[Syndicate] Automatism/Autonomy/Virtual Unconscious III

["anna balint" <epistolaris@freemail.hu>]

Convulsive Beauty Then and Now

In 1924 Louis Aragon wrote: "If 'reality' is the apparent absence of
contradiction?he marvelous is the eruption of contradiction in the real."
(44) Contrasting this statement to the positions of Antiorp, Zizek and
Baudrillard makes clear that the prevailing picture of 'reality' at the
turn of the 20th century is something very different. Since our reality
today is dominated by 'truths' such as the 'irrational exuberance' of the
market or the unquantifiable probability of an epidemic outbreak of CJD, a
radical aesthetics can no longer tenably be premised on revealing the false
illusion of consistency.(45)  But conversely, as Hal Foster has
persuasively argued, the Bretonian surrealists' interest in uncovering
repressed psychic and social content to reveal its marvelous
contradictions, was not aimed at the radical disaggregation of the subject
or society that this might imply. Foster makes a case for the uncanny
being, paradoxically, the repressed content of Bretonian surrealism but one
that is 'everywhere treated'. In other words, the surrealists were drawn to
the uncanny - the repressed material which returns to disrupt unitary
identity, aesthetic norms and social order - but resistant to its truly
disruptive, compulsively repetitive and deathly force. In the Second
manifesto du Surr?alisme, Breton explains that the primary urge of
surrealism is to 'fix[] the point' at which core opposites such as life and
death, the real and the imagined, the past and the future, "cease to be
perceived as contradictions".(46)  For Foster, this wish to reconcile what
cannot be reconciled reveals that:

"[t]he paradox of surrealism, the ambivalence of its most important
practitioners, is this: even as they work to find this point they do not
want to be pierced by it, for the real and the imagined, the past and the
future only come together in the experience of the uncanny, and its stake
is death." (47)

>From what could be exaggerated as the safety of the Bretonian surrealist
position, the uncanny provided the opportunity for the aesthetic concept of
the 'marvelous' whose key components were 'convulsive beauty' and
'objective chance'. In the discussion that follows here, we will be mostly
concerned with the formulation of convulsive beauty because of its ability
to grasp in images the interpenetration of the conflicting impulses
operative in the unconscious: the life drive (Eros) and the death drive
(Thanatos). Through a consideration of the ASCII movie Deep Ascii by Vuk
Cosic (1998) and Olia Lialina's online narrative Agatha Appears (1997), I
will discuss the net artists' similar interest in the interpenetration of
the binaries order and disorder, and animate and inanimate, but show how
here the 'repressed' of Bretonian surrealism - the threat of disaggregation
without reconciliation - comes to its conscious articulation.
In the Manifesto, Breton gives several examples of the marvelous: romantic
ruins, a train trapped amidst vines in the jungle and shop mannequins. Both
these emblems, cherished by surrealists, involve a coincidence of
opposites; the ruin and the train suggest the forces of culture in conflict
with those of nature, the submission of history and 'progress' to entropy,
and the mannequin encapsulates the inhuman or inanimate in the human - an
emblem of capitalist reification. Breton's ability to conceive as
convulsively beautiful these revelations of the immanence of death in life
is for Foster evidence of Breton's own resistance to the 'grim connection'
which betokens the uncanny. Breton elaborates on the beauty of the
marvelous in L'Amour fou, declaring: "Convulsive Beauty will be
veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magical-circumstantial or will not be"(48)
Particularly pertinent to a reading of Cosic's Deep Ascii are the images
Breton offers of the veiled-erotic which entail reality convulsed into
writing: "a limestone deposit shaped like an egg; a quartz wall formed like
a sculpted mantle; a rubber object and a mandrake root that resemble
statuettes; a coral reef that appears like an underwater garden; and
finally crystals deemed by Breton a paradigm of automatist creation."(49)
Foster interprets these images of 'natural mimicry' as exemplifying the
uncanny because what alerts us to its presence is the return of something
familiar in the guise of something alien and threatening. In psychoanalytic
terms, the uncanny is characterised by the return of a familiar phenomenon
made strange by repression and transformed into a "ghostly harbinger of
death". In The Uncanny, written in 1919, Freud argues that there is an
instinctual compulsion to repeat, to return to a prior state, i.e. of
inanition, and that whatever reminds us of this repetition compulsion is
uncanny. Later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud finally formulates
the uncanny as the manifestation of the struggle between life and death
drives, or between Eros and Thanatos.(50)   For Freud, it is Thanatos that
ultimately dominates Eros, but for Breton the possibility of the drives'
resolution is preserved. His inventory of the beautiful involves precisely
this 'fixed-explosive' balance; the shock by which entropy is arrested to
reveal something significative and self-positing. As Foster stresses,
however, the coincidence of order and disorder, and/or sign and referent,
also point towards the underlying presence of disorder or the 'informe'
within what appears to be highly organised and meaningful. In this sense
the experience of the marvelous is less that of beauty than of "the
'negative pleasure' of the sublime.(51)
If the surrealist concept of convulsive beauty can be said to involve the
usurpation of the thing by the word (nature convulsed into writing), then
Vuk Cosic's 1998 'ASCII movie' Deep Ascii would seem to present an
inversion of this relationship.(52)  Cosic has taken the 1972 classic
pornographic movie Deep Throat as a highly schematic erotic 'sign' and
engineered its semiotic subversion and partial erasure through a purely
technical conversion. Crudely speaking, what Cosic, with programming
assistance from Luka Frelih, has done is to translate a sequence of film
images into a sequence of moving ASCII characters.(53)  This process
effectively updates an old technique used to print images from computers in
the days before the widespread availability of printers capable of
outputting raster digital images. Using a UNIX programme called 'toascci'
the computer was able to "print[] textual characters that represent the
black and white image used as input."(54)   Cosic and Frelih used an
equivalent
process called 'ttyvideo' by which a video image can be converted into its
equivalent ASCII output. They then made a Java applet to play the video in
a Web browser. (55)  As Lev Manovich argues, where films such as George
Lucas's
The Phantom Menace ("the first feature-length commercial abstract film: two
hours worth of frames made up of numbers") hide the digital nature of the
image under the appearance of traditional film, Cosic's ASCII movies
"'perform' the new status of media as digital data."(56) In actual fact,
what
we view is no less a mediated representation of the underlying processes
than The Phantom Menace in that the figurative play of ASCII characters on
the computer screen is by no means a direct encounter with the binary
functions which underlie the Java script and HTML functions which produce
the image. Nonetheless, the translation of the fixed and indexical nature
of film into a shimmering display of discrete and shifting characters is
the result of the images' conversion into binary digital code and it is
this process which the ASCII characters signify or 'perform'.
The struggle produced by Deep AsciiI between legibility and chaos, or
information and noise, is a struggle for signification conditioned by the
'compulsive' activity of the software's automatic processes. Cosic has set
up the terms of the image translation, after which all number of variables
beyond his control decide upon whether the film sequence suddenly becomes
legible or remains obscure. This is ultimately quite different to the
surrealists' use of automatist processes such as hypnosis, frottage or
objective chance which were understood as a dissociative means capable of
producing a synthetic end; an asymmetrical means/end relation of causality
in which something irregular, undetermined or serendipitous brings forth a
deep, underlying unity (the liberated unconscious). With Deep Ascii by
contrast, the automatic-automatist process of the 'asciimator' converts
what was already often a hypnotically repetitive sequence into a densely
intricate scramble of green characters and numerals in which a recognisable
image is constantly lost and found. The viewer's struggle to decipher the
video likewise inclines her, in turn, to a kind of automatist state, a
suggestible frame of mind, triggered by the swirl of indistinct images and
dancing green characters, condensing into recognisable scenes and then
exploding into total abstraction. One is often uncertain if one is looking
at, say, a woman crossing the road or a couple engaged in fellatio. The
regularity of the software's procedure reveals the underlying irregular,
mutating tendency of Informatic behaviour and the instability of visual
perception. Although this regularity is certainly at odds with the
dissociative strategies of surrealism, the attempt to bypass the conscious
control of the image's production and to reveal an underlying chaos do
create parallels between the two moments.
Hal Foster's reading of the outcomes of these processes which the
surrealists' ultimate decision to abandon denies or represses, is helpful
in reading Cosic's much later variant of automatism. Foster sees the logic
unleashed by automatism, contrary to the surrealists' intentions, as
forcing the same conclusions as those reached by Freud in his late theory
of the primal struggle between the life and death drives:

"Of course, Breton and company framed the question of automatism very
differently. For them the problem was one of authenticity, i.e., of the
threat posed by calculation and correction to the pure presence of the
automatist psyche. But this formulation missed the more fundamental problem
- that automatism might not be liberatory at all, not because it voided the
controls of the (super)ego (such was its express purpose) but because it
decentered the subject too radically in relation to the unconscious. In
short, the question of the constraints of the conscious mind obscured the
more important question of the constraints of the unconscious mind."(57)

In light of these remarks, it is interesting that Cosic - who has converted
many shorter classic film clips into ASCII movies- chose a pornographic
film for conversion into the only movie that approaches full length.(58)
Cosic, passing over the sexual content of the film, has explained that the
choice of Deep Throat was a result of its ubiquitous use of close-ups which
provide a bolder image when converted into moving ASCII: "ASCII rendering
of an image does not allow you to use a lot of noise. You can use an image
with a lot of detail, but it will not render well in ASCII." (59)  In this
explanation, Cosic somewhat repurposes the term 'noise' to imply the less
bold elements of an image, rather than meaning that details are
non-meaningful per se. Although it is clear that Cosic is using this idea
of noise to make a quite technical point, his choice of words also
illuminates something essential in his selection of pornographic material
which he does not mention. Pornography makes use of film and the
conventions of cinema in a highly efficient and schematic way. For example,
a pornographic film typically dispenses with the necessity of a narrative
plot as soon as the basic erotic conceit has been established. Similarly,
the introduction of contextualising or mood setting shots is kept to a
minimum in order to reserve the majority of the film for the undisturbed
display of sexual acts. These acts themselves typically illustrate the
inherent instrumentality of the genre as erotic pleasure is whittled down
to the mechanics of stimulation and penetration in its full permutative
range. Metaphorically speaking then, pornography is a filmic genre that
attempts to keep 'noise' to a mimimum in the interest of keeping the
potential for erotic 'information' at a maximum.
Ironically, the mechanistic logic of pornography is reminiscent of the
compulsive repetitions associated with the death drive and yet it is
difficult not to associate pornography's erasure of 'noise' with a
repression of the very violence and deathliness which underpin eroticism.
In this sense, pornograpy, like Bretonian surrealism, courts the deathly
void of the unconscious - by way of repetitive, mechanical techniques -
whilst eschewing an encounter with its 'deathly stake'. Georges Bataille -
who, it is worth remarking, was a dissident from Breton's surrealist circle
- wrote extensively about the intimate connection between eroticism and
death.(60)  As Bataille noted, in most societies both sexuality and death
are
the sites of extensive prohibitions and taboos, and it is the danger of our
attraction/repulsion to this pullulating complex of life and death forces
that the prohibitions seek to control. For Bataille the precondition of
life is an excessive, non-conservative and luxurious expenditure premised
on death, and conversely the putrefaction of death is also productive of
the fecundity of life. Eroticism, which itself partakes in this economy of
excess, is shot through with a desire for annihilation:

"Just as the crime, which horrifies her, secretly raises and fuels
Phaedra's ardour, sexuality's fragrance of death ensures all its power.
This is the meaning of anguish, without which sexuality would be only an
animal activity, and would not be erotic. If we wish to clearly represent
this extraordinary effect, we have to compare it to vertigo, where fear
does not paralyse but increases an involuntary desire to fall; and to
uncontrollable laughter, where the laughter increases in proportion to our
anguish if some dangerous element supervenes and if we laugh even though at
all costs we should stop laughing.

In each of these situations, a feeling of danger - yet not so pressing as
to preclude any delay -places us before a nauseating void. A void in the
face of which our being is a plenum, threatened with losing its plenitude,
both desiring and fearing to lose it. As if the consciousness of plenitude
demanded a state of uncertainty, of suspension. As if being itself were
this exploration of all possibility, always going to the extreme and always
hazardous. And so, to such a stubborn defiance of impossibility, to such a
full desire for emptiness, there is no end but the definitive emptiness of
death." (60)

Curiously perhaps, Cosic's insistance on a minimum of noise in his original
material, although on one level merely a straighforward requirement for
achieving any degree of legibility at all, is also the precondition for
producing a newly 'noisy' erotica. This is an erotica, if that is in any
way an adequate word, in which the image is constantly threatened with
disaggregation and the compact delivery of erotic information is constantly
undermined by the interference of the informe. Taking the highly Apollonian
material of Deep Throat, in which the destructive stake of eroticism is
bound and stabilised, Cosic releases a Dionysian disorder which, in my
opinion, reintroduces the 'nauseating void' of death into the erotic
spectacle. In this sense, Deep Ascii evidences what here has been termed
the virtual unconscious - an externalised and societal derepression in
which the repressive mechanisms which undergird the consistency of identity
are destabilised and wherein the subject is not spared a nauseating
confrontation with the void of self-cancelling chaos. In the shift from the
fixity of analogue film (whose frames can be spliced together but which, in
themselves, cannot be altered) to the mutability of the discrete units of
information (its binary code) this movement from a system premised on order
(Enlightenment rationality) to one based in deterministic chaos (the
'second Enlightenment')is concisely apprehensible. Relatedly, the material
instability of information, its 'flickering' state as N. Katherine Hayles
has described it, provides a rather different kind of automatic process.
Unlike the industrial machines of the pre-information age whose output was,
and still is, regular and repetitive, the output of the automatic processes
of computation is mutagenic and unpredictable. Its capacities to iterate or
parse and thus transvalue information, although orderly procedures in
themselves, are key to its more unruly potential. In this respect, the
automatic functions of computers produce unexpected effects with surprising
parallels to those automatist techniques of surrealism such as frottage,
hypnosis, and objective chance. In other words, the result of an algorithm
more closely approximates the creative output of the human psyche than the
holes punched by, say, an automated steel cutter. This uncanny aspect of
computers - neither dumbly, mechanically repetitive nor posessed of a
psychology - entails the same 'fixed-explosive' contradictoriness as the
surrealist notion of the marvelous. Strangely, the tools of the information
age have come to resemble the vying forces of the life and death drives,
the action of the Freudian unconscious. Computation then is not only
productive of a derepression, an exteriorised, virtual unconscious, it is
also emblematic of it. However, what a work such as Deep Ascii reveals is
that, in contrast to the Bretonian faith in the resolution of opposites
achieved by such a derepression, these tools tend to reveal the
disaggregated chaos before which the viewer swoons in the same
attraction-repulsion dynamic as we experience in the face of sex and
putrefaction. Noise opens up a vertiginous void before which we often feel
dazzled and powerless.

Agatha Appears (Disgusted): the Informatic Dissolution of the Autonomous
Subject

So far we have encountered Antiorp's experiments with nonlinear dynamics
and deterministic chaos which present a view onto an illegible but
nonetheless meaningful universe which delightedly contemplates our ethical
suspension 'beyond good and evil'. The nonlinear dynamics articulated and
celebrated in the work of Antiorp are, however, constantly indexed to a
variety of relatively orderly, rule-bound systems such as natural and
programming languages or the social codes developed in mailing lists. We
have also encountered Cosic's Deep Ascii which is one in a series of works
that translate stable forms (analogue films or physical buildings (62)) into
their unstable Informatic equivalents. In these translations, however, the
initial referent is always perceivable in some residual form, be it in the
intermittently recognisable sequences of a film or a building glimpsed
beneath its projected ASCII overlay. It is the tension maintained between
order and disorder, or stable referent and unstable Informatic sign -
perhaps an image of non-order - which triggers a sense of convulsive beauty
reminiscent of Bretonian surrealism. But Antiorp and Cosic also both
display something reminiscent of a Bataillan erotic exhilaration that
pivots between disgust at dissipative chaos of information systems and an
attraction to their complex, negentropic fecundity.
At the outset of this chapter we encountered Adorno's concept of repressive
desublimation and the associated impact on the bourgeois autonomous
subject. Adorno argued that in liberal bourgeois society, the repressed Id
also provided an unreachable psychic repository which both prevented the
unmediated expression of drives but also protected the unconscious from
direct Superego manipulation. Towards the end of the 20th century, we
encounter the idea of the 'non-oedipal' subject or cyborg for whom a key
attribute, as theorised by Haraway, is said to be "a different logic of
repression", a logic which is evidenced in the work of Antiorp and Cosic.
In contrast to the fascist co-optation of the Id by a repressive Superego
embodied in the singular figure of the F?hrer today, in these purportedly
'non-oedipal' times, the big Other terrorises through its infinite
complexity - the chaotic universe. A derepression of the Id, as epitomised
by the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s, coincides with an immense
complexification of the big Other in the form of epistemological crises and
the exponential growth of IT. In other words, the widespread social
injunction to express ones desires and live out ones fantasies is
accompanied by the inability to settle on the nature or mandate of
authority. As Western societies become increasingly atheist, the power
vacuum left by religion and unsuccessfully occupied by money, leads to a
questioning of authority or, in Zizekian terms, an attempt to fill out the
consistency of the symbolic order. This derepression is sometimes
experienced, and celebrated in culture as a release from individuality, a
radical interconnectedness with people, ideas, cultures, information,
technology, interdisciplinarity and so on, but as often it is experienced
as a threatening destablisation of subjectivity. If Antiorp's and Cosic's
work seems to operate ambivalently along this line of tension which runs
between the fear of complete disintegration and the delight in the
marvelous "eruption of contradiction in the real", Olia Lialina's work
articulates a more concrete and horrified sense of subjective decentrement
within the non-llinearity of the Net's dynamic.
Lialina's investigates this sense of instability through her hypertext
narratives which use the hyperlinked and decentralised structures of the
Net to create a literal and metaphorical sense of our inability to
cognitively map. In her 1997 work Agatha Appears - as with her 1996 work My
boyfriend came back from war. After dinner they left us alone discussed in
Chapter One - Lialina collides the sequential frame logic of film narrative
together with what Lev Manovich has termed the 'database logic' which
subtends computer narratives. For Manovich, narrative is just one amongst
numerous options for the sequencing of data in computer databases.(63)
Unlike
film whose frame by frame sequentiality inherently lends itself to
narrative, from the point of view of the computer's data storage and
retrieval systems, it is irrelevant whether data is arranged according to
chronology, alphabetical sequence, keyword or any available criterion. For
Manovich, this underlying logic is best expressed in the medium of the Net:

"Where the database form really flourished, however, is on the Internet. As
defined by original HTML, a Web page is a sequential list of separate
elements: text blocks, images, digital video clips, and links to other
pages. It is always possible to add a new element to the list - all you
have to do is to open a file and add a new line."(64)

>From this particular perspective we re-encounter the same nonlinearity and
multidimensionality that Antiorp explore in its work in the question of
hypertext narratives. Indeed the Internet in its entirety can be seen, and
often is, as a gigantic symbol and concrete example of a nonlinear system.
However, what is interesting in the work of Lialina, is her sensitivity to
the fact that the movement through a website entails a sequential logic
strongly reminiscent of film:

"Hypertext is the best way to tell stories, hundreds of stories
simultaneously. And interaction is merely a field for experiment, the same
as stage, film, brain. Net language is closer to film than video. Video
doesn't think by frame. Web does. Not only. It gives a chance to operate
with such ideas as line, parallel, associative (digital, wow) montage. Its
a fascinating experience."(65)

Although in this quote, Lialina makes clear that frame logic is only one
amongst multiple narrative dimensions offered by the Net, her online
narratives are intentionally reminiscent of film. As with the tensions
between order and disorder in the work of Antiorp and Cosic outlined above,
Lialina's work engages in an equivalent formal struggle between linear and
nonlinear sequence. We might say that, for her, film is the writing which
the Net threatens to convulse into a kind of nonsignificative 'nature', and
the characters in her narratives are directly under threat.
Agatha Appears can, in a limited respect, be described purely in terms of
its plot which follows a system administrator recently fired "because some
important files disappeared from his network". In a disgruntled and
perplexed state he meets Agatha, a 'lost country girl'. He asks her "Baby,
have you heard about the Internet?", to which she replies in the negative,
whereupon he invites her to his apartment and offers to 'teleport' her, or
upload her into the Net. Although they encounter some difficulites due to
her 'long legs', she eventually experiences a kind of dissolution in the
universe of "millions of zeros laughing and screaming". This experience,
which she finds both 'disgusting' and exhilarating, eventually separate her
from her system administrator beau and she is left to wander the lattice of
connections, from server to server, ad infinitum. The story is brought to
an end not through a resolution of the plot's inherent conflicts but by a
kind of apathetic or entropic resignation in which "Agatha los[es]
interest".
The plot itself is mirrored through an ingenious use of browser
functionalities as well as the system for storing the work's digital files
on the Net. As touched upon in Chapter Four, Lialina is highly conscious of
the location and names of digital files, seeing them as the only index of
originality available. In the plagiaristic environment of the Net, where
anyone can clone any website, the artist's URL is the only guarantor that
one is viewing the 'original', most up to date and uncompromised version of
the work. Her work also repeatedly reveals an interest in how the name of a
file is its location and that, in this respect, language very literally
controls the movement and behaviour of digital information - an example of
the new performativity of words in the Net. In this piece Lialina's files
are distributed across various servers and, as we shall see, the names of
the servers and files play an increasingly central role in the narrative.
Agatha Appears commences at http:www.c3.hu/collection/agatha, a file in the
collection of the Hungarian mediacentre C3's archive. After the initial
scene in which the flat cut-out figure of the system administrator appears
alone, the suffixes appended to the file names begin to set the various and
typically noirish scenes that unfold between the two characters. In the
second scene in which the equally flat and wooden figure of Agatha makes
her first appearance, the location bar reads,
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/big_city_night_street.html and
thereafter:

http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/next_night_sysadms_apartment.html
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/late_evening_railway_station_heavy_rain.h
tml
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/there1.html
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/here1.html
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/alone1.html
http://www.c3.hu/collection/agatha/alone.html
http://www.here.ru/agatha/cant_stay_anymore.htm
http://www.altx.com/agatha/starts_new_life.html
http://www.distopia.com/agatha/travels.html
http://www2.arnes.si/~ljintima3/agatha/travels_a_lot.html
http://www.zuper.com/agatha/wants_home.html
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/agatha/goes_on.html
http://www.easylife.org./agatha/already_tied.html
http://www.irational.org/agatha/wants_to_teleport.html
http://www.tema.ru/agatha/has_no_idea.html
http://www.thing.at/agatha/teleports_and_teleports.htm
http://www.superbad.com/agatha/lost_the_interest.html



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