SOCIETY OF CONTROL: IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE?

By Abbi Torrance MA Fine Art 2011

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1 NO MAN IS AN ISLAND 2 CAPITALIST REALISM 3 AESTHETIC REVOLUTION AND ITS OUTCOMES CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY

p2 p4 p10 p17 p22 p24

INTRODUCTION Mark Fisher (2009) and Francis Fukuyama (1992) despite having opposing political ideologies have both warned us of the approach of Nietzsches last man1. This last man is a despicable, derisive man who has lost his will, he is complacent, unemotional and takes no risks. He is weak and ill, takes drugs to feel good, everyone is the same and only concerned about their health. He thinks he is happy. Herbert
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It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow there. Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man -- and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whiz! I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves. Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I show you the Last Man. "What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest. "We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men! A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death. One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one. One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse. "Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink. They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

Marcuse (1964) has described a similar man, a one-dimensional man. He said A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. (Marcuse, 1964, p1). He stated: advanced industrial society created false needs, which integrates individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought (Kellner, 1991, p xii). We are slave to our masters because of our desire for ever more material objects. This onedimensional thinking he said is the uncritical and conformist acceptance of existing norms of structure and behaviour. He suggests Westerners, need to reassert their individuality against technologies that oppress man and nature, and actively oppose the waste, destruction and exploitation that occurs within advanced industrial society. (Marcuse, 1960).

Melvin Goodall It Says Here (2010) Photographic print

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. "We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink. (Nietzsche 1891)

1. NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

Someone points at someone else, with a growing sense of recognition. The stranger is mortified and transfixed, pinned to the spot. They are released as doubt creeps in and the hand is lowered. They escape. They are caught again, and the action spreads through the group. Their simple lives become increasingly complex as they make relationships and give names. They discover that they know each other well. They explore and uncover the interconnections and interrelations as their lives interweave (Island 2010).

Flock is an unstable, nebulous object. It is seen from a distance drifting around a space or up close invading a room and threatening to envelop spectators. They move as a mass with collective behaviour, governed by a strict program. This behavior holds them together - like molecules, a herd of animals, a flock of birds, a swarm of bees. The mass sweeps through a room or garden, washes over chairs and tables, adheres to furniture or bounces around an interior. This collective entity interacting with the space, created by their adherence to copy each other and a set of common instructions (Flock 2005).

The 'objects' were temporary, momentary formations, collective entities appearing around the grounds at different times. The structures were interwoven within the environment, the spectators included. The performers lurked in the bushes, hid and stared back at the spectators, or ran for cover, also forming fluctuating masses of density and instability out in the open. The group, like a startled herd of animals, ran off into the trees, in response to the spectators behaviour or some internal dynamic, or would scatter in all directions, like a firework. (Pieces of People 2003).

Gary Stevens, Island (2010)

In these three performances, Island (2010), Flock (2005) and Pieces of People (2003) the artist Gary Stevens choreographs a flowing rhythm of actions to represent human interaction and behaviour. He slowly develops works through long practice periods, the complex structure, often including a text, grows out of the process and becomes rich and compelling. He describes and defines a fictive space and situation but the invention confronts us with our reality (artsadmin.co.uk).

In 2002 the Artist Rod Dickinson reminds us of a much starker example of human behaviour with his re-enactment of Stanley Milgrams Obedience Experiments. Milgram began these experiments in 1961 after Eichmann defended his war crimes saying he was simply following orders when he condemned millions of Jews to death2.

2 Milgram developed an intimidating imitation shock generator for participants to shock

unseen role-playing students if they got answers to questions wrong. The participants were told to continue by the experimenter even if they were worried about the effects of the shocks. 65% of participants despite becoming upset gave potentially lethal shocks to the students (Milgram 1974).

After the experiments Milgram said:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority (Milgram, 1974, p6).

This re-enactment prompts a reassessment of other classic psychology experiments: Aschs Conformity Experiments3; Festtingers Cognitive Dissonance Experiments4; and Zimbardos Stanford Prison Experiment5, which he had to stop early after 6 days, he said that only a few people had resisted the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance whilst maintaining any morality and decency (Zimbardo 2007). Milgram (1974) sums up the era saying that the major lesson learned was it is the situation a man is in that determines how he will act, not the kind of person he is.

In thinking about mans situation one needs to consider the whole effect of the society within which he lives. Goffman (1959) stated that societies produce the kinds of individuals they need and in turn, individuals become capable of making the society that suits them. Giddens (1984) in his theory of structuration says that all human action is performed within the context of a pre-existing social structure, which is governed by a set of norms or laws. Therefore all human action is at least partly predetermined based on the contextual rules under which it occurs. But the structure
3 We learn that a third of the time participants will conform to fit in with a group and give the

wrong answer even though they know or think its wrong. However he also discovered that if the group is small or one other person gives the right answer, there is less conformity (Crisp, R.J. & Turner, R.N. (2010)
4 We learn that to reduce dissonance (holding conflicting ideas simultaneously), we will

change our opinions to fit in with a situation or group, adjusting our own values and beliefs about things to align with our own actions or those of others (Crisp, R.J. & Turner, R.N. (2010).
5 Zimbardo (2007) demonstrates the powerful role that situation plays in human behaviour.

With a group of students role-playing guards and prisoners. He found that the guards became domineering and abusive and the prisoners became passive and depressed. In fact he said that he couldnt believe that he had allowed the experiments to go on for so long an evil of inaction (Zimbardo, 2007 p4).

or rules are not permanent and external, but sustained and modified by human action. Bourdieu develops this theory with the concepts of Habitus6, Capital7 and Social fields8.

Joanne Finkelstein says in The Art of Self Invention: Society rests on assumptions of trust and reciprocity. We must believe that the trains will run on time, that money will hold its value, that people are not murderous and that traffic rules will be obeyed. At the same time we know that these principles are constantly violated. We live with contradiction and become alert to the existence of paradox. While we enjoy the orderliness of the surface life, we know there are irruptive tensions beneath the thin surface membrane, ready to flood out the situation (Goffman, 1963). To participate in society we cultivate a public persona much of the training for this dual and divided mentality is delivered through popular culture (Finkelstein, 2007 p2). She says that in order to be successful we have to act in certain ways, which shapes our character. She then questions whether this means we are over-socialised and made into artefacts beyond our control (Finkelstein, 2007).

Some ideas of control from past thinkers still seem relevant today. Louis Althusser, in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus (1970) states that although within capitalist societies, the individual is regarded as a subject endowed with being a selfconscious responsible agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. This is not a given but is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on the individual. He says our preferences, values and desires

6 Habitus is the set of learned dispositions and taste for social actions that we learn

subconsciously from those around us. It is shared by those of similar class but varies across different social groups. It is an unconscious skill that gives us a sense of how to act in specific situations (Bourdieu, 1977).
7 Capital is accumulated labour and includes all material and goods. Bourdieu distinguishes

between economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. Economic capital is the ownership of something that can be sold. Cultural capital is the product of intellectual ability. Social capital consists of social relations. Symbolic capital is the recognition of other forms of capital, which can give a person prestige (Bourdieu, 1986).
8 Social Fields are structured social spaces around disciplines such as the arts, politics,

education, science and economy, where people network through social relations. Fields are relatively autonomous from the wider social space (Grenfell, M 2008).

are inculcated in us by ideological institutions called Ideological State Apparatus, which include the family, the media, religious organizations, government and the education system. He also highlights Repressive State Apparatus, consisting of the police, courts, prisons, and the army. When individuals or groups pose a threat to the dominant order the state invokes the systems of law and courts to govern individual and collective behaviour. As threats to the dominant order mount, the state turns to increasingly physical and severe measures: incarceration, police force and ultimately military intervention are used in response (Althusser 1970). However Gilles Deleuze (1995) in Capitalism: A very special delirium, argues that ideology has no importance. He says it is the organisation of power that matters. Felix Guattari in the same essay explains this, he says in traditional politics there are big ideological debates in parliament, with questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary however these problems of organization are the real problems, never specified or rationalised, only projected afterwards in ideological terms (Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. 1995)

Deleuze (1990) in his essay Society of Control gives us a detailed analysis of how control in societies has changed under different governing regimes. He summarises Foucaults location of the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries. The disciplinary societies initiated the organisation of vast spaces of enclosure. A person passed from one enclosed environment to another, each with its own rules, starting with the family, then school, barracks, the factory, occasionally the hospital and maybe even prison. These environments of enclosure he said aimed to concentrate, distribute in space, order in time and organise production. These societies succeeded the societies of sovereignty which aimed to tax and to rule on death rather than life. This transition took place over time and in turn, Deleuze says, the disciplinary society is now transforming into a society of control.

We are in crisis regarding the institutes of enclosure. The authorities continually announce reforms such as to schools, industries and hospitals. He says these institutions are finished, they are gradually being taken over by societies of control. He tells us, Burroughs calls control the new monster and Foucault sees it as our future. It is a free-floating control with pharmaceutical productions, molecular engineering and genetic manipulations as part of it. The corporation has replaced the factory, with its salary according to ability and its encouragement of competition and rivalry. Perpetual training replaces the school, which will deliver the school to the corporation. One is never finished with anything. He gives the metaphor of Kafkas The Trial; Kafka had already placed himself between the two types of social formation. In disciplinary societies the apparent acquittal and in societies of control the limitless postponements. He further explains that Individuals have become dividuals, and masses have become samples, data, markets, or banks. In monetary terms we have moved from minted money that has gold as a standard to floating rates of exchange.

He describes the technological evolution with the computer being used by the society of control, with its risks of failure, hacking and viruses. He says that capitalism has followed in the same direction, it is no longer involved in production, this is relegated to the third world. It wants to sell services and buy stocks and shares. The family, the school, the army are coded figures, deformable and transformable of a corporation that only has stockholders. Fixing exchange rates rather than decreasing costs or streamlining products controls markets. He says corruption has gained a new power the markets are the instruments of social control and form impudent masters. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt..Capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal

with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos (Deleuze, G. 1990, p1)

2. CAPITALIST REALISM

Mark Fisher (2009) in his book Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? paints a dystopic picture of capitalism and our current cultural malaise. He explores the consequences of the belief that there is no alternative to capitalism. From The Communist Manifesto he quotes:

[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (Marx in Fisher 2009, p4)

This turn from belief to aesthetics, and from engagement to spectatorship is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009). In claiming to have delivered us from the mistaken ideologies of the past, capitalist realism presents itself as a shield protecting us from the perils posed by belief itself. The attitude of ironic distance in postmodern capitalism is supposed to immunize us against the seductions of fanaticism. We are supposed to lower our expectations as a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism. Badiou says:

a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect

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Goodness. But were lucky that we dont live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But its better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But its not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we dont make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we dont cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc (Badiou in Fisher 2009, p5).

Deleuze and Guattari describe Capital as a motley painting of everything that ever was; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic (Fisher 2009, p6). Fisher says our current malaise the feeling that there is nothing new, is not new. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 capitalism seemed to completely dominate the global space, which led Francis Fukuyama (1992) to controversially claim The end of History, finding in liberal democracy the final form of government and the end of mans ideological struggle. Nietzsche predicted this over saturation of an age with history and that it would lead to a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself leading to cynicism and detached spectatorialism (Nietzsche 1997, p83). This is Nietzsches Last Man, who has seen everything but is tired of life, takes no risks and only seeks comfort and security (Nietzsche 1891). Fredric Jameson (1991) claimed that postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism. He argues that the failure of the future is constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene. Fisher states we are impotent in the face of a neoliberal ideological program, which seeks to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives of business. However we are not passively duped, there is an interpassive corporate culture, which solicits our involvement and encourages us to join in. He tells us how in education, lecturers and teachers have been locked into managerial self-surveillance, and students persuaded into the role of consumers. He suggests that the widespread mental health epidemic is a symptom of our times and critisises the adhoc drug treatment regimes pushed by the pharmaceutical companies in the name of science, as in all capitalist organizations their concern is profits, not health. Ben Goldacre (2011) on his blog Bad

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Science exposes the inconsistent practices of science.

Fisher (2011) on his current blog talks about the recent compromising of the neoliberal program but also the intensification of capitalist Realism, with austerity measures crippling the masses to support the capitalist system. He talks of the growing unrest in the Middle East as an opposition to capitalism and liberal democracy and says that History has started again. Even Fukuyama (2002) has now posed the question in relation to the rise in Middle Eastern fundamentalism, Has history started again?

Fisher joins the growing number of thinkers, including Zizek (2009) and Badiou (2010) calling for a rethinking of the grand narratives of modernism, albeit with a new understanding of the failures of the past. Fisher suggests we need to consider questions like what a post-capitalism might be, and how we can get there.

The painter Kaye Donachie considers failed utopian dreams using found footage of rebellious and revolutionary groups to create narratives that investigate group dynamics and power structures. Her series Enlightenment curated in the show At the beginning was a scandal at the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich bridged ideas of how the museum can show its historically important but as Ranciere would say sleeping works and also broaden ideas of how the museum might today be perceived, utilized and evaluated. These works showed spaces that reveal hidden or coercive power structures. She explored the spaces and relationships of the Blue Rider artists and the Lenbachhaus Museum and suggests a form of patriarchal freemasonry behind these groups. In one painting Donachie depicts Kandinsky and Klee in a Masonic double handshake. Donachie presents Freemasonry as an elitist discourse, ghosting that of modernism, which reminds us that while art is regarded as an enlightened occupation, its most celebrated practitioners often rise to prominence through influential networks

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and connections (Suchin, 2002).

Kaye Donachie (2002) Enlightenment installation of six small canvasses.

Fisher claims the Left will only succeed if it can reclaim modernity from a neoliberal Right that has lost control of it. This entails understanding how the current possibilites for agency are controlled by the machinery of Deleuze and Foucaults Control Society, including cyberspace, the media landscape, psychic pathologies and pharmacology. He also says that neoliberalisms dominance cannot satisfy the desires that it has captured. He suggests that we need a genuinely new Left shaped by those desires and suggests that the green movement is a good starting point or way out as capitalism will continue to rapidly use up the worlds diminishing resources:

Nothing contradicts capitalisms constitutive imperative towards growth more than the concept of rationing goods and recourses. Yet it is becoming uncomfortably clear that consumer self-regulation and the market will not by themselves avert environmental catastrophe (Fisher 2009, p80)

He also claims there is a libidinal as well as practical case to be made for this new restraint. He likens our current situation to a generation of parents who have allowed

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their children to do and have what they want without strict boundaries. The children become more and more demanding and whiney, showing that unlimited licence leads to misery and disaffection (Fisher 2009, p80).

The Artist Rod Dickinson explores ideas of control and mediation and focuses on the way our behaviour is moderated by feedback systems. Using detailed research he has re-enacted events that represent various mechanisms of social control

(roddickinson.net).

Rod Dickenson in collaboration with Steve Rushton (2010) Closed Circuit (Who, What, Where, When, Why and How # 2).

Closed Circuit interrogates the historical form of the presidential speech and government press briefing. Two actors deliver a simulated press briefing. The script is

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composed of fragments of press statements and speeches delivered since the Cold War. The script focuses on how similar declarations have been used by different governments with different ideologies to declare and maintain states of crisis and emergency. The press briefing is linked to the feedback circuitry of Television. The press statement produced for TV thus works as a carefully constructed feedback mechanism, disseminated by TV, which then shapes political and social reality. Dickinson says The visual and theatrical syntax of the political briefing alongside the repetition of rhetoric reproduces the logic that governs public life and media in general (roddickinson.net).

Adam Dix is another artist who confronts and explores control in our society. He is particularly interested in behaviours of mass compliance and the contradictions of our relationship with technology, within this he looks at the impact of telecommunications on our society. He examines past futuristic predictions of the 21st century and dreams of a technological utopia, mixed with our current technological aspirations. He says:

It is this embodiment of a contradiction that presents itself within our understanding of todays communication technology,. the conflict between the unification and physical detachment of a persons engagement with it. The paradox of a need to communicate while remaining physically isolated by the very object of connectivity has led my investigation into describing behavioural responses with regard to communication, how we relate or comprehend technology on a humanistic level. In doing so I have found other areas that are representative of galvanising people into a group response, that project a sense of ritual, coveting, sect and in extremes, fanaticism. (adamdix.com)

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Adam Dix, Satellite State (2009)

Foucault (1984) re-presents us with Kants (1784) essay What is Enlightenment? He suggests that to be enlightened we need a way out of immaturity which he states is a certain state of our will which makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. Foucault (1984) re evaluated this question and suggests that the way out is to subject the present to critique, a possible way out of the present.

In critiquing the present I think we should consider George Agambens essay What is

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the Contemporary? (2009). He has made a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. He states that those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands. He explains that this dys-chrony does not mean the contemporary is a person who lives in another time, a nostalgic.

Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch....are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it (Agamben, 2009, p41).

3. THE AESTHETIC REVOLUTION AND ITS OUTCOMES

Ranciere (2002) discusses complex ideas in his essay The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes, which explain in some way, how art can contribute to the what is the alternative discourse. Schiller stated that Man is only completely human when he plays and he assured us this paradox is capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living (Schiller in Ranciere 2002, p133). Ranciere suggests we reformulate this to: there exists a specific sensory experience the aesthetic that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community (Ranciere 2002, p133). Ranciere says this is the question of the politics of aesthetics or the aesthetic regime of art, it grounds the autonomy of art to the hope of changing life.

To understand the politics of aesthetics he says we need to understand the link

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between autonomy and heteronomy. Firstly the autonomy set up by art is by a mode of experience, not the work of art. Secondly, for the subject of the aesthetic experience there is a dismissal of autonomy, hence one of heterogeneity. Thirdly the object of the experience is aesthetic in as much as it is not only art. He calls this the original scene of aesthetics (Ranciere 2002, p135).

He describes the contradiction in aesthetics, that art is art to the extent that it is something else than art. He says there is interplay of three major possibilities. Art can become life. Life can become art. Art and life can exchange their properties.

Art becoming life Constituting the new collective world: He says the aesthetic selfeducation of humanity will frame a new collective ethos (Ranciere 2002, p137). The politics of aesthetics can succeed where the aesthetics of politics failed. Ultimately he says, aestheticisation is the alternative to politics. Hegel, Holderlin and Schelling first proposed this as the Oldest System- Programme of German Idealism. Politics vanishes in the dead mechanisms of the state in relationship to the living power of thought of the community. The task of poetry (aesthetic education) is to make ideas sensible by turning them into images, creating an equivalent of ancient mythology. They said mythology must become philosophy to make common people reasonable and philosophy must become mythology to make philosophers sensible (Ranciere 2002, p138). Ranciere goes on to say art is a matter of living in a shared world, but this art has a temporality as a new life needs a new art.

Life becoming art Framing the life of art: Here Ranciere talks of the museum and how this institution renders visible the life of art by historicizing it, which gives it a new life framing it within history. They exhibit a time-space of art as so many moments of the incarnation of thought (Ranciere 2002, p141). The museum also

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precipitated the end of art, which framed new visibilities of art which led to new art practices of art.

He gives Hegels example of a Greek statue, which he says is art because it figures the distance between that collective life and the way it can express itself (Ranciere 2002, p141). He says the Greek statue is the work of an artist who is expressing an idea that he is both aware of and unaware of at the same time. What matters most is the limit of the artist, of his idea and his people, thats what makes the art successful. Art is living as long as it expresses an idea unclear to itself. It lives as long as its something else than art - a way of life and a belief. He says when art is no more than art it vanishes. When the content of thought shows itself and when nothing resists it, this success means the end of art. When the artist does what he wants it becomes mere trademark. This idea of the end of art, is, that when art ceases to be non-art it is no longer art either. He describes the history of aesthetics as a clash of: a new life needs a new art; the new life does not need art (Ranciere 2002, p142).

Art and life exchanging properties: The temporality of art also leads to the boundaries of art being permeable. Past works may fall asleep and cease to be artworks or they can take on a new life in a new framing. In the same way common objects can cross over the boundaries of art. Ranciere warns us that the danger is that everything becomes artistic, the border becomes blurred, where nothing escapes art, such as when art exhibitions duplicate commercial videos and objects of consumption, assuming they are critiquing commodification. He suggests that we should break away from this area of aetheticised life and draw a new border that shouldnt be crossed.

He concludes: there is a metapolitics of aesthetics which frames the possibilities of

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art. Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on that ambiguity (Ranciere 2002, p151).

Art theorist and critic Alfredo Cramerotti (2009) in his book Aesthetic Journalism: How to inform without informing, traces the shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism. He says the mass media has increasingly aestheticised the distribution and publication of information as Commercial global pressure has led to news being packaged in entertaining formats, with the separation between information and opinion becoming blurred. At the same time the Art world is increasingly using investigative work methods to produce material and knowledge, which they reprocess using aesthetic strategies, often shown in journalistic formats. He says thus shifting the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of Art. Since the 60s Art has gone through a structural change alongside the sciences, cross-referencing to become increasingly

interdisciplinary. Art has also come to represent knowledge production that resides outside of established expert domains (Cramerotti 2009).

The artist Uriel Orlow, questions the great narratives of history, and looks for forgotten histories, he explores the spatial and pictoral conditions of history and memory, focusing (urielorlow.net). on blind spots of representation and forms of haunting

The Short and the Long of it (v 1.0) (2010) takes as a starting point the failed passage of fourteen international cargo ships through the Suez Canal on 5 June 1967. Caught in the outbreak of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the ships were only able to leave the canal in 1975 when it re-opened. While stranded, the political allegiances of the multi-national crews were dissolved and gave way to a form of communal survival and the establishment of a social system. This involved the organisation of their own olympic games, amongst other activities. Playing with different modes of documentary and narrative, [the work] focuses on

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this event hidden in the shadow of official histories. (gasworks.org.uk)

Orlow (2010) likens these forgotten histories to heterotopias, which is a space inside but outside our society, such as hospitals, prisons, nursing homes and ships. They have their own systems separate from the main. Orlow makes his Art as heterotopia, a space where things can be brought together to create a new space. He suggests we think of history as events in space rather than in a linear time. This gives us the ability to return somewhere and link past and present. He describes the Aesthetic Revolution as a blurring of facts and fiction, which destabilises mechanisms of truth, but engages with politics of truth. He says documentary must be fictionalised, the playing of sources, to suggest new possibilities. He talks about the journalist and the storyteller and says dont work on a blurred line between them but enter the two camps. He suggests fiction might be a more powerful way to display fact. He also reminds us that image is only a snapshot and can never be the whole picture. Sally OReilly (p9) says Creativity and information are no longer distinct. We must think of how to inform with a light touch, how to yield pleasure while maintaining a political grasp, how to know and to dream at one and the same time'. Cramerotti suggests we 'employ fiction as a subversive but meaningful and effective agent of reality' (Cramerotti 2009 p22). He also highlights that art is not about delivering information, it is about questioning that information' (Cramerotti 2009 p29). Finkelstein says that art produces a fantasy world that far exceeds reality while also making reality easier to see (Finkelstein 2007 p15).

Walter Benjamin (1936) also talks about the journalist and the storyteller, he bemoans the demise of the storyteller, which has occurred in tandem with the rise of

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the novel and the journalist. With this demise he says we have lost the ability to exchange experiences (Benjamin 1936, p1), the value of experience has fallen, and the consequence is no councel for others or ourselves. The storyteller tells his story from experience and makes it the experience of the listener. Villemessant, the founder of Le Figaro, characterized the nature of information which Benjamin says has even put the novel in crisis. To my readers, he used to say, an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a revolution in Madrid (Villemessant in Benjamin 1936, p4).

Benjamin says half the art of story telling is to keep the story free of explanation as one re-tells it. Information only lives in the moment its new, it has to explain itself to that moment, and is therefore shot through with explanation. The story however, does not expend itself and lives on. He says Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience but because of our busy lives, especially in the city, the gift of listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears (Benjamin 1936, p5).

CONCLUSION

It seems there is no question that we live in a society of pervasive control, control that goes far beyond the realms of most individuals knowledge. This control is Burroughs multi-layered monster, affected by Social structure and conventions, human psychology, Ideologies, Power structures and global Capitalism.

I am persuaded that there is an alternative to an ever-increasing society of control: Fisher suggests a new left with green credentials. Zizek suggests we try communism

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again with a new understanding of what it could be. Benjamin suggests we hold on to the art of storytelling with the authentic experience and counsel it brings with it. Kant said educate yourself. Foucault said critique the present. Ranciere describes how the play of art can be an ambiguity that encourages a new life. Ford (2008) suggests we poke our heads out the fractures of the system and take a look. Strike through the gaps and create autopoesis. Frederic Jameson suggests:

It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world - better to say the alternate world, our alternate world - as one contiguous with ours but without any connections or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible (Jameson 2009, p612).

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