A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://eprints.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details The Major and the Minor On Political Aesthetics in the Control Society Seb Franklin Dphil University of Sussex August 2009 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted, in whole or in part, to any other university for the award of any other degree. Seb Franklin Abstract This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka , which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production. Table of Contents Page Introduction On the Ubiquity of the Digital ....................................................................... 1 Part One: Major and Minor in the Control Society Chapter 1: The Contemporary Major ............................................................ 27 Chapter 2: The Contemporary Minor ............................................................ 57 Note on Hacking Theory ............................................................................... 89 Part Two: Samuel Beckett: Towards a Control-Era Minor Practice Chapter 3: Beckett and Computation ............................................................. 93 Chapter 4: Beckett, Silence and Minor Practice ............................................ 111 Note on Beckett and Critical Hypertrophy ..................................................... 124 Chapter 5: Beckett and Informatic Horror ...................................................... 130 Part Three: Commerce Chapter 6: Commerce and Control-Era Major Practice ................................. 150 Chapter 7: Halloween and Commercial Informatics ...................................... 169 Chapter 8: Commerce and Noise in Twin Peaks ............................................ 189 Chapter 9: Indifferent Informatics in the Film, Television and Video of Takashi Miike .................................................................................................. 207 Chapter 10: Videogames and Minor Practice .................................................. 229 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 265 Appendix ....................................................................................................... 275 Works Cited ..................................................................................................... 291 1 Introduction: On the Ubiquity of the Digital In one of the final notes to his 2007 book Gamer Theory McKenzie Wark makes the claim, referring to his modification of a quote from the blogger K-Punk, that “gamespace replace[s] the now archaic term cyberspace.” 1 This claim is fascinating primarily because of the way it dismisses so easily as “archaic” a cultural-theoretical term that is amongst the most widely used of the computer age. The implications of both Wark’s dismissal and his suggested alternative, elaborated throughout Gamer Theory , are central to the work that follows in this thesis. If cyberspace is the distinct ‘space’ in which electrically mediated interactions take place, defined by Bruce Sterling as “the place between the phones” in a telephone conversation, then Wark’s gamespace is the next historical ‘space’, the ‘space’ in which material objects and information become inseparable. 2 When mediation becomes expanded, through digital technology, to the point where machines are able to both record and compute input from all sources of information, from lines and distances to trajectories, from images to sound to video and from the genetic makeup of the human body to the affective, formal constituents of narrative, then a distinct conceptual ‘space’ in which such mediation takes place becomes unnecessary. Gamespace is, in effect, cyberspace and ‘real’ space combined. The political, cultural and theoretical implications of this transition are complex and problematic, underpinning a number of critical approaches to new media that follow the work of Friedrich Kittler in stressing the material aspects of media technologies, the immutability and transformability of digital data 1 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), note to paragraph 223. This book eschews pagination in favour of sequentially numbered paragraphs, and as such any reference to it hereafter will be to these numbers. K-Punk’s original comment reads “[w]hat do we look like from cyberspace? What do we look like to cyberspace?” K-Punk. ‘Cartesianism, Continuum, Catatonia: Beckett’, http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2006_03.html. Last accessed 21/07/09. 2 Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (London: Viking, 1993), p.11. 2 and the purely formal character of code over or alongside aesthetics, deconstruction or other modes of textual ‘reading.’ 3 The digital, as a technique for information storage, processing and transfer, is radically distinct from the analogue techniques that precede it. As Wark remarks: [w]here once analogue and digital maintained an ambiguous and continuous…relation to each other and the world, the digital now distinguishes itself sharply from the analogue, subsuming the analogue difference under the digital distinction. This is a transformation not merely in forms of communication or entertainment, not even in forms of power or of topos, but a change in being itself. 4 Where analogue mediation converts variations of, for example, air pressure directed into a telephone mouthpiece into corresponding variations of electricity for transmission, digital mediation converts any input into series of discrete states, eliminating continuous variation in order to greatly decrease the probability of errors. Where analogue systems represent actions as lines, unbroken flows of, for example, electricity over components, digital systems code all input as discrete alternations. Analogue Signal 3 Besides Kittler see, for just a few examples of this technically rigorous move in media theory, the work of Espen Aarseth, Alexander R. Galloway, N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geert Lovink, Lev Manovich, Eugene Thacker and Hartmut Winkler. 4 Wark, Gamer Theory paragraph 081. ‘Analog’ changed to ‘analogue’ by me throughout. 3 5 Digital Signal The comprehensive replacement of the analogue with the digital as depicted by Wark underpins