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The Good, the Bad, and the Productive
Sadie Plant
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Abstract: The proliferation of new technologies and media has been accompanied by many new ethical
questions, and also an unprecedented sense of crisis about the very foundations of Western morality itself. This
presentation suggests that there is now both a need and an opportunity to go beyond the orthodox terms of an
ethical debate which, as it stands, can sometimes do more to get in the way of productive and co-operative
activity and behavior than to facilitate them. Intelligence, a term which is assuming a new importance in the
light of research on emergent intelligent behavior amongst complex systems, networks, and machines, may well
provide some clues as to the directions in which an attempt to move beyond our old and failing moralities might
move.
Text:
"Being governed by morals and logic has made it impossible for us to be anything other than impassive towards
policemen." [1]
Once upon a time, back at the beginning of the century, both ethics and art were either held in contempt or
treated with outright hostility. Defined by Dada as pillars of a bourgeois culture which was itself to be
overthrown, these categories were considered to be inherently conservative at best and, at worst, dangerously
reactionary. But at the other end of the century, the atmosphere is very different. While the proliferation of new
technologies and media have prompted many new ethical questions to be raised, particularly in relation to the
arts, artists, and the roles they play, this time, it seems, there is a reluctance to challenge the foundations of either
art or ethics themselves. Instead, there are attempts to carve out a new ethics and a new art to accompany the
new media, technologies, and political situations in which the Western world now finds itself immersed.
"Morals have given rise to charity and pity, two dumplings that have grown like elephants, planets, which people
call good. There is nothing good about them." [2]
It is clear that the nihilism of a movement like Dada has only the most limited of roles to play in the context of
contemporary practice and debate: the Dadaist gesture can be made only once, and we really have "been there,
done that". On the other hand, it is no longer possible to assume that there is, or can be, any kind of consensus
about what constitutes "good" and "bad" or "right" and "wrong" in cultures which are not only internally diverse
in terms of their populations and ethnicities, but also increasingly affected by very different sets of values
prioritized in other parts of a diverse multinational world. Given that the ethical systems to which Western artists
and critics continue to appeal have themselves played rather more than a passing role in support of the
misogynist, homophobic, racist, colonialist and nationalist tendencies which continue to mark the cultures of
Europe and the US, it would seem that there is now both an urgent need and a new opportunity to go beyond the
orthodox terms of an ethical debate which, as it stands, often does more to get in the way of productive and cooperative activity and behaviour than it does to facilitate them. Not that any of the issues currently defined as
ethical cannot or should not be debated in these terms. The only question is how useful such debates can ever be.
Prostitution, pornography, paedophilia, censorship, surveillance: while these can all be seen as moral issues, it is
not at all clear that it is particularly helpful to take this approach to them. Ethical debate tends to be conducted in
a theoretical vacuum which either leaves it confined to a matter of quasi-philosophical speculation or, if it is to
carry any kind of pragmatic weight, then needs to be applied to the "real world". This kind of separation between
theory and practice, speculation and reality, is itself an extremely problematic distinction which prioritizes
intellectual debate, gives intellectuals a privileged role, and assumes that a set of principles or instructions is - or
should be - the precondition of all and any activity. And this is simply to get the cart before the horse. As Michel
Foucault said in the course of a debate with Noam Chomsky on the question of social struggles and justice, "the
proletariat doesn't make war with the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat
makes war with the ruling class because... it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the
ruling class, it considers such a war to be just." [3]
It may well be tactically useful, and even crucial, to invoke some notion of justice or the good. But these matters
of principle are not the prerequisites of what Foucault here defined as social struggle. They are epiphenomena,
side-effects, subroutines of far more immediate concerns and pragmatic demands. Winning an ethical debate
may well be useful and even necessary to some particular achievement, but it is certainly never sufficient. As the
role - or lack of it - played by the Declaration of Human Rights makes abundantly clear, knowing that one has
the moral right to food and shelter is of little or no comfort to the hungry and homeless. It is no good believing
that poverty, for example, is ethically unsustainable if one has no way of acting on such a belief. And while the
enforcement of such principles would give them substance and make them real, this move would also entail the
exercise of political power on a scale which would be welcomed only by the most authoritarian.
A second set of problems associated with the role played by ethics concerns the inevitably humanist paradigm
within which they are discussed. When it is not - overtly - underpinned by theism, morality inevitably invokes
some universal notion of humanity, and even the most relativist variations on the ethical theme find it hard to
escape the imperative to come down to some bottom line of what is good for the species as a whole. These
humanist preconceptions not only lead to generalizations which extend far beyond the specific cultural situation
in which they arise, but also presuppose that the ambience of a culture is, or should be, largely determined by the
free choices human actors make. There are plenty of philosophical objections to this kind of crude humanism
but, interesting as arguments for or against such a position may be, they too are entirely besides the point when it
comes to dealing with reality. Far more relevant is the question of whether the humanist paradigm within which
the vast majority of ethical debate occurs is pragmatic and productive, or whether it tends to compound the
problems which ethical debate sets out to solve. While an issue such as censorship, for example, can of course be
judged in terms of rights and wrongs, it is clear that is also involves a vast range of other tendencies and
variables which persist regardless of what is considered to be ethically desirable: the extent to which particular
media and communications technologies can be restricted and controlled; the levels of economic demand for
information; the technical capacity of states, corporations, and/or communities to intervene in its circulation.
"Morality infuses chocolate into every man's veins. This task is not ordained by a supernatural force, but by a
trust of ideas-merchants and academic monopolists." [4]
What this really comes down to is the question of whether one, some, or even all humans are, should be, or ever
can be in a position to judge not only themselves and their own activities, but also these other tendencies as well.
The sense of weary futility which accompanies so many ethical debates is an implicit recognition of the extent to
which the influences which produce either a disciplined culture or a relaxed one go far beyond the conscious
decisions made by human beings. Ranging from the bacterial to the meteorological, the astronomical to the
neurochemical, the geological to the economic and the technological, these influences are far too multiple and
complex to be judged, still less controlled, by a human agency which is itself composed of them. And while such
tendencies can all too easily be ignored and overlooked, attempts to influence the direction of cultural life which
fail to take them into account run the risk of being either ineffective or, at worst, obstructive and dictatorial. Not
least because of the impossibility of taking so many diverse factors into account, even the most liberal and well
intentioned of moves can produce extremely negative effects, just as repressive intentions can have unexpectedly
volatile outcomes.
Thoughts such as these may seem to run far from the issues which affect art and artists, critics and critique. But
the vast majority of artists' statements and critical commentaries leave little doubt that the predominant tendency
is for art to be presented and judged in terms of its ethical content and, by implication, the intentions of those
who produce it. There is an enormous pressure on artists to write in the first person about the motives which fuel
their work, and while statements which begin "in this piece I am trying to express..." reflect a genuine desire on
the part of artists to "do the right thing" in their work, there is also a sense in which such expressions tend to
reinforce some of the most orthodox and potentially reactionary tendencies at work in late twentieth century
culture. The privileging of the conscious intentions of an individualized creative subject reinforces the arrogance
implicit in a Western humanism which assumes that one is in a position to dictate the outcomes and effects of a
particular act or work, and the emphasis on the meaning expressed by a work of art suggests that any effects
other than those which can be intellectually absorbed tend to drop off the agenda. Art, like ethics, can easily find
itself confined to a relatively isolated zone in which its impact on what it too then has to define as "the real
world" is necessarily limited.
Both art and ethics are very literally idealist categories which function to maintain the categorizations with
which modernity has sliced the world into manageable and relatively harmless chunks of specialized activity.
Just as the heading of ethics functions to curtail the possibility of dealing with the issues which come under it, so
the titles artist and art tend to restrict the potential of the activities done in their name. The problem does not lie
with the actual activities, processes, and communications entailed in the production and consumption of art:
these are alive with tendencies which, although curtailed by the roles they are forced to play within the category
of art, are also continually exceeding the boundaries within which they are supposed to be confined.
Many of the best examples of work which does extend beyond these categorizations are, hardly surprisingly,
tangential to orthodox definitions of art. The DJs mixing records in clubs like Birmingham's Kleptomania, where
drum 'n' bass sounds take music a long way out of the ambit of content-laden lyrics and even melody, have learnt
to make themselves integral to circuits of sound and rhythm, volume and frequency, movement and dance in
which any notion of getting some message across is supplanted by the simple attempt to produce affects and
intensities whose success is not to be judged according to any pre-existing aesthetic or existential criteria, but
instead in terms of their own immanent criteria. Good intentions are never enough in circumstances such as
these. A night either works or it doesn't, and success is something to be tentatively explored and experimentally
pursued, rather than guaranteed in advance. This is an instance in which, in spite of the mythologies surrounding
the role of the DJ, the music extends its sphere of influence far beyond the conscious intentions and
interpretations of those who make and absorb it. Neurochemical effects and visceral vibrations take its impact
into bodies, brains, buildings, city streets, local economies...
And if such activities are excluded from orthodox conceptions of art, there are also plenty of examples of work
within more traditional contexts which also disrupts the categories. Faultlines, an installation produced by
Barbara Layne and Ingrid Bachmann in Montreal and San Francisco in October 1995, used two hand looms
connected both to each other and to seismic monitoring equipment in both cities by way of the Net. Each loom,
one in each city, received the seismic data transmitted from its twin city and, over a period of several weeks,
wove this information into black and white cloths resembling the paper graphs on which it would normally be
recorded. While an earthquake in San Francisco, for example, would have significantly changed the pattern, the
weaving was significantly volatile even in the absence of such a dramatic event. And it was not just what would
conventionally be defined as geological activity which was being processed in this piece. Trains passing through
the city, construction work... anything which registers itself in terms of frequencies and vibrations feeds into the
woven cloth.
It is also the case that the motion of the loom, a relatively heavy piece of machinery whose use produces a loud
and rhythmic music of its own, was itself contributing to the seismic activity which it is also registering.
Whether the artists intended this to happen or consciously made this connection in their considerations of the
installation is not entirely beside the point: if they do notice this ability of the work to affect its own operations
and therefore assume a "life" of its own, they are bound to be in a better position to seek out and encourage these
tendencies for works of art to escape from the confines of the category art and connect with activities far beyond
both the gallery and the deliberations of their producers. But even without this intention, the loom began to have
an impact on the work it was producing, and the artists found themselves becoming engineers, intelligent
components of an network with its own dynamic, its own "desire" to make itself work, its own emergent
intelligence.
Faultlines may well have been making some ethico-political point about the imposition of geographical
boundaries on lines of geological activity, but it is not its ethical content, the meanings it conveys, which made
this such an interesting piece of work: Faultlines worked so well because it was an actual example of something
that works, a living lesson in how to make something connect with itself and reality (or rather, how not to
disconnect in the first place). What counts is the fact that something with its own dynamic is produced,
something new, something which connects with reality simply by virtue of the fact that it works, and something
that works by virtue of the extent to which it sets up loops with itself, feeding back into the processes which
compose it, and extending itself far beyond the gallery, the individual artists, the critics, and even its own end
products. While Faultlines produced its lengths of cloth, these were not the works of art. Like the good, the just,
the right and the wrong, the cloths are side-effects of a process to which they are integral but by no means enjoy
a privileged relationship.
The extent to which Faultlines runs off to make waves of its own suggests that processes defined as works of art
are also dying to exceed the definitions imposed on them. There is no sense in which this tendency can be
translated into ethical categories: it is not "good" that something works, and nor is it "bad" if it just sits there
waiting to be passively viewed by a spectator in a gallery. By the same token, it is certainly the case that the
most reactionary tendencies at work in contemporary culture are always those invested in the erection of
obstacles, barriers, and mechanisms for the regulation and control of anything which tends to run away with
itself and threatens to exceed regulation and control. Many of the issues currently defined in ethical terms - the
protectionist drives for security implicit in racism, nationalism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny; demands
for surveillance and censorship - can be far more pragmatically addressed in this context of tendencies towards
and against control. These are the abstract terms favored by, for example, Foucault's writing on power and
resistance, and Deleuze and Guattari's vocabulary of energies and forces, stratification and destratification,
territorialization and deterritorialization. These tendencies are neither good nor bad, but rather productive or
obstructive. They either tend to promote the possibility of some emergent activity not legislated in advance, or
they work to containing all activity, regardless of whether it is defined as ethical or artistic, into the categories
and boundaries of an old and stifling world.
An approach employing criteria such as these opens up as many problems as it solves. But unless the late
twentieth century is to find itself defending the repressive categories and practices which Dada so violently
attacked in its early years, some such move seems both desirable and necessary. In any case, and quite regardless
of those who define themselves as intellectuals and artists, it's probably already happening in some cafe or
basement or corner of cyberspace near you.
References
[1] Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto 1918", Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, London: John Calder, 1977
|back|
[2] Ibid |back|
[3] Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky, "Human Nature: Justice versus Power", Fons Elders, ed., Reflexive
Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London, Souvenir Press, 1974 |back|
[4] Tristan Tzara, op.cit. |back|
Links:
"Sadie Plant"@plants.demon.co.uk
updated Dec.28.96
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