Desire, Commodities, Media and Hacking
David Cox, September 2001
d.cox@mailbox.gu.edu.au
Images are themselves a lens on the culture which makes them. Walter
Benjamin was both right and wrong about art in the age of mechanical
reproduction. He was correct in stating that as images proliferate,
their
overall commercial value in depreciates. He was wrong in assuming that
manufactured images are worth less than their 'real world' referent.
As manufactured goods accelerate away from the decade in which they
were made,
they themselves gain a kind of new cultural value. Some commodities
seem to accrue
more cultural gravitas than others. The dodgiest of global trade in
junk, the antique market
bears testimony to the ways in which even the most trivial
of manufactured items can become obscure objects of desire once made
to enter
the domain commodity relations.
Culture is What I Say it Is
If desire is expressed through the commodity, and the commodity is that
which is supposed to stand in for desire, to desire an end to commodity
society is the desire to embrace that which consumer society deems
no
longer useful or valuable. Alongside this is the desire to re-inscribe
certain specific things with new and unauthorised types of cult value.
The culture hacker collects things which seem to have no value.
She makes of the world around her a quilt of emblems of her own desire.
She anticipates a world in which control and governance have shifted
away
from the surrogate mercantile type of economy to an economy of desire
itself.
The act of deciding what will become a cult item to oneself personally,
is the
first step toward emancipation from the Empire of Signs. Surely, others
will
come to see the significance of the enshrined emblems of personal liberty
as
self evident tokens of a broader idea of libertarian social
and cultural possibility.
Desire is Free
The hacker society is one which values desire above commodities, it
makes the
search for pleasure the same as the rejection of the mainstream culture
itself.
It is anti-suburban, anti middle class and pro urban. It yearns for
experiences,
which affirm the centrality of the creative act as a social relation
between people of like mind.
Where ideas, pleasure and fun and mystery and desire fuel the work
of the media hacker,
her world is one of constant uncertainty. Intertextuality, the migration
of meanings from
one context to another. is the catalyst of social change for the media
maven.
Play with them long enough, and you'll see that meanings arrive on
the back of shots
and sounds as stowaways. You stow away with those meanings too, a refugee
from the Society of the Spectacle.
Choose (a) life
In culture jammer cinema, its the selection which makes the shot. It
is
both choosing and looking but not just the act of choosing, rather
the noble
decision to make choosing the centre of ones life. The decision to
make
looking for elements to play with results in the media hacker viewing
problems facing her with curiosity, a sense of experimentation.
No barrier should be taken seriously. No limit to access to the
principle of free expression. You find some old films, you make a new
film out of them. You find some old cassettes, you chop up the bits
and make a new work out of them. Old media are windows on the times
they come from. Images are like lenses onto other times and other places.
History Speaks While the Guy Holding it Drinks a Glass of Water
Media speak as if the ventriloquists doll of history. Looking at the
sea of
ancient images which constitute the western imagination, it is easy
to see
why so many museums are becoming theme parks. In a corporatised urban
space, the notion of a civic use for cultural memory is potentially
subversive. Implicit within the old-school idea of the museum is that
the
centre of civic life lies with local governance. Sponsorship and theme-parking
does away with such troublesome notions of government in the service
of a
population, for its own sake. We must construct our own museums of
cultural
memory. If we don't remember the period before the Dark Times, nobody
will.
Bradbury at 451 degrees knows more than you do, honey.
We're burning up to tell you like it was, like it is, like it may yet
be.
The Worm Hole Theory of Collage
William Burroughs insisted that his cut-up works of writing had properties
of
prediction about them. Implicit within this idea is that collage is
a kind of
dimensional travel, where intended meanings become disrupted so radically
that the act of reworking words in a newspaper article or shots in
a film actually
disrupts the time/space continuum. Try showing a collage work to anyone
not
up with radical postmodernism and just sit back and wait for the questions
about
authorship, ownership, copyright and other methods of psychological
police
torture in the service of the State and Capital.
Assembly Instructions - Read Carefully
Jamming is more than a sytlistic technique. It is more than a simple
set
of artistic practises. It is for its most central practitioners, an
entire
philosophy of life. It means looking at the world as a kit of parts.
The
beatnik sensibility is one in which only the relation between images
and
sounds makes sense, not the parts themselves. The relationships, the
moment
between notes, the silence in a jazz riff, the double splice and the
katchink
sound it makes as it moves through the projector. The distortion on
the tape,
the hiss, the crackle. The hole damn pop sensibility.
Text is Picture is Sound is Authority is Negotiable.
William Burroughs knew of the power of words as images. His ideas about
the
provisionality of meaning, and the dependence ideas have upon the cultural
contexts in which they emerge have yet to be fully Understood, dealt
with
let alone let loose sufficiently widely enough to overthrow society!!!
The intensity of a shot well cut with a sound also well selected will
rock audiences
for a long time to come. Hacking is the spirit of play the spirit of
letting the material
speak to you. Listening and looking for patterns hidden in the material.
COME ON BUBBA!!!! SQUEEZE THAT MONKEY!!!
To quote Ren 'n' Stimpy before they went commercial.
Familiarity and Defamiliarisation through Detournment of Everyday Experience.
Encyclopaedias are often surrealistic juxtapositions of things organised
alphabetically, imagine a film whose sequence of events matched that
of
the encyclopaedia! Aardvarks, to Zoetropes, that's all she wrote.
Just take that sound and do with it what you will.
Jamming Retail: Shops as Museums of the Present.
You search for things as if you were in the biggest thrift store in
the
world. The world is a bit thrift store. K-Mart is no longer a shop
to buy
things in. It is the museum of the present, for the archaeologist of
the
below $40 consumer item. Everything is on special, and in all but price
itself, is free. You look at the world as if it were some other place
at
some other time. You turn your alienation into an asset. Suddenly the
culture of the lower middle class becomes an urban toolkit of survival
and
of anti-boredom. Things on the street, in gutters, behind fences, thrown
away packaging become the fuel for a free imagination, accumulating
in the
growing database of ways to be free, as well as on the mantelpiece
at home:
Price Check, aisle four, hardware, manchester and adult males!!!
Store detectives are too busy masturbating while looking at security
camera monitors to really stop desire
in its tracks.
Database vs Narrative: Complementary Philosophies of Media
Database is about the connections between related but separated elements.
Searches provide lists of elements. Narrative is about linearity, sequential
series
of events, it is about organic growth, root like from the bottom up,
from the top
down, any which way but loose-lipped.
A culture jammed event is a combination of database and narrative.
Database provides the navigational basis for searching for things,
indexing,
cross indexing elements, while narrative provides the structural framework
for those database philosophy inspired found elements. The web, search
engines, videogames are databases of experience you navigate through.
Narrative, by contrast is about hearing events out, having them unfold
in a
predetermined sequence. When you combine the logic of database and
apply
them to narrative you have a potent combination of forces. Look at
all the
videotapes on your shelves. All the books. Go to your cd collection.
Now
imagine that they were all in a database and you were able to combine
every track of every cd, every scene of every film, and every chapter
of
every book into new works, determined by say, your favorite bits of
each
type of media. As the entire lot is now able to be reworked into new
combinations, cultural reworkings become not only possible, but necessary.
As we move toward a database culture in which all texts are made
available to all others, the empire of signs starts to crack as surely
as the
Berlin wall. Twas booting killed the beast.
To refine texts into fragments for later recombination is the philosophy
and working approach of the idea hacker. To see all the world as a
sea of
samples is the privilege of the free. Academia tries hard enough, but
is stymied
by its own working methodology, its own beurocracy. A cultural studies
department with no time tables in a permanent Burning Man would be
the
closest thing yet to New Babylon.
Database as non sequentialism for its own sake
Database offers the technological means as well as the methodological
basis for searching, indexing, seeing patterns between media elements.
Narrative offers the moral container within which those elements can
be
organised in such a way that they reinforce the broader moral standpoint.
Hacker culture is about living ones life as if authority had already
been
done away with, as if ones own liberty were a birthright and access
to all
things were not only possible, but to be expected. The ultra rich and
the
ultra poor are both familiar with what it is to be on the outside of
society. With a database, you know about ways in which search criteria
can
be applied, for example by key-word, by date, by numerical index and
so on.
Database is a natural extension of the quality of computers, but only
hackers
can redeem computers from the shackles of work, and all that goes with
it.
Where the provisionality of meaning proliferates, there you will find
the
possiblity of life beyond commercial society. The mainstream world
expects
meanings, like people themselves, to remain behind the counter, within
boundaries, within their pre-determined cultural office dividers. In
the
early 1990s when a nightclub in Melbourne screened ultra-realistic
ads
warning people of the dangers of drink driving in the context of sado
masochism, the shit hit the fan. Infuriated that their social realist
ads
depicting supposedly real traffic accidents were being detourned to
satisfy the desire of a cultural minority.
Napsterising Everything, For All Time
Guy Debord insisted that plagiarism was a key to liberty. He even went
so
far as to to say that progress implies it. If the future of our world
lies
in the belief that all meanings should be stripped of any claim to
authenticity then museums, universities, and other last remaining bastions
of modernist essentialism whould allow students to copy texts freely,
Copying music, films, books, indeed any type of media can only ultimately
assist in the eventual devaluation of ideas as commercial entities.
What
if suddenly the Napsterisation of all ideas were made possible. All
films,
all music, all books, all texts became enterable within the realm of
database? Once made database elements, the constant generation and
regeneration of meanings could technically at least, be enterable into
a
kind of Nelsonian Xanadu realm in which all films and all texts could
be perpetually
reworked and recombined.
You might have noticed that when downloading files from Napster, you
would
often get cut off. This would result in most files being only partial
songs, or
sounds. We have a generation emerging who are
Quite happy to have only bits of songs, bits of films, bits of texts.
The fragments are horny! They want to get it on and procreate.
All I am saying is give the pieces a chance!
D.C. September 2001