"Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter's system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content."
Adam Curtis begins talking about networks and self-organisation in the second episode of Machines Of Loving Grace [ep1] [ep2], and his claims range from muddled to misinformed and at worst misleading. It's become painful to watch him cherry-pick events and paradigms from different social periods in history, while linking his dubious trajectories with fascinating archive footage.
Take one example: He offers experimental west coast communities of the late sixties as proof that self-organising networks are not an apt model for human society, because they can't deal with the emergence of power. He claims that this vision had flawed egalitarian aims (true). He extrapolates this conclusion to recent global uprisings, effectively saying that all self-organising movements are doomed to failure, because, you know, humans like power, and our belief in self-organising systems is based on misplaced notions of equilibrium (false since about 1970). An equilibrium which we mistakenly believe in as the result of a gross simplification of nature enshrined in computer models (false since about 1970).
Modern science does not tell us that self-organising systems are about steady state equilibrium. It tells us the opposite: that they are complex, and that these complex systems have many (fragile) stable states which break down into chaos easily. He seems to be in denial about the fact that cybernetics was superseded by complexity as a paradigm for understanding non-linear dynamics in the 70s. We can see this in the body of discourse, which the machine will now illustrate for us:
The intersection of complexity and cybernetics in the 70s reflects the discourse, which affected economics, ecology, and the social sciences. That's 40 years ago, long before any of the uprisings he talks about and at about the time of the experimental communities he depicts. Clearly, economic theory was no longer concerned with steady state solutions by the Clinton era (Episode 1).
In fact, as early as 1925 ecology had begun to explore the fragility of equilibria (Lotka-Volterra's logistic population equations, which break down into multi-stable states through bifurcations at certain points in the parameter space), whilst my own colleagues (Wilson, Batty) were already looking at complexity in human society by the late 70s.
So we know very well that self-organising networks in human society are not a means of creating equality or a steady state stability. Even a cursory understanding of a self-organised network like the web (Barabasi) will show you that node degree distributions fall into power laws, with small numbers of powerful hubs and long tails of less influential nodes. But basing a social critique of self-organisation on this is flawed for anyone but a die-hard Marxist (who believes in an egalitarian society) or an early systems theorist (who believes in a stable society). This does not discredit self-organisation as a way of say, creating a participatory democracy, or creating a global information network, because these projects are not explicitly about creating equality or stability, they are about making society inclusive, making information accessible, and connecting people. These are laudable social goals for a complex age. These projects have an implied emergent order to them, a complex order, not 'stable' in any naive meaning of the term.
What Adam in his retronautical trajectories hasn't grasped is that we are living in an age of complexity, not a failed cybernetic society. It is an 'age' of complexity because we are beginning to digest the paradigm into our popular consciousness, including our social structures. Few people have developed a good critique of complexity (Castells might be trying, figures like Luhmann and more recently De Landa have produced some of the theory), whereas a critique of early systems theory is just far too easy. The social sciences demolished it in the 80s. By contrast, his attack on self-organisation fails because he has no convincing body of social theory to fall back on. Self-organisation is a feature of our complex age, not of a bygone cybernetic utopia. I wonder if he will deal with this in his concluding episode.
In his latest cognitive mapping exercise, Curtis comes across as everything Jameson feared, his map appears to be out to debunk anything that isn't true Marxism as 'unrevolutionary', and quickly descends into either conspiracy or pastiche. Machines are generally cast as a controlling force acting on humanity in ways we can't affect, as we are mere nodes (the tired, reductive discourse of techno-determinism), so it follows that techno-utopians aren't proper revolutionaries. He's then peppered this with some David Harvey lite.
Ultimately the work's distinctive aesthetic (typography, soundtrack, editing) triumphs over its attempts at a coherent argument, confirmation of its "slippage into sheer theme".
A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity will become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?
Abraham Cruzvillegas was brought up in the self-built district of Mexico City, Colonia Ajusco. His parents built their own house (here), as did the rest of their community. Infrastructure and resources were all produced or sourced informally. Here's the DIY scene Cruzvillegas sets in his book,
Every weekend there was a festive air around the dusty activities of moving chalk, cement and sand; the women would cook and help to carry water, haul stones, bricks, bags of cement, buckets of sand or fizzy drinks, under a burning sun, in a challenging atmosphere moved by a spirit of busy and efficient collectivity. On what years later would become known as streets, the men and women of the community would stir the huge bowl of cement to the rhythm of cumbias, songs by José José, ranchera ballads, and there would be no shortage of beer, pulque or fruit juices to keep it all going.
Cruzvillegas has documented the evolution of his self-built barrio, producing photographs and a range of testimonies from the residents, recounting the relationship between the population & building materials — they often built from the natural volcanic rock on the site — as well as discussing the social, political & cultural formations that arose, imparting a great sense of what it must have been like to participate in the construction of what Mexicans call the ciudades perdidas (lost cities). His personal story is a kind of entry point for grappling with the roots, mechanics & repercussions of spontaneous organization in informal urban areas.
Between Friday and Sunday, while we were growing up, fragments of homes were built with a dynamic that some more than others joined in with. Water was brought in tins, buckets or tin cans originally used for vegetable fat, hung from a strong pole that bent in the middle - it was balanced across someone’s back so that it wouldn’t spill and he wouldn’t fall on the uneven ground. It was also brought on request in bins from Primera Parada (First Stop), so-called because at that time it was the only place where you could pick up public transport.
There were sometimes real conflicts over the monopolising of some specific service. Accidentally, the drinking water tap was in front of someone’s shabby little home; absurdly, they then became the ‘owners’ of the water. There was an owner of light, an owner of a telegraph pole, an owner of the street and even someone who owned the rubbish-always a source of excellent building materials.
Cruzvillegas has gone on to explore the aesthetics of this kind of construction, basing his art practice on notions of auto-construcción,
Windowless constructions, wooden shutters, tile and linoleum floors, walls with a plasterboard finish, plastic mouldings and aluminium windows, can be chosen on the spot, at a moment when the visual intention, the urgent need for comfort, functional ingenuity and lack of resources combine. That is why the lack of planning or the apparent stylistic incongruity of many self-built structures are also ideological, with a social and economic basis, even when apparently at their most frivolous. The formal configuration of the houses is first rooted in intuition, in the instinct for survival and the distant reference to what a decent life means, that is satisfying all vital needs, including the visual character of the day to day environment, its objects, its ornaments, and the physical relationship with things – ergonomics straight from the heart.
Century is almost definitely the best 'introduction' to the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Compiled from a set of lectures taking as their subject the 20th Century, it makes for some remarkable reading and gently introduces aspects of his wider philosophical vision. What I'm most struck by is the Lacanian influences and his ability to examine the Century in terms of what it says about itself. It's tantamount to the psychoanalysis of an epoch and illuminates his central thesis that the common thread behind the significant developments of the century is a passion for the real (where the 'real' takes a Lacanian meaning). His mathematically grounded ontology (based on Cantor-fuelled set theory), thoughts on multiplicity and Marxism are also subtly on display in these lectures.
Badiou is passionate, highly readable, succinct and immensely knowledgeable on the literature, visual art, poetry and politics of the Century. He makes seemingly simple, profound statements over and over again whilst examining Brecht, Breton, Mao, Mandelstam, Celan, Mallarme and others. If you've trawled through your fair share of Derrida and Foucault, Badiou is a refreshing, brilliant counterpoint with an astoundingly complete and mature ontology of his own.
I leave you with this drawing by Badiou himself, produced during a lecture entitled 'Truth procedure in politics':
Uncanny similarity in conduct between Microsoft, Scientology and Neo-con Republicans here, all going ahead and creating their own new realities. Conclusion: positions of such power allow organisations to disregard the actual state of the universe. By this logic, Microsoft is purely an ideology machine and no longer a technology company.
This illuminating 'architecture' drawing from Microsoft manages to pack six (awful) logos and two pieces of packaging onto one stupid schematic. If you're in Microsoft's marketing department, can you please do us all a favour and take extended leave? Please? And leave Visio alone. It's not for you.
1950 Encephaloscript EP 502 – 4 to 16 channel EEG, From the forthcoming 'Sleeping & Dreams' exhibition at the Wellcome Trust building
Henry Wellcome's esoteric personal collection of artefacts from the history of medicine is housed inside the renovated Wellcome Trust building on Euston Road (Euston Square station). The Trust has a huge public exhibition space alongside the permanent collection, currently exhibiting 'The Heart'. It's a great trawl through the history of medical science with outstanding exhibits displayed with care and attention. Included in the collection are objects as disparate as Ayurvedic anatomical drawings, centuries old Japanese dildos, collections of artifical eyes, a Bosch painting, 19th century medical chairs, a fully functioning modern heart/lung machine and a collection of prosthetic limbs through the ages. They have an exhibition on 'Sleeping & Dreams' coming up. Don't miss.
Listen to 14 Live Sets from Supersonic 2007 in their entirety. Supersonic was held in Birmingham in July and included folks such as Sunn O))), Jazkamer, Mogwai, Modified Toy Orchestra and Wolf Eyes.
Probably the most important British architectural undertaking of the post-war period, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood's (never realised) Fun Palace would have changed the complexion of East London, at least for a decade (Price didn't believe in 'permanent' architecture) but I suspect far longer.
Essentially a re-programmable cultural space built on the principle of work as 'play', Fun Palace was 20-30 years ahead of its time, displaying an attitude towards technology that has since faded from a lot of architectural practice.
Fun Palace was composed essentially of a scaffolding housing massive rotatable walkways and movable wall components (two cranes presided over the building). Cybernetic regulation systems were planned (perhaps naively) to control everything from scheduling to programming to flow of people.
All images are from the Architecture Association.
Ironically, one of the sites earmarked for the Fun Palace in 1964 is now part of the Olympic Masterplan in the Lea Valley - an aquatic center will sit on the site. A plan whose 'cultural legacy' promises seem both vague and lacking in conviction.
Fun Palace, for all its utopian principles, was a project pursued with conviction and designed in detail. Its legacy lives on in various Fun Palaces since realized, including the Pompidou and Toyo Ito's Sendai Media Center (video torrent).
Now I know what Sontag was on about. I can't think of a better work of art that expresses what the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe actually meant than this one. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Bela Tarr at senses of cinema:
FD & MLC: Do you use storyboards?
BT: No. Storyboards are stupid, stupid things... the story's only a part of the movie because the other things, time, rhythm, noises and...
FD & MLC: Music?
BT: Music, of course. And we are just trying to find something like a complex or total movie which isn't only the story...
FD & MLC: Thematically, your films' depiction of a world on the brink of catastrophe seems to link up with a lot of other films made lately, Pola X for example.
BT: I'm sorry, in the past four years I haven't seen anything.
Fatcat have recently released a compilation of Brighton-based Semiconductor's audiovisual work on DVD, and I must say it's great. I particularly like the 'Microclimates' piece, in which real landscapes are subtly altered. You may have seen a number of these pieces before, but it's well worth the compilation. More here.
Nestled deep in Jacques Attali's brilliant multi-disciplinary analysis of sound in human society, 'Noise - the political economy of music', i found this,
Inevitably, the statistical evaluation of the quantity of the representation will be adopted. The usage of music will be evaluated exclusively by polls determining the quantity of the music broadcast. Musicians will be renumerated according to statistical keys and treated as producers of a stockpile of undifferentiated raw material. This shift relates to a statistical reality: the disappearance of use-value in mass production and the final triumph of exchange-value.
Attali's fourth stage (after sacrifice, representation and repetition) is composition, in which he puts his money on technology liberating the music makers from the aforementioned scenario.
If you haven't been exposed to Attali's oft-quoted work, try this for a provocative hypothesis,
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.
Bernd and Hilla Becher constructed a typology of industrial buildings in post-war Germany. It's an amazing body of work. They are the most productive collaborating couple i can think of. Lovegrove says, "industrial design is the art of the 21st Century", and the engineer in me, the one that correlates beauty and function, is tempted to agree. It's the same part of me, however, that fondly recalls the smell and thick layers of white powder inside ammonia chemical plants. Go figure.
The single most important piece of writing I read in 2006; Sennett's 1976 study of the public and private sphere through the ages (in particular through the last four centuries) is erudite, expansive, thought-provoking and profound. Defining the city as "the place where strangers meet", Sennett goes on to demonstrate the breakdown of the public sphere by the emergence of personality, the cult of the individual and the erosion of the boundary separating public from private. Sennett is a sociologist with the ability to study the bigger picture without getting lost in a statistical labyrinth. Here he takes a selection of detailed observations scattered through the centuries, probing deeply into the social relations of one particular era or location at a time (he dubs the technique "postholing"), and brings them into a wider ideological frame. It makes for highly interesting reading.
Sennett believes the public sphere has been in deep crisis for quite some time, that the public and private need be clearly distinguished for healthy social relations to exist, that personality is a narcissistic construct that threatens public discourse, that public space in our cities should be rich with interaction as it once was, that we endlessly seek the intimate in public interactions. The book includes an analysis on the social relations that brought about cosmopolitanism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, clothing and its evolving role in identity, myriad observations on the impact of urban planning on social interactions and a lot more.
I'm curious to know how Sennett views the hyperlinked 'social network' environment of the present day. He's talking in kensington next week at an RCA debate, so perhaps i'll have a chance to ask him myself at some point.
Anyway, essential reading for anyone with a commitment to social software (beyond the 2.0 hype machine).
This issue of Mono.Kultur is an interview with dance music icon Wolfgang Voigt (a man with too many pseudonyms to mention), with some really beautiful photography by Juergen Teller, designed by my friend Laurent, of Reala. It's a great little booklet. More here.
Those who've been following the story will know i had my last analogue camera stolen at gunpoint on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. I've been digital ever since, but recently started hankering for printable media again. Should have snapped the Horizon Kompakt with a 120 degree lens but i want to blow these up, so opted for the medium format Holga. Both are from lomo.
On a photography tip, i recently picked up David Robinson's excellent series on themed landscapes (shot with a Horizon?), entitled Wonderland. Here's a shot from that collection:
For further reading on the subject try Baudrillard's America - in particular his fascination with Disneyworld.
Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one.
- Joshua Kit Clayton, website announcement upon the closure of record label Orthlorng Musork.
All sorts of crazy good stuff going on at the Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park this weekend - like Cory Doctorow hanging out with Cecil Balmond and Rem Koolhaas chatting to Zaha Hadid and Ken Loach and Liam Gillick and a Thomas Demand show and open air screenings to cap it all off. More here.
A weekend retreat for a classical musician in Japan. Girl plays the violin for Alain de Botton (a popular philosopher with a receding hairline) while he looks out on the forest. This is the scene.
De Botton's main observation in this TV program is that the trite aesthetic traditionalism of the British means most of us aren't living in homes that reflect the age we live in. We seem averse as a society to the idea of modern architecture, whereas the japanese effortlessly blend age-old religious values with modern materials and structures. For the Brits, when it comes to architecture, traditional is good and modern is ugly by default. Potential mass scale post-industrial fallout with design, subjugation to our nation's Most Great History or just plain apprehension. Not sure.
I made a noise video from my old handycam tapes. I've found myself coming back to it quite a lot over the past few days. Here's a low resolution excerpt(avi) captured on my digital camera (original still vhs right now).
Hard to think one company could come up with design excellence like my old handycam as well as design crimes such as the jewel case (what an environmentally damaging design, aside from its aesthetic and functional problems), all in one decade.
I have a phobia of jewel cases. I had to encode all my CD's to digital format just so i could throw them away.
This handycam features a single battery pack that plugs into the 8mm tape player, the camera and the battery charger as well. That's modular design. The whole kit comes in a metal handycam briefcase. Testament to what was arguably a golden age in technology product design.
Still works to this day (more than 20 years of use). Try saying that of your Sony Cybershot in 2026.
Showed up at a talk on DIY culture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here in London, mainly to support a couple of good friends, Sheikh and Frances, who happened to be sitting on the panel. Aside from the irony of sitting around talking about DIY culture at an institution on the Mall (which is regal territory, in case you don't know London), it was worth the trip.
The panel consisted of,
A kid from Universal music who had a real guilt complex as to his role at a large media behemoth. He couldn't go two sentences without saying 'universal' and making self-deprecating jokes about being 'evil'. His name was Luke and he seemed nice enough.
A musician called Fink from the Ninja Tunes record label.
Nick Luscombe, a radio presenter (XFM) who's curating all the music events at the ICA right now. Very nice chap.
Frances, who edits a print magazine called Plan B.
Sheikh, who ran Absorb.org (an electronic music resource) for 10 years and now blogs about digital music
The concepts of a 'mainstream' and an 'underground' are laid to rest by networked culture. There are only open and closed networks. Everything is flat.
Top down control structures (like major labels) are unable to assure quality control in the same way bottom up structures can. In networked culture, quality bubbles up from the bottom, and the role of large entities (like major record labels) as arbiters of taste is undermined as a result.
Collaborative filtering in trust-based networks is the way in which networked culture will deal with information overload.
The printed press' hallowed notion of 'genre' is under threat through the processes of user-generated metadata that describe Folksonomy.
The concept of DIY is less relevant to networked youth culture today as it was when we grew up (with movements like Hardcore). DIT - Do It Together - which finds it's roots in the Open Source movement's model of production, is a far more relevant paradigm today.
Bit-torrent is currently the most powerful distribution technology thrown up by the web.
DIY culture was always about control, from production through distribution, performance and promotion of cultural product. It enabled people to have control over the end-to-end process of communicating through cultural products. A network of trusted people could be used to oversee all aspects of production/distribution/retail.
DRM - Digital Rights Management - is a survivalist legal attempt from a desperate culture industry to preserve a revenue model (content ownership) which is at odds with a new medium for culture (digital networks).
The new revenue model for cultural content in digital networks involves syndication of content with embedded, trackable advertising.
Update: OK so i turned off Trackbacks due to spam headaches, so here's me manually telling you that Sheikh posted some more on this over at failme.net.
