There is a nervous condition felt by many under the aegis of advanced capitalist economic practise. It is no longer enough to call it an alienation felt by the distance between workers and the means of production. The interpellative gestures of social and productive discourse under advanced capitalism are misread by many as being a sense of advanced temporality, a quickened pace. It is becoming increasingly difficult for people to cope, each as an individual, to the social and productive demands made on them. Indeed, the very notion of individuality which is fundamental to philosophic and legal discourse in nations which have developed capitalist economies is itself becoming ever more problematised. I wish to take as fundamental to this present examination the notion, elaborated in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, of a hybrid existence between humanity and the machines that are employed in production. There has never been an ontological distinction between humanity and its technological practises and devices. Primitive humans were as fully hybridized with their tools and technologies, in the ontological sense, as their modern counterparts. There has always been a hybridized discourse between what is organic and what is technological. The public sphere is always-already the medium in which the hybrid subject is formed. Through a process of interpellating subjects, the productive agents of society reproduce themselves: “the behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 23). As a subject always-already interpellated under the panopticon of control which constitutes and reifies such institutions, there is no true exteriority to the system. (If we view resistence against an authority a product of that authority, as Foucault himself does in Discipline and Punish, then what marks the rupture necessary for the creation of an alternate system of production and interpellation: violent interruption of the system, characterised by the two World Wars which led to a relatively peaceful Europe at the expense of many of its former colonies, or the aggressively pacifist resistence which led to Indian independence from Britain?).
Presently, the principle concern that I wish to explore is the degree to which technological hybridization has changed two concepts for philosophical discourse: subjectivity (or even more precisely, the degree to which ‘immanence’ can be understood) and the sublime. Both of these concepts have been tied (historically speaking) to a sense of ‘organic’ transcendence. Alternately phrased, notions of the beautiful and of truth cannot be defined in the same manner as they once had. There is no hieratic (divine) subject to which the gesture of transcendence is given function, as I will further elaborate below. Postmodernity has transformed the beautiful to achieve an aesthetic balance between technological application and natural (human) generation. Technologies which have increased the circulation of goods in order to maximize market development have also allowed increased population flows which simultaneously disrupt and constitute productive capacities. The current developments in the hybridization of human subjects and mechanical processes signal a metonymical exodus, as subjects are continually attempting to dislocate themselves from the limitations of their productive capacity. This occurs in “not only spatial but also mechanical [means] in the sense that the subject is transformed ... toward (or with) the machine – a machine exodus” (Hardt & Negri: 367). Moreover, this exodus “is no longer defined by the linear path it followed throughout the modern period”, as linearity has ceased to function as it once had (see below). It is fitting that the linear technologies of the industrialization would induce linear aesthetic responses (and ruptures, in the sense of Cubist or Expressionist aesthetics), and likewise digital technologies of the post-industrial era, which invoke the referential patterns of the rhizome, will induce non-linear responses (and ruptures). It is my intention to widen the scope of the non-linearity of postmodern subjectivities somewhat, in particular in relation to the conception of aesthetic as relating to temporal continuity.
As advanced capitalist economics, and specifically market capitalism, are continually creating wealth from non-material means not directly tied to labour (such as land and stock market speculations), time itself has become the “exchange value”. In a very reductive sense, time has been erased from the interpellative mechanism of productive social structures which function by (and in order to) creating subjects. It is a form of a vicious cycle, with productive motivation standing as Adam Smith’s infamous ‘invisible hand’. As Hardt and Negri point out, there is alongside ‘material’ labour an ‘affective’ form of production which relates to material labour in a complex manner. Indeed, such production informs the entire landscape of production. Worker alienation is the desire for production to lend meaning to the subject’s existence; desire becomes nothing when it lacks a substantial Other to which it applies itself. Desire for an Other to the present is that which creates time as a concept. This Other has disappeared in modern capitalism to become merely a quantized element of the Self, a temporality wholly dependent on the annihilation of past and present for a marketable future. This is in counter distinction to Marx’s determination that capital always requires an ‘outside’ to itself in order to actualize surplus value. Yet it is within this ‘anomaly’ that a creative space can be located, negotiating the demands of both subject and time, which create themselves in the same expressive gesture (time is, in the sense of creation, a restoration of an infinite present). Furthermore, this motivation, or affective production, is tied to ideology and not material value itself; in Sartre’s formulation, there is no thing-in-itself for the otherwise empty signifier ‘money’ in its most absolute sense. Jameson argues that a good deal of postmodern architecture is emblematic for the empty signification of modern signs. It is interesting in this regard to note the continual use of building design, typically the most capital-intensive medium for aesthetic expression, to metaphorically stand for the deterioration of capital itself. (Is this the ghost of Marx’s ‘general intellect’ in a new form?) The glass skins which form the structures of many contemporary skyscrapers reflects “the difference between a brick and a balloon”, serving to “dematerializ[e spirituality itself] without signifying in any traditional way” (Jameson 1999: 186). Religious doctrine has been shifted from the transcendent gesture of its spiritual forms to become the empty ritualistic faith associated with consumer culture.
New temporalities and subjectivities are formed by technological developments, and these altered senses of time inform conceptions of the ‘present’ in a complex and heteroglossiac manner. The sense of rupture required for Jameson’s notion of periodization has folded in upon itself somewhat. It is becoming increasingly difficult to assuage past and present in the digital archive of culture, as the two are purposefully conflated as a means to further a certain nostalgia for the present. To use Derrida’s conception of the archive as a site of violence, it is my belief that the current exultation of financial gain over the rights of the citizen body is itself a reflection of the violence done to the present by capitalism. This violence cannot be exclusively figured in a national framework. We cannot blame America, for example, for the domination of other countries on moral grounds alone for the simple reason that as morality is situationally relative, there can be universal sense of justice imposed from without. It is not incomprehensible therefore that many who actively seek America’s dominance over other countries see themselves as acting in a morally just manner, and consequently will not relinquish their positions by moral appeals against productive systems. Not only will it be made clear that there is no longer a ‘without’ to which an enlightened individual can retreat, but also the irrationalities and problematics of the system of production and culture which is represented by the semantic figure ‘America’ can be appropriated to perpetuate the disruption of the system as a whole. For the expression of hate only feeds back in upon violent repression and consequently the system is never metamorphosed. The sense of jouissance which constitute the strategies used to legitimate corruption is the same jouissance which constitute the struggle in opposition, and thus mutual destruction is resultantly to be expected. Instead the process must itself be harnessed, (not necessarily under the guise of a conscious control), and restored from internal means. At this point authoritative agents interpret the populace in a manner suggesting a violent reaction in order to further the legitimacy and jurisdiction of Empire. Subjects are themselves interpellated within this violent act: it is their mutual destruction as individuals in the absolute sense which guarantees their formation as subjects in the sense predicating (productive) citizenship. Is it possible to suggest that money, as an otherwise empty signifier, is itself the mark of archival violence? Certainly time is sacrificed for this particular form of impression, as it is excised out of the equation in real financial terms. So is subjectivity in its historical sense, as a newly reinscribed subjectivity, which prefigures the termination of the older productive mechanisms, is fabricated in subjects who are themselves made ‘timeless’ locked into an eternal present of desire and expectation. And yet, lacking the sense of time results in a dislocation of the sublime, at least in regard to Adorno’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Gestures made invoking transcendence lead to ideological categories (such as politics or aesthetic judgement), and consequently there can be no possibility for the conceptualization of a universalized entity, or in other words, a transcendent one.
And yet the financial market is itself seeking a certain transcendence, at least in terms of temporal and geographic space. This is a gesture enacted with the recognition that the current system of production is not self-sufficient in relation to profits. The internal stages of the cycle of its decomposition follow Marx’s formulation in Capital, in which money is concentrated in order to be realized as capitalization, usually along production lines which have distinguishable limitations. Every material construct is limited and circumscribed by its creation. In terms of production, growth will be continually diminished by necessary expenditures, and consequently the profit margin diminishes to virtual non-existence. At its most reductive figuration, one only has to refer to the definition of a recession in contemporary economic parlance: not as a loss of money, but a zero growth in profit revenues. It is not enough for capitalism to plateaux, making the same amount of money year after year (even after inflation is accounted for), but rather profits must continually rise, otherwise the company is perceived to flounder under ‘market pressure’. (It is interesting to note that all elements of the rhizome of the various heteroglossiac finanscapes seek to monopolize power, conglomerating like pooled mercury and demonstrating the true nature of market pressure.) As a consequence, capital must itself be dislocated from geographic localization, and indeed ultimately from production itself. It is my belief that with the digital quantization of cultural production, and the emergence of digital technologies of control over manufacturing production, as more and more fragments become autonomous wholes, they network together, functioning as an ever-increasingly omnipresent rhizome of productive interpellation.
Within finance capital itself, the sole value given to the present is in anticipation of future earnings; there is no present without a future-reflection which adds value over the present. Accordingly, it is possible to recognize the non-existence of the future in economic terms, and what we name and quantize as such is merely a certain nostalgia for the present. In reality the present serves as a defence against the future, and the continually diminishing units of time which serve to define the present in economic discourse can be seen to function as the division of the present into nothingness, as more and more instances of the future giving meaning to the present (nostalgia for the present). In this sense the present can never be truly itself in any capacity. Expectation has itself become a consumable product, to the point where the future exists and is reified solely in the financial terms of its present capitalisation. This mechanism can be seen to operate most distinctly in finance capital, yet can be located in other realms of culture and production as well. (It should be noted however that simple reactionary approaches will not serve to ‘fix’ the problems of the postmodern subject, and indeed such nostalgic flights from technology are themselves transformed into commodities, the current zeal for organic farming practices perhaps most emblematic of the ‘back to the Earth’ movement defining itself for the 21st century.) Pastiche is one of the aesthetic figurations for this cross-contamination of the past and the present in terms of content or form, and by its nature as object of interest serves to anticipate the future (itself a form of nostalgia for the present, an anticipated future looking back on the present with a positive judgement). It is possible then to view society itself conglomerating not as a monolithic structure of productive capacity, which is indeed where, in a rather ominous manner, market capital seems to be heading, but rather as a rhizome of micro-productive spheres.
Technological advancement under late capitalism signals the push through capitalism that is required to overcome it. The technologies which Empire requires for its continuation are the same which can be used to overcome the centralization of power which is the principle condition for its existence. This is true even of ‘Empire’ itself as a concept. To use a rather harmless example, the transfer of representational media into the digital realm allows for a greater amount of such cultural products to be more readily consumed. It is far more efficient (and by extension less costly) to produce and distribute texts in their digital form than has been allowed before by any other technology. More importantly, productive capacity has itself begun the process of digital conception, as an ever broadening array of software tools are becoming available for general use. While these developments certainly do not overcome the requirement under modern economic doctrine for the outlay of capital in order to realize productive capacity – one still needs to purchase the computer hardware in addition to having the knowledge of its use, which itself reflects a certain socio-economic elitism – they certainly begin to foreshadow the prognostications Hardt and Negri elaborate in the latter part of Empire.
Within this framework, it is interesting to note the changes that have occurred in representational media over the past few decades. Increasing flows (in Appadurai’s sense) of culture allow older conventions and aesthetics to be recontextualized as individual instances of artistic expression, and not as being representative of the artform itself in any ontological manner. Time is significant in this respect, for the continual accretion of cultural production depends very highly on this continual circulation of textual elements. In this capacity, it is possible to analyse cultural production in a quantified form. Individual artworks do not retain the Benjaminian aura they once had, not only because of mass production but also because of sheer volume of cultural artefacts. Every consumer product has been associated with a variety of representational media – commercials for Coca-Cola can use references to classic cinema as well as top-40 music, and each becomes subsumed to the product itself – and this may lead to sensory anaesthesia in the sense of being able to discern what is substantively original from copies or appropriations. In a very real sense there is nothing which cannot be assigned a monetary value, and one of the crises felt by modern consciousness is the reduction of all the dreams, desires, and histories of individual subjects into a quantized element. It was a very small step from the Anglo-centric media representations of the 1950s to the current panoply of cultural voices which all speak the same language, namely commercial discourse. Literature was perhaps the first to do so, as the reading audience was meant to enter into a fictive state of immanence with the author. Simultaneous to this fact must remain the elitism inherent in the medium; until as late as the 18th century, there were very few participants in the discourse, for both educational and economic reasons.
One of the more prominent tangents that modern musical composition (in the avantgarde, in any respect) has taken involves the transference of determinate control away from the composer. This compositional technique is not entirely a new one – wind chimes and other ‘sound sculptures’ are centuries old – yet by employing them within digital media there is an interesting juxtaposition of temporalities. The ‘aggressive present’ which defines a great deal of modern production has in the computer created a tool for the dissolution of time within the subjective framework of a human lifetime. This has interesting repercussions on the aesthetics and forms of music, itself an expression of a present made absolute in its most truth sense. Music is ephemeral, qualifying each moment with meaning by involving time as a fundamental element. The moment signals both itself and a nostalgic glance away from itself, to its own termination [Death drive?]. One of the responses music has had to digital technologies is to remove the composer from the creative process to a degree not normally associated with aesthetic techniques. Hegel provides a means by which determinacy can be negotiated, as he links it with verbal language and not musical ones. Generative music operates in the vein of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome, as each musical element is informed by and in turn informs every single other element in the system. Any figuration of determinate conceptuality must be cast aside in order to let the piece speak for itself. The composer uses software which generates music based on the rules that the composer wishes to establish, however arbitrary they may be, and themselves made to evolve and create new rules. This process ostensibly is to direct the musical output to as limited a degree as possible while still retaining aesthetic value. Furthermore, generative compositional forms signal the discourse of hybridization between humans and machines. As the system can use adaptive strategies, typically founded on the principles of fractal and biological (population growth and adaptation) mathematics, it can frequently prove to be an interesting juxtaposition and negotiation of compositional and improvisational strategies involving both human subject and machine (can the current state of artificial intelligence research allow us to call it a subject?).
Generative systems seek to hypostatize the present as a fundamental element standing outside of the experiencing subject’s temporality. In other words, the present only exists in relation to an expected future and has no transcendent signification in and of itself. Certainly, this refers back to Kantian transcendence, yet Kant’s notion of the sublime has lost some of its applicability, as the composing subject and the listening subject do not share the same frame of reference. In its most brief and reductive terms, the conditions for judgement by the subject are wholly different, and thus the composer cannot gesture toward the same aesthetics of form used by ‘linear’ composers. In a very real sense, generative music dispels the illusion many feel concerning the aesthetic experience of music, namely that it is a medium invoking a sense of transcendency in the subject. Quite on the contrary, music is forever tied to the present in a manner that other forms of cultural expression are not. The past and future of music do not have any solidity save in a subject’s reflective consciousness, and thus within the ‘past’ of consciousness Kantian judgement enters into the relation between subject and object. In linear musical forms, the present is given meaning by the past (crescendos, harmonies, melodic phrasing, “themes”, etc) and yet with generative music there is no relation of signification other than simple origination. Seen in this context, it is possible to liken such forms of composition to the life process itself, as each moment of music serves not only to signal itself as such but to provide the generative base for future “generations” of notes. By removing the individual from the system of composition (production) to as much a degree as possible, any appeals to the sublime or the beautiful must also be distinguished from their Hegelian traditions, usually used in the discourse of aesthetics. Such composers do not establish parameters in which the compositional output is controlled in a direct manner, but rather the composer determines the course which the music will follow by means of a system of compositional rules.
Jem Finer’s Longplayer project, in which a generative algorithm based on the mathematical dynamics of life processes and other fractal and logarithmic systems continually produces one composition which is intended to remain operational for one entire millennium, is the logical extension of this principle. The piece is intended to be available to anyone with an internet connection, and as well has several physical locations around the planet. Each of these nodes serves to inform the others, and accordingly the system as a whole functions as a rhizome. The process used by Finer invokes contemporary genetic research and refigures that knowledge as an aesthetic principle. In doing so, the work aggressively defies both consumption (in the traditional mode of its operation) and the interpellative practises of modern cultural institutions. There is no single moment of signification in any sense in the ‘present’ of Longplayer. And yet fundamentally the piece serves to heighten the listening subject’s awareness of their own subjectivity, as the machine creating the piece interpellates the listener as a subject identical to all others despite temporal or geographic distance. Principally this is accomplished by removing the conceptual totality of the piece from the boundaries of a single subject position. In other words, all subjectivities are as one to the interpellative capacity of the piece. In actuality there is no ontological distinction between machine, composer, and composition in terms of the listening subject. Consequently, it is possible to determine the essential concern of the piece is human subjectivity to time itself.
APPENDIX????? WTF??!??
At the end of the representational spectrum (at least in terms of its valuation by mainstream society) is digital entertainment, more precisely understood in its more colloquial usage as “video game” or “computer game”. While such terminology refers to the fact that such games take place on video screens, the coincidence of its origin should be noted with the development of the home video revolution (which itself, in a rather melodramatic sense brought people in from the harsh elements of the public exhibition of films). In a very real sense, the new must be described in terms of the old, or what is most easily recognized in conventional terms. When the first mass produced arcade machine entered North American culture in 1972, there was a great deal of confusion as to the relationship between what was on screen and what the user performed: it was felt that the user should do “something”, and then watch the results, thus remaining within the linearity of subjective relation ascribed by the video medium. Other than a few exceptions – being the laserdisc-based games of the early 1980s such as Dragon’s Lair, which were extremely linear and did not involve the participating subject in any meaningful manner by allowing judgement or strategic adaptation – digital gaming is fundamentally antithetical to the process involved in ‘video’, consequently the term should be recognized as a rather appropriate misreading. There is no precise linear equation of medium and its relation to the viewing subject. This lack occurs not only in the ontology of the ‘interface’ – one reads books or watches films or theatrical performances from start to finish, for example – but also in terms of the form of subjectivity interpellated by the medium itself.
Gaming is a user-defined medium which deviates significantly from the traditional figuration of production author/text. The narrative does not exist as a prior object, but rather like generative music unfolds under the guise of a few generative rules, and is given shape as the participating subject progresses through the game itself. In this sense, the subject is author of its own experience; the narrative is reified by the subjectivity imposed on the participating subject. The narrative can be as simple as that which results from a game like Pac-Man and its contemporary equivalent of the first-person ‘shooter’ genre, or as complex as the narratives developed in ‘toy sand-boxes’ such as SimCity and the persistent online playfield of games such as Everquest. The authors of such programs are not placing the participating subject into a totality of narrative and experience such as those of other mediums. Just as has occurred in music by the use of a variety of generative processes in composition, game producers provide the rules by which the system operates but in no manner do they control the ‘final product’ or the experience the subject will have with their creations. There is no conductor who leads the viewing subject to a specific point, but rather the subject itself makes decisions involving (and creating) the outcome. The question remains as to what forms of subjectivities might come to exist in virtual worlds, and perhaps more importantly what happens to time during that process. Such is, by virtue of its diverting nature, wholly beyond the scope of this present examination.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodore. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, & Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1996.
Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn. New York: Verso, 1998.
(Mattelart, Armand. Networking the World: 1794-2000. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.)
(Therborn, Goran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1980.)
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