1: Missing Mother’s Body (Lawrence Abu Hamdan)

“... You speak to people on the levels of other’s readiness to listen.... God intended truth to be enunciated with one’s Adam’s apple.”

The above quote is from a live audio essay, ‘Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself’ (2016) by the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan. In it, Abu Hamdan points to a relation between language and body, one that has recently changed for a generation who has learned more words from machines than from mothers.

Firstly, language can be understood as a type of consensus that is formed on the basis of trust between people. Secondly, language is the very first agenda by which an individual signifies themselves. In the above-mentioned performance, Abu Hamdan attempts to recover the political, perceptive and affective capabilities of language by examining a range of cases in the Islamic jurisprudence known as Taqiyya. Using this speech act and language, the members of the Druze minority have the capacity to relinquish their faith during times of war and political turmoil. As a minority group, language has been a crucial political tool to maintain and pass on their collective consciousness over the generations.

The potential of language discovered in ‘Contra Diction’ is demonstrated in the pre-semantic domains – where ‘signification’ takes place. For example, a baby communicates with its mother by hearing the abstract sound of her voice, although it doesn’t make any linguistic sense. In the physical and emotional context guaranteed by the mother’s voice and body, the baby learns the way that ‘signifier’ means ‘signified’. So, the signification is not a precise moment of semantic exchange, but a process that occurs in the indeterminate sector of language that is communicated by trust and affection. Therefore, language is a product of a bodily and social mechanism beyond linguistic exchange, and this process of signification becomes the very first mediation between bodies and the world.

For the current generation a number of different machines, from televisions to smartphones, have replaced the authority of the mother, and my experience of the world has been filled with more words I have learnt from machines than from another’s body. This transition from the mother’s body to machinery has fragmented and subsumed language into the infosphere. For the generation that has not inherited language from their mother’s body, what will their first experiences of the world be? And what rhetoric will they get to live by?

Although there may not be a definite answer yet, we can speculate about the future through technology. In fact, software such as Free Speech 4.0 and Layered Voice Analysis 6.50 used during the performance by Abu Hamdan clearly shows the results of this rhetoric: the emancipation of language from the body. The softwares not only transcribe the words he says, but also detects emotions and identity from accents, micro fluctuation of vocal cords and lung capacity. The software is sold in the United States and Russia to governments and insurance companies all over the world. It is the point where signification is rendered as a swarm of information which it is practicable to exploit, such as detecting one’s identity and veracity. This might be the beginning of the alienation and exploitation of our own bodies.

2: The Body as Monadic Apparatus (Lu Yang)

This sign-flooded world of hyper-simulation might have already been anticipated. Every generation, whether through mythology or fiction, has had a concept of hybridity. These ideas of hybridity give us the parameters to imagine future generations of how humans will mediate and the world that surrounds them. For example, in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), hybridity comes in the form of a sleek, romanticised creature, which is made of metal and machinery and navigates the United States as a type of lustful symbol of the late industrial society soon to come.

If so, where could today’s hybridity – floating bodies as simulacra without axis points – have been imagined from? The Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999) might have shown us a glimpse of the body in our current simulated society: the selves programmed arbitrarily on reality. This program-human hybrid is completely disconnected from its axis point, which is the human body, and the bodies are used only as batteries by machines. The film was released 20 years ago, at the height of the dot-com boom and during the ‘Prozac age’. Back then, it was believed that the emancipation of consciousness from the body would actualize eternal economic growth and freedom. Viewing it within this context of the late ’90s in the U.S., it seems that the film The Matrix can be seen as a plausible foreshadowing of the body gestalt in the semiocapitalist society, in which bodies are alienated from any reference points and valorized by mobility and attention capacity.

Shanghai-based artist Lu Yang often uses her digitized body which, for example, appears completely detached from any modern subjectivation, such as nationality and gender, as well as from its corporeal mass. Instead, this virtual body has retained its consciousness intact, created by digitizing the brain’s neural network. Throughout her practice, we can observe her attempts to portray the reduced bodily regime – corporeal body, bodily rhythm and indeterminate sectors like emotions and selfhood – into a mere simulation of a brain. Lu Yang Delusional Mandala (2015) is based on the hypothesis that by digitizing ones self a human can be recreated – even its consciousness, and the sense of its own body and itself – on a simulation, and at the same time emancipate from its territory, the corporeal body and subjectivations so that the simulated body can move freely and live ubiquitously.

One of the reasons why The Matrix is still being talked about 20 years after its release is that this single question it proposes has not been answered, and is in fact becoming more complicated - What is “real”? How do you define “real”? From Kerouac’s automobile to The Matrix to Lu Yang’s virtual body, we see that in the imagination the hybrid continues to evolve as a more extreme substitute for the body. In this narrative, we should highlight notions of mobility and the lost axis points. The body is an empty agent on the global network that can be moved easily anywhere and at any time, and it is possible to provide a large amount of soft labour since the physical body is removed. Also, their reality is forged only after they are programmed for the functionality required by the network
(‘Construct’ in The Matrix). This imagined hybrid seems to imply a depressing future for cognitive labour in the age of semiocapitalism, characterized by accelerated attention and the disappearing body. In our current hyper-simulated society, there is insufficient language to speak of the boundary between simulation and the real world.

3: Scattered Frames of Representation (Lu Yang)

I. BYOD [bring your own device] The development of transient work spaces like WeWork
II. - The automation of drones that allow solders to kill remotely
III. - The mass outsourcing of telecommunications to India
IV. - The separation of mothers from families in order to work aboard in the West to provide for their families back home

We can draw some common conclusions from these four ‘offshore’ examples that continue
to happen in 2019. Bodies have been liberated from territory, intention from result, labour
from production. Here we need to consider the metalinguistic idea of a ‘frame of representation’. The ‘existent’, which is thrown into the world, adheres to the weave of the system of meaning, and falls and slips constantly over it. That is how I, the existent, mediate the world. If we call the first frame of representation (mother ‘s) language, the weave that is composed of the value system, the symbols and the frame of representation, is society.

The frame of representation is generated over a long period of time with various collective intelligences, but this incantation of neoliberalism known as ‘deregulation’ instantly destroys the frame of representation according to the examples mentioned above. The liberated body reflects an indirect and simulated world, no longer the world it belongs to, just as Franco “Bifo” Berardi takes the analogy of nineteenth-century French Symbolism to both move away from the interconnections between word and meaning, senses and reality and reconnect them to finance and currency deregulation and the ways value-backed currencies were transformed through the 1970s. The body, which was designated as the ‘territory’, and the ‘mother’, which spoke out for the identity of itself and the collective, or which was valued by average labour time, are now emancipated from their meanings and ‘signifieds’, and become free floating, easily transferable, like a dollar.

As a result, ‘offshore’ is yet another trajectory from the continued transformation of language to symbol, body to avatar, currency to value and society from land through online networks. Since the notion of offshoring (outside of colonial enterprise during the age of expansion), has been first initiated in Europe by the French telecommunications company Alcatel in order to lower its costs by hiring engineers in India, the current international labour paradigm is shifted. The productivity of cognitariats and computing power all over the world is more likely to be centralised into the immense, hidden and anti-ecological server farms of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, for example. Many denounce this practice as pure business strategy, but it is, above all, a giant business model which implies the expulsion of labour from IT services in order to accelerate outsourcing practices and eliminate millions of servers and public and private IT centres.

4: All the Lonely People, where do they all
belong? (Josh Kline)

I. The people born in South Korea starting from 1972 are now immersed in information capitalism.
II. The people born after 1988 has not lived the world without the mobile phone.
III. Those born in South Korea after 1994 have only known life with the Internet.
IV. Those born after 1997 have not known a time when there was no concept of ‘irregular workers’.
V. Those born after 2007 have not experienced the world without the smartphone.

As Marshall McLuhan once famously said, the medium is the message. The message, in the narrow sense, means language as the act of communicating, and in a wider sense this means the semiosis which regulates a society. So, as media technology progresses, it is natural that the human social geography will be transformed. For example, the boundary between private and public sectors will increasingly become blurred and society will require new subjectivations from its members. If people had been subjectivated as nationalist, liberals, social democrats, socialist, and so on, in the past, how would they be subjectivated in the semiocapitalist society?

The above chronological examples are but some of the pivotal shifts that have occurred during South Korea’s economic transformation from 1972 to the present, and at the same time these examples can be seen as the fractalisation of the body and society. Fractalisation, as suggested here, is a process that takes the body, words and time, fractures them into the regime of the algorithm, and then effectively recombines and scatters them according to the needs of corporations and capital. For the so-called neo-liberal society, in which social solidarity and safety nets have already been destroyed in many countries, this is a question that must be asked: What kind of subjectivations are required for extreme fractalisation? For whom is it ‘effective’, and thereby, out of this fractalisation, who makes astronomical profits?

For us, who already live in a world full of services that separate, collect and monetize the body and bodily rhythms, as exemplified by Airbnb and Uber, the body fragments in Josh Kline’s work Unemployment (2016) seem to show the endangered middle class in all its plastic glory. The fragmented body parts are arranged in office cupboards or shopping carts to represent sad objects such as reproducible office supplies and old cell phones. Bodies are outsourced and scanned, in a new style of displacement, like 3D-printed objects to be shared globally.

People, like old technologies, become obsolete, like Motorola flip phones with no camera to capture this global phenomenon of fractalisation. The hands, cut off at the wrist, are holding a number of branded commodities such as Iphones and vitamin water. Your hands are branded every day with the cell phones and water bottles that you buy. All of these apps and start-up companies are confident that we can connect with and empower each other, as long as we are under the umbrella of their brand. We ‘date, meet, network better’, as the slogan from Bumble goes. How much of your hand does Apple now own? How many of your memories does Instagram hold? What does privatization do to the fragmented and integrated techno-body? Currently, your body is no longer connected with yourself, or with anyone, but rather bodies and time are more fractalised and isolated into pieces. These fractalised bodies freely traverse between working and non-working hours and public and private sectors. When you are walking on the street outside working hours, your hands are functioning purely as a prosumer – a new subjectivation invented during fractalisation.