 |
Essay |
Virtual
Biopolitical Parliament
Davide Grassi's DemoKino (*)
Bojana Kunst
I.
Introduction
Over
the last decade, numerous reflections have dealt with the political
potentiality of cyberspace: with the direct participation it
enables, cyberspace establishes a different form of contemporary
community. Pierre Levy talks about the contemporary "virtual
agora"; he views cyberspace as a field characterized by
a different way of activity, a parallel collective intelligence
of some sort, an 'inclusive society' born online. The net enables
one to be active directly because a different field of the public
is involved: in order to enter, one is not necessarily represented
by another, but everyone can make a direct contribution to society.
With their new ways of connecting, online communities are supposed
to embody the ideals of the sixties student revolutions and
establish forms of parallel direct democracy. Levy's definition
of the virtual agora thus echoes some of the findings of the
revolutionary movements in the sixties of the twentieth century;
a direct way of activity is thereby not understood as an acclamation
of direct voice, but as a unique demand for the transfer of
the private into the public, with this transfer constantly putting
the public sphere under the question mark. The demand for the
transfer of the private into the public can be understood not
only from the perspective of private pleasure (as this, for
example, is dealt with by Kristeva), but also from the materialistic
perspective. This demand namely represents the multitude which
incessantly thwarts and contests the public sphere with its
unstoppable productivity, realized through contemporary connections
and multilayered participation. This direct participation, however,
with its numerous interactive connections, turns into a grave
threat in the science fiction novel Noir by the American author
K.W. Jeter. The word "connection" is used as a swearword,
with people cursing at each other with expressions like "connect-you,
mother-connector", "get the connect outta here".
In short, you are fucked, when connected. (1)
Soon
after the initial wave of optimism, the ideal of direct and
multiplying connections is turning out to be the worst of nightmares.
There is, of course, a variety of reasons for this disappointment,
ranging from the commercialization of both the private field
of the sixties and the cyberspace of the nineties, to paranoid
contemporaneity, where everybody can be controlled / observed
/ basically dislocated by everybody over that connection. In
my opinion, today's disappointment and pessimism are especially
generated by the emptiness of contemporary democratic procedures.
Despite the civil initiatives resulting from the utopian demands
at the end of the sixties (and included by the cyberspace of
the nineties), despite a number of the in-between communities
that have found their ambivalent ways into political space,
we can sense disappointment with the democratic ways of participation
and connecting. It has been sort of generally accepted that
today every community, regardless how parallel and different
it might be, and every initiative no matter how private in character,
gets lost in its own procedure. It thus seems that it is necessary
to profoundly rethink the manner of contemporary connecting,
and thus also the relationship between the interior and the
public, as established through various forms of political activity.
II. Virtual Agora: DemoKino
Contemporary
artistic projects can often serve as an excellent basis for
such rethinking, especially as their critical orientation can
no longer be understood only as a formation of oppositional
standpoints, a presentation of opposite contents, or a reflection
of already existing forms. Today, these kinds of projects use
the same procedures as we ourselves do in our private or public
activities; they succumb to the same bureaucratic laws and participatory
problems. Nevertheless, their gesture can still be uncivil -
they still somehow don't succumb to the strict contemporary
demarcation of territories and to the division of labour: according
to Nicolas Bourriaud, the contemporary artist is our contemporary
sophist.(2) This is why it seems to me
that the critical potentiality of these kinds of projects can
be grasped precisely through the connections and transgressions
they establish, through their performative gestures: the political
power of the project is revealed by the situation through which
it establishes itself as project.
At
this point, we will make a reflection on the pains of contemporary
political activity and contemporary connections with the help
of DemoKino, a project by the Italian-Slovenian artist Davide
Grassi (*). It consists of a series
of eight virtual sessions in the form of interactive short films:
"Eight bills are presented to the cyber-electorate in form
of a short movies that show the "pro and contra" inner
dialogues of its protagonists. By means of voting the electorate
leads the character around his home in a parliamentary kind
of way." (DemoKino, www.demokino.net)
The films depict a young man: in short dialogues (texts by the
Italian philosopher Antonio Caronia), he states his views on
eight topical contemporary ethic dilemmas: those of abortion,
cloning, genetic manipulation, gay marriages, privatization
of water sources, copyright / copyleft, euthanasia and therapeutic
cloning. Each of the virtual conferences or short films takes
place in a certain part of his apartment, with the ends of the
films determined interactively by the electorate / spectators.
At the end of each session (film), they vote for or against
the issue, with the majority of the votes determining a door
in the apartment which will lead the man to the next dilemma.
The spectators thus take stands to the issues and the man, directing
him towards the next door, which not only opens an entrance
to the next room in the apartment, but also to the next dilemma,
film and virtual session. The sequence of the stories, the man's
moving through the apartment, the private geography if his daily
routine (going to the toilet, teeth brushing, rest, web surfing,
phoning, etc.) is thus determined in a referendum-like way,
leading the man through his private abode. In general, there
are two, but not totally distinct possibilities of such "referendums":
that of virtual individuals within a virtual community, and
that of 'life' parliamentary decision-making in the cinema hall.
The
basis of DemoKino is precisely Levy's concept of the virtual
agora. With the interactive mimicry of contemporary connections,
and nearly laboratorial simulation of democratic decision-making,
DemoKino lucidly points out the symptoms of contemporary politics.
Using the interactive form in order to practically realize the
utopia of direct activity, it also demonstrates the deep problems
of this kind of activity. In other words, the project reveals
an impossible connection that characterizes contemporary political
decision-making. In our direct co-operation as interactive spectators
in DemoKino (by voting, stating our views and competing with
the majority or minority in connection with the topical ethical
issues), the majority of the votes does not only determine the
narrative and geographic course or the film, but for some time,
makes us an agreed part of a voting community. The project simulates
sessions on ethical and economic dilemmas, which we witness
on a daily basis, as well as the form of the political life
surrounding these questions. And yet, at the end of the DemoKino
project, our co-operation in this virtual agora is put under
an enormous question mark. The last of the films is namely shown
regardless of the course we have determined, and has not been
chosen by us at all. It shows a spinning head of a clown whistling
a well-known melody, with the caption saying: "What
if I tell you now that everything was pre-defined?"
When
DemoKino comes to an end and the virtual sessions are over,
it is no longer clear to what degree our direct and interactive
pleasure has been forged and simulated in advance. Wherein lies
the potentiality of our decision-making, i.e. the actuality
of our participation? Does our connection makes any sense at
all if even the most direct forms of co-operation between the
private and the public can turn into their own parodies?
III. Self-sufficiency of Procedure
Of
course, a certain degree of falsification is always part of
political activity itself; it seems, however, that DemoKino
touches on much more than this old disappointment with the essential
characteristics of politics. With the interactive participation
of the spectators, DemoKino demonstrates several paradoxes of
the topical democratic decision-making, which seems increasingly
distant nowadays from the original classical conception of politics
and political insight (phronesis), gained with public activity.
With
his internal monologic stands he takes regarding topical political
issues, Grassi's man (*) actually
embodies the alleged essence of political activity. In his reflections
on abortion, genetic technology, cloning, gay marriages, etc.,
he gives moral, ethical, philosophical, economical and personal
arguments from different viewpoints, and thus places himself
in the place of another. The interactive voting enables us spectators
to be politically active participants: i.e., to think both for
ourselves and for another at the same time. Describing his monologues,
we could employ the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt,
who deals with the fact that political thinking always presents
the opinions of others as well. This is precisely what the man
in DemoKino does - he thinks in a political way: "With
the help of imagination, yet without giving up my identity,
I should also put myself in a place in this world that is not
mine, and form my own opinion from there. The more of such viewpoints
I can consider and the better I can imagine what I would think
and feel if I were in the place of those who are there, the
better my ability of insight (phronesis) will be developed."(3)
In politics, it is mainly about the truth of facts, formed through
our basic ability of reflecting, which leads to the formation
of opinion. Only such kind of thinking is discoursive and can
connect us, i.e. enable us to personally enter the public field
of decision-making and activity. Precisely due to its basic
trait of being able to put itself in the position of another,
however, precisely because of the basic connection between the
private and the public, this kind of thinking runs a constant
risk of being totally dissolved. On the example of lie in politics,
Hannah Arendt warns us that the freedom that enables us to place
ourselves in the place of another and gain insight, can also
very quickly become a falsified freedom. Lie in politics is
indeed essential; it is in accordance with man's manner of free
activity that lie is part of political procedure. "Our
ability to lie belongs to the scarce bits of information that
prove that something like freedom actually exists. The conditions
in which we live, and are influenced by, can only be changed
because, despite all the conditionality, we are relatively free
as to them. It is precisely this freedom, however, that enables
lying, the very thing by which freedom is abused and perverted."(4)
We could say that the main freedom and problem of the phenomenology
of activity lies in the fact that, in politics, a liar has an
advantage before the veracious: "No one namely raises that
much doubt and danger in politics as a professional truth-teller;
in difference to him, a liar does not have to use such dubious
means to enforce himself politically, he has the advantage of
being in the centre of politics already. Whatever he says is
not a statement, but taking action; he namely speaks what he
is not because he wants to change what he is."(5)
It is precisely this openness and potentiality, however, that
constantly puts political activity in double danger. On the
one hand, political activity can turn into its own forgery,
and on the other hand, it tries to enforce its power by attributing
itself a direct connection with truth, which does not belong
to political activity at all because political activity itself
has a representative function. When lie becomes self-deceit
and we begin to lie to our own selves, every potentiality of
activity freezes into procedure. Public activity can thus also
destroy the fundamental play which is the most essential for
man's activity: the feeling for differentiation and orientation
between truth and lie.
As
we have seen, the fact that, in politics, a liar has an advantage
before the veracious, has always been part of man's freedom
in the history of political activity, part of his possibility
to change what he is or speak what he is not. At the same time,
however, this fact also represents the dangerous edge where
activity turns into procedure, with lie becoming self-deceit
and actually an image of constructed truth. The original phronesis
turns into self-sufficiency of political procedure, where it
is no longer possible to distinguish between truth and untruth.
Although it seems to us that DemoKino presents an ideal image
of virtual agora, where the monologues of the young man even
enable us to interactively communicate in a direct way and literally
place ourselves in the place of various arguments, we are finally
surprised by the clown's head and the doubt which lets us know
that our freedom of activity might be abused in advance. This
problem is nowadays felt as distrust of the artificial and forever
falsified democratic procedure (showing e.g. in increasing voting
apathy and the paradoxical belief that most people who still
vote nowadays are extremists). With the intrusion of modern
consultants for public relation and commercialization of political
image, lie is becoming an increasingly professionalized and
systematized political procedure. The representative force of
activity is getting lost, i.e. the theatrical situation constantly
established by activity. What is getting twisted and falsified
is the representative shift from me to another and from another
to me - with the tension between the originality and forgery
being lost.
Let
me explain now what I mean by the theatrical situation that
I mentioned above. Lie can productively insist in activity as
long as it is established as a basic tension or the state in-between,
which is similar to the status of performing in a theatre performance:
for both lie and theatre performance, it holds that the correct
way of lying is only that of the veracious. What does that mean?
In theatre, an act of direct address itself never triggers responsibility
if it happens (e.g. in very bad moments of a theatre performance,
amateur shows, political moralism); it can trigger uneasiness
at best. The responsibility and the unique jouissance of the
common communicative situation are triggered by the impossibility
of direct address, which can not be manifested or tested otherwise
as through performance. Every public address thus imposes an
essential, but also impossible responsibility: I am responsible
because immediately when someone addresses me, that is already
a forgery; it is a forgery precisely because a person can only
address me in a direct way. It is this interdependence between
the direct voice and its forgery, however, that enables us to
move not only along the lines of freedom of activity, but also
through imagination, utopias and wishes; it enables contact,
with parallel worlds and fields - it is precisely in this impossible
dependence that the open political potentiality of activity
is at work.
What
the self-sufficiency of procedure generates, however, is something
entirely different. We do not only get an increasingly formal
and flashy image of political spectacle, a PR product establishing
remote and self-reflexive procedures, but also something else
even more problematic. In its nature, self-deceit is some kind
of 'pure performance', where there is no longer a relationship
between me and the place of another, just an obsessive persisting
in a relationship that no longer exists. It is precisely this
persistence in a relationship that no longer exists that marks
many absurd 'procedural complications', e.g. the pianist scandal
in the Italian parliament, one of the references of the DemoKino
project. Pianists are the MPs who play the role of their absent
colleagues by pressing their voting buttons for them. Although
absurd at first glance, the example can reveal much more - the
degree of autonomy of the whole democratic procedure, with any
kind of responsibility and connection lost in its self-sufficiency.
In
this direction, we can also read the short film at the end of
DemoKino, when, after the whole process of voting and interactive
co-operation, there appears the clown's head with the caption:
"What if I tell you that everything was pre-defined?"
It would be short-sighted to read this bizarre image only as
a disclosure of some big Other pulling the strings from the
background - a disclosure of that primal dictatorial voice,
which initially strengthens and then swallows our voices. It
is namely not about a lever of the Other standing behind the
process and directing everything in advance, but about the fact
that the process becomes its own purpose. Similarly to Kafka's
In the Penal Colony, with the machine writing its verdicts directly
upon the body, the big Other now talks in the midst of our procedure,
precisely when our freedom is most realized. The paranoid talk
about a conspiracy is but the surface of the problematicalness
of connections and is actually still redemptive in a way, as
it still can be located. But the contemporary problem of the
question "what if I tell you that everything was pre-defined?"
lies in the fact that this question is the essence of contemporary
procedure. This question is the transparent semiotics of contemporary
political speech, where the representative speech has been frozen
into the silence of political procedure; the authoritarian origin
of lie, which has become truth, can no longer be found. What
ultimately reveals to us is theatre, with all the parts brilliantly
performed, but the perfection of the procedure no longer allows
any space for activity, regardless of all the voting buttons
pressed. When it comes to that, every potentiality of putting
oneself in the place of another has been lost. The purity of
the procedure no longer allows space for position and opposition;
one needs to take a new stand towards both agreeing and rebellion.
When this representative connection between the private and
the public, which triggers activity, is frozen in the self-sufficiency
of procedure, putting oneself in the place of another is impossible.
Now, we but co-operate, with our co-operation producing nothing
at all.
IV. Biopolitics of the interior
There
is another problem, however, that puts the contemporary political
activity in a very specific dilemma. How can it be possible
that nothing at all is produced by co-operation - and today,
at the time when questions of the private and interior are becoming
topical political issues, and when we are increasingly confronted
with the multilayered and parallel ways of co-operation? What
is the nature of the jouissance of the private today, when we
are confronted with it in the political (i.e. public) field
of activity, and why does our basic connection seem so falsified?
Here, we can once again help ourselves with DemoKino, which
not only demonstrates the paradoxes of the activity and self-sufficiency
of contemporary procedures, dealt with in the previous chapter.
Let us once again have a look at the situations from the eight
virtual sessions. In each of them, the young man ponders in
his private abode over contemporary dilemmas which touch upon
life itself, which could be private life or life of the nature
and things itself (clone rights, gay marriages, therapeutic
cloning, abortion, water sources). He offers various arguments
for and against, and ultimately it is us who decide the end
of the session by means of an interactive vote. The man of DemoKino
thus somewhat resembles the resident of Schiller's aesthetic
state, who talks to himself quietly in his room, and to the
whole of mankind when he comes out. The virtual agora thus comes
close to Schiller's ideal of the aesthetic state, which is a
realization of the will of the whole through the individual.
The individual is included into the political decision-making
by means of the interactivity of the interior and the exterior,
or, as Schiller says, "progressing with calm innocence
through the most complex of relationships and thus not having
to infringe someone else's freedom in order to enforce one's
own, nor cast his dignity aside in order to show gentleness
and grace."(6) The watching of the
man's monologues and the interactive participation of the spectators,
who move the man through his private abode with their votes,
also resembles this ideal relationship at first sight - as it
takes place with the direct participation of both the private
interior (the man of DemoKino) and the public exterior (us voters).
But Schiller knows that this kind of relationship is only aesthetic
in character; in his words, it can only be realized in the aesthetic
state: "in the aesthetic state, man shows himself to another
as an image."(7) In contemporary
terms: the ideal relationship can only be achieved through meticulously
formed and conceived images, posed in Romanticism by the rules
of the aesthetic education and nowadays understood as the procedures
of transparency and layers of representative co-operation in
decision-making.
These
kinds of procedures are not only a consequence of the complicated
phenomenology of political activity (as warned by Hannah Arend),
but also that of a problem brought by the entering of the private
interior into political decision-making. Although the meeting
of the man's inner monologue and our direct interactive co-operation
offers a seemingly ideal political situation of public activity,
it is actually far from ideal. This kind of interactivity between
the private interior and public decision-making needs to be
read from another perspective. The character's inner monologues
in Demokino, which seemingly grant us the freedom of public
decision-making on a variety of issues (no matter how private
and intimate they might be), point at a very problematic aspect
of contemporary politics. Although one of the crucial demands
of modern political activity was the entering of inner life
into public life, this kind of demand, like every decisive political
event, is actually two-faced: "the spaces, the liberties,
and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central
powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing
inscription of individuals' lives within the state order (...)".(8)
(Giorgio Agamben). The entrance of the interior into politics
thus actually offers an even more final argument for the sovereign
power, something of which the interior itself wishes to be liberated.
The man of the virtual sessions of DemoKino thus openly presents
his complex reflections and arguments regarding issues touching
upon life itself, and it is about these issues that we, by means
of direct "yes" or "no", decide with voting
buttons. What initially reveals as an "ideal" situation
of political decision-making, is precisely the opposite of activity
itself. The biologically given becomes a political issue - or
as Agamben says, politics becomes biopolitics. What emerges
is a total politization of everything (Karl Lowith), even of
seemingly neutral areas of life.(9) When
life itself becomes a political issue, it no longer has anything
to do with the essence of political activity - the insight we
get by putting ourselves in the place of another. Biopolitical
activity is not activity in terms of 'speaking what is not in
order to change what is'. Life itself namely does not have this
representative moment because it mustn't have it at all: it
is impossible to place oneself in the place of someone else's
bare life. Bare life is impossible to stage; we can only accept
and realize it, put it into practice. It is precisely these
dilemmas that are in the kernel of our political participation
nowadays; this makes our connection between the public (exterior)
and the private (interior) the more impossible, and fills us
more and more with a sort of inherent powerlessness in the contemporary
connecting. In a way, any kind of political decision-making
is thus a publicly legitimized kind of violence; it is impossible
to make decisions at all because the primal political wisdom
(phronesis) is entirely powerless in this case.
What
is left to the entering of interior into politics is thus primarily
the procedure, or more precisely, its self-sufficiency, which
today manifests itself as an illusion of direct participation
regarding various issues pertaining to our corporeality, sex,
privacy and intimacy, medicine and science. Or differently:
with the entrance of life into the arena of politics, directness
only shows itself as a strategy of political connection, as
the only straw we can grasp at; but in reality, it is just another
face of the self-sufficient procedure, which has changed into
the only truth of activity. With the entrance of life into politics,
the falsification of directness has become double: firstly,
as a procedure of co-operation, which is long self-sufficient
and has lost its necessarily playful and lying connection, and
secondly, as an illusion of placing oneself into the place of
another, since it is impossible to place oneself in the place
of someone else's bare life.
By
means of his inner monologues, in which he presents ethical,
moral, philosophical and religious arguments for and against
ethical issues, the man of DemoKino reveals the elusive edge
of contemporary politics. It is about an activity which seemingly
still has something to do with the changing of the actuality
and with constant negotiation, but is actually already far away
from the original political activity. It namely seems as if
the realization in the procedure itself and the demand for direct
access to truth have joined into a monolithic unity: "the
novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biologically
given is as such immediately political, and the political is
as such immediately biologically given".(10)
This monolithic unity is changing the field of activity, i.e.
of that freedom that places itself between truth and untruth,
between my place and that of another, that always manifests
itself through image and thus reveals its freedom - its lying
and at the same time veracious potentiality. The self-sufficiency
of procedure now becomes the only truth, but that does not happen
because lie would take on the status of truth, as is the case
e.g. in totalitarian systems, where the authority always determines
the original course of the procedure. Contemporary politics
not only faces the temptation to ultimately falsify the freedom
of placing oneself in the place of another and change it into
a spectacular forgery - in other words, to satisfy itself by
and base itself only on its own procedure. There is something
much deeper at work here: today, procedure is becoming our only
actuality, the only totality when bare life enters politics.
Procedure is becoming our only biopolitics, determining, regulating
and directing life itself.
"So - get the connect outta here"!
(*) In June 2007 Davide Grassi changed
his name in Janez Janša.
(1) The novel is discussed by Steven Shaviro in: Connected,
or what it means to live in the network society, University
of Minessota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2003
(2) Nicolas Bourriaud: Formes de vie, L'art moderne et l'invention
de soi, Denoel 1999.
(3) Hannah Arendt: Resnica in laž v politiki, Društvo Apokalipsa,
p. 73.
(4) Ibid., p. 88.
(5) Ibid., p. 88.
(6) Friedrich Schiller: O estetski vzgoji človeka, Claritas,
Študentska založba, Ljubljana, 2003, p 137
(7) Ibid., p. 134.
(8) Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer, Solvereign Power and Bare Life,
Stanford University Press, 1998, p 121.
(9) From: Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare
Life, Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 121
(10) Ibid., p. 148.
