Nothing Special

Something I have been meaning to rant about for a while is the prescribed individuality that is integral to the creation of our digital identities on social media platforms. Facebook, Youtube, but also to a lesser extent art sites Artslant, re-title, not to mention dating sites, all involve at least some self-definition within parameters they set out (taste in movies, music, books, religious/ political beliefs etc).

It’s another case of choice but within a structure where the more significant choices have already been made; for example, belonging to a social media platform is more of a necessity than a choice, and for those who do opt out, part of their identity is then defined by this choice. Last year I had been thinking about how self-definition works in personality tests and the industry of self-help/ self-actualisation that depends on classifying one’s personality- stuff like are you an optimist or a pessimist? A leader or a follower?

There is an almost comical adherence to the notion of personality as a rigid entity rather than one that fluctuates according to surroundings and circumstances. The cult of personality is also well suited to the process of self-definition through consumerism, in which our particular personality type must find expression through our consumer choices- one of my favourite tests was the Indie test, to determine how ‘alternative’ you are, mainly based on what clothes and music choices you make. Talk about cooption of dissent!

Tying in (maybe) with some of these ideas is an essay by Janet Kraynak, which I re-read today, ostensibly about Bruce Nauman’s sculptural practice but hinging on ideas of participation as submissive and dependent. She develops this idea from the writing of Alain Touraine, who first coined the term ‘programmed society’ 40 years ago, a loaded term synonymous with the rise of post-industrial technocratic society.

Put simply the technocratic society valorizes efficiency and productivity (as opposed to ‘old’ ideals like freedom, self-determination), a ‘business-ontology’ (as Mark Fisher puts it) currently being implemented by the Con-Dems. ‘Optimum’ performance, in the mechanistic meaning of the term, becomes the desired model for subjects and institutions as well as corporations.

Another important aspect is repression through inclusion, rather than exclusion –not enforced by the police but through comfortable conformity, through fully participating in the systems of consumption and social life, where, however, ‘opting out is not a possibility’. Closely related to inclusion is participation, which is actually the central theme of her essay: drawing on Tourlaine’s, notion of ‘dependant participation’, where the subject, although ostensibly ‘free’ to participate in society, is actually to a large extent obligated.

She uses this framework for understanding Nauman’s work within this tension of participation and control, where the viewer is both ‘beseeched and thwarted’, becoming willing yet not exactly free participants in his installations. Joining the chorus of grumblings about relational aesthetics she also contrasts this with the supposedly benign, democratic aesthetic of inclusion which masks both the potentially problematic power relationship between artist and viewer within RA practices and the economic arrangements allowing them to thrive.

Amongst many strands that I’m trying to tease out is the relationship between programming/ rationalization and the performance of identity within contemporary culture. As she points out, programming is all about a scientific, rationalised process of information gathering which is then subjected to number-crunching in order to enable its parsing as information, and not just a jumble of facts and figures. This analysis creates a statistically accurate picture of past behaviour and can to a certain extent predict the future.

Then its just a small step to prescribing (programming) the future, as users of Facebook and Google have found- advertisers don’t just place ads in your profile based on your previous inputs for the hell of it, but because its a fair predictor of future activity, i.e. future consumption.

This is the closed-loop variation of capitalism in its networked phase, personalized ads targeting you with ever increasing precision, where any response further shades out that picture and thereby feeds back into the loop. “Free’ internet services, along with ‘free participation” are both apparently underwritten by a contract with hidden costs, one that we are seemingly quite happy to pay.

I’m suffering post-holiday loss of bearings in relation to my work, and trying to get my head back into it by going to film screenings and talks. As part of this re-immersion drive I went to Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s screening and talk at the Whitechapel, which showcased new work made for Nick Cave’s forthcoming DVD, alongside old work and videos that had influenced them, all focused on the talking head format. I don’t know their other work very well, though the event convinced me to go to the South London Gallery to rectify that, but from this selection it seemed primarily concerned with the foibles of human nature- obsessions, passions, attachments- filtered through the lens of music.

While talking heads are standard in documentaries and YouTube videoblogs, Mike Sperlinger, who was chairing the talk, pointed out that when utilised within ‘cheap’ TV clip-shows the people talking are treated as merely a means of content delivery- to say the things the progrmame editors require so that a coherent narrative can be pieced together from multiple voices. Jane pointed out how easy it is prompt certain answers, comparing this type of cynical interviewing to handing out a script- an instrumentalised mode of interview that their work is clearly in opposition to.

Their use of talking heads also differs from mainstream manifestations by rejecting name-titles, depriving the viewer of the framing device that identifies the interviewees, and thereby affords authority and prestige to them and to the interviewers, particularly when dealing with famous personalities as in the Nick Cave videos, for being able to secure such ‘big names’. Without names, everyone is leveled and hierarchy is eliminated, in a kind of gesture towards fundamental equality (unless they’re so famous you recoginse their faces).

Another interesting thing Jane said concerned their editing process, which is done according to the spoken word, much like a radio edit. This type of work is seemingly much more a literary/ writerly form of art since the text has primacy over the visual content, with the visual elements almost entirely determined by the text. One could argue that the individual speakers are similarly subordinated since their individual voices and stories are not as important as the overall narrative the artists construct from them.

My video Reality Life (2009), which featured teenage girls reading out a script written entirely from the titles of ‘unscripted’ TV programmes, attempted to foreground the potentially exploitative aspect of this practice; un-named and cut into wherever it suited the rhythm and flow of the video, the girls were simply ‘delivering’ their lines to camera for my use.

Of course the difference is that it was scripted beforehand, whereas documentaries are constructed from the (supposedly) unpredictable stuff people come out with. But- and this is something I’ve pondered a lot in relation to my own text-based work- where does carefully manipulating other people’s language leave the artist? Contrary to the positing of the work screened as oppositional, with their collaborator Nick Cave acting as a credible signifier of ‘alternative’ culture, the artists still have total authorial control and edit the content to create their own unique, individual response out of it.

It reminded me of something Steven Ball said at the curator’s talk at Banner Repeater in relation to one of my videos. He mentioned Marjorie Perloff, a theorist of conceptual poetics, who has espoused the notion of ‘unoriginal genius’, which as the name suggests, hardly destabilises the old romantic/ individualist idea of the artist as genius- albeit one who displays their virtuosity through re-using and re-ordering existing texts. She gives Benjamin’s Arcades project as a paradigmatic example but also champions the work of contemporary artists like Caroline Bergvall, who has worked with re-written found texts like lyrics and titles of pop songs, for example.

I think she is proposing this as a definitive break from the idea of ‘original genius’ in the age of the internet and simulacrum but I wonder whether using existing texts does anything to challenge the authority and control of the artist since what they formulate from them is still unique and individual – words often associated with ‘genius’, original or otherwise.

Reality Life (2009)

It’s a familiar feeling to anyone who has found themselves trapped in an endless cycle internet browsing- somewhere, out there, is the article, text or information that’s going to make sense of it all and make something click, as it were. My new year’s resolution for the second year running- having finally managed to quit smoking- was to stop wasting time in this manner, along with the even more pointless activity of reading the comment boards of blogs. Amongst many others, this topic was covered during a workshop at the ICA lead by Mark Fisher and Nina Power addressing the way the internet has affected the dissemination of artworks and looking at how artists and writers have used the web, especially blogging.

More of an informal dialogue with comments and questions actively encouraged throughout, the talk took in themes like the continuous displaced attention typical of the web, the illusion of infinite time it conjures up and the politics behind a switched-on culture. Thankfully free of the usual tips to success, networking and branding that often characterize ‘artists and websites’ discussions, the speakers instead talked about the personal reasons behind starting a blog in the first place and the strangeness of suddenly addressing a public- even if no one is reading. Mark asserted, and Nina concurred, that for him and others of his acquaintance, starting a blog coincided with some sort of loss or otherwise difficult period, in his case depression following the ending of his PhD. It takes some guts to offer up this kind of detail to a crowd of strangers, and it set the tone for an almost intimate (in a good way) discussion.

The tension between the printed word and on screen text was another theme, since most people prefer to read long articles in book form; on screen, with other tabs constantly attracting your attention, the pull to keep scanning and moving to the next article is too strong. This continuous displaced attention, a kind of distracted roving in which the ‘labour is the look’ and eye-balling accrues value, is apparently integral to what Jodi Dean called “communicative capitalism”. As I understand it, the utopian dream of increased quantity of and access to information does not lead to a more democratic situation, but to a state of confusion and distrust, where the endless stream of publicity, op-eds, wikipedia entries and blogs “produce searching, suspicious subjects ever clicking for more information, ever drawn to uncover the secret and find out for themselves”. The excess and lack of meaning creates a kind of whirlpool intensity of information, which the subject gets swept up in, unable to decide who to trust.

Not to mention the fact that despite the liveliness of online debate, the endless ‘Support this or that protest’ Facebook group thousands join, there is little actual, real-world activism to back it up. I started writing this before the uprising in Egypt, and I wonder how much events there disprove this theory- some have suggested that its precisely the Wikileaks episode which lead to the uprooting of the Tunisian regime, which consequently spurred on the Egyptian people into action. Mubarak’s decision to disable the internet suggests there is real fear from authoritarian regimes of protestors using it to communicate and organize; it undeniably also presents us, the online observers, with a captivating ‘breaking news’ drama to keep abreast of and endless debate to engage in.

Mark mentioned the crucial role of debate to culture as well, since the debate- the buzz, hype, discussion around it, the participation of the viewer- is the product; that’s what is being produced (and guarantees its success). This is obviously integral to reality TV, a pseudo-participation better described as interpassive rather than interactive, and as he said, with the whole ethos of ‘inclusion’ as practiced by the government and corporate interests. I’ve seen this ‘Have Your Say’, ‘Join the debate’ culture in action in Redbridge where I live: posters saying “£3 million must be cut, have your say where from” but the decision to cut at all, is of course, closed to debate. As Mark said, if your opinion made a difference, they wouldn’t want to know it!