Symbolic Value in Artifacts and the Self as Illusion in "Babel"
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relation to things has
changed. That is, we live in a culture where the value of
things is now mediated not so much by money but by how they
exist as semiotic elements amongst other semiotic elements.
I guess I am trying to extend the idea of intertextuality
(semiotic relativity and interconnectedness) to cover not
only the linguistic but everything. Perhaps artists like to
do this as although they, just like writers, are dealing
with meaning they are doing so through "things". A banal example of this
might be cars. I like, and own, some old Italian sports
cars. When they were first built and sold their value was
determined a little by various "value-added" factors, such
as fashion, association with certain Italian values, etc,
but primarily their value was determined by how much it had
cost to make and deliver the vehicle to market. 30 years
later such a car is likely to be worth more than when it was
new, and yet it is not as good as a new car; it is not even
as good as an old car for no matter how good the example one
finds it will always have suffered from years of weathering
and driving. So, why does such a car end up being worth so
much? That question is partly
answered when it comes to buying and selling these things.
You never ask what such a car is worth, for there is no
clear answer as there is with a new or recent model. The
only answer is that it is worth what you are prepared to pay
for it, and if you are willing to pay more than somebody
else. So, the value is determined not by the car itself, nor
by the labour or other costs associated with its production.
Its value is determined by its symbolic value...the meanings
that you, and others, ascribe to it and the relative merits
of those meanings. How you attach a monetary value to that
is neither here nor there. If you think about such cars in
monetary terms you are missing the point (and will probably
lose a lot of sleep worrying about what a stupid investment
you have made). dd:
How would this apply if it is not an italian sports car, but
an artifact, which is respectively a digital
artifact. SB: I would say that
the same holds true, except that you are even more likely to
lose sleep as your investment would have been clearly
insane. In part the value of an Italian sports car is
established by its relative rarity (eg: there are only x
number of Alfa Sprint SS's left) but with digital art, where
there is not even the notion of an original much less a
limit on the number of copies that are possible, you do not
even have this factor to assist in adding value to the
artifact. dd:
In "Culture, Technology and Creativity" you are also
claiming that the computer is not an especially visual
machine and has no special facility for imaging above that
of other representational strategies. You proceed: "To
restrict our analysis of the impact of the computer on
representation to the strictly visual we not only narrow our
conception of what the computer is and what it may mean, but
also impoverish the diversity of representational
strategies." I totally agree with you and we both know that
it can even be (and has widely been) argued that the
computer is absolutely a text medium since even the image on
the screen is just the translation of the underlying
alphabetic code in which it is digitally stored. On the
other hand computers and the Internet offer very new ways of
visualization. Your work "Babel" that monitors user presence
is based on it: It visualizes perception, or to put it this
way: social action.
SB: Computers are not
only a text medium, not only a text but are writing itself.
In a sense all things are a text or part of one however, the
computer is in its very conception not only a writing
machine but a form of writing itself...a new type of writing
where the text is able to modify itself, determining its
morphoses according to what is written in its ever changing
code. In this sense I think the computer offers us not only
a new means to write, with all that normally implies, but
also a new way to see what writing can be. It is this
understanding which underlies much of my work. In "Babel" this
understanding is implicit (it was explicit in "Great Wall").
The focus in Babel is not the act of writing, nor its
intrinsic other "reading", but the process of visual
perception and both the manner in which normally this allows
us to differentiate ourselves and, in "Babel," the
subversion of the singularity of perception (it also treats
"knowledge", in the form of taxonomy, in the same way). That
is, I am seeking to make a work where the almost unconcious
processes by which we come to know ourselves "to be" are
desublimated, made visible and then rendered so as to
question and even destroy one's subjective ocular sense of
singularity. In short, the work is seeking to question our
notions of being, positing us each as just temporary notions
emerging and merging from a de-differentiated unconcious.
This relates to what I was saying above about the self as an
instance of intertextuality...an extremely contingent
instance, at that. I like the idea that what we
think we are, in all its sense of totality, is actually so
fragile, dependent and little. Essentially, the "self" as
illusion, a collective chimera where we assemble ourselves
from whatever is to hand and bestow the value of "being"
upon one another, more or less like the church accepts one's
existence through a baptism or the system of
education/employment through a degree, etc. It is all a
fiction, complex and beautifully worked out...but incredibly
fragile all the same. It is also a little like the story
above about Italian sports cars...their value is in the eyes
of the beholder and nowhere else. So, in Babel I just ask
what it would be like if we could all see what everybody
else can see, hear what everyone hears, think what everyone
thinks, and what would then happen to the self? And, of
course, I am relating that to the idea of the self as a
temporary "textual" event. dd:
In this way, Babel is a kind of visualization of what
Foucault meant by describing the subject as an intersection
of the discourses she takes part in, or as Marx, one of his
teachers put it: as an ensemble of its relationships.
SB: Foucault's idea
of the self as a nexus or the result of an intersection of
discourses flows through all my work. It is what underlies
my thinking about the "self" when I say it is contingent and
relative, not singular. I would probably go further than
Foucault and speak of the self as an example of an
intertextual artifact which is unstable in the extreme. That
we perceive ourselves and others as continuous beings is, to
me, an illusion. I rather prefer to see the self as a
fractured and even divergent series of events, each an
instance of interaction between innumerable factors where
the entire self is just that, the interaction. Beyond this
moment of interaction there is nothing. I often quote
Nietsche on this, where he writes of the self only coming
into being in its actions upon the world and the actions of
the world upon it. If you take this a little further, and
begin to see the world itself as a symbolic rather than
material thing, then you are very close to Foucault's idea
as well. It is only the complex and
fragile fiction we create, that we call memory, which allows
us a sense of being. In many respects I imagine that
insanity is when a person loses access to or a sense of
authority over that fiction. In English we have the saying
that "somebody has lost the plot" when they are mad. I guess
I am suggesting that you could take this saying literally
and then ask what is the value of that plot, how does it
work and is it worth the trouble...could things be more
interesting if we all lost the plot? dd:
According to Hayden White ("The Content of Form") we all
tend to see our life and history as a plot in order to find
coherence and sense in it. Maybe we have to learn living
without this last illusion of the pre-postmodern subject.
Thank you for a piece like "Babel" and "Great Wall", which
may help us doing so, and thank you for this
interview.
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