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THE ELECTRONIC DISTURBANCE

  Critical Art Ensemble

 Part 4 of 7

Published by Autonomedia

ISBN 1-57027-006-6

New theater should tell the viewer how to resist authority,
     regardless of its source along the political continuum.  If
     we seek liberation through the control of our own images,
     performance should illustrate resistant processes and
     explicitly show how to achieve autonomy, however temporary
     it might be.  Self-presentation revealed in the performance
     must not be perceived by the audience as a self image that
     should necessarily be copied, as this will end merely as a
     shift in coding regimes.  Rather, one should seek an
     aesthetics of confusion that reveals potential choices, thus
     collapsing the bourgeois aesthetic of efficiency.

Already here and yet always one step ahead:  It seems that
     virtual reality is always about to arrive with the next
     technological breakthrough.  On the other hand, that curious
     feeling--that we are %currently% in a real environment--
     leads to the conclusion that virtual reality is located in
     the near future, in science fiction, or in an as-yet
     undeveloped technology.  Perhaps the fact that we are
     already enveloped by the virtual is what makes it so
     unrecognizable.  Perhaps it is because a promise has been
     issued by technologues, that the boundary between everyday
     life and virtual life will soon congeal, forming completely
     separate theaters.  These promises are what keep the virtual
     forever invisible.  The virtual theater promised by the
     technologues, like everyday life, will have an enveloping
     effect.  it will be the first engine of the virtual where
     people will be able to physically interact and have a degree
     of control over their identities, narrative trajectories,
     and the objects of interaction.  Unlike painting, theater,
     film or television, the new virtual theater will make
     screenal mediation transparent and offer the appearance of
     unframed experience.  This is the idea of virtual reality
     proper, in its technical sense.  However, this technology
     does not really exist, except in the crudest of forms, and
     functions primarily as a game.  For this reason, the virtual
     %stage% seems to be nothing worth noting, but as suggested
     herein, it is already interlocked with everyday life, and
     already controls the performances of this theater.  Should
     virtual reality proper make its appearance in culture, it
     must not be confused with virtual power.  At present,
     virtual reality and its promise act as deflectors to turn
     vision away from the electronic source of domination and
     authority.  The promise of a cybernetic performative matrix
     serves to alienate us further from our electronic
     counterparts, falsely leading us to continue believing that
     electronic bodies do not really exist, let alone that they
     are signs of authoritarian power.  A theater of resistance
     can be established only if we understand that the virtual
     world is in the here and now.

The Situationists were correct in their claim that power resides
     in the spectacle; however, this claim was truer in the past-
     -when the opening shots were fired in the revolution of the
     economy of desire over the economy of production. 
     Information technology quickly divorced power from the
     spectacle, and power now wanders invisibly in a cybernetic
     realm outside of everyday life.  Spectacle has become the
     site of mediation, not so much between social relationships
     proper, but between the concrete and the virtual worlds, the
     sedentary and the nomadic, the organic and the electronic,
     and the present and the absent.  To this extent, performance
     cannot concentrate solely on the virtual.  The electronic
     elements of spectacle are also of great importance and
     require further investigation, especially since this is the
     side of the spectacle that mutates at a velocity that
     parallels consumption.  (Architecture and other
     subelectronic visual markers of the spectacle are not as
     significant.  These forms change too slowly and access to
     them is limited by geography.)  In the electronic image one
     can detect the clearest traces of the cyberelite, but more
     importantly, this image is also the source which
     redistributes identities and lifestyles suitable for
     excessive consumption.  This new social relationship between
     the electronic body (the body without organs) and the
     organic body is one of the best resources for performance
     material.  Performance resources must go beyond the organic
     body, which at present acts as the master link in
     performative models of representation.  In the age of
     electronic media, it is inappropriate to argue that
     performance exhausts itself under the sign of the organic. 
     After all, the electronic body is always performing, even if
     %in absentia% on every stage.

There is every reason to desire the electronic body, and every
     reason to despise it.  This pathological struggle occurs
     when one views the electronic body, and feelings of sympathy
     (Husserl) and envy (Benjamin) implode in a schizophrenic
     moment.  As Baudrillard states:  "In spite of himself the
     schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most
     extreme confusion.  The schizophrenic is not, as generally
     claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality,
     but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness
     with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the
     world."  In the debris of intersubjectivity, the organic and
     the electronic face each other.  The electronic body looks
     so real.  It moves around, it gazes back, it communicates. 
     Its appearance is our appearance.  Identity manifests and is
     reinforced, as subjectivity is extracted/imposed by the
     electronic other.  How can such a perception not conjure a
     sympathetic response?  Yet in that same instant of unity
     comes the burning feeling of separation born of envy.  The
     identity of the electronic body is not our own.  We must
     eternally consume something to make our appearance more like
     its appearance.  The desire for greater access to the signs
     of beauty, health, and intelligence, through the unceasing
     accumulation of cultural artifacts, brutally reminds us that
     the perfect excess of the electronic body is not our own. 
     The limitations of the organic abound, and what is achieved
     becomes vulgar and unnecessary at the point of achievement. 
     All the remains is the unbearable moment of enriched
     privation.  Sympathy and envy are forever spliced together
     in the form of a hideous Siamese twin.  This is the
     performance of everyday life, so near, so instantaneous,
     eternally recurring.

Artaud's only misjudgment was his belief that the body without
     organs had yet to be created.  The electronic body is the
     body without organs.  It already dominates performance, and
     has recentered the theater around empty identity and empty
     desire.  The body without organs is the perfect body--
     forever reproducible.  No reduction to biology now.  Two
     hundred Elvis clones appear on screen.  Separate them:  Turn
     the channel; play the tape.  Each performance is on an
     eternal loop.  These clones were not made in a test tube;
     they reproduce of their own accord, each as precise and as
     perfect as the last.  No fluids, no plagues, no
     interruptions.  The orifices of the body without organs are
     sewn tightly shut.  No consumption, no excretion, no
     interruptions.  Such freedom:  Safely screened off from the
     virtual catastrophes of war, capital, gender, or any other
     manifestation teetering at the brink of a crash, the body
     without organs is free to drift in the electronic rhizome. 
     The theater of the street and its associated cultural debris
     collapses.  Civilization has been washed clean--progress is
     complete--dirt, trash, rot, and rubble have been screened
     off and erased from the perfect world of the electronic
     body.  The electronic body, free of the flesh, free of the
     economy of desire, has escaped the pain of becoming.

What is the fate of the organic body, caught between sympathy and
     envy, forever following in the shadow of the body without
     organs?  Very simply, the flesh is sacrificed--carved into
     layers that better serve various economies.  This is not the
     Cartesian dualism valued by the cyberpunk ("Hence, at least
     through the instrumentality of the Virtual power, mind can
     exist apart from body, and body apart from mind"), in which
     the body is no more than a slab of meat.  It is not simply a
     matter of downloading the mind and trashing the body. 
     Rather, the body is divided between surface and depth,
     between dry and wet.  Since spectacle is a dry surface
     image, the body must reflect that image.  The body becomes
     its mirror, or perhaps more accurately, its xerox.  It is
     paper onto which designer gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle
     are inscribed.  As with any surface of inscription, it must
     be dry if it is to run through the sight machine.  It must
     also be flat and void of depth (desire).  The only
     acceptable desire is the desire to consume the spectacle's
     texts.  As image cascades down through various classes of
     consumption, the resolution of the original decays, until
     nothing is left but the body as receptacle of water.  This
     is the body sacrificed to the anti-economy.  It is the
     abject body, left to wander the street in misery ("What is
     sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror I
     have spoken of, a fetid, sticky object without boundaries,
     which teems with life and yet is the sign of death").

     The body which signifies the absence of rationalized
     economic desire is that which we are taught to fear.  It is
     the sign of the organic itself; it is the primordial soup,
     the placenta-filled womb to which there can be no return. 
     To mention the scared, or worse, to display signs of the
     organic, the code of death, is to reject economic
     inscription.  To do so is to become one of the abject, and
     to suffer great punishment.  Many performers have tried to
     reinstate the organic within the network of value, but they
     are unable to overcome the power of the body without organs
     (BwO).  The BwO is always there with them, on the stage and
     in the audience.  The best result produced from such work is
     a cheer for deviance, but the sign of deviance is forever
     broken.  Simply putting on a counterspectacle within the
     theater of the abject is not enough.  It only servers to
     confirm what is already known:  do not mention the organic
     and its untamed desire, or its yearning for death.  Such
     spectacle is quickly reduced to an aberration, or a peculiar
     idiosyncrasy.  The organic and the electronic must
     explicitly clash in an attempt to open the rigid
     hierarchical closure that is presented every day by the
     engines of the spectacle.  To take the most obvious example,
     this closure is crucial to the success of any horror movie. 
     In every case, horror films express the BwO overcoming the
     sign of the organic.  Spilled guts, sticky goo, splitting
     skin, erupting pus, uncontrolled excrement, all incite
     horror in the viewer.  It reminds h/er of the organic, that
     uncontrolled watery excess simply waiting to burst through
     the seamless xerox surface.  The horror movie makes the
     organic--as well as the means by which it must be punished
     for its appearance--visible.  There are two fundamental
     rules for simulating horror in spectacular society:  The
     innocent (BwO) must suffer (eat the sacrifice), and the
     guilty (subelectronic desire) must be punished.  The
     replaying of these two fundamental myths in spectacular
     endeavors keeps people buying.  It makes known that all must
     aspire to be the innocent and virginal BwO, and that all
     must block the organic with accumulated piles of
     manufactured excess.  This is the performance that must be
     disturbed, but it must be disturbed electronically.

If the BwO is conceived of as appearance of self contained in
     screenal space, it is nearly supernatural to think that the
     BwO can possess flesh and walk the earth.  It is during the
     time of possession that the BwO is the most vulnerable to
     the appearance of organic deficiencies, and yet, this is
     also the time when the BwO can present itself as an entity
     separate from spectacle, thus reinforcing its ideal image as
     existing in the realm of real achievement.  The phenomenon
     of flesh possession by the BwO is commonly referred to as a
     celebrity.  The celebrity acts as empirical proof positive
     that electronic appearance is still dependent on the
     organic.  In this form the BwO is not just a mediated
     screenal vision, but can also be touched, so that it
     deflects thought away from the categories of the
     recombinant, and toward the nostalgia of essentialism.  Is
     it any wonder that celebrities are hounded for autographs or
     any other artifact that can act as a trace of comfort to
     those desiring the assurances of the pre-electronic order?

The construction of the electronic theater has been completed by
     nomadic power.  The Situationists alarmed us to its
     construction when they presented their critique of the
     spectacle.  Indeed, the melding of architecture, graphic
     design, radio, television and film have come to constitute
     the spectacular stage, but its logistical support in
     backstage virtual technology had yet to fully appear.  The
     strategic error came when anachronistic forms of resistance
     (occupations, strikes, protests, etc.) were used as a means
     to stop construction.  One of the many failures of the
     revolutionary actions of the late 60s and early 70s is that
     they neither attacked the electronic theater nor employed
     nomadic oppositional tactics.  The theater of operations was
     perceived as purely sedentary, without nomadic component,
     and was thereby situated in the binary of offense/defense. 
     Within the electronic theater, strategy consists of pure
     offense.  Surveillance systems are the only remaining
     defensive trace.  The trick is never to be caught off guard,
     always to track the opposition's movements, thus preventing
     the disappearance of the opponents.  The other option is to
     establish temporary blockage points that allow time to
     regroup and begin a counter-offensive.  The defensive
     posture of fortification is unrealistic.  Unfortunately this
     has traditionally been the tactic (occupation) chosen by the
     resistance.  This was a proper means of resistance against
     spectacular architecture, but the electronic theater
     remained untouched and continued expanding its domain.  Once
     again, the culture of resistance is working primarily from a
     model of critique, and as always, is moving very slowly off
     the mark in this endeavor, preferring to continue engaging
     cultural and political bunkers.  However, all is not lost. 
     Because of the lack of fortifications in the electronic
     theater, there are always windows and gaps ripe for
     disturbance.  Unfortunately, such resistance can only come
     from the technocratic class, and it must occur before
     surveillance systems become too well-distributed.  The
     performance of the politicized hacker should be the ultimate
     in performative resistance.

     Compared to cyberspace resistance techniques, possible
     strategies for the cultural producer are much more modest. 
     These producers can re-present the electronic theater for
     what it is, by creating simulations of performative control
     that call attention to the technology and methods of
     control.  The other strategy is to attempt to reestablish
     the organic body in arenas other than the abject and the
     deviant; however, this performance has no meaning other than
     to replay the past, unless it is contrasted with the mythic
     standing of the BwO.  To take this approach is not to
     uncover the invisible, but to impose the vacuum of
     scepticism on the visible.  With either option, the
     performer must appropriate and occupy the electronic
     theater.  It is unwise to wait until virtual reality has the
     trappings of a classical theater--one into which the
     performer and viewer may physically enter and which is
     enveloped by artificial (electronic) surroundings.  As
     stated earlier, resistant performers must establish those
     interlocking recombinant stages which oscillate between the
     theater of everyday life and the virtual theater.  Such
     actions will help develop practical performance models--ones
     which lend themselves to an autonomous performative matrix,
     rather than ones in which the performers are automatons,
     replaying the creations of designer culture.  Resistant
     theater is electronic theater.


=================================================================

                            %Case 43%

               From the notebooks of Jacques Lacan

     From the darkness a pre-recorded voice begins to overlap
     itself in "commentary" on a certain "Case 43" and discussion
     of the "imaginary status of economic consumption."  Then Fon
     van Voerkom's drawing, "a painful solution," appears on
     large screen.  A few moments later an eye appears on two TV
     monitors, from which a distorted voice begins to answer the
     "commentary."  The "subject" enters and stands in front of
     the screen, then begins to make a series of "statements."

     The Subject:  Born to consume just for the fun of it.  Just
     for the fun of it, mass consumption necessitates self
     consumption, just for the fun of it.  Just for the fun of it
     auto-cannibalism is the material signifier of excess
     consumption, just for the fun of it.  Just for the fun of it
     excess consumption is the logic of economic narcissism, just
     for the fun of it.  Just for the fun of it mass consumption
     equals self-consumption, just for the fun of it.  Auto-
     cannibalism is the logic of fashion.  Deconstruction just
     for the fun of it.  Auto-cannibalism is the praxis of
     everyday life:  I chew my nails just for the fun of it; I
     eat my hair just for the fun of it; I eat myself just for
     the fun of it.  Consumption is concerned with the
     internalization of objects, just for the fun of it.  Just
     for the fun of it we consume the objects in order to make
     them "real," just for the fun of it.  Just for the fun of it
     I eat myself in order to be "real," just for the fun of it. 
     Auto-cannibalism is created just for the fun of it; planned,
     just for the fun of it; organized through social production,
     just for the fun of it.  We are dogs in love with our own
     vomit.  This is not an aesthetic transgression, this is not
     a ritual sacrifice, this is not body art, it is only self-
     consumption, just for the fun of it... just for the taste of
     it.

     The "Subject" then takes out a razor blade and cuts the palm
     of his hand.  As the blood begins to flow, the "Subject"
     drinks the blood for a few moments and then walks away.  The
     "commentary" ends, the large screen image ends, and then the
     two TV monitors are turned off.


=================================================================

                         %Tongue Spasms%

     The mouth fragments the body.  What remains?  A narrow
     constipation, a violent meaning that makes vomit reason. 
     The grotesque colonization of the oral cavity chews on the
     silenced body and spits out a bestiality of signs.  What
     remains?  Spasms.

     %The screenal tongue floats freely from its pillars.  A
     sliding surrealistic appendage.%

     The eye spasms before the virtual tongue, blinding the
     dominant need for appropriation.  What remains after the
     system digests everything?  A nomadic tongue riding the
     waves of its digital secretions.  A post-biological
     cannibalism that reborders the body.  What remains?

     %The tongue no longer occupies one place.%

     The nipple is the matrix of a lost cause, a nostalgia of a
     network plurality in which one is too few and two is only
     one possibility.  What remains?  As screenal tongues cleave
     and suck the pacifier of unreal ideologies and unreal
     referents, the cancer of the techno-democracy reveals
     itself.  The nipples mandate the electronic passion of
     diachronic doubles that blur desire and labor.

     %Cyber saliva slides in little jerks, punctuating farts and
     knuckle cracks.%

     The spasm of digital bytes legitimizes the violence of
     information.  Both the left and right hand are driven by the
     ritual of representation and sacrifice before the keyboard
     of dromographic speed.  What remains?  Hyper-real hands,
     sociologically unconscious desiring machines, always already
     possessed.  What remains?

     %The sex speaks of a language based on lubricants, a
     different kind of saliva.%

     The virtual tongue fuses with the hot and cold units of
     pleasure.  Unlike things join, tugging sensory hair, and a
     cannibalism is turned inward.  Diseased rumors float back
     and forth between nano peckers and macro cunts.  What
     remains?  A discharge of blind desire moving in and out of
     virtually gossiping genitals.

     %Would the virtual tongue multiply and separate toes or
     simply lick between them?%

     The big toe is the horror of a base materialism that spasms
     beyond suitable discourse.  Toes lead an ignoble life,
     seducing the data base with corns, blocking electronic
     interface with calluses and resisting the drift of
     information with dirty bunions.  What remains after the
     system digests everything?  The ecstatic deformity of pure
     labor, laughing before the solar anus, flicking mud at the
     virtual body above it.  What remains?  The brutal seduction
     of abandonment more acute in movement.

     %The spasm of the digital body breaks open the orifice of
     profound physical impulses.%

     The anal night calls the virtual tongue to leave the mouth
     and enter it, red and obscene.  An eruptive force of
     luminous thirst that demands indecent rupture and debauched
     hacking.  What remains?  An ontology of farts, of breathless
     lacerations that reborder the body and begin to speak.  A
     revolutionary breakthrough of a post-biological sound.  What
     remains after the system digests everything?  Virtual gas.


=================================================================

           %Body without Organs% (first manifestation)

     A series of appropriated images appear on 3 TV monitors
     which refer to the particular vectors that mark the BwO.  As
     the images flow across the screens, a silent "body" moves
     through the spectators, while 2 voices enunciate the
     necessity of bodily aphanisis--BwO.

     Voice 1:  No more cocks.  No more cunts.  BwO now.  All
     extensions must be cut off.  All orifices must be sewn up--
     plugged up.  We must rid ourselves of the biological, empty
     ourselves of it.  All bio-fascism must be ripped out and
     sealed up in the clear jars of the museum, so that we will
     never forget the pain of somatic tyranny.

     Voice 2:  For the biggest lie ever was to frame humans as an
     organism of consuming, assimilating, incubating, excreting,
     creating a whole hierarchy of latent functions.

     Voice 1:  So we will never forget the late-capitalist
     physiology that bites, sucks, devours--it is driven by the
     bio-destiny of the oral hole:  consumption, assimilation,
     incorporation--the mouth must be suppressed, repressed.  BwO
     now.

     Voice 2:  For too long we have been caught in the circle of
     the organism, between the goat's anus and the mouth of God,
     between the logic of the cock and the cunt, the One and the
     Zero, the cause and the effect--let nothing flow--let
     nothing pass--BwO now.

     Voice 1:  The excretion of surplus-value imprisons us in
     shit-economics: the bio-machine eats in Africa, digests in
     Asia, and dumps its excess in the first world.  The anal
     force must be eradicated, eliminated.  BwO now.

     Voice 2:  Let us empty the body of its retensions, of its
     expulsions, of its paranoid dichotomies, of its compulsive
     production, of its hysterical dissemination, of its neurotic
     interpretations--let us go further still; we haven't
     sufficiently dismantled our selves.

     The "body" kneels before a chair and takes out the
     "imaginary phallus" and begins to cut it off.

     Voice 1:  Let us strip ourselves of one part of the body-
     despot:  an eye, an ear, any piece of epidermis, cut off the
     cock, sew up the cunt, plug up the asshole--staple your
     mouth shut and remain silent forever.  Let us all empty the
     body.

     Voice 2:  Let us all empty the body, that coagulated
     nothingness, and flush it down the toilet:  no more shit-
     economics, no more urinal-politics.

     Voice 2:  Let us vanish into the post-biological continuum.

     The "body" places the "imaginary phallus" in a clear jar and
     seals it, then walks away, leaving the monitors behind.

     Voice 2:  Dialectical evolution is over--BwO now.

     Voices 1 & 2:  BwO now.