A break-down of the code

I've been thinking about baudrillard's Requiem in relation to 9/11. His latter work on 9/11 indicates the possibility of a horrific transcendence of the code in an act of terrorism that epitomizes a new kind of symbolic exchange beyond the normalcy of the code of the reified exchange system. Here is a model of the code of exchange before I move onto how 9/11 complicates this entire structure

Capital (value exchange) Media (image/info exchange)

Products	Events (including speech or communication events)
Labor value, fetishization, reification, etc…	Prestructured models of interaction (fait divers all becomes organized into political categories)
Control of Surplus Value, immateriality of labor, social factory, etc	Mass Mediatization and the logic of reproducibility
Too numerous to mention	Singularity of revolutionary act, immediacy of communication, Symbolic exchange beyond or against the code, democracy beyond decentralized authoritarianism
Resistant Poaching or Interactivity or Exit or “new Communism” of the multitude, etc….	The mortality of speech over the prescripted/preordained referendum style of writing, politics of surface immediacy without truth referent

“Stuff”

“Filtered”

through

“Effects”

(or causes)

Political Loss

(requiem)





Solutions

Privacy & Publicity

I think what Bogard wants to say by stating that “in the telematic imaginary, total privacy is fully consistent with total publicity” is that actually there is nothing we can hide because everything of individuals has already been open to control. What we experience everyday on the web is an imaginary, which conceals that “reality no more exists outside than inside the bound of the artificial perimeter” (Baudrillard). The privacy performed on the web and based on this imaginary is a simulacra. And this imaginary world requires you to submit information. According to Baudrillard, a simulacra does not have origin. However this imaginary without origin is more real than real reality. Therefore, it is hypereality.
Discussing new biosurveillance technologies (p. 129), Bogard borrows Baudrillard’s theory again: “in fact, by this time real privacy, the master signifier, like the real body, is already lost, and the apparent mechanisms to which it has been lost (surveillance apparatuses) are the very mechanism that now generate it as a hyperreality, launch it into orbit.”

Simulation. Surveillance, and Risk Society?

Bogard said that surveillance is not just about maintaining and reproducing social order but it is also "a fantasy of power" driven by simulation, which Baudrillard defines as "feining what one doesn't have." I kept on thinking about risk society and how Bogard's concept of surveillance as not just controlling things that are happening but controlling what can happen (imaginary happenings) in the real world can apply to risk society. America has become a greater risk society post 9-11 (fear, anxiety, panic have driven Americans to prepare for diasters that have not happened but COULD happen by stocking up duct tapes, altering schedules according to the color coded security system, and most of all, preemptive strike). It was the imagination/simulation of what could have happend with the WMDs that triggered the Bush Administration to invade Iraq. I think this is where Baudrillard's use of the word, "deterrence," comes in handy as it is a strategy of preempting reality.

MSNBC's reality show, To Catch a Predator, seems to best capture the trinity of simulation, surveillance, and risk society. The show uses hidden cameras to monitor and capture the POTENTIAL child sex abusers who have made contacts with children (who are posed by volunteers from Perverted Justice, an online watchdog group for child sex offenders). The problem with this show is that it is not about punishing people who have committed the crime but who MIGHT violate the law (a very Minority Report like situation). The show is not about correcting the broken system that enables children sex labor, sexual abuse, and kidnapping to continue but rather covering up that the system is broken by highlighting one or two individuals that might violate the law. In this sense, To Catch a Predator is like the Watergate Scandal, which Baudrillard argued was a scapegoat incident to cover the pervasive corruption in the political field. By preempting strike on the potential lawbreakers through a simulated surveillance, the show provides a false sense of security in the risk society that crimes will be prevented when in reality (if there is such thing), the system remains broken.

I Hyperrealize?

(1) Cyborgs have no privacy (unless it’s simulated). After Tuesday’s class, I started thinking about how he posits a telematic society where publicity and privacy coincide. I have to admit, one of the things that really resonated, especially after class, was this idea of the Korean RRN. In Venezuela, we have a similar national ID number. We use it for any form, any public comment (e.g., letters to the editor are signed with this ID number). I kept on wondering why it is that these countries use this ID number so liberally whereas the confidentiality of the SSN in the USA is sacrosanct. It’s almost like in the USA we preserve this secret which means that we are entitled to privacy. If you take away secrets (total publicity) we have no ‘real’ privacy to preserve.

Bogard seems to posit a similar scenario, a cyborg or clone with an overcoded and precoded body (not private, already exposed because the code is known) that is perfectly known, is totally exposed, with no secret to keep and nothing to keep private, is perfectly anonymous and undistinguishable – total publicity = total privacy. This idea of the undistinguishable yet unique was tricky, but I was able to wrap my head around it a bit, when Bogard says, “As that path opens to all, fame itself definitively vanishes as a mark of distinction...everyone is instantly famous, instantly forgotten” (Bogard 141). “The orbitalization of privacy through the erasure of machinic-organic boundaries, and the forging of an indissoluble connection between simulation and surveillance technologies. The cyborg and the clone as the paradoxical figures of the hyperization of privacy and its fantastic, absurd crash into nothing. The clone and the cyborg are the ultimate Others, inscrutable because they are perfectly known” (Bogard 145).

Privacy is restored through simulation (the privacy/truth paradox Bogard goes into): either through simulated private space and intimacy or through information saturation (using language similar to Dean’s always frustrated conspiring subject): “Information saturation always leaves one with the suspicion that nothing has been understood, that in fact the crucial information has been left out or excluded...The very information that encloses and saturates them gurantees that they won’t be known, that they will always remain obscure and mysterious” (Bogard 151).

(2) The Soft Control of Simulated Surveillance. We (and Bogard himself) may dismiss Bogard’s telematic society as fiction, but his discussion about the control effected by this simulated surveillance was also really reminiscent of Terranova’s soft control. Simulated surveillance seems mighty similar to the forms of soft control we discussed in class weeks ago. Bogard explains, “The biomachinic assemblage works to erase permanently the already tenuous distinction between the individual and the totality, and substitute instead a kind of pure, cybernetic operationality or connectivity...This assemblage masks a rather simple aim to develop a closed system where all process can be translated and managed as flows from and back into information – no longer conformity to a historically variable and continuously contested system of norms, but rather, if you will, production, from and return to a singular, universal norm of norms” (Bogard 30). He continues, “[Simulated surveillance’s] strategy is always control in advance, hyperized, front-end, programmed control – regulation as a matter of feedback, models, circuitry design, interface, and integration” (Bogard 32).

Terranova discussed soft control in a similar way when discussing control mechanisms for acentred multitudes involving different levels: “the production of rule tables determining the local relations between neighboring nodes; the selection of appropriate initial conditions’ and the construction of aims and fitness functions that act like sieves within a liquid space, literally searching for the new and the useful” (Terranova 115). Terranova continues (and tell me this doesn’t sound like something straight out of Bogard), “The new place of the individual in the mode of immanent control is not as a model for the organization of a multitude, but as a tool that allows the overcoding and the ultimate containment of the productive power of flow...to the dissolution of the individual into the productive powers of the multitude, corresponds an over-coding of the multitude onto the individual element understood as a unit of code” (Terranova 123).

(3) Cyborg Work. Bogard’s description of cyborg work were also uncannily similar to a lot of the readings on immaterial labor, with a few additions that seemed answer some of the outstanding questions about and implications of this immaterial labor. For Bogard, in telematic societies, the project to extract surplus value (and exploit labor) entails exchanging “living labor for simulated labor, or what I call ‘cyber work,’ which doesn’t mean just work using computers, but the informatization and virtualization of the entire work environment (Bogard 98). Bowring described a similar trend when discussing Hardt and Negri’s Empire, “The increase in non-working time brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry outstrips the power of fixed capital, so that ‘the surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.’ Instead we have the development of the collective powers of labor as an autonomous productive force (Bowring 115).

“In telematic societies, cyborg work is not simply unproductive, or even not-productive; it is in fact, ultraproductive, production as information and information as production...Information is what cyborgs ‘produce’” (Bogard 109). Similarly, Hardt uses the idea of a prosthesis and Haraway’s cyborg when discussing affective labor, “Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves...This type of immaterial labor is called ‘symbolic-analyitic’” (Hardt 95).

There are two concepts pertaining to our discussion of immaterial labor that Bogard problematizes (a) the collapse of valorization and the apparent end of Capitalism, and (b) the unalienated immaterial laborer. With regards to the former, “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth” (Marx, Grundisse). Bogard seems to allude to this same shift, “It is in the effort to transgress this limit, to consume the totality of living labor, that capital simulates labor, and in so doing begins the transition from a material productive order to a rematerialized, informated order of simulation, a cyborg order” (Bogard 103). But he uses Baudrillard to discuss the decline of the commercial law of value and instead describes, “The evolution of third-order simulacra constitutes the regime of simulation proper, governed by the structural law of value and the emergence of a hyperreal economy”(Bogard 109). I am having trouble understanding what this structural law of value is and whether it responds to this contradiction that Marx brings up in the Grundisse.

With regards to the latter, Bogard mentions this idea that labor owns the means of production [i.e., their brains] in the realm of immaterial labor, “The movement to close the gap between production and control also explodes the very principle on which Capital was founded, the alienation or externality of the product and the producer. Cyborg labor, in a paradoxical movement, supports capitalist production only to subvert historically sedimented relations of power in the workforce...when virtual production substitutes for production, control slips from the grasp of Capital” (Bogard 110). Bogard uses Baudrillard to kind of say, “So what if you own your brain?” “Cyborg work represents nothing more than a radical intensification of these processes: surveillance now saturates work to the point of defining it. Instead of ‘informing’ on work as it occurs, it informates work in advance, closing the gap between activity and its sign...the product of labor is simultaneously its record” (Bogard 115). Your options, your choices, your labor are already afforded by the program, the code.

(4) Beniger 2.0. This entire narrative could be the epilogue to Beniger’s The Control Revolution. Beniger’s narrative of continuity – discussing the need for speed and the rise of technologies in response to a crisis in control – seems to coincide with the historical growth of the technologies of surveillance in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that Bogard mentions: “The coevolution of energy utilization, processing speed, and control, the gains from control technologies that accrue through increasing reliability and predictability, and the increasing control required of control technologies themselves – account for the Control Revolution that has continued unabated from the 1880s to the present” (Beniger 293). Bogard also claims a narrative of continuity, “As a strategy of control [the simulation of surveillance] is a simple and ancient idea...the observation machine of postindustrial societies – is dromological; it operates on speed, on the time of movement...In the abstract, power is the policing of speed, of material flows, by the machinery of observation” (Bogard 26).

(5) Telematic Perversions. The paradoxes of the simulation of surveillance were very reminiscent of the perversions mentioned by Zizek in “The Matrix, or, the Two Sides of Perversions.” Zizek posits the juxtaposition of the two aspect of perversion, “on the one hand, reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitray rules that can be suspended” (omnipotent subject); “on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity” (mediatized subject). Bogard echoes this almost verbatim, “Simulated surveillance refers to a paradox of control. It is a fantasy of absolute control and the absence of control at the same time, total control and the end (perfection, cancellation) of control” (Bogard 22).

Perfect Deterrence?

One of the initial problems I had with Bogard (and I am now realizing it might be with Foucault, whose discussion of panopticism he relies upon) was how the logic of panopticism “induces offenders to police their own behavior, transforming them into ‘subjects…’” And it is this turn on “subject” that Foucault, and arguably Bogard too, is making. It seems that panoptical surveillance creates at once a subject and object of the surveilled – object in so far as it is the “prisoner” on whom the disciplinary gaze falls, and subject in so far as that same prisoner ends up playing a proactive role in his/her own discipline, ensuring “docility.”
I’m not sure if I can wholly digest Bogard’s claim that in perfect form, simulation leads to perfect deterrence, which is “a state where deterrence is no longer necessary” (32). On the one hand, this might coincide nicely with the above, with the seeming hybridity that exists in the object/subject. If I am the object of my own gaze, my own disciplinary subjectivity, have I surpassed the point Bogard is referring to, where deterrence is no longer necessary? But isn’t that a type of deterrence in itself. Having an individual or a population self-monitor, I think, is not some form of perfect deterrence. It might be a sophisticated one, and it might reduce the amount of information processing or even pre-processing that authorities have to do, but it is still deterrence, more hidden but not, I would say, perfect.

More non-digital free labor

Just in case you did not catch it, this is a story from the NYTimes about a stylish entrepreneur who moved his free labor digital writers into the print media world. I like the part where he explains that not having to pay writers means that he can use higher quality paper in the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/business/media/24mag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Virtual Sex, Actual Adultery?

A concern running through Bogard's work revolves around the concept of intimacy in relation to simulation and surveillance. As we get a hint of the first page of the next chapter dealing with "Sex in telematic societies" I do not feel as if I am off base with this assertion.

I would like to primarily focus on the "privacy/trust simulacrum" and try to link this with developing concerns of online spousal or romantic partner infidelity.

In the privacy/trust simulacrum section, Bogard notes on p. 149, "Likewise, intimacy is not lost, but purified and hyperized (in virtual space it is possible to be 'closer than close,' more than intimate, but still keep a safe 'distance,' just as it is to be 'farther than far,' but still retain an operational closeness. In our societies the screen is what is close and far, intimate and distant, private and public."

Even the Wall Street Journal seems to pick up on "hyperized" intimacy - see this article "Is This Man Cheating On His Wife?" This is an article concerning a man who has a real life wife and a wife on Second Life.

Some highlights from this article that are relevant to the conversation include the husband's assertion that, "it's only a game." A second highlight is the commentary of the real life (RL) wife "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."

The couple is "closer than close" but still at "a safe distance." He is married, is intimate with someone online, but it is "only a game."

On p. 150 Bogard offers further useful commentary to understand a situation such as this, "You don't escape, you sacrifice yourself."

I figure this online infidelity concept is a useful way to mobilize the work Bogard does in this piece. Other concerns such as the one Mark raised in his post about class issues, I will just have to leave for class-time exploration.

Just for clarification - it does not seem that the couple highlighted in the WSJ article agreed to a polyamorous relationship.