________________________________________________________________________________ >Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2000 12:21:05 +0100 >To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net >From: David Garcia >Subject: What matters What Matters Amidst the constant use of the word "community" I find it easier and more realistic to talk of friendship. Are there any histories of the importance of intellectual friendship? I can only think of Plato but there must be others. Intellectual biographies often hinge on a pivotal moments of intellectual union. Meetings of minds. Hakim Bey describes the paradox of love or *unmediated* communion as the ultimate goal all media. Individual meetings of opposite sensibilities create the sparks around which larger intellectual movements grow. Wordsworth and Coleridge, , Virginia Wolfe and Vita Sackville West, Freud and Jung, Charlotte, Emily and Ann Bronte. Picasso and Braque, Marx and Engels. I am raising this because of a line in an old posting of Geert Lovink's, which seemed to me to raise an important question. He wrote "it is the invisible social network aspect of the internet is what makes it so different from broadcast media." In other words friendship. This sentence came out of Geert's ruminations after a troubling nettime meeting held in Lublijana, Beauty and the East, in which he detected "grumbling about disorganization, about no solid resolutions, definitive programs or advances". He then went on to describe "how much harder it is preserve looser bonds--loyalties, trust a certain faith." The valiant but seemingly doomed attempt to keep questions of power out of nettime reminds me of the following statement "Where love reigns there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking" Jung, collected works, volume 7. Geert's posting ends with a reference to the rise of the net as an environment for capitalism and he goes on hopefully to pronounce that "The magic of (shared) communication in itself remains untouched by these developments. What counts are illusion and imagination in whatever environment. But these fluid untamed elements are precisely what is endangered now...." The text has a qualified optimism based on the existence of invisible social networks.... and illusion and imagination, the strange forms of friendship created by nettime that allowed new forms of content to emerge from new social processes. A more recent text (this year) *An Early History of 90s Cyberculture* is both more nostalgic reffering to "a time when Gibson, Sterling and Virtual Reality were still secret passwords. " and also more pessimistic "As far as autonomy are concerned we are left with www.ghost towns, abandoned home pages, boring avatars, broken links, switched off servers, overspammed lists and newsgroups...The freedom is there but no one cares." Are the secret histories of nettime's broken friendships coloring Geert's view of the arrival of capital's power in the Le Cyber, which we all knew was as inevitable as night following day. Are we really to believe that the capitalist bulldozer driven by the "baby suits" mean that we can no longer create the invisible social networks of the imagination and illusion? Or did we just get tired? >Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 22:50:02 +1100 (EST) >From: McKenzie Wark >To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net >Subject: Re: What matters "True love is love of death in the other and the other in death." If there's a key moment in the history of friendship's media, it is Michel de Montaigne's book, The Essays. He was, i think, the first writer to address himself to his imagined, prospective, virtual readers, as friends. As if they were friends, and eventually, as a new kind of friends. Friends who may never meet, who may live in different times, places, languages. Montaigne wrote in memory of a dead friend, but created a new kind of communication in the process. One not aimed at writing on the basis of authority (spiritual or secular). Merely on the basis of friendship. But friendship is a paradoxical business. All kinds of love are, but perhaps friendship most especially. But the extraordinary thing is that while few friendships are permanent, the practice itself is self-renewing. There's an ethic in this, in friendship's capacity to seek the asymptote of the moment rather than of eternity. If mass print was the vector along which Montaigne could practice his virtual friendship, then if anything we have too much opportunity to multiply its virtuality. And perhaps this just increases the turnover. Friends for five minutes rather than five years. We've all had that experience of the net -- the intense exchange that abruptly starts -- and ends. But so what? In the time space of a week none might exchange as many messages as was possible in a year only two centuries ago. The speed of particular friendships forming and dissolving does not interrupt the timelessness of the practice. It merely creates a more microscopic texture. And is not friendship the whole basis of a certain kind of democracy? Even when it fails, or moves on? A democracy not of the mass organised aorund the broadcast vector, but the mesh of changing alignments of particularities. If it cuts across broadcasting, mediated friendship also mitigates against hierarchy. Or at least hierarchy imposed from without, by disciplinary machines. Friends arrange their own mutable relations of the incomensurable. Who needs manifestoes, declarations, resolutions, when one has friends? Perhaps there are two avant gardes in European culture: the one good at friendship and the other good at bullying. The latter includes Andre Breton, Guy Debord -- but who belongs to the former? That's the thing about friendship -- it is all about communication, but sometimes with discretion. Friendship is not very compatible with meglomania, paranoia. Rousseau, unlike Montaigne, was a complete failure at friendship. Rather friendship is invested in scepticism. Its the desire to communicate inspite of its very impossibility. It never survives the illusion of communion. Friends who stay friends know they talk, or write, past each other. k __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org