Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/ES Cyberama/Wired?

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               Copyright (c) 1993 by Charlie Bertsch,
                        all rights reserved.

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WIRED?
Charlie Bertsch

BAD SUBJECTS #10 -- DECEMBER 1993

That we're *physically* addicted to electricity is obvious; the extent
to which we're *psychologically* addicted is not.  Particularly among
people who try to conceive of opposition to the dominant powers in our
society, psychological dependence on electricity reveals itself in a
recurring tendency to imagine that those powers behave like electrical
power. To a certain extent, this makes intuitive sense: electrical
power plays an undeniably significant role in structuring our everyday
lives.  However, this isn't the only reason we make sense of power
relations with an 'electrical consciousness'. Electrical power appeals
to our imagination because it is described by a coherent body of
concepts, a 'conceptual apparatus' with indisputable rules to guide our
classifications of phenomena. Other forms of power--political, social,
economic--often seem much harder to describe. Hence, people 'come to
terms' with the powers that dominate them by borrowing terms used in
the description of electrical power. In other words, electrical power
becomes a *metaphor* for these other forms of power. What I will
briefly discuss here are the ways in which this 'habit of mind'--habits
are, after all, addictions--has conditioned many people's perception of
reality in the last three decades, often with politically debilitating
consequences.

The use of electrical metaphors is nothing new. Ever since the
beginnings of electrical theory in the 18th century, poets
philosophers, and ordinary people have been borrowing its terminology.
Since the early 1960's, however, the use of electrical metaphors has
attained a new level of importance. What happened in the early 1960's
to radically advance the electrification of our consciousness? For one
thing, people started to realize the significance of post-war
technological developments. Although some intellectuals--Norbert
Wiener, Jaques Lacan and any number of science-fiction writers come to
mind-- were already talking about cybernetics and the human being-as-
machine in the mid-1950's, it took most people a little longer to
recognize the significance of post-war technological innovations like
the television, the transistor, and the computer. The early 1960's also
marked the time at which these innovations finally went global.
Television culture had ceased to be an Anglo- American phenomenon.
Satellite telecommunications were starting to make possible the
existence of global 'events' like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The
telephone  and mass-electrification had finally been extended to the
most  underdeveloped portions of the globe, which, not coincidentally,
were now linked to first-world states in an increasingly universal
United Nations. The computer, though still not an everyday phenomenon,
was beginning to be more and more of a presence in the first-world
corporate workplace.  Finally, the development of the integrated
circuit promised a new era of low-cost, high-volume, pre-fab electrical
circuits that would extend the realm of advanced electronic technology
to the most mundane tools of everyday life.

These changes heralded the development of a 'global culture' in which
information could be transferred across vast distances almost
instantaneously. Some people were alarmed; some were elated. The work
of prominent cultural theorists of the time offers excellent examples
of both extremes. In his One- Dimensional Man of 1964, a seminal text
for 'New Left' student movements of the 1960's, Herbert Marcuse adopts
the alarmist view and worries that technological progress has
outstripped our capacity to control its course. The language he uses to
describe this dire situation borrows heavily, though perhaps
unconsciously, from the description of electrical power.  For one
thing, he conceives of society as a 'closed circuit' that seemingly
incorporates all of our existence. Though it is seemingly full of
movement--the rapid flow of information, the breakneck pace of
technological innovation--global society is, as a whole, "a thoroughly
static system of life: self-propelling in its oppressive productivity
(p.17)." Thus, like a circuit, society constitutes a stable system.
Furthermore, society resembles an electrical circuit in that it
contains and even thrives on the tension between 'positive' and
'negative' elements. Marcuse believes that being 'negative'-- opposed
to the status quo--no longer constitutes a challenge to the system and
that a truly critical take on society must "proceed from a position
'outside' the positive as well as the negative, the productive as well
as destructive tendencies in society," for "modern industrial society
is the pervasive identity of these opposites--it is the whole that is
in question (p.xiv.)." Society can no longer be distinguished from the
technology it produces, for "in the medium of technology, culture,
politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which
swallows up or repulses all alternatives" and that "technological
rationality has become political rationality (p.xvi.)." All aspects of
existence appear to be subordinated to a one-dimensional 'total
system'.

Media theorist Marshall McCluhan saw liberation in the very
developments that so alarmed Marcuse. In his 1967 book The Medium is
the Massage he agrees with Marcuse that "the medium, or process of our
time--electric technology--is reshaping and restructuring patterns of
social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life" and that
this technology "fosters and encourages unification" of societal forces
into a 'total system', that the "social drama" has become the "electric
drama." He echoes Marcuse's apocalyptic declaration that society has
become one-dimensional, stating that "electric circuitry has overthrown
the regime of 'time' and 'space'" and made it impossible for us to
challenge the powers-that-be by opposing them from a position outside
the system, since "the instantaneous world of electric informational
media involves all of us, all at once" and "no detachment or frame is
possible." For McLuhan this means that "electric circuitry is
Orientalizing the West," that "the contained, the distinct, the
separate--our Western legacy--are being replaced by the flowing, the
unified, the fused." What's interesting to note are the remarkable
similarities between Marcuse and McLuhan's descriptions of 60's
society, even though they take completely opposite positions on the
relative value of the technological 'progress' they describe. Both
agree that society is one giant circuit into which individuals are
placed like so many pre-fab integrated circuits. Marcuse details at
length how the individual has become little more than an organizing
principle for an assembly of 'manufactured needs'; McLuhan even peppers
his book with greatly enlarged pictures of integrated circuits and at
one point asks the reader about one of these pictures, "When this
circuit learns your job, what are you going to do?" In the end, Marcuse
and McLuhan seem like positive and negative poles in a total system
they both take for granted.

What are the political consequences of imagining that society is a
'total system' in which every social role, every position seems to be
contained within a continuous circuit of power? For one thing, when we
do this we are forced to revise radically our notion of political
'resistance'. Marcuse's belief that resistance no longer lies *outside*
or opposed to the system makes perfect sense if power is conceived of
in electrical terms, for resistance is an integral part of electrical
circuits, one of their most basic components. Although 'resistors' act
to *dissipate* the energy in a circuit--by producing heat or light--
and therefore *impede* the flow of current, they do not impede the
functioning of the circuit as a whole. On the contrary, they play an
essential role in its smooth operation.  Often resistance is even the
raison-d'etre of a particular circuit. Electric light, for example, is
the product of resistance put to a particular practical use. Using
electrical power as a metaphor for socio-political power thus
encourages us to think that resistance functions as what Marcuse calls
'structural resistance': it supports the social whole.

If, as many people--especially young ones--in the 1960's did, you still
want to somehow struggle against a system you suppose to be a total
circuit that makes use of everything it encompasses, *including*
resistance to the flow of power, what are your options? Since the 60's,
I would argue, two superficially opposite strategies have dominated
political thinking. The first appears to assume--sometimes
provisionally, sometimes not--that the conflation of electrical power
and the powers that dominate us is not just a useful way of
conceptualizing those difficult-to-grasp powers, but an actual fact. In
other words, this strategy assumes that the problem literally *is*
technology itself and thus holds that the renunciation of technology
and the renunciation of the status quo are one and the same thing. The
most committed advocates of this strategy have been associated with
back-to-nature movements and, more recently, 'green' politics; with
'hippie' communes and their descendants; and, towards the right of the
political spectrum, with simulations of 'frontier-living' by the sweat
of one's brow such as we see on TV's _Northern Exposure_. The strategy
itself, however, has had far wider impact than, for it deeply informs
the logic of one of America's most popular leisure and vacation
practices: camping.

After all, for most Americans camping is primarily a vacation from
'wired' existence, from the continuous and seemingly limitless flow of
electricity itself. They drive their cars or RV's to a campsite without
electricity--the weak and short-lived output of the batteries they
bring with them excepted--in order to set up their often elaborate
camping apparatus, get out the Weber grill and the Coleman lantern, and
then spend several days in a 'nature' that has all the accoutrements of
modern everyday life--cars and even traffic, high 'population density',
lots of garbage--*except* 'real' electricity. I would argue that people
who engage in this sort of camping think they are 'getting away from it
all' because they think the 'all'--etymologically, the 'universe' in
which their everyday lives take place--they are escaping is synonymous
with the domain of electrical power. In other words, they imagine that
the total system--by definition 'all-encompassing'--only holds sway
over the technologized world. It seems that these people go camping to
convince themselves that they *can* still go 'unplugged', *can* do a
good job simulating their everyday lives *without* recourse to the
socket. Camping thus appears to be an attempt to imagine a world *not*
dependent on centralized power source, an 'alternative' world apart
from the electrical All.

Aesthetically, the strategy that would resist the system by going
'unplugged' has lead to attempts to find and distribute 'authentic'
pre-electronic or at least 'traditional' culture. In the early 1960's
it was folk music, a little later blues and country. From the late 60's
on, different aspects of minority, primitive, or 'third-world' cultures
have appeared to offer the 'antidote to civilization'. In all these
cases, the people who appropriate these 'authentic' cultures seek
refuge from the system in something that appears to originate outside
of its circuit of power. In a sense, then, they are 'camping' in what
they take to be cultural wilderness. That their experience of 'camping'
tends to consist of pre-packaged hiking tours, visits to ethnic
restaurants, or shopping for world music at Tower Records means only
that they strongly resemble their less culturally sophisticated fellow
citizens who camp in the smog- filled Yosemite Valley. This might
explain why acoustic guitars fill both the cultural haunts of those who
appropriate folk cultures *and* your average summertime campground!

The second oppositional strategy is less optimistic about the prospects
for escaping the system. Those who adopt it tend to view the first
strategy as the product of wilful self-delusion.  How could a total
system be so easily escaped? After all, there doesn't appear to be any
place left on the globe completely untouched by technology. Proponents
of this second strategy thus seek not to *escape* the system, but to
oppose it *from within*.  They are 'turned-on' rather than 'unplugged'.
The problem they face is to reconcile the desire to resist the system
from within with their conviction that 'resistance' can *itself* be a
function of the system. To do this they must differentiate themselves
from the sort of structural resistance' that supports the system. This
requires a more in-depth account of the relation between individuals
and the power flowing through the total system.

What does it mean to be 'plugged in'? Philosopher and cultural
historian Michel Foucault succinctly exemplifies the answer this second
strategy builds upon when he states in his 1975 book Discipline and
Punish that "power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a
prohibition on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is
transformed by them and through them (p.27)." In other words, power
flows through different social positions within the total system and
'empowers' the people who occupy those positions to transform it before
they pass it on. Foucault makes it clear elsewhere that the system
functions efficiently when people use their 'empowerment' to be
productive and *increase* the sum total of power within the system
before passing it along: the amount of power within the system should
perpetually increase in the course of its circulation. 'Productive'
individuals thus come to be defined as people who receive an input--the
particular 'signal' of power-- and generate an output that is greater
in size--a change in *quantity*--that is otherwise identical to the
input--no change of *quality*. They are like amplifiers in an
electrical circuit.  Of course, like people, no electrical component is
perfect. An amplifier will always produce 'distortion'. The input
signal will be transformed into an output signal that "will not be
simply an enlarged replica, but will have a different shape. (Steven
E.  Schwarz and William G. Oldham, Electrical Engineering: An
Introduction, p.342)." Engineers seek to avoid 'positive feedback' that
"is very likely to lead to instability" because the distortion keeps
getting reinforced with each course through the circuit until "the
circuit 'runs away' (p.347)."

The 'turned-on' oppositional strategy sees its opportunity in this
tendency for distortion to build upon itself until the system is out of
control. Its basic project is to make people not into 'resistors' but
'bad amplifiers' who "can produce an output in the absence of an input
(p.354)" and thus transform their 'input signal' *not* quantitatively
but *qualitatively*, who maximize not the volume of their output but
the extent to which it deviates from their input. In other words, this
strategy is based on the idea that the only way for individuals to help
undermine a rational, efficient system is to 'fail' in their assigned
tasks and produce the "random signals (p.363)" that constitute systemic
'noise' instead of what the system requires (more of itself). Of
course, since real people do not receive input signals of an electrical
nature, this is not the sort of strategy that can be directly enacted
like the first one: you *can* renounce use of electrical power and go
live in a log cabin or cave; you can't, however, really alter the shape
that power takes. The sorts of responses to the system that employ this
second strategy thus tend to be much more self-consciously
metaphorical.

The 60's provided us with an excellent sequence of idioms to describe
the process of literally 'failing' the system. People 'turned on' to
drugs like L.S.D., 'tuned in' to the power they suddenly felt to be
literally surging through them, and either 'dropped out' or 'burned
out'. 'Burn out' is a particularly striking conceptual legacy of the
60's, for it appears to indicate the long-term effect of the systemic
'overloads' that generate noise. All of this metaphoric language is
blatantly dependent on 'electrical consciousness'. Of course, as the
problem of 'burn out' will attest, striving for *literal* failure does
not make for good long-term political strategy: too many people die or
go insane. For this reason, the 'turned on' oppositional strategy has
predominantly inspired *aesthetic* responses to the system--although
many of the individuals undertaking them unwittingly cross over into
*literal* failure or self-destruction.

What form do aesthetic applications of this strategy take?  In general,
they strive for deliberate distortion or even the 'white noise' of
incoherence. While there are numerous examples in all media of what
this aesthetics leads to in practice, its effects are particularly
obvious in rock music, where 'electrical consciousness' finds its most
immediate expression. Since the mid-60's, when rock groups like The Who
and The Velvet Underground responded to pop artists like Andy Warhol by
combining sweet pop melodies worthy of Tin Pan Alley with deliberate
use of feedback and distortion, one of rock's most critically lauded
lineages has illustrated again and again how a 'harmonious' input
signal can be transformed into something monstrous by turning up the
volume to the point of overload. This lineage leads through punk, the
'college radio' or 'indie' music of the 80's on up to the mainstream
'alternative' rock of bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and the Smashing
Pumpkins today.  Throughout its history, this lineage has convinced
people that it is somehow 'oppositional' by aesthetically demonstrating
a failure to process input signals efficiently. Bands like Nirvana
appear to be undermining the system when they generate distortion
because "when the 'true' signal is small it may become lost in the
noise, and thus be unusable," for "in communications, noise is the
great enemy (p.363)." In other words, they illustrate the way in which
a circuit of power can be made 'useless' by amplification gone awry.

So we have two basic strategies for opposing a total system
conceptualized in electrical terms: we can give up on it altogether and
go hide in the woods; or we can 'fail' to play our societal role--or at
least *pretend* to--by being 'bad amplifiers' who flood the circuits of
power with incoherent noise; we can 'challenge' the system by either
running away from it or self-destructing. Personally *and* politically,
neither strategy seems a particularly effective way of bringing about
change in our everyday reality. This is not to say that there is
nothing pleasing about them. On the contrary, they offer very seductive
pleasures as compensations for their very impotence:  fantasies of
escape on the one hand and a blissful self- annihilation on the other.
The real problem, I would argue, is not that such fantasies are
available to us, or even that we sometimes indulge in them. It is,
rather, the way in which our psychological addiction to electrical
power prevents us from having any *other* fantasies of opposition
besides these two. If we realized the extent to which electrical
terminology has come to inhabit our mind; if we understood that many of
our perceptions of reality have been substantially altered by a
decades-long and largely unconscious addiction to that terminology; if
we became more self-conscious about the ways in which we use metaphors
as tools; and if electrical terminology were just one of many tools
available to us for conceptualizing power, these fantasies would be
less pernicious. As things stand right now, however, we are at the
mercy of a mind-altering metaphor that makes meaningful opposition to
the status-quo seem hopeless.
-----------------------
Charlie Bertsch is a graduate student in English at UC Berkeley, who
plans to write his dissertation on the relationship between modernist
aesthetics and popular culture.  He is also a member of the Bad
Subjects Collective.  He can be reached at the following Internet
address:  [e-mail].