Wafaa Bilal is currently an artist-in-residence at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the city of Troy, New York. Shortly after his arrival on March 5, his exhibition in the gallery of the Arts department was closed to the public by order of the university’s president. Today there is no certainty that the exhibition will be reopened. What I want to show is that every aspect of Wafaa Bilal’s visit to RPI points back to one fundamental issue: the value of free speech in a democracy.

Bilal was born in Iraq in 1966. He resisted the authoritarian government of Saddam Hussein, suffered persecution and then escaped the country, emigrating to the US in the early 1990s to realize a lifelong dream. He completed an MFA at the Chicago Art Institute in 2003 – and then, due to circumstances far beyond his own choosing, he became one of the most controversial artists in America.

He works with photography, video and computer games, using the Internet to reach beyond the gallery to a wider public. At the heart of his recent pieces is a single principle: he performs the existence of an Iraqi civilian. He shows us, tells us and tries to make us feel what life might be like right now, for those he left behind in his home country. By staging himself in interactive situations, he asks each of us to chose what we have to say to the Iraqi people.

Let’s remember that Iraqis are not necessarily our enemies. US armed forces originally came to liberate them from a dictator. This apparently simple premise has given rise to a terribly complex dilemma. An occupying power, claiming to restore democracy to a foreign nation, is faced with deadly attacks on its forces and with the parallel development of civil wars linked inextricably to its presence. A civilian population, which had no voice and no chance to intervene in any of the events leading up to this violence, is faced with explosives, assassinations, cross-fire, penury, immeasurable suffering and death. By the most cautious and thoroughly documented account available, the liberation of Iraq has been accompanied by 81,632 civilian deaths by violence since March 20, 2003 (cf. www.iraqbodycount.org). Each of those who have died, including Bilal’s own brother, is a unique human being, just like each of the 3,974 Americans who have died in the war. The question that arises today is whether the citizens of the United States – who, through our elected representatives, did collectively decide to engage in violence – can still speak in public about the consequences of that decision.

What does it mean to speak in public? It’s no longer so easy as standing on a soapbox. We live in an intensely mediated society. Every day, politicians, journalists, newscasters, movies, recruiting officers, brochures, posters, blogs and games “speak” about the war. They raise feelings of the widest variety: fear, revulsion, hatred, pride, a sense of strength or courage, sadness, horror, anxiety. Amid all these emotions, one overriding concern is constantly at issue: our relation, as a listening and viewing public, to the image of American servicemen and women faced with a strange, seemingly unknowable enemy. That one issue conditions every political decision made about the war. Yet those whom we came to liberate – not our enemies, but the Iraqi people – are strangely absent from this discussion. As if in reality, we wished to know nothing about them.

Wafaa Bilal is now a US citizen. He uses his rights as a citizen to speak to us symbolically, with photographs, videos, websites, interactive games. He insists that symbolic speech has its consequences. One of his recent pieces was entitled “Domestic Tension: Shoot an Iraqi” (2007). He designed an interactive website allowing anyone, anywhere, 24 hours a day, to aim a paintball gun inside a gallery and fire it at him. With this work he addressed the American public. The participants chose their responses. They could speak with bullets, by firing paintballs at a supposed enemy; or they could respond in any other way, with words, with letters, with emotions, with recognition and respect, with solidarity for another human being. Some of them found that if they “spoke” just right, by a click just in time, they could divert the paintball which another participant was firing directly at the artist.

Bilal came to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a video game: “The Night of Bush Capturing: A Virtual Jihadi.” Here, the situation is complex, like the war itself. Bilal’s piece is based on the video game “Quest for Saddam,” where American gamers were invited to attack and kill stereotyped Iraqi enemies during a mission to capture the dictator. This commercial game was hacked by individuals claiming to be part of Al Qaeda. They transformed it into a game where Islamist warriors seek to kill the American president. Then they offered it to people in Iraq, just as the original game had been offered to young Americans. Bilal hacked the hack, and placed his own image in the game. He let himself be symbolically absorbed within it, the way any teenager would be absorbed during the time of play. And he then made this situation public, as the central element of his exhibition at RPI. Via Bilal’s image, you become the virtual jihadi, playing the game as an individual on a giant screen which forms the public exhibit.

Wafaa still has one project going at RPI: and you can participate, at www.dogoriraqi.com. He wants your vote to decide which one — a dog named “Buddy,” or an Iraqi, himself — will be waterboarded at an “undisclosed location” in upstate New York. An act which has gained a whole new timeliness, since President Bush just vetoed the Congressional bill that would have prohibited it.

Are Iraqis our enemies? Did we already vote for torture? Is free speech the essence of a democracy? Would you pull the trigger? To ask these dangerous questions through symbolic speech, without physical harm to anyone, is a possibility that art can give us. To make use of that possibility, and thereby to keep democracy vividly alive, is to fulfill one’s civic responsibility. This kind of challenging and open debate is what we could expect in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a great university. Yet precisely that has been denied, with the closing of the exhibition “Virtual Jihadi” at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Exercise your right of expression. Write to President Shirley Jackson in favor of re-opening the show (email: president@rpi.edu). Free speech is now severely threatened. But what we need today, at a minimum, is to ask many more public questions about the reasons for remaining involved in this war.

Brian Holmes

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Wafaa Bilal interviewed on the RPI censorship

“People, this is art. It’s supposed to educate.”

The exhibition, “Virtual Jihadi,” has been restaged at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York. See the Sanctuary’s website for extensive information.

.

Come one, come all! As we enter our 6th year in the occupation of Iraq, our leaders refuse to present an exit strategy or even a truthful representation of what’s happening on the ground. Though we keep being told violence is down, US air strikes are up, and in 2007 sectarian killings “ethnically cleansed” Baghdad, turning it from 65% Sunni to 75% Shia. A poll conducted by the British Ministry of Defense found that 82% of Iraqis are “strongly opposed” to the occupation, and “less than 1% of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security.” Resistance to the war has emerged on three fronts: Iraqi civilians defending their country against foreign invasion and continued devastation, enlisted US troops refusing to participate in an illegal and bloodthirsty war, and American civilians (particularly the student movement, who feel that effect of the war daily– as military recruiters continue to haunt our campuses and tuition is raised as the cost of the war depletes funds for education). As of yet, the US government has refused to recognize these forces of resistance as legitimate, but with continued and heightened pressure in the form of independent, grassroots activism, we can hope to create the change we wish to see.

Join us, the Campus Antiwar Network’s Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, for our spring regional conference on the US War on Terror and our student movement. Students from campuses across the East Coast will be convening to share their organizing experiences. Together, through workshops and plenaries, we’ll try to address some of the issues facing the antiwar movement today, educating ourselves as well as combining efforts to create long and short-term strategies to end the war.

Antioch Confidential is a video and text on the gross mismanagement of Antioch College by an Ad Hoc Committee, whose secret decisions have imperiled the College’s existence. What the film expresses in a shocking anecdote — a SWAT team in the stacks for a Homeland Security exercise conducted against the will of the librarians — the text corroborates with a point-by-point analysis: the sobering story of what can happen to an institution when democratic checks and balances are ignored. As the introduction remarks: “Two modes of higher education management have been and continue to be in conflict at Antioch College, an institution historically based on shared governance and currently micromanaged by Antioch University. One presumes a private space of command, control and communications and the other supports a public realm of courage, responsibility, and shame (“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”).

Watch the film, read the documents, form your own opinion.

It’s a new, world-class, 142 million-dollar architectural extravaganza for music and the electronic arts — and nobody seems sure where it came from or what it’s doing there. Opening next October.

Any visitor to Troy has to wonder about the huge, glass-skinned, vaguely green-colored building rising up the steep slope that divides the declining post-industrial city along the Hudson river from the prosperous Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on the top of the hill. Is it a vast community center where the inhabitants of the city will be able to meet the students in a friendly egalitarian atmosphere? Is it a library, a hospital, a sports-and-leisure facility — or maybe a particle accelerator, a jet-propulsion lab, an astronomy complex unlocking the secrets of the stars above?

Well, no, it’s not any of that, but instead the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center, or EMPAC. When the main stage is done you’ll be able to hear a pin drop from the back balcony of the 1,200-seat concert hall; you’ll attend a top-flight theater production with computer-controlled special effects, watch film projections on the world’s largest screen, participate in vanguard sound and media experiments in two black boxes outfitted with every imaginable kind of electronic equipment, then finally relax with a glass of wine on the terrace cafe and enjoy a view over the quaint little provincial city. Johannes Goebel, formerly of the prestigious ZKM art and media center in Karlsruhe, Germany, has overseen the design and construction process with the aim of contributing a beautifully designed and acoustically perfect building to the world music, media and performing arts community. This man knows exactly what he’s doing. But the question why such a facility has been planned at RPI in Troy, and what it will ultimately be used for, remains an enigma of the first degree.

Throughout the country and increasingly, throughout the world, universities are major actors in local economic and cultural development. One could imagine an ideal situation in which practitioners of a broad range of disciplines are able to bring together the raw intellectual materials for a democratic debate about the best use of land and resources. But in reality, the priorities of the universities are shaped by fierce international competition for students, professors, funds, equipment, contracts, places in the rankings and, last but not least, that most elusive quality of all: prestige in the eyes of the global elites. RPI might be your school or it might be located in your home town, but in this key respect it’s no different from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia or the University of Chicago. The worldwide expansion of the Western productive system since 1989, the speculative boom around computers, biotech and nanotech, and the resulting demand for scientific, cultural and administrative talent to build and operate the new machinery has placed the universities at the cutting edge of the global economy (for just one example, see the recent New York Times article about the transnational market in higher education). If there is one place to look for clues about the world of tomorrow, it’s in today’s universities. Which brings us back to the spectacular glass monument on the side of the hill in Troy.

EMPAC, the jewel at the heart of the Rensselaer Plan for the enlargement of the endowment and the expansion of the university, was made possible by the $360 million gift of a thus-far anonymous donor. It has been envisioned as a quintessentially modernist facility focusing on the purest of the arts, music, whose contemporary electronic dimensions necessitate hi-tech lighting, monitoring, projection, control, mixing, postproduction and network capacities. These in turn can be extended to the other stage and studio spaces, offering a unique technical environment for aesthetic experiments that would be simply impossible anywhere else on earth. Yet despite the mind-boggling specs of the building, there are two conundrums that arise whenever anyone discusses the new facility. The first is where the audience will come from, at a relatively small engineering school in a depressed post-industrial area where high-culture aficionados have every incentive to move to nearby New York City. The second is where to find the money and the select intellectual/aesthetic community to welcome teams of artists-in-residence, whose extended presence at EMPAC would give it the character of a vanguard production facility independent of any local public.

In both cases, the most evident goals of the new arts center seem like wildly unrealizable dreams, with the resulting suspicion that the underlying agenda of the structure must be elsewhere. If one were to guess rashly at its function, something more than sheer generosity or love of the arts might emerge from this architectural program, which outshines both the impressive new biotech lab just behind it and RPI’s $100 million collaboration with IBM to build one of the ten largest super-computers in the world. One of the aims is clearly to confirm RPI’s place among the so-called “New Ivies“: prestigious private universities where the presence of the arts and humanities is supposed to produce a well-rounded individual. But there may be other destinies, developing almost by default under the pressure of major economic and political trends in American society. In addition to its role as a modernist performing arts venue or even a vanguard laboratory, EMPAC could become a massive visualization device whose state-of-the-art equipment serves as advertising for technological developments in bio- and nanotech — all in a luxury, high-class atmosphere that can flatter the tastes and loosen the pocketbooks of America’s industrial, financial and political classes, spurring further investment along the path to the unversity’s expansion and insertion into global circuits. In other words, this would be a fundamentally speculative operation, a risky bet on the future. One can easily picture the high-level conference/trade-fairs, corporate froth sessions, elite receptions and political colloquia that could animate such a place — if the ambition to improve the campus caused administrators to forget the fundamental missions of the university.

. .

All that, of course, is itself just pure speculation, in the face of an unfinished project which has caused a lot of tongues to wag but has given rise to relatively little documentation or critical debate. As a visitor to RPI, I went on a tour of the construction site in the company of students from the university’s clubs and associations. What was striking was not so much the many questions about how students would use such a facility, and the evasive responses that indicated a certain difficulty of access, because of project-based calendars that would tie up the rooms for weeks at a time, and above all because of the relatively large expense for the technical teams, to be paid for by the student groups. Nor was it really surprising to hear that in addition to vanguard artists carrying out the most rarefied experiments, EMPAC might also be filled with Homeland Security agents performing tests on the movement of bodies through perfectly monitored spaces outfitted with latest sensor technologies. Elite spaces, after all, usually come with access-restrictions; and dual-use technologies are the rhetorical commonplaces of a military industrial complex that has always sought to insure at least a façade of legitimacy for academic research. So the truly striking thing was to be there as a visitor to RPI’s Arts department, focused on electronic music and computerized media, which has essentially been excluded from the entire planning and programming process, despite an evident overlap of skills and realms of investigation. The gulf separating the Arts department from the new developments of the arts on the RPI campus is tremendous. Yet this also signifies that the critical practices which form one of the major strengths of the department have not been able to exert their influence on the architectural program. And this raises a question that I believe is fundamental to both the theory and practice of art in the world today.

Simply put, the question is this: What kinds of subjects will the new aesthetic environments help us to become? In the space of a single generation — over hardly more than a decade — the focus of the international art scene has shifted from the neo-expressionist painting revival of the late 80s early 90s to the resolutely media- and network-oriented practices that dominate the scene today. Meanwhile, skyscrapers in Asia and elsewhere are transforming into gigantic video screens, the Internet has become a rival of both television and the recording industries, and mobile telephony plus geolocative devices have brought entirely new orientations to the environment into the palms of our hands. Precisely conceived aesthetic contents, narrowcast through network channels to a plethora of new screens and other display media, increasingly modulate the day-to-day experience of citizens everywhere; while unfolding discoveries in biotech and nanotech, coming hard on the heels of the digital revolution, promise to transform the productive regime on which that experience is based. Will the ethics of egalitarian participation, conscious experimentation, critical inquiry and procedural transparency, which have developed in art practice since the 1960s, be allowed through the doors of the laboratories that are busily producing tomorrow’s aesthetic experience? Or will a quiet transfer of competencies take place, marginalizing the artists and critics and leaving the new aesthetic enviroments to develop without any troubling questions as to the kinds of subjectivity they foster?

Today, a similar sense of mystery hovers over these philosophical questions and over the future use of facilities like EMPAC. Speculation breeds speculation, as financial capital translates into huge new art centers up and down the Hudson River. All these changes have great cultural potential. The unfortunate thing is that their destinies by default are all too predictable. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, the United States has evolved along an almost uninterrupted path toward the formation of a kind of overclass, benefitting both from the tremendous increases in upper-level corporate salaries and the seemingly infinite possibilities for profit on the financial markets. Universities have followed this same path, vying for state and corporate research grants and above all, currying donations from the billionaires, in the hope of generating endowments that will allow them to compete with their distant peers on the transnational knowledge-production circuit. But these developments have been paralleled all too clearly by the impoverishment of the less-advantaged classes, the rise of geopolitical tensions in the struggle over scarce resources, and the specter of ecological collapse, long denied but now pressing upon us with tangible urgency. The subjects of the new global wealth-production regime are trained to be highly competitive, individualistic and above all, blind to the impressive accumulation of social and ecological problems, deaf to the critical voices asking for a change of trajectory.

The question for society in general is whether we want our educational structures, and our aesthetic institutions in particular, to go on fostering this paradoxical blindness, which predominates when the minds and the senses of both producers and consumers are focused exclusively on the glittering spectacles of technoscientific progress. And the question for artists, critics and university art departments is whether we can find the expressive means and the critical discourses to intervene once again, and to bring a new ethics of equality, experimentation, inquiry and transparency onto the stages and into the black boxes where the aesthetics of tomorrow is taking form. To do this requires a precise and far-ranging awareness of what’s happening at the cutting edges of social change, where the new technological environments are invented and installed in daily experience. But it also requires a capacity to confront the managerial techniques, the economic rationalities and the political discourses that keep us on a development path calibrated to the needs of the few and the powerful. In this effort, art can’t go it alone. All the disciplines and sectors concerned with the forms of contemporary society have to find ways of addressing each other and formulating mutually reinforcing agendas. We have to find ways to contribute to a wider debate about the shapes of the future.

Benjamin Geer (photographed with a friend in Cairo) is a computer hacker and Indymedia enthusiast who decided the only way to really take part in a progressive world politics was to learn other languages — really “other” ones, like Arabic. He is also part of the edu-factory dialogue. Here is one of his most incisive contributions on the notion of autonomy.

On 10/02/2008, an edu-factory participant wrote:
> On knowledge production – well it has a certain range of meanings in
> the current world – tied up with certain notions of value etc…

If you want to talk about academic work as a social phenomenon, and
about how it could become more autonomous, I think you absolutely need
a sociology of knowledge production, one that deliberately breaks with
everyday understandings of academia. Otherwise you’ll fall into the
trap of taking those understandings for granted, and reproducing the
very problems you want to solve. You and I, who are part of academia,
need a reflexive critical understanding of what we are doing (and
could or should be doing) when we produce papers, talks, or messages
on this mailing list. Moreover, we need a shared language for talking
about what we’re doing.

I like Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of intellectuals and academia. The
intellectual field is an arena of power relations and conflict, in
which people occupy hierarchical positions. Those positions are
defined by the possession of cultural capital (e.g. knowledge that is
rewarded with diplomas and recognition) and symbolic capital (the
ability to be seen as the disinterested representative of a legitimate
principle). With symbolic capital comes symbolic power, the ability
to do symbolic violence, e.g. to excommunicate others. These forms of
capital are not reducible to economic capital, but they can be
converted into economic capital and vice versa, at the expense of
labour. Different sub-groups of intellectuals compete with each other
to change the rules of the field in their own favour, by making
different types of cultural capital appear more legitimate. The more
cultural capital you’re required to have in order to participate in
the field, the more autonomous the field is from the larger field of
power. A relatively autonomous field is not one in which the
participants are disinterested; that would be impossible. Rather, a
relatively autonomous field is one in which you can’t simply pay cash
to have your article published in the most prestigious journal;
instead, you can advance your interests only by convincing your peers
that your ideas solve problems that they care about, and you can do
this only if you possess enough of the cultural capital that is
recognised as legitimate within the field. That’s why autonomy is a
prerequisite for scientific revolutions and for critical attacks on
economic and political power.

> But it is worth asking what is/why thought,? what is/why knowledge?
> in the context of an autonomous uni.

I think we need to ask: how can we increase the autonomy of the
intellectual field? How can an “autonomous university” be made more
autonomous than any ordinary university? How will the legitimacy of
cultural capital be recognised? In an ordinary university, it’s
recognised by acts of consecration such as the granting of diplomas
and the writing of letters of recommendation, and it requires the
physical presence of the student and (in many countries) the paying of
university fees. The intellectual labour performed by the student
transforms economic capital in the form of fees, plus whatever
cultural capital the student acquired previously, into the specific
form of cultural capital recognised in academia.

This was my reason for bringing up free software a while ago. If you
follow developments on the Linux kernel development mailing list, as I
used to do, you notice that the participants in Linux kernel
development are geographically widely dispersed. There are no fees
for participation; anyone can submit a patch. The economic barrier to
entry (the cost of a cheap second-hand computer and an Internet
connection) is lower than university fees in many countries, but a
high level of cultural capital is required (the technical knowledge
needed for solving problems in operating system kernel development).
There is a clear hierarchy of roles, in which each subsystem has a
“maintainer” (i.e. manager), and Linus Torvalds oversees the
maintainers, acting mainly as an arbitrator in conflicts. Developers
improve their positions in the field by getting their patches accepted
(which is analogous to academics getting their articles published),
and this often involves prevailing in disagreements with other
developers who have opposing views. The maintainers act as judges in
these conflicts, but it is in their interest to choose solutions that
have a broad consensus in order to maximise the participation of
skilled developers. The maintainers themselves are chosen from among
the most successful participants.

The field of Linux kernel development looks very autonomous to me. A
few years ago, I watched as IBM, one of the biggest companies in the
computer industry, spent what must have been considerable funds to
develop a much-needed overhaul of a key Linux subsystem (POSIX
threads). Some developers strongly objected to IBM’s approach, and
Ulrich Drepper, an employee of Red Hat (a much smaller company),
developed a different overhaul of the same subsystem, solving the same
problems in a way that raised fewer objections. When it became clear
that Drepper’s approach was winning the argument, IBM politely
acknowledged defeat and abandoned their project:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030608022055/www-124.ibm.com/pthreads/docs/announcement

So when we talk about an autonomous university, I think it means:

1. Low economic barriers to participation. This means not only that
there are no entrance fees, but that you can participate wherever you
are in the world, without having to cross political borders or be
lucky enough to live in a rich country.

2. High barriers to participation in the form of cultural capital.

3. A system of advancement in which higher positions are assigned to
those who are most successful at convincing their peers of the
usefulness of their ideas.

> (Diversity refers to the grammars, form etc not to the content.

I think the concept of “diversity” tends to reject certain criteria of
inclusion and exclusion, the better to mask the reality and power of
other criteria. There is no such thing as unlimited diversity,
unlimited inclusion. The question is, what criteria do you want?
Different grammars can coexist, but what relationships should exist
between them? Specifically, what social practices will mediate
between them and maintain those relationships?

> ( but it began to get very wordy and
> I already think I talk too much)

On the contrary, I think we need more specifics.

–
Benjamin Geer
Postgraduate student
Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

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Is the university in ruins, as Bill Readings said ten years ago? Or is it in chains, as Giroux says today? These are two basic books for understanding the contemporary university. They explore the history, philosophy, economics and politics of what used to be called “higher education” — before the process of becoming a knowledgeable member of society turned into yet another vector of the flexibilization, corporatization and militarization that is currently plaguing the United States.

One thing is certain: if there is to be any fundamental transformation of the so-called “knowledge societies” and of the people who inhabit them, it will have to come at least in part from the laboratories, libraries, studios and public debates of the institutions of knowledge production. Never in the past did these institutions play such a central role in shaping society, through streams of innovation that are almost immediately turned into technologies, organizational forms, landscapes of belief and behavior. And never before did universities have such a great responsibility to innovate for the better, in a world that is now faced with major crises. In the United States in particular we are at a crossroads:

The Project for a New American University has been founded out of a sense of responsibility and urgency. The United States has undergone staggering changes over the last thirty years. The military has ballooned out of control, super-privileged elites have sought further advantages by every available means while the middle classes crumble into a world of temps jobs and uncertain health and retirement conditions, yet are still invited to consider themsleves lucky with regard to the growing ranks of the poor and the the excluded. The ecological bill, deferred, exported and restructured like the national debt, has now come up for payment, which cannot be effected by simply printing more dollars or issuing more Treasury bonds. The US needs a process of sweeping change and renewal, which can only begin with a serious assessment of the social forms elaborated over the last 30 years, since the last great political-economic crisis in the 1970s. Who can perform such an assessment and subject it to public debate? Who can imagine a way out of the desperate situation into which the country has fallen – and who can move from imagination to reality?

The neoconservatives launched their Project for a New American Century in the 1990s. We can clearly see what disastrous effects it has had since then. Their project was based on a marshaling of elite visions, whose gaping blind-spots have proven to be mutually reinforcing. What we need to the contrary is a bottom-up process of frank investigation and open debate, to overcome the multiple crises that oligarchical leadership has unleashed on society. The Project for a New American University is not an interest group, a lobby, an old-boys club or a conspiracy. It is not a spoof or a hoax or another exercise in fruitless irony. It is an ethical principle applied to the institutions of learning and of knowledge production, and to their use value not only for a nation, but for a world society beyond all borders.

OF THE RESEARCH TRIANGLE

Entry to IBM plant, RTP North Carolina

Corporatisation, Flexibilisation
and Militarisation in the Creative Industries

We’ve heard a lot in recent years from urbanists and economic planners about the ‘creative city’, the ‘creative class’ and the ‘creative industries’. To compare facts with fictions, I decided to take a little tour of one of the urban areas that have been specially designed to put the creativity into industry.

The Research Triangle is an unusually wealthy, unusually brainy metropolitan region of North Carolina, centred around the university towns of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, and home to about one-and-a-half million people. It owes its name and fame to the establishment in the late 1950s of a state-funded science park, the Research Triangle Park, which is a woodsy retreat for the R&D labs of giant transnational corporations. ‘Where the minds of the world meet’ is the RTP motto.

Long before Silicon Valley or even Northern Italy, Research Triangle Park was the template for the creative industries. At the time, the phrase would have evoked men and women in white coats with test tubes in their hands, bringing you a better tomorrow with chemicals, plastics, nuclear radiation and colour TV, all beneath the umbrella of the US government and its Cold War agendas. The RTP project can easily appear as its own caricature, like other relics of the fifties. But is the present-day picture really that different? As our tour unfolds, we’re going to see that far more intricate private-public partnerships in the universities have taken up where the old-style science park left off, boosting employment and productivity and continually advertising the potential to do more, with the result that the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill technopolis is now being touted as a model for the emerging knowledge dumps of Europe. The question for everyone living downstream of the ‘Triangle model’ is whether we want to throw our minds away in the restricted space of corporatisation, flexibilisation and militarisation – the triple dead-end of the neoliberal knowledge economy.

Entropy and its Discontents

To raise a few doubts, I’m going to try something between thick geographical description and allegorical landscape. The approach has an illustrious predecessor. Some forty years ago and a few hundred miles to the north, the artist Robert Smithson proposed ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’. He was looking not at majestic beaux-arts sculptures but at freeway projects, or what he thought of as involuntary earthworks: ‘the Bridge Monument’, ‘the Great Pipe Monument’, ‘the Monument with Pontoons’, etc. Smithson saw these infrastructure projects as ruins in reverse: ‘This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built’. [1] Coming of age in the era of peak production and planned obsolescence, Smithson was fascinated with the dark side of the American dream, with what he conceived as the entropic nature of the industrial monuments. Their very construction seemed imbued with an invisible dissolution and decay, a hidden destiny of collapse and disorder, which he brought out graphically in the black-and-white snapshots that illustrate his essay.

The monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, seen by Robert Smithson in 1967

The monuments of the Research Triangle today (click for larger image)

Ours is a more optimistic age. The new monuments of the Research Triangle appear in bright digital colour, like projected images, or life-sized advertisements for someone else’s utopia. As you glide by them in your air-conditioned American car – from the GlaxoSmithKline building and the National Centre for the Humanities at Research Triangle Park, to the Nasher Museum on the Duke University campus, the Lucky Strike Water Tower at the American Tobacco Historic District in Durham, or even the the brand-new County Jail right next door – what’s striking is that here in the South, in cities like Durham or Raleigh with historically important black communities, everything that looks the slightest bit monumental tends toward an increasingly pure, clinical white. Maybe this shade of ‘laboratory white’ signifies a different type of entropic monument, beyond the limits of thermodynamics with its simple laws of energetic decay. And since the knowledge-based economy – with its emphasis on superstructure, not infrastructure – requires such extraordinary rates of data transmission, maybe this new entropy is of the kind that telecommunications engineer Claude Shannon famously ascribed to information.

Shannon is the founder of the ‘mathematical theory of communication’. Recall that for him, ‘meaning’ is irrelevant: all that matters is the quantity of information, the ratio of signal to noise. More signal, less decay, less disorder – less entropy in the usual sense of the word. [2] Shannon’s ideal is maximum order, perfect transmission, i.e. negentropy, which literally means entropy in reverse. Now, negative entropy is held by modern science to be the characteristic of life, of growth. Which obviously has its economic connotations – in biotech for instance, where everyone constantly predicts the next great financial bonanza. [3] The Research Triangle is banking heavily on biotech, as we shall see. Still there comes a point when you have to ask the question: where does all this knowledge-driven growth really lead? When the entire spectrum of human concerns, from knowledge and creativity to democracy, social justice and ecological sustainability, is subsumed under the imperative of economic expansion, then the absolute purity of the informational signal becomes indistinguishable from noise.

In the knowledge-based economy, growth just cranks up the volume of white noise. This is the most basic idea I’m going to offer, inseparable from the pixellated images of the Triangle monuments. The ever-expanding range of digital choice – starting from the 0/1 alternative which is the essence of information – finally culminates in a meaningless blur.

Surface Illusions

Let’s begin our tour of the negentropic monuments like any good tourist would, with the new UED or ‘urban entertainment destination’ of the American Tobacco Historic District in Durham, right across the street from the County Jail. Once a factory for poison products, now a veritable leisure campus, still unfinished but already in full swing, it conforms in every way to Richard Florida’s descriptions of successful urban theme parks for the creative class, combining luxurious consumption environments with chic professional interiors, everywhere marked by the presence of art and design. Like any prosumer paradise, it calls out to the intellectual side of you, it offers you informative lectures accompanied with lunch or drinks, it includes an extension of Duke University, and mingles PR firms with perky restaurant ideas – so you can do your corporate duty while having some innocent fun, or vice versa. In short, it’s a perfect architecture for what I call ‘the flexible personality’. [4]

It’s fascinating to go into such a place as it is being built, to see the underside of the façade, the material end of the immaterial labour, and then to follow the workers outside to the ‘ordinary’ city, which now appears as an immense reserve of nostalgia and available space, ripe for gentrification. For your eyes only, every dilapidated building, every vacant lot, can be a Disney-in-waiting, just as the ruined American Tobacco factory once was. The whole seduction of the postmodern lies in its capacity to transform entire urban environments into 3-D images. Your pupils become the cinematic lens, reshaping everything through your own free experience. But back at the Historic District, paradox awaits: because this narcissistic mirror is all under copyright, and if you take out your camera to fulfil your artistic aspirations, you’ll be rapidly hailed by a security guard and required to sign a contract restricting any use of the images.

One could no doubt explore the ways that the exercise of copyrighted creativity gradually turns the open space of experience into a labyrinth of obligation, constraint and submission, subverted but also reinforced by the clandestine pleasures of immaterial piracy. It’s a perversely gratifying sort of game, with which American academics will be all too familiar. This would be perfect material for yet another exercise in what the literati like to call ‘theory’ – after all, we’re at Duke, the stomping grounds of Fred Jameson, who wrote the definitive post-Marxist book on postmodernism. [5] But maybe that would be a bit too much local colour.

What I really think is that in the Triangle all creation of images, and probably every activity subject to copyright, functions primarily as advertising for the region, laying a seductive gloss over a more fundamental vector of wealth production which arises from the patenting of technological inventions. Between the two, copyrighting and patenting, there is a functional division of what has been called ‘immaterial labour’. That is, the creation of images still helps you to forget what’s really going on – even if today, in the new version of the spectacle society, it will as often as not be yourself doing the creating. And so it might be possible to say, in a very general vein, that there can be no critical approach to the creative industries without a dissolution of the commodity veil that both conceals and reinforces the relation between copyrighted image and patented technology.

But this kind of ultra-Leftist pronouncement is ultimately void without an examination of concrete situations, which always evolve in time, following their intrinsic trajectories. So now we’re gonna have to put some history in our postmodern geography.

Back to the Future

Research Triangle Park, or RTP, is a separated, isolated space designed specifically for patent production. It was officially founded in 1959 as a non-profit foundation, charged with developing, managing and gradually selling off a strip of unincorporated land four kilometres wide and fifteen kilometres long, close to the airport, well served by freeways and theoretically just a twenty-minute drive from all the major universities of the metropolitan area. This is the place that brought you Astroturf and the Universal Product Code – but also 3-D ultrasound technology and AZT, the Aids treatment.

Initially it was conceived as a private venture, promoted by corporate officers of Wachovia bank and a local building contractor with the benevolent support of the governor’s office, Duke University and the University of North Carolina. [6] The loftier goals were to stem the tide of unemployment in a state dominated by low-wage manufacturing and small-scale agriculture, and to halt the brain drain of educated youth. However, its backers soon realised that only clear commitments from the state and the universities would give corporations the confidence to locate their labs in a relatively unknown area of the American South. Public money was therefore raised for the Foundation, and the non-profit Research Triangle Institute (RTI) was installed alongside it, to perform contract research for government, business and industry. The aim of RTI was to spark interest in the park from social-science faculty who might like to try their hand at the messy practicalities of governance, while at the same time setting the example of a functioning business, in the hopes of attracting private investors. IBM led the way, with the decision to build a 600,000 square-foot research facility in 1965. Today there are some 137 corporate landowners in the park. In addition to IBM, residents include Nortel Networks, GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, BASF, Eisai, Biogen, Credit Suisse and Syngenta, as well as a host of federal agencies. With its nearly fifty-year history, RTP claims to be the premier science park in the world.

What you see on the tour is forest, parking lots, curving driveways, stop signs, heterogeneous buildings and omnipresent warnings prohibiting photography – this time for reasons of corporate secrecy. The architecture has a boxy, outdated look, recalling the shoddy modernist designs and Formica interiors of the postwar era. There is no housing anywhere on the grounds, as the whole point was to avoid incorporation into a municipality, and thus be able to offer tax-free status to the businesses. The original guidelines called for no industrial production, but these were eased to permit ‘approximately 20%’ manufacturing activity – a figure which no one suspects the sprawling IBM plant of having ever respected. Still the mainstay of the park is scientific innovation, recognised from the 1950s onward as the major driver of advanced economies. The sylvan landscaping, vast green lawns and endless jogging trails evoke the Apollonian imaginary of research in the fifties and sixties.

A building with the intriguing inscription of ‘Cape Fear’ – the name of a North Carolina river – revealed nothing of any particular interest. Nonetheless, fear has a certain tacit currency at the RTP Foundation these days. A graph entitled ‘Expected Results’, distributed to visitors, shows the sharpest-ever decline in jobs in the park since 2001, as well as a pronounced flattening in the curve of R&D firms moving in. While biotech and pharmaceutical companies remain strong, IBM has sold its manufacturing to the Chinese firm Lenovo, Nortel remains mired in the scandals of the new-economy bubble and Cisco has seriously cut back operations. The major upswing shown for the next six years, in dark black, is entirely hypothetical.

A regional report, entitled ‘Staying on Top’, notes further job loss in the rest of the Triangle area. [7] Yet another one analyses critical weaknesses with respect to comparable regions in the US: failure to meet the needs of start-up companies, less opportunities for social interaction, a lower level of popular brand-name recognition, an absence of networking and awareness-raising mechanisms to encourage the creation of spin-offs. [8] To that can be added the transport crisis: freeway bottlenecks at quitting time, when 40,000 employees all simultaneously get behind the wheel.

To be sure, the last few open plots in the south of the park have recently been sold to massive financial institutions such as Fidelity and Crédit Suisse, looking to install backup facilities in the woods, in case New York is ever bombed again. But a bunker mentality is hardly a key resource for the overwhelming priority that now obsesses corporate execs: namely, achieving the highest possible rank in global competitiveness. The hope seems to be that solutions will come from elsewhere.

Great Expectations

Don’t forget you’re still on tour. Take the time for a leisurely stroll around the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: admire the tree-covered grounds, the stately classical buildings. A blue banner stretched between the columns of the School of Information and Library Science proudly reads: ‘Ranked 1st in the Nation by U.S. News and World Report’. Make no mistake, that ranking is all-important. A little further on you’ll find what students call ‘the Pit’: a sunken plaza reserved for democratic expression, where a volunteer sandwich man gesticulates and vociferates, his personal billboard reading ‘Trust Jesus, Fear God’. The link between an ostentatious quest for the highest economic rank and an intimate desire for salvation was revealed long ago by Max Weber. [9] It has found an extraordinary new field of expression in neoconservative America, where public mores were decisively influenced in the 1990s by religiously oriented technophiles such as George Gilder. [10] All this has had its consequences on education. The real ‘ruin in reverse’ in the USA today is the university, and the minds it manufactures. The campus is the ultimate negentropic monument – the key resource on which the entire Triangle concept was based.

The effort to restructure the educational system for a vastly more intensive production of patented technologies dates from the late 1970s, when US corporations were perceived as losing technological leadership to Japan. The problem, according to sociologists Walter Powell and Jason Owen-Smith, was that at the cutting edges of industrial development, ‘research breakthroughs were distributed so broadly across both disciplines and institutions that no single firm had the necessary capabilities to keep pace’. [11] The solution has been to engineer a fusion between corporate appetites for technical innovation and the university’s capacity to span the most diverse domains of fundamental research – often at enormous capital expense, paid for by the public.

Two things were required for the transition from in-park secrecy to open cooperation between state, corporations and civil society. The first was a way to keep the technologies acquired functionally private, reserved for exploitation by a single licensee. The patenting of material formerly in the public domain accomplishes this, with worldwide profits, thanks to the extension of intellectual property treaties under the WTO. The second thing was a maximum of social legitimacy, a pure and unquestionable ideology of direct benefits for everyone, to maintain an unruffled equilibrium among all the minds that are destined to meet, even those still tempted to believe in utopias of technological progress for the whole planet. This could be provided by the touchy-feely side of the new technologies, or what are now called ‘the creative industries’. Yet if you look around the world, what mets your eyes is really an updated version of classical imperialism, where intellectual property laws and IMF-guaranteed loans are used to extract profits from a global ‘South of the Border’. Is it too much to speak of a white ideology?

What gets lost, in the meeting of minds under the aegis of a search for excellence, is exactly that sense of utopian separation and critical reserve that campus architecture – and the whole concept of the modern university – was designed to foster. The appearance of religiously backed neoconservativism as the major US political actor in the post-bubble era, with its continuous injunction to ‘fear God’, has served above all as a distraction from the psychic consequences of the vast social overhaul carried out by neoliberal policy over the past thirty years, spurred on by a more basic narcissistic fear of competition from a distant, abstract other – no longer Japan, but now the strangely Americanized clone of communist neoliberal China.

Intellectual Incubators

The money’s the thing, where you’ll catch the conscience of the postmodern king. The same goes for educational reform as for genetic engineering. The archaeology of the public university’s ruin goes way back to the invention of the Cohen-Boyer gene-splicing technique in 1973, and its privatisation by Stanford’s patent administrator, Niels Reimers. A significant event because it involved not an application but a primary research technique. And even more because of the enormous profits it netted: some $300 million in the 17 years before the patent’s expiration. [12] This is the figure that made the University Patent Office inevitable.

The privatisation of research formerly held in the public domain has been a long process, whose major phases have only recently been retraced. But there is a landmark piece of legislation in this story, something like the genetic code of the corporate university: the Bayh-Dole act of 1980. [13] Passed in a context of rising international competition and declining federal funding for education, it served to codify the increasingly prevalent practice of patenting and commercialising publicly funded research. Exclusive licensing of inventions would be legal, even encouraged; and the inventors would be allowed and even required to take a cut of the profits. The keyword here is technology transfer, or the process of moving ideas as quickly as possible from laboratory to industry. This transfer has spawned two new identities: the professor as small-time entrepreneur, and the university as big-time business.

A glance at one of the University of North Carolina websites reveals the basic procedure: ‘The Office of Technology Development (OTD) manages inventions resulting from research conducted at UNC-Chapel Hill. OTD evaluates and markets UNC technologies, obtains intellectual property protection where appropriate, and licenses these technologies to industry. OTD also assists faculty in obtaining research support from corporate sponsors. OTD is dedicated to serving its faculty and helping corporations gain access to UNC’s technological resources. This process works best when companies first identify specific areas of scientific interest, OTD can then bring inventions to a company’s attention which specifically match those areas of interest. We invite companies to get to know us and hope you will think of us as a guide to the technology and collaborative opportunities available at UNC-Chapel Hill.’ [14]

In short, the university itself now takes charge, not only of the mechanics of licensing, but also of the functions of what is known in business circles as an ‘incubator’, providing support to fledging businesses in the start-up phase before they attain commercial success – or, more commonly, before they’re snapped up by a major corporation.

To do all this has required a change in the institutional nexus that guides the activity of scientists, but also a deep-running change in what Michel Foucault theorised as ‘governmentality’, i.e. the underlying logic or common sense that structures individual modes of self-evaluation, of public expression, of relation to others and to the future. [15] Nigel Thrift catches this imbrication of policy and individual subjectivity very well, in his book Knowing Capitalism: ‘Nearly all western states nowadays subscribe to a rhetoric and metric of modernisation based on fashioning a citizen who can become an actively seeking factor of production…. And that rhetoric, in turn, has hinged on a few key management tropes – globalisation, knowledge, learning, network, flexibility, information technology, urgency – which are meant to come together in a new kind of self-willed subject whose industry will boost the powers of the state to compete’. [16] The disinterested university becomes the active incubator of homo economicus.

In the case of a teaching school like UNC Chapel Hill, the payoff may appear slim: a measly $2 million in 2005, with a peak of around $4 million in 2004, sums still dwarfed by federal and state contributions. Consider, however, how far the process of corporatisation has gone in nearby Duke University, an elite private school which boasts the most romantic faux-Gothic architecture in the region. Duke is currently on a building spree, thanks to the $2.3 billion it raised in an eight-year campaign; it leads all other American universities in industry funding for R&D, obtaining approximately a quarter of its research budget from corporate sponsorship ($135 million in 2005). [17] What’s more, it is now partnering with Singapore on a seven-year, $350 million project to install a new graduate medical school in the Asian city-state, ‘as part of a national strategy [for Singapore] to become a leading centre for medical research and education’. ‘They told us, you hire the faculty, you admit the students, but we’ll build it and give you total control’, says a Duke spokesman. ‘It’s a very cool deal’. [18]

Little wonder that the theoretical infinity of biological growth – negative entropy – has fascinated corporate capital for the last ten years. Given the way that American universities such as Duke are now run – as incubators – deals like this could proliferate into the greatest exportation of governance that the world has ever seen. Nigel Thrift lists no less than fourteen universities – including one each from France, Holland, Germany, Sweden and India – which have agreed to similar contracts with Singapore (even if one, John Hopkins University, has since proved unable to uphold its end of the bargain). Thrift describes the strategy of the Singapore Economic Development Board as consisting in: ‘the creation of a “world-class” education sector which would import “foreign talent”, both to expose Singaporean educational institutions to competition (thereby forcing them to upgrade), and also to produce a diverse global education hub attractive to students from around the Asia-Pacific region. In theory this cluster of educational institutions would produce and disseminate knowledge at a range of scales, supporting local and foreign firms in Singapore, state institutions in Singapore, and firms and states in the South East, East and South Asian regions’. [19] The big prize here is the China market, followed by India. The question is apparently not whether Asians will get American-style neoliberal governmentality, but instead, whether they will get it directly, or through a Singaporean relay.

In any case, there is now a huge market for the education of the flexible knowledge-worker. Such an education is an export product for its chief supplier, the United States, with a profitable role left for all kinds of intermediaries. One could make similar remarks about the role of Britain – the great promoter of the creative industries – as a major relay in the transmission of ‘white noise’ from the USA to Europe.

The Final Frontier

Meanwhile, back in the metropolitan region where so many basic tenets of contemporary societal planning were born, the problems that confronted the 1950s-vintage RTP science park are well on their way to being solved. The driving force this time appears most nakedly at the third corner of the Triangle, North Carolina State University at Raleigh. NCSU Raleigh is in the process of executing a full-fledged vision of the future: the Centennial Campus, a perfectly integrated private-public partnership, explicitly described as a ‘knowledge enterprise zone’, making the best of all corporate, governmental, leisure and academic worlds. Every lesson from the long history of neoliberal planning, including the fluffier ones more recently offered by Richard Florida, seems to have been applied. I quote from the project description: ‘This “technopolis” consists of multi-disciplinary R&D neighbourhoods, with university, corporate, and government facilities intertwined. A middle school, residential housing, executive conference centre and hotel, golf course, town centre and recreational amenities will weave the campus into a true interactive community…. The unique master plan for this environmentally sensitive, mixed-use, academic village responds to the professional, educational and recreational needs of the University’s faculty, staff and student body, as well as those of corporate and government affiliates whose presence on Centennial Campus adds to its vigour and effectiveness’. [20]

No longer an isolated, secluded activity, R&D is now proposed as a whole way of life, able to extract the full spectrum of value from every creative person engaged in it. It seems that the final frontier of knowledge-based capitalism – or the last natural reserve of energy to be exploited by the state and its corporations – is you, your body, your intelligence, your imagination. The question is, what will you be used for? Some inkling of the innovative possibilities that lie in wait at Centennial Campus can be gained from the first completed facilities: not one but two Biosafety Level 3 laboratories, built with federal subsidies as part of an effort to increase America’s readiness in the ever more likely event of bioterrorism. [21] You guessed it, the growth market is potentially tremendous. It’s worth noting that this effort also serves to bail out the failing biotech industry, which US economic planners have slated to replace networked computer technologies as the new benchmark of technological superiority on the world market. Indeed, Defence Department funding is an essential piece of the puzzle. [22] The ‘third leg’ of the triangle that defines the meeting place of minds in the knowledge-based economy is militarisation, which alone can provide the massive influx of subsidies on which private-public partnerships depend. But the question of whether this kind of military-driven economic growth is viable, in the face of rising hostility abroad and deepening inequality at home, does not seem to get asked in the US anymore.

While waiting to judge the lifesaving capacities of NCSU Raleigh’s unfinished biomedical campus, we can get a whiff of the creative-industrial future from a news item on the NCSU Engineering website: ‘Sponsored by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Grand Challenge competition was created to answer a congressional mandate to convert one-third of military vehicles to driverless, computer-driven mode by 2015′. [23] This is a nationwide program, conceived to mobilise an entire population, from amateur computer geeks and small-town racing aficionados to corporate project teams and university engineering labs. The Raleigh campus has been thoroughly hooked in. Already the road tests of a lushly designed and specially modified Lotus Elise sports car are generating enormous excitement, at least if you believe the PR campaign. But what this kind of remote-controlled creativity conceals is a deepening militarisation of society, heralding not only the advent of robotised battles in foreign countries (the only way to escape the shortfalls of a mercenary army), but also an increasing regimentation of life on local streets. As the rhetoric continues: ‘The technology that will guide the Elise through city streets may one day revolutionise not only the way the military performs missions but also the way that commuters drive to work each day’. In other words, someday the steering wheel of your car may be connected to a centralised computer, in the name of rush-hour efficiency. But by that point, what else will be hooked in? The silver lining is that such an invention would finally solve the bedevilling RTP traffic problems, and allow the would-be visionaries of North Carolina to make it back in less than twenty minutes to the Research Triangle Institute – which as early as March of 2003 had won its largest-ever contract, worth over $400 million dollars, for the redesign of local governments in the fledgling democracy of Iraq. [24]

So our tour comes full circle, back to its point of origin, just when the illusions of the creative industries finally come to coincide with the meaningless economy of war. And it all works so smoothly, so perfectly. Who knows? With the help of defence, academic and corporate contracts, along with a dash of aesthetics and a few computer-piloted automobiles, the declining science park might still contribute to a future World Government. Unless some more radically creative class finds the way to disconnect the dots of this hell machine.

click the crystal ball to peer into the future

Epilogue

These reflections were inspired by an in-depth introduction to the Triangle region, offered generously by the 3Cs Counter-Cartography Collective at UNC Chapel Hill. 3Cs is about permeability and difference: students, professors, community members, political groups, distant interlocutors; labour, leisure, professionalism, amateurism, discipline, organising, satire, statistics, subversion… They’ve created a ‘disorientation guide‘ to the school, with a definition of precarious labour on the back, and a cartographic image stating that the university is both a ‘functioning body’ and ‘a factory producing your world’. [25] It’s my belief that an extended network of such personal-political partnerships could throw the ruined future of the world-factory into reverse, by dissolving the surface images and uncovering the triple program of corporatisation, flexibilisation and militarisation that increasingly defines the shapes and destinies of the knowledge-based economy. But to do so means establishing priorities that aren’t fixed by an ideal of unsustainable and ultimately meaningless economic growth, and that aren’t pictured through the seductive lens of PR and advertising. To do so, in other words, requires a kind of revolution.

The public universities – not only in the US, but everywhere – are the places to begin imagining an entirely different future, a turn away from war and ecological collapse. And if it’s impossible to use them for anything but intellectual property production and self-fetishization, then it’s time to start up free ones, where there’s some room to think among the debris of the future. Every step through the postmodern mirror offers our still-functioning bodies another chance to cut the signal, click off the automatic pilot, give away the dots and open our minds to other possible worlds.

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( Thanks to Claire Pentecost for the constructive critique. )

Notes

1. Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’ (1967), in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1996; p. 72.

2. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), University of Illinois Press, 1998. ‘Entropy’ is a strange word to describe the quantity of information, which is obviously ordered. Von Neumann apparently made this remark to Shannon: ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.’ Scientific American 1971 , volume 225 , page 180; cited at en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann.

3. ‘Negative entropy’ was theorized as the characteristic of life by Erwin Shrödinger, What Is Life? (1944), Cambridge University Press, 1992. Shannon entropy was identified as ‘negentropy’ by Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory (1956), New York, Academic Press, 1962. For a full discussion of the relations between information, negentropy and biotech, see Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London, Pluto Press, 2004, chaps 1 and 4.

4. Brian Holmes, ‘The Flexible Personality’, in Hieroglyphs of the Future, Zagreb, Arkzin/WHW, 2002; online at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106.

5. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1992.

6. Albert Link and John Scott, ‘The Growth of Research Triangle Park’, in Small Business Economics 20/2 (2003); at www.dartmouth.edu/~jtscott/Papers/00-22.pdf.

7. Future Cluster Competitiveness Task Force, ‘Staying on Top: Winning the Job Wars of the Future’, Research Triangle Regional Partnership, 2004, www.researchtriangle.org/uploads/Reports/StayingOnTop.pdf.

8. Research Triangle Foundation, ‘Triangle Innovation Project: Preparing for the Next 50 Years’, 2005, www.rtp.org/files/final.pdf.

9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958. [The whole book is online here.]

10. Cf. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God, New York, Doubleday, 2001, pp. 79-83.

11. Walter Powell and Jason Owen-Smith, ‘Universities and the Market for Intellectual Property in the Life Sciences’, in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 17/2, 1998, p. 257; quoted in Jennifer Washburn, University Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education, New York, Basic Books, 2005, p. 59.

12. Cf. Jennifer Washburn, University Inc., ibid. pp. 49-54; and Niels Riemers, ‘Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing and the Cohen/Boyer Cloning Patents’, interview by Sally Smith Hughes, 1997, http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt4b69n6sc&brand=calisphere.

13. Bayh-Dole act, United States Congress, 1980, www.cctec.cornell.edu/bayh-dole.html.

14. Office of Technology Development, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ‘Overview for Companies’, http://research.unc.edu/otd/industry/overview.html

15. Cf. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, 1991; and Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, Nikolas Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities of government, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

16. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, London, Sage, 2005, p. 98.

17. Ella Powers, ‘Corporate Research Support Rebounds’, Inside Higher Ed, Feb. 1, 2007, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/01/r_d.

18. Michael Wagner, ‘Duke on track with $100M Singapore medical school’, Triangle Business Journal, August 11, 2006, http://triangle.bizjournals.com/triangle/stories/2006/08/14/story9.html.

19. Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism, op. cit., p. 100.

20. ‘Vision of the Future’, Centennial Campus, http://centennial.ncsu.edu/overview/index.html.

21. ‘NC State College of Veterinary Medicine Dedicates Research Building’, Media Advisory, NC State University, April 27, 2005, http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/05_04/103.htm. Duke University also operates two Biosafety Level 3 labs, one of them installed in 2003; see http://dukenews.duke.edu/2003/10/20031003-4.html.

22. Cf. Vernon Ruttan, Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development, New York, Oxford UP, 2006. Ruttan studies the role of US military R&D in the development of ‘six general-purpose technologies: (1) interchangeable parts and mass-production, (2) military and commercial aircraft, (3) nuclear energy and electric power, (4) computers and semi-conductors, (5) the Internet, and (6) the space industries’ (p. 7). These major civilian technologies are ‘spin-offs’ from previous military research, which thus acts as a planning instrument, following the notion of the ‘permanent war economy’ advocated in 1944 by Charles Erwin Wilson (CEO of General Motors, later Secretary of Defence under Eisenhower). However, Ruttan suggests that recent military investment in biotech is a ‘spin-on’ approach, which involves ‘weaponizing’ basic discoveries made with non-military funding (pp. 178-181). Note that so-called ‘biodefence’ always involves the creation of new bioweapons, considered the only way of knowing whether there is a potential threat!

23. ‘NC State Unveils New DARPA Urban Challenge Driverless Vehicle’, NC State University News, Nov. 15, 2006, http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/2006/nov/203.html.

24. Brooke Williams, ‘Windfalls of War: Research Triangle Institute’, Center for Public Integrity, Washington D.C, http://www.public-i.org/wow/bio.aspx?act=pro&ddlC=49.

Towards a New Critique of Institutions

Gov’t Office in Baku (Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files)

The artistic frame has expanded beyond the border of the painting, beyond the perimeter of the gallery or museum. Now it encompasses the entire society, where each artistic intervention is a catalyst of awareness and a pointer toward possible change. But how does that society work, of what does it consist? To fulfill the promise of a socially transformative art, we need the research tools of extradisciplinary investigations.

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What is the logic, the need or the desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own discipline, defined by the notions of free reflexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by the gallery-magazine-museum circuit, and haunted by the memory of the normative genres, painting and sculpture?

Pop art, conceptual art, body art, performance and video each marked a rupture of the disciplinary frame, already in the 1960-70s. But one could argue that these dramatized outbursts merely imported themes, media or expressive techniques back into what Yves Klein had termed the “specialized” ambiance of the gallery or the museum, qualified by the primacy of the aesthetic and managed by the functionaries of art. Exactly such arguments were launched by Robert Smithson in his text on cultural confinement in 1972, then restated by Brian O’Doherty in his theses on the ideology of the white cube.1 They still have a lot of validity. Yet now we are confronted with a new series of outbursts, under such names as net.art, bio art, visual geography, space art and database art – to which one could add an archi-art, or art of architecture, which curiously enough has never been baptized as such, as well as a machine art that reaches all the way back to 1920s constructivism, or even a “finance art” whose birth was announced in the Casa Encendida of Madrid just last summer.

The heterogeneous character of the list immediately suggests its application to all the domains where theory and practice meet. In the artistic forms that result, one will always find remains of the old modernist tropism whereby art designates itself first of all, drawing the attention back to its own operations of expression, representation, metaphorization or deconstruction. Independently of whatever “subject” it treats, art tends to make this self-reflexivity its distinctive or identifying trait, even its raison d’être, in a gesture whose philosophical legitimacy was established by Kant. But in the kind of work I want to discuss, there is something more at stake.

We can approach it through the word that the Nettime project used to define its collective ambitions. For the artists, theorists, media activists and programmers who inhabited that mailing list – one of the important vectors of net.art in the late 1990s – it was a matter of proposing an “immanent critique” of the Internet, that is, of the technoscientific infrastructure then in the course of construction. This critique was to be carried out inside the network itself, using its languages and its technical tools and focusing on its characteristic objects, with the goal of influencing or even of directly shaping its development – but without refusing the possibilities of distribution outside this circuit.2 What’s sketched out is a two-way movement, which consists in occupying a field with a potential for shaking up society (telematics) and then radiating outward from that specialized domain, with the explicitly formulated aim of effecting change in the discipline of art (considered too formalist and narcissistic to escape its own charmed circle), in the discipline of cultural critique (considered too academic and historicist to confront the current transformations) and even in the “discipline” – if you can call it that – of leftist activism (considered too doctrinaire, too ideological to seize the occasions of the present).

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice. The word tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline; while the notion of reflexivity now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an attempt to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment. This back-and-forth movement, or rather, this transformative spiral, is the operative principle of what I will be calling extradisciplinary investigations.

The concept was forged in an attempt to go beyond a kind of double aimlessness that affects contemporary signifying practices, even a double drift, but without the revolutionary qualities that the Situationists were looking for. I’m thinking first of the inflation of interdisciplinary discourses on the academic and cultural circuits: a virtuoso combinatory system that feeds the symbolic mill of cognitive capital, acting as a kind of supplement to the endless pinwheels of finance itself (the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist is a specialist of these combinatories). Second is the state of indiscipline that is an unsought effect of the anti-authoritarian revolts of the 1960s, where the subject simply gives into the aesthetic solicitations of the market (in the neopop vein, indiscipline means endlessly repeating and remixing the flux of prefabricated commercial images). Though they aren’t the same, interdisciplinarity and indiscipline have become the two most common excuses for the neutralization of significant inquiry.3 But there is no reason to accept them.

The extradisciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations on terrains as far away from art as finance, biotech, geography, urbanism, psychiatry, the electromagnetic spectrum, etc., to bring forth on those terrains the “free play of the faculties” and the intersubjective experimentation that are characteristic of modern art, but also to try to identify, inside those same domains, the spectacular or instrumental uses so often made of the subversive liberty of aesthetic play – as the architect Eyal Weizman does in exemplary fashion, when he investigates the appropriation by the Israeli and American military of what were initially conceived as subversive architectural strategies. Weizman challenges the military on its own terrain, with his maps of security infrastructures in Israel; but what he brings back are elements for a critical examination of what used to be his exclusive discipline.4 This complex movement, which never neglects the existence of the different disciplines, but never lets itself be trapped by them either, can provide a new departure point for what used to be called institutional critique.

Histories of the Present

What has been established, retrospectively, as the “first generation” of institutional critique includes figures like Michael Asher, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers. They examined the conditioning of their own activity by the ideological and economic frames of the museum, with the goal of breaking out. They had a strong relation to the anti-institutional revolts of the 1960s and 70s, and to the accompanying philosophical critiques.5 The best way to take their specific focus on the museum is not as a self-assigned limit or a fetishization of the institution, but instead as part of a materialist praxis, lucidly aware of its context, but with wider transformatory intentions. To find out where their story leads, however, we have to look at the writing of Benjamin Buchloh and see how he framed the emergence of institutional critique.

In a text entitled “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” Buchloh quotes two key propositions by Lawrence Weiner. The first is A Square Removed from a Rug in Use, and the second, A 36”x 36” Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (both 1968). In each it is a matter of taking the most self-referential and tautological form possible – the square, whose sides each repeat and reiterate the others – and inserting it in an environment marked by the determinisms of the social world. As Buchloh writes: “Both interventions – while maintaining their structural and morphological links with formal traditions by respecting classical geometry… – inscribe themselves in the support surfaces of the institutions and/or the home which that tradition had always disavowed…. On the one hand, it dissipates the expectation of encountering the work of art only in a ’specialized’ or ‘qualified’ location…. On the other, neither one of these surfaces could ever be considered to be independent from their institutional location, since the physical inscription into each particular surface inevitably generates contextual readings…”6

Weiner’s propositions are clearly a version of immanent critique, operating flush with the discursive and material structures of the art institutions; but they are cast as a purely logical deduction from minimal and conceptual premises. They just as clearly prefigure the symbolic activism of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “anarchitecture” works, like Splitting (1973) or Window Blow-Out (1976), which confronted the gallery space with urban inequality and racial discrimination. From that departure point, a history of artistic critique could have led to contemporary forms of activism and technopolitical research, via the mobilization of artists around the AIDS epidemic in late 1980s. But the most widespread versions of 60s and 70s cultural history never took that turn. According to the subtitle of Buchloh’s famous text, the teleological movement of late-modernist art in the 1970s was heading “From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” This would mean a strictly Frankfurtian vision of the museum as an idealizing Enlightenment institution, damaged by both the bureaucratic state and the market spectacle.

Other histories could be written. At stake is the tense double-bind between the desire to transform the specialized “cell” (as Brian O’Doherty described the modernist gallery) into a mobile potential of living knowledge that can reach out into the world, and the counter-realization that everything about this specialized aesthetic space is a trap, that it has been instituted as a form of enclosure. That tension produced the incisive interventions of Michal Asher, the sledgehammer denunciations of Hans Haacke, the paradoxical displacements of Robert Smithson, or the melancholic humor and poetic fantasy of Marcel Broodthaers, whose hidden mainspring was a youthful engagement with revolutionary surrealism. The first thing is never to reduce the diversity and complexity of artists who never voluntarily joined into a movement. Another reduction comes from the obsessive focus on a specific site of presentation, the museum, whether it is mourned as a fading relic of the “bourgeois public sphere,” or exalted with a fetishizing discourse of “site specificity.” These two pitfalls lay in wait for the discourse of institutional critique, when it took explicit form in the United States in the late 80s and early 90s.

It was the period of the so-called “second generation.” Among the names most often cited are Renee Green, Christian Philipp Müller, Fred Wilson or Andrea Fraser. They pursued the systematic exploration of museological representation, examining its links to economic power and its epistemological roots in a colonial science that treats the Other like an object to be shown in a vitrine. But they added a subjectivizing turn, unimaginable without the influence of feminism and postcolonial historiography, which allowed them to recast external power hierarchies as ambivalences within the self, opening up a conflicted sensibility to the coexistence of multiple modes and vectors of representation. There is a compelling negotiation here, particularly in the work of Renee Green, between specialized discourse analysis and embodied experimentation with the human sensorium. Yet most of this work was also carried out in the form of meta-reflections on the limits of the artistic practices themselves (mock museum displays or scripted video performances), staged within institutions that were ever-more blatantly corporate – to the point where it became increasingly hard to shield the critical investigations from their own accusations, and their own often devastating conclusions.

This situation of a critical process taking itself for its object recently led Andrea Fraser to consider the artistic institution as an unsurpassable, all-defining frame, sustained through its own inwardly directed critique.7 Bourdieu’s deterministic analysis of the closure of the socio-professional fields, mingled with a deep confusion between Weber’s iron cage and Foucault’s desire “to get free of oneself,” is internalized here in a governmentality of failure, where the subject can do no more than contemplate his or her own psychic prison, with a few aesthetic luxuries in compensation.8 Unfortunately, it all adds very little to Broodthaers’ lucid testament, formulated on a single page in 1975.9 For Broodthaers, the only alternative to a guilty conscience was self-imposed blindness – not exactly a solution! Yet Fraser accepts it, by posing her argument as an attempt to “defend the very institution for which the institution of the avant-garde’s ‘self-criticism’ had created the potential: the institution of critique.”

Without any antagonistic or even agonistic relation to the status quo, and above all, without any aim to change it, what’s defended becomes little more than a masochistic variation on the self-serving “institutional theory of art” promoted by Danto, Dickie and their followers (a theory of mutual and circular recognition among members of an object-oriented milieu, misleadingly called a “world”). The loop is looped, and what had been a large-scale, complex, searching and transformational project of 60s and 70s art seems to reach a dead end, with institutional consequences of complacency, immobility, loss of autonomy, capitulation before various forms of instrumentalization…

Phase Change

The end may be logical, but some desire to go much further. The first thing is to redefine the means, the media and the aims of a possible third phase of institutional critique. The notion of transversality, developed by the practitioners of institutional analysis, helps to theorize the assemblages that link actors and resources from the art circuit to projects and experiments that don’t exhaust themselves inside it, but rather, extend elsewhere.10 These projects can no longer be unambiguously defined as art. They are based instead on a circulation between disciplines, often involving the real critical reserve of marginal or counter-cultural positions – social movements, political associations, squats, autonomous universities – which can’t be reduced to an all-embracing institution.

The projects tend to be collective, even if they also tend to flee the difficulties that collectivity involves, by operating as networks. Their inventors, who came of age in the universe of cognitive capitalism, are drawn toward complex social functions which they seize upon in all their technical detail, and in full awareness that the second nature of the world is now shaped by technology and organizational form. In almost every case it is a political engagement that gives them the desire to pursue their exacting investigations beyond the limits of an artistic or academic discipline. But their analytic processes are at the same time expressive, and for them, every complex machine is awash in affect and subjectivity. It is when these subjective and analytic sides mesh closely together, in the new productive and political contexts of communicational labor (and not just in meta-reflections staged uniquely for the museum), that one can speak of a “third phase” of institutional critique – or better, of a “phase change” in what was formerly known as the public sphere, a change which has extensively transformed the contexts and modes of cultural and intellectual production in the twenty-first century.

An issue of Multitudes, co-edited with the Transform web-journal, gives examples of this approach.11 The aim is to sketch the problematic field of an exploratory practice that is not new, but is definitely rising in urgency. Rather than offering a curatorial recipe, we wanted to cast new light on the old problems of the closure of specialized disciplines, the intellectual and affective paralysis to which it gives rise, and the alienation of any capacity for democratic decision-making that inevitably follows, particularly in a highly complex technological society. The forms of expression, public intervention and critical reflexivity that have been developed in response to such conditions can be characterized as extradisciplinary – but without fetishizing the word at the expense of the horizon it seeks to indicate.

On considering the work, and particularly the articles dealing with technopolitical issues, some will probably wonder if it might not have been interesting to evoke the name of Bruno Latour. His ambition is that of “making things public,” or more precisely, elucidating the specific encounters between complex technical objects and specific processes of decision-making (whether these are de jure or de facto political). For that, he says, one must proceed in the form of “proofs,” established as rigorously as possible, but at the same time necessarily “messy,” like the things of the world themselves.12

There is something interesting in Latour’s proving machine (even if it does tend, unmistakably, toward the academic productivism of “interdisciplinarity”). A concern for how things are shaped in the present, and a desire for constructive interference in the processes and decisions that shape them, is characteristic of those who no longer dream of an absolute outside and a total, year-zero revolution. However, it’s enough to consider the artists whom we invited to the Multitudes issue, in order to see the differences. Hard as one may try, the 1750 km Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline cannot be reduced to the “proof” of anything, even if Ursula Biemann did compress it into the ten distinct sections of the Black Sea Files. 13 Traversing Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey before it debouches in the Mediterranean, the pipeline forms the object of political decisions even while it sprawls beyond reason and imagination, engaging the whole planet in the geopolitical and ecological uncertainty of the present.

Similarly, the Paneuropean transport and communication corridors running through the former Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, filmed by the participants of the Timescapes group initiated by Angela Melitopoulos, result from the one of the most complex infrastructure-planning processes of our epoch, carried out at the transnational and transcontinental levels. Yet these precisely designed economic projects are at once inextricable from the conflicted memories of their historical precedents, and immediately delivered over to the multiplicity of their uses, which include the staging of massive, self-organized protests in conscious resistance to the manipulation of daily life by the corridor-planning process. Human beings do not necessarily want to be the living “proof” of an economic thesis, carried out from above with powerful and sophisticated instruments – including media devices that distort their images and their most intimate affects. An anonymous protester’s insistent sign, brandished in the face of the TV cameras at the demonstrations surrounding the 2003 EU summit in Thessalonica, says it all: ANY SIMILARITY TO ACTUAL PERSONS OR EVENTS IS UNINTENTIONAL.14

Art history has emerged into the present, and the critique of the conditions of representation has spilled out onto the streets. But in the same movement, the streets have taken up their place in our critiques. In the philosophical essays that we included in the Multitudes project, institution and constitution always rhyme with destitution. The specific focus on extradisciplinary artistic practices does not mean radical politics has been forgotten, far from it. Today more than ever, any constructive investigation has to raise the standards of resistance.

EU Summit in Thessalonica (Angela Melitopoulos and Timescapes, Corridor X)

Thanks to Gerald Raunig and Stefan Nowotny for their collaboration on this text and on the larger project.

Notes

1 Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement” (1972), in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1996; Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition), Berkeley, U.C. Press, 1976/1986.
2 See the introduction to the anthology ReadMe!, New York, Autonomedia, 1999. One of the best examples of immanent critique is the project “Name Space” by Paul Garrin, which aimed to rework the domain name system (DNS) which constitutes the web as a navigable space; cf. pp. 224-29.
3 Cf. Brian Holmes, “L’extradisciplinaire,” in Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Laurence Bossé (eds.), Traversées, cat. Musée ‘art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001.
4 Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls,” at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0507.
5 Cf. Stefan Nowotny, “Anti-Canonization: The Differential Knowledge of Institutional Critique,” http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/nowotny/en/#_ftn6.
6 Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990).
7 “Just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc…. if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a ‘totally administered world,’ or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves.” Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique,” in John C. Welchman (ed.), Institutional Critique and After, Zurich, JRP/Ringier, 2006.
8 Cf. Gerald Raunig, “Instituent Practices. Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0106/raunig/en.
9 Marcel Broodthaers, “To be bien pensant… or not to be. To be blind.” (1975), in October 42, “Marcel Broodthaers: Writings, Interviews, Photographs” (Fall 1987).
10 Cf. Félix Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle (1972), Paris, La Découverte, 2003.
11 See “Extradisciplinaire,” http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0507.
12 Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Karlsruhe, ZKM, 2005.
13 The video installation Black Sea Files by Ursula Biemann, done in the context of the Transcultural Geographies project, has been exhibited with the other works of that project at Kunst-Werke in Berlin, Dec. 15, 2005 – Feb. 26, 2006, then at Tapies Foundation in Barcelona, March 9 – May 6, 2007; published in Anselm Frank (ed. and curator), B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond, cat., Berlin, KW/Actar, 2005.
14 The video installation Corridor X by Angela Melitopoulos, with the work of the other members of Timescapes, has been exhibited and published in B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond, op. cit.