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Subject: Verena Conley q&a with Pauline part 2 From: pauline@metamute.COM (pauline) Date: 26 Aug 1997 00:04:03 +0200 * * * * * Questions dx @): Q: In our last Q+ A session, we discussed some historical and contemporary conceptions of nature and technology. In a discussion we had today (23.8) (with artist Kathleen Rogers, for example, or curator Rob La Fresnais) we found again that talking about the fusion of these areas (e.g. in biotechnology) reveals problematic assumptions about their previous separation. A: It sounds like you are in the middle of a discussion. Coming from the outside, all I can do is to reiterate that: It's the relation between nature and technology that has been reassessed in recent findings. Nature hardly exists in a brute state outside of some kind of techn (even in the DNA, as some argue). However, since the Second Scientific Revolution--and Descartes--it was believed that nature could be dominated through Western technology. One of the important articles on this is Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology (ca 1951) in which he shows how western metaphysics are based on control, domination and arresting nature. Through metaphysics, nature and humans become part of a standing reserve. To this, he opposes a Greekconcept of techne as poetry that deals with approach rather than domination. This is really overly schematized. There is another metaphysical, non- cartesian tradition running through Spinoza and more recently Bergson, Deleuze-Guattari and others. I do not have time to elaborate, I will run out of battery power. Today, many scientists--and artists and philosophers--argue for a reassessment of the difference between nature and technology. However, some biotech people feel that nature now no longer exists in that living organisms can be treated like things at the very level of instruction. Q:A member of the audience (Carla, a member of V2 in Rotterdam) suggested that constantly taking science as an "object" of criticism, study or engagement, especially by supposedly enlightened or creative artists does nothing for our understanding of the manner in which it is both similar to, and co-extensive with other fields--politics, architecture, art (!), social policy. A: Yes, I agree. Science does not exist outside of a certain culture. The problem is that, in Western culture, the belief in science as objective and as a purveyor of utlimate truth is very tenacious. Scientists like Prigogine and Stengers tried to introduce a narrative element into discipline. Most scientists do adhere to claims of objectivity and truth. At the same time, culture studies often tend to lag behind science and hang on to outworn paradigms. It is important to be aware of what is happening in many discourses at once. Obviously, those discourses (see below on research and funding) function transversally with other dominant discourses. Q: So, what I am interested in talking with you about today--as it seems one factor that does dominate the techno-scientific debate specifically-- is the relationship of accelerating capital to biology, technology and research. We could look at several discussion threads that have been started here at the WorkSpace: One raised most clearly by Critical Art Ensemble + Faith Wilding's multimedia contribution, "Let's make a baby," is to do with Capital's use, manipulation, and subjugation of human desire. A: Capitalism produces desire. It is extensive and intensive. It invades more and more personal spheres. It controls the imaginary and does away with what used to be called a symbolic order (of dynamic homeostasis). Exchange is subordinated to profit motives and accrued circulation of capital. Thus it is not an overly great logical leap to state that that is why a lot of old-style psychoanalysis (based on long-term homeostatic exchange) no longer works. This production of desire is favored, and by being valorized as it is, it also favors infantilism. It does not want people to think, only buy. Funny about "Let's make a baby," (see below). Here, at the local "gallery," the oly bric-a-brac shop in a radius of 50 miles, the proprieter sells chainsaw sculptures. The original sculptor who brought the art to the area was killed in an automobile accident two years ago. He won an award for sculpting two interwoven giant whales (in white pine) to symbolize the demise of the cold war. The sculptor who has taken his baton sells gaudy (but somewhat stiffly rendered) fauna of the region that seem to be confined by the limits of their logs. But sculpture is not the big item in artistic bric-a-brac. It is the Beanie Baby (made in China but patented by an entrepreneur in Chicago), little (smiling) animals that one can collect, that become extinct every six months, and that command a high price for those driven to collect them. It's a craze... for adults. If any production of desire can be exemplified in the margin between fetish objects and art, it is best seen in the Beanie Baby. (The species do exist in Germany too.) Q: The other is to do with the rampant, ever growing incursion of Corporate Capital into research institutes, and the third is to do with bionomics; the popularity of non linear--even biological models--for understanding, predicting and legitimating certain economic processes and concerns. A: I attended a workshop at MIT where this was being discussed by outraged professors. Yes, corporate capital does fund most of the research; capital is decisive in hiring and in funding of projects. The major concern is that research is not free but dictated by corporate structures. What is being funded and who? You have to please the corporation or the donor (in the French classical age one had to please the king). What kind of a culture does one produce? The question needs to be pondered. One rich in social interactions, with art, ethics and aesthetics? Or, one with deadly repetitions and in which everything is subordinated to profit alone? Non linear models and probability are used to predict outcomes. I am not sure they always work. Complex models supersede simple models. Are the predictions always right? I think there are plenty of unknowns and new orders always emerge, at times to everyone's surprise. Q: Personally, though I understand its logic, I sometimes find the anthropomorphising of Capital quite difficult. The abstract, often mytho-poetic discriptions of a devouring creature striking again and again. The abstraction, Capital, becomes a unified, or at least unifying, quasi-animalistic entity. Although I know it is not new, I'm interested in what you think of this. A: I think that the anthropomorphising goes back to an older model of capitalism widespread in the 19th century. Now, in world capitalisms, differences of regional character, cultural development, and even exchange, are entirely impersonal and determined to institute the same models of desire and consumption in any and every latitude of the biosphere. To obtain an impression of what is happening one can say that there are only flows, to borrow from the lexicon of Deleuze and Guattari, and that capital reaches its absolute speed based on machinic components rather than the component of human labor. More and more people are part of the system, be it through their modes of sheltering their resources, saving for their children's education, or selecting retirement plans... Q: Another think I'k like to pick up from Critical Art Ensemble and Faith Wilding's piece is to do with women's position within the techno-scientific field. Especially when looked at from the vantage point of in Vitro Fertilisation. "Let's make a baby," paints a bleak picture in which the (female) body and human conception have become completely divorced from sexual acts. Would you interpret IVF in as negative a way as they do in this piece--as ultimately being symptomatic of an ambient and violent process of distantiation, mechanization, alienation and privatisation where only the rich get to choose and choice--babywise--inexorably comes to mean the perfect able-bodied white (?) baby? A: In medicine a tension exists between a desire for more "holism," because of recent discoveries that show how different registers are interrelated, and an extreme separation of body and mind--or soul, especially through virtual medicine. That this may be the case for IVF comes as no surprise to me. This desire for perfection--what is taken to be perfection in terms dictated by advertisement--can be ordered. The client is king (or queen), at least in the US. Perfect and able bodies, yes; color, I think is secondary--as long as it is not extreme. See the composite pictures that have appeared on the covers of various magazines. This baby will be free of bad genes and other abnormalities. Is it Foucault's ultimate nightmare of normalization. Is the desire for perfection a desire for normalization? Some cultures tried this with less advanced technology at their disposal. Germans were not alone in trying to breed good subjects. Recent rape/warfare in southern Slav nations was interpreted as wanting to breed pure subjects. Is technological purity just another side of this? Q: The Bureau of Inverse Technology who have also participated in the technoscience Workgroup made a product a while back that took a 'mean average' of sperm, perfectly mixed for ultimate efficacy and sold it (at a price I can't remember, if it was specified at all). The product made mockery of the unspoken, but very obvious desire of people to know what sperm it is they are "buying" when they commence their IVF treatment, their need to know whether relevant donors are white, colored, intelligent, no so, etc. It raises the specter of an incipient eugenics, soemthing that haunts the whole genetic field. I'm interested in the way that BIT release products in parallel to industry. They "service Information Culture," do not critique it but redirect its products, as it were. Do you think this kind of artistic intervention itself has any troubling ethical issues attached? A: Troubling, yes but also quite funny. As long as the baby and the child do not suffer. As such, it's a great idea. Incipient eugenics, yes. That's been around and may still be a problem. See above. Recently in the war in the southern Slav nations, it has been argued that rape was used for similar pruposes. One want to have or impose what one takes to be the best product. Definitions of the best vary of course. Q: Back to the artists' issue then. We've been talking about this quite a bit over e-mail. Especially within the context of documenta x, with its high theoretical aims and millenial flavour. Yesterday, Philip Pocock gave a talk in the 100 days 100 speakers series...As a net artist, he has been presented in far more high profile in a way than others on display here. Yet, he was truly terrible: patronising, falsely heroic and constantly proselyitising about how use of the net should happen. For me, a statement of Brian Eno's which he quoted embodied best his strange essentialisms and mythologising of culture and the nets...he quoted that "what the net needs is more Africa." What on earth is a statement like that supposed to mean..... A: I do not believe in millennial economy. Funny about Philip Pocock's talk. Not surprising that the presentation was "patronising and heroic." It all sounds very familiar. People who give talks on "in" things, the net--and not so long ago architecture, philosophy, etc.--often misjudge their audience. The net can be a very wonderful thing. It's also an ocean sea of advertising and serves as the vehicle of speed for the sake of profit (see above). As for the enigmatic formula of Mr. Eno, "What the net needs is more Africa!" what a way to end our conversation. In a recent issue of Vogue, Hillary Clinton touring Africa remarked that the "Masai's way of life collided head-on with Africa's push for development." Just think of all these monitors to be sold and all these capital flows. . . .