Railway Flap Sign 1 (Grid-networks and flow-networks)

Stand in front of a railway flap sign, a historical form of today's electronic time schedule, and you see, above you, a grid of numbers, letters and symbols for keeping time that changes rhythmically, but unpredictably. Changes are accompanied by a mass of noise, the simultaneous flapping of hundreds of letters and numbers, changes marking the arrival of a new train on the board, the progress of time as a schedule of arrivals and departures, all trains and their itineraries moving to the left to give way to a new train added to the right, signaling that time is moving forward and so is the schedule.

You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.

The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].

The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.

Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.

Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].

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.