Code is a project dedicated to art research on digital-societal issues. This platform is an initiator and incubator of/for ideas lead by the exchanges of a research community.
The reflection for 2019 will focus on the definition of the Dispositif (as developed by Foucault or Agamben) and its impact (or reverse) in/on the body (or digital body).
Baselines for Carla Streckwall and Lisa Marie Patzer:
– Sociology and digital issues
– Surveillance
– Collective and/or private thinking
In the same way, Michel Foucault, or more recently Giorgio Agamben developed wide reflections about the dispositif – as structure of power – which manipulate choices, not by probing the essence of the choice itself, but through codes inherent of our social experiences. It is therefore a question of form and not about content.
What is the reality around us? A structure, a neutral entity modulating in a random way, are we part of it?
A sociological premise would be to lay two basic elements – if we take the example of a house, in which people are living – the relationships between individuals would be called “social relationships”, while the house around them would be called “the societal structure”. How then can a house influence exchanges, discussions between several people? In a privileged, neo-liberal context, this question seems to remain uninteresting, even laughable, as our context – in this regard – is terribly neutral and is purported to have no influence on our own lives, which we consider to be completely in line with our own choice taken by a free conscience. However, this freedom to judge, to choose, is therefore… obvious?
No, looking at the social movements that appear over the last few years – 2019 Hong Kong protests / FridaysForFuture / the Anonymous / … – because they echo as calls to shake a structure, a dispositif named as stable, current and has always been. Therefore, there seems to appear an ambiguity… Either, a structure can be the genesis of a way of life, but yet is it the ontology of a life itself? If we stipulate that the way of life and life itself are different concepts, those citizen claims intend to deconstruct a model and not a substance. In the same way, Michel Foucault, or more recently Giorgio Agamben developed wide reflections about the dispositif – as structure of power – which manipulate choices, not by probing the essence of the choice itself, but through codes inherent of our social experiences. It is therefore a question of form and not about content. Thus, it is by codes (of life, consumption, rights, obligations, way of using Internet, choices,…) embodied by globalizing devices that the trickery appears – the aestheticization of our life become its nature, its essence itself… By owing an aesthetic value, our life worth in image, in money, in publications, in « likes », in family, be in a relationship, in work,… and more it worths, more it seems we feel comfortable in society, in this dispositif which financialized our manner of living.
Thus, whether in our physical and/or virtual reality, it becomes essential to question the capitalization of our behavior – because that is what we are talking about… the value of our choices often disguised by societal reinforcements and algorithms (which reproduce an already existing substance). We – as actors, but also as collaborators of this societal imagery, do we want to be or to appear? In this economy based on a neoliberalism idea, where each newness has only a value in its ephemeral nature, where do we stand? An additional or a lesser value in a social and societal aesthetic, where the power is only an image of ourself… or something else that strangely echoing to a creation of ourself, a real conscious choice?
