THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE Critical Art Ensemble Part 4 of 7 Published by Autonomedia ISBN 1-57027-006-6 New theater should tell the viewer how to resist authority, regardless of its source along the political continuum. If we seek liberation through the control of our own images, performance should illustrate resistant processes and explicitly show how to achieve autonomy, however temporary it might be. Self-presentation revealed in the performance must not be perceived by the audience as a self image that should necessarily be copied, as this will end merely as a shift in coding regimes. Rather, one should seek an aesthetics of confusion that reveals potential choices, thus collapsing the bourgeois aesthetic of efficiency. Already here and yet always one step ahead: It seems that virtual reality is always about to arrive with the next technological breakthrough. On the other hand, that curious feeling--that we are %currently% in a real environment-- leads to the conclusion that virtual reality is located in the near future, in science fiction, or in an as-yet undeveloped technology. Perhaps the fact that we are already enveloped by the virtual is what makes it so unrecognizable. Perhaps it is because a promise has been issued by technologues, that the boundary between everyday life and virtual life will soon congeal, forming completely separate theaters. These promises are what keep the virtual forever invisible. The virtual theater promised by the technologues, like everyday life, will have an enveloping effect. it will be the first engine of the virtual where people will be able to physically interact and have a degree of control over their identities, narrative trajectories, and the objects of interaction. Unlike painting, theater, film or television, the new virtual theater will make screenal mediation transparent and offer the appearance of unframed experience. This is the idea of virtual reality proper, in its technical sense. However, this technology does not really exist, except in the crudest of forms, and functions primarily as a game. For this reason, the virtual %stage% seems to be nothing worth noting, but as suggested herein, it is already interlocked with everyday life, and already controls the performances of this theater. Should virtual reality proper make its appearance in culture, it must not be confused with virtual power. At present, virtual reality and its promise act as deflectors to turn vision away from the electronic source of domination and authority. The promise of a cybernetic performative matrix serves to alienate us further from our electronic counterparts, falsely leading us to continue believing that electronic bodies do not really exist, let alone that they are signs of authoritarian power. A theater of resistance can be established only if we understand that the virtual world is in the here and now. The Situationists were correct in their claim that power resides in the spectacle; however, this claim was truer in the past- -when the opening shots were fired in the revolution of the economy of desire over the economy of production. Information technology quickly divorced power from the spectacle, and power now wanders invisibly in a cybernetic realm outside of everyday life. Spectacle has become the site of mediation, not so much between social relationships proper, but between the concrete and the virtual worlds, the sedentary and the nomadic, the organic and the electronic, and the present and the absent. To this extent, performance cannot concentrate solely on the virtual. The electronic elements of spectacle are also of great importance and require further investigation, especially since this is the side of the spectacle that mutates at a velocity that parallels consumption. (Architecture and other subelectronic visual markers of the spectacle are not as significant. These forms change too slowly and access to them is limited by geography.) In the electronic image one can detect the clearest traces of the cyberelite, but more importantly, this image is also the source which redistributes identities and lifestyles suitable for excessive consumption. This new social relationship between the electronic body (the body without organs) and the organic body is one of the best resources for performance material. Performance resources must go beyond the organic body, which at present acts as the master link in performative models of representation. In the age of electronic media, it is inappropriate to argue that performance exhausts itself under the sign of the organic. After all, the electronic body is always performing, even if %in absentia% on every stage. There is every reason to desire the electronic body, and every reason to despise it. This pathological struggle occurs when one views the electronic body, and feelings of sympathy (Husserl) and envy (Benjamin) implode in a schizophrenic moment. As Baudrillard states: "In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion. The schizophrenic is not, as generally claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality, but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world." In the debris of intersubjectivity, the organic and the electronic face each other. The electronic body looks so real. It moves around, it gazes back, it communicates. Its appearance is our appearance. Identity manifests and is reinforced, as subjectivity is extracted/imposed by the electronic other. How can such a perception not conjure a sympathetic response? Yet in that same instant of unity comes the burning feeling of separation born of envy. The identity of the electronic body is not our own. We must eternally consume something to make our appearance more like its appearance. The desire for greater access to the signs of beauty, health, and intelligence, through the unceasing accumulation of cultural artifacts, brutally reminds us that the perfect excess of the electronic body is not our own. The limitations of the organic abound, and what is achieved becomes vulgar and unnecessary at the point of achievement. All the remains is the unbearable moment of enriched privation. Sympathy and envy are forever spliced together in the form of a hideous Siamese twin. This is the performance of everyday life, so near, so instantaneous, eternally recurring. Artaud's only misjudgment was his belief that the body without organs had yet to be created. The electronic body is the body without organs. It already dominates performance, and has recentered the theater around empty identity and empty desire. The body without organs is the perfect body-- forever reproducible. No reduction to biology now. Two hundred Elvis clones appear on screen. Separate them: Turn the channel; play the tape. Each performance is on an eternal loop. These clones were not made in a test tube; they reproduce of their own accord, each as precise and as perfect as the last. No fluids, no plagues, no interruptions. The orifices of the body without organs are sewn tightly shut. No consumption, no excretion, no interruptions. Such freedom: Safely screened off from the virtual catastrophes of war, capital, gender, or any other manifestation teetering at the brink of a crash, the body without organs is free to drift in the electronic rhizome. The theater of the street and its associated cultural debris collapses. Civilization has been washed clean--progress is complete--dirt, trash, rot, and rubble have been screened off and erased from the perfect world of the electronic body. The electronic body, free of the flesh, free of the economy of desire, has escaped the pain of becoming. What is the fate of the organic body, caught between sympathy and envy, forever following in the shadow of the body without organs? Very simply, the flesh is sacrificed--carved into layers that better serve various economies. This is not the Cartesian dualism valued by the cyberpunk ("Hence, at least through the instrumentality of the Virtual power, mind can exist apart from body, and body apart from mind"), in which the body is no more than a slab of meat. It is not simply a matter of downloading the mind and trashing the body. Rather, the body is divided between surface and depth, between dry and wet. Since spectacle is a dry surface image, the body must reflect that image. The body becomes its mirror, or perhaps more accurately, its xerox. It is paper onto which designer gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle are inscribed. As with any surface of inscription, it must be dry if it is to run through the sight machine. It must also be flat and void of depth (desire). The only acceptable desire is the desire to consume the spectacle's texts. As image cascades down through various classes of consumption, the resolution of the original decays, until nothing is left but the body as receptacle of water. This is the body sacrificed to the anti-economy. It is the abject body, left to wander the street in misery ("What is sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror I have spoken of, a fetid, sticky object without boundaries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death"). The body which signifies the absence of rationalized economic desire is that which we are taught to fear. It is the sign of the organic itself; it is the primordial soup, the placenta-filled womb to which there can be no return. To mention the scared, or worse, to display signs of the organic, the code of death, is to reject economic inscription. To do so is to become one of the abject, and to suffer great punishment. Many performers have tried to reinstate the organic within the network of value, but they are unable to overcome the power of the body without organs (BwO). The BwO is always there with them, on the stage and in the audience. The best result produced from such work is a cheer for deviance, but the sign of deviance is forever broken. Simply putting on a counterspectacle within the theater of the abject is not enough. It only servers to confirm what is already known: do not mention the organic and its untamed desire, or its yearning for death. Such spectacle is quickly reduced to an aberration, or a peculiar idiosyncrasy. The organic and the electronic must explicitly clash in an attempt to open the rigid hierarchical closure that is presented every day by the engines of the spectacle. To take the most obvious example, this closure is crucial to the success of any horror movie. In every case, horror films express the BwO overcoming the sign of the organic. Spilled guts, sticky goo, splitting skin, erupting pus, uncontrolled excrement, all incite horror in the viewer. It reminds h/er of the organic, that uncontrolled watery excess simply waiting to burst through the seamless xerox surface. The horror movie makes the organic--as well as the means by which it must be punished for its appearance--visible. There are two fundamental rules for simulating horror in spectacular society: The innocent (BwO) must suffer (eat the sacrifice), and the guilty (subelectronic desire) must be punished. The replaying of these two fundamental myths in spectacular endeavors keeps people buying. It makes known that all must aspire to be the innocent and virginal BwO, and that all must block the organic with accumulated piles of manufactured excess. This is the performance that must be disturbed, but it must be disturbed electronically. If the BwO is conceived of as appearance of self contained in screenal space, it is nearly supernatural to think that the BwO can possess flesh and walk the earth. It is during the time of possession that the BwO is the most vulnerable to the appearance of organic deficiencies, and yet, this is also the time when the BwO can present itself as an entity separate from spectacle, thus reinforcing its ideal image as existing in the realm of real achievement. The phenomenon of flesh possession by the BwO is commonly referred to as a celebrity. The celebrity acts as empirical proof positive that electronic appearance is still dependent on the organic. In this form the BwO is not just a mediated screenal vision, but can also be touched, so that it deflects thought away from the categories of the recombinant, and toward the nostalgia of essentialism. Is it any wonder that celebrities are hounded for autographs or any other artifact that can act as a trace of comfort to those desiring the assurances of the pre-electronic order? The construction of the electronic theater has been completed by nomadic power. The Situationists alarmed us to its construction when they presented their critique of the spectacle. Indeed, the melding of architecture, graphic design, radio, television and film have come to constitute the spectacular stage, but its logistical support in backstage virtual technology had yet to fully appear. The strategic error came when anachronistic forms of resistance (occupations, strikes, protests, etc.) were used as a means to stop construction. One of the many failures of the revolutionary actions of the late 60s and early 70s is that they neither attacked the electronic theater nor employed nomadic oppositional tactics. The theater of operations was perceived as purely sedentary, without nomadic component, and was thereby situated in the binary of offense/defense. Within the electronic theater, strategy consists of pure offense. Surveillance systems are the only remaining defensive trace. The trick is never to be caught off guard, always to track the opposition's movements, thus preventing the disappearance of the opponents. The other option is to establish temporary blockage points that allow time to regroup and begin a counter-offensive. The defensive posture of fortification is unrealistic. Unfortunately this has traditionally been the tactic (occupation) chosen by the resistance. This was a proper means of resistance against spectacular architecture, but the electronic theater remained untouched and continued expanding its domain. Once again, the culture of resistance is working primarily from a model of critique, and as always, is moving very slowly off the mark in this endeavor, preferring to continue engaging cultural and political bunkers. However, all is not lost. Because of the lack of fortifications in the electronic theater, there are always windows and gaps ripe for disturbance. Unfortunately, such resistance can only come from the technocratic class, and it must occur before surveillance systems become too well-distributed. The performance of the politicized hacker should be the ultimate in performative resistance. Compared to cyberspace resistance techniques, possible strategies for the cultural producer are much more modest. These producers can re-present the electronic theater for what it is, by creating simulations of performative control that call attention to the technology and methods of control. The other strategy is to attempt to reestablish the organic body in arenas other than the abject and the deviant; however, this performance has no meaning other than to replay the past, unless it is contrasted with the mythic standing of the BwO. To take this approach is not to uncover the invisible, but to impose the vacuum of scepticism on the visible. With either option, the performer must appropriate and occupy the electronic theater. It is unwise to wait until virtual reality has the trappings of a classical theater--one into which the performer and viewer may physically enter and which is enveloped by artificial (electronic) surroundings. As stated earlier, resistant performers must establish those interlocking recombinant stages which oscillate between the theater of everyday life and the virtual theater. Such actions will help develop practical performance models--ones which lend themselves to an autonomous performative matrix, rather than ones in which the performers are automatons, replaying the creations of designer culture. Resistant theater is electronic theater. ================================================================= %Case 43% From the notebooks of Jacques Lacan From the darkness a pre-recorded voice begins to overlap itself in "commentary" on a certain "Case 43" and discussion of the "imaginary status of economic consumption." Then Fon van Voerkom's drawing, "a painful solution," appears on large screen. A few moments later an eye appears on two TV monitors, from which a distorted voice begins to answer the "commentary." The "subject" enters and stands in front of the screen, then begins to make a series of "statements." The Subject: Born to consume just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it, mass consumption necessitates self consumption, just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it auto-cannibalism is the material signifier of excess consumption, just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it excess consumption is the logic of economic narcissism, just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it mass consumption equals self-consumption, just for the fun of it. Auto- cannibalism is the logic of fashion. Deconstruction just for the fun of it. Auto-cannibalism is the praxis of everyday life: I chew my nails just for the fun of it; I eat my hair just for the fun of it; I eat myself just for the fun of it. Consumption is concerned with the internalization of objects, just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it we consume the objects in order to make them "real," just for the fun of it. Just for the fun of it I eat myself in order to be "real," just for the fun of it. Auto-cannibalism is created just for the fun of it; planned, just for the fun of it; organized through social production, just for the fun of it. We are dogs in love with our own vomit. This is not an aesthetic transgression, this is not a ritual sacrifice, this is not body art, it is only self- consumption, just for the fun of it... just for the taste of it. The "Subject" then takes out a razor blade and cuts the palm of his hand. As the blood begins to flow, the "Subject" drinks the blood for a few moments and then walks away. The "commentary" ends, the large screen image ends, and then the two TV monitors are turned off. ================================================================= %Tongue Spasms% The mouth fragments the body. What remains? A narrow constipation, a violent meaning that makes vomit reason. The grotesque colonization of the oral cavity chews on the silenced body and spits out a bestiality of signs. What remains? Spasms. %The screenal tongue floats freely from its pillars. A sliding surrealistic appendage.% The eye spasms before the virtual tongue, blinding the dominant need for appropriation. What remains after the system digests everything? A nomadic tongue riding the waves of its digital secretions. A post-biological cannibalism that reborders the body. What remains? %The tongue no longer occupies one place.% The nipple is the matrix of a lost cause, a nostalgia of a network plurality in which one is too few and two is only one possibility. What remains? As screenal tongues cleave and suck the pacifier of unreal ideologies and unreal referents, the cancer of the techno-democracy reveals itself. The nipples mandate the electronic passion of diachronic doubles that blur desire and labor. %Cyber saliva slides in little jerks, punctuating farts and knuckle cracks.% The spasm of digital bytes legitimizes the violence of information. Both the left and right hand are driven by the ritual of representation and sacrifice before the keyboard of dromographic speed. What remains? Hyper-real hands, sociologically unconscious desiring machines, always already possessed. What remains? %The sex speaks of a language based on lubricants, a different kind of saliva.% The virtual tongue fuses with the hot and cold units of pleasure. Unlike things join, tugging sensory hair, and a cannibalism is turned inward. Diseased rumors float back and forth between nano peckers and macro cunts. What remains? A discharge of blind desire moving in and out of virtually gossiping genitals. %Would the virtual tongue multiply and separate toes or simply lick between them?% The big toe is the horror of a base materialism that spasms beyond suitable discourse. Toes lead an ignoble life, seducing the data base with corns, blocking electronic interface with calluses and resisting the drift of information with dirty bunions. What remains after the system digests everything? The ecstatic deformity of pure labor, laughing before the solar anus, flicking mud at the virtual body above it. What remains? The brutal seduction of abandonment more acute in movement. %The spasm of the digital body breaks open the orifice of profound physical impulses.% The anal night calls the virtual tongue to leave the mouth and enter it, red and obscene. An eruptive force of luminous thirst that demands indecent rupture and debauched hacking. What remains? An ontology of farts, of breathless lacerations that reborder the body and begin to speak. A revolutionary breakthrough of a post-biological sound. What remains after the system digests everything? Virtual gas. ================================================================= %Body without Organs% (first manifestation) A series of appropriated images appear on 3 TV monitors which refer to the particular vectors that mark the BwO. As the images flow across the screens, a silent "body" moves through the spectators, while 2 voices enunciate the necessity of bodily aphanisis--BwO. Voice 1: No more cocks. No more cunts. BwO now. All extensions must be cut off. All orifices must be sewn up-- plugged up. We must rid ourselves of the biological, empty ourselves of it. All bio-fascism must be ripped out and sealed up in the clear jars of the museum, so that we will never forget the pain of somatic tyranny. Voice 2: For the biggest lie ever was to frame humans as an organism of consuming, assimilating, incubating, excreting, creating a whole hierarchy of latent functions. Voice 1: So we will never forget the late-capitalist physiology that bites, sucks, devours--it is driven by the bio-destiny of the oral hole: consumption, assimilation, incorporation--the mouth must be suppressed, repressed. BwO now. Voice 2: For too long we have been caught in the circle of the organism, between the goat's anus and the mouth of God, between the logic of the cock and the cunt, the One and the Zero, the cause and the effect--let nothing flow--let nothing pass--BwO now. Voice 1: The excretion of surplus-value imprisons us in shit-economics: the bio-machine eats in Africa, digests in Asia, and dumps its excess in the first world. The anal force must be eradicated, eliminated. BwO now. Voice 2: Let us empty the body of its retensions, of its expulsions, of its paranoid dichotomies, of its compulsive production, of its hysterical dissemination, of its neurotic interpretations--let us go further still; we haven't sufficiently dismantled our selves. The "body" kneels before a chair and takes out the "imaginary phallus" and begins to cut it off. Voice 1: Let us strip ourselves of one part of the body- despot: an eye, an ear, any piece of epidermis, cut off the cock, sew up the cunt, plug up the asshole--staple your mouth shut and remain silent forever. Let us all empty the body. Voice 2: Let us all empty the body, that coagulated nothingness, and flush it down the toilet: no more shit- economics, no more urinal-politics. Voice 2: Let us vanish into the post-biological continuum. The "body" places the "imaginary phallus" in a clear jar and seals it, then walks away, leaving the monitors behind. Voice 2: Dialectical evolution is over--BwO now. Voices 1 & 2: BwO now.