Tactical Art in Virtual Space-1

Josephine Berryがイギリスの雑誌「Inventory」に投稿した「Tactical Art in Virtual Space」がnettimeで公開された。nettimeが営利目的でない場合は転載自由ということであり、長文であったことからここに全文を中見出しごとに分断して全文を掲載する。。ただし、データベース管理上問題になる文字は近い文字に変換し、URLはリンクするように設定した。また、この考え方に対する判断は読者自身でしてほしい。

Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 13:01:50 +0000
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
From: Josephine Berry (josie@metamute.com)
Subject: (nettime) Tactical Art in Virtual Space
Sender: nettime-l-request@bbs.thing.net
Reply-To: Josephine Berry (josie@metamute.com)

This chapter of my thesis has just been published in the erratic British jounal 'Inventory', in their latest Homo Ludens issue.

Also, the footnotes have been lost in transit from Word to email...I've pasted them in at the end but annoyingly the numbers in the text are gone. Please mail me if you want to read this as a word document.

Josie

''Another Orwellian Misnomer''? Tactical Art in Virtual Space

Self-conscious tactics in an unstable space

In the wake of Michel Foucault's discussions of the discrete, invisible and all pervasive 'microphysics of power' at work within technocratic society, Michel de Certeau was moved to write an alternative account in which the 'network of an antidiscipline' is uncovered; a category of largely invisible, improvised and ephemeral practices which comprise 'everyday life'. This heterogeneous set of practices, de Certeau claims, exists outside discourse and has no proper name, belongs to no ideology, acts heterogeneously and by virtue of its evasiveness comprises an ongoing and pervasive resistance to an optical and panoptic regime of power. The exteriority of these practices to discourse is also, ironically enough, seen by Foucault to have characterised the advent of panoptic power , which emerged in a similarly 'mute' manner. The panopticon's articulation in discourse happened after the decentralised historical growth of a panoply of observational techniques resulted in a coherent disciplinary regime.This, argues de Certeau, is a mode of power almost necessarily in decline because it has ceased to operate at an unconscious level; it has become distinct. If the panoptic mode of power gained ascendancy in silence, de Certeau spectulates, what other silent forms of power are coming into being? In his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life, he asks:

''If it is true that the grid of 'discipline' is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also 'miniscule' and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them, and finally, what 'ways of operating' form the counterpart on the consumer's (or 'dominee's'?) side, of the mute processes that organize the establishment of socioeconomic order.''

In what was not only a riposte to Foucault's uni-directional discussion of the discrete mechanisms of panoptic power but also an analysis of the all-too visible phenotypes of technocratic rationality, de Certeau mobilises two modes of operation: strategy and tactics. The former describes force-relationships ''that can be circumscribed as proper (propre)'' and which are brought to bear on objects or targets distinct and external to themselves. Strategy is the mode by which legitimated power operates from within a designated field; through language, political structures of representation, the assignation of gender roles, the regulation of space, discourses of the body and so on. In short, it is the productive mode of hegemonic power. Tactics, by contrast, has no proper site, discourse or language, of its own - it ''insinuates itself into the other's place'' , it adorns itself in the other's garb, speaks through the other's language, and, because it has no fixed address or permanent mode, never consolidates its own achievements or preserves its conquests.
Tactics comes out of the encounter with the rigid geometry of urban planning, the syntax and vocabularies of languages, the regulated flows of television, the choreography of the supermarket. In de Certeau's terms, tactics is the practice produced by 'making do' with the oppressive conditions of modernity and common people are ''unrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality'' . It is a mode of production based in the heart of consumption, a production that feeds on the desire provoked by the commodity but which is used in the creation of an own language rather than the singular conformity to the libidinal economy of the commodity's 'promissory note'.

But if Foucault and de Certeau can claim the desublimation of the panopticon, then we can also claim a similar coming to consciousness of tactics. And just as the discourse and the techniques of the disciplinary society are split, so too are the goings on of the everyday and their discursive integration into politics and aesthetics. In 1992, the term 'tactical media' was coined by the Amsterdam based organisors of the first Next5Minutes conference Geert Lovink, David Garcia and Caroline Nevejan in 1992 . This term soon found its way onto media theoretical mailinglists such as nettime , and the term gained common currency in the virtual communities, working groups and social circles in which net artists participate. By the third Next5Minutes conference on net culture in March 1999, 'tactical media' had become the organising subject, with activists, media theorists, artists and technologists debating a new context and mode of political and cultural resistance. In the post-68 political envirnoment in which the notion of a united front of resistance as questionable as its erstwhile target, imperial power, is anachronistic, the vagrant hybridity of tactics provides an important model for conceptualising and organising resistance. The structure of the Internet, which mirrors and fuels the decentralisation and hybridity of the global market economy and its geo-political correlatives, becomes an obvious and important site for resistance.

In the analysis of net artist's involvement in the cultural logic of tactical media which follows, the discussion will be framed by the problematic of virtual space. Although a closer enquiry into the phantasmatic quality of space on the Net will be presented in chapter 3, for the present the discussion will hinge on the friction between the idea of real and virtual space. Although tactics, as theorised by de Certeau, are by no means limited to spatial practices, I have selected this framework partly because it is the existence of an evasive but irreducible difference between real and virutal space that gives the Net it's distinctive identity. It is within the context of a contested splitting of real and informational space that the phase shift of power pointed to by Foucault and de Certeau (the shift from disciplinary power to what Negri and Hardt have recently termed the 'biopower' of 'Empire' ) begins to emerge: a world in which power has become as deterritorialised as capital. Out of the four artworks discussed in this chapter, only Heath Bunting's X Project addresses this spatial splitting directly but, as I will argue, the ontology of virtual space and its impact on behaviour are crucial concerns and points of leverage for all the artworks considered. While some net critics argue the danger of the libertarian rhetoric of dual worlds in which cyberspace is cast as the zone of borderless and unfettered freedom , others see their disjuncture as promising a radical potential. I will be using the widely diverging theories of the spatial and environmental production of the subject offered by Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augeand Slavoj Zizek to think through 'the practice of everyday life online' which the artworks of Jodi, Etoy, Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting present. In these works, the positing of 'typical' kinds of behaviour by net artists presupposes a definition of the nature of space and place, and vice versa. It is through the exploration of everyday behaviour. which is the concern of tactical net art, that the radical potential and oppressive flattening of cyberspatiality is brought into focus.

In a more limited respect, and as we have seen in chapter one, artists were drawn to the Internet because it offered them the possibility of a different kind of 'professional' practice; indeed a chance to ellude the professionalisatin of their own practice. In this sense, the Net offered them a 'tactical' space in which to evade the strategies of the art market. But if the Net seemed to offer such a tactical topology , it also imposes a new set of conditions which can be seen as belonging to strategic power within which art must operate. The establishment of technical protocols and languages such as the Domain Name System (DNS), TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, CGI and so forth impose a language or architecture from 'above'. But, beyond the expansion and ellaboration of tactics and strategy along older lines, the Net participates in a broader development of mutual imitation that occurs within both dominant cultural strategy (the 'Prada Meinhoff' mode of advertising) and cultural resistance (the adoption of corporate identities ). In other words, strategy and tactics are becoming harder to distinguish or require a new set of conceptual tools with which to decode them. An important aspect of this development for the online environment is the mutability of the Internet's distributed networks and digital modalities which complicate the production/consumption binary. The ease, for example, with which a digital file can be copied, parsed, mirrored, linked to and endlessly redeployed makes it, in some senses, extraordinarily vulnerable to tactical use. However, this malleability is also harnessed by the strategic forces of power at work in the Net; we begin to lose the distinction between the 'properness' of strategy and the vagrancy of tactics. Where de Certeau describes tactical action as a slow, erosive force, the ''overfow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks'' , in the new media age tactics are operating under more mutable conditions in which strategy no longer resembles anything so static as rocks. To grasp this more concretely, we have only to consider the intensification of market research carried out within the Net - based on the increased ease with which individuals' movements and patterns of behaviour can be tracked through inventions such as 'cookies' - to get an idea of how responsive the system has become. This is not yet the technological dystopia imagined by Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein in Data Trash, where the subject has become totally assimilated into the instrumental operations of virtual reality. But, to a great extent, the user does provide the 'encrypted flesh' or behavioural data-set required by the market to continuously reinvent itself in the putative image of the user-consumer who, in turn, reflects the conditions of consumption - the series of choices on offer - in a recursive loop.

Media theorists and activists David Garcia and Geert Lovink identify the shifting, mutating and transferable quality of digital data on the Net as 'media hybridity' and discuss the mobility it produces in their influential manifesto The ABC of Tactical Media written in 1997. The first passages of the manifesto synopsise the ideas set out in de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life thereby explicitly revealing the indebtedness of the concept of 'tactical media' to his work. In their text, which was posted on community-building mailing lists such as nettime , Garcia and Lovink update de Certeau's tactics for the New Media environment, and ellucidate on the centrality of mobility and hybridity for this newly instrumentalisd 'practice of everyday life':

''But it is above all mobility that most characterises the tactical practitioner. The desire and capability to combine or jump from one media to another creating a continuous supply of mutants and hybrids. To cross borders, connecting and re-wiring a variety of disciplines and always taking full advantage of the free spaces in the media that are continually appearing because of the pace of technological change and regulatory uncertainty.''

We should not forget that this manifesto of tactical media was written at a time in which governments were still in a state of relative confusion over how to regulate the activities taking place over the Net as well as the Net's own technical administration. Although 1996 saw the first serious piece of U.S. Interent legislation in the form of the Communications Decency Act , international governments were still in a state of confusion as to which existing laws could be stretched to deal with the network, what new legislation was required and how, if at all, it could be enforced. This was a symptom of the Net's awkward transformation from a U.S. government owned and academically administered research and communications tool, to a commercially open, privately financed space of international exchange. In the period between 1996 and 2000, a flurry of legislation has taken place regarding encryption, public surveillance of private communications, the liability of ISPs for the content stored on their servers, and a 'purely technical' body has been appointed by the U.S. government to regulate and administer the DNS system -the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). These are just some of the areas in which the Internet's once 'wild frontier' is being tamed, and strategy is extends itself legislatively and bureaucratically into this formerly disregarded zone.

Returning to tactics, the marriage of the terms 'tactical' and 'media' has come to signify something more than the new terrain of everyday practice. 'Tactical media' belongs to a whole cultural turn in which what might be described as the old 'strategies' of art and politics are abandoned in favour of a parasitic, fast mutating and non-originary practice . The modernist belief in conceptual and aesthic originality or the political belief in the aggregative basis of opposition such as class and trade unions cede to a postmodern refusal of such 'essentialist' individual and collective definitions of subjectivity. Once entities such as authenticity and origniality are invalidated by contemporary thought and the belief in the plausibility of global revolution retracts into the limited struggles of the 'new social movements', the modest contingency of tactical practices come to the fore; a form of culture and politics as far beyond metaphysics as the virtualised environment (both on and off the Net) in which they unfolds. The predominance of parasitism and vagrancy in net art as such, clearly owes much to the precursive experiments of minimalist and site specific art which began in the 1960s; the threshold of the information (post-disciplinary?) age. By this I mean site specific art's location within a pre-existing network of spatial, social, economic and political relations as against the artwork's creation of a series of separate and internally constituted 'internal relations' - the zenith of modernist practics as theorised by Clement Greenberg. Although not necessarily adopting practices of the everyday, the expansion of the artwork's limit beyond its physical 'pretext' to include a self-constituting network of forces and relations is an important anticipatory development. Michael Fried discusses this new turn in 'literalist' or minimalist art thus:

''There is nothing within [the beholder's] field of vision - nothing that he takes note of in any way - that, as it were, declares its irrelevance to the situation, and therefore to the experience, in question. On the contrary, for something to be perceived at all is for it to be perceived as part of that situation. Everything counts - not as part of the object, but as part of the situation in which its objecthood is established and on which that objecthood at least partly depends.''

This art in which 'everything counts' is a phenomenological conception of the artwork's meaning occurring in dynamic relationship between work, viewer and world. In Frederic Jameson's description of the awesome scope of a Hans Haacke artwork, the circumference of the 'situation' and the intricacy of its phenomenology extends far beyond those immediate elements which comprise the artwork's situation to encompass a global situation. This scope is also the scope of the 'situation' articulated by net art:

''in the work of Hans Haacke, for example, [conceptual art] redirects the deconstruction of perceptual categories specifically onto the framing institutions themselves. Here the paralogisms of the 'work' include the museum, by drawing its space back into the material pretext and making a mental circuit through the artistic infrastructure unavoidable. Indeed, in Haacke it is not merely with museum space that we come to rest, but rather the museum itself, as an institution, opens up into its network of trustees, their affiliations with multinational corporations, and finally the global system of late capitalism proper (with all its specific representational contradictions).''

Here the artwork is understood as creating a self-consciousness in the viewer which operates on their own unarticulated and/or unreflexive behaviour (looking at art in public space) and the seemingly remote and silent functionings of the world order. If we consider how the collective and largely undirected construction of Net gives the many activities which compose 'the practice of everyday life' a greater emphasis, while the emphatically global scale of the Net creates a very different scale for these activities, we can imagine how the self-reflexivity of the viewer gains a seemingly more affective quality - hence the sharp focus laid on the relationship between behaviour and global 'situation' in net art. The artwork's animation of the intersubjective relationship between the user and situation can also, in Hegelian terms, be said to have effected a shift from a quotidian use of tactics 'in themselves to a practice of tactics 'for themselves. The tactical mode has become an explicitly self-conscious way for net artists, activists and media workers to act in cyberspace, lifting the small scale countervailing practices of the everyday (the repurposing, circumventing, jamming, connecting, reversing etc. of disciplinary powers) to the level of programmatic cultural resistance. This tactical self-consciousness in net art can sometimes exceed that possessed of site specific art because its self-reflexivity invites the viewer not only to see their (physical, ideological, economic etc.) relationship to the work and the world as part of the work's circumference and vice versa, but also because it often invites them to participate in its morphology. This invitation, although not unprecedented, has an easiness based in the contiguity of the space of art and the everyday in the Net, which comprises a (relatively) unhierarchical organisation and materially homogeneous consistency of space. Art ceases to be perceived as the site at which 'the practices of everyday life' grind to a halt and a different kind of behavioral logic takes hold. Some critics have optimistically formulated this development as 'the art of involvement' and designate preceding experiments in interactive art 'open works'. In contrast to the viewer's role within 'open work', where the viewer is solicited to ''fill in the blanks, to choose between possible directions, to confront the differences in their interpretations [to explore] the possibilities of an unfinished monument'','' the 'art of involvement' no longer constitutes an anterior work at all but rather, ''causes processes to emerge, it seeks to open up a career to autonomous lives, it invites one to grow and inhabit a world. It places us in a creative cycle, in a living environment in which we are always already co-authors.''

But where does such a programmatic reading leave tactics? Are tactics simply another name for the productive capacity of countless individuals which can be massified into a coherent aesthetico-political project? Are they the behaviours preyed upon by marketers in their search for the true identity of the consumer or are they that which necessarily eludes this form of systematic reincorporation? Do tactics become available to strategists when they reach the level of self-consciousness revealed in the term 'tactical media' and therefore cease to be tactical? In net art, as with the coming to self-consciousness of tactics within tactical media, it is possible to see the elevation of this everyday practice of resistance (for example la perruque - the use by factory workers of their employers' resources for their own private ends) to the order of dominant cultural strategy . If tactics no longer solely constitute ways of 'making do' under the oppressive conditions of society, but begin to attain the legitimation of artistic value or political modus operandi, do they still remain the 'antidiscipline' to the dominant order? By investigating this question, we must necessarily ask the question of how tactics themselves change in virtual space, which in turn poses questions over the nature of that space. But it is imporant to bear in mind that no matter how self-consciously net artists are adopting tactics, their mutating nature is as hard to fix down as the changeability of the material and semiotic terrain in which they unfold.