1997 - Declaration of the Obsolescence of Cyberhype - Mark Dery
Texto
From: Mark Dery
Re: <nettime> Barlow
I give you...
A Declaration of the Obsolescence of Cyberhype.
Barlow writes:
> What I meant to say is that nature is itself a free market
system. A rain
forest is an unplanned economy, as is a coral reef. The difference
between
an economy that sorts the information and energy in photons and one
that
sorts the information and energy in dollars is a slight one in my
mind.
Economy *is* ecology.
This is pure neo-biological cant, tediously familiar from
Kevin Kelly's _Out of Control_, the fist-banging fulminations of
Louis Rossetto, and a growing stampede of managerial gurus, among
them Michael Rothschild, who argues in _Bionomics: The
Inevitability of Capitalism_ that "what we call capitalism (or
free-market economics) is not an ism at all but a naturally
occurring phenomenon" (and therefore presumably beyond reproach).
The global marketplace is increasingly conceived of in Darwinian
terms, with the social and environmental depredations of
multinationals rationalized as corporate life forms' struggle for
survival in an economic ecosystem. In essence, it's a
philosophical bait-and-switch that gives power relations the
irrevocable force of natural law by casting them in metaphors drawn
from nature (or, increasingly, Artificial Life or the sciences of
chaos and complexity).
To begin, the analogy fails on logical grounds: What, in
precise, literal terms, does it really mean to say that nature is
"a free market system?" This is the sort of glib McLuhanism that
vaporizes on contact with serious scrutiny. To the best of our
knowledge, coral reefs aren't composed of conscious individuals
with inalienable rights, among them a voice in their individual
destinies and collective governance. Moreover, coral reefs,
untouched by human meddling, are homeostatic entities that will
not, under any circumstances, knowingly engage in self-destructive
behavior. (Again, to the best of my knowledge---marine biology
isn't my bailiwick.) By contrast, the postwar history of America's
"free"-market economy---which as Byfield helpfully reminds us is
far from "free," having been engineered by government intervention
and underwritten by a "permanent war economy" (Seymour Melman) that
only recently downsized from World War II levels---is not pretty to
look at; GE is only one of many corporations that has widened its
individual profit margin at the expense of flagrant environmental
violations and worker abuses---suicidal behavior in a coral reef,
but the Hobbesian order of the day under a multinational capitalism
unrestrained by even the flimsy environmental and labor laws
erected, in a more progressive moment, by that much-reviled relic
of bygone times, the nation-state.
More importantly, as mentioned above, neo-biological metaphors
draw a picturesque scrim---who can argue with a rain forest or a
coral reef?---across the ugly face of raw power and brute force.
But somewhere, up in the attic, the portrait of Dorian Gray waits
to be exposed, in all its grisly glory. As I argued in my essay
for Ars Electronica's _Memetics_ anthology, "the costs of turning
culture into Nature, transforming it from social construction into
elemental force, are merely hidden, buried in Western history. A
little spadework reveals that the indisputable authority of natural
"law" has been invoked, throughout European history, to legitimate
the subjugation or extermination of women, non-whites, and other
lesser ethers, as well the exploitation of nature itself. A single
example speaks volumes: In _Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of
Modern Science_, Londa Schiebinger reveals how 18th century
anatomists, anthropologists, and natural historians, "working under
the banner of scientific neutrality," cited the supposedly simian
anatomy of Africans to account for their location near the bottom
of the great chain of being. Similarly, the childlike "compressed
crania" of women of all races were adduced as evidence of
impulsive, emotional, and generally inferior intellectual
qualities.
The free-market ecology of the digerati is only the latest
example of nature used as a ventriloquist's dummy in the service of
social agendas, few if any of which are pretty to look at: Herbert
Spencer's Social Darwinism (as popular in its day with monopoly-
builders like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie as Kevin
Kelly's neo-biological capitalism is with Tom Peters and his
corporate flock); the American eugenics movement of the 1920s,
which resulted in the passage of laws that legalized the forced
sterilization, in more than two dozen states, of anyone deemed
"socially defective"; and, more recently, the voodoo sociology of
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's _The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life_.
Andrew Ross contends that we are witnessing "a wholesale
revival of appeals to the authority of nature and
biology...nature's laws are invoked once again as the ground of
judgement and the basis of policy...biologism and Social Darwinism
have returned with a vengeance, and are a driving force behind the
sweeping new world view engineered by biotechnology and genetic
medicine." Roland Barthes warned us about this nearly 40 years ago
when he argued, in _Mythologies_, that one of ideology's most
insidious aspects was that it converts constructed social reality,
and the power relations embedded in it, into innocent, immutable
"nature." Ideology, he noted, "has the task of giving an
historical intention a natural justification, and making
contingency appear eternal." Neo-biological metaphors are
pernicious because they do just that, forestalling debate by
camouflaging the man-made as the god-given.
> I'm not sure that anything humans do is unnatural.In a sense,
it's all
nature. But some our efforts are so mechanistic as to be
counter-productive. I would assert that planned economies have been
about
as successful as many planned ecologies: tree farms, drained
wetlands, etc.
Mother Nature is cruel, but she can be far kinder than the
unintended
results of our best intentions.
(A minor point: The term "Mother Nature" is unfortunate, and best
consigned to the scrapheap of sexist essentialisms.)
Again, the invocation of a slippery term like "nature" should
trip alarms everywhere. Nature, for naked apes, is an object of
knowledge, mediated by language. There's a Heisenbergian logic at
work, here: no sooner do we encounter nature than we alter it,
often irreversibly; science has revealed that more than a few of
the plants and animals that we take to be untainted nature are in
fact the product of meddlesome human engineering. Tribal
societies, far from being poster children for some Rousseau-ian
idyll, pollute and exterminate whole species (though obviously on
a vastly less devastating scale than industrial or post-industrial
societies). In short, the term "nature" is fraught with cracks; if
we're going to use it legitimate economic systems that affect
millions, it would behoove us to take a philosophical hammer to it
and see what sense we can make of the fragments.
Frankly, I think any _democratic_ argument founded on an
appeal to "Nature" is built on quicksand, since nothing could be
more _unnatural_, to my mind, than an ethics whose cornerstone is
the concept of "inalienable rights," a mystical vision for which
there's no correlative in the natural world, where might makes
right and survival is the only game in town---a state of affairs,
come to think of it, not unlike the prevailing conditions among
multinational corporations, red in tooth and claw and seemingly
unburdened by concern for human rights or the environment (nature,
by any other name).
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