Daniel Rourke

This mini-paper was given at the Escapologies symposium, at Goldsmiths University, on the 5th of December

Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe centres on the shipwreck and isolation of its protagonist. The life Crusoe knew beyond this shore was fashioned by Ships sent to conquer New Worlds and political wills built on slavery and imperial demands. In writing about his experiences, Crusoe orders his journal, not by the passing of time, but by the objects produced in his labour. A microcosm of the market hierarchies his seclusion removes him from: a tame herd of goats, a musket and gunpowder, sheafs of wheat he fashions into bread, and a shelter carved from rock with all the trappings of a King’s castle. Crusoe structures the tedium of the island by gathering and designing these items that exist solely for their use-value:

“In a Word, The Nature and Experience of Things dictated to me upon just Reflection, That all the good Things of this World, are no farther good to us, than they are for our Use…” [1]

Although Crusoe’s Kingdom mirrors the imperial British order, its mirroring is more structural than anything else. The objects and social contrivances Crusoe creates have no outside with which to be exchanged. Without an ‘other’ to share your labour there can be no mutual assurance, no exchanges leading to financial agreements, no business partners, no friendships. But most importantly to the mirroring of any Kingdom, without an ‘other’ there can be no disagreements, no coveting of a neighbours ox, no domination, no war: in short, an Empire without an outside might be complete, total, final, but an Empire without an outside has also reached a state of complete inertia.

Crusoe’s Empire of one subject, is what I understand as “a closed system”…

The 2^nd law of thermo dynamics maintains that without an external source of energy, all closed systems will tend towards a condition of inactivity. Eventually, the bacteria in the petri dish will multiply, eating up all the nutrients until a final state of equilibrium is reached, at which point the system will collapse in on itself: entropy cannot be avoided indefinitely. The term ‘negative entropy’ is often applied to living organisms because they seem to be able to ‘beat’ the process of entropy, but this is as much an illusion as the illusion of Crusoe’s Kingdom: negative entropy occurs at small scales, over small periods of time. Entropy is highly probable: the order of living beings is not.

Umberto Eco:

“Consider, for example, the chaotic effect… of a strong wind on the innumerable grains of sand that compose a beach: amid this confusion, the action of a human foot on the surface of the beach constitutes a complex interaction of events that leads to the statistically very improbable configuration of a footprint.” [2]

The footprint in Eco’s example is a negative entropy event: the system of shifting sands is lent a temporary order by the cohesive action of the human foot. In physical terms, the footprint stands as a memory of the foot’s impression. The 2^nd law of thermodynamics establishes a relationship between entropy and information: memory remains as long as its mark. Given time, the noisy wind and chaotic waves will cause even the strongest footprint to fade. A footprint is a highly improbable event.

Before you read on, watch this scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

The footprint, when it first appears on the island, terrifies Crusoe as a mark of the outsider, but soon, realising what this outsider might mean for the totality of his Kingdom, Robinson begins the process of pulling the mark inside his conceptions:

“Sometimes I fancied it must be the Devil; and reason joined in with me upon this supposition. For how should any other thing in human shape come into the place? Where was the vessel that brought them? What marks were there of any other footsteps? And how was it possible a man should come there?” [3]

In the novel, it is only on the third day that Crusoe re-visits the site to compare his own foot with the print. The footprint is still there on the beach after all this time, a footprint Crusoe now admits is definitely not his own.

This chain of events affords us several allegorical tools: firstly, that of the Devil, Crusoe believes to be the only rational explanation for the print. This land, which has been Crusoe’s own for almost 2 decades, is solid, unchanging and eternal. Nothing comes in nor goes beyond its shores, yet its abundance of riches have served Crusoe perfectly well: seemingly infinite riches for a Kingdom’s only inhabitant. Even the footprint, left for several days, remains upon Crusoe’s return. Like the novel of which it is a part, the reader of the mark may revisit the site of this unlikely incident again and again, each time drawing more meanings from its appearance. Before Crusoe entertains that the footprint might be that of “savages of the mainland” he eagerly believes it to be Satan’s, placed there deliberately to fool him. Crusoe revisits the footprint, in person and then, as it fades, in his own memory. He ‘reads’ the island, attributing meanings to marks he discovers that go far beyond what is apparent. As Susan Stewart has noted:

“In allegory the vision of the reader is larger than the vision of the text; the reader dreams to an excess, to an overabundance.” [4]

Simon O’Sullivan, following from Deleuze, takes this further, arguing that in his isolation, a world free from ‘others’, Crusoe has merged with, become the island. The footprint is a mark that must be recuperated if Crusoe’s identity, his “power of will”, is to be maintained. An outsider must have caused the footprint, but Crusoe is only capable of reading in the mark something about himself. The evocation of a Demon, then, is Crusoe’s way of re-totalising his Empire, of removing the ‘other’ from his self-subjective identification with the island.

So, how does this relate to thermodynamics? To answer that I will need to tell the tale of a second Demon, more playful even than Crusoe’s.

In his 1871 essay, Theory of Heat, James Clerk Maxwell designed a thought experiment to test the 2^nd law of Thermodynamics. Maxwell imagines a microscopic being able to sort atoms bouncing around a closed system into two categories: fast and slow. If such a creature did exist, it was argued, no work would be required to decrease the entropy of a closed system. By sorting unlikely footprints from the chaotic arrangement of sand particles Maxwell’s Demon, as it would later become known, appeared to contradict the law Maxwell himself had helped to develop. One method of solving the apparent paradox was devised by Charles H. Bennet, who recognised that the Demon would have to remember where he placed the fast and slow particles. Here, once again, the balance between the order and disorder of a system comes down to the balance between memory and information. As the demon decreases the entropy of its environment, so it must increase the entropy of its memory. The information required by the Demon acts like a noise in the system. The laws of physics had stood up under scrutiny, resulting in a new branch of science we now know as ‘Information Theory’.

Maxwell’s Demon comes from an old view of the universe, “fashioned by divine intervention, created for man and responsive to his will” [5]. Information Theory represents a threshold, a revelation that the “inhuman force of increasing entropy, [is] indifferent to man and uncontrollable by human will.” [6] Maxwell’s Demon shows that the law of entropy has only a statistical certainty, that nature orders only on small scales and, that despite any will to control, inertia will eventually be reached.

Developed at the peak of the British Empire, thermodynamics was sometimes called “the science of imperialism”, as Katherine Hayles has noted:

“…to thermodynamicists, entropy represented the tendency of the universe to run down, despite the best efforts of British rectitude to prevent it from doing so… The rhetoric of imperialism confronts the inevitability of failure. In this context, entropy represents an apparently inescapable limit on the human will to control.” [7]

Like Maxwell, Crusoe posits a Demon, with faculties similar in kind to his own, to help him quash his “terror of mind”. Crusoe’s fear is not really about outsiders coming in, the terror he feels comes from the realisation that the outsiders may have been here all along, that in all the 20 years of his isolation those “savages of the mainland” may have visited his island time and again. It is not an outside ‘other’ that disturbs and reorganises Crusoe’s Kingdom. A more perverse logic is at work here, and once again Crusoe will have to restructure his imperial order from the inside out.

Before you read on, watch this second scene from Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954):

Jacques Rancière prepares for us a parable. A student who is illiterate, after living a fulfilled life without text, one day decides to teach herself to read. Luckily she knows a single poem by heart and procures a copy of that poem, presumably from a trusted source, by which to work. By comparing her memory of the poem, sign by sign, word by word, with the text of the poem she can, Rancière believes, finally piece together a foundational understanding of her written language:

“From this ignoramus, spelling out signs, to the scientist who constructs hypotheses, the same intelligence is always at work – an intelligence that translates signs into other signs and proceeds by comparisons and illustrations in order to communicate its intellectual adventures and understand what another intelligence is endeavouring to communicate to it…

This poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning.” [8]

What interests me in Rancière’s example is not so much the act of translation as the possibility of mis-translation. Taken in light of The Ignorant Schoolmaster we can assume that Rancière is aware of the wide gap that exists between knowing something and knowing enough about something for it to be valuable. How does one calculate the value of what is a mistake? The ignoramus has an autonomy, but it is effectively blind to the quality and make-up of the information she parses. If she makes a mistake in her translation of the poem, this mistake can be one of two things: it can be a blind error, or, it can be a mutation.

In information theory, the two ways to understand change within a closed system are understood to be the product of ‘noise’. The amount of change contributed by noise is called ‘equivocation’. If noise contributes to the reorganisation of a system in a beneficial way, for instance if a genetic mutation in an organism results in the emergence of an adaptive trait, then the equivocation is said to be ‘autonomy-producing’.

Too much noise is equivalent to too much information, a ‘destructive’ equivocation, leading to chaos. This balance is how evolution functions. An ‘autonomy-producing’ mutation will be blindly passed on to an organism’s offspring, catalysing the self-organisation of the larger system (in this case, the species). All complex, what are called ‘autopoietic’ systems, inhabit this fine divide between noise and inertia. Given just the right balance of noise recuperated by the system, and noise filtered out by the system, a state of productive change can be maintained, and a state of inertia can be avoided, at least, for a limited time.

According to Umberto Eco, in ‘The Open Work’:

“To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say… In the end… there is no real difference between noise and signal, except in intent.” [9]

This rigid delineator of intent is the driving force of our contemporary, communication paradigm. Information networks underpin our economic, political and social interactions: the failure to communicate is to be avoided at all costs. All noise is therefore seen as a problem. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define, “the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage.” [10] To go back to Umberto Eco then, we appear to be living in a world of “do say” rather than “could say”.

Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management are our primary economic and political concern: control the networks and the immaterial products will manage themselves.

The modern network paradigm acts like a Maxwell Demon, categorising information as either pure signal or pure noise. As Mark Nunes has noted, following the work of Deleuze and Guattari:

“This forced binary imposes a kind of violence, one that demands a rationalisation of all singularities of expressions within a totalising system… The violence of information is, then, the violence of silencing or making to speak that which cannot communicate.” [11]

To understand the violence of this binary logic, we need go no further than Robinson Crusoe. Friday’s questions are plain spoken, but do not adhere to the “do say” logic of Crusoe’s conception. In the novel, Crusoe’s approach to Friday becomes increasingly one sided, until Friday utters little more than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers, “reducing his language to a pure function of immediate context and perpetuating a much larger imperialist tradition of levelling the vox populi.”[12] Any chance in what Friday “could say” has been violently obliterated.

The logic of Ranciere’s Ignoramous, and of Crusoe’s levelling of Friday’s speech, are logics of imperialism: reducing the possibility of noise and information to an either/or, inside/outside, relationship. Mark Nunes again:

“This balance between total flow and total control parallels Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a regime of signs in which anything that resists systematic incorporation is cast out as an asignifying scapegoat “condemned as that which exceeds the signifying regime’s power of deterritorialisation.” [13]

In the system of communication these “asignifying” events are not errors, in the common sense of the word. Mutation names a randomness that redraws the territory of complex systems. The footprint is the mark that reorganised the Empire.

In Ranciere’s parable, rather than note her intent to decode the poem, we should hail the moment when the Ignoramus fails, as her autonomous moment. In a world where actants “translate signs into other signs and proceed by comparison and illustration” [14] the figures of information and communication are made distinct not by the caprice of those who control the networks, nor the desires of those who send and receive the messages, but by mutation itself.

Michel Foucault, remarking on the work of Georges Canguilhem, drew the conclusion that the very possibility of mutation, rather than existing in opposition to our will, was what human autonomy was predicated upon:

“In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error… Further, it must be questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains the fact that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right place, that is destined to ‘err’ and to be ‘wrong’.” [15]

In his writings on the history of Heredity, The Logic of Life, Francois Jacob lingers on another Demon in the details, fashioned by Rene Descartes in his infamous meditation on human knowledge. François Jacob positions Descartes’ meditation in a period of explosive critical thought focussed on the very ontology of ‘nature’:

“For with the arrival of the 17th Century, the very nature of knowledge was transformed. Until then, knowledge had been grafted on God, the soul and the cosmos… What counted [now] was not so much the code used by God for creating nature as that sought by man for understanding it.” [16]

The infinite power of God’s will was no longer able to bend nature to any whim. If man were to decipher nature, to reveal its order, Descartes surmised, it was with the assurance that “the grid will not change in the course of the operation”[17]. For Descartes, the evil Demon, is a metaphor for deception espoused on the understanding that underlying that deception, nature had a certainty. God may well have given the world its original impetus, have designed its original make-up, but that make-up could not be changed.

The network economy has today become the grid of operations onto which we map the world. Its binary restrictions predicate a logic of minimal error and maximum performance: a regime of control that drives our economic, political and social interdependencies. Trapped within his imperial logic, Robinson Crusoe’s levelling of inside and outside, his ruthless tidying of Friday’s noisy speech into a binary dialectic, disguises a higher order of reorganisation. As readers navigating the narrative we are keen to recognise the social changes Defoe’s novel embodies in its short-sighted central character. Perhaps, though, the most productive way to read this fiction, is to allegorise it as an outside perspective on our own time?

Gathering together the fruits of research, I am often struck by the serendipitous quality of so many discoveries. In writing this mini-paper I have found it useful to engage with these marks, that become like demonic footprints, mutations in my thinking. Comparing each side by side, I hope to find, in the words of Michel Foucault:

“…a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things.” [18]

References & Bibliography

[1] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Penguin classics (London: Penguin Books, 2001).

This paper (more of an essay, really) was originally delivered at the Birkbeck/London Consortium ‘Rubbish Symposium‘, 30th July 2011

Living at the very limit of his means, Philip K. Dick, a two-bit, pulp sci-fi author, was having a hard time maintaining his livelihood. It was the 1950s and Dick was living with his second wife, Kleo, in a run-down apartment in Berkley, California, surrounded by library books Dick later claimed they “could not afford to pay the fines on.”

In 1956, Dick had a short story published in a brand new pulp magazine: Satellite Science Fiction. Entitled, Pay for the Printer, the story contained a whole host of themes that would come to dominate his work

On an Earth gripped by nuclear winter, humankind has all but forgotten the skills of invention and craft. An alien, blob-like, species known as the Biltong co-habit Earth with the humans. They have an innate ability to ‘print’ things, popping out copies of any object they are shown from their formless bellies. The humans are enslaved not simply because everything is replicated for them, but, in a twist Dick was to use again and again in his later works, as the Biltong grow old and tired, each copied object resembles the original less and less. Eventually everything emerges as an indistinct, black mush. The short story ends with the Biltong themselves decaying, leaving humankind on a planet full of collapsed houses, cars with no doors, and bottles of whiskey that taste like anti-freeze.

In his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick gave a name to this crumbling, ceaseless, disorder of objects: Kipple. A vision of a pudding-like universe, in which obsolescent objects merge, featureless and identical, flooding every apartment complex from here to the pock-marked surface of Mars.

“No one can win against kipple,”

Dick wrote:

“It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

In kipple, Dick captured the process of entropy, and put it to work to describe the contradictions of mass-production and utility. Saved from the wreckage of the nuclear apocalypse, a host of original items – lawn mowers, woollen sweaters, cups of coffee – are in short supply. Nothing ‘new’ has been made for centuries. The Biltong must produce copies from copies made of copies – each replica seeded with errors will eventually resemble kipple.

Objects; things, are mortal; transient. The wrist-watch functions to mark the passing of time, until it finally runs down and becomes a memory of a wrist-watch: a skeleton, an icon, a piece of kipple. The butterfly emerges from its pupae in order to pass on its genes to another generation. Its demise – its kipple-isation – is programmed into its genetic code. A consequence of the lottery of biological inheritance. Both the wrist-watch and the butterfly have fulfilled their functions: I utilised the wrist-watch to mark time: the ‘genetic lottery’ utilised the butterfly to extend its lineage. Entropy is absolutely certain, and pure utility will always produce it.

In his book Genesis, Michel Serres, argues that objects are specific to the human lineage. Specific, not because of their utility, but because they indicate our drive to classify, categorise and order:

“The object, for us, makes history slow.”

Before things become kipple, they stand distinct from one another. Nature seems to us defined in a similar way, between a tiger and a zebra there appears a broad gap, indicated in the creatures’ inability to mate with one another; indicated by the claws of the tiger and the hooves of the zebra. But this gap is an illusion, as Michel Foucault neatly points out in The Order of Things:

“…all nature forms one great fabric in which beings resemble one another from one to the next…”

The dividing lines indicating categories of difference are always unreal, abstracted from the ‘great fabric’ of nature, and understood through human categories isolated in language.

Humans themselves are constituted by this great fabric: our culture and language lie on the same fabric. Our apparent mastery over creation comes from one simple quirk of our being: the tendency we exhibit to categorise, to cleave through the fabric of creation. For Philip K. Dick, this act is what separates us from the alien Biltong. They can merely copy, a repeated play of resemblance that with each iteration moves away from the ideal form. Humans, on the other hand, can do more than copy. They can take kipple and distinguish it from itself, endlessly, through categorisation and classification. Far from using things until they run down, humans build new relations, new meanings, carefully and slowly from the mush. New categories produce new things, produce newness. At least, that’s what Dick – a Platonic idealist – believed.

At the end of Pay for the Printer, a disparate group camp in the kipple-ised, sagging pudding of a formless city. One of the settlers has with him a crude wooden cup he has apparently cleaved himself with an even cruder, hand-made knife:

“You made this knife?” Fergesson asked, dazed.

“I can’t believe it. Where do you start? You have to have tools to make this. It’s a paradox!”

In his essay, The System of Collecting, Jean Baudrillard makes a case for the profound subjectivity produced in this apparent newness.

Once things are divested of their function and placed into a collection, they:

“…constitute themselves as a system, on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together [their] world, [their] personal microcosm.”

The use-value of objects gives way to the passion of systematization, of order, sequence and the projected perfection of the complete set.

In the collection, function is replaced by exemplification. The limits of the collection dictate a paradigm of finality; of perfection. Each object – whether wrist-watch or butterfly – exists to define new orders. Once the blue butterfly is added to the collection it stands, alone, as an example of the class of blue butterflies to which the collection dictates it belongs. Placed alongside the yellow and green butterflies, the blue butterfly exists to constitute all three as a series. The entire series itself then becomes the example of all butterflies. A complete collection: a perfect catalogue. Perhaps, like Borges’ Library of Babel, or Plato’s ideal realm of forms, there exists a room somewhere with a catalogue of everything. An ocean of examples. Cosmic disorder re-constituted and classified as a finite catalogue, arranged for the grand cosmic collector’s singular pleasure.

The problem with catalogues is that absolutely anything can be collected and arranged. The zebra and the tiger may sit side-by-side if the collector is particularly interested in collecting mammals, striped quadrupeds or – a particularly broad collection – things that smell funny. Too much classification, too many cleaves in the fabric of creation, and order once again dissolves into kipple. Disorder arises when too many conditions of order have been imposed.

William H. Gass reminds us of the linguistic conjunction ‘AND’ an absolute necessity in the cleaving of kipple into things:

“[W]e must think of chaos not as a helter-skelter of worn-out and broken or halfheartedly realised things, like a junkyard or potter’s midden, but as a fluid mishmash of thinglessness in every lack of direction as if a blender had run amok. ‘AND’ is that sunderer. It stands between. It divides light from darkness.”

Collectors gather things about them in order to excerpt a mastery over the apparent disorder of creation. The collector attains true mastery over their microcosm. The narcissism of the individual extends to the precise limits of the catalogue he or she has arranged about them. Without AND language would function as nothing but pudding, each clause, condition or acting verb leaking into its partner, in an endless series. But the problem with AND, with classes, categories and order is that they can be cleaved anywhere.

Jorge Luis Borges exemplified this perfectly in a series of fictional lists he produced throughout his career. The most infamous, Michel Foucault claimed influenced him to write The Order of Things, the list refers to a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which:

Animals are divided into

1. belonging to the Emporer,
2. embalmed,
3. tame,
4. sucking pigs,
5. sirens,
6. fabulous,
7. stray dogs,
8. included in the present classification,
9. frenzied,
10. innumerable,
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. et cetera,
13. having just broken the water pitcher,
14. that from a long way off look like flies…

In writing about his short story The Aleph, Borges also remarked:

“My chief problem in writing the story lay in… setting down of a limited catalog of endless things. The task, as is evident, is impossible, for such a chaotic enumeration can only be simulated, and every apparently haphazard element has to be linked to its neighbour either by secret association or by contrast.”

No class of things, no collection, no cleaving of kipple into nonkipple can escape the functions of either “association OR contrast…” The lists Borges compiled are worthy of note because they remind us of the binary contradiction classification always comes back to:

• Firstly, that all collections are arbitrary
• and Secondly, that a perfect collection of things is impossible, because, in the final instance there is only pudding “…in every lack of direction…”

Human narcissism – our apparent mastery over kipple – is an illusion. Collect too many things together, and you re-produce the conditions of chaos you tried so hard to avoid. When the act of collecting comes to take precedence over the microcosm of the collection, when the differentiation of things begins to break down: collectors cease being collectors and become hoarders. The hoard exemplifies chaos: the very thing the collector builds their catalogues in opposition to.

To tease apart what distinguishes the hoarder, from the collector, I’d like to introduce two new characters into this arbitrary list I have arranged about myself. Some of you may have heard of them, indeed, they are the brothers whom the syndrome of compulsive hoarding is named after.

Brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer lived in a mansion at 2078, Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. Sons of wealthy parents – their father was a respected gynaecologist, their mother a renowned opera singer – the brothers both attended Columbia University, where Homer studied law and Langley engineering. In 1933 Homer suffered a stroke which left him blind and unable to work at his law firm. As Langley began to devote his time entirely to looking after his helpless brother, both men became locked inside the mansion their family’s wealth and prestige had delivered. Over the following decade or so Langley would leave the house only at night. Wandering the streets of Manhattan, collecting water and provisions to sustain his needy brother, Langley’s routines became obsessive, giving his life a meaning above and beyond the streets of Harlem that were fast becoming run-down and decrepid.

But the clutter only went one way: into the house.

On March 21^st 1947 the New York Police Department received an anonymous tip-off that there was a dead body in the Collyer mansion. Attempting to gain entry, police smashed down the front-door, only to be confronted with a solid wall of newspapers (which, Langley had claimed to reporter’s years earlier his brother “would read once his eyesight was restored”.) Finally, after climbing in through an upstairs window, a patrolman found the body of Homer – now 65 years old – slumped dead in his kippleised armchair. In the weeks that followed, police removed one hundred and thirty tons of rubbish from the house. Langley’s body was eventually discovered crushed and decomposing under an enormous mound of junk, lying only a few feet from where Homer had starved to death. Crawling through the detritus to reach his ailing brother, Langley had triggered one of his own booby traps, set in place to catch any robbers who attempted to steal the brother’s clutter.

The list of objects pulled from the brother’s house reads like a Borges original. From Wikipedia:

Items removed from the house included baby carriages, a doll carriage, rusted bicycles, old food, potato peelers, a collection of guns, glass chandeliers, bowling balls, camera equipment, the folding top of a horse-drawn carriage, a sawhorse, three dressmaking dummies, painted portraits, pinup girl photos, plaster busts, Mrs. Collyer’s hope chests, rusty bed springs, a kerosene stove, a child’s chair, more than 25,000 books (including thousands about medicine and engineering and more than 2,500 on law), human organs pickled in jars, eight live cats, the chassis of an old Model T Ford, tapestries, hundreds of yards of unused silks and fabric, clocks, 14 pianos (both grand and upright), a clavichord, two organs, banjos, violins, bugles, accordions, a gramophone and records, and countless bundles of newspapers and magazines.

Finally: There was also a great deal of rubbish.

A Time Magazine obituary from April 1947 said of the Collyer brothers:

“They were shy men, and showed little inclination to brave the noisy world.”

In a final ironic twist of kippleisation, the brothers themselves became mere examples within the system of clutter they had amassed. Langley especially had hoarded himself to death. His body, gnawed by rats, was hardly distinguishable from the kipple that fell on top of it. The noisy world had been replaced by the noise of the hoard: a collection so impossible to conceive, to cleave, to order, that it had dissolved once more to pure, featureless kipple.

Many hoarders achieve a similar fate to the Collyer brothers: their clutter eventually wiping them out in one final collapse of systemic disorder.

To finish, I want to return briefly to Philip K. Dick.

In the 1960s, fuelled by amphetamines and a debilitating paranoia, Dick wrote 24 novels, and hundreds of short stories, the duds and the classics mashed together into an indistinguishable hoard. UBIK, published in 1966, tells of a world which is itself degrading. Objects regress to previous forms, 3D televisions turn into black and white tube-sets, then stuttering reel projectors; credit cards slowly change into handfuls of rusted coins, impressed with the faces of Presidents long since deceased. Turning his back for a few minutes a character’s hover vehicle has degraded to become a bi-propeller airplane.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, another stand-out novel from the mid 60s, begins with this memo, “dictated by Leo Bulero immediately on his return from Mars”:

“I mean, after all; you have to consider we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You get me?”

I’ve released a single.

Yes me, a music single.

It’s 79p / 99c on iTunes:

RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2

RAWTunes.exe 10.4.2 by therourke

But is it noise-art or just digital sinister?

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.”

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

What are artists to gain from taking a PhD? How does the mantle of ‘artistic research’ enable art objects and those invested in them? And where does art’s autonomy reside when its criticality comes from within an academic institution?

Over the last 20 years art has eased its way into academia. Past the door of the artist’s studio and up the back stairs it tiptoed until, in a very bold move, it seated itself in the commissioner’s chair. Where once art reacted against academies from the outside, art, and the artists who make it, now work from within the institution. Artists interested in pursuing a doctoral degree will have heard time and again about ‘the critical function of art’. Indeed, many theorists would insist on art being defined from this state of opposition (the ‘avant-garde’). But to understand the potential of art today it becomes impossible to separate it from the academic institutions that use its name to label their distinctive, often daring, new departments. Goldsmith’s Art Writing MFA and the RCA’s Critical Writing in Art & Design being two of the freshest – some might say hippest – examples.

To begin producing ‘new knowledge’, PhD researchers often need to pursue contradictory goals. A strong research question poses not the trajectory to a definitive answer, but a principle by which the researcher may begin to generate knowledge. This becomes especially slippery when that ‘knowledge’ is woven into an artistic practice, or when the art objects created by that practice are assumed to qualify the research. How does one invest research in projects that have yet to be realised? Practice-based PhDs hide another stumbling block, usually one based on the expectations of the artist: the belief that time invested in a research degree should improve the quality of practice, as well as strengthen one’s grasp of theory.

The distinction between the practice and theoretical components of a PhD can vary wildly, and although on paper they each glean 50% of the final mark severing them into definite halves can be an unwieldy, often impossible, task. In the RCA’s Department of Communication Art & Design for instance, projects regularly emerge that blur the line between the written and ‘practical’ components of research. A recent edition of critical journal Texte Zur Kunst focused on artistic research declared, “Philosophy and art share the conviction that cognition requires a material form.” A practice-based PhD may have a smaller word count than its non-practical equivalent, but as final exhibitions are documented and literature reviews are spell checked, the boundary between art object and critical reflection will have hopefully elided into a single, successful, conglomeration.

As a practice-based researcher myself, with two years of the academy under my belt, I’ve found that the primary method of answering these concerns is to reflect them back at the institution. Research does not take place in isolation. As with any treasured job it is the people that make a PhD worth undertaking. If you are lucky – and let’s admit it, fewer things are harder to predict than luck – the artists and academics that make up your department will be driven by similar desires as you are. Of course, I could spend the rest of this short article on the restrictions of labelling yourself a graduate of the RCA, Goldsmiths or the Slade. But reflecting back the conditions of research at the institutions that produce them comes closer to addressing what really makes academies function: exchange. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what academia can do for you—ask what you can do for your academia.’ Productive exchange begins by giving your all, whilst always expecting those around you to do the same.

In terms of the market, artistic practice often inhabits an obscure space, cut off from the concerns of art galleries, of buyers, sellers and the aesthetically motivated public. The main benefit of taking up a practice-based research position is exposing one’s practice to the eyes of others. But this exposure always focuses both ways. Jean-Francois Lyotard writes, in The Postmodern Condition, “Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.” Criticality – the enactment of research – begins in the process of exchange, a goal which, if Lyotard is to be believed, should be held in higher esteem than the art market. Taking a practice-based PhD means investing time and knowledge with other practitioners, often other artists who, having undertaken their research years before, now enact their modes of exchange as tutors, professors and PhD supervisors.

Research degrees are not always the best way to fortify the foundations of an artist’s practice. Indeed, many would argue that the very principle of artistic practice within the academy is to rock those foundations, even raze certain principles of practice to the ground. But when PhD researchers are supported to develop and sustain their thought from within their art it can often be the supervisor or established academic artist who has to rethink their assumptions, rather than the other way around. Personal exploration, issuing from practice, becomes valid as PhD research when its significance is a significance shared. A significance exchanged is a significance enhanced.

In this sense then, practice-based PhDs seem to offer nothing new: artists have always produced in order to advance knowledge. No one is suggesting that artistic practice takes place from within a social vacuum, or that artistic value cannot be found in studio and gallery spaces apart from the art school or academy. Instead, art’s investment in the exchange of knowledge – what we could call the momentum of knowledge – gathers energy and value from a variety of sources. To construe one’s practice as academic as well as artistic is to recognise that exchange is more than a two-way process. What Lyotard’s exclamation tells us about practice it also tells us about research, that investing time, effort and – principally – intellectual labour in anything is only half as valuable when you expect nothing in return.

This reflection is intended to bind together two recent posts of mine:

• The Doctrine of the Similar (GIF, GIF, GIF)
• Digital Autonomy: A Response to Hito Steyerl

UPDATE: Having just read ‘The Things‘, a short story written by Peter Watts, I wanted to share it. Text and audio versions can be found online, courtesy of Clarkesworld Magazine. Really stunning read for Thing lovers everywhere.

John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi masterpiece, containing all the hallmarks of a great horror film. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits an awesome ability to imitate, devouring any creature it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect – at every level of replication – that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost’s Doctor is sent mad at the implications:

Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth… and it’s not gonna stop!!![1]

The seeming perfection of the thing’s replication process goes far deeper than mere imitation. Earthly, organic life is a nature of disruption – a discursive, discontinuous magisteria. Error is usually understood as that which impedes on a normalcy, disrupting its order. But as the history of the sciences shows the error of life is an error intimate to its specificity. Michel Foucault’s interest in the work of Georges Canguillhem, the grand expositor of biological disease and disorder, bears a striking similarity to Hito Steyerl’s interest in digital images. Foucault sees in Canguillhem’s work on disease a self-sustaining paradigm of scientific principles, where error “is eliminated not by the blunt force of a truth that would gradually emerge from the shadows but [at all stages] by the formation of a new way of ‘truth-telling’”.[2] This epistemology of science as productive failure is further aligned with the status of the biological systems Canguillhem studied. Foucault, from his essay Life: Experience and Science:

“At the center of these problems one finds that of error. For, at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or a monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a ‘mistake’. In this sense, life – and this is its radical feature – is that which is capable of error…”[3]

Pathological disease constitutes a better model of the Earthly organism than the normalcy, the magisteria of The Thing. But in the film The Thing, the alien entity becomes an external imposition on the entire ‘magisteria’ of Earthly nature. The perfection of the thing is utterly alien to Earthly nature, because it is both perfect and absolutely other. If, as Foucault suggests, life is error, then the characters in The Thing are torn between two equally horrifying worlds. In one, the alien thing aims for perfection, cloning its hosts cell by cell until, like The Ship of Argo, an entirely new, but identical world remains. In the other, the beauty of nature, in all its intricacy, is the result of a billion years of ugly mutation. Is it perhaps too much of a liberty to suggest that the thing’s most terrifying, absolute alien quality, comes from its inability to err? As the creature tears through every organism in sight its eventual perfection is hidden behind the veil of blood, guts and mutating body parts more readily associated with imperfection. But these depictions of cruel, cancerous blobs and swelling sacks of gaseous, oozing human matter are actually manifestations of a perfection being perfected; a process with one outcome: absolute substitution. The error of Earthly life, its ability to err, represents its most beautiful capacity, to change by mutation and pass those mutations on to the next generation, ad infinitum.[4] The thing, in opposition to this, can only become its other absolutely. There is no room for error, for mutation, for change or evolution. The thing is destined to be “everything on the face of the Earth”. Its magisteria is terrible because were it to ‘replace’ the Earthly magisteria all the beauty of error would be gone. Thus we find a contradiction. Because so far I have insisted on the absolute replication of the Earthly by the thing-ly. But as the Earthly magisteria ‘becomes’ the thingly magisteria, the ability to err is removed, and thus, by turns, there has been no absolute replication at all. Error got missed out because of perfection. The original is flowing, dynamic, imperfect. The simulacrum is static, stable, unchanging; eternal. The Thing, then, as a singular, isolated spectacle of closure, brings into question Friedrich Kittler’s exclamation that:

“…nature is not a computer… therefore, a number of highly complex human phenomena, by their very nature, fall outside the scope of the current processing paradigms. This is, in fact, the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history.”[5]

[2] Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (The New Press, 1999), 471.

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which images are created, scarred and destroyed in order to get to a much deeper, ontological question about autonomy. Avoiding the kind of subject/object purification Latour warns about, Steyerl asks us to consider images as something we can participate in, even model our autonomy on. Is it possible to become a thing? And where does Hito Steyerl get off calling us ‘things’ in the first place? For Latour things cannot be understood in a pure form, material or otherwise. To understand a JPEG means also understanding personal computers, digital economies, carefully programmed image compression software and the relations which connect them:

“…as soon as we are on the trail of some quasi-object, it appears to us sometimes as a thing, sometimes as a narrative, sometimes as a social bond, without ever being reduced to a mere being.” [2]

To map and follow these narratives and social bonds it becomes necessary to understand the history of actants and their relations without manipulating those histories into subject/object hierarchies themselves. Hito Steyerl begins with David Bowie’s pop-video Heroes: a highly produced moving-image made to re-present “three simultaneous angles” of the idealised proto-idol. In order to grant a condition of autonomy to the identity that results, Steyerl becomes more explicit:

“…if identification is to go anywhere, it has to be with this material aspect of the image, with the image as thing, not as representation.” [3]

If we are to identify “with the image as thing”, whilst acknowledging the debt Steyerl’s account pays to Bruno Latour’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’, we must do two things. Firstly, we need to trace the materiality implicit in the technology of image reproduction which Hito Steyerl is interested in. Secondly, we need to isolate the kind(s) of autonomy those technologies are traditionally thought to (dis)allow and, in turn, determine whether Steyerl’s ‘thing-oriented’ participation is compatible with the definition of ‘image’ that results. Throughout, it is my aim to highlight Steyerl’s major concentration: the digital, maintaining that Steyerl is, above all, arguing for a new, singular conception of autonomy that does away with subject/object dichotomies rooted in the ‘material’ products of a market economy. Seeming to sever their dependency on the physical processes that underlie them, digital technologies:

“incorporate hyper-redundant error-checking routines that serve to sustain an illusion of immateriality by detecting error and correcting it…” [4]

The alleviation of error and noise, is then, an implicit feature of digital materiality. Expressed at the status of the image it is the visual glitch, the coding artifact, [5] that signifies the potential of the image to loosen its digital shackles. Enabled by over-used compression software, images are forced to atrophy as they navigate multiple bandwidth streams. Hiding in the random access memory of a user’s personal computer, the coded image waits patiently for browser software to determine which type of de-compression will best suit its use, before, in microseconds, the image re-emerges as a 60 frames per second flicker on a dirty, regularly fingered, poorly maintained computer monitor. Iman Moradi on ‘the glitch’:

“The visual glitch is an artefact resulting from an error. It is neither the cause, nor the error itself, it is simply the product of an error and more specifically its visual manifestation. It is a significant slip that marks a departure from our expected result.” [6]

Here Steyerl is calling for us to “tap into” the power of the bruise and the glitch, in order to participate in the forces that compel contemporary digital-capitalism. Blurring the boundary between things (their networks and relations) becomes a way of exposing the market forces that bind us. In the 80s and 90s digital networks, including most prominently the World Wide Web, were talked about in utopian whispers (listen closesly and you can still hear them). With the idea of the ‘original’ banished, corporate oligarchies could concentrate on distributing perfect digital simulacra to customer nodes. These processes, according to W. Daniel Hillis, define:

“the essence of digital technology, which restores signal to near perfection at every stage.” [7]

Maintenance of the network and the routines of error management thus became of primary economic concern: control the networks and the immaterial products would manage themselves. In the case of digital images, error-managed at every stage of their transmission, it is only at the level of the visual that Steyerl’s “bruises” become manifest. Code-savvy artists (and theorists, such as Moradi) do not see a visual glitch as an aesthetic abhorrence, but as a signal of the kinds of errors that image may have been subjected to. Once an error - perhaps resulting in a glitch or a bruise - is allowed to creep into an image file, that error will itself be re-produced accurately by the systems it navigates. In effect, error management will maintain the glitch just as readily as it maintains the intended image. There is no distinguishing between the two at the status of computer code. For Steyerl, autonomy emerges from the participation, not in the error, but in the “bruises of images… its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers”, outer marks signalling “a constellation of forces” petrified within:

“In the commodity fetish, material drives intersect with affect and desire, and [Walter] Benjamin fantasizes about igniting these compressed forces, to awaken “the slumbering collective from the dream-filled sleep of capitalist production” to tap into these forces… Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.” [8]

Participating in these glitches then gives us back a certain control over the market networks that images navigate. Immaterial, perfect simulacra become – in what some may see as a modernist reversal – unique material things, scarred by their passage and better for it:

“In a sense we are cherishing the little idiosyncrasies that are absent from the soulless machines churned from the production lines.” [9]

Glitch artists identify with the aesthetic of malfunction, compression artifacts and creative transcoding, tending towards techniques that manifest these qualities in their work. Although the glitch is universally acknowledged as a way to expose digital and technical materiality, much debate surrounds whether it is accurate to say one can intend a glitch. Glitches expose errors, and errors are in opposition to the norm. [10] To manipulate the code of an image, and manifest a particular aesthetic result, is not to produce a glitch, but to produce the representation of a glitch. This problem stabs at the very heart of Hito Steyerl’s appraisal of ‘things’ as, very early on in her text, she turns her back on representation:

“It doesn’t represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other—a thing like you and me.” [11]

Materially the glitch in the image does not represent error, neither then can error be intentionally injected into images in order to produce a bruise or artifact. But here, perhaps, we may have a way to prise open Steyerl’s rhetoric, in order to uncover the slip (glitch?) she makes between ‘participation’ and ‘autonomy’. In another of Steyerl’s e-flux essays, In Defense of the Poor Image, we find ourselves allied further with, what she calls, these “Wretched [debris] of the Screen”:

“The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction… The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled… It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all. Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place.” [12] [my emphasis]

So poor images have become, for Steyerl at least, not only a way to expose and betray network economies, but the improbable re-definition of the digital itself. Here perhaps, it is worth mentioning Paul Virilio’s work on ‘failure’. Virilio opposes the idea of a ‘norm’ to which an accident would be an unintended divergence. Instead, Virilio sees accidents and failures as productive – human – acts, they are an integral, crucial, part of the system of relations:

“Failure is not a condemnation! … Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug… In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this respect, it is a profane miracle.” [13]

The glitch then, exposes its own causes (i.e. the digital ‘failure’) revealing features of the network “we would not otherwise be able to perceive”. Poor images, crammed full of artifacts, glitches and bruises maintain their autonomy in two ways. Firstly, they “mock the promise of digital technology” by exposing the errors and limitations of the networks they have been parsed through. In turn, these networks - designed to maintain market equilibriums - actually act in favour of glitches, managing the ‘errors’ that produced them as if they were part of the ‘intended’ digital quarry. Secondly, and most crucially in our rhetorical distinction, images avoid having this autonomy controlled by web users and artists because an ‘intended’ error is not an error at all and does not produce a ‘real’ glitch. Images with glitches then suddenly become an interesting thing to aspire to because (and here I will loosely echo Steyerl’s concerns) unlike subjects, they cannot be subjected, and unlike objects, they are impossible to objectify. This brings us back to one of our questions: how to become a thing like an image? With our awareness of digital images refreshed, it becomes possible to read into Steyerl’s text an ontological proposition:

“To participate in the image as thing means to participate in its potential agency—an agency that is not necessarily beneficial, as it can be used for every imaginable purpose. It is vigorous and sometimes even viral. And it will never be full and glorious, as images are bruised and damaged, just as everything else within history. History, as Benjamin told us, is a pile of rubble. Only we are not staring at it any longer from the point of view of Benjamin’s shell-shocked angel. We are not the angel. We are the rubble. We are this pile of scrap.” [14]

With true participation in the agency of the image now exposed as improbable, the question of what this “potential agency” is shouts back at us. To finish I want to re-pose Steyerl’s proposition, asking more explicitly for us to identify with the glitch; with the “pile of scrap”. The image as thing maintains its autonomy through the glitches it harbours. These glitches, in turn, are non-physical, non-subjective elucidations of the digital. Michel Foucault’s interest in the work of Georges Canguillhem, the grand expositor of biological disease and disorder, bears a striking similarity to Hito Steyerl’s interest in digital images. Foucault sees in Canguillhem’s work on disease a self-sustaining paradigm of scientific principles, where error “is eliminated not by the blunt force of a truth that would gradually emerge from the shadows but [at all stages] by the formation of a new way of 'truth-telling'”.[15] This epistemology of science as productive failure is further aligned with the status of the biological systems Canguillhem studied:

"It has not been possible to constitute a science of the living without taking into account, as something essential to its object, the possibility of disease, death, monstrosity, anomaly, and error. Although one may come to know, with increasing exactness, the physiochemical mechanisms that cause them, they have their place nonetheless in a specificity that the life sciences must take into account, lest they obliterate the very thing that forms their object and their particular domain." [16]

In other words, disease exposes the errors that are the constituting factors of life. It is the only thing about life we can be sure of – in effect, Foucault says “life is [productive] error” – and in this regard also stands as a meta-paradigm for the scientific method. The turn towards error[17] and glitch as the defining principle of the network effectively removes ‘intention’ from the system of communication (the digital market?). What Virilio calls “the accident inherent”[18]in the network. The computer virus, the technical glitch, router noise et al. all then become actants exposing the topology of networking. “Through a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting glimpse of an alien intelligence at work."[19] What’s more – and this is where my alignment with Steyerl’s proposition again rears its head – because we are living systems, error is the fundamental principle exposed by human ‘being’:

“At the center of these problems one finds that of error. For, at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or a monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a 'mistake'. In this sense, life - and this is its radical feature - is that which is capable of error… Further, it must be questioned in regard to that singular but hereditary error which explains that fact that, with man, life has led to a living being that is never completely in the right place, that is destined to 'err' and to be 'wrong'.” [20]

The autonomy we participate in has, it seems, been uncovered as a principle feature of our constitution all along. Dealing with images, with their glitches, with the networks of failure they expose, is simultaneous to dealing with our own natures as beings composed of matter. These principles are not representations of our autonomy. In a very fundamental sense, we expose the possibility of our autonomy. For it to be any other way our material natures would have to be ontologically different. Participating in the glitch, in the artifact that exposes the error, is to align oneself with material reality. Perhaps this is my own, expanded reading of Steyerl, but I want to suggest that doing away with subject/object distinctions might just be the only way we have to claim a true autonomy in the world. A world, if Latour and Steyerl are to be taken seriously, made up of actants related through networks of failure, accident and error. To identify with the “image as thing” means doing away with the notion of autonomy bound to the free-floating subject. We material-things express our “own conditions of existence” :

“How about acknowledging that this image is not some ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression.” [21]

  Daniel Rourke, June 2011 Download PDF version  

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Footnotes / Bibliography