Be Offline & Exist Online

Saas Fee, August 2012

Siegfried Zielinski

Foreword

If one casually says the words that the abbreviation “PC” stands for, they now sound remarkably antiquated. Although PCs only came into service in their masses around twenty years ago, the concept PC is passé. There is no longer anything personal about computers.

On the one hand computerised devices have gotten very close to the bodies of their users, certainly comparable with the functions of Oswald Wiener’s “bioadapter”. One caresses their displays, they snuggle into the hand, one wakes up to them in the morning, and for many people they are the last things they touch before going to sleep at night. Much of the data that inhabits the devices is personally encoded; it can only be decoded completely by the owner of the device. These appliances organise people’s private lives as well as work, study, and school.

The office is anywhere. Life is managed administratively. The telematic artefacts have become intimate appendages of biological life forms: they help them to cope with techno-logical reality and facilitate their orientation in it — the last interface, before it disappears as an unrecognizable adapter inside the body. These artefacts are an integral part of the paradise aggregates that we require to live harmoniously with the world and in

order that the world can tolerate us to some degree.

On the other hand, computers have ceased to be autonomous stations for work and for amusement like the Atari ST (Sixteen/Thirty-two) or the C (Commodore) 64 on which we cut our computing teeth and the PCs that came

afterwards were. No matter where the users of contemporary digital notebooks and workstations happen to be, they are connected to telematic hubs for commanding, ordering, distributing, informing, and for propaganda. As a rule.

The individual machines are no longer terminals; they function as interconnected components of a telecommunication and informatics system to which many others are connected at the same time and who engage more or less in dialogue with or against each other. They are fast-flow conduits for information and communication. Here the individual artefact is no longer particular, that is, individual and distinct; indeed, strictly speaking it is no longer a single item because it merely functions as a receptacle for a myriad of other artefacts (apps, etc.) which, in turn, are only in operation from time to time — when they are needed. The particularity or specificity of these artefacts consists in how they are updated. Each laptop or PowerBook or iPhone, which do not even have physical drives of their own any more, is an individual connection within dispositifs that are called “social networks”. The stem “soci-“ from the Latin “socius”, a companion, in the adjectival form “social” is thus a concentrate of its original meaning; namely, being a participant, consorting with others, being in a relationship of reciprocal exchange — no more, no less.

The users are operating updating machines. The individual devices function as convenient and temporary receptacles for a myriad other artefacts of a programmed kind, the applications. Apps are only used when needed. Their particularity consists in instantaneous realisation. Just as for the first hundred years of cinema the particular variant that was established involved paying a certain sum of money to rent designed time, contemporary users in the telematic networks pay for updates to application programmes and services. The apps have left the various hardware devices and are temporarily re-imported as and when required. Programmes are now service providers on loan; they are treated like digital guest workers or leased labourers. One phenomenon is particularly strange which, modifying the name of an appliance of 1967 manufactured by Ampex called “Instant Replay” and continuing an idea of Vilém Flusser’s concerning electronic recording technology, one could call instantaneous archaeology. It is particularly conspicuous in digital photography. Because the time between recording the image and playback is so short, anyone can get to see what they looked like just a few split seconds ago, and with this knowledge they make a face so as to be forearmed for the next picture. Young people

practise this cultural technique of real-time archaeology to an extreme degree. Platforms such as YouTube or MySpace are the playgrounds for the excesses of this cultural technique.

Is this really a form of remembering or merely a slight stretching of the present into the past? Is this not a kind of pro-spective archaeology or even a form of “de-remembering”? Instantaneous archaeology is not concerned with looking back, but looking through what has just transpired while focusing on the future. Yet to be already the subject of a past topic in the instant that something happens amounts to abolishing the present. The present becomes merely an effect for the future; a minimal, no longer quantifiable amount of time; simply a moment of updating. The extreme shortening of storage times coupled with the simultaneous expansion to near-infinite storage capacity have not led to the past being forgotten, rather it is the possibility of enjoying the present that is the victim. There’s no time for that anymore. Future and past have to be joined together directly and effectively.

Essentially, this means the implementation of cybernetic ideas in a psycho-social context. The increasing ability to perform an “instantaneous calculation of highly complex interactions” was identified by Zbigniew Brzezinski already in 1970 as a principal characteristic of a “technetronic society”. Now that willingness and the necessity to engage in social interaction have become standard in job descriptions, immediacy as an ability is the next “greatest good” in the indirect handling of technical communication.

Nevertheless: The YouTube therefore you are of the contemporary modern era, which many theorists continue to call “post-modern” for want of a better term, is progress compared to the vanity of cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) of the classical modern era. Lacan’s reservations about the logical consistency of the relation between the thinking and the being “I” are superbly confirmed by the technologically based everyday rituals of the late twentieth century. 

The notion of a closed bloc of the hegemonial was always a chimera, just like the idea of strong and unbowed subject as the centre of the universe. The notion of a fragile subject, however, could be useful for formulating the concept of an oscillating/vibrating life, as proposed by Gianni Vattimo. By this Vattimo understands a weak subject; in my view, such a subject can only derive its vital force from its relationship to the Other, and in this way can become a strong subject through the Other.

Many good ideas are paradoxical.

The “you” advances to become the centre of attention, be it only as an electrified “you”. Vilém Flusser, intellectually trained in Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, in the last years of his life defined this as a possibility for the individual to get closer to God again after God had so thoroughly hidden His face in Auschwitz. In this variant of Jewish religious philosophy the encounter with “you” (or “thou”) is the only possibility of beholding the countenance of God. In terms of a telematic network this would mean for Flusser from monitor to monitor, from one terminal to another, if they have affection for each other.

“Because through the computer-image, I can talk to the other person: he sends me his image, I work on it and send it back to him — so this is the Jewish image. This is not an idol. This is not paganism. It is a way to love my neighbour, and by loving my neighbour, to love God. So — I am not a good Talmudist — but I would say that from a Talmudic point of view, the synthetic computer-image is perfectly Jewish.”

(Vilém Flusser interviewed by László Beke and Miklós Peternák (1990); the interview is on the DVD We Shall

Survive in the Memory of Others (Budapest/Berlin 2010), published by C3 Budapest and the Vilém-Flusser-

Archiv Berlin.)

This was how Vilém Flusser perceived things before the advent of the harsh dialogic reality of the developed form of the Internet. The British film-maker Chris Petit, who became internationally famous for his road movie Radio On

(1979), has masterfully staged the new mood in another road movie, thirty years later: Content (2009). This film is also driven by the notion that camera and automobile are two devices that originate from the same dispositif context.

Petit’s young characters move in front of the camera, which in Content is a simulated webcam, like in a strange hall of mirrors where they perpetually encounter different people who all want to snatch their image. They style

themselves for total visibility while at the same time trying to hide within it; under the brims of hats, behind cascades of hair falling over their eyes, behind outsize sunglasses, by turning their heads to present their faces in semi-profile. DOPPELT S. UNTEN

“Just once, for one day in my life, I would like to feel that I and everyone speaking to me, were talking full sense.”

“I would like to fall in love before it’s too late, don’t care who with.”

“I would like a feeling of assignation to life, not sitting here calculating how many fucks I have got left. The middle-ground is hardly there anymore.”

The middle-ground — in a temporal perspective this is the present, which we have been talking about. Petit’s young protagonists, who utter such sentences, move in front of the camera as though they are in a strange hall of mirrors where they continually meet someone else who wants to steal their image. They style themselves for total visibility while at the same time they try to hide behind it: under the brims of hats, behind fringes falling in their eyes, huge sunglasses, hoodies, or by turning their head away from the camera to a semiprofile position. Such games of hide-and-seek are familiar to us — under completely different historic circumstances — from the

existentialist shadow figures in John Cassavetes’ early films Shadows (1958) and Faces (1968). “Technologies of the self”4 is what Michel Foucault called such identity exercises in the 1960s. Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York was the ideal laboratory for developing attitudes and poses of this kind.

I’ll be your mirror is the soundtrack to this quest for another identity, composed by Lou Reed in 1966 for Velvet Underground and sung inspirationally by Nico, the icon of Andy Warhol’s factory: 

“I’ll be your mirror / 

Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know / 

I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset / 

The light on your door to show that you’re home [...]

Let me stand to show that you are blind / 

Please put down your hands /

‘cos I see you”. 

The imaginary overcoming of paranoid separations, the cause of so much pain, through the romantic reunion of the gaze of the one and the Other / the Other and the one, at least in an ecstatic moment of Rock poetry.

The individuals integrated into the techno-social networks are possibly seeking the reflections of the myriad fragments of their own egos. On the other hand, the centre of attraction for their actions is the yearning of a counterpart to their own existence and actions, for the “you”, to be acknowledged by its gaze, even if the actual formulation of such an affirming look is only imagined. These networked solitary individuals are not simply arbitrary singulars, as the French theory group associated with the journal Tiqqun celebrated so enthusiastically in their radical extension of Situationist ideas (and was quite willing to risk injurious harm to the individual). They are individuals who are seeking possible vocations, meaningful recognition, and — particularly — respectful attachments that go far beyond what they experience every day with their hundreds, or even thousands, of associates, which are called “friends” by the system.

For the manifesto that I shall present in a moment, it is indispensable to make a differentiation which is familiar to you all. It is the differentiation between existing and being. It not only plays an important role in Heidegger’s philosophy as the difference between existentia and essentia, that is, between the merely extant and unconditional being. 

This pairing that straddles the different notions of what is essential runs through the history of Western thought.

Just briefly:

In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right the difference concerns the question as to if and how the particular / the individual is connected to the whole, whether it perceives this as a necessity, or whether its particularity is sufficient; that is, simply to exist:

“Actuality is always the unity of universality and particularity, the resolution of universality into particularity; the latter then appears to be self-sufficient, although it is sustained and supported only by the whole If this unity is not present, nothing can be actual, even if it may be assumed to have existence [Existenz].”

Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Dritter Teil: Die Sittlichkeit, Dritter Abschnitt: Der Staat. Zusatz zu § 270, in: G.W. Hegel (Frankfurt 1986), vol. 7, p. 428f; English edition: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, 1991, § 270, p. 302.

Looking at the so-called “social” networks of the Internet, which play a similar role for young people today as the state did for Hegel distinguish on the one hand between living a life that amounts to little more than engaging in technology-based communication and which at the same time through this act seeks to constitute itself with reference to the obscure “Net community” On the other hand, there is the type of being that is aware of the interwovenness of its communicative activities and in a broad sense can realise itself relatively independently of them — without adhering to any disastrous notions of unity. In short, I distinguish between a subject that, by and large, merely functions (and is therefore subjected), and an individual who has the courage to be selfpossessed

at times and at others to escape from the self, which from the perspective of dialogic philosophy presupposes intentional communication with the Other, including in (technical) experiments. From this point, which has become an impossibility, sociality as a positive experience, as a sensation, is conceivable.

If one understands the two modes as the graduations of a scale, existence relates more to the universal in the particular, whereas for being it is a priority to perceive the particular in the universal. God can exist, but not be. Humans are, but they cannot merely exist. 

In my manifesto I discuss some fundamental prerequisites for this differentiation to remain effective, or to become effective again. At the calendaric launch of the new millennium The Cluetrain Manifesto (2000) proclaimed that under the conditions of the digital networks all business markets are conversations. By contrast I maintain that not all conversations must necessarily be markets.

The title of my manifesto is a hommage to two works from the heyday of the age of industrialisation: Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis [Sexual Psychopathy] (1886) and Oskar Panizza’s Psichopatia criminalis (1898). In his meticulously detailed study of sexual deviance, the psychiatrist and forensic scientist Krafft-Ebing succeeds admirably in maintaining a balance between the multifarious phenomena of deviancy and the scientist’s penchant for integrating. (Latin!) Panizza’s pamphlet, modelled on Krafft-Ebing’s book, on the surface purports to be a guide to identifying the energies and manifestations of criminality, but emerges as actually a shameless manual against melancholy, agony, weepiness, and paranoia as the inevitable consequences of being subordinated to authority. “Only when they have communication with the infected, with no-hopers, [...], with leftwing liberals, with the preceding crop of the lunatic asylum, does the seed begin to grow in the hearts of these young people, some of whom once probably belonged to the Young Men's Christian Association where they sipped the tea of innocence [ ...] and takes the form of spine-tingling passion for evil”, as Panizza writes in the first paragraph about paralisis cerebri, the softening of the brain.

Against psychopathia medialis — For normal schizophrenia

A Minimal Manifesto for 2011

1. Arts and theories that possess an affinity to advanced thinking and advanced technologies demand maximum moveability. This moveability is not the same as the mobility that is demanded of us day in, day out, and proclaimed as an inherent necessity. Moveability does not offer itself for exploitation and, in turn, it does not exploit. Our moveability gets by with a minimum of possessions albeit carefully selected ones. It cultivates a life of wandering and attempts to orient itself in the world without prescribed disciplines. It is in the best sense undisciplined. It cannot be disciplined. This is a plea for theory and practice situated in the in-between of disciplines, between staked-out territories, between the dispositifs of power, which Michel Foucault identified above all as sexuality, truth, and knowledge. To this we can add the network.

2. Globalisation is a concept that is profoundly bound up with economic, cultural, and political power. The word originates from a vocabulary that has nothing to do with art. Our justifiable concern is to communicate our work on a worldwide basis, and to carry this through without falling into the trap of such (pre)determinations, therefore we need other concepts and other orientations. Poets and philosophers, like Édouard Glissant from Martinique, may be able to provide them. Glissant operates with the concept of mondialité. Jacques Derrida also regarded this concept very highly. With mondialité both thinkers describe a quality of worldwide relationships, which are not defined in terms of their rational purposiveness, but as the “poetry of relations”. Art and theory that are created with the aid of advanced ideas and media could in this sense become “mondiale” theory and practice.

3. In case of doubt and with the option of choosing alternatives a risky decision in favour of the possible is more appropriate than a pragmatic decision in favour of reality. Modern science, technology, and art have expended their energies for over 400 years on making the invisible visible and the imperceptible perceptible. Through translating nature into binary data and rendering social relations, including their fine structures, systematic, this process is now far advanced. The more that the technological world is programmed to make the impossible possible — that means, to make it function — it is worthwhile to undertake the attempt to confront the possible with its own impossibilities. This would be an alternative programme to establishing cybernetics as a cultural and social technology.

4. In the most advanced societies — advanced meaning technological societies based on industries and services — we live in a permanent testing situation. Our environment is set up as a test department, which was also the name of a great band (Test. Dept.) in the 1980s from Glasgow in Scotland. Ideas and concepts that have barely seen the light of day are subjected to trials to test their viability on the market. By contrast, in elaborate artistic processes the experiment takes precedence over the test. As a matter of principle experiments are free and failure is always possible. Tests, on the other hand, are tied to clearly defined purposes and pre-ordained objectives that have to be met. Tests serve to create products. In a test, input and expected output are connected as closely as possible.

5. In the early modern era the attraction of the alchemist’s laboratory was not primarily to turn base metals into shining gold. Rather, the fascination was that they were places where it was possible to gather profound experience of active processes for changing something less than perfect into something more perfect. This process consisted mainly of research. And the transformation of the transformers was just as important as the transformation of matter.

6. Theory and practice of the arts that are realised by media, amongst other things, should not waste their energy on renovating and restoring the world, but rather on the never-ending experiment, which is never in vain, to create a different world to the one that exists. Because the media-based arts are all timebased — that is, arts realised in a space–time continuum — one thing is of prime importance: to give back to those who are supposed to look at and enjoy the works some of the time that life has stolen from them (Godard).

7. The enormous amount of effort and energy, which is required to occupy the centre of technological and cultural power, is not worth it. Movements at the periphery have greater freedom, give more enjoyment, and hold more surprises in store. Such movements do not preclude the occasional excursion through the centre to reach other places on the periphery. On the contrary: living permanently on the periphery is only to be recommended if one knows the centre’s special qualities and if one has an idea of how it works. Only then can one enjoy the movements at the periphery. 

8. In more ways than one dual identities at very least are a basic requirement for activists on the terrain of the arts, the apparatuses, and the theories associated with them. In economic terms this means to master the tactics of the guerrilla, and to know how the businessman thinks and acts (Pesoa). For those who have to deal with complex equipment it is not enough to be a poet and a thinker. In the long term they will not be able to get by without experience of adapting and directing.

9. Imagination and mathematics have never been irreconcilable opposites and will not be so in the future. One can use them as two different, complementary possibilities of understanding, analysing, or constructing the world. The highest levels of pure mathematics can anyway only be attained via the imagination. Vice versa, imagination does well not to discard computing and calculating needlessly. There is no place for soft options in the theory and practice of arts that are realised through media.

10. To produce exciting and inspirational things and processes using devices one does not necessarily have to be an engineer or a programmer. It is, however, a great advantage to know how engineers and programmers think and work. Without respect for the work and working methods of the others, complex projects are not possible.

11. For artists who have taken the decision to engage rigorously with advanced technology, it is not sufficient to be merely an operator or a magician. An experimental approach to the world demands acts of intervention as well as actors who are prepared to follow a hands-on approach. The best is: magical operator or operative magician. It is high time to cease regarding as an antagonism what Walter Benjamin formulated over seventy years ago for “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction” for art processes in the age of their limitless simulability.

12. The social and political macrocosm, just like the microcosm of the individual brain, is determined by a high tension, which time and again threatens to rend the one or the other. One does not have to be a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to engage with the theory and practice of art generated by advanced ideas and technologies. However, it is good to know in what ways they act within the field of tension constrained by systems of censorship and the open regions dedicated to the imagination. This is one of the reasons why the psychiatrist and philosopher Hinderk Emrich has become one of my most important teachers.

13. The dream is the most powerful mental machine that we cannot regulate but from which we can profit enormously. Cultivation of one’s own dreams is just as important as constant practice of organising everyday life. Care of others’ dreams we should leave to others. The act of interpreting dreams and the act of controlling dreams are closely related. That is the reason why we mistrust people who want to know what we have dreamed in order to interpret it.

14. Art produced by advanced ideas and technologies does not necessarily have to increase the mysteriousness of the world. But it also does not necessarily have to increase the amount of what is obvious or customary. There is quite enough of this already, without artists and theorists contributing more.

15. The difficult balancing act for the visual arts is to enable expression of the invisible using the resources of the visible. This applies similarly to the acoustic world and the world of poetry: to make what is tonally not imaginable accessible to hearing, and to formulate what is not expressible in language in a formal arrangement that possesses the greatest degree of freedom. The most important task is to sensibilise, or maintain people’s sensibility, for the Other, that which is not identical to us, that which is as a principle and in its essence alien, utilising the means and instruments of aesthetics. This task of art will not change regardless of what media we use to express ourselves.

16. When the various levels of artificial reality (analogue instruments, recording devices, computers, programmes, digital tools) are mixed together so closely in aesthetic productions that they are indistinguishable, the necessity of signalising the technical structure of the various levels — as the classic avant-garde did — recedes into the background. At last all of the design parameters can be brought together in a relationship that plays out in freedom.

17. Perpetually dancing on plateaus that are above volcanoes misleads people into professional dilettantism and, currently, to veneration of the impassionate amateur as the guiding model of aesthetic action. The courage to ascend vertical heights helps such people to avoid slipping on the seductively smooth plateaus. However, we need both of these movements, the vertical and the horizontal — as well as an elegant finish to the jump off the cross formed by these two lines. 

18. To be permanently connected and perpetually wired rapidly tires the mind and the body. (My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired, sang Bob Dylan in “Love Sick”.) This state is comparable to a prolonged artificial paradise, the stretching of time that only drugs can induce but machines can simulate. The Long Now is an obscene project that was developed by engineers and programmers who want to play God. 

19. To avoid an existence that is caught up too much within time and is therefore paranoid, and to avoid being too little within time and therefore thinking one is at home on the rings of Saturn in melancholy and bitterness, it is helpful as a principle to cultivate the conscious split. We work, organise, publish, and amuse ourselves in networks. We rhapsodise, meditate, enjoy, believe, and trust in autonomous, separate situations, each to his/her own and sometimes with other individuals. This adds up to a balancing act: in a single lifetime we have to learn

to exist online and be offline. If we don’t succeed in this, we shall become mere appendages of the world that we have created, merely its technical functions. We should not allow cybernetics, the science of optimal control and

predictability, this triumph.

20. As the young Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus logico philosophicus "The subject doesn’t belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world" (Proposition 5.632). This has not changed. Not even after the sovereign individual subject of the European modern age was declared variously as dead. On the contrary. Only the boundaries have shifted. The fact that such limits exist is not affected.

21. Like heaven and hell, the Internet has no location. However, body and mind can only be in one place at a time. To militate against the sacralisation of the networks it is useful to develop a profane relationship to them. This can only be done from somewhere located outside of them.

22. The Internet is one of the non-locations where physical and mental being dissipates itself. The subjects, however strong or weak they are conceived to be, should not give up their willingness to squander gratuitously. However, it is time to think about who profits by this squandering.

23. The greatest impossibility that one can work on at the moment is the relations of individuals with each other and, as a consequence, the relations between the many. Michel de Montaigne defines friendship (following Aristotle) as a constellation where one soul lives in two different bodies so that neither giving nor taking is an issue. “To the company at table I would rather invite someone witty than thoughtful; to bed rather beauty than goodliness; to social occasions the quick-witted [...]” Relationships between friends are characterised by the absence of any such determination of aims and intent. This absence is not a lack but a reflection of the greatest possible richness of experience.