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СКАЧАТЬ blind spot of visual cultural studies, at least until recently, was vernacular self-presentation. But it’s hard to deny the pathos of images these women craft of their stillborn or miscarried children. The one thing that perhaps received the most belated attention in studies of emerging media is how they interact with the tragic side of life—with illness, death, and disease. Those of us who have been both on the internet and studying it for thirty years or so now will have had many encounters with loss and grief. We will have had friends we hardly ever saw in real life who have passed or who grieve for those who have passed. In real life there are conventions for what signs and gestures one should make. In online communication they are emerging also.

      Nakamura was right to draw attention to this in Digitizing Race, and she did so with a tact and a grace one can only hope to emulate:

      The achievement of authenticity in these cases of bodies in pain and mourning transcends the ordinary logic of the analog versus the digital photograph because these bodily images invoke the “semi-magical act” of remembering types of suffering that are inarticulate, private, hidden within domestic or militarized spaces that exclude the public gaze.¹⁴⁹

      Not only is the body with all its marks and scars present in Nakamura’s treatment, it is present as something in addition to its whole being.

      We live more, not less, in relation to our body parts, the dispossession or employment of ourselves constrained by a complicated pattern of self-alienation … Rather than freeing ourselves from the body, as cyberpunk narratives of idealized disembodiment foresaw, informational technologies have turned the body into property.¹⁵⁰

      Here her work connects with that of Maurizio Lazzarato and Gerald Raunig on machinic enslavement and the dividual respectively, in its awareness of the subsumption of components of the human into the inhuman.¹⁵¹

      But for all that, perhaps the enduring gift of this work is (to modify Adorno’s words) to not let the power of another or our own powerlessness stupefy us.¹⁵² There might still be forms of agency, tactics of presentation, gestures of solidarity—and in unexpected places. Given the tendency of the internet culture in the decade after Digitizing Race, perhaps it is an obligation now to return the gift of serious and considered attention to our friends and comrades—and not least in the scholarly world. The tragic side of life is never far away. The least we can do is listen to the pain of others and speak in measured tones of one another’s small achievements of wit, grace, and insight.

Hito Steyerl: Art Is Beauty That Does Not Try to Kill Us

      Thinking of getting into the art world? According to Hito Steyerl, here’s what you may find:

      Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding … Conceptual plastic surgery … Bespoke ivory gun handles. Murals on border walls.¹⁵³

      “Good luck with this,” she concludes, “You will be my mortal enemy.”¹⁵⁴

      The art world does not seem like a promising place from which to write and think critically about the world as it is, let alone its possibilities for being otherwise. It seems to have floated free from any other world. And yet in Duty Free Art, Steyerl finds a way to make its autonomy interesting. Its separation affords her the possibility of observing, if not the totality of the world, then at least a few more sides of it than many others see. What she sees is planetary civil war, sharpening class conflict, and the enclosure of the informational commons into proprietary theme parks.

      From her art world vantage point, history appears to have a tempo no longer accessible to humans, running backward, from a vacant future to a festering past. “What was public is privatized by violence, while formerly private hatreds become the new public spirit.” A spirit drunk on twitterbots, fake news, internet hacks, and “artificial stupidity”¹⁵⁵—mostly in the service of actual or aspirational authoritarian rule.

      It was the lapsed Marxist Werner Sombart who probably coined the term creative destruction, although it is also associated with Joseph Schumpeter.¹⁵⁶ Today’s ruling class embraces it without the ambivalence and irony the term once had, under the more anodyne labels disruption and innovation, which in actuality means the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. The practice of design is celebrated, but weapons design is not mentioned in polite company.

      Art appears floating above all that. Its autonomy rests in part on its weird economy of value. It is about singular things rather than mass commodities. It is also an economy of presence, which is in turn an odd subset of what Yves Citton thinks of as an ecology of attention.¹⁵⁷ Sometimes the encounter with the artist is of more value than the work, because the artist is rarer. Artists are cheaper to transport than art, because they don’t require the specialized handling and insurance. This means that the artist has to be permanently available to be present and usually without getting paid. This attention to the artist is bad for the artist’s own powers of attention. The artist gives off an aura of unalienated labor and unmediated presence but is actually living in a fragmented, disjoined junktime.¹⁵⁸

      Various proposals for an art strike, by Lee Lozano, Stewart Home, and others, have never quite worked out, because the artist does not exactly perform labor in the first place.¹⁵⁹ But maybe there is a kind of attention strike that goes on all the time. Your body is there, present and correct, but you are distracted, checking Instagram. Your attention is on strike, and that distraction is then captured as value through one or another networked, computational device.

      If your body is present but your attention is not, then perhaps that’s a sort of proxy for presence. A proxy is there in place of something else; it at least counts for something and registers as a valid stand-in. Steyerl wants to ask who or more likely what is getting to make the distinctions between valid and invalid stand-ins. When is one’s existence recognized as giving off a signal and when is it just noise? That might be the fault line today between existing and not-existing, in a polity, a culture, an economy, even in the definition of what might be allowed to live.

      Perhaps because the art world is rather slow on the uptake with all things technical, it’s a useful vantage point from which to think it’s much bigger and more powerful rivals in the information and image trade. Take for example what is happening in computational photography.¹⁶⁰ The lenses on cellphone cameras are not that great, so the production of the image rests in part with computation, which is more and more inclined to make images out of what the computer thinks you want to see. It decides on your behalf what in the visual field is signal and what is noise.

      What happens in an individual camera happens on a bigger scale in the policing of images of sex and violence online. When is an image signal, and when is it noise? It only appears as if algorithms are deciding all this for us now. There is a lot of what Astra Taylor calls fauxtomation, where such work is outsourced to a globally subcontracted workforce.¹⁶¹ But developers are on the case, designing “probabilistic porn detection.”¹⁶² It works by feeding millions of images into a computer so it can find the patterns, so the computer can determine whether that’s a ginger cat next to a teapot, or some obscure sex position, such as Yawning, Octopus, Fraser MacKenzie, Watching the Game, Stopperage, Chambers Fuck, and Persuading the Debtor. You can look those up for yourself to see if they’re real or if Steyerl made them up, but then all the services with which your computer communicates about its actions will know you wanted to know.

      What’s at stake when algorithms clear noise from information? Steyerl updates Jacques Rancière’s distinction СКАЧАТЬ