[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> avant.garde - transfigured or dead?

["Károly Tóth" <karoly.toth@xs4all.nl>]

dear duna, list

i can not find the original post, duna maver have replied to

can somebody please post it to me this original article

thanx & grtnx
k'roy

__________________________________________
zero g artlab & cultural engineering rotterdam
Károly Tóth
karoly.toth@xs4all.nl
www.xs4all.nl/~are
__________________________________________
zero g artlab rotterdam is an independent art-lab.
The lab is in an evolving process of exchage
with initiatives of individuals and institutions,
based on mutual sympathy.
__________________________________________



----- Original Message -----
From: "duna maver" <dunamaver@yahoo.com>
To: <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 10:06 PM
Subject: <nettime> avant.garde - transfigured or dead?


> This is a belated reply to Eric Kluitenberg's
> 'Transfiguration of the Avant-Garde/The Negative
> Dialectics of the Net,' posted on nettime two months
> ago. Mladen Stilinovic, Croatian artist, once said it
> is good to be lazy, not just in art but in life. I am
> in fundamental agreement with Eric's position: the
> disturbance of the apparently seamless surface of the
> digital media universe by groups like RTMark is indeed
> a transfiguration of the dialectic of the old
> avant-garde. But rather than seeing this as a sign of
> their challenge to the logic of the network society,
> to my mind, it is the mark of their obsolescence.
> Actually, this is not much of a reply since it engages
> with Eric's post only indirectly by evoking the same
> three terms - dialectics, the avant-garde, and the net
> - though they're walking down a different road. What
> follows is the last piece of a longer book, Twilight
> of the Idols.
>
> Hello.
>
>
> < 1 >
>
> The specter of the avant-gardes haunts the
> revolutionary imagination.  The powers of the left
> once entered into unholy alliance with the forces of
> the right to exorcise this specter: the czar of
> Bolshevism and the pope of Fascism, the PCF and
> Charles de Gaulle.  Pronounced a simultaneous threat
> and a nothing, a tragic farce of bourgeois
> individualism and political ineptitude reduced to
> monumental ineffectiveness, the specter is hastily
> written out of the pages of serious history. During
> more than a century of small triumphs and triumphant
> defeats, the monopoly over the production of this
> history has been protected and defended by the guard
> dogs of Marxism.
>
> What's behind the desire to write a manifesto, one
> that would trump Marx by mimicking the gestures of a
> beginning that returns to the same point of departure,
> invoking one or another specter who haunts the
> contemporary landscape and who will inherit the truth
> of a still imperceptible becoming? The manifesto is a
> performance, it summons an apparition that does not
> yet possess clear contours, it calls its object into
> being through an invocation, a magic ritual. The
> manifesto is no mere representation, it is itself the
> action it demands, uniting the 'we' of a new group
> through the proclamation of new laws. The church
> manifestoes of the 1640s denounced those who deviated
> from the light, summoning the bearers of the truth of
> God. The communist manifesto abolished the false god
> of the market in the name of the truth of a new group
> in fusion who would inherit the legacy of state power.
> Manifestoes may negate, but only as a means to the
> affirmation of a new truth; they are essentially
> positive, programmatic, constitutional. Sure of
> themselves, they are always written in a declarative
> mode. We are, we say, we want.
>
> It is through the laws and proclamations of their
> manifestoes that the various avant-gardes instituted
> themselves as micro-nations, states in miniature.
> Surrealism launched itself in 1924 in the form of a
> dictionary definition: 'Surrealism, noun. Psychic
> automatism in its pure state.' It proclaimed the
> purity and truth of its uncorrupted desire and
> declared openly that it proposed to institute itself
> as a totality over the fallen world and 'solve all the
> principal problems of life.'  Surrealism and the SI
> were only the most rabid forms of the avant-garde's
> identification with ideological discourse, which is
> simultaneously the logic of territoriality - it lists
> negations and abolitions, affirms goals in advance,
> demarcates borders that separate the outside from the
> inside, and denounces enemies and ideas that exceed
> the limits of its own system. The will to
> excommunication and the juridical tone of these
> movements was not a deviation, some last tragic gasp
> of the avant-gardes in decline, it was present in the
> act of their founding.
>
>  < avant.NET >
>
> The life of the avant-gardes has become a virtual
> geography. Manifestoes invoking the arrival of new
> forms of immaterial, liquiescent subversion assume
> that after the stagnation of the conservative
> eighties, the previous movements of the left,
> including the radical avant-gardes, have
> de-materialized from the streets to the 'rhizomatic'
> universe of the net. Critical Art Ensemble announce
> the disappearance of visible power: the power which
> was once incarnated in the body of the king or in the
> architecture of castles and parliament houses has
> vanished under the simultaneous compression of space
> and time. Becoming liquid, power seeps through
> cyberspace, an elusive entity that nomadically wanders
> the globe, a body without borders that changes shape
> as it moves. In vain would the war machines of
> subversion run after it on the streets. Vacated of the
> symbols and materiality of power, the streets are dead
> and not worth fighting for and defending - it is the
> control of information that has become the terrain of
> battle, and the name of resistance whispered in every
> enthusiastic ear is infowar, the appropriation of
> 'data and/or means of communication.'  The net, in all
> its beauty and terror fulfills the promise of the
> radical impulses of earlier generations. The
> revolutionary vision lives, transfigured.  As Eric
> Kluitenberg has said, 'The strategies, the conceptual
> tools, the tactics of intervention in the new digital
> hypersphere are highly familiar. They draw on the
> legacy and experience of the avant-garde movements.'
> The affirmation of the origins of tactical media
> <communication guerilla // infowar // hacktivism //  .
> . .> in the gestures of the old avant-gardes is
> invoked by artists and digerati alike; the arsenal of
> the future is constructed out of the ruins of the
> past: Duchamp, Berlin Dada, Breton, the irreproachable
> Situationists.  According to the new mythology, is
> only the geography of the gestures - their location in
> physical space - that has become obsolete. But which
> gestures, which avant-garde?
>
> < cyber terrorism >
>
> CAE has implied that cyber terrorism is impossible:
> 'How can terror happen in virtual space, that is in a
> space with no people - only information?' But people
> are not only their material bodies, but their
> relations, their accumulation of knowledge and skills,
> the information others have accumulated about them -
> and a manipulation of information can be experienced
> as a concrete threat. Some have called Netochka
> Nezvanova, the online entity who has 'destroyed'
> several mailing lists by unleashing a wave of panic
> over 'spams' against their citizens, the 'great terror
> of the net.' Just on a formal level, the resemblance
> between this particular form of 'spamming' and
> terrorism may not be so far off the mark. For the
> Social Revolutionary terrorists in Russia during the
> 1880s an assassination meant the direct removal of the
> cause of repression; after the 1890s, terrorism became
> indirect. The 'propaganda of the deed' of fin de
> siecle terrorism in France attacked an oppressive
> power by random violence against those ruled, against
> 'citizens' who were guilty for applauding the current
> order.  An initial panic ensues; State functionaries,
> under the pretext of protecting citizens impose
> increasingly rigid and intolerant rules which actually
> restrict their freedoms. The ultimate aim of the
> second phase of terrorism is to reveal the State as
> the real terrorist, in the hope that citizens will
> eventually shift the blame to those who rule.
>
> Historically this reversal has almost never worked.
> Except maybe on the Syndicate list. The 10-20 average
> daily mails that NN sent to the mailboxes of the
> netizens were frequently in the form of attacks
> against the oppressors who were administrating the
> list or against the others who commanded some form of
> power and respect as the leaders of net activism. Pit
> Shultz, Geert Lovink, Tilman Baumgaertel were called
> 'inkompetent pop.tart male imbeciles . whose m9nd
> aktivity resembles that of a housefly - only
> understand the trivial hence the state of things . . .
>  following refuse - i.e. each other.'  Andreas
> Broeckmann: one of the 'neu media kr!!ket dictators,'
> 'dezt!tut korporat.fasc!zt bagatela' who makes 'a
> total !mbez!l ov h!mzelv + h!z teror!zt anzeztrz.'
> Mark Tribe and Alex Galloway of Rhizome: 'laughable +
> destitute' Thing.net: bunch of 'inkompetent
> marionetten . invalids + posers.' Syndicate: an
> 'ART>MAFIA . DUMB + DEAD.' In the Syndicate debacle
> that followed, NN succeeded in derailing the
> discussions and forcing the citizens of the list to
> take sides - either for NN, thus supposedly on the
> side of freedom of speech and 'democracy,' or against
> her, in other words, siding with the totalitarian,
> fascist, dictator administrators of the list. For a
> moment the tactic succeeded in inverting the blame.
> After the administrators kicked NN of the list in
> secrecy, a wave of protests and accusations of fascism
> and totalitarianism followed, NN was re-s*bscribed and
> the admins quit the list taking a lot of the long term
> members with them in a wave of mass-uns*bscription.
> Ostensibly power vacated its seat, and the list was
> re-occupied in another name - in the name of freedom,
> as the story might be written in the pages of history.
>
> Alexei Shulgin once said of NN, there's nothing new
> here, we've seen it all before. Legacy of the
> avant-garde? 'da.da da + da.' Excommunication and
> terrorism were the twin faces of the avant-garde,
> excommunication as the form the internal relations
> among the group eventually took, and terrorism against
> bourgeois institutions as their tactic of external
> relation to their social context. The prudence of
> history would criticize the reprehensible
> excommunications but celebrate the hijacks and pranks
> against the establishment as strokes of brilliance.
> Bravo, epater le bourgeoisie, slap in the face of
> public taste. But both are driven by the same impulse,
> by a dogmatism convinced of the truth of its own
> theory and vision, and an intolerant dismissal of
> everyone else. The Surrealists hijacked a bourgeois
> dinner party with the same sleigh of hand as Breton
> later expelled Artaud, Bataille, Vitrac, Souppault and
> many others from the group 'by reason of their
> occupation and character.' The Lettrists hijacked a
> press conference given by Charlie Chaplin  <'you've
> identified yourself with the weak and the oppressed .
> . .  but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could
> already see the nightstick of a cop . . . Go to sleep,
> you fascist insect . . . We pray that your latest film
> will truly be your last'> with the same ardor as the
> Situationists later expelled whole nations from their
> International.  NN is the anti-climax of the
> avant-garde's hysterical nightmare of persecution:
> everyone is guilty save herself, all the names of
> net.history who pretend to be revolutionaries are in
> fact reactionary cops and corporate fascists, all
> abuse her, steal from her, terrorize her, ban her from
> lists, deny the expression of her freedom. She is the
> only one in possession of truth and virtue in this war
> of words, which is above all a war of righteousness:
>
> David Zicarelli - cycling@sirius.com  typed
>
> >>We have removed the user 'netochka nezvanova'
>
> >Truth  -  The `estimable` + `fashionable` [permit
> someone to roll the eye
> >komponents + faint theatrically] David Zicarelli has
> removed and blocked++
> >Netochka Nezvanova from the MAX forum because she has
> posted
> >a brief excerpt from an internal Cycling74
> communication which
> >David Zicarelli transmitted to all Cycling74
> employees.
>
> >>'she' intiated what could best be described as a
> terror campaign
>
> >Absolute nonsense. Tell the truth.
>
> >>that included spam to anyone who posted to the Max
> list, denial of service attacks,
>
> >Absolute nonsense. Tell the truth.
>
> >>and threatening and slanderous e-mail sent to random
> individuals at McGill.
>
> >Absolute nonsense. Tell the truth.
>
> >>I didn't see any point to subjecting myself and my
> co-workers to this type of harrassment.
>
> >Tell the truth liar. trrruth.
>
> This first NN flame war on the list for MAX users <a
> graphic programming environment for audio and video
> manipulation from multiple sources; NN's own software
> Nato 0+55 extended the capabilities of MAX> began
> after NN initiated a lawsuit against the MAX
> developers, Cycling '74. After being thrown off the
> MAX list, NN retaliated against the list admin by
> creating a site in his tribute: 'There were Web pages
> all over the place with swastikas and my name on it.'
> This first list war revealed the personal motives
> behind the attacks. Katharine Mieszkowski recently
> speculated that power and money were behind the
> seemingly idle net.pranks; when criticized in the
> past, NN has revoked her clients' software licence
> (which was already paid for), a veritable monopoly,
> she can afford to control the game and freedom of
> expression does not cut both ways.
>
> NN's brand of 'terror' is just excommunication in
> reverse, and the people who rushed to her defense on
> the Syndicate were defending what they accused the
> list administrators of: a self-certain righteousness
> that is capable only of crushing dissent. And vice
> versa, by kicking her off the list, the admins were
> stooping to the tactics they claimed she used and they
> deplored, especially since the expulsion was decided
> off the list rather than publicly by consensus. The
> excuses given later were desperate at best, shamefully
> paternalist at worst: 'nn promised to Syndicate admin
> to behave herself. it went fine in the first weeks /
> months. unfortunately, she lost control of herself
> again.' It seems, on the contrary, that NN was very
> much in control of herself and the situation, and in
> the panic that ensued on the list netizens and rulers
> alike played into her hands. For or against, the
> choice itself was a choice in choicelessness, and
> things could have played out differently. Many of NN's
> earlier posts, those that were not so abusive and
> self-serving, were provocative and amusing. It's a
> pity that they were so overshadowed by the empty
> accusations and cheap insults which became so
> repetitive, adolescent, and full of ressentiment - but
> this was a decision to be made by individual members.
> The flood of emails were not such a 'great terror';
> the insults were extremely superficial and lacking in
> substantive analysis <fascist or nazi is the easiest
> form of character attack; saying nothing, it relies
> purely on hyper-emotional reaction> and it is an
> exaggeration to say they could have wounded anyone's
> reputation. From a certain perspective, NN was by far
> the best performance on a list that had and become a
> string of announcements with little discussion. August
> 2001, when all the kitsch about democracy and
> totalitarianism hit the fan, was the list's most
> lively and interesting month, as much for what was
> said as for what remained unspoken.
>
> >From a certain other perspective, this could be seen
> as just the business of art as usual. Older
> avant-gardes and classical terrorist cells alike were
> driven by a supreme cause, by the vision of an
> absolute theory - which was the source of their
> heroism and of their tragedy. In the contemporary
> theater, no cause is important enough to die or kill
> for, nothing is 'transcendent,' and immanence has
> become the order of a night in which all cows appear
> black. The absence of a cause and the adoption of a
> nameless identity could be a promise of liberation or
> the shadow of a catastrophe. Nameless Nobody,
> self-proclaimed body without border, wandering
> purposelessly from one mailing list to another, black
> listing all the names of power in the not so general
> economy of the net. Ultimately the cause behind all
> the covert tactics and agitations is sui generis, NN
> is its own cause, terrorizing lists through seemingly
> random flames and character assassinations as a form
> of self-advertisement. The third time, history repeats
> itself as innocuous farce, without substance.
> Terrorism in abstract form, void of content,
> aestheticized and mute. The image without image  <or
> the nameless name> manufactures a myth that can be
> filled by anything, as rumors escalate and speculation
> feeds on itself. One person with multiple identities?
> A female New Zealander artist? A male Icelander
> musician? An Eastern European collective conspiracy?
> For some, the advertisement is seductive, promising
> something-I-know-not-what, the secret of the commodity
> that can be apprehended only as a fetish. Darling of
> the net who everyone loves, or loves to hate. Either
> way, all propaganda is propaganda. 'Mysterious.
> Inapprehensible. Elusive.' 'Brilliant deconstruction,
> A1 quality. Intelligent, cool' 'Geographical
> deconstruction. Gender deconstruction. Identity
> corruption.'
>
> 'NN's reputation is based on mouth 2 mouth
> adverti.cement. When something is very well
> konstruckted and designed with a degree of integrity
> it stands on its own ... All the cool girls wear NN.'
> Everything is made and unmade in the mirror image of
> consumption. You are either with us or you are uncool.
> The ultimate terror is that of being out of fashion
> with the times + + symbolically dead.
>
> < detournement? >
>
> Detourne: a verb used, among other things, to describe
> the hijacking of a plane. The SI may have come up with
> the name detournement, but the practice was first
> stumbled upon by the previous era of the avant-gardes.
> In 1919 Johannes Baader, Berlin Oberdada, interrupted
> a meeting of the Weimar National Assembly and threw
> fliers from the balcony onto the heads of the
> statesmen below announcing his candidacy for the
> presidency of the world.  The press reported that the
> country's leading politicians had been publicly
> insulted.  Probably they had been insulted before on
> many occasions, but this one was not in the form of
> ideological discourse they were familiar with. No
> assertions or rebuttals. Was it political speech? Was
> it theater? It was an answer to politics but not from
> the 'inside' by using the same language or adopting
> the same presuppositions. It was not dialectical -
> dialectics negates only what is irrational,
> inconsistent, or dogmatic in the system, ultimately to
> perfect and strengthen it. <Marx may have criticized
> the irrationality of capitalism - the theft of
> surplus, the spawning of alienation, the degradation
> and misery of those who were deprived of the fruits of
> their labor - but preserved the values and
> presuppositions of its 'rational' kernel - the
> valorization of production, the goal of continuously
> expanding productive forces, the instrumental use of
> technology. By preserving the forms but altering the
> content (putting it in the hands of the proletariat)
> the whole system can be transformed from the inside,
> made more rational, more democratic, more productive;
> eventually the form itself would change and repressive
> institutions would wither away.  By the 1960s and
> 1970s it first dawned on the ex-Marxist left
> <Castoriadis, later Baudrillard and Deleuze> that
> dialectics never gets 'outside' what it criticizes -
> its negation is already prefigured by the logic of the
> system itself. Actually Bakunin had made this same
> criticism a century before, after being thrown out of
> the First International by Marx and Engels.> Baader's
> detourned negation made no overt criticism, and put
> forward no demand for the transformation of the
> content of the Assembly's program - his demand for
> world presidency was a prank, making a joke out of
> politics rather than engaging in it on its own terms.
> He did not seek to take over the National Assembly in
> the name of a new movement. The politicians and press
> who answered the gesture did not know what to make of
> it. It was not the kind of kind of thing they were
> used to, its power to disrupt was precisely that it
> was unexpected. Detournement, in updated jargon, has
> become communication guerilla, cultural jamming,
> aesthetic sabotage, infowar - but are the gestures so
> unexpected almost a century later?
>
> The most interesting thing about RTMark is the
> illusion of the real - for a moment some unsuspecting
> visitors who entered their fake WTO or Bush or other
> sites and read the inverted messages of their pages
> did not know what to make of it since they believed
> them to be genuine sites. For these sites RTMark
> simply copied the layout, graphics and images from the
> originals, and altered the content. The fake WTO site
> <www.gatt.org, named after the General Agreement on
> Tariffs and Trade> doesn't celebrate global free trade
> but criticizes the WTO's lack of socio-environmental
> responsibility, replacing WTO documents with
> counter-documents of groups protesting globalization.
> And maybe it should be stressed that it is an
> *unsuspecting few* visitors who are fooled. The sites
> got millions of hits after the story broke in the
> mainstream press, and those rushing to check them out
> already knew they were 'fake' sites. Surprisingly,
> some bewildered few still stumble upon them and
> continue to be fooled. The fact that RTMark has gotten
> invited to speak as real representatives of the WTO
> 'by mistake' and that their hilarious performances as
> impostors of the real went unquestioned by the
> audience members is perhaps only a testimony to the
> incredible stupidity of the liquiescence of power.
>
> The then presidential-hopeful GWBush protested against
> the fake RTMark site <which accused him of hypocrisy
> and drug use> by denouncing it as a form of routine
> negative campaigning. In a sense, it could be said
> that the politicians and the press did not know what
> to make of it because it was an unexpected thing and
> they didn't recognize its language or its aims. But to
> give some credit to Bush's gullibility, RTMark's form
> of tactical media uses the same language and the same
> strategy as political ads. The gullible are confused
> because the similarity is too close.  And maybe it is
> the similar *form* of this strategy and the desire to
> be mistaken for the real thing which should be
> questioned. RTMark videos and websites, which dwell by
> choice in the language of corporate advertising,
> attempting to use the height of banality against
> itself, seem stuck by necessity in the mire of this
> same banality. RTMark productions are an occupation of
> the form <of media and capitalism in simultaneity, as
> corporate advertising> with an inversion of its
> content. When Daniel Cohn-Bendit once proposed making
> a leftist western by just changing the soundtrack,
> Debord answered that the homogenous, unbroken form of
> the western would preserve the ideology behind it,
> offering a complacent, facile consumption.  Preserving
> the form and just changing the content was
> insufficient, especially a change of content in the
> form of a reversal.  'Detournement by simple reversal
> is always the most direct and the least effective. The
> Black Mass . . . merely reverses - and thus
> simultaneously conserves - the value of that
> metaphysics.' Satanism may be heretical, but it's
> still a religion, the whole field of ritual and
> subordination before a superior power is preserved in
> it.
>
> Baader may not have aspired to become a real
> politician, but Breton did when founded a 'Bureau' of
> surrealist research and modeled the organization of
> the group on the French Communist Party.  The
> Situationists held real congresses and aspired to
> become an International <modeled after the first one>
> with altered demands. As a practice detournement
> reflected a contradiction at the level of theory
> between the recognition that fighting on the same
> terrain and wanting to be taken for the real thing is
> a seductive but inevitable trap, and the desire
> <expressed in the hijacking metaphor> to occupy the
> old buildings of power under a new name, with new
> demands. Detournement was a momentary line of flight
> out of dialectics, and also a reterritorialization on
> familiar ground.
>
> Alex Burns from Disinformation remarked that RTMark
> uses 'dialectical reasoning' - they prefer 'to subvert
> the system from within' in contrast to other acts of
> resistance which want to 'dismantle the corporate
> system altogether.'  This is not a criticism by Burns,
> who celebrates RTMark's dialectical ingenuity; the
> only danger he foresees is the external one of being
> recuperated by corporations <who can 'steal' their
> tactics>, rather than a problem with the choice of
> dialectical method itself. As a dialectical gesture,
> RTMark is an inversion of corporatism from within, an
> identification with the corporate image in order to
> reveal and oppose its abuses. In legal terms, RTMark
> is a real corporation, selling mutual funds, even if
> they are mutual funds for corporate sabotage. The
> detourned content is amusing, and the issue they raise
> is significant: corporations have aggregated powers
> under the law of limited liability that are
> technically illegal for persons: corporations have
> only rights, but no responsibility.  But RTMark
> proudly admit to using the same legal form of limited
> liability as a protection against the potential risk
> of prosecution for their sabotage activities - they
> depend on what they denounce as an abuse when used by
> 'real' corporations. Using the same graphics and
> language of the Internet brokerage sites of the late
> 1990s, RTMark mirrors the Internet stock corporation.
> Using the same tactics of exaggeration and spin as
> mass media, RTMark mirrors the banality of media
> scandals.  Mark Amerika has noted that especially in
> the Toywar campaign RTMark's press releases were
> 'skewed in a way that essentially mimics the way
> corporate press releases are skewed, complete with
> sound-bite blurbs, website addresses for further
> information, and self-reflexive advertisements for
> RTMARK art products (projects).' Taking the logic of
> corporate advertising to its limit, RTMark is not
> above skewing information to enhance its own image.
> Some of the projects which they claim under their own
> sponsorship and direction are Toywar <which was a very
> large collective effort>, FloodNet <which was
> developed by EDT, who never got any money for project
> development from RTMark> and the idea of pręt a
> revolter <colorful clothing that is ready to revolt,
> made of resistant parts of water bottles, complete
> with micro-cameras hidden in fake breasts - created
> for anti-globalization protests in Barcelona last
> summer by several different designers, though the
> project itself was initiated by the Spanish group Las
> Agencias>. RTMark may include real individuals, but is
> just an abstraction, a shell, the mirror image of a
> boss appropriating the work done by many workers in
> the struggles against corporatism.
>
> RTMark is a corporation in reverse, a corporation with
> an alternative message that mimics the same mode of
> operation as their opposition. As with any
> corporation, the aim is the maximization of profit,
> and profit is always counted in numbers.  RTMark
> define their most successful projects as those that
> 'got the most press' and in the battle for press
> coverage 'Quality is less important than quantity, I
> guess you could say, we spend a lot less time fretting
> about the gemlike qualities of projects than about
> their effectiveness. Just let them keep coming, and
> faster and faster!' The quantity of articles and
> mentions in the press housed in the archive of
> symbolic capital on RTMark website is indeed
> impressive.  Over 650 press items, including NY Times,
> Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Village
> Voice, Wired, Playboy, Fringeware, Suck, Slashdot,
> Telepolis, ArtNetWeb, ArtByte; hundreds of mentions in
> foreign press: Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Italy,
> Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland,
> Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Sweden, China, Japan,
> South Africa. In this battle over the control of the
> media by its own means of manipulation to promote the
> RTMark corporate image as a veritable monopoly of
> subversion, the most important victory is the
> accumulation of images.
>
> < infowar >
>
> The legal battle at the end of 1999 between the
> billion dollar toy dot.com eToys and the European art
> group etoy was one of the important events in the
> history of the Internet, since it was precisely the
> possible use, legality, and future direction of the
> net that were at stake. The facts of the case were
> that etoy had existed and had its domain name first;
> the demand by eToys that etoy change its domain on the
> grounds that the similarity of the names was confusing
> eToys' customers and hurting its business was spurious
> and the legal injunction it obtained against etoy was
> bordering on illegality - this all served as a
> realtime demonstration that money determines the
> rights to operate in cyberspace and is behind the
> so-called impartiality of the justice system.  But the
> myth of this epic battle suffered from its own
> exaggerations. RTMark credited the campaign which they
> directed with crippling the eToy servers and with the
> eventual '70% decline in the value of eToys stock.'
> The numbers on the Toywar site are even more
> impressive as are attributions of the causes and
> effects: 'result: within 2 months the eToys Inc. stock
> (NASDAQ: ETYS) dropped from $67 (the day the battle
> started) to $15 (the day eToys Inc. finally dropped
> the case). TOYWAR was the most expensive performance
> in art history: $4.5 billion dollars.' Reinhold
> Grether, one of the key players in the campaign,
> portrayed the war as 'a conflict between two
> lifestyles, one consumerist, giving absolute priority
> to acquisition, in this case, a domain, and the other
> artistic, declaring the exhibition of complex social
> practices, rather than art objects, as the object of
> art.' But was the war between eToys and etoy a
> conflict between consumerism and the purity of
> anti-corporate art as the social construction of an
> alternative style of life, or was it a conflict
> between different market segments of  consumerism?
> After all, as etoy has insisted over and again 'We are
> not anti-corporate. That's something people don't
> understand. We are an overdrive corporation with
> surreal goals. We sell nothing except ourselves. We
> don't promise any revenue, except excitement and maybe
> a little bit of confusion.'
>
> Etoy sells itself, it barters its image. As Geri
> Wittig remarked to etoy in an interview, 'Your look
> and your stance exudes a very stylish, militaristic
> quick response tactic.' This stylish militarism also
> depends on wearing the same uniform, looking alike,
> and giving the impression of the interchangeability of
> toy soldiers (or members of a gang).  As Etoy
> confessed, 'it makes it impossible for women to enter
> the group, or for black people to enter the group,
> because it would destroy the concept' of its
> uniformity. The Toywar campaign helped to boost sales
> not only of etoy.shares, but of the image of
> subversion which was on demand by an increasingly
> large consumer public: 'we give about five interviews
> a day in America at the moment.' After the victory,
> the toywar.shop became more specialized, selling not
> only standard etoy.shares, but offering the consumer
> the option to 'customize your purchase' by adding
> 'T-SHIRTS and CD'S to your basket.' CDs were a bargain
> at $20.  'please check the amount of articles as well
> as the total amount in USD before the final
> submission.'
>
> The many support sites that sprang up during Toywar
> capitalized on an incredibly puerile image of warfare,
> an image capable of seducing only adolescent boys,
> even if its target audience proved to be older. The
> Toywar UK site under the direction of 'Captain
> Smithers' launched its own internet offensive against
> eToys as a sign of support. The site featured e*bombs
> in the forms of alternative news service and mailing
> lists. 'The e*bomb blast radius was global and it
> rendered eToys.com powerless. VIVA la e*bomb!
> Thousands of friendly fire e*bombs detonated, and no
> one hurt! Pure 21st century FIRE POWER!' In this
> postmodern fantasy of revolution the jargon of
> righteous war has become more timid and cautious,
> eliminating the risk of action through a detour of
> rhetoric, bowing, in the end, to political
> correctness.
>
> The image of war is sexy not just in the popular
> imaginary of television, but among the more refined
> tastes of the militant left and the radical art crowd.
> The indiscriminate forms of its rhetoric and gestures
> are legion, though the mask as a symbol of the
> terrorist or the guerilla stands out as one of the new
> trends of identification, from the multitude who
> gather in the street borrowing the checkered mask of a
> Palestinian holy war, to RTMark, who don the pantyhose
> of the bank robber in their videos, and Ricardo
> Dominguez who performs the story of electronic civil
> disobedience in an EZLN mask, as a gesture of
> identification with the cause of the Zapatistas. The
> context of the performances are to evoke the
> Zapatistas' Mayan technology which differentiates
> their tactics (offering a rose or a poem or an
> unanswerable gesture as an answer to military power)
> from those of guerilla struggle of the twentieth
> century. The Zapatistas say they use masks so that
> people won't be beguiled by their beauty but pay
> attention to the power of their words.  But in this
> EDT performance, it is the power of the words that
> speak of the different form of struggle of the
> Zapatistas that is obscured as the audience identifies
> with the image of the mask. The mask is the identity,
> the words are secondary, and the identity of the mask
> is prefigured in advance by the associations it has in
> the contemporary stage of the media.
>
> The media spectacle needs a boogey of opposition to
> the righteous war of democracy and the right to
> consume, and after the collapse of the big other of
> 'Eastern Europe,' the image of a man dressed in black
> wearing a mask has now become the mass medias perfect
> fantasy, the face against which it can define its own
> values. Whatever may be behind the mask of the
> militant, the media will capitalize upon it in reverse
> for the sake of the ideology it serves. Making a
> fetish of the image of the terrorist or guerilla has
> become both pious and stupid, even in the
> aestheticized form of the avant-gardes, as the
> theatricalization of some nameless revolution. The
> identification with the logic of warfare was always
> the worst militant aspect of the avant-gardes.  If,
> the avant-gardes were a momentary instantiation of a
> great promise, speaking in a different language
> outside the banality of organized politics, they were
> simultaneously the ridiculous quarrels over names and
> concepts, vicious arguments about ideological
> correctness, exclusions of deviations, puerile antics,
> and the inflated machismo of warfare. The desire to
> proclaim the avant-garde an unfinished project -
> something triumphant that still lives and inevitably
> returns to fulfill a secret history - preserves all
> these characteristics. Above all, it preserves the
> militarism inherent in the metaphor of the
> 'avant-garde' - the avant-garde as an elite group,
> organized by strict military discipline, going out
> first and paving the way for the attack, perhaps
> sacrificing itself in the end so the army can finally
> advance the cause of its righteous war.  If this
> metaphor started out as a blank parody, it became real
> with the march of history. The avant-gardes, for all
> their dress rehearsals and posturings became, in their
> relations to each other and to the opponent they
> claimed to despise, nothing more than the magical face
> of the double, its inverted mirror. Drawing upon their
> strategies, conceptual tools, and tactics of
> intervention summons not the specter haunting a new
> epoch, but a corpse in absolute decomposition.
>
> Someone once said a long time ago 'The most urgent
> expression of freedom is the destruction of idols,
> especially when they claim to speak in the name of
> freedom.' It is true that the destruction of idols
> itself can speak in the name of a freedom that is just
> as illusory, including the destructions of the
> present. But the wisdom of silence is the most
> difficult thing to attain, since it does not reveal
> itself in the image of consumption.
>
>  < opposition >
>
> Electronic civil disobedience is neither terrorism nor
> acts of cultural jamming, detournement, or media
> pranks. CAE define the manipulation of the media in
> the service of an alternative message as a losing
> battle; any subversive message is lost in the flood of
> information or is itself detourned through spin. If
> there is such a thing as infowar, maybe it should be
> understood as the war against information rather than
> a war of counter-information. Denying the power of
> propaganda, CAE praise the effectiveness of a direct
> battle with power.  Simple trespass and blockage of
> data and their conduits can force the state or the
> military or corporations to make policy changes
> because it may prove cheaper for them than the threat
> of the loss of profits from information. As people
> joined together to physically blockade the entrances
> to the opponent's house of power in earlier forms of
> civil disobedience, participants in electronic civil
> disobedience can join a virtual sit-in from anywhere
> there is access to the internet in order to block
> access to the opponent's website. If the promise of
> ECD remained a theory until 1998 for CAE, the faction
> of the group which took the name Electronic
> Disturbance Theater actualized it in the form of
> FloodNet, a software which sends reload commands to
> the targeted site's server every few seconds. When
> enough participants are simultaneously pointing the
> FloodNet URL toward an opponent's site <Mexican
> government, Pentagon, Frankfurt Stock Exchange, eToys,
> EMF> a critical mass of users can prevent access to
> the site because there are too many requests to be
> accommodated - in theory, at least, since these kinds
> of sites can sustain millions of hits without a
> problem.
>
> But is the direct intervention of ECD about bringing
> power to the bargaining table and getting concessions
> in the form of policy change? If the aim were simple
> trespass and blockage, a single hack would be more
> efficient in bringing down a server and blocking
> information. The point of the virtual sit-ins is to
> get across how widespread the protest is rather than
> the denial of access to data or their conduits. The
> aim seems to be not trespass and blockage but gaining
> a critical mass. A policy negotiation is a closed
> form, an exchange of threats between a vanguard of
> activists and the functionaries of power; the form and
> effect of a virtual sit-in is something very different
> - a kind of contagion, a movement of outward
> expansion, the feeling of participating in something,
> even though its contours may be vague. And this vague
> feeling of participating in something that escapes the
> dialectic of global capital is often hijacked by being
> turned into the declaration of a war of opposition.
>
> When the 'multitude' come together in a virtual-sit-in
> <in opposition to one or another particular website>
> or on the street in a show of power against the forces
> of capitalism, they don't escape its dialectic. The
> form assumed by the association and linkage of
> individuals is based and mediated by the cause it is
> opposing, rather than on the desires and aspirations
> of the participants, and on their interests in each
> other. To subordinate the process of fusion to the
> goal of a coalition - driven by a single cause, one
> that is negative, directed against conquering some
> small concessions from power - is not a collaborative
> construction of a new form of being, as much as it is
> a formal repetition of a cycle of enslavement and
> retribution. Opposition misses the mark, though it is
> very successful in the media. When tactical media seek
> to smash the code, to disrupt the seamless surface of
> digital mediation, of corporate power, of whatever
> abstract form the boogey of opposition takes, they are
> determined by their enemy. They oppose the false,
> ideological shell of their enemy with
> counter-statements made from a counter-perspective - a
> perspective they never question, because it is
> self-evident.  The energy and source of their
> self-valuation derives from their act of negation.
> Negation can be a splendid thing, a source of
> exhilaration and an experience of increased power, as
> the limits imposed artificially on the self by the
> myriad forms of micro-oppressions are temporarily
> transcended, transgressed. But this is a potentially
> endless cycle of negation ad infinitum, unto death;
> the satisfaction of negation is only temporary, its
> hunger renewed again.
>
> The coalition of activists who swarm through the
> network may not be the best form for constructing a
> new entity in fusion; support for a cause, especially
> in the form of opposition to an abstract enemy, is
> easy to get for a few hours online and requires little
> commitment, but a collaboration based on trust and
> reciprocal interest in other people is more difficult.
> This kind of collaboration works best in an encounter
> that doesn't measure success in terms of numbers,
> speed, or the corporate logic of the network society,
> which always subordinates the present to the demand
> for a future goal and profit. Last year a number of
> individuals and small groups came together <including
> Ricardo Dominguez, who did not come as a
> representative of EDT> to try to establish a loose
> form of association between different net.culture
> clubs and media centers. This association was not a
> coalition, because there was no common goal or
> interest or ideological uniformity among participants
> from the different regions - Europe, east and west,
> America, north and south - and because there was no
> overall plan which could be imparted to different
> 'sections' of some would-be international.  One of the
> criticisms this meeting received was that the thing in
> fusion it invoked had no real cause for being, that it
> lacked a definitive reason for making the association
> in the first place, other than some vague aspiration
> to share what each group had in resources and
> experience with each other or a seemingly banal desire
> to travel and meet with others to participate in and
> learn about the process each had started in their own
> location. The absence of a cause can sometimes be the
> shadow of catastrophe or the promise of liberation.
>
> < 0 >
>
> In a correspondence that was neither private nor
> public, Sebastian Luetgert wrote 'it is the network -
> not empire - that is materializing before our very own
> eyes, and the multitudes are part of it. their only
> threat to the regimes of control is that they will be
> their mirror . . . the enemy of the network is not the
> activist, but the passivist. passivists don't surf:
> they have learned to wait, and they know that when
> crossing a desert there is no need for a powerbook, a
> gps phone or a press tent.' But maybe this is a false
> dilemma, the swing of a pendulum across the clockface
> of dead time. The activist in its familiar militant
> pose is a creature that should be abandoned to a
> museum of relics - the activist determined by a war
> against an oppressive power, engaged in a fight which
> consumes all his energy in reverse, convinced of the
> absolute virtue of his cause and of the correctness of
> his theory <a theory correct in inverse proportion to
> its practice> and, since possessing the correct ideas,
> endowed with the supreme calling of teaching them to
> others, especially to those who have not had the
> privilege of being schooled in the classroom of
> advanced capitalism. But invoking the passivist risks
> being construed for a celebration of the silent
> majority of consumers, secretly active in their
> absolute stasis. There are forms of action that are
> neither activist nor passivist. Somewhere, where the
> location is unimportant, there's a group of people who
> started a club <social center is not the right word,
> but sometimes the search for names is also
> unimportant> not out of a desire to be in opposition
> to any of the dominant art or cultural institutions,
> but because they wanted to create a scene that did not
> yet exist. While inside, everyone uses a form invented
> currency. Some members of the group who are graphic
> designers make posters for restaurants and bars in
> town in exchange for free vouchers so they have places
> to take their friends. They don't make any claims to
> the space they have in their own name but invite
> others to take temporary possession of it: artists,
> musicians, some local people from a half-way house for
> those considered mentally ill, even political
> theorists and sociologists. They make a lot of
> actions, but when added together their sum is not
> activism. No theory is constructed, no manifesto
> written that proclaims this form of life as the model
> of the coming revolution. There is no gospel and no
> disciples. The critics of the institutionalized left
> might perhaps snicker at this flimsy example,
> concluding that it changes absolutely nothing, that it
> will not 'overthrow' capitalism <overthrow = desire to
> rule, to become master>, that it doesn't conform to
> their vision of utopia <utopia = waiting until the
> conditions are ripe, negating the present in
> anticipation of a future whose past has already been
> glimpsed>.
>
> Zhivago once fled with his lover to the interminable
> snow plains across the barren landscape of
> revolutionary Russia. Reaching a place that most
> resembled the center of nowhere, they stopped. The
> Bolshevik police followed on their heels, moving at a
> different speed, chasing a desire that escaped their
> comprehension. They knocked at the door, asking, what
> is your agenda, what are you plotting against us, what
> do you plan to do here? Live, he answered, just live.
> If understood slowly, this is not the fatality of
> hopelessness or a sign of passive acquiescence in the
> face of an obscene demand. And if it is an
> insurrection, it is not the insurrection proclaimed
> loudly on the center stage of capital cities whose
> success is measured by how many times the police beats
> it to the ground. Knowing when to disappear, it does
> not ask to be represented. Although there are many who
> live it today, outside the speed of the media
> spectacle, their names would only be invoked in vain,
> as the idols of yet another manifesto thrown on the
> rubble-heap of history.
>
> Dialectics never died. It lives every time another
> tired exhibit of the relics of dada or situationism
> opens at the houses of culture across the world. It
> lives when the hackers who haunt the net repeat the
> slogans and gestures of the dead and then congratulate
> themselves when they are finally inducted into the
> halls of power of the Venice Biennale or Ars
> Electronica. It lives when the theorists and
> cartographers of new deterritorialized flows of desire
> sell their interests by entering a classroom to become
> functionaries of the empire of production, offering
> packaged knowledge to students who eagerly produce
> whatever stupidity is asked of them in exchange for
> the general equivalent of a grade. It lives when the
> anti-globalization 'multitude' faithfully ascend to
> the stage of negation to recite their memorized roles,
> proudly displaying the garments of an ideology that
> long ago betrayed its exhaustion.  Dialectics consumes
> the desire of life as it beats its wings against the
> limits of the impossible. As Tzara once said,
> dialectics kills - it lives by producing corpses,
> which lie strewn across an empty field where the wind
> has ceased to blow.  The field only reveals its own
> folly and despair; and victory is the illusion of
> philosophers and fools.
>
>
>
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