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Surely, what is most absolutely unique to the Web is that it offers
a totally unprecedented conversational situation. It does not involve
speech - even in spoken chat rooms, the words in one's own voice
are mediated by a deflector which synthesises them - and because
of that, any illusions of stability in the economies of production
or transmission of meaning are completely ruled out. Even when chatting
is done in supposed real time, between each sending and each reception,
between each thought and its being typed out, there is an inevitable
microsecond. Within it, any illusion of simultaneity falls into
an abyss, into the depths of the forgotten. The Web produces the
illusion of sharing a space - but in each of its extremes a different
internal, radically separated time is inhabited. If the illusion
of a full presence of the meaning of words is fed by the deceptive
impression of mutual intelligence produced - in the experience of
live conversation - by the simultaneity of the acts of speaking
and of listening, we have here the explanation for why the act of
encounter that is produced on the Web remains completely free of
this pressure of meaning. The internaut is a navigator of the routes
of the signifier, who is aware of the unbridgeable distance that
(still) separates them from those of meaning.
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Put another way: these who chat on the Web are not where their
words are; they inhabit an insurmountable delay with regard to them.
The words that circulate are always anonymous, writing without a
subject. What they say, they say for themselves - they are completely
lacking in the supposed subject who enunciates them. A chat room
is a game for latter-day Surrealists - producers of genuine exquisite
cadavers - given over to the succulent experience of confirming
how a text speaks only to the extent that it moves around - and
perhaps, to the extent that in moving around, it pronounces them.
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We are never dealing here - therefore - with words, but with a
text. Not with the logos, but with the graph, not with the word,
but with writing. Writing that is exchanged in a regime that is
somewhat archaeological, native, of an anthropological nature. A
regime in which signs were still exchangeable as objects, in their
dark and splendorous materiality. Not as bearers of a meaning, yet,
but above all as witnesses to a connection, to the free establishment
of ties between peers, between anybody within a community - manufactured
precisely by that rite. The internaut is a neoprimitive devoted
to re-experiencing barter, the primal ritual of the gift.
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The gift that is exchanged on the Web is the sacred gift of writing,
of the primal graph. It is a remote, first-generation writing. A
writing-gram, a writing-sign, which we could not differentiate from
pure image, from pure graphic gesture. On the Web, writing and image
enjoy the same status - we experience them both equally. They reach
us like a message sent from far away, materiality bursting with
"intention" and not with meaning, with will and not with
representation, like effects charged with a principal finality:
that of giving testimony to the existence of an other. Our first
gaze brims over in the recognition of this graphomanic, libidinal
quality: intensive, mute, and material.
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Never underestimate - it has been said - the power of an image.
And the image - as archaeowriting, precisely - reigns here.
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We can, then, begin to read - or not begin. Rather, indifferently
given over to the experience of the pure superficiality and visuality
of the signs, we "look at" the texts as we look at images
- as witnesses or tracks, as mere traces of the existence of the
other. Surely, the maximum subversive potential of the medium resides
in this quality. On the Web, the collusion of the regimes of image
and writing is absolute. And its reciprocal subversion: it moves
writing away from the word - from meaning, as given - but it also
moves the images away from its innocuousness, from its value as
representation. It - and here this is also made evident - has to
be read, interpreted. Like writing, infinitely. No look - no reading
- can wear it out.
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The Web - as an unlimited club of "readers" of images,
as a secret society with an innumerable number of "voyeurs"
of writings, of graphemes.
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The very nature of writing - which is revealed with more clarity
by being put on the Web, as long as the "book" device
does not weigh it down to force its temporal one-dimensionality
on the sole axis of legibility - is multidimensional, it expands
in various directions, which can be travelled without a predetermined
order. It is the power of the word, and its expression as a sound
in time, which impeded perception of the multidirectionality that
is characteristic of the graph: a kind of writing that explodes
in all directions, and that connects in all directions, for which
there is no before and after, for which space is not the determination
of order, but rather the potentiality of an encounter. How hallucinating,
how forceful, would be an image which, like writing, could be able
to find the possibility to develop like that: multidirectional and
not successive, open and not fixed. On the one hand, all of the
power of the still image - of the "plastic" artwork, whose
refusal to "occur" in time imbues the images with an incredibly
powerful internal potential, of existing outside of time - in its
own time of significance which the posterity of readings must open.
On the other hand, all the power of film, of story-telling - but
no longer subjected to the unilinear axis of duration itself, of
things happening (which due to happening in a same place, had to
occur, until now, some before, some after). But that is all over
- and therein resides the highest metaphysical potential of the
Web.
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What is the most characteristic "conversational situation"
that is produced on the Web - a situation that we have not hesitated
in calling absolutely unique? Its peculiar cocktail of public/private.
The fact that it is offered as a place in the public domain - in
a time during which the public has been deactivated, engulfed by
the pressure of the media and the entertainment industry - to which
there is both access and projection from the extreme privacy of
one's own experience. The attraction of the Web for the subject
of experience resides right there - and that connotes the way in
which subjects express themselves, maintain their singular form
of "conversation", at once private and public. On the
one hand, it offers the experience - lost to contemporary society
- of the public domain, of the agora in which to meet and converse,
before many, with the other. But simultaneously, it enables us to
accede to this place - whether as mere receptors or spectators,
or as broadcasters - in the full reserve of privacy, in full contact
with what is absolutely unique about one's own experience.
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One who chats on the Web - or one who listens - does it with this
dual passion. On the one hand, the passion with which we address
ourselves in public to anyone. On the other, with which we hear
resounding, in the echo of the others' voices, that profound sense
of the absolutely unique loneliness of their own lives, their own
spirit, their own world of experience.
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The matter of secrecy is, for all these reasons, the key. But not
to preserve either the identity of the members or the nature of
the society which they form - sporadically. Rather, precisely to
preserve the most important of the secrets that the Web keeps -
that is has none.
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The moment of entering is therefore - and contrary to the classic
that confabulates the one who joins a secret society - the last
in which participants have their own names. From then on, subjects
can move around freely, namelessly, without public responsibility
- their movements are secret, private. The self-advertising of the
Web depends on this ability to offer full guarantees of secrecy,
of privacy - to the observer, not to the observed.
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The Web makes the world transparent, it completely empties it of
secrets - and the hacker, as a figure of the new, more subversive
wise man, is in charge of ensuring the penetrability of every place
on it. There is no form of encryption or password impeding the most
absolute transparency. All of the data, all of the knowledge in
the world, are accessible to this new incarnation of the Absolute
Spirit - to this new avatar of the Encyclopaedia of the world, which
is the Web. In return, it should ensure - even though, in so doing,
it lies - the complete anonymity of net-surfers.
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The multiplication of security instruments, of programs for guaranteeing
privacy offered by the different web sites, is therefore vital.
The net-surfer - the reader - is a nobody. And the one who writes
- a fictitious being, always invented. That is why on the Web everything
is pseudonyms, aliases, heteronyms, fake names.
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"Navigating is necessary; living is not." The celebrated
motto of the Argonauts is today, and with more reason, that of all
the innumerable, faceless people who, in the dead nights of their
lives, wander around the Web every day.
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To a certain extent, the Web brings back some of our childhood
dreams. Being able to go down the infinite passageways of an interminable
castle - of one's own house, every nook of the garden, every shelf
on the kitchen, every secret drawer of every piece of furniture
in the attic - without ever reaching the end. On the Web, everyone
explores the secret of the hidden treasure, sure of being able to
find it. By infinitely putting off finding it, the dream of being
able to do so someday never ends - this feeds the adventure of surfing
on. Unlimitedly.
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Moving around the Web has nothing to do with discovery, with finding
the truth. Rather, just the opposite, with the experience of pure
search, of misunderstandings. With the experience of infinite interpretation,
of interminable reading, which the Web feeds, constituted as a machine
of the multiplication of readings, of the proliferation of texts
and signs.
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It is illusory to think that the Web has to do with communication,
or even with information. It is untrue that there are two Webs:
the official Web, born under the wing of the institutionalised knowledge
industry - academies, libraries, universities, research centres
- and another rhizomatic "anti-Web" that maintains a transversal
and disseminating relationship with the same objects of knowledge,
with the same information. It is senseless to seek "information"
or knowledge on the Web. The very nature of the medium sabotages
any diurnal pretension of a relationship with it. All knowledge
put on the Web creates rhizomes, it fans out and propagates irrepressibly,
it overflows its uncontrolled connection with other places, other
knowledge. Impossible to ignore that any information, that any significant
content, must be reached through another. The Web is the very map
of a dissemination of knowledge which, in its impossible contemporary
obesity, makes any pretension of taking it in, of centralising it,
unrealistic.
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Therefore, it is a mistake apropos of the Web to envision a political
horizon defined in terms of some "ethics of communication"
- let us say a certain "democratism of the new information
order" or something of the sort. Political meaning on the Web
lies in recognising that its very nature triggers a change in the
"ethics of interpretation" - or, to be more precise, of
the "uncompromising multiplicity of interpretations".
The political potential of the Web lies precisely in its capacity
to subvert any pretensions of veracity of communication or information,
to show that the very condition of any effect of significance is
that of merely giving oneself over - unfinished - to the infinite
play of all possible readings, of all possible interpretations.
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The Web is, therefore and always, anti-Web. It is the mirror image
of the exhaustive conditioning of contemporary life around the world
by the communication and entertainment industries. It is their subversive
counter-figure: where the former produce - or aim to produce - "information",
"reality", or "communication", the latter merely
revokes any pretension of "reality"; at best it leads
us to the recognition of the "little piece of reality"
which, as subjects of experience in the contemporary world, it is
our lot to enjoy. This is why the Web feeds - to such an extent
- our melancholy.
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We cannot ignore, in any case, the heavy investment that major
corporations in the communications world are making in the Web -
nor consequently the danger of instrumentation and out-and-out commercialisation
of the medium which this involves. But they are mistaken in taking
this way - we would like to think. I can only imagine one thing
more idiotic than reading a newspaper on a web site, or follow a
news broadcast on one: to pay for it.
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In itself, the existence of the Web is witness to the tragic insufficiencies
which, faced with the communications industry, the citizens of our
times experience. They do not find in it almost anything that really
interests them. And much less do they find in it the possibility
of expressing what really interests them. The Web is an irrevocable
cry of rebellion that a humanity, silenced in what matters to it,
lifts minute by minute towards the insulting contemporary mandarinate
of journalists.
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Although thinking about an "anti-Web" seems irrelevant
to us - due to the fact that we believe that it is the only one
there; the one on which it is superimposed has its days numbered
- we do find extremely interesting any ideas about an intra-Web.
Indeed: the effect of the Web's "globalness" could never
be fulfilled under a figure of universality that supposed denial
of differences - but precisely an irrevocably multivocal expression
of them. That is why the idea of single, global Web, of a macro-Web,
is in the end repugnant to the subversive nature - hybrid and multicultural
- that characterises its nature. Only at the cost of thinking of
it as a "Web of webs", therefore, can we talk about the
Internet.
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What in the anarchic polyphony of the exploded totality of infinite
voices is mere noise, becomes dialogue and intelligence when the
scoop is centred, when the chorus of voices is modulated. What for
the universal community - for the global Web - occurs as final,
adding mere redundancy, discommunication - for the micro-communities
and infra-Webs that reverberate within it - occurs as clear and
splendid pertinence. A community of micro-communities, a Web of
anti-Webs. All effect of political pertinence - and all value of
production of significance - attributable to the Web is due to the
capacity to activate the micro, even the meso, within a global,
unlimited paradigm - in which every effect of identity remains suspended.
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"So if men, instead of still looking
for their own identities in the now inappropriate and senseless
form of identity, came to support this inappropriateness as
such, to make of their very being not an identity and an individual
belonging, but rather a singularity without identity, a common
and absolutely manifest singularity - if men could not be
thus, in this or that particular biographical identity, but
rather be merely the thusness, its singular exteriority and
its face - then humanity would attain for the first time a
community without budgets and without subjects, a communication
that would know the incommunicable no more. To select in the
new planetary humanity those characters able to permit its
survival, to remove the subtle diaphragm separating bad media
publicity from the perfect exteriority that communicates only
with itself - this is the political task of our generation".
(G. Agamben, The Coming Community).
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Its is, therefore, a matter of exploiting the possibilities that
the Web offers to establish floating forms of community - which
would express only "moments of community", specific vectors
of a community of interests, or concerns, or of desires, momentary
and unstable code-lines established in the free flows of difference.
Not some community regulated by the effects of identity - ethnic,
cultural, political; nothing about state or even individual - but
mere fluctuating communities regulated only by the instantaneous
and ephemeral expression effects of difference - trans-identity
communities, hybrid, multiform and pluricultural from their very
foundations. In them, there will be no more "subjects"
or "individuals" - rather the circulation of pure effects
of identity, equipment and machines of production of subjectivity
- mere expressions of free difference.
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On the strength of this dual evidence, the Web could also announce
"the coming community". Forcing us to awake from the despotising
delirium of an already millenary system, it could indeed become
its most horrific nightmare - and therefore, the sweetest of our
dreams.
ATLANTICA, #32, Oct99
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