Berlin

Also in A Year from Monday, Cage speaks of a wireless world. It was part of the utopian planning coming out of Cage's engagement with Buckminster Fuller, starting in 1948 when they were both instructors at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Fuller, a former government employee, inventor of the geodesic dome (think Epcot), had a little revival a few years back as part of architectural dreams for effective city planning - long since abandoned after various modernist failures. Fuller's head seems back on the block these days, considering for example Adam Curtis' most recent BBC documentary, 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace'. Fuller failed, like the dreams of a networked, ecological society Curtis is critiquing, because they failed to take account of power. Linking alternative community movements who built geodesic domes to leaderless uprisings in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine, Curtis detects the same failure: the belief that power and politics can be removed, and humans can spontaneously self-organize like machines.

This is certainly false, but its not clear what Curtis' solution is. At one point in the film, he appeals vaguely to the Enlightenment separation of 'man' from nature - and the insistence that only by this abstraction can critique and intervention occur (in terms of critiques of ecology, he is not too far from Slavoj Zizek). When I watched the film at Jan van Eyck, the question came up about Cage's involvement with Fuller, and if the critique was applicable to him. Certainly to the extent that he does not accept the abstraction/intervention solution model. But nor does he accept this vision of an ecology without politics or concern for power. D.T. Suzuki, a Japanese philosopher/cultural figure whose relationship to Cage is my broader interest, argues that Zen should never be confused with naturalism or spontaneity. For Suzuki, spontaneity is earned, not given. One does not exist in a cycle of abstractions and always-too-late-interventions. Rather, one is embedded in the present in such a way as to change it through perpetual engagement and self-improvement.

The question is, can there be a combination of a thinking of power and politics with this ethic of earned spontaneity. In this way, we would never fall back an impractical models of critique, nor get so lost in an immediate present as to fail to organize properly. For Cage, this question is always tied to a thinking of technology, and here at least Curtis would seem to agree. We are not machines, but our lives are connected to them, mediated by them, to a degree controlled by them. Though limited, Cage's idea that technological production - engagement with contemporary media - can be woven into projects is a potential starting point. It would not claim that technology is one thing or another, but that it is essentially indeterminate, and its indeterminacy is the task of the human to work through. (My starting thesis for this project was that such production would lead to 'global transparency'. A definition of this will be a future post.) For now, the point would only be that we should not throw the baby out with the bath water - ecology, networks, etc. are neither the human, nor what the human is opposed to.

In 'The Century', Alain Badiou defines the manifesto (I am citing from memory), as that which attempts to name that which has no name in the present. In giving it a name, it opens up a possible thinking of what needs to be done. The friend I am staying with was telling me today about Martin Kippinberger's Metro-Net, a linked global system of subways, for which he began to make entrances leading nowhere. My host has made a few as well. Like most utopic projects, they name a future, attempt to create a future, that has no real basis in the present. But in so doing perhaps they help create the resources for its coming into being (perhaps also a link here with Terminator and Terminator 2 - the arm from the future that allows the robots to be built).

After a few days without internet here in Berlin, using some friendly advice, a youtube video, an exacto knife, a kitchen knife, a German translator and some luck, the city of Berlin is now wireless for me as Cage would have wished. Though it is certainly not so for everyone. And they are saying again that phones cause cancer and the waves are bad for the bees. Still, to transform Cage's dream seems more important now than merely abandoning it.