From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: _arc.hive_@lm.va.com.au
Subject: RHZOMES 6: CODEWORK / SURVEILLANCE (fwd)
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 13:28:59 -0400 (EDT)





RHIZHOMES: CULTURAL STUDIES IN EMERGING KNOWLEDGE

www.rhizomes.net

Issue 6: Codework/Surveillance guest-edited by Louis Armand, with
contributions by McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Zoe Beloff, Darren Tofts,
Ondrej Galuska, MTC Cronin, Alan Roughley, Philip Hammial, David Seiter,
Tom Mackey, Damien Judge Rollison.



"Codework/Surveillance" attempts to work the seam between critical
paradigmatics & social discourse, between codework as invention, aesthetic
practice, activism, sabotage & its recuperation within and by institutions
of knowledge & techno-social surveillance (& vice-versa).



"Codework/Surveillance" attempts to go beyond the usual pseudo-antagonism
of theory/praxis by investigating how the contest over such terms (and
other terms which are supposedly defined by them) is itself a mirage
effect of the oppositional assumptions of institution vs.
anti-institutional practition.



"Codework/Surveillance" designates a relation of terms & of social
postulates which are & remain biomorphic, parac(r)itical and dialectically
irreducible. As "criticism" is placed under increasing pressure to account
for itself in terms of action within the social/technological sphere, the
artist & "public intellectual" may be regarded more in terms of "codework"
than of traditional critical or aesthetic practices--in the sense that
"codework" implies not only a working with the language and means of
contemporary technological conditions (& of "taking responsibility" or
"coming to terms" with these), but also a tactical counter-coding which
exploits the margins of error within control apparatuses exemplified by
such mechanisms as "surveillance."



The linkage of "surveillance" to "codework" here stands for the way in
which infrastructures of power always operate on a basis of hybridity &
structural discontinuities which leave them open to "uses" other than
those sought or intended by the various institutions of "authority." That
authority, too, is inherently linked to codework, to the authenticity &
authorship of certain codes or codices (of the law), points not only to
existing critiques of "writing" but to the institution of critique itself
& the enormous resources of codification which are today applied in the
name of learning &/or knowledge.



As in Orwell's 1984, it remains necessary to consider seriously the fact
that "authority," in order to be what it is, deploys its resources in a
hugely asymmetrical way "against" the "individual"--that sabotage (or
terrorism) is not exclusively a means used by individuals (or cells of
individuals) against the symbols & institutions of "authority." Codework
in this sense is not the masturbatory fantasy of the programmer or hacker,
but above all the game of power calling its own bluff & still trying to
reduce all the bad odds to zero.

________________________________________________________________


LOUIS ARMAND

UAA Philosophy Faculty, Charles University

Nam. J. Palacha 2, 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic

www.geocities.com/louis_armand


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