BDDP & Fils.

BMW X3 Advertisement
Campaign, 2004.

96

Dialogues Carried Out

in Silence:
An E-mail Exchange
ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY, GEERT LOVINK,
AND EUGENE THACKER

I. Introduction; or,
Media Studies as a Form of Zenos Paradox
The strange, forever-emerging discipline of media studies or
new media often finds itself caught in a race with new media
technologies themselvesthe latter always remaining a halfstep ahead of the former. From one perspective, the relation
between the media industries and academia has never been so
smooth as it is today, for even the most Luddite humanities
departments function (administratively and pedagogically)
through computer and networked media.
The social sciences are perhaps the most vulnerable to this
growing investment by industry into realms formerly dominated by scholars and cultural workers. A few generations ago,
industry had a monopoly on muscle. Today it has a monopoly
on information. For example, a social scientist today seeking
research data on social networks will forever be playing catchup to those industrial concerns that make it their business to
cull such data. In the information economy, media critics often
find themselves in a quandary: How can one ever keep up with
the legions of mathematics Ph.D.s on staff at Google or with the
hobbyist hoards keeping guard over Wikipedia? The new spirit
of capitalism is one in which creative expression is valued as
labor pure and simple. Self-measurement and optimization,
perpetual performance evaluations, intellectual innovation,
fungibility of purpose, graduation into global flowsthis is the
new terrain of intellectual labor. One might claim that there is a
crisis today in the very validity of scholarly methodologies
within media research: they are at best underfunded cousins to
the titans of data extraction and reprocessing (Google, Equifax,
etc.) and at worst the willing accomplices within a system of
dubious political worth.
If this is the case, perhaps the question is not about how to
make sense of new media but whether to make sense of new
media. The question is no longer: Can we use the masters tools
to take down the masters house? The question is: Can we still
use our own tools, now that the master has taken them up?

Grey Room 33, Fall 2008, pp. 96112. 2008 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

97

II. Nihilism and New Media

Eugene Thacker: I find the concept of activity interesting
in regard to new media and the claims made for new media.
Activity is not quite the same as action, because, while an
activity may be composed of actions, an activity does not have
the same sort of status as an action, which epically cleaves
space and time in its enacting. The action marks an event, while
activity just sort of goes on. Activity is also not as grandiose as
agency, because this term carries with it all the baggage of
being interpolated as a certain kind of subject (a citizen or
noncitizen, a professional or amateur, a resident or nonresident, and so on). Finally, activity is not quite so progressive as
interactivity, which imagines a mythical, pretechnological
era in which the dark cloud of passivity ruled the planet.
Activity seems to have less weight than any of these other
terms, but at the same time it is not nothing, because it does
imply some sort of intentionality, some kind of coming-to-be.
Maybe activity is simply akin to something one does to pass
the time. One may have activities planned for the day, but
those activities are just things to do, not necessarily life-changing
experiences or political acts. In English, activity is akin to the
phrases noodling, piddling around, or doing stuff. If
the perspective of action and agency asked What is to be done?
that of activity simply asks What is there to do?
Given this, activity hardly seems to be the cause of what are
understood to be meaningful political, social, or ethical effects.
Actually, that is one of my questions, because many of the commonly voiced claims for the political efficacy of new media
that is, that they involve meaningful actions, empowered agency,
and, above all, the infinite possibilities afforded by interactivityseem to be based on a rather mundane continuum of activity
that often amounts to recording keeping, logging, record keeping,
archiving, and database management. And yet it is not hard to
think of instances in which having or not having a file can have
real political effects.
This is a simplification, to be sure. But the limit-case is
networked media because, if we accept that networked media
have effects that are above and below the scale of the individuated user/participant, this recasts the concepts of agency,
action, and activity in a polarized way: either nothing you do
makes a difference (because network effects are the culmination of multiple and often conflicting intentions), or everything you do makes a difference (because network effects are
the culmination of multiple and often conflicting intentions).
We are strangely taken back to the primal scene of classical
tragedy: either one is Master of the Universe or one is at the mercy
of the Fates (or Furies).
But networked media require a whole infrastructure of storing

98

Grey Room 33

and distributing information, of logging, registering, archiving,

and filing information into databases as technical points-ofaccess. This infrastructure raises the question in a different
way: does activity produce meaning, or is it the reverse, the
emptying out of all meaning? Does the increase in the activity
of data management correlate to a decrease in the significance
of the media being managed? If so, would this emptying out of
meaning imply that a new type of nihilism is in fact integral
to new media? Is there a correlative nihilism to the system of
filing, one in which the accumulative nature of filing can lead
to its oppositethe emptying out of informational content?
Geert Lovink: I am interested in grounding this banality of
nihilism in todays culture of virtuality. The overall aim of my
project is to think technoculture. We have to see technology
and culture as one and the same. Technology has no impact on
our culture. Something is deeply wrong with this binary thinking. You have technology here, and it has an impact on culture
over there. This problem in particular appears with software
applications such as browsers, operating systems, database
ontologies, and search engines. The builders and early adopter
communities see these technologies as aliens from outer space
that somehow landed on this planet we call Earth. This coincides with the view of most Gutenberg intellectuals who see
information technologies as invading society. To read computer culture as the product of its time is not so easy.
Alexander Galloway: Eugene asked whether the system of
filing has a correlative nihilism. By evoking nihilism, we are
clearly now in the realm of the secular, in the act of profanation
of some great authority. Is it absurd to think that the system of
filing is some sort of sovereign that may be blasphemed
against? I do not think so. Taking on this perspective helps us
to understand the attention paid in recent years, both in Europe
and elsewhere, to the notion of exodus, of disappearance, of
what Vilm Flsser called an ethics of migration, of the desire
to flee ones informational content (The Freedom of the Migrant:
Objections to Nationalism [Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2003]). Future avant-garde practices will be those of
nonexistence.
ET: I am reminded here of Geerts remarks in Zero Comments
(New York: Routledge, 2007) that blogs, far from being an
example of the inherent democratic nature of networked media,
actually exhibit a kind of nihilist impulse to empty out the
established meaning-making structures. But, if this is the case,
it seems that instead of doing this by subtractive or destructive
means, the nihilism of blogging is achieved by an additive,

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

99

even exponential means. Blogs, counterblogs, and alternative

blogs proliferate; this exponential tendency reaches its pinnacle, perhaps, in the blog portal, the blog-of-blogs. So, my question: is a kind of new media nihilismor better, a nihilist
technicson the horizon, one that is not predicated on the
subtractive mode of negation or deletion but instead on the
multiplicative mode of addition and supplementing, one based
on multitasking and hyper-activity? Is there a nihilist technics
that is based on the most mundane of activities?
GL: My nihilist thesis is a new media adaptation of Jean
Baudrillards thinking. I have not presented it in such a way,
but that is it. Read it as a tribute to the thinker that influenced
me most and who sadly passed away March 2007. I resist the
academic mode of Rezeption of fellow and past intellectuals.
I would like to break out of this economy of fear: Do I quote
enough Badiou? Did I understand Baudrillard right? Do I drop
out if I do not use Deleuze? And so on. This whole way of
thinking has corrupted our cultural climate. We have been confronted with a crisis in the master-pupil relationship for decades.
We are not studying anymore under this or that professor.
Inside the democratized edu-factories is a growing uncertainty about His Masters Discourse. That is the real existing
nihilism for me. The postcolonial and postmodern deconstruction of the dominant Western (read: continental European) canon
is only one among many reasons why we have so many difficulties setting up grand debates. Instead of reading books, students play games. They are not even into e-mail anymore and
instead exchange text messages on their cell phones and chat
via IM. I am interested in reading this informal orality as a new
text culture. To read all this clicking and chatting as noise and
call for a return to content, is so tempting, but I resist this and
instead explore the desert conditions of the real.
The nihilist impulse in the current media landscape grows
out of the odd coexistence of two spheres, to use Sloterdijks
term: the hyperproductive reflection on the Self and the profound indifference toward the world. The one is warm, the
other cold. What bridges these worlds is the obsessive identification with celebrities. Blogs and social networking sites put
forth the promise that we can be celebrities, toonot for fifteen
minutes but for fifteen people. An incredible inflation is occurring regarding what is and what is not news. For the blogosphere everything that is tagged and that can be read with an
RSS reader could be considered news. Obviously everyone is a
(citizen) journalist. This is the logical consequence of the drop
in price (and size) of consumer electronics.
Before we start to talk about counterblogs, it would be good
to further investigate the blogosphere. At the moment I am

100 Grey Room 33

writing a blog theory with Jodi Dean (Polity Press, 2008), and
we have encountered large fields in an utterly unknown cybernetic terra incognita (New Holland 2.0, so to speak). Ever read a
fundamental study about social networking sites? What are
these hundreds of millions of users doing out there? How are
our Mandarin, Spanish, and Hindi? Any idea what is going on in
the largest blogosphere in the world (namely the one in Japanese)?
A healthy techno-deterministic approach would be to merely
study the software architecture and ignore the social drama
that occurs on the surface. But I bet you would miss half of the
social, which is the very essence of it all.
III. Media and Mastery
AG: Can you expand on your observation that instead of reading
books, students play games? I ask because this claim is usually associated with a certain nostalgic impulse within culture,
the notion that new media have little pedagogical value, that
one must study the great books, and so on. But I assume this is
not what you were aiming at.
I prefer to think of it in terms of the master-slave relationship: interactive media are fundamentally media of mastery.
They are sadistic media. Thus, the new ludic pedagogyplaying Bioshock rather than reading Virgilis one that teaches the
subject position of mastery within an often complex or chaotic
environment of social and technical interplay. As you point
out, this is also precisely what, in the tradition of the Western
Enlightenment, is called nihilism; that is, the disenchantment
of the father, the requirement that one must zero out existing
belief systems, that one must participate in the scene of ones
own anonymity. But you also point out, rightly, that this
nihilist impulse has lost any of the moral condemnation that
accompanied the nihilism of previous generations, particularly
that of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Today
we are living through the banality of nothing. (To fulfill the
intellectuals economy of fear, I am obligated to reference
Badiou! Is it mere coincidence that todays most pronounced
philosophy of being, that of Badiou, puts the void at the heart
of being, claiming that the one is not? This is certainly symptomatic of todays neo-nihilist impulse.)
But I am also interested in the format dilemmathe pairing
of books versus games is a handy example, but we could think
of many alternate oppositionsbecause it forces one to think
about what should be the best methodology for doing critical
work in and around media technologies. I cannot help but
notice a certain asymmetry: Geert did not write a blog on blogs;
he wrote a series of essays; and Eugene and I have worked in
similarly asymmetrical ways. I am very interested in the notion
of alternative algorithms; that is, code machines that resist

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

101

the dominant historical trends toward positivistic efficiency

and expediency. Of course these code machines can exist in a
variety of formatslegal contracts like the GPL (General Public
License), tactical media software, but also traditional bookbound intellectual writing.
I was quite interested in Cornelia Vismanns claim in File:
Law and Media Technology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007) that files are preconstitutional, procedural, or
action-based. Files are principles, variables in the calculus
of writing. The notion that files are machines is ultimately
much more useful than the notion that files merely store and
record things. Vismann also notes a certain ad hoc, cobbledtogether quality of files. They, not unlike blogs, are part of an
amateur, or shall we say folk, technics of writing.
I am also fascinated with Vismanns arguments around protocols and files. A file is nothing but its own protocol. Her
book ends with the programming language LISP, but does not
the Unix operating system best fit the discussion? In Unix, data
are stored in files, but so are executables, and even devices like
disks or network interfaces are themselves files. As the saying
goes, in Unix everything is a file.
GL: My love for the writing of books goes back to the early 1980s.
I am not a book fetishist. I never had the money and time to get
into that expensive hobby. But books are amazing time travelers. They transcend context in a way that few other cultural
information carriers can. Since I started to work with a PC (in
1987) my way of producing books has changed. These days I
see the book purely as an intercultural metamedium that stores
ideas and experiences. I also use the book-making process as
an excuse to sit down and reflect on what is happening in this
busy, loud, and ever-changing new media culture. The book
thus becomes a vehicle, a therapy, something to slow down and
systematize thoughts. Books are concept compilers. I can
imagine that future generations will no longer have to use the
book-writing ritual to sit down and write a coherent study. I am
a member of an in-between generation: not quite as digital as
we might wish.
The problem with games is already apparent and goes for all
new media: games do not generate codified knowledge. We can
put this problem aside as something that will change in a generation or two, but I do not see the scientific community changing
one bit in this regard. As long as you are not playing their game,
writing for peer-reviewed journals, quoting the academically
correct authors in the style they have decided, submitting to
their conferences, and so on, you are out. The wisdom of gamers,
expressed with the skills and in the language they use, is light
years away from the Gutenberg Galaxy.

102 Grey Room 33

Concerning the boys and their toys: no, I did not mean to
look down on computer gaming, even though I do not do it
myself (yet). What knowledge do gamers have that we, from the
book species, lack? I am not sure if this has already been
researched. To me, the link between gamers and the military is
a myth. They may be the perfect techno-warriors, but, who
knows, they may as well have an entirely different set of values,
incompatible with NATO and the Pentagon. Perfectly skilled,
yet unusable. The dominant techno-libertarian mentality does
not always go well with authoritarian agendas that often reintroduce state regulation (and ultimately state terrorism).
AG: Perhaps I take issue with Geerts claim that the book is
purely a metamedium of storage. This in my mind is one of the
preconditions for the new forms of sovereignty that we are calling media of mastery. The moment when the material substrate
becomes irrelevant to processes of valorization is the same
moment when Google enters the scene, is it not? I would be
horrified if the change were not all so predictable. The uncoupling of sources from substrates has a long history, going back
to Marx and beyond, but the crucial difference today is that the
source (labor) is no longer cast off in favor of pure substrate
(commodities), as it was during industrialization. Instead the
opposite occurs: the source (writing) is obsessively conserved,
while the substrate (the husk of the codex) is discarded. This is
also why Geerts work on blogs as technology (or the work of
Richard Rogerss group on media research methods) is so interesting; it casts a spotlight on auto-archival features like permalinks, chronological seriality, comments, content aggregation,
and linkbacks.
GL: A search for media of mastery did not match any documents, says master Google. That is interesting and means that
we could open up a new field of inquiry here. Together with my
students I designed a similar concept a while ago. The name of
the collaborative blog of my masters students at the University
of Amsterdam is Masters of Media. The blog started in
September 2006, in English, and has been a successful experiment from the day we started. These new media researchers in
the making have mastered the medium, in this case the
Internet, to such an extent that I am learning a lot from them.
The question then should be: do these Masters of Media at
some point transform into Masters of the Universe, as, for
instance, Tom Wolfe described it in Bonfire of the Vanities?
Can we speak of a democratization of mastery? And how can
we envision masters without pupils? Or are todays users/
customers the ones that are subjected to the will of the master?

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

103

ET: I agree, this phrase media of mastery is worth dwelling on.

But Google replies, Did you mean mastery of media? How
would the media of mastery be different from the mastery of
media? Let us say that the mastery of media is similar to what
Geert describes as the media-as-alien-invaders hypothesis, an
approach that inculcates a whole way of thinking about media,
one that is as popular as it is naturalized: (i) media are tools; (ii)
our relation to media is an instrumental one; and (iii) the
nature of this relation is rooted in relatively traditional models
of causality (Aristotle-as-interaction-design). Let us also say
that given this approach the conclusion often arrived at is that
the most successful media would be those that pass from
mediacy to immediacy, from the opaque to the transparent,
from the engineered to the intuitive, and so on. In other words,
the most successful media, according to this logic, would be
one that negates itself as media. (Already in this is something
worth thinking about, because media would always harbor
some relation to a negativity immanent to themselves, evoking
an unemployed negativity.)
Can we invert this and think instead of the media of mastery?
I do not mean in a radical or liberatory way, but simply according to a different topology. Maybe one possibility lies in thinking
about the relation between mastery and causality. In the media
of mastery, what is the nature of cause and effect? Networked
media, for instance, are often described in ways that avoid a
simple, linear cause-effect model of action. Networks are complex, self-organizing, collectively emergent, and so on.
Thus the emphasis is on open-ended design rather than closed
or deterministic engineeringthe designing of environments
in which a multiplicity of microcauses and microeffects take
place, culminating in a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
Openness is acknowledged, but at the same time so also is the
minimal intentionality of design itself. This is, perhaps, less
the old-style mastery but something like a metamastery.
Metamastery is the pushing back of linear causality into a
domain of either hypercomplexity (the scientific viewpoint) or
a collective intelligence (the romantic viewpoint). Metamastery
is not simply the mastery of mastery, or instrumentality scaled
up a level. Metamastery is the claim that a level of causality
exists beyond traditional, linear causality and its atomistic perspective of individuals and actions, subjects and events, nodes
and edges. Is metamastery the sublime of networks?
Now the main alternative to the mastery-of-media (tool,
instrumentality, cause-effect) seems to be the media-of-mastery
(condition, possibility, openness). But this is not without its
own problems. How do we know that this does not simply raise
mastery to a higher level or, worse, endow it with almost mystical properties (be they smart mobs, scale-free networks, or

104 Grey Room 33

some other such collective self-organization)? This is, I think,

one of the hugely ambivalent areas in all the talk about social
networks, especially when they involve digital media. The
horizon of mastery is mastery without a masterthis is also its
most purified state. Here metamastery becomes almost like a
negative theology for the digital age, positing a nonrealized
essence that is always about to become manifest. Will YouTube
or Facebook or whatever finally bring about the messianic
moment of democratic media? If one were to begin rethinking
the relation between media and mastery, one would have to
also rethink really basic concepts like causality or action.
IV. Subhuman and Elemental
AG: This discussion of mastery ties in with Geerts notion of
the two spheres (one intensive and one extensive) and Eugenes
description of new media as a sort of limbo zone held in
balance by a contradiction not in time or in space but in scale.
(Here, after the induction of time into philosophy with Bergson
or Heidegger, and later with space via the newfound interest
in spatial relations of Bruce Chatwins songlines or Gilles
Chtelets diagrams, one can already hear drumbeats of the
scale turn in philosophy, with Manuel De Landas scale-based
analyses or Albert-Lszl Barabsis scaled versus scale-free
networks being two interesting recent examples.) The human
is not out of place in new media but out of scale. Hence our
discussion around meta versus normal levels. This is also the
nihilist impulse, is it not? That the middle (media) must be
annihilated, that the subject in balance must be destabilized and
injected into a new mold, the new man? These are the age-old
techniques of capital formation, as well as of National Socialism.
The media of mastery is evident in todays trend toward extreme
virtuosity: the new weird hypermusicianship of Orthrelm or
Lightning Bolt, the extreme philosophy of Franois Laruelle,
or the twitch movements of turntablism or PvP gaming. The
expectations put on todays potential masters are difficult to
live up to and certainly help explain all forms of novel neuroses
and psychoses that result: the new diseases around attention,
anxiety, and sociability, of generalized physical stress and
depression, and of the cultivation of bodily performance through
stimulants and enhancements both physical and mental.
But I agree with Eugenes suggestion that the media-ofmastery trend, while different and in some cases opposed to
these new virtuosic media subjects, is equality disquieting. The
invisible hand is back. Or perhaps it never left. What network
theorists call emergence today is really just a migration of
romanticism into the body of the machinic network, wherein a
new spirit emerges born from the mystery of the open and the
mystery of the machine.

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

105

GL: To put it in the terms that you both developed in The Exploit
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), are the
media of mastery capable of exploiting the exploits, digging
further into the nonhuman aspects of technical networks, with
the aim of producing counterprotocols? I do not think so. Is this
mastery merely a meta-activity? Yesterday we watched the original Superman animations from 1941 to 1943 on DVD. In it
Superman is introduced as an alien from another planet
(Krypton) who is fighting a never-ending struggle for truth and
justice. This is so interesting. Why is he not just a tourist?
Where does this will to intervene come from? I suspect that the
masters we are talking about have transformed this primal
energy to intervene and innovate (or make better as Philips
says in their ads) and rechanneled it into exploring boundaries.
As you say, Alexander, we see the mood of this figure oscillating between the extreme and zero. There is no interest anymore
to make the system work, to administrate the flows and
improve the output. The answer to neo-cons is not reform or
engagement but sublime indifference. Not protest or subversion but radical banality aimed at undermining the PC
morality and the system of good intentions. Just think of Beavis
and Butthead, South Park, the Dutch shocklogs such as
Volkomenkut and Geen Stijl, the Australian TV series
Summer Heights High, and so on. This is interesting material
for those who believe that Michel Foucaults analysis is now the
dominant discourse (one that needs to be deconstructed). The
problem is that Foucault is not in charge. Neither is Zizek or
Deleuze for that matter. All these thinkers come from a twentieth-century tradition that questions capitalism and power in
general. Todays culture is not questioning capitalism, and this
is where a lot of confusion is coming from.
Instead, we see that life is inherently unstable, out of control, on the verge of collapse. Out of this situation grows an
indifferent mentality that either pushes the situation into the
extreme or seeks the zero point where nothing will happen.
Think of sports and boredomwe can combine these two
in multiple ways. The question is how we can leave such
dynamics. The Luddite answer of unplugging, disconnecting,
and so on is too simple. The communication pause is already
part of the management rhetoric. We have to find both power
and counterpower inside the network architectures. We should
investigate the elemental aspects of networks. To investigate
the nonhuman is one way to go. To look into the subhuman
could be another. How could networks become subsets of our
existence, travel companions instead of attention cancers?
One strategy could be to explore dysfunctionalities; another
would be to stress elegant styles that help us to overcome
info anxiety.

106 Grey Room 33

AG: Agreed, the ecological impulse to administer flows,

improve the output, maintain a balance, and so onthese belong
to a former time, perhaps the period dating from the late 1940s
to the early 1970s. I do not think these are actually existing
political practices any more. Perhaps this is why the figure of
Bartleby (from Melvilles short story Bartleby, the Scrivener)
has recently achieved such currency, in large part from the
short section in Hardt and Negris book Empire, which itself
borrowed the philosophical exaltation of Bartleby from
Agamben, Blanchot, Deleuze, and others. But the suggestion
that Bartleby is a viable political hero is misguided. Bartlebys
simple refusal is little more than a communication pause, as
Geert notes. Have we not yet learned that dialectical reversal is
exceptionally easy to co-opt? Here is where Geerts mention of
indifference is important. I hope we can speak more about disappearance, exodus, withdrawing and drawing toward, sleep,
the nonhuman within the human.
Todays culture is not questioning capitalismthis
resonates deeply. The economic industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provoked a strong immune
response in the human form, first rejecting the foreign tissue of
capital, then healing, scarring, and deforming in response to it.
But today we have a new healthfulness around capital, an economic modality of disaster and ruin that nevertheless coexists
within the very terrain of health, within a new, secure social body.
In this same historical vain, perhaps we could also have a
much longer conversation around the transformation of the
concepts of play or rhizome, from transformative political
concepts a few decades ago to some of todays central techniques for organization and economic management. There is a
romantic, or poetic, core to these terms that cannot be gotten
rid of. I am always amused to see how well the concept of play
survived the twentieth century, even as other termsculture,
ego, logos, and so onwere eviscerated many times over in the
critical literature. Play is doing just fine, winning accolades
from Derrida or Debord just as much as from the latest books on
corporate management theory. In my view we are living through
a romantico-cybernetic era vis--vis the notion of play.
The romantic strain we inherit from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, in large part from works like Friedrich
Schillers On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), which
arrives at the concept of the play-drive, the object of which is
mans living form. Schillers notion of play is the same we
have today: play is the thing that brings abundance and raw
creation; play is innocent and unsullied by the modern world;
play is an act of hacking or tinkering; play allows the core of
that which is most human to spring forward in an inexhaustible
life force of expression. Johan Huizingas book Homo Ludens

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

107

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) is the best twentieth-century

example of this same trend. The cybernetic strain, on the other
hand, solidified in importance in the years immediately following World War II. Like romanticism, cybernetics is an antiscience movement. Instead of science (a process of dividing
and isolating), cybernetics addresses itself to systematics (a
process of integration, connection, contextualization, arrangement). From cybernetics, play gains the principles of systemic
interaction, homeostasis, balance. This is a much more economic notion of play wherein the multilateral associations
between things allow for things to play out in emergent ways.
We speak today of playing around with problems in order to
find solutions.
The union of cybernetics with romanticism is also connected
to the discussion about mastery-of-media versus media-ofmastery. The former is iterative; the latter is instantaneous. The
former follows a design aesthetic; the latter a poetic aesthetic.
The two halves fused during the second half of the twentieth
century. Consider the Web itself: the universal laws of protocological exchange, sprawling across complex topologies of
aggregation and dissemination, result in the awesome forces of
emergent vitality. This is what romantico-cybernetic play
means. Todays ludic capitalist is therefore the consummate
poet-designer, forever coaxing new value out of raw, systemic
interactions (consider the example of Google). The rest has
changed to follow the same rubric: labor itself is now play, just
as play becomes more and more laborious. Or consider the
model of the market, in which the invisible hand of play intervenes to assess and resolve all contradiction and is thought
to model all phenomena, from energy futures markets, to the
market of representational democracy, to haggling over pollution credits, to auctions of the electromagnetic spectrum, to
all manner of supercharged speculation in the art world. Play
is the thing that overcomes systemic contradiction, but always
via recourse to that special, ineffable thing that makes us most
human. It is, as it were, a melodrama of the rhizome.
So perhaps it is not the ecological impulse that has changed
since the middle of the twentieth century, but simply the political
status of that impulse.
V. Sense and Silence
GL: I am not into games. Alexander, you wrote a book about
computer games, and play games, I suppose. Here in the
Netherlands, Utrecht is the place to be if you are into games
research. I am trying to stay away from that crowded field. I can
see that work and play are becoming more and more intertwined. But my question would be: do we want to go there? Is
it not time to unravel? It is one thing to point at the multitude

108 Grey Room 33

of previous contradictions that now play together so well. That

is critical analysis. We are all doing that. It is another thing to
design concepts that overcome the current cul-de-sac culture.
ET: This is definitely one of the challenges for critical thinking
about media today. The many theories of play do seem to take
part in a continued, humanist-based investment in the politics
of romanticism. What Alex refers to as the romantico-cybernetic concept of play is, I think, accurate: the principles of liberalism inherent in the modern concept of play have become
part and parcel of our era of immaterial labor.
So what do we do with these terms? We can create new terms,
but the problem with this is that these new terms may simply
replicate the conceptual structure of the old ones. We can also
complicate the distinction between work and play by distinguishing between types of play. Just as Marx distinguishes the
terms work, labor, and production, so can we distinguish play
and its correlative terms like game, fun, entertainment, and so
on. But the problem with this is that we still presume an original
split that ultimately has its roots in both political economy and
anthropology (e.g., play and ritual as the essence of the human).
As an alternative, we can return to the idea of the unhuman,
or, as Geert proposes, the subhuman. The term subhuman is
interesting because it denotes that which operates below the
radar of human activity (but the subhuman is not simply the
unconscious); it also denotes that which the human cannot
account for, that which is perhaps in excess of the human precisely because it is almost or not quite human. (One of
Tristan Tzaras later works was titled Lhomme approximatif,
or, Approximate Manoffering, perhaps, another variant on
the subhuman.)
Maybe this is an absurd question, but what would subhuman
play be? Perhaps someone like Alfred Jarry has already answered
this. In English, the word play is also used in a nonhuman
sense, meaning variables, fuzziness, or some degree of
randomness. In a colloquial sense, one might say that a given
measurement has a degree of play to it, meaning that it is not
precise or absoluteor that so many variables are in play
that any single decisive measurement is impossible.
This brings us back to the language of climate and the elemental. This subhuman notion of play is exactly that which
remains outside of human prediction. We all experience this on
a daily basis with the weather reportyou can check Weather.com
for hour-by-hour forecasts, but that forecast itself changes from
hour to hour. In the end you are better off just going outside.
And, once prediction is thrown off, so is our entire relation to
what Bernard Stiegler calls the organized inorganic beings of
the world. Perhaps for this reason nearly every film about

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

109

natural disasters, from the Irwin Allen productions of the 1970s

to current films like The Happening, evoke the sublimebut
the sublime of a strange, alien, noumenal world out there.
This outside is not a romanticized place of human resistance,
much less of the new mastery-of-mastery, the control of nonhuman protocols.
GL: But I ask myself: mastering whose protocol? Who is in
charge? Can critics and artists ever become protocolistic
visionaries, or are they condemned to implement other peoples network architectures? Is art and criticism merely commentary? Do we waste our time by dreaming up this impossible
possibility of a productive and innovative conceptualism that
can shape things? Why is the engineer-maker, the techno-intellectual genius, the profession of our dreams, and why is our
role model not the dilettante-subversive-dropout whose task it
is going to be to sabotage it all?
AG: I am not particularly happy with either option, but the
main issue I see with the dilettante-subversive-dropout flavor
is that these subject positions are so often fatally flawed by contradictions. I do not mean generative contradictions but real
political failings. These days I find Bohemia the most troubling.
Capitalism took about a hundred years to figure out how to subsume the subversive, but now the strategy is fully developed
and seems to work quite well. An example: the antiglobalization activist dropout who nevertheless consumes gasoline,
contributes to landfills, eats industrial food, consumes commercial culture, and so on. We spoke earlier of Baudrillard as
an influence; this phenomenon is what he called, in a text from
1969, the principle of separation. In the principle of separation, the material realm is separated from the cultural realm
all within the same subject. In such a formation one witnesses
the concurrence of two opposite forces working together:
material exploitation can proceed willy-nilly, while cultural
liberation also flourishes (i.e., the Western liberal dilettante
having a good feeling about going green). This is why it is not
the critics goal to discover or elevate new subject positions.
The economy already does that with abandon. We have to think
in terms of systemics not subjects, subhuman beings not human
beings: misanthropology. Of course the difficulty with this
whole line of thought is that, as Baudrillard himself pointed
out in his excellent book on 9/11, the new political actor that
the Western progressive secretly longs for but can never
approach is precisely the terrorist. They did it, but we wanted
it, wrote Baudrillard. So if the political right has won anything
in recent years it is precisely the conviction, utterly rampant
today, that there is no alternative; that is, one is either a soccer

110 Grey Room 33

mom or a terrorist (and all others are bad apples).

GL: We are all aware of the pitfalls of identity politics. Radical
politics has turned into a fashion statement, and it is bloody
hard, if not impossible, to circumvent that logic. I experience
this trap as a tragic faith that we absolutely have to overcome.
We have to go postidentity, which also means postmultitude.
It is no longer sufficient, or desirable, that a colorful coalition
of identities (queer, green, black, and so on) goes out on the
street to resist the established political class. What if you prefer other music or clothes and your hair is not quite right? What
if you are indifferent to iPods and do not buy into the very
notion of an (alternative) lifestyle? We have to move beyond
expression (form) and opinion (content). Should protocolistic
activism become invisible, indifferent to the form and content
of the day, in order to work on the design of tomorrows primordial structures? To be invisible implies no longer openly
talking about strategy. Leo Strauss made some interesting
observations about this. But I am not thinking of the Heideggerian
gesture of silence. I am searching for dialogues carried out in
silence. What needs to be done is to invent new strategies of
invisibility in the midst of the network spectacle. What we
need is untimely creativity, in an organized fashion, that is neither escapist nor arrogant about its intentions.
ET: If a dialogue carried out in silence would itself carry us
anywhere, it would have to be to this question of scale and scaling. Political philosophy often loses its footing when politics
is scaled above and below the human being. But just as quickly
as the human is de-scaled above or below the human, so
does political thought immediately recuperate it. Below the
scale of the human, we have only the lowly, Hobbesian state of
nature; above the human, we have the majesty of the transcendent, Augustinian City of God. This leaves us with little option
except to return, once again, to the scale of the human, to in
effect sublimate the political animal and the City of God into
the postexistentialist subjectthe individual, the group, identity, difference, the global, the local, and so on.
Perhaps, then, the strategies of invisibility of which Geert
speaks will not be invisible in the sense that they are not
empirically seen, witnessed, or detected, but will perhaps be
invisible in the sense that they lie at a scale beyond the possibility of any sight at all, machinic or animal or human. This
would mean considering the scale of the macro and the micro
simultaneouslythe climatological and the microbial, the
geographic and the intimate, the ecological and the dietic, the
atmospheric and the cognitive, the live network and the dark
fiber. The challenge, then, is how to think these unhuman

Galloway, Lovink, Thacker | Dialogues Carried Out in Silence: An E-mail Exchange

111

categories as unhuman, but also as political.

AG: Let us end by returning to our opening quandary: whether
to make sense of new media. The crucial term in that phrase is
to make sense. Shall we not fear a new antithought movement, just as the labor-centric activism of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries spawned their own antiwork movement?
Do we need a Bartleby of Nonsense? Or is this a self-defeating
folly? I am also thinking about cryptography and the cryptoutopias prophesized in the jubilant period of the 1990s.
Cryptography erects barriers to sense but in a method entirely
distinct from the semantic tomfoolery of Lewis Carroll or
Samuel Beckett.
Dialogues carried out in silence is a powerful turn of phrase.
Again following Baudrillard, we might propose that today
dialogue itself (logos) is dead. Instead we have a universal
discourse, a culture of enforced interaction, the militarization
of connectivity. We already know that we must work with this
new system. But must we make sense of it too?

112 Grey Room 33