Beacon, Institutional Critique, Capitalist Monstrosity

[having read laterally from Battelle, into writing on search engines, privacy, the government's attempts to subpeona data, how to count comprehensiveness among search engines...then also read Shaviro's post on "Monstrous Flesh"...]

Shaviro writes about Hardt and Negri's attempts to reverse Marxist metaphors of monstrosity vis. capital. This is, ultimately, the argument about capitalism v. the powers that try to resist it, e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello's thesis on the new spirit of capitalism or Buchloh on institutional critique or Adorno on The Culture Industry, although Adorno is different for his lack of a dialectical movement here; i.e. he's FAR more pessimistic about resistance, although someone optimistic about avant garde art). Shaviro writes that H&N appropriate for the multitude the characteristics of creativity and parasitism that Marx attributes to capital. Marx says that capital always comes after, appropriates the creativity of the masses, makes it its own, privatizes what is public...etc.; H&N say that it's actually the multitude who are monstrous in this way, monstrously creative, lateral, productive. Indeed, capital is ONLY a parasite. Shaviro counters that capital doesn't just come after and take what it finds; it spurs production. So, in an argument about the expanded purview of capitalism's thefts, they not only appropriate affective labor + physical labor, they incite it, they produce the conditions under which it can happen (e.g. Google's famously good labor conditions). They also produce the conditions under which people come to love and identify with their work, the very labor that Marxism says that capital always appropriates and steals the value of.

The question of institutional critique is a version of this story (e.g. in Buchloh, the storms works its way through H&A's culture industry argument, where capital in the form of the CI appropriates culture by gaming the systems that produce it, which is more like Shaviro's story than H&N's). Art, in this system, either reflects on those dilemma, or is trapped by them. Broodthaers seems to be the artist who can reflect on anything, who is trapped by nothing; and it's the voracious meta-tactics of his art that lets him float above anything, provide a critique of anything (or let a critic feel as though they themselves can provide a critique of anything in Broodthaer's aesthetic idiom).

Beacon's relationship to the search engines it appropriates can be cast in the same conceptual terms, and within the same conceptual relationships: it either exceeds and reflects on the way that, e.g., search engines monetize desire, wishing, curiosity, knowledge, or Beacon can be attributed with the voracious critical intelligence and prescience that lets us believe that it sees, reflects on, predicts, visualizes, spectacularizes all of these problems. Something in its form predicts the cooptations of capital, or lets us believe that we are witnessing them being reflected up and predicted.

So, in this view, there would be two versions of the story:

1. Beacon helps us to think about the problem of "relevancy" in search by giving us the search terms divorced from their answers, and from their identifying data. We can neither get back to the searcher, nor get forward to the results of their search. We see the search engine stripped of its source of capital (advertising represents 99% of Google's revenue). We see the search stripped of the identity markers that makes that searcher a source of potential revenue for the companies who buy rights to certain search terms. Beacon shows us a non-monetized identity, organs without a body (Shaviro explains the BwO as D&G's way of describing how capitalism separates people/bodies from what they can do, as a way of monetizing those actions, appropriating them), just what bodies can do, not the discourses under which they become sources of value. ... Etc. Or this could go less in the direction of performative critique and more toward revelation critique: it lays bare the processes by which...

2. Beacon is trapped by the very processes it would or should set out to critique. By failing to show the ads, the culture of advertising, the various ways in which knowledge itself (the common in H&N's and Marx's terms) becomes capitalized through search engines, Beacon succumbs to the illusion that search engines need to foster in order to be trustworthy, in order that people trust them with their "personal" data, and in order that people trust them to provide knowledge, objective, trustworthy facts.

These two options only? The tradition of avant garde critique seems to dictate yes (e.g. R. Krauss would say, in the mode of post-medium argumentation, that we cannot critique search engines unless they are VERY new [they are not] or nearly obsolete [they are not]).

It seems obvious that some version of the story whereby search engines are capitalizing knowledge itself, searching itself, curiosity itself, the desire to know, to find out (cf. J. Dean) is true and operative and worth critiquing. It also seems clear that there are sources of awareness about this process: not just art like Beacon, but even Google's own Zeitgeist and dogpile's own Trends monitor and more explicitly critical sources like SearchengineWatch, which wield knowledge in order to disabuse us of any thought that search engines are objective or innocent. Maybe a question that starts to break the impasse of institutional critique is: given a capitalist project in motion, and given some sources of critical thought about that process, what is the role of an artwork like Beacon? What does Beacon do that other things don't do? Or, to put it in terms of value that don't come directly from capitalist discourses of originality and unique value: what does Beacon contribute to a collaborative awareness of the capitalist process in question?

Another tack: does it help to identify the problem as broadly capitalist and the solution as broadly critical? As we know, critique itself is not not-capitalist; it's not even anti-capitalist at all times. Criticism runs on, is produced in the context of, if not produced by, the same systems of values that drive capitalism writ large: originality, incisiveness, communicability, some sense of hard or cutting edge.... The point of noting this wouldn't be to say that critique itself is a fool's game, is itself appropriated. It would be to say that noticing its value should not hinge on bracketing capital and capitalism. This is where work like Jose Munoz's on coca-cola, warhol and O'hara is useful and interesting: not for its more celebratory rhetoric, but for the project it models whereby some sort of response to capitalism and capitalist processes can be produced without bracketing the awareness of capitalism as a source of motivation, energy, productivity, in the process of critically reflecting on capitalist processes. What can be done with capitalism, not just against it.

This is part of the problem of institutional critique: it has to see its most effective models as being not-capitalist, if only in the moment the critique is working most effectively, is being written or read. I can't tell is Shaviro's work is moving in this direction, or moving towards a soberting, more depressive view of our contemporary affairs.