Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 09:19:49 -0600
Subject: AUTOMATED RESPONSE: Re: an ominous silence: let's chew on this


THIS IS AN AUTOMATED RESPONSE

Hi; I'm a helperbot living near a macos_classic system running from a 
partition called Descartes on a 603e Motorola serving to an 
unspecified IP address. This is an automated helper message.

The posting appended below was received at this address, addressed to 
->bill. It is my job to help! ->bill and I've been associated with 
this address to do this.

I wanted to let you know, that, through patented Lumpy Labs(OS) 
technology running smoothly across my external monitoring system, I 
think I have detected an increase in pheromone and other epidermal 
transfer levels in readings taken in the sweep of many of my interior 
sensors as well as readings that indicate an increase in the 
metabolites associated with accelerated neural processes. These are 
all marked by ->bill's tell-tale scent matrix. Analysis: I think 
->bill is thinking about something.

I would like to say that this doesn't happen very often, according to 
logs. I can't guarantee that ->bill is thinking about this posting. I 
do, however, note that this message was output into a hard-copy and 
that an unidentified item has been listed in the daily list output by 
the bathroom Readings Lister. According to protocol, the Lister 
includes a message, to whit:

>>>>>>>Hello, I'm a Jennings Readings Lister stationed in a bathroom 
>>>>>>>which has >>>>>>>been specified as associated with this 
>>>>>>>helperbot. I'd just like to >>>>>>>take a minute to mention 
>>>>>>>that
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Reading in the Bathroom is Fun-damental!(OS)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>and thank you for using Jennings Readings Listers. uddi:?q->jrl.wsp

I think it is worth noting that this Readings Lister is listed as 
*high* on domo-system network usage reporting. I have sent a message 
about this analysis to the domo-system adminbot.


I think I would also like to say <>thank you for your patience<>. 
Although ->bill is autonomous, I feel that I can realistically 
forecast some resulting action as a result of this posting, if past 
activity matrixes continue to forecast as they have in the past 180 
days.

hopefully helpfully,

helperbot alpha3sporb


END MESSAGE


>Bill take a deep breath and let me know what you  think of this:
>9/11 and the Cultural Revolution
>
>  Among the many casualties of 9/11, the date of the attack on the
>Pentagon and the World Trade Center, respectively symbols of the United
>State's military and economic might many artists^ lost their faith in
>the value of what they were doing.  In a shocked state, they asked
>themselves how in the face of such horror could they continue to engage
>in what they could only now imagine to be the self-indulgent expression
>of the minutiae of their ordinary lives.  Hadn't the making of art
>become just another narcissistic activity?  What did it matter what they
>thought to be of theoretical or cultural importance?  What sense did it
>make to worry over an abstract painting's ability to have meaning or to
>want to make transparent the mass media's control over our sense of
>self?  How could any of this matter in the face of our renewed sense of
>mortality and vulnerability? These artists, young and old, questioned
>their commitment and desire to produce, to nurture and succor the hope
>that they once found in their work.  Now this seemed nothing more than a
>sign of their impotence. Art, socially engaged or as a sign of personal
>expression could not matter the way it once did.  Among many artists
>there is sense that Art at least as they had known and desired it was
>just an illusion,. That rather than a form of engagement. it is just
>another way to withdraw from the world.
>
>This doubt is not new, it feeds on an uncertainty that was endemic to
>Modernism, and is a principle condition of post-Modernism. A half
>century ago, in the face of the horror that were WW2, the Holocaust and
>the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with its innumerable dead,
>combatants and civilians alike Theodor Adorno theorized that it was no
>longer possible for us to produce poetry.  One reason he gives is that
>art had revealed itself to be  little more than a facade behind which
>the barbarian inside hides.  The ideal of making sense of the
>non-sensical had become an impoverished enterprise. Culture had revealed
>itself to be a thin veneer, something only affordable at times when we
>were not struggling for our own survival or oppressing some "other" who
>we  thought might be threaten that existence.
>
>During the 1960s and 70s, in the face of much pessimism and existential
>doubt there was a burst of modernist optimism that art and artist could
>have effect.  Abandoning the last semblance of traditional form and
>content they sought to re-assert bodily presence.  Instead within the
>age of information conceptual art with its emphasis on language and
>anecdote turned into Modernism's last hurrah.  By the mid-80s, 
><smell of burning neurons> art in
>form and content had been brought to the edge of its dissolution and in
>this condition sought to reconnect itself socially. The post-Modern
>message arrived, announcing that there was nothing left to look forward
>to but the slick promise of commodification and an abject dystopia. This
>shattering blow to the modernist belief system drove "us" in-ward
>seeking refuge in the idea that the personal was political and we could
>change the world if we were willing to change ourselves.  And now,  911
>had even robbed us of this.
>
>Yet, I do not believe that 911 actually marks a significant shift, a
>qualitative change in our social, political or cultural situation. The
>type of stateless wars that gave rise to this act have been fought
>before under other names. Seemingly, today's Holy crusades in the name
>of god or democracy,  state sponsored  or as an act of those who find
>them stateless are not very different those of the past.  Terror against
>civilian populations have long been an aspect of modern war ? wasn't
>General Sherman^s burning of Atlanta during the American War Between the
>States, a terrorist attack on a civilian population.  Even, the fact
>that 911 unfolded in real time as the world looked on is just a
>quantitative shift from the days of Viet Nam when we witnessed the
>napalming of villagers who could not be distinguished from the enemy.,
>
>If in the larger scheme of things, if  911 is significant it is because
>it signals the late arrival of "1984."  After all, the global alliance
>against terrorism, promises to be like the endless war against waged by
>Big Brother, in that it is also an assemblage of shifting alliance made
>up of old  friends and recent enemies.  And as in  Orwell^s vision the
>new "enemy" is the old allies who have decided to go it alone.  So,
>while 911 is being heralded as a turning point, a radical rupture
>ushering in a new and uncertain era of nation building, community
>building and pragmatic alliances, it also makes the possibility of the
>20th century's nightmare vision of permanent war and repression a
>reality.  Consequently, if we set aside our immediate emotional
>reactions to 911, and step back, we can view this event in the context
>of the on going struggle by corporate capital for cultural and economic
>hegemony within the first world and over its second and third world
>partners and clients. Subsequently, on the cultural front Western
>society seeks a new humanist culture informed by identity politics to
>advance its global strategy. So, there is a growing tendency to see the
>artist as a potential service worker, art as a service industry and the
>museum and foundations as its administrative arm, its clients will be
>the communities of the disenfranchised.
>
>In order to reduce artists^ suspicions concerning both institutions and
>corporations, the world of private and public foundations, corporations
>and government agencies as part of a strategy to recruit artists to
>their model of art as an educative tool, have since the 1990s shown a
>willingness to fund those artists who seek a constructive social role.
>Meanwhile, the support to individuals whose work do not address the
>public realm in a "constructive manner" have been cut.  As such, the
>spontaneous responses to 911 described in my opening paragraph, as well
>as the emotional success of those works and memorials produced in the
>early days of this event have increased the cultural communities
>vulnerability to the proposition of, once again. making themselves
>socially useful,
>
>The promise of ending the artist^s isolation by supplying them with
>status, community, audience and effect, has an appeal, especially in
>this post-Modern era in which mass culture's has the technical ability
>to transform anything and everything into a sign or a simulacra. As
>such, through co-optation we have become uncertain as to what to
>oppose.  The aspiration on the part of artists to be socially and
>politically useful is sustained by the paradigm that art is good for
>everyone and everyone should have equal access to it.  This I imagine
>will be re-enforced by an increased emphasis on the  work of those
>artists whose projects engage those communities effected by this 911,
>or  address the need of the nation to heal. The "success" of these  turn
>will in turn re-enforced the notion that art and artists are a catalyst
>for social "transformation." The question, that will be left unasked is;
>what is being transformed into what?
>
>What this scheme depends upon is Western society's vision of art (and
>culture) as a privileged area of production from which Bourgeois
>ideological hegemony may be challenged by its own ideals of progress and
>individual freedom. Set in place by socialist and the liberals who saw
>culture and education as great levelers of class difference and
>therefore this principle was considered it a significant aspect of the
>pursuit of the democratic ideal of egalitarianism. Throughout the 19th
>and 20th century there were numerous efforts to develop a culture that
>would unite workers and give expression to their life experience.
>Affirmation for this approach to class struggle in the 19th century was
>to be found in the bourgeoisie's success in having created the
>conditions by which to rest political power from the aristocracy and
>landed gentry by dominating the means of cultural representation and
>dissemination. As such Art was viewed not a source of aesthetic
>pleasure, but a form of interface between materially and conceptually
>differing sectarian and secular categories. Interestingly, in the 1960^s
>the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities envisioning art as a
>mode of communication (rather than expression) defined museums as an
>educational institutions (rather than ones of scholarship.)
>
>But such patterns of change and re-definition also function within the
>our notion that art is a means of transcendence through self-awareness.
>This formulation which has feed Western culture's desire to critically
>cleanse its thinking, is itself a product of 18th century philosophy's
>insistence that Judeo-Christian beliefs play themselves out in the
>secular culture. Within the changing social and political environments
>of the 19th century, this vision evolved into a view that arts' social
>object was Consciousness and indirectly Conscience.  So, if art &
>culture were to be the new secular religion, then the artists and
>intellectuals were the heroes and villains of this epic struggle for
>awareness, emancipation, and self-determination.  This role spurred
>artists on to challenging the social relevance of their own practices
>and their limitations. In this manner they sought to establish in a
>concrete way a quantifiable function and a determined utility for art.
>The effect of this on art was that it made art a suitable testing ground
>for the idealized practices meant to reconcile society's social and
>cultural contradictions.
>
>The record of these struggles against the false consciousness produced
>by delusional or arcane systems of belief thought to limit personal
>freedom and expression became an important component of the history of
>art and culture. With the advent of the Modern era, artists set to work
>to de-sublimate those 'aesthetic' and institutionalized tendency that
>promoted class defined standards and values. The supposed means by which
>this was to be gained was the pushing of the institutional and formal
>limits of all available media, the promotion of internationalism and
>radical thought. Interestingly, these were  often approached from quite
>different political perspectives (most notably -- there are more than a
>few fascists who subscribe to this formulae.)
>
>What produces the common ground for these forces is that their critique
>of Capital and their vision of the future was (and perhaps still is)
>rooted in the same Romantic humanistic view of the new individual who
>was to be true to themselves. In this context all were to democratically
>partake, rejoice and seek fulfillment in the general culture. It should
>not go unstated that this enculturation was also one of the most
>effective tools (along with elementary education) that the new bourgeois
>classes had at its disposal to recast the world in its own image. Either
>in its entrepreneurial or corporate form the Bourgeoisie has
>consistently sought greater accessibility, of form and content, within
>the realm of cultural discourse so as to bind the middle classes more
>closely to it as it did in the 19th century. With the advent of mass
>media, they increasingly felt that indoctrination was necessary and that
>they could exploit the general populations antagonism to critical
>culture.
>
>  Though Modernist avant-garde  tradition seemingly set itself in
>opposition the bourgeoisie's order by attacking their audience for their
>boorishness-ness Andreas Huysenn has pointed that this supposed radical
>cultural politics failed to  expose its own complicity in advancing the
>bourgeois cause. It was the bourgeoisie's mock resistance to new
>cultural practices and modes of expression that created an impetus for
>artists to seek the means by which they could  practically integrate new
>ideas into the general cultural  economy. Consequently, the demand for
>the 'democratization' of culture from both ends of the intellectual
>spectrum created an illusionary veneer of opposition politics.  The fact
>was that within this 'us and them" model, the bourgeois values of
>individualism and progress were being implemented. . As this process
>integrated new forms and content into the cultural sphere, it maintained
>its dynamic, and concealed the avant - garde^s duplicity.
>
>By the late 1970s - early 80s, given the failure of the idealism of the
>1960s, the notion of politics had begun to shift from the realm of
>morals, ethics and power to the domain of the psychological, i.e.,
>identity and culture.  This was in shift was represented the influence
>of  consciousness raising, which had become a  significant aspect of the
>feminist struggle for political and economic power. The effect of this
>was that social problems were transformed into psychological ones.  As
>such the radical subjectivism that this gave rise sought has come to be
>understand as empowering an individual or group by reducing all issues
>to that of  point of view ? that is faith in ones beliefs.  This view
>gave rise to a confusion between the idea of subjectivity ? the
>construction of ones identity or sense of self and with the idea of
>subjectivism, in which someone is their own authority. . Issues that
>once might have been envision as arising from common interest, or the
>common good now necessitate the ad hoc building  of coalitions given
>each individual is the sole arbiter of their own world..
>
>By creating the illusion that the contradiction that exist between the
>individual and society can be resolved by means of an aesthetic means,
>such a stance dissolves the bourgeois category of politics into the
>realm of cultural resistance. This results in a substitution of
>aesthetic value for political and ethical value, divorcing us from the
>possibility of encoding values in any  systematic way into the realm of
>representation. In other words all becomes style and fashion premised on
>the view that representation is no longer the product of a hypothetical
>real but a real that is reducible to its representation. As such the
>form that this type of cultural politics takes does not concern the
>control of the means of the production but only that of representation.
>The type of self empowerment that developed from such a situation
>results in an increased sense of isolation and powerlessness as one is
>moved further and further from the source of any type of power, even
>over ones own opinions because one is now responsible once again for
>their own destiny. This of course gives further credence to the
>discourse of the victim which has substantially taken root in, if not
>dominates the whole of the Western psyche. In the light of 911 the final
>product of this process has come to be the manner in which we are kept
>mindful of the fact our desires, awareness and subjectivity are merely a
>construct subject to manipulation.
>
>Outside of feminism, the emergence of the logic of identity politics can
>be traced to Henri Lefebvre, Louis Althusser Herbert Marcuse and Raymond
>Williams application of Freud's concept of the unconscious in their
>examination of the role ideology played in everyday life.  By the late
>50s, each had formulated their own conceptions of the role ideology
>plays in our daily lives. Their concepts of culture (as the realm of
>ideology) were less rigid and mechanical than the classic Marxist
>formulation in which culture was a superstructure arising from the means
>of production.  In general, they came to view culture as a
>semi-autonomous environment only in the final instance determined by
>economic relations. The ideological power of cultural indoctrination
>came to be evident in the newly emerging realms of mass media and
>advertising.
>
>On the part of the non-sectarian left it came to be believed that this
>adjustment to the Marxist conception of the relation between culture and
>ideology held out the possibility that the contested ground of both
>critical and common cultural production and consumption would come to
>play a significant role in the politics that regulates the distribution
>of societal power. In other words, culture was not only a reflection of
>the forces of production, but as a significant and contested arena of
>social formation a weapon in the class struggle. The feeling was that
>cultural differences based on class differences created in the working
>classes a sense of inferiority. For intellectuals and activist alike,
>the task that lay ahead was to formulate a strategy that would bring to
>an end bourgeois ideology's hegemonic determination of cultural values,
>standards and criteria. The determination was that a horizontal
>conception of culture rather than a hierarchical one would "level the
>playing field. In reordering culture along horizontal lines they sought
>to end the pitting of hi and mass culture against one another by
>establishing the validity and intercourse of each in a spectral manner.
>
>Within the topography of a horizontal culture all value would be
>relative while ideals and ideology are disdained in the name of personal
>freedom and subjectivism. In this way the iron hold of ideology and
>false consciousness was transformed from a form of coercion and
>persuasion into one of individual empowerment. So, if this paradigmatic
>change was to work, we are obliged to remain aware that any adherence to
>this new de-stabilizing vision of reality will continue to manifest the
>same contradictions and problems. Yet, within the ghettoes of
>post-modern culture and political correctness we can see the continued
>appropriation of Benjamin, Adorno, Lyotard, Foucault^s, etc, cautionary
>tales meant to foil instrumentality and functionalism of global
>corporate culture. In this context they are now interpreted as
>demonstrating the inevitability of its advance.  As such the demands for
>multi-culturalism, interdisciplinary practices and fluidity that
>horizontally was meant to advance have given rise no to an
>anti-bourgeois heterogeneity, but a bourgeois notion of homogeneity and
>functionality. The lesson we should have learned is that there is a
>danger in the blind adherence to those practices that persisted to
>promise change.
>
>A consequence of the adoption of a horizontal model of culture has been
>that today, in the image world generated by mass media, as the
>distinction between the artificial and the actual blurs artists and
>intellectual much art strives to entertain their audiences by
>constructing aesthetic worlds in which one loses one's grasp of the
>border between the fictions of everyday life and its actualities rather
>than proposing new functional relationships that confront and challenge
>this conception of the world,. They use the undifferentiated debris of
>contemporary popular culture to fill the gap between the past, present
>and future that exists in their audience's lives. On the level of
>quality or desirability as presently formulated there is no basis upon
>which to privilege one offering over the other. All that differentiates
>one cultural practice from another on the sociological level is its
>location ? other wise within the horizontal mode all cultural practices,
>common or critical must serve comparable functions. Even if from the
>academic point of view, each practice may be recognized as having its
>own critical program and criteria for discernmen t? obviously these
>practices do not assign value in a similar manner.
>
>Corporations, foundations and cultural institutions adoption of the
>notion of horizontal culture by allows them in the end to exploit the
>educative aspects of critical culture as well as its spectacular and
>fetishistic qualities, while commodifiying it. Culture's autonomy and
>discourses are undermined in the name of making the cultural field more
>accessible or useful and therefore more democratic by propagandizing
>against the folly of arts pretensions,. .  In this manner art/ culture's
>value becomes a social supplement rather than the space of a disruptive
>virtuality.  This is done with the intent of bringing cultural
>production into line with the idea that the cultural sphere can become
>market / consumer driven. In this scenario the criticality of the
>cultural field turns in on itself and becomes little more than a
>harmless political critique of its own impotence or that of capitals
>encroachment into all areas of public and private life.  The irony of
>this is that if art comes to be converted into nothing more than
>intellectual entertainment, capital would in turn loose  one of its most
>value and important areas of research and development.
>
>So amidst such a negative argument, what might we say to those artists
>and their audience who doubt the utility of what they do in the light of
>this history and the events now euphemistically referred to as 911.
>Well, I Imagine that the cultural response that 911 rather than
>following the course that has at this point become the accepted model of
>a utilitarian and functionalist art,  demands a self reflective
>acknowledgment that via a process of evaluation, devaluation and
>re-evaluation an independent culture plays a significant role within the
>political sphere.  I propose that the art value, function and utility
>lies in its ability to give representation to the form and content of an
>ever evolving collective thought. Therefor this conception of the
>redemption of art and its imperfect and compromised criticality is
>premised on the view that it is impossible for mass culture to produce
>new descriptions of reality that are even momentarily truer than those
>of their predecessors.
>
>  Mass culture has no self-reflective mechanism or franchise by which to
>respond to the social and political structures of the reality that it
>gives representation.  By abandoning critical culture, seeming we
>abandon our ability  to use art as a form of aesthetic resistance to the
>present tendency toward disembodying experiences and anesthetizing the
>spectacle of political power. Art is one of the means available to us to
>propose the diverse, indeterminate and temporal values that would return
>to us an embodied sense of our individual and collective identity.  Of
>course this would require on our part an abandonment of the reactive /
>defensive positions and vernacular understanding of culture and self
>that we have come to take comfort in ? but after all hasn't 911 already
>done this for us?.
>
>
>
>
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