Working Notes on 'Dust' as a dialectical image
----------------------------------------------
http://www.ordure.org/


'How are we to understand the 'dialectical image' as a form of
philosophical representation? Was 'dust' such an image?' (Buck-Morss
1991: 221)

'Dust' is a dialectical image (originally a photograph by Rosse Yael
Sirb) accessible on the ordure.org web site. It is both a representation
and a process of detritus that slowly 'corrupts' - pixel by pixel. The
corruption is triggered by viewing the web page and in doing so a pixel
moves from one location to another. On one level, the resultant image
with pixels moving incrementally out of order is the same as the first
image where the pixels are in the correct order. The data is consistent,
the pixels merely rearranged. Any comparison demonstrates a dialectical
play between two interconnected states of order and disorder, between
generation and corruption, suggesting the potential for change built
into the system - and by extension, the social system.

Corruption is the negation of generation. Corruption is also a good term
to describe the violent, destructive and virus-like procedures
self-evident in the capitalist relations of production (Hardt and Negri,
2000). Whether generation itself is dialectical remains arguable (and
dialectics is certainly something that Hardt and Negri would reject),
yet there may be broad agreement that politics needs to articulate
itself in terms of generative processes in lieu of the regenerative and
degenerative mechanisms built into contemporary capitalism. In this
sense, all material and immaterial production might be described as
generative.

Dust can be similarly seen to operate in an ambiguous relation to
materiality - it is hardly there, but always there (once swept away only
to reappear in an endless auto-generative process). Like Hardt and
Negri's description of contemporary power that is hardly discernible, it
is everywhere and nowhere. They say: 'In this smooth place of Empire,
there is no place of power - it is both everywhere and nowhere.' (2000:
190) The importance in terms of analysis is that 'in effect, the place
of politics has been de-actualised' (2000: 188; somewhat in the manner
described by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle). As the place of
production becomes more and more place-less, resistance become
correspondingly hard to place - still generated, but generated in new
ways: 'The Empire's institutional structure is like a software program
that carries a virus along with it, so that it is continually modulating
and corrupting the institutional forms around it.' (2000: 197-8)

It is true that the mode of production has undergone dramatic
transformations, characterised by flexibility, decentralisation and
networking. The system has become fully flexible and mobile, with
unpredictability and complexity as the predominant metaphors for both
culture and economics. In contemporary neo-liberal democracies (what we
might call post-in-dust-rial societies), inadequate toilet training has
led to a particular form of political organisation - ultimately
reinforcing centralised control and systemic totalities. This is usually
justified by some oblique reference to complexity theory that stops
short of an understanding of the dialectical dynamic of decentralisation
and centralisation, dirtiness and cleanliness, or disorder and order,
within such a model.

Like ordure, the value of dust is questionable, its relative status,
material worth - leading perhaps to a discussion of (use and exchange)
value. Ordure.org's 'dust' stands for things that appear to be out of
control, or appear to be beyond our control - the more we look the more
it becomes unrecognisable. Marx once said that 'all that is solid melts
into air'; now, this simply sounds like a truism. The very idea of
change has paradoxically become stable (or solid rather than melting)
and digital technology appears to be the engine for this approach.
Things that once appeared stable have been swept away, becoming
'antiquated before they could ossify', ground into dust by ever-newer
modern forms. To the historical materialist, data cannot be seen to be
fixed but is always able to be transformed.

More recently, Hardt and Negri describe the dominant power structure in
the following manner. It is: 'characterised by a fluidity of form - an
ebb and flow of formation and deformation, generation and degeneration'
(2000: 202). Herein lies a crucial part of dialectical thinking - as it
is as a result of the recognition of the exploitative relations of
production that change is made possible. The violence of corruption is
self-evident in the capitalist relations of production as exploitation.
Here the world of actual human labour, of dirty production, of
exploitation appears in the form of material things. Dialectical
thinking would suggest this is reversible, that corruption might be
superseded by generation. Does 'dust' reveal the possibility of such a
transformative process?

'Under Louis Philippe, dust settled even on the revolutions' (Benjamin
quoting Gutzkow, 1999: 102). The condition of change is exposed by dust,
which can slowly accumulate on things if they remain immobile. According
to Capital, the decline of capitalism's mode of production is
inevitable, as it is simply a product of history that also produced it
in the first place. Contradictions manifest themselves in all aspects of
capitalism's workings, however latent they may appear. These
contradictory tendencies unfold in every detail of the system, 'every
one of its basic "cells", the commodities' (Mandel, 1990: 13) - every
one of its pixels and every speck of dust.

Geoff Cox
treasurer, UKMO    
--

* these notes are recycled from previous essays: 
'Generator: the dialectics of orderly disorder' (2002), conference paper, Creativity & Cognition Proceedings, ISBN 1-58113-465-7, ACM Press, pp. 45-49.

references:
Walter Benjamin (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.
Susan Buck-Morss, (1991) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Ernest Mandel (1990), 'Introduction' (1976), to Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, London: Penguin,  pp. 11-86.