[Reader-list] [Announcements] Essay preview | Eric Kluitenberg | Delusive Spaces, Essays on Culture, Media and Technology

Mon May 19 20:07:11 IST 2008

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Essay preview from Eric Kluitenberg - the Pleasure of the Medium
'Jouissance' and the Excess of Writing.

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Eric Kluitenberg, Delusive Spaces. Essays on Culture, Media and
Technology, Rotterdam/Amsterdam: Nai Publishers & Institute of Network
Cultures, 2008.
www.naipublishers.nl/art/delusivespaces_e.html

The open terrain of new media is closing fast. Market concentration,
legal consolidation and tightening governmental control have
effectively ended the myth of the free and open networks. In Delusive
Spaces, Eric Kluitenberg takes a critical position that retains a
utopian potential for emerging media cultures. The book investigates
the archeology of media and machine, mapping the different methods and
metaphors that speak about technology. Returning to the present,
Kluitenberg discusses the cultural use of new media in an age of post-
governmental politics. Delusive Spaces concludes with the
impossibility of representation. Going beyond the obvious delusions of
the new and the 'free', Kluitenberg theorizes artistic practices and
European cultural policies, demonstrating a provocative engagement
with the utopian dimension of technology.

Eric Kluitenberg is a Dutch media theorist, writer and organizer.
Since the late 1980s, he has been involved in numerous international
projects in the field of electronic art, media culture, and
information politics. Kluitenberg heads the media program at De Balie,
Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam. He is the editor of the
Book of Imaginary Media (NAi Publishers, 2006) and the theme issue
'Hybrid Space' of Open, journal on art and the public domain (2007).

A previous publication in this series is from Ned Rossiter about
Organized Networks (2007).
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/studies-in-network-cultures/organized-networks/
Coming publications in the Studies of Network Cultures Series will be
from Matteo Pasquinelli, Florian Schneider and Josephine Bosma.

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The Pleasure of the Medium 'Jouissance' and the Excess of Writing. pdf
downloadable at:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/files/2008/05/pleasure-of-the-medium-delusive-spaces.pdf

I am looking at a website - it bores me. I am delighted by my boredom.
Why should it not bore me?
Why should I be fascinated?
I am looking for an escape from spectacularity.
I dont want to be spectacularized.

I hear a discussion about quality. I am bored by it.
I hate this boredom!
Why should I be interested in quality?
What quality?
Whose quality?

What is this shit?!??
I hear desperation, unnerving irritation.
I am stimulated!

Who is saying this to me?

Who is writing?

Does it really matter?

- - - - - - -

The greatest fascination of a new medium always lies within the
machine. It is not the old medium being the content of the new
medium  wrong formula. It is only when the old medium is discarded,
even if this delightful moment is brought about by a mistake, that the
magic of the new medium can disclose itself.
	I had this experience when watching some of the magnificent websites
created by jodi.org, specifically for the Netscape 2.0 browser on a
mac system. The website would get stuck, seem to buffer indefinitely.
Then suddenly, the page would start to load again, superimposed layers
of graphics and ascii swirls crowding the screen. Blinking signs,
links to more digital garbage, neatly organized in the defunct mosaic.

- - - - - - -

We were at the launch of the net.congestion archive and we experienced
net congestion . . . Some people from Seattle who had visited our
festival about half a year earlier had made a real local show. We had
asked participants to this festival of streaming media to stream-in
for the occasion. We were watching from a comfortable space in the
centre of Amsterdam. The Riga crew, as always, knew exactly what they
were doing  a nice, low-bandwidth, grainy, but perfect web video mix
and stunning electronic music from that magical city in the Baltics.
The people in Banff had made a wonderful sound loop, perfect reception
from Canada  we projected an image of Sleeping Buffalo to it, a
local mountain just outside the Banff campus.
	But Seattle  they topped it off. They gathered a crowd (with some 9
hours time difference) and were staging a real-life serious debate on
the politics of the networked media sphere. It sounded inspiring and
insightful, from what we could get at our end, but every 10 to 15
seconds the stream would break up. The face of a speaker would
suddenly contort while the sound would squeak, turn into electrostatic
noise (so it seemed)  on the projection screen we saw the most
wondrous cubist images; constantly transforming over time, new
contortions, blends of colours that were not there before, a
grotesque, a caricature, emerging spontaneously. Adam, one of the
organizers of the festival, was standing in awe watching this anti-
spectacle  "Wow, this is so beautiful! I could look at this for hours!"

- - - - - - -

David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technnorati, reports on5  April 2007
that according to technorati.coms then latest count, about 70,000,000
blogs are online, with a significant growth of fake and spam blogs
(splogs), but still far outranked by genuine postings.

An excess of writing.

- - - - - - -

Minor mathematics  to get an average readership of about 100 readers
over a certain average period in which these blogs are available
online, before they disappear into oblivion, requires a population of
7 billion.
	The conclusion would probably have to be that population growth needs
to be sped up so as to match the growth of blog-production and provide
them with a readership.

- - - - - - -

Roland Barthes identified two types of pleasures in text  the text of
pleasure and the text of 'jouissance' [1]:

"Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the
text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to
a comfortable practice of reading.

Text of jouissance: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text
that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom),
unsettles the readers historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings
to a crisis his relation with language." [2]

The subject who holds these two texts in their field and in their
hands, according to Barthes, is an anachronic subject. A contradictory
subject who both "enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his
pleasure) and seeks his loss (that is his ecstasy). He is a subject
split twice over, doubly perverse."

- - - - - - -

 From Lacan we learned that the desire of the subject is oriented on
an essential lack. This lack results from the illusory quest of the
subject for its own consistency and unity that does not exist. This
Lacanian subject is lost between the emanations of its own body, the
imaginary images it projects on itself (the images the subject mirrors
itself in without ever having laid direct eyes upon itself), and the
symbolic order, that of language and text paradigmatically, in which
it tries desperately to articulate itself, while this act of
articulation by means of language only results in a further deferral
of the subject from its (supposed) self.

The excess of writing is the futile quest of the subject to fulfil its
own impossible desire by means of language.

The ecstasy of writing is the realization of the impossibility of this
quest and the willing submission to it  the subject willingly losing
itself, dissolving into text.

- - - - - - -

The ecstasy of writing/reading is a bodily experience. It adheres
neither to bourgeois morality nor to Marxist/materialist doxology.
Barthes explains:

"On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the
text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the
reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes
grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye, which an
excessive author (Angelus Silesius) describes: The eye by which I see
God is the same eye by which he sees me.
Apparently Arab scholars, when speaking of the text, use this
admirable expression: the certain body. What body? We have several
of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science
sees or discusses: this is the text of grammarians, critics,
commentators, philologists (the pheno-text). But we also have a body
of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from
the first body: it is another contour, another nomination;
Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?
Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible
to physiological need." [3]

- - - - - - -

The erotic can only come into being beyond utility. This is what
Bataille has taught us. Only when sexuality is freed from its
productive (reproductive) functions can it be transformed into an
erotic principle. The sovereign experience of eroticism cannot accept
any reduction to a sanctified social code  it is instead heightened
in the transgression of that very code, in the moment of jouissance,
the coming, the climax of ecstasy, of entering the beyond.

Eroticism, as opposed to sexuality is what defines our humanity. The
dialectic of desire and prohibition simultaneously conceals and
reveals that which is of supreme (souverainement) importance to us 
the sacred. Its consumption is a moment of absolute delight, but it
also opens up an experiential void where we stare in the face of death.

The erotic is never a principle of efficiency. It does not attempt to
produce a maximum effect with a minimum expenditure of energy. Quite
the reverse, it attempts to achieve a maximum expenditure of energy, a
climax, in which lifes energy is expended excessively.

"Anguish, when desire opens onto a void  and, sometimes, onto death 
is perhaps a reason for desiring more strongly and for finding the
desired object more attractive, but in the last instance the object of
desire always has the meaning of delight, and this object, whatever
one might say of it, is not inaccessible. It would be inexcusable to
speak of eroticism without saying essentially that it centers on joy.
A joy, moreover, that is excessive. In speaking of their raptures,
mystics wish to give the impression of a pleasure so great that the
pleasure of human love does not compare. It is hard to asses the
degree of intensity of states that may not be incommunicable, perhaps,
but that can never be compared with any exactness, for lack of
familiarity with other states than those we personally experience." [4]

- - - - - - -

The ecstasy of the writing (blogging) subject is the embrace of its
moment of its loss into text. This loss constitutes a negative
pleasure far greater than the appreciation of beauty, or the positive
pleasures of taste and sanctioned intimacy. The moment of loss opens
up a void in experience because it signals to the subject the loss of
its illusory consistency and unity of self (which never existed in the
first place  but such a horror is simply too great to live with, and
thus is always covered up by a phantasmatic support and imaginary self-
images). In this sense, this moment of loss constitutes an absolute
negativity  in that it signals the end of existence (of the unitary
subject)  and confronts it with the face of death. But this text,
written by the blogging subject seeking its own loss, comes back to
that subject, and reconstitutes it, in another place according to
Barthes. This moment of reconstitution of the subject produces a
sensation of such absolute delight that it dwarfs any possible
experience of positive pleasure  such is the nature of the
existential sublime. [5]

- - - - - - -

A fundamental asymmetry between pleasure of writing and pleasure of
reading remains, however:

"Does writing in pleasure guarantee  guarantee me, the writer  my
readers pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must
cruise him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then
created. It is not the readers person that is necessary to me, it
is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an
unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be
a game." [6]

In that sense the bliss of blogging does not end the objectives of
literature.

  - - - - - - -

To whom is this text addressed?

"I am offered a text. This text bores me. It might be said to
prattle. The prattle of the text is merely that foam of language
which forms by the effect of a simple need of writing. Here we are not
dealing with perversions but with demand. The writer of this text
employs an unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaffectionate, a
minor disaster of static . . .: these are the motions of ungratified
sucking, of an undifferentiated orality, intersecting the orality
which produces the pleasures of gastrophy and of language.
You address yourself to me so that I may read you, but I am nothing to
you except this address; in your eyes, I am the substitute for
nothing, for no figure (hardly that of the mother); for you I am
neither a body nor even an object . . . but merely a field, a vessel
for expansion." [7]

This text for Barthes is quite apart from 'jouissance'  it is a
frigid text.

The text produced by the subject attempting to escape its own lack is
the producer of this prattle, frigid text.

The text produced by the subject consciously embracing its own loss
into text, yes desiring to dissolve itself in the text to escape the
sheer weight of its own desires and dabble in the delight of its
reconstitution in another place, is the text of coming of
jouissance, of ecstasy - For, "any demand is frigid until desire,
until neurosis forms in it."

- - - - - - -

Self-mediation is the act of constituting presence in a mediated
environment. Formerly a marginal practice it has now moved to centre
stage - Broadcast Yourself!

Presence in the mediated environment of digital electronic networks is
constituted through the continuous circulation of images, sounds,
streams in the network. Prosumed, picked up, remixed, laboured on
affectionately, appropriated, commodified.

There is a subjectivity at work here, but a contradictory one. The
images, the sounds, circulate, they are sampled more than created,
mixed more than framed. The subject dissolves itself in the mediated
streams of images and sounds  remix can dissolve the streams in turn
to mere static.

Self-mediation does not aim at communicating information, at conveying
a message  instead it tries to establish affective relationships.

The networked subjectivity at work here is not an artistic
subjectivity  the media space it creates is prattle. It does not push
out the limits of what language and the machines are able to express
(at all); to the point of crisis. Much rather, it embodies this crisis
in constituting the outer limit in itself  beyond which only an
absolute negativity, death itself, stares back at it.

- - - - - - -

The self conscious self-mediating subject adheres only to its ultimate
maxim:

	I transmit, therefore I am . . .

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Notes:
1) Barthes borrows the term jouissance from Lacan, which is most
commonly translated as bliss, though some theorists consider
ecstasy a closer approximation of its intended meaning. I decided to
use the original French word where its translation is ambiguous.
2) Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1975), 14 (French original 1973).
3)  Ibid., 16-17.
4) Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share - Volume II: The History of
Eroticism (New York: Zone Books, 1993, orig. 1976), 103.
4) And this we knew already from Edmund Burke, see: Edmund Burke, A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757, second edition 1759).
5)  Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, op. cit. (note 2), 4.
6) Ibid., 4-5.

Source: Eric Kluitenberg, Delusive Spaces - Essays on Culture, Media
and Technology, (Rotterdam: NAi Publsihers / Institute of Network
Cultures, 2008), pp. 277 - 284.
ISBN: 978-90-5662-617-4

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