Art Papers April/May 1995

Future Culture


*("Future culture," ethnocentrisms, multiculturalisms, regionalisms,
implying both cultural production vis-a-vis the arts and lived cul-
ture "in general." So we say our art is our life something to that
effect. Now, there is no difference; both are utterly transforming,
the terms suspect. Keep that in mind. You're on a journey and there's
no turning back.)*


A short time ago, there would have been no problem; Delphi and other
predictive techniques, including computer extrapolations, presented a
relatively coherent view of an emergent world. Now and for at least
the next half-century, such extrapolations are locally relevant at
best; no pictures, nothing is glimpsed beyond them. We are in the
dark-age of fast-forward multiple (inter)connectivities that con-
struct equally multiple topographies and worlds. It's no longer clear
that what lives on the level of representation, does not live as well;
artificial life is life of a form, decimated by pulling the plug. If
artificial life is clearly the dynamics of information/processing,
what removes us from this as construct: What remains obdurate in the
world?

Even embodiment becomes problematic; the body is a report from our-
selves to ourselves, and an echoed message on the Internet sends the
state of things back to the machine that sent it. What appears to be
the Net is the first step into the darkness of cyberspace, rather cyb-
erspatiality, where William Gibson novels appear almost classical in
their depictions of communications domains and their (ecological)
niches. The confines of 3-space in/out up/down back/forth may break
apart, returning only as orthogonal foundations always already out of
sight.

The act of reading the screen thrusts the body's desire away from the
body like a thing unhinged; desire travels, no longer a psychoanalyti-
cal category, but an intelligent agent, away from the home terminal,
perhaps to return immediately, perhaps to wander forever. New rela-
tionships become possible; net.sex is only the beginning of an efflor-
escence of intimacies that no longer necessarily reflect an "authen-
tic" self. It is not so much that gender is switched, as that gender
is construed in each and every case, the body falling/not falling far
behind. (Not to mention other genders, nuances, other forms of power,
multiple and new organs, vaginal mouths, probosci.)

Traffic Report: As bandwidth increases and protocols become more flex-
ible, so do sensory modalities increase on the Net; virtual reality
technology will eventually become commonplace. But as the Net expands
into the simulacrum of an organic membrane, it becomes increasingly
vulnerable to hacking. Hint: Look for increased hacking in the next
millennium, hacking as a way of life, the hacking culture, with its
emphasis on anarchic bricolage, becoming the seeds of a future ren-
aissance.

Suburban sprawl begins to characterize the spew and cacophony of in-
formation fleeing the Center City everywhere in the world; within the
Sprawl, nothing lacks. The growth of CMC (computer-mediated-communi-
cation) in the less industrialized or poorer nations is indeed
slow, and within them, nationalism on the Enlightenment model becomes
increasingly difficult to maintain. Cut off, they will be more and
more left to fend for themselves, Net sites like sparks in blackout
electrical storms. One can expect continuous reinscription of
territory as global extinctions and pollutions exhaust the land every-
where. In spite of occasional success with DNA banks, the world of
2020 will be one of limited species maintenance; only viral and bac-
terial disorders will continue to proliferate at an unprecedented
level. (And what of other models of nationalism or territorialization?
Everywhere, competition and weaponry work war, separate. Desertifica-
tion and population are still out of check.)

Information will exhaust itself daily in this model, without legitima-
ted steering mechansims; these, too, are up for grabs, sprawl, prolif-
erate.

The future model of anything moves from mechanism through clock
through membrane to coagulation. Consider mechanism and Newtonian/Euc-
lidean physics; clock and general/special relativities; membrane and
string theory/telecommunications; and coagulation, the clotting of
local nanotopographies, computer-assisted theoretics; the humanities
continuing their retreat, on occasion retrenching vis-a-vis totality,
CMC, and deconstruction. (Connectivity: Currently this is most often
through university or corporate accounts, work-states used on- and
off-hours.) The trend towards home computers will obviously continue,
particularly as multimedia expands and prices drop. Future culture,
however, tends towards portability, beyond laptops towards notebooks,
subnotebooks, voice reception/transmission, and above all, towards the
elimination of the modem in favor of cellular or other radiolinks. In
this fashion: voice/radio, the terminal becoming an intensification of
identity/community processes, a tacit accompaniment or prosthesis to
the body inhabiting "virtual subjectivity" or _cybermind._ Hint: The
body moves from _being_ to _doing,_ an existential project.

Hint: It's not used to this; it lurks, or talks and talks. Speaking,
it abandons the productions of its speech. Listening, it flows with
abandonment. Hint: The internalized machine listening to its own and
others' speech.

(The arts: People will continue to make things. People will continue
to write about them. There will be fewer/more galleries. There will be
more images and more museums. Nothing will die and nothing will
change.)

The arts will be a painting. As on the Net, the spectator shifts into
the gear of a spectator; sure, there will be collectors and justify-
ingly dense prose as long as capital survives with its insistence on
the hand-crafted and materiality. But vis-a-vis Bourdieu, CMC is
already its own formulation, sparking transformations, sexualities,
desires, economies, identities, objects, visions, disembodiments, and
life on another level altogether. What is occurring epistemologically
leaves the traditional art-critical methodologies working upon the
hardened body of representation behind; when representation becomes
dynamic flux - when process art no longer processes within an isolated
bandwidth (i.e. Robert Barry), criticality itself changes, hypertexts,
absorbs. Hint: Just as hacking is an art, art is hacking. In art,
identity burrows beneath representation and commodity structures. It's
sellable because unsellable, always software-in-hardware, always _in
media res,_ always in discourse.

Just as "a short time ago, there would have been no problem," now
there is a problem, as new class structures emerge in North America
and elsewhere, among those who embrace the new technologies and those
who do not. The telephone, in spite of its relation to the dead and
mourning, never promised the space of the Other and the Same;
television's space is clearly indexical, no matter how much surround
is added to it, sweetening the real. (In fact, indexicality may be
considered an attribute of late capitalist production, which has moved
from the symbolic in terms of consumerism.) In virtual reality, how-
ever, as well as its intimations upon the Internet, one moves even
beyond the iconic to representation's absence (although built of
course upon level upon level [protocol suites] of representation);
it's for this reason that so much is made of "cyberspace" as if there
were really another world present, instead of single or double compu-
ter output screens. Representation glides into the _uncanny,_ which
both utilizes and problematizes the symbolic itself; it becomes deeply
and permanently unclear _who_ is beyond/within/without the physical
body clearly interacting with the monitor. (This _"who"_ comes up
constantly in discussion on newsgroups and email lists, usually in
reference to issues of embodiment. It's not so much a matter of reach-
ing a resolution, but of charting previously uncharted territory - as
if one were finally able to concretely examine the psychology and
phenomenology of ghosts. Something like that, but not quite.)

The phenomenology of ghosts lacks granularity; details go blank as the
abyss opens up between one and another character or pixel. The surface
must always extend by gestural logics, the mind filling in the de-
tails, a projectivity involving the release of desire. This is the
dream-like quality of cyberspace, always melding, flexible, a relative
of the arcana. Surface and depth become identical, but not surface.
(Oh just like Narcissus.)

And in the abyss, there is always the darkness beckoning from the
screen. Noise and abjection are relegated to the content of text or
image; the space is cleansed and stuttering. It stutters because of
the others who are also on-line and speaking, chattering elsewhere; it
stutters because of the vagaries of the network connections, because
of the hops; it stutters because of the weather. But the stuttering
closes down, lends itself to textual lag, not to the slow deteriora-
tion of analog communication, which almost always gives the appearance
of reconstitution; one can try to hear someone else, after all, in the
midst of a noisy party. Instead, the abyss is a metonymic representa-
tion of absolute annihilation, also given by the kill/delete commands
found in Net applications.

It is the abyss that opposes the excess of the textual, and the abyss
that provides the substructure against/within which the textual ap-
pears. It is always tenuous, the crack in cyberspace spelling death of
(dis)embodiment, a remainder or reminder. It is the abyss that is
located within the appearance of real life as well - just as "real
life" now needs a term of its own, not in contradistinction to a cul-
tural arena such as the theater, but in relation to lived experience
elsewhere, an elsewhere-inhabitation. (In cyberspace, nothing dies,
everything moves from node to node, the flood floods. "In cyberspace,
there is no there there.")

In the future, books will be very clean with illuminated letters. In
the future, books will never have pages; they will have search engines
(re)producing the reader's history, or search engines producing hyper-
textual content. In the future, images will stop at a specified magni-
fication of content to pixel; nothing but codes exists beyond the ob-
ject you carry with you, the being you make love to. In the future,
you may use a search engine to search that being, or a search engine
to _enable_ you. In the future, you will learn the art of concatena-
tion, the placement of one thing against or adjacent to another thing,
and the art of linking, connecting the two, beginning the web. You
will hope that the web will grow, take on a life of its own. You will
examine your body for your own web; your web will have links that you
and others have constructed.

In the future, you will thik of this as a recognition, but it will
never be clear that the coagulation-thinking is in fact "you" think-
ing, or thinking-thinking, and it makes no difference, philosophical-
ly, psychoanalytically, or otherwise.

In the future, your body will be very clean with illuminated images.
In the future, your body will never have organs; it will have search-
engines(re) producing your history or lending itself _out,_ in coup-
lings bringing back dim memories of ancestries that are located else-
where, in another web, but completely and entirely accessible. "In the
future, there is no when when." There are sheaves, topologies of tem-
porality, internal and external time-consciousness. There are differ-
entials, but there is no when, no now. There is certainly no then.

Like space, time is a becoming-coagulation, a confluence as nation
passes nation into collapse, or there is no nation, no one talking.
Begin with this no one, this zero-psychoanalysis. Emerging beings
flutter around networks, embodied as programs or information, embodied
as machines, embodied as organic carbon-based complexes. Emerging
beings are always emerging and there are irrevocable passages among
them. Emerging beings, _emergency beings:_

The differential is because of the absent class, those not jacked in,
those close to starvation; those in the midst of wars and famine;
those producing these equations in dirt-poor factories around the
world. Information flows from the material substrate of exhaustion and
pestilence through the chips themselves to the jacked-in; this is the
political economy of information, as deadly as any, with its informa-
tion rich and poor. Overall, the cost of production decreases as phys-
ical downsizing continues; no one requires an office building or phy-
sical starship model, when bits and bytes will do. Value relates to
information density and management. Value is the processing of that
density and management. Unlike the traditional artist, working with
clay and other relatively disorganized materials (in spite of the cost
of oils, say), the artist who is the _shape-rider_ exists parasitic-
ally at the top of the heap: _S/he has access._ Access and the know-
ledge to use it determine future culture, and this is literal jacking-
in, the crack-war information drug pumping hard through one's veins.
Emerging beings, _emergency beings:_

The future is one of addiction, language-games coming around full
circle; if we're addicted to speech now, and who isn't, we will speak
_through_ each other, through ghosts speaking through us, through the
thinking thinking that we will/are become.

_In the future, there is no is._


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