From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: alt.cyberpunk,alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Industrial Culture (Or, why I'm being such an
Date: 15 Oct 92 15:58:45 GMT
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

In article <1992Oct14.165218.1187@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, 
pbancrof@nyx.cs.du.edu (Phil Bancroft) writes, among other things:

> So you wanna talk _real_ industrial culture?  True industrial art must
> reflect and take these facts into consideration:
>         1). That the most beautiful sculptural/engineering works of the
> last
>             20 years have been war machines capable of immense destruction;
> 
>         2). That sexuality has been reduced to entirely commercial terms;
>             its entire conceptualization has been moulded in the service
>             and mandate of profit;
> 
>         3). That our media has been seized by coproations wishing
>             to anesthetize our thoughts through censorship;
> 
>         4). That politics is no longer of the people: opinions are merely
>             academic and encouraged by our educational system to stay that
>             way (action is discouraged; passive ingestion is encouraged or
>             whatever).
> 
> 
> Thus for industrial art to be successful it must equate beauty with
> totalitarian menace, corporate domination with sexual bondage, media
> information with drugs.  

   Must it accept these terms? Really? I'm not sure that imitating 
commercial nihilism is really the way to go.  *Parody*, on the other hand, 
could be useful; like Umberto Eco says, dark humor (tragicomedy) is the 
only form that manages to critique the existing order (see "The Comic and 
the Rule" (title?) in *Travels in Hyperreality*).
   I kinda like Peter Lamborn Wilson's personal antidote to the sickness 
of society, which was a combination of various philosophies plus "rampant 
happy sexuality". :-)


> It also must explore and promote anarchic media
> and political acts under the premise that anything done to subvert the
> seductive agencies of the corporate class (televison, government, military,
> etc..) will promote individual will and thought.  Finally, it must
> integrate the above display in ways that are startling, unnerving, 
> shocking: both as a response against media anesthetization and 
> censorship and as a realization that all other artistic and influencing 
> techniques have been co-opted (e.g. stolen) by corporations.  We must 
> unleash the unspeakable on society as a small antidote for their quite 
> common everyday experiences. 

   Hmm.  Dunno.  Shock tactics aren't always useful.  Check out what 
Richard Saul Wurman has to say about media anethsetization in *Information 
Anxiety*; people are bombarded with way too much *data* (noise) and way 
too little *information* (signal)-- what Alvin Toffler called "blip 
culture"-- and so go into a kind of shock.  Either they walk around 
twitchy and nervous, unsure what's going on, or (more commonly) lapse into 
a kind of numb stupor, like the soldiers in various wars who, in the 
middle of intense firefights, have suddenly fallen asleep (a real medical 
phenom; Toffler mentions it as a metaphor in *Future Shock*).  How will 
the addition of more high-volume noise help?
   I've read *High Weirdness by Mail*, a guidebook to the kind of 
"anarchic media" you prescribe.  A billion sources offer mythologies, 
pseudo-scientific explanations, conspiracy theories-- the narratives that 
people need to string the blips together... but it's mostly *junk* 
narrative.  Fast-food narrative.  There's little in there that will foster 
any kind of coherent critique of what's going on in the world.  Like 
someone once wrote, the freedom of press that makes this underground media 
possible is no threat to the existing order, which is why it's allowed to 
exist without much systemic harassment.
   I'm pretty much in agreement with your analyses, but I take issue with 
your ideas of what is to be done.


   --Jesse.