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Subject: Article 88[2]-Distraction and Digital Culture
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CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 23, NO 3
Article 88[2] 11/10/00 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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Distraction and Digital Culture [Part 2]
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~William Bogard~
Digital Distraction
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We can perhaps now begin to see mass media, and particularly
electronic media, along similar lines, i.e., in terms of an
"architecture," the adjustment of conditions of perception and the
formation of habits. But precisely what kinds of perception and
habitualized modes of behavior, in relation to what architecture, are
we dealing with here?
Benjamin's (230-236) remarks are again instructive. He notes that the
technology of film places the observer in the role of a passive
critic. This would be a subjective way of putting it. More to the
point, cinematic equipment, and particularly the film camera,
modifies, in an historically important way, the social conditions of
perception.[6] Because film can be speeded up and slowed down,
because the camera can zoom in and out, because it can move around
its object, take various angles, etc., the traditional reception of
the work of art has been replaced, Benjamin says, by one of
"testing." The audience, in effect, ~becomes the camera and sees as
it sees~. In an age where power is increasingly exercised through the
mechanical reproduction of images, the "aura" of the traditional art
object - its cult value, its "authenticity," its unique origin in
space and time - is sacrificed to the modern value of testability.
One can now view the object up-close; from any and all sides; and at
any place and time (since it is now mass produced and distributed).
The cinema, a distraction-assemblage and in Benjamin's hands the
model of a technology which once and for all strips the image of its
traditional functions, inaugurates a new mode of perception and, one
would have to say, a new set of habits. Henceforth, everything is
subjected to the test. Testing - i.e., measuring, dividing out,
selecting, ranking, ~sorting~ - becomes the order of the day, and
this is manifest in a specific way of manipulating the image, of
producing it in each and all of its possibilities, in every one of
its multiple perspectives, the better to ~capture its object
definitively~. "Every day," Benjamin writes, "the urge grows stronger
to get hold of the object by its likeness, its reproduction" (223).
Baudrillard (1983a) has an apt image along these lines: all this -
endless examination, continuous inspection, the effort to penetrate
and reproduce the object in itself by detailed analysis,
re-magnification and over-magnification of parts, etc. - signifies
the cultural dominance of the ~hyperreal~, i.e., the substitution of
signs of the real for the real itself, which increasingly disappears
from the stage of perception (Benjamin notes that the perfect image
in cinematic society is one from which the technology which captures
it is absent, i.e., disappears, leaving only "reality" in its purest
form) (Benjamin:234). The hyperreal, we will say, is our current mode
of distraction, and our current mode of capture, since, no less than
everything else, it subjects us to the test as well.
We should not think, however, that the hyperreal is something
insubstantial or immaterial. The urge to test, to convert objects
into signs, provoked and supported by technologies like the camera
and increasingly by digital information systems, it comes down to
sorting and re-depositing material flows. Deleuze and Guattari (1987;
cf. also Guattari 1996, 1992) insist that any system of signs must be
examined not only in terms of its meaning, but in its "asemiotic" or
arepresentational component as well, i.e., as a regime of desire and
affect, an organization of force relations, rather than as a
linguistic or "mental" structure. This is Foucault's position as
well, who in affirming the connection of language (discourse) and the
sign, denies the sign's assimilation to representation and the
signifier: "Of course discourses are composed of signs; but what they
do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this
'more' that renders them irreducible to language (langue) and to
speech" (1972:49). Foucault's "more" refers to discourse as a
practical deployment of forces on bodies, in ways that harness their
energies, hierarchize them, functionalize them, etc. The sign is not
just representation, but power; not just indication, but ~dividing
practice~.
Here we return full circle to distraction in the material sense of
the test - signification as dividing practice (or sorting-machine).
This is not by any means a new idea. It has long been a matter of
practice and a condition of knowledge in military organizations. We
have already hinted that distraction utilizes signs to divert the
enemy - false appearances, lures, feints, ruses, decoys. Such signs
divide the enemy's forces, separate him from his lines of support,
and render him visible. The military employs these tactics on their
own soldiers to establish the order of rank. The enlistee in the
American armed forces, for example, is immediately forced into
practices that divide him from his cohort and fit him to a system of
rank. Shaving the head, rising before dawn, early morning exercises,
unison marches, on and on. These can only be called forced
distractions.
Distraction, of course, is not unique to the military, and it is not
the property of a military elite - in its multiple forms, it is a
tactical element in all conflicts, and on all sides, military or not.
It is not, we have seen, solely the possession of the stronger force,
nor can it be limited to the conditions of capture. One can distract
power to escape it. To distract power is to elude its grasp and,
potentially, to ~overpower it by blocking its sense~. Unable to sense
its object or to ~make sense~ of it, i.e., to signify it, distracted
power is rendered powerless.[7] It cannot locate or name its object,
or assign it a place in its code (thus distraction is not just sign,
but anti-sign, anti-code). It is not surprising that this
overpowering potential of distraction, which originally aims to
destroy power, immediately becomes power's strongest ally. As soon as
they appear, as soon as they are seen in their role as productive of
the conditions of perception, the means of distraction are harnessed
to the Law, which then employs them to normalize behavior, to
reinforce or modify habits, to channel desire and belief along
appropriate paths. But these same means, at any time, can once again
become methods for mocking the Law - then it is the "bad" habits that
they generate, the illicit desires, and the "evil" signs (cf.
Baudrillard [1993b; 1987] on the "evil demon of images").
Because distraction is both a signifying and anti-signifying power,
it is a diagram of ritualized, social behavior. It is the basis of
both the sedimented character of ritual enactments (forms of habit)
and the ~challenge~ ritual throws up to the very forces which
authorize and sanction those enactments. Ritual power is nothing more
than the distraction of a superior power - a god, a demon, death
itself. This is how we should view the practices of sacrifice,
prayer, and sacrament, as so many distractions to divert a dangerous
force and divide it from its supports. In all these practices we
witness the sign as dividing or sorting strategy, a machine for the
purpose of weakening and strengthening, but a machine that ultimately
obeys no master and can as easily turn on the very forces that seek
to employ it.
Today, we perhaps must radicalize Benjamin's question about
distraction to account for changing technical conditions. It may no
longer be adequate to frame this question in terms of theses
regarding art in an age of ~mechanical reproduction~. Rather, we must
consider the possibility that mechanical techniques of reproduction
are being supplanted by digital technologies, and that this signals
at least an intensification of their dynamics, and possibly a
qualitative shift. That is, we must think about moving from an
industrial to a post-industrial or informational model of
distraction. At issue in this question is not so much the notion of
"reproduction" which still assumes that it makes sense to distinguish
an "original" from its copies, but ~simulation~, which implies, at
least in theory, the essential meaninglessness of that opposition
(cf. Baudrillard 1993a; 1990; 1983a; 1983b). Benjamin, we have seen,
notes the loss of the artwork's "aura" in contemporary culture - its
originality and spatiotemporal uniqueness - as it increasingly is
subjected to the imperatives of mass production. But it is the
principle of production (and reproduction) itself that is challenged
by simulation. When art is simulated, its status ~as~ art becomes
problematic in a way that is different than if it is merely mass
produced. Not only is its originality lost, but so is its value as a
copy, i.e., as a "reminder" of uniqueness, situatedness, realness.
The same is true of architecture - computer technology, for instance,
has made it possible to speak of "virtual" architectures,
cyberspaces, and so on (cf. Benedikt 1992). Baudrillard (1993b)
believes we have entered a time of "trans-aesthetics," where
everything becomes art even as art itself disappears (in the same
sense that the "real" disappears into the "hyperreal"). The notion of
"simulated architectures," then, would refer not to constructions of
steel and concrete, but to the (no less material) information
structures that now form the background (noise?) of daily life; not
to negotiated spaces, but to digital "environments" or "climates";
not simply to tactile or visual appropriation, but to seamless neural
integration.
The purpose of these reflections is not to analyze simulation, which
would take us too far afield, but to think how distraction might
operate in an age where simulation has become a dominant strategy of
social control. Distraction, it would appear, impacts the body today
by organizing its flows at a molecular level, at the interface of the
cellular structure of the organism and the system of information. To
use language from Donna Haraway (1985), distraction has gone
"cyborgian." It is no problem to see the forces of distraction at
work in the connection of any kid's fingers to the buttons of his or
her video game controller. Can we imagine a time when our brains are
wired directly to those buttons, when the brain itself is a
distraction-machine that can call up its own diversions at the merest
thought? When we no longer appropriate the scene tactilely but
through our nervous system (cf. Taussig 1991)? Pure escape, or pure
capture? Who could tell? This would be "trans-art" and
"trans-architecture" at their logical, and nightmarish, limit.
Benjamin's thesis that modern art mobilizes the masses to convert
socially necessary tasks into habits is undoubtedly still salient. So
is his theory that increasingly those tasks converge on the practice
of testing. If anything, we could say that testing as a social
imperative is raised to the ~nth degree~ in simulation societies.
Simulations are, in fact, not just tests, but ~pre~-tests - one uses
simulation as a favored tactic whenever possible to eliminate the
very need for tests (Baudrillard 1983a:115-117). The army simulates
battle scenarios on its computers to avoid having to "test" any one
of them in a real conflict; the police utilize profiles to narrow the
range of possible suspects; schools utilize models of performance to
prescreen and sort students into appropriate tracks; advertisers test
their images on sample populations, which are themselves derived from
simulations; parents select their children from a range of genetic
options. Computer simulation technologies as a whole could be seen as
sorting and selection assemblages of the most radical kind,
channeling flows of matter and energy by virtue of pre-testing the
outcomes of those flows. In fact, their essential function is nothing
more than to sort materials into testable aggregates (pre-sorting,
pre-dividing). Money, sex, food, blood, genes, words... whatever
flows can be captured in terms of information and fed into simulation
models to better control absolutely the ranges of possible outcomes.
It is becoming increasingly apparent today that few flows indeed can
escape these widely distributed methods of tracking and diversion
(cf. Bogard 1996).
Can it be said any longer that we "inhabit" these spaces of
information, these pre-test, pre-sorting, pre-dividing zones where it
is no longer a matter of tactile but molecular and genetic
integration? Do information architectures generate habits? Or do they
in fact eliminate the requirement of habituation to necessary tasks?
When things can be distracted - marked, drawn off, diverted - before
they even begin their trajectories (as is the plan for genetic
engineering technologies), when their flows are captured in advance,
what role does habit play? Does a cyborg or a clone fall into habits?
Or is it, rather, one ~big~ habit, ~only~ habit, the utopia of
perfect habituation which the control societies of the West have been
aiming at for the past one hundred years (Beniger 1986)?
Such speculations could easily make us forget that distraction must
still be linked to questions of power, that it operates as a means of
escape as well as capture. Guattari (1996, 1995), for instance, is
not willing to identify information systems strictly with systems of
domination or subjectification, although clearly that is how he would
characterize a great deal in the contemporary situation.[8] Virtually
everywhere we turn in information societies, where information is
channeled for commercial purposes, distraction functions to arrest
flows, to harden them into permanent structures and functions. Where
are the information strategies that offer escape, that break down
hardened systems, that destratify and remix layers of sediment?
Hacking technologies for breaking and distributing computer codes
should remind us that no system of domination is permanent or
seamless, and that even virtual architectures are subject to sudden
breakdowns and catastrophes. What else is hacking than an elaborate
game of distraction (breaking and entering, covering one's tracks,
drawing off flows of information into banks other than those which
were intended for their deposit)?
It is no doubt that modern systems of information control threaten to
eliminate both the dangers and the charms of distraction as escape.
"Recliner" civilization increasingly finds itself caught up in grand
delusions of escape, only to discover itself bound ever more tightly
to the images on its screens, and to the channels of information
which now threaten to restructure it at the molecular level. The
political question today remains: what modes of distraction,
operating at the most micro-scales of the body, can transform such
delusionary escapes into real ones?
Notes
-----
[6] Cf. also Virilio on this point (1991; 1989). Virilio makes
important connections between the development of modern cinematic
equipment and strategies of disappearance.
[7] On sense and regimes of power and desire, cf. Deleuze (1990).
[8] Nor would he accept the idealist assumptions of Baudrillard's
analysis of simulation (in this he agrees with Virilio [1995], who
views simulation as a matter of material substitution of technical
practices rather than the hyperrealism of signs). Distraction, too,
we must insist, can only be adequately grasped as a material practice
(machine-assemblage).
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----------
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Editor's note: Part 1 of "Distraction and Digital Culture" was
published on Thursday, October 5, 2000.
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William Bogard is a Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in
Washington, and is currently writing a book about smoothing machines.
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