[iDC] Immaterial Labor and life beyond utility
Eric Kluitenberg
epk at xs4all.nl
Mon Aug 13 23:15:20 UTC 2007
Hello,
Funny discussion. I wanted to respond to some things that John has
written, partly because when I read his comments and my own few lines
quoted I could not help but agreeing with some of his points, yet
disagreeing with others, anyway great because it allows me to rethink
a few issues again. Also, some terms are not used entirely properly,
so just a few comments here...
On Aug 5, 2007, at 20:04, john sobol wrote:
> On 5-Aug-07, at 4:57 AM, trebor at thing.net wrote:
>> Back in the iDC archive I found Eric Kluitenberg's comments, which
>> can
>> perhaps be a starting point to point forward.
>>
>> "... the quest for self-determination and meaningful and memorable
>> experiences ultimately will hinge on people's understanding that
>> they are
>> not merely consuming a product, but that they are actually
>> participating
>> in a meaningful social process not guided by an extrinsic logic
>> (profit),
>> something that rather has intrinsic, or 'sovereign' value. I don't
>> believe
>> that these two can be fused into one as a business process always
>> necessarily relies on an external utilitarian motive beyond the
>> object
>> itself (profit, market share, enhancing brand recognition, long-term
>> consumer franchise, etc..), while we can learn from Bataille that the
>> sovereign (experience) is 'life beyond utility.'"
>>
>> I'm not sure if life beyond utility is possible today.
>> What's your take?
> A few comments:
>
> firstly, I think that Eric's strict binary formulation of authentic
> vs. commercial experience is misguided. I can think of innumerable
> examples of meaningful experiences that combine both, as I am sure
> any reader of this post can as well. (Examples from this morning:
> using my iMac/ISP to connect to the Internet, buying bagels at the
> local bakery, reading the newspaper.) It's a theoretical divide of
> use for theoretical discussions but little else.
The citation that Trebor sent is indeed quite strict, and so the
first thing for me was to recapture in response to what I wrote it
originally, to see why this strict wording... Actually this was in
response to a crappie website and (I think) fake project by Phillips
around "experience design" in which some distastefully fashionable
argument is made that industry can really learn something from
theatre and literature studies to find out how "memorable and
meaningful experiences" are created for people (in their perception
of course quickly reconfigured as "consumers"). Hence the use of
these words, ironic paraphrasing, In a fully fledged argument I
would rarely use such terms as "meaningful" and "memorable" and the
like...
And yes indeed, such crooky schemes I really don't believe in. At the
same time I can also give innumerous examples of how commercially
driven projects can give me meaningful experiences, etc... HOWEVER
here the issue of 'use' is the crucial one. How do I use these
things, how do other people use these things, put them to use and use
them in all kinds of ways, including seemingly non-utilitarian,
illogical, unproductive or even counter-productive ways, wasteful,
excessive, insane (whatever that means), poetic, transgressive, etc
etc... the boundaries between the utilitarian and non-utilitarian
within all of these activities ('uses' in the sense of Certau
perhaps) are thoroughly blurred.
Is life beyond utility possible today? My intuitive answer without
further deep contemplation would be yes absolutely, since it is
nothing else than an attitude, an approach, a use of things within
and around you. Then again, within a digital environment every
possible message is fully articulated in a finite digital scheme of
encoding, governed by an operational logic that is ultimately
preprogrammed (in the software, systems, standards, etcetera), which
would make all interactions there (here) appear exclusively
utilitarian...
What I object to first of all is the use of the word "authentic" (I
never used that term) - in the Bataille discussion the issue is about
whether a particular human activity is guided by external aims beyond
the activity itself (as most human actions are) versus a type of
activity that is guided only by its intrinsic dynamic - Bataille
thinks there are forms of experience that leave all external
objectives behind, all demands of use and utility, are in a way
complete within themselves, and he suggests that only by leaving all
demands of usefulness behind us can we come in contact with that
which is of sovereign importance to us (as human beings). Obviously
his suggestion is entirely radical and seems also deeply mystical and
invites countless rebuttals of inconsistency in his argument. Still,
this idea I find intriguing and the radically of his suggestion is
something that can neither be imagined within the Phillips type of
'Experience Economy', nor is it something specific for a particular
time or age. I read it much more as an invitation to life.
> Secondly, why have you, Trebor, along with Kluitenberg and
> Bataille, idealized "life beyond utility"? This is not a
> universally held ideal. As with the notion of "Art for art's sake",
> the condemnation of utility arises out of a specific technological
> approach. In a previous discussion on this list I argued that the
> notion of aesthetic 'taste', which also devalues artistic utility
> (i.e. art is nobler than mere design), was a consequence of
> literacy, which idealizes private creativity and prizes abstract
> thought. In oral cultures, on the other hand, all creativity is
> dialogical and dialogue is inherently public, contextual and
> constructive - and therefore always utilitarian.
And here I entirely disagree. I don't believe that all creativity is
dialogical in nature, that it is constructive (in a constructionist
sense I assume), that therefore all this type of activity is always
(emphasis on 'always') utilitarian. Here it might be useful to point
out where my use the idea of 'life beyond utility' originally came
from - an essay I wrote quite some time ago in response to a
discussion about future media developments that seemed rather
misguided, and secondly a series of projects and phenomena that just
defied explanation. The discussion happened mainly around 2000 when a
lot of people were speculating on the emergence of new audiovisual
modalities on the internet (streaming media was the big thing at the
time), and quite a few people tried to see this in terms of an
extension of the existing audiovisual broadcast system (i.e.
constructing a false linearity between radio - television -
internet). The text was btw called "Media without an Audience" and is
widely circulated on the internet.
A lot of things I saw happening around me, both in experimental
artistic scenes as well as in community and even government initiated
projects that seemed to defy all logic of either broadcasting, or of
traditional sender <> receiver relationships in communication. It
just seemed to me at the time, that what was germinating (and now has
become some kind of main-stream) just didn't fit the broadcast mould,
nor even a reconstructed linguistics such as proposed by JF Lyotard
in his Les Immatériaux notes on the exhibition.
A great example from everyday life around that time was this one: A
"knowledge-neighbourhood" project was initiated in The Netherlands by
the government, giving a new residential district in the city of
Eindhoven full access to fibre-optics to the home. This was around
1999 or so, giving people 10mbs up and download speed and various
facilities like access to (video-)servers, on-demand services,
digital community services, contact with the city government and so
on. The project started with high hopes, but was aborted after one or
two years. Main reason cited in reports about the closure of the
project: people were simply not using the on-demand and other
services provided for them, but more importantly, monitoring of the
up and download statistics had revealed that people on this network
were actually up-loading much more than they were downloading
(presumably family video's, ripped-off materials and all kinds of
other 'garbage'). For the officials involved in the project this
signalled complete failure - what could possibly be the sense of an
advanced infrastructure, used by people to send out much more
messages than they ever receive?? i.e. putting out stuff that really
nobody will ever see - that could thus be equated to 'mere' noise...
At the time I also noticed that lots of artists and friends of mine
were doing all kinds of weird transmission projects in which it was
completely unclear who was listening / looking, or if there was
anybody out there at all? Did it really matter to them? Apparently
not... But why not?
I couldn't find any probable explanation for this type of behaviour
and use of advanced communication systems, but I kept finding more
and more examples that proceeded along similar lines as the ones
indicated, projects also that started with clear (utilitarian)
objectives and along the way transformed into something beyond or
outside of any identifiable objective, yet highly appreciated by the
'transmitters'.
Should it all be written off as meaningless? - was it a kind of lost
Lacanian subject, lost within language and abstract symbol systems,
deferred from corporeal sensations and principally unable to
recapture them, thus hopelessly articulating this deferral in the
very media that denied the corporeal to enter? Or should we regard
this corporeal dimension as any way a useless chimera, an il/de/
lusion, a mystification, false consciousness, or just plainly
impossible?
I had no idea how to proceed with this.
At that time I was also reading some older texts of BILWET / ADILKNO,
the ever brilliant writer collective from Amsterdam, and most notably
in the Media Archive they wrote about "sovereign media" - media that
'emancipated' themselves from the need for an audience - the signal
is simply there, you can pick it up... And obviously they referred
back to Bataille and his alternative general economy and his ideas
about the "sovereign" in describing this "UTO" (Unidentified
Theoretical Object)....
It seemed to me that such approaches could offer a way to get out of
the pragmatics of linguistic analysis and sender <> receiver
relationships,and the body-count of audience statistics of broadcast
(an essentially industrial model), and that this might lead to
something richer, more diverse, less determinable, and maybe even to
something not so much governed by market and profiteering principles...
Well, we know now how easy it was for 'industry' to appropriate such
structures and mechanisms and turn them into a highly profitable
business-model. This still doesn't mean, however, that some of the
experiences that people gain from this cannot be 'meaningful' and so
on, nor that there is not really something else going on than what
defined broadcast media and their operational logics - that dreadful
term "user generated content" does signify something different, but
the sovereign has a hard time establishing itself in the multi-
million business schemes of YouTube - I guess we have to find that
somewhere else now.
So, the notion of the sovereign as outlined by Bataille was not so
much used here as a critique of commercial operations, business
schemes and so on, but much rather as an attempt to figure out some
of these media practices that adilkno dubbed "sovereign media" and
that I saw multiplying around me. The quote Trebor picked up is
indeed a bit too strict in creating certain binaries, but it was
primarily a response to a completely fraud business scheme - cultural
theorists without a job selling their half-baked ideas to the
business community re-branding literature and theatre as 'experience
economy' - brought to you by Phillips - give me a break!
Finally, I don't believe in paradigm shifts, certainly not when they
are proclaimed every few years and with the emergence of new
technical trick or hyped up concept. What is called "web 2.0" stands
in a direct lineage to Usenet and many other systems, and ideas that
far preceded the internet. Therefore I feel that while a lot needs to
be rethought, but dispensing with critical analysis is not the
advisable route to go. There's a lot of careful plodding necessary
and that is simply work, critical work. Like John I feel that Marxist
orthodoxies should be left behind, but insightful critical ideas and
procedures can help a lot with figuring out current developments and
conditions. An uncritical fusion of all these categories, or a new
type of meta-discourse riding on a culturalist version of the "let's
all just get along"-type of discourse to me sounds too much like the
good-old bourgeois denial of (the existence of / reality of) conflict
- power, inequality and strategic intent have to be taken on board
together with the phantasmatic, the imaginary, the desirous, the
subliminal to get anywhere to untangle this giant spaghetti...
Like in this great Esso slogan of the seventies "Es gibt viel zu tun
- packen wir es an!", I would say let's get to it...
bests,
Eric
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