoming Spring 2011 from University of California Press... no cover image yet, and no table of contents online, hence I am posting at least the contents here! For clarity's sake, this is the one that is ready, and I am writing at the moment another book, a single authored one on the same topic.

1. Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology --Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka

Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary

2. Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study --Erkki Huhtamo
3. On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media --Eric Kluitenberg
4. On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine --Jeffrey Sconce
5. Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock --Thomas Elsaesser

Part II: (Inter)facing Media

6. The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern --Machiko Kusahara
7. The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch --Wanda Strauven
8. The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports --Claus Pias
9. The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory --Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Part III: Between Analogue and Digital

10. Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation --Paul DeMarinis
11. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media --Wolfgang Ernst
12. Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance
--Jussi Parikka
13. Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium --Casey Alt
14. Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes --Noah Wardrip-Fruin

15. Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past --Vivian Sobchack

[edit 21/12/10]: Endorsement by Sean Cubitt:

"Huhtamo and Parikka, from the first and second generations of media archaeology, have brought together the best writings from almost all of the best authors in the field. Whether we speak of cultural materialism, media art history, new historicism or software studies, the essays compiled here provide not only an anthology of innovative historical case studies, but also a methodology for the future of media studies as material and historical analysis. Media Archaeology is destined to be a key handbook for a new generation of media scholars."
- Sean Cubitt, author of The Cinema Effect

Nauman-cum-Lynch

My perspective to Bruce Nauman television art piece (at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, September 2010) becoming a David Lynchian experience.

RIP: A Remix Manifesto - film screening and panel discussion

A screening of the fantastic RIP: A Remix Manifesto and followed up by a panel discussion with some leading technology and culture writers, presented by CoDE (as part of the Festival of Ideas):

Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge
October 30, Saturday, 15.00-17.30
Tickets from the Picturehouse ticket counter

"In RIP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Crea...tive Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride."

The screening is followed up by a panel discussion with
- Bill Thompson (technology writer and columnist for the BBC Online, as well as head of partnership development for Archive Development projects at the BBC)
- John Naughton (academic at Cambridge University, writer and columnist for the Observer),
- Becky Hogge (technology writer, columnist for the New Statesman and former executive director of the Open Rights Group),
- Jussi Parikka (media theorist and director of the CoDE-institute at Anglia Ruskin University)
and
- Geoff Gamlen (a founding member of the remix-music/video group Eclectic Method have been called upon by artists like Fatboy Slim & U2 and by film, video, and television companies such as New Line Cinema and Palm Pictures to create custom a/v remixes.)

The panelists address the themes raised by RIP: Remix Manifesto and a range of interesting and provocative approaches to cultural production in the digital age, copyright and its alternatives, and free culture.