On the Post City...
The grid and its certainties is what Negri mourns. Geometric and planar, horizontal and rational, from Malevich to Mondrian, the Grid embodied the state of the modernist political-technological art, which was a disciplinary art. But as the societies of discipline morphed into the societies of control, the ‘architecture of borders, walls, doors, and locks give way to that of passwords, fire walls, public key encryption, and security certificates.' Modernist culture, organised by the grid (and its subjective correlate: the enlightened master) succumbs to a thousand niche-market cuts, whipped raw by Chris Anderson's ‘long tail' and decomposed into tribes by Mark J. Penn's ‘microtrends.' The grid mutates into the web, the imperial/utopian into the molecular/heterotopian. The new media-architecture begins to manipulate smaller units. The birth, from the ruins, of the negative center, issues the coup de grâce. The centre is robbed of its sovereignty.
‘The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past,' notes William Burroughs. ‘We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. Hegel writes of the function of kingship as consisting in dotting the i's and crossing the t's. No system can close itself-off using only elements internal to it. The function of the sovereign (what Foucault terms the author-function) was to supply the seal of transcendence. 20th century dictators, captured by cameras and connected with telephones, pumped-up the volume.
‘The age demanded an image,' notes Ezra Pound, ‘of its own accelerated grimace.' Placed in the heavens of a vertical hierarchy, the iron willed dictator conducted and channeled the psychologies of his followers: The Father of the Nation. But the death of God, pronounced by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, was the death of transcendence; the death of the possibility of an absolutely transcendent image. The ‘age of extremes' was a reaction-formation, against Gödel's incompleteness theorem, against Nietzsche's nihilism. Modernism was an ideology of reaction, which grafted the forms of the past onto new contents (Stalin the Red Tsar, Hitler the Sorcerer-Emperor...) and then stood back, aghast, as the host rejected the transplant.
The invention of digital technology ended this period of ideological frenzy. ‘As the Enlightenment and "modernity" were increasingly called into question,' writes Peter Wollen, ‘a process accelerated by post-1968 disenchantment, French intellectuals turned away from "knowledge-based" approaches to the humanities and towards the more speculative domains, urging a decentralised vision of "dissemination," "rhizomes" and "molecular" microstructures, Replacing Stalin and Hitler are ‘Enterprise Systems', computerised content management systems which cross organisational boundaries, and actualise the potential which the panopticon once contained.
Disciplinary power was based on anxiety; prisoners could never be certain whether the watchtower was occupied. Citizen-subjects today can be sure; the prisoners are now watching each-other. ‘In sales organisation,' reports Richard Sennett, ‘sales reps' performances can be mapped in real time on home-office computer screens.' Instead of a centralised point of imaginary control; a distributed network of leveraged eyeballs.
Something to chew on.
