Hiroshi Yoshioka argues that tolerating multiple cultures is not enough: we should also find a multitude in our single culture, whether singleness refers to a nation, a religion or any other tradition. One great benefit of the development of media technology is that it has prepared a hyperspace in the social and cultural context, where we interact with a higher sense of mutual formations. Marina Grzinic on the other hand speaks about an imposed flexibility that subjugates artists and activists to the digital elites, and forces them into isolated digital creativity. Such a context produces an apolitical position. To develop a political intervention in the digital realm is imperative. Therefore, the talk will on one side present positive aspects of digital technology and on the other a wider, more critical perspective.

Tolerance of Complexity
Hiroshi Yoshioka

Digital technology has brought significant changes in our daily communication, commercial transaction, business behavior, formation of public opinions, educational methods, accessibility to knowledge, and the whole view of our life and the world in general. There are seriously negative and incredibly hopeful aspects in each of these changes and we feel dazzled everyday by innovations and bombarded by their accompanying problems. Pictures of these changes drawn by mass media and the industry look too overwhelming, while there are also emerging autonomous movements to reconfigure them in more democratic forms.
 
What I am going to pay attention to in my talk, however, is a more fundamental, intellectual consequence we seem to have, whether we are aware of it or not, by living in the age of digital media. The consequence has negative as well as positive sides. The negative is what I call “metaphysics of digital media”, which conceals our freedom and suppress our power to act, by replacing the reality with computer-generated figures and images on the monitor. They are at work in every aspect of our life. I would also like to focus on the positive and ethical side of the change in our basic way of thinking brought by digital media. Let me phrase this as Atolerance of complexityA. To take this issue seriously, we should first of all be careful not to be misled by a “simple” way to look at “complexity”. In other words, we have to know that “complexity” is not a “simple” opposition to “simplicity”, or there is no such thing as a “simple” dichotomy of complexity versus “simplicity”. We may easily say “This issue is complex and you cannot find the solution” often when we don’t (want to) think hard enough to find a simple verbalization of the problem. The word “complexity” in this case is used as an excuse for our intellectual laziness. On the contrary, complexity in a true sense appears as a necessary limitation of our simple and clear reasoning. We shouldn’t let the word “complexity” mean an incompetence of reason, but a hope to open a new perspective about intelligence formed in the network, by being fully aware of the limits of the individual human understanding. I think we will find this possibility in one of its most interesting and promising forms, in the field of cross-cultural attempts, both in academic research and in various cultural and artistic practices. One great advantage of living in today’s digital media environment is that we are coming closer to this perspective, not so much as the result of philosophical or scientific insight, but rather as a more common pattern of behavior, which we have acquired through our normal experience of digital media, during a couple of past decades. By showing some examples I have been involved in for the past couple of years, I would like to sketch how “tolerance of complexity” in people’s attitudes has a potential to organize creative activities both in the field of art and cultural activities in the community.

To Develop a Political Intervention in the Digital Realm
Marina Grzinic

The question that interests me is the relation between the digital realm and financial capitalism. The digital realm must be understood as a form of social programming and a as a mode of making profit, therefore as the digital mode of production (if I call it in parallel to Jonathan Beller cinematic mode of production) that is a new formation of techno-capitalist-labor condition of the financial capital logic. The digital realm reinforces commodification and computerization of its users, preventing processes of de-coloniality and de-linking from the financial capital to take place. It fits perfectly in the new division of labor necessary for financial capitalism to make profit and to rationalize its system of exploitation. Financial capitalism is working hand in hand with computer-generated imagery; in front of the screen images are ideological mindscapes for interiorizing exploitation, and behind the screen (mostly in the Third and also Second Worlds) due to labor division that allows capital to make profit using extremely cheap labor force, these images are produced and at the same time interiorized. These orchestrated computerization, globalization and financialization processes need to be connected with today’s financial capitalism. Third and Second World’s production and consumption of images are performed without mediation (without delay, or without a Deleuzian interval, tout court so to say, is a constant state of exception). Precisely from what is going on there we can understand that global financial capitalism (re)produces itself through dysfunctional logics and economic, social and political disruptions, propped up by science and new media technology. Science and technology are being implemented for the figuration, representation, mediation and rationalization of the crisis.

What new media technologies put forward is in fact, as claimed by Sarah Kember, an “anti-politics”! Such technologies are seen as a “consensual hallucination”, the new “final frontier” of an out-of-control realm where only “post-humans” will be able to live. But what are the real humans doing in the meantime, those who sometimes are not even considered to be fully human? They are looking for discarded food in the immense garbage dumps on the outskirts of the big cities of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. This will become more and more visible, especially with the present crisis of the financial capitalism, across Europe and the US.

As argued by Aihwa Ong, management and administration are running our social lives through a system of calculations. Exception functions as a mechanism of differential inclusion. Neoliberalism is the technology of optimization, from economics to politics, from nature to environment, and can be used, pace Ong, by any political regime (with no changes needed in the system for improving the conditions of life whatsoever) in order to effectuate only one single calculation: the calculation for profit. Profit as we can learn from financial capital is not made only and solely through investments in the stock markets but is supported by a series of interventions and logics of exploitation. One is that massive impoverishment of the world population is co-substantive with massive militarization that changes the “western” concept of governance over our lives (known as biopolitics, still playing the card of modes of life) into necro(DEATH)politics.