The Poetic Imperative in the Age of Surveillance
In returning to writing from curating, I find the absence of a unified
theory of poetry distracting, especially in these dark times. I have “Architecture
& Now” (my poem with Maurice Shapero’s architectural drawings) coming out
shortly and my hybrid-poetry collection “Dyer & Mahfouz” is rapidly taking shape, but a theoretical framework
is missing. Thus, I am preparing just that: “Poetry as Thoughtcrime”. This aims
to examine the huge existential problem facing contemporary writing and
includes my manifesto for what to do about it. The analysis flows from the
curatorial practice developed in the Text Festivals from 2005 to 2014. After
that, I was creatively focused on the projects in China, which took my
attention away from theoretical and practical next steps that should follow
from the Text. In retrospect, this post-Text hiatus gave me a parallax view and
distance from which my vision for the future could mature.
The full analysis will be available soon as a publication, but with the
request from Synapse for an extract, and the near apocalyptic turn of
world events in 2020, it feels imperative to offer some form of the new
thinking. The starting point for any analysis of future direction has to
acknowledge the backdrop of the crises of Late Capitalism, Brexit, Trump, and
of course the big one, climate catastrophe; in this truncated disaster
timescape, the hope that the post-virus world will be a brighter future already
looks delusional; indeed, though I have referenced capitalism
as the evil, there are credible arguments that it has already been
replaced by an economic system that is even worse .
When Mark Fisher
bleakly observed “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism” you sort of optimistically imagine that he meant capitalism being
ended with something better. Anyway, increasingly the massive crisis of the
pandemic and capitalism’s responsibility and response continues to fit my
initial analysis of the dangers we face as humans, and specifically, the
challenge for writers isn’t materially changed.
My analysis does have an implicit fatalism – the longer version of this
essay investigates the implication of writing in the countdown to extinction.
My project then will be as follows: as with all manifestos, the opening
essay (a taster for which this is) is an analysis for the scale of the dangers
we face – ‘Poetry as Thoughtcrime’. This is followed by a Manifesto, which
posits an imperative direction for writing, and, more specifically, a unified
theory for poetry in this age of multiple global crisis. In support of this
statement and proposal, there are a series of related essays examining the
implications for literary production which include a new vision for
internationalism, a recognition of the inadequacy of Conceptual Poetry to meet
the challenges, the poetic space within Post-Truth and the
distractions/implications of dominant tropes in popular culture.
There are two ‘problems’ writers no longer have. From Albert Camus “A
writer writes to a great extent to be read (as for those who say they don’t,
let us admire them but not believe them).” And from Derek Beaulieu - “Don’t
protect your artwork. Give it away. Trust your audience. Be your own pirate.” We
have entered the age when everything is read and you don’t have to give
your artwork away, because it is taken at the moment of conception. In
fact, more than that, writing will soon be heteronomically manipulated
in advance of its creation. In this regard, as the conceptualist writers argue,
writers will not be the special category which they have claimed for
themselves, as we progress into the end of Personhood.
In the full essay, I expand on the threats to Personhood (“You”) through three dynamic appropriations:
commodification of consciousness, addictive attention sequestration and
behaviour manipulation. For the sake of brevity here, I will just touch on some
of the main sources of analysis. Shoshana Zuboff’s ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ articulates the final stage of capitalism where humans themselves
are the commodity, humans are ‘farmed’:
“Surveillance capitalism migrated to
Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon – and became the default option in most of the
tech sector. It now advances across the economy from insurance, to retail,
finance, health, education and more, including every “smart” product and “personalised” service.” … “Surveillance capitalism
unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into
behavioural data … fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you
will do now, soon, and later”. So “Computer-based personality judgements are
more accurate than those made by humans” - Facebook knows you better than
members of your own family do. “The team found that their software was able to
predict a study participant’s personality more accurately than a work colleague
by analysing just 10 ‘likes’’; and “Belgian police now say that the Facebook is
using ‘likes’ as a way of collecting information about people and deciding how
best to advertise to them. As such, it has warned people that they should avoid
using the buttons if they want to preserve their privacy” (Andrew Griffin, the
Independent). With personal data becoming the world’s most valuable commodity,
the best analogy I’ve seen comes from Digital Ethicist Tristan Harris where he likens the digital model of you to a voodoo doll. Every action you
take, real or digital, updates a more perfect copy of you which can then be
used to predict what you will think, do or consume next, but more than that it
can be tested, digital ‘pins’ can be poked into it to see how the real you will
react to stimulus, and building on that, can be used to alter you. Algorithms
are developing in ways that allow companies to profit from our past, present,
and future behaviour – or what Shoshana Zuboff describes as our “behavioural surplus.”
You’ve already heard this. You know that
your data is farmed. You know governments sell citizens’ records to the private
sector. You know that facial recognition and location technologies have started
following you – you’ve seen it on TV from China, cameras that identify citizens
crossing the road wrong, etc. Every time you upload a photo, every time you
download an app that makes an comic avatar of you or turns your selfie into a
Renaissance style painting, or shows what you’d look like if you were a
different gender, etc, you give more of yourself away, and make the software
better at recognising everybody else.
Even more extreme Microsoft were, until
recently exposed, working with the Israelis on implant technology for children;
and under cover of the pandemic the transnational digital passport system
ID2020 is actively being promoted, which will be able to restrict movement on
the basis of your health status. It’s no coincidence that American police
departments are using Covid Tracking Apps to identify Black Lives Matter
protestors. “The internet is, in its essence, a machine of surveillance. It
divides the flow of data into small, traceable, and reversible operations, thus
exposing every user to surveillance”, writes Boris Groys.
Predictive data will tune and herd our
behaviour towards the most profitable outcomes. It is not enough to automate
information about us; we need to be consumable consumers. As one data scientist
observed: “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour, and force
change that way … We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the
music make them dance.” Herbert Marcuse
wrote in One Dimensional Man “The music of the soul is also the music of
salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centres the
rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”
The final step will be AI. One might
imagine that AI research is driven by the spirit of philosophic or scientific
enquiry, but fundamentally it is business driven: AI, when successful, will be
able to work faster, cheaper and beyond the limits of labour laws. With human
factory labour already replaced, companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook
have the automation of white-collar jobs directly within their sights. “It is
no surprise that the idea of creative machines is coterminous with the ascent
of platform capitalism. Art is among the last problems for which a human is
still the best solution. No ruling class can exist without an appeal to the
aesthetic, as almost any page from art history will show. To administer the
aesthetic – to control the terms of what counts as an image, or what
constitutes art – is to rule both the mind and the body, to influence the whole
sensate world of human emotion and expression.” Mike Pepi (Frieze).
The world has become more digital in
response to the Covid19 lockdowns, so the dynamics of control and subsummation
are magnified. You may think that this is over-egging the threat of
Surveillance and even that this is a First World anxiety, but the combination
of corporate capitalism, rapidly expanding dictatorships and controlling
propensity of neoliberal-fascist government, there are numerous examples of not
only the dangerous direction of travel but significant inhuman initiatives.
Orwell’s prediction - “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres
inside your skull” will be surpassed very soon when that few centimetres has
gone too.
This is not a luddite rejection of the
digital, we can only live in
now, the 21st Century. But facing a more voracious form of
capitalism: how can artists respond? Artists responses to surveillance hegemony
fall into 3 categories (ignoring the blind innocents farmed as human cattle):
Lamentation - “the Internet,
completely and unreflectively subject to market processes and dedicated to
monopolists, controls gigantic quantities of data used not at all
pansophically, for the broader access to information, but on the contrary,
serving above all to program the behaviour of users, as we learned after the
Cambridge Analytica affair. Instead of hearing the harmony of the world, we
have heard a cacophony of sounds, an unbearable static in which we try, in
despair, to pick up on some quieter melody, even the weakest beat.” Olga
Tokarczuk (Nobel Lecture)
Compromised Embrace - There are writers, certainly within the
Uncreative/Conceptual movement who piratically celebrate the ‘creative’ utility
of technology, the prospect of AI creativity, the literate viruses etc, etc.,
but in the context of this consciousness Final Solution, their commitment is
reminiscent of Buddhist Monks willing to
self-immolate: they prove their absolute belief; you can be impressed with
their rigour and their faith but you have considerable doubt that they will be
reborn in their next life. Notwithstanding this zeal and accepting that
conceptual literary techniques will have a place in the way forward I will
propose, we can also accept that there will be writers and readers who will
choose subsummation.
Subversion – There are many
technology critical artists mostly reliant on guerrilla or subversive
utilisation of digital tools – a good example is Pip Thornton’s ground-breaking
critiquing of linguistic capitalism using the system algorithms
themselves to question the appropriation of value.
I contend that these strategies ultimately fail to
free human creativity. None of them address the scale of the threat and will be
subsumed by it. So where does poetry come in? Without Romanticism or wishful thinking,
how is poetry answer to be all-consuming capitalist behemoth? After all, if you
look at the canonical moments when poetry is addressed seriously, it doesn’t
generally measure up. Everyone’s first thought, of course: Plato bans it from
the Republic; and the go-to in times of totalitarian threat, George Orwell is
even less enthusiastic: “There can be no doubt that in our civilization poetry
is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the
average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he
said that in the English-speaking countries the word ‘poetry’ would disperse a
crowd quicker than a fire-hose.” Interestingly
though, Orwell soften his dismissal of poetry in the context of the totalitarian:
“Poetry might survive, in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts,
such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial,” and “It follows that
the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer, though
a poet … might possible find it breathable.” Maybe his observation of discredit
becomes a utility: “It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism
upon verse need be so deadly as its effect on prose … To begin with,
bureaucrats and other ‘practical’ men usually despise the poet too deeply to be
much interested in what he is saying…It is therefore fairly easy for a poet to
keep away from dangerous subjects and avoid uttering heresies: and even when he
does utter them, they may escape notice”.
It would be a pretty lame revolutionary claim to posit irrelevance and
inefficacy as the resistance space against Surveillance Capitalist. However,
these ‘weaknesses’ have the strength in the context of the commodification of
Personhood of being an agency with intrinsically no value. As Guy Debord observed: “Poetry
is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer
society, since it is not consumable”. So, in this historic moment of crisis,
where the omniscient god they have created turns to consumption of us, its flock -
Poetry is thoughtcrime. But how do you commit that crime? There are already
programmes that create artificial poetry. So, poetry as thoughtcrime must take
a specific resistance form: I will lay out what that is in the second (Manifesto) essay.
In April 2006, after the end of the first Text Festival, I installed Vertigo, the first exhibition of my own works, in the Sleeper Gallery in Edinburgh. This began my practice of installation writing in which I created site-specific poetic texts responding to the gallery space and/or its location. Thus each of my shows was accompanied by a publication. Vertigo the book had a print run of 50 - as far as I know they sold. By way of anniversary, I include a short extract here: 
