Petty kink
Posted on | March 1, 2006 |
Geert Lovink has started a blog, which features this terrific interview with Alan Liu. It’s already been on nettime, but it’s new to me. I wish someone had told me about this book 6 months ago. Choice cuts (but the whole thing is worth reading):
GL: You write: “Cultural criticism is fundamentally historical.” At the same time History as we know is declared obsolescent. The history that unfolds is now partitioned in files and stored in a database. You call for cultural criticism to become ‘ethical hackers’ of knowledge work.
AL: Your question is interesting to me partly because of the way it is asked. There is actually no question in your question. No insult intended, but it’s as if you were yourself a database outputting information (a fragment from my book, sound bites from the culture of obsolescence, etc.). More frightening, you (and I, too!) are like many professionals today, whether they are information workers, economists, journalists, bloggers, or professors: we’re good at outputting data without any query (SQL or otherwise) actually having been made by anyone. We call that knowledge work, which produces a kind of “information overload” from which corporate culture harvests all its surplus value. (They don’t even need to query; we output!) I play upon the database-like aspects of your question because it’s a way of getting at what my book is about. A long time ago (and, of course, still in many parts of society today), people had another name for massive information dumps that occurred spontaneously without any query having been made. They called it God. It was God, or the gods, who spoke out of the burning bush to tell you what you didn’t even know you needed to ask. Before Oracle, Inc., in other words, there were oracles. But since the Enlightenment, secularization, and the many modern revolutions, that role of the oracle has been renamed History. We know we are in the presence of history when it preemptively tells us, and enforces upon us, something we didn’t even want to ask about.
[...]
GL: What, except for Microsoft, needs to be destroyed? Macht kaputt was euch kaputt macht is a famous German punk slogan (destroy what destroys you). However, the destruction that you talk about can hardly be labeled as punk. At best it’s tinkering, uncovering the dark, but it can also be the kind of adolescent troll behavior that attracts attention, and aims at the destruction of online social structures. Can we still make a distinction between us and them, between those that need to be defeated and others who are the revolutionaries? Isn’t the problem of destructive creativity not also that everything (digital) can and will be saved, stored and archived? And talking about creative destruction, what do you see as obsolescent these days? We know what management gurus in the late nineties want to blow up in terms of old corporate structures but what is there really to do if want to apply destructive creativity? I often see not much more than self-destruction or predictable critiques of mainstream media.
AL: “Destructivity,” as I call it, is a much larger and more interesting phenomenon than adolescents, artists, intellectuals, and hacktivists performing, as you suggest, the now predictable acts of mischievous critique and petty kink. It is a way of participating in a civilization of destruction. As you know, the great theories of “civilization” in modern times have been dark ones–whether we think of Weber’s vision of bureaucratization, Freud’s of repression and sublimation, Foucault’s of discipline, Habermas’ of the decoupling of the “lifeworld,” or even Elias Norbert’s works on the”civilizing process” and the rise of “manners. The process of civilization is not the bright, Enlightenment vision of ever-upward “progress” in which all the main domains of life–intellectual, social, economic, and cultural–improve together but instead a kind of hostile take-over of life at large by the rational-economic subsectors of life. That’s what we call corporatization today. Corporatization attempts to sell its own vision of civilization, which it calls “globalization,” on the basis of a kind of neo-Enlightenment vision of progress, which it calls innovation. It is astounding, for example, how many business books and articles there are with such titles as “Continuous Innovation,” “Radical Innovation,” “The Innovative Enterprise,” “The Rise of the Creative Class,” “Creativity Under the Gun,” and so on. But a dark interpretation of such civilization would ask: what needs to be destroyed to make creation possible? Even more interesting, what logics, structures, and technologies of destruction are embedded so deeply in the process of creativity itself that they’re not just viral; they are part of the DNA of “creative destruction”?
What I call “destructivity” is a way of asking such questions and, on that basis, proposing ethical as well as tactical “best practices” for participating in the civilization of creative destruction. So, to come back to adolescents (we call them “students”), artists, intellectuals, and hacktivists: such people are often like the old Processed World collective I write about at one point in my book, who wrote critiques and played merry, situationist pranks against institutionalized knowledge work while simultaneously eking out a living in office cubicles. Such people–who can easily be mocked, but can just as easily be cherished as the carriers of our collective best hopes and dreams–stake out their identity at the margins of the major power institutions, neither fully in nor fully out. Under the title of “destructivity,” I want to provide a more useful rationale for how and why such people can best participate in the major institutions of knowledge work that, in one way or another, they have to engage with anyway.
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3 Responses to “Petty kink”
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March 1st, 2006 @ 11:40 am
yes, still waiting for this book to come into the library…i have my eye on it too
March 15th, 2006 @ 8:52 am
Ironically, most of those involved in constructing “situationist pranks”, like the german section known as The Spur Group who published the Gaudi Manifesto in 1961, were summarily thrown out of the situationist international. The idiots from Processed World would never have made it into the S.I., on the grounds that they are especially moronic pro-situationists who churn second class drivel which passes as radical only amoung academics and technorati. Which is again very ironic.
September 13th, 2006 @ 3:09 pm
[...] Apart from this description, which culminates in the idea of petty kink I’ve mentioned before, Liu seeks to understand the stakes at risk in cool’s ‘bad attitude’, its anti- or nonpolitics. Put one way: “Cyberlibertarianism is in-your-face individualism, except when it would rather lose itself in the anonymous mass.” (p. 261) Put another: [...]