Sylvère Lotringer Does Not Heart the Internet
French theorist Sylvère Lotringer speaks with Nina Power in the September issue of Frieze (whose website, not-so-incidentally, is the best of the art rag bunch, in my not-so-humble opinion). Early in the conversation, he addresses the Internet as a means of disseminating information and organizing people. Though not entirely so—his final point about power and control holds firmly—his assessment is largely off the mark. My suspicions are twofold:
A) I highly doubt that Lotringer himself engages with social media. For as ambivalent as I can be about these applications—or rather, the their larger implications; I refuse to proffer my GPS coordinates to Foursquare, par example—I will rally for their usefulness in mobilizing people because I have actually employed them as such. Lotringer champions the Autonomists’ use of the radio as a means of creating a “total” environment where people “knew who they were talking to.” Here, he privileges the communal experience of hearing sound broadcast into an open space for a designated audience; for him, the Internet spreads information too thinly, abstracting our individual sense of self in space and thus preventing effective social interaction in the material world.
Lotringer has obviously not enjoyed the experience of standing next to a couple of riot cops during a protest, iPhone in hand, eavesdropping on their discussion while disseminating their plans to the thousands of other Twitter users who are simultaneously doing the same. He has obviously not convened at a bar with said protesters after said protest as directed via said communal Twitter feed, thus collapsing virtual and “real” space into one hyper-local celebration of digital democracy. Sylvère Lotringer has obviously not dated online. For this, I forgive him fully.
B) The Internet—and the body of discourse it has spawned—tends to inspire a fight-or-flight response in those whose own interests lie in the analog world (in the case of Lotringer, academic book publishing). Unfortunately, that sense of panic often reveals itself as an attitude of contempt toward that which poses a perceived threat. Rather than filing Lotringer away under the bed in a shoebox marked “The Olds”—fighting fire with fire, as it were—I think that his remarks should be taken as a clarion call. Those of us who think and write about the Internet need to work harder in positioning our punditry; we need to inspire people to actually want to use this stuff in order to make the kinds of theory-to-life connections that we take for granted. The Internet can be—nay, is—as much a “long-term intellectual commitment” as any other pursuit; it can be as serious as we take it, and therefore portray it as.
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An excerpt (emphasis mine):
Nina Power: One of the most important media for the Autonomia was radio. The obvious contemporary comparison is the Internet; it offers the possibility of putting out material quickly, and of constructing para- or non-academic discussions, as you did with Semiotext(e) at a time when French theory was still mostly untranslated. Perhaps there is less room for the kind of fetish items that the early Semiotext(e) books became. Now there are blogs, online books, and so on. How do you feel about this development?
Sylvère Lotringer: It certainly offers an enormous range of possibilities that didn’t exist before, but increased dissemination and accessibility doesn’t replace hard theory. Actually the introduction of the electronic media in the late 1970s marked the end of French theory in France. Philosophers of this great generation were replaced by publicists, like Bernard-Henri Lévy. Theory is not synonymous with blogging, nor is multi-tasking with thinking. The books that we publish are a long-time intellectual commitment on their authors’ part and we have hardly scratched the surface. We are interested in everything that helps us diagnose the future, where we are going, what can be done, and that is far from clear at this point. We are presently moving from a humanistic space to a more global and ecological horizon. So we need an ever wider range of theories, not less, and the re-introduction of Italian social thinkers as well as Peter Sloterdijk’s amazing philosophical extrapolations are part of this project. Radio certainly had its time, but it is no less interesting for that. Actually it has been experiencing a revival. Technological advance isn’t everything. The Autonomists’ radios were not just radio, they were part of a total – not a global – environment, and they could mobilize the population whenever the police tried to raid them. These were political groups embedded in a local community, they knew who they were talking to.
Can these communities be extended on a wider scale? Not in the same way. The Internet seemed to be the answer at the time it was introduced, but it has quickly become a new form of mental pollution. The CIA, apparently, is now working on a ‘gated’ equivalent that will keep hackers and other rogue idealists off-limits. The Internet certainly allows for a direct connection between people, but it still depends on long-time memory and a central organ. It assigns individuals a place that pre-exists them and abstracts them from their own environment. This is just the opposite of the idea of ‘general intelligence’ that Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno have extracted from Marx, which implies social creativity and public cooperation. Like other recent technological inventions, the Internet runs the risk of reproducing itself at the expense of the very sociability it was supposed to provide. It expands our world and reduces it to nothing, enforcing a culture of non-stop communication that is taking its toll on human temporality and its capacity to connect to the outside.
Ernst Jünger was the first to invoke, in the 1930s, the ‘total mobilization’ of populations in times of peace as in times of war. He was careful to point out that it didn’t mean sending people to the battlefields, but making sure of their readiness for mobilization. We all seem to be engaged at this point in a war of movement whose purpose and outcome mostly exceeds our control or understanding. And this war, unlike any other before, is being waged by humanity against itself. Fittingly, the Internet was conceived by ARPANET for the US military in 1962 before being released to the general public. Its original purpose, let’s not forget, was to preserve the capacity for massive retaliation from below in case of a nuclear explosion. This doomsday scenario involved the destruction of 20 million Russians in major cities, and there is no question that it would have been activated given the chance. Paradoxically, the same concept was invented separately by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with their ‘rhizome’ in 1975, and the disproportion between the means involved tells a lot about the power of theory. The rhizome doesn’t foster separation or passivity, which was the major Situationist diagnosis of the society of the spectacle. It is not a given, but invented along the way and you constantly have to look for roots that could burgeon into untimely events. It fitted perfectly what was happening with Autonomia and Guattari at the time; but when you look at the extension of the concept of rhizomatization alongside Foucault, then this fluidity can also reinforce power and control. We’re in a society where nothing is simply what it is. All the more reason to try and drive a wedge, in concrete situations, between active and reactive forces.
