“You believe in the Crystal
Palace, eternally indestructible, that is, one at which you can never stick out
your tongue furtively nor make a rude gesture, even with your fist hidden
away.” Dostoyevsky – Notes From Underground, Pt 1 Ch X (1864)
“The Crystal Palace is
perhaps the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is perceivable
by a spectator situated either at the west or east extremity of the gallery…where
the most distant parts of the building appear wrapped in a light blue halo. The
first triumph of the commodity takes place under the sign of both transparency
and phantasmagoria”. Giorgio Agamben – Means
Without Ends (1996)
"Transparency is not
produced by friendly light that allows the particular to appear in its
particularity, the arbitrary in its lovely arbitrariness, that is the other in
its incommensurable otherness. Instead, the general politics of transparency
makes otherness disappear by eliminating what is other. The violence of
transparency ultimately expresses itself as the reduction of the other to the
same, as the elimination of otherness. It draws on re-semblance. The politics
of transparency is a dictatorship of the same". Byung-Chul Han - Topology of Violence (2011)
♗ A hundred and fifty years after Dostoyevsky published his Notes from Underground and over eighty
after the real building in London burnt down, the West is threatening to bring its
global Crystal Palace to completion. This utopia under the sign of transparency
represents for the authors cited above a kind of perversion, a noble idea taken
to grotesque extremes. The concept of a transparent building, illuminated
solely by natural light, penetrating through clear glass walls, allegorizes the
idea of a transparent society which was bequeathed to us from the 18th
century Enlightenment; in particular, via the French revolution. For the Jacobin
revolutionaries there was a dream of a free and equal society, where no dark
corners remained and where Man and Truth would be definitively revealed. There
were to be no secret societies of aristocrats plotting the restoration of the
monarchy; no clergyman undermining the “age of reason” with their Popish propaganda.
No zones of disorder or privileged bastions of the Ancien Régime; a
society visible in all its parts.
But just as the abolition of distance does not bring everything
close, so too has this regime of permanent visibility failed to bring a
"New Man" into the open. As it did during the French Revolution, the
clamor for transparency and the concomitant atmosphere of tension and paranoia manifests
in an increasingly securitized and anxiety ridden response. During the Terror, Robespierre
spoke repeatedly in the National Convention of treachery and plots being hidden
behind masks and veils. The prevalence of denunciations and the bypassing of
all but the minimum of due process transformed the Enlightenment dream into a
killing machine of nightmarish proportions. In the minds of today's conspiracy
theorists and an increasingly broad spectrum of the public, all forms of
political power are viewed as a kind of veiling or covering up, and thus they
cannot but see shadowy elites and grand plots even in the midst of the most
chaotic and uncertain times. Today in
all areas of governance and social life, the will toward transparency manifests
itself, from CCTV surveillance and the monitoring of online activity, to
endless auditing and the amassing of
ever larger quantities of data about citizens by both public and private powers. All this is routinely justified
by reference to concepts such as security, confidence and visibility; which is
little more than a self-referential circle. Similarly there are ever greater
demands for transparency from public institutions, reflecting the collapse of
boundaries around individuals, whose lives are rendered ever more transparent
and available for monetization through social media and mass data collecting.
Only in the last year or so have questions finally begun to be asked about the
power of social media and the disparity that exists between the openness
demanded of users and the opaque workings of multi-billion dollar businesses
like Facebook and Google. As with so much in the lives of the modern Western subject: from
who or what we are meant to be protected is less certain.
♞ On multiple levels the drive towards transparency has becomes an end
in itself quite apart from any obvious benefit. The now ubiquitous exposure by individuals,
to online public scrutiny, of what used to be considered private life, is
sufficient to confirm the thesis that the neoliberal subject coincides with the
transparent subject. Much of the public discourse
on these issues take as its object the question of limits. For example where
the boundary is between public and private property when using internet
resources like Facebook or Twitter; to what degree governments should be
permitted to access our personal data or use technology to monitor and record our daily
movements; or what safeguards should be in place to protect individuals from
press intrusion or having their personal data stolen by criminals or sold to
third parties. However, framing the problem as a uniquely contemporary one, or leaving
it at the level of legislation, misses the deeper significance of the concept
of transparency for the development of globalization and the enclosure of the
world into a single system of governance enabling the free unhindered flow of
capital.
“At the foundation of the
entire undertaking, remarkably enough, rests the principle that such a work
must be backed not by the state but by the free activity of its citizens ...
The great new thought found a great new form. The engineer Paxton built the
Crystal Palace ... It is in the highest degree remarkable and significant that
this Great Exhibition of London - born of modern conceptions of steam power,
electricity, and photography, and modern conceptions of free trade - should at
the same time have afforded the decisive impetus, within this period as a
whole, for the revolution in artistic forms ... We see now that it was the
first great advance on the road to a wholly new world of forms ...When did this
idea make its triumphal entry into the world? In the year 1851 , with the Crystal
Palace in London“. Julius Lessing, Das
halbe Jahrhundert der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 1900) pp. 6-10. As quoted
in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
“This reign of opinion, so
often invoked at this time, represents a mode of operation through which power
will be exercised by virtue of the mere fact of things being known and people
being seen in a sort of immediate, collective and anonymous gaze. A form of
power whose main instance is that of opinion will refuse to tolerate areas of
darkness”. Michel Foucault – Power/Knowledge (1980)
♖ Despite long running concerns about possible misuse of the massive hordes
of data culled from European and American internet users, the revelations about
possible interference in elections by UK based Cambridge Analytica and their
proxies, by utilizing Facebook's technology, have seemingly come as a shock. This latest
'big data' controversy came at the same time as the now completed Mueller
investigation into possible Russian influence in the election of Donald Trump. Only
now, when it appears that "democracy is under threat", are questions
about the role of data collecting by social media companies and the whole nature of a
transparent big data driven economy, finally being raised. In fact security
breaches and large scale loss of data have been commonplace for years, usually
being perpetrated by criminals seeking access to bank details and other
sensitive information. It's only the scale and the ultimate motive of the
perpetrators that has shifted in the case of Russia and Cambridge Analytica. In
a development analogous to that identified by Carl Schmitt, the full scale
assumption by states of the possibilities of big data for nefarious activities
is comparable to the shift during the early modern period from piracy to
"corsair capitalism".
♟ These data scandals coincide with the recent publication in English of
several volumes by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose short,
almost manifesto like texts have caught the attention of some areas of the
press. For
Han, criticisms over privacy and democratic oversight miss the real significance
of transparency and big data for our times. For Han, beneath the rubric of the
society of transparency lies the society of exhibition, of acceleration, of pornography
and ultimately a society of control, marked by what he has termed
"Psychopolitics". This development, which hinges upon the concepts of
big data and transparency, takes us - he argues - far beyond the notions of
disciplinary and biopolitical power theorized by Michel Foucault in the 1970s
and 80s. In effect, the ability of an agent - whether state or non-state - to harvest
vast amounts of data and use it to micro-target individuals with tailored
messages aimed at influencing preferences, marks a significant shift in the
architecture of power in modern societies. The target is no longer the body or
the will, but instead political power aims directly at our pre-reflective
responses; at the psyche itself.
For Han, the advent of big data has had a radicalizing effect analogous
to the development of statistics during the 18th century. Then as now grand
claims to the predictive power of analysis have led some to prophesize the end
of politics and the ascendency of an algorithmic technocracy. Where
disciplinary power affects the soul by way of the body, and Biopolitics
operates upon life at the level of the population, psychopolitics - expanded
into every area of social life - intervenes directly at the level of the
unreflective will. This is the mode by which big data coalesces with habits of
consumption to "nudge" voters or customers, towards new content, or
purchases. There is however an important distinction in the way in which this data is meant to be
used. Unlike the promise of large scale statistical analysis - especially as it
was applied to national economies in the early 20th century - big data is not a
tool to be used for top-down planning. In complete contrast, its application is
geared solely to the management of
individual preferences, whether those for products, for people (as in the
case of online dating) or for political views.
"Great masses of
industrialised peoples today still cling to a torpid religion of technology
because they, like all masses, seek radical results and believe subconsciously
that the absolute depoliticization sought after four centuries can be found
here and that universal peace begins here. Yet technology can do nothing more
than intensify peace or war; it is equally available to both. In this respect,
nothing changes by speaking in the name of and employing the magic formula of
peace. Today we see through the fog of names and words with which the
psycho-technical machinery of mass suggestion works". Carl Schmitt, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations
(1929)
"Inasmuch as it
expends a great deal of energy to force people into the straightjacket of
commandments and prohibitions, disciplinary power proves inefficient. A
significantly more efficient technology of power makes sure that people
subordinate themselves to power relations on their own. Such a dynamic seeks to
activate, motivate and optimize - not to inhibit or repress. It proves so
effective because it does not operate by means of forbidding and depriving, but
by pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to
make them dependent".
Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitics (2017)
♤ Joseph Paxton's designs for the Crystal Palace were originally
rejected by the London Building Committee ahead of The Great Exhibition of
1851. Appropriately, it was by means of mobilizing public opinion that Paxton's
vision of a vast structure of glass and steel came to be realized. Paxton -
gardener to the Duke of Devonshire - published his designs in the London News. The public response was so
favorable that the London Building Committee reversed its decision to reject
them.
♣ The civil war, in which - according
to Martin Heidegger - we have already been defeated for centuries, is
intensified under the regime of digital overload and mass communications
technologies. This scientific/technical intensification is only the most recent
step in a process with a long history. The connections between the development
of the sciences and the multiplication of techniques of surveillance and
discipline have been posited for some time. The link with security apparatuses
was famously posed by Michel Foucault in his discussion of Bentham’s
Panopticon; a prison design that subjected its inmates to a regime of permanent
visibility, regardless of whether anyone was in fact watching. From the
perspective of the French revolutionaries who made Bentham a citizen in 1791,
the brightly lit structure of the Panopticon was a humane triumph over the
tortuous darkness of the Bastille where prisoners were sent to suffer out of
sight. The prospect of observation, categorization, even re-habilitation of
prisoners was simultaneously the possibility of knowing and reforming the
character of humanity itself. The expansion of industry, the reform and
extension of education and rapid changes in the management of health led (so the
thesis goes) to the general deployment of these techniques to a gamut of other
institutions. Hospitals, schools and workplaces; all were placed under the
regime of “power through transparency”, “subjection by illumination”. But it
wasn’t the production of “docile bodies” that was the aim of these techniques
for the age of Enlightenment. Instead, by removing the darkness that obscured
humanity - the ignorance that clouded the mind - humanity would finally be able
to speak its truth; this truth was public opinion.
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| The ruins of the Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba. Photo by Tod Seelie. |
♡ In Bentham's designs we should recognize a prototype for the
paradigm of the Crystal Palace, both of which mobilize transparency and
visibility within an architectural form. Both of which, by means of enclosure,
sought to render palpable a revolutionary change in the management of people
and things. And both, of course, were the product of England's cult of utility
and spectacle. The key difference was that in the case of the Panopticon there
was no doubt about the ultimately oppressive nature of the idea. It was a prison,
and it was first and foremost by the negativity of physical restriction and limitations
to movement that the "soul" of the inmate would be made available for
disciplinary refashioning. In contrast, The Crystal Palace - as Byung-Chul Han alludes
to in his writing - is a space of compulsive positivity. It's architecture is
characterized by unrestricted (or deterritorialized) flows. The building seems
to float on air, its glass structure blurring the boundaries between inside and
outside. From within it appears like a vast uninterrupted smooth space, lacking
in clear demarcation. As the art historian Julius Lessing noted at the turn of
the 20th century, the artistic form of the Crystal Palace instantiated an idea
of global free trade, where each producer would sell their wares in an
environment of clear air and light, free from the distortions of protectionism
and tariff walls. From his perspective, half a century after the Great
Exhibition of 1851, this noble idea had been buried beneath the rubble of
rising nationalism. His vision of an enclosed, yet open and transparent space
for trade, where capital and goods would move freely, unencumbered by the
democratic architecture of nation states, would become a key motif for the
group of economists (Including Ludwig Von Mises and F.A. Hayek) who emerged out
of post-Imperial Vienna to lay the foundations for global neoliberal
capitalism.
♦ The era of big data really began during the interwar period with the
rise of statistical analysis of international economic data by institutions
such as the League of Nations, the International Chamber of Commerce and the Vienna
Institute. Here too we find the demand
for transparency - this time directed at the previously sacred world of the
businessman. The collection of global economic data was itself a
"globalizing" activity, producing a single "world picture", which altered the mentality of the economists
themselves, turning them more and more toward the idea of global
interdependence and the world as a giant economic organism. What the
neoliberals brought to the fore in the post-war period was the idea that no
amount of data would ever provide the economists with a total picture of the global
market sufficient to plan from above. Instead, as we have increasingly seen in
the digital age, data was to be used solely to give an indication of the present
preferences of market actors and to correlate those preferences with other
similar market choices. This is the basic algorithm - the "if you like
that, try this" - which has become the driving force of big data
capitalism and psychopolitical manipulation.
♠ There was a missing piece of the puzzle in Foucault’s early work on
discipline. In the reformed character of the prisoner, in the productivity of
the worker, the effects of discipline on the soul could only be approximated.
What was missing was a direct avowal of the soul, a confession, repentance. The
agent, the speaking subject, was absent, viewed by a strong reading to be a
mere effect of the power relations in which they were situated. The
transparency offered by big data technologies eliminates the necessity for an avowed preference
in favor of mere correlations. Through the operationalized language of big data
the "speaking subject" is overthrown and in its place comes the
"clicking subject" whose motivations and inner world - like the ineffable
world market itself - cease to be an object of politico-economic interest.
Modern psychopolitics does not believe in a "soul of man" that needs redeeming.
♢ The hidden centre of the dream of a transparent society was the
dream of a pure form of communication, one unsullied by the multitude of
misunderstandings, irrationalities and everyday human failings that prevent the
sharing of information and consequently the formation of preferences. There
have been numerous attempts to realize this idea. Some, like the failed project
of Esperanto had utopian aspirations of world peace and cooperation at their
heart. But just as the dream of using data to effect wide scale top-down
planning of the world economy fell into abeyance after WW2, so too did the
teleological notion of a universal communication for a global community.
Instead what has come about is the subordination of human language to the
overload of mass data collection and algorithmic correlations. Alongside this
development has been the slow leveling out of communication into forms which
valorize the lowest common denominator. Corporate language, with its empty
buzzwords signifying nothing but the mere presence of hierarchic power, is
undoubtedly familiar to most Western subjects. Mass communications technologies
have accelerated concision to the point where locution and grammar have all but
been abandoned. In their place now stands the impoverished hieroglyphs of
emojis and memes. A language of ideograms appropriate for globalised idiocy.
"The world exhibitions have lost much of their original character. The enthusiasm that, in 1851, was felt in the most disparate circles has subsided, and in its place has come a kind of cool calculation. In 1851, we were living in the era of free trade... For some decades now, we have witnessed the spread of protectionism ... Participation in the exhibition becomes...a sort of representation...;and whereas in 1850 the ruling tenet was that the government need not concern itself in this affair, the situation today is so far advanced that the government of each country can be considered a veritable entrepreneur." Julius Lessing, Das halbe Jahrhundert der Weltausstellungen (Berlin, 1900) pp. 29-30. As quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
"...it is the natural
mechanism of the market and the formation of a natural price that enables us to
falsify and verify governmental practice when, on the basis of these elements,
we examine what government does, the measures it takes, and the rules it
imposes. In this sense, inasmuch as it enables production, need, supply,
demand, value and price, etcetera to be linked together through exchange, the
market constitutes a site of veridiction, I mean a site of
verification-falsification for governmental practice. Consequently, the market
determines that good government is no longer simply government that functions
according to justice. The market determines that a good government is no longer
quite simply one that is just". Michel
Foucault - The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)
"Culture has provided
a great variety of cultural niches in which that great diversity of men's
innate or acquired gifts can be used. And if we are to make use of the distinct
factual knowledge of the individuals inhabiting different locations on this
world, we must allow them to be told by the impersonal signals of the market
how they had best use them in their own as well as in the general
interest". F.A.Hayek - Law Legislation and
Liberty Vol 3: The Political Order of a Free People (1979)
♔ Benjamin's arcades were already defunct by the time they caught on
in Paris. Their architectural trick, rendering a consumerist hot-house as urban
connective tissue between Haussmann's boulevards, did not aim at the cosmic
level. Their internal logic still incorporates the basic dichotomy between
inside and outside, whilst holding the consumerist spectacle captive within a
hall of mirrors. The function of natural light in their case is solely so that
those passing through might be granted enough illumination such that the
phantasmagoria of commodities functions at a level above ground, thus obscuring
their "metaphysical subtleties ". A nascent "global artistic
form" must, even in such an inchoate state, reach for the skies which are
its destiny.
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| The Passage des Princes, Paris (Built 1860) |
♛ It would be a mistake to consider the advent of a global Crystal
Palace to entail the elimination of hierarchic forms of organization. Undoubtedly
this mistaken belief is linked to the predominant technophilia emanating from
silicon valley and popularized by the likes of Facebook and Google. Sections of
the Left have also fallen for this reasoning on occasion. What has in fact
occurred is an intensification of complex legal and constitutional restraints
at both the national and global level, representing a stratified order designed
to guarantee the free flow of capital, while actively restricting the horizons
of alternative forms of organization. Hierarchy too in the form of massive
inequality abounds in the World Interior, permitting a tiny class of
international super rich to bypass legal constraints for the supposed benefit
of the "general economy". The paradigm for this form of
exceptionalism (like hierarchy itself) originates in Christian theology.
Today's financial scholastics however do not concern themselves with justifying
God in the face of the existence of evil, but instead busy themselves
justifying the global economic order as
"the only possible world", in the face of increasing hardship,
corruption, and the near collapse of social mobility in the most developed economies. The
"Greek lesson" which saw the spiritual heart of European culture
reduced by the EU and their colleagues in global finance to the level of a debt
colony, provides a salient lesson for those who still speak of the community of
all nations.
♕ Within the confines of the Crystal Palace of 1851 the ideal of world
trade was staged in microcosm. Hayek's vision of a stratified system of economic
constitutional constraints operating at the national, transnational and global
level, is the clearest exposition of the fully realized 'World Interior'. This
"global economic constitutionalism" which purports to act only
negatively, by insulating markets from democratic "interference", in
fact both encourages and legitimates today's big data dystopia. All social life
dissolves into the endless accumulation of information.
♘ A significant effect of the advent of big data is that public
opinion no longer requires a will (let alone a general will) to express it. It
is the immediate kneejerk reactions of the isolated clicking, swiping
individual that shall collectively provide the political opinions of the
future. And since the Political Will ceases to be an object for power, we will not be able to say that the will is
overthrown by repression or coercion, but instead it is merely pre-reflectively
nudged towards the desired preference, be that democracy or dictatorship.
♝ The life of the transparent subject in the World Interior is
conditional upon maintaining as few borders around the self as possible.
Permeability is expected of the precarious. In an era in which the separation
between public and private, state and non-state, outside and inside are all but
dissolved, the transparent subject becomes a node in the network of digital
affects and constant micro-capital extraction. As Byung-Chul Han and the late
Mark Fisher both saw, this dissolution of the self into the network of
boundless digital possibilities results in a slate of very modern affective
disorders. Anxiety and depression, narcissistic personality disorders and ADHD
have exploded across populations of the most developed economies. It is now
often heard that the UK faces a mental health crisis, that the impact of social
media on the self esteem and self image of users is driving the rise. More than
just social media, the entire nature of modern connectivity is driven - like
the vampire capitalism described by Marx - to monetize every aspect of our
existence; extracting ever more capital from our accelerating lives; from our preferences, our hopes and our
desires. Fisher's desciption of the paradigmatic state of the modern subject as "depressive hedonia" rings ever more true.
♙ The neoliberal utopia of a perfectly transparent globe, allowing the
free and instantaneous communication of price signals, has reached its apogee
in the modern transparent subject; someone who, by means of being permanently
plugged into the network, is always available as a feedback relay in the global
cybernetic system; continuously sending out data on preferences while ready to
receive the latest nudge towards the New.
"The gigantic is
rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a
remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a
distinctive way in contrast to others, it also has, in each instance, its own concept
of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and
adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a
special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be
calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This
becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all
things everywhere when man has been transformed into subjectum and the world
into picture". Martin Heidegger - The Age of
the World Picture (1977)
"Where everyone is the
other and no one themselves, humans are cheated of their ecstasy, their
loneliness, their own decisions, and their own direct connection to the
absolute outside, namely death. Mass culture, humanism and biologism are the
cheerful masks that, according the insights of the philosopher, conceal the
profound boredom of an existence devoid of challenge. The task of philosophy
would then be to shatter the glass roof over one's own head and directly make
the individual the monstrous once again". Peter
Sloterdijk - In the World Interior of Capital (2005)
"How little pleasure
men must nowadays take in themselves when such a tyranny of timidity prescribes
to them their supreme moral law, when they so uncontradictingly allow
themselves to be ordered to look away from themselves but to have lynx-eyes for
all the distress and suffering that exists elsewhere! Are we not, with this
tremendous objective of obliterating all the sharp edges of life, well on the
way to turning mankind into sand?
Sand! Small, soft, round, unending sand! Is that your ideal, you heralds of the
sympathetic affections?" Friedrich Nietzsche,
Daybreak, Book III, Aphorism 174 (1881)
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| Image from Lawrence Lek's Shiva's Dreaming (2014) |
