[spectre] Beyond the Edge....

[Eric Kluitenberg]

Dear Spectrites,

Just back from ISEA 2004 in Tallinn and Helsinki, I decided to post 
this little 'fast' text on NICE and on this list, which I wrote for 
the small book called: "Opening Acts: New Media and Art in Estonia", 
which has been published in the run up to the Tallinn part of ISEA 
2004. The text is a request to reflect on a period (1995 - 1999) when 
I was closely involved with the realisation of a series of 
conferences and mini-festivals called "Interstanding", organised 
bi-annually in Estonia. ( http://www.interstanding.ee )

Looking back it feels like we are at the other side of a divide: 
Beyond the roaring nineties, after the dotcom and telcom-crash, after 
9/11 and in the midst of the violent end-game of the former 
superpower USA, frantically defending its hegemonic position, which 
it has already lost, but is unwilling to accept (The US economy is 
already smaller than the EU economy, China and India will soon be 
bigger, technological superiority will within 10 years be shed to the 
new Asian superpowers, the military superiority of the US will become 
unaffordable, the US trade and budget deficit will within a few years 
ex- or implode, after which the power of the US will shrivel - 
roughly summarised...).

Estonia meanwhile has become an EU member, will be granted full 
membership rights in 2007, and will most likely soon after adopt the 
euro as its currency, at which point its 'assimilation' is complete. 
In many ways it feels that the local context is 'beyond the edge'.....

"Beyond the Edge" was also the title of the last Interstanding 
edition I was involved with (in 1999) and the title seems so apt now 
to describe the new position this tiny country finds itself in that I 
decided to play around with the concepts we worked with at the time 
and reviewed them in the light of our current (sad) knowledge and 
recent experience.

New media, information, and communication technologies have played a 
crucial role in the repositioning of the country and therefore the 
separation between new media culture and its economic and political 
context is very thin indeed in Estonia. Now one of the most densely 
networked countries on earth, Estonia has embraced the information 
age more eagerly than virtually any other nation. In many ways it can 
be seen as a micro-model for a society in radical change in the midst 
of geopolitical and technological reconfiguration.

Hope this is of some interest...

best wishes,

Eric

_________________________


Estonia Beyond the Edge



	"It is necessary to map the new minefields,
	 to avoid treading on a misplaced shell...."



It was 1999, in the middle of the hype of the new media expansion. 
Life was shifting to the "virtual", the economy was "new", recession 
was "no more", the cold war was irrevocably over, the new world order 
was the non-order of a post-historical capitalism, the victory of 
liberty was "final"...

... or so it seemed....

In so many ways we were beyond the edge. Observing. In Tallinn....

Where?

Yeah right!!

"..I am always more interested in the margins than the center." is 
what Saskia Sassen wrote me in reply to a lengthy letter of 
invitation to the third Interstanding conference, "Beyond the Edge - 
Escaping from Marginality"1. However, our main question was "where is 
the edge? where are the margins?, where is The Center??"

  >>"Critical cultural activity has always identified itself with an 
existence at the edge of society, but that position has become 
increasingly dubious. Increasingly we seem to be living in a society 
without clear and fixed boundaries: A globally interconnected 
economic and social system with constantly shifting borders.

Our time seems to be one of limitless possibility. Ideas and money 
travel at the speed of light through virtual networks, and capital 
can accumulate in boundless quantities.

Our time also seems to be one of limitless brutality and violence 
(Rwanda / Kosovo). A time of limitless political transformation, 
where empires disintegrate without a clear reason (SU). A time also 
where new economies collapse even more quickly than they emerged 
(Asian Tigers). Where the dream of independent economic success is 
bought away by foreign investors overnight (Estonia and other newly 
'emerging states').

The boundaries of society have become so fluid and open that any 
attempt to define what exists 'inside' and 'outside' of the social 
framework becomes irrelevant. The edge of culture can quickly be 
turned around into a profitable mainstream trend. The outsider 
becomes the trend-setter, the oblique the eccentric, the perverted 
the exclusive. Otherness is embraced as a market opportunity. 
Meanwhile, authoritarian politics implode, but re-emerge shortly 
after as if nothing ever happened (Juganov).

The role of the avantgarde artist, finally, becomes a tragic joke. 
The advertisement industries have long understood the shock of the 
new, and make art look retrograde. The utopian visionaries have 
become entrenched in an increasingly self-referential art-scene that 
propagates itself through exclusive coffee-table books and glossy 
international art-zines.

So, where is the edge?"<<

Couldn't have put it better myself....

But wait, I did in fact write this myself!! Back then in '99, at the 
end of an era that turned out to be little more than a decennium...

But you're no Estonian! How can you write such things?!

Indeed I cannot begin to imagine what the experience could be of 
living in the soviet union, or any dictatorship, having grown up in 
comfy Holland. So what was the engagement?

Estonia was definitely "beyond the edge". Shifted from complete 
marginalisation to one of the 5 frontrunners for EU inclusion. It was 
already clear in 1999. And now it is a fact. But Holland? Were we, in 
another way, beyond the edge, so much in the centre and in the flux 
of things that the edge for us simply did not exist anymore, or was 
no longer visible? Interconnected with all and everything, trade, 
culture, network politics, post-ideological, pragmatic, progressive, 
liberal, advanced, limitless after ten years of uninterrupted growth 
and unimaginable prosperity....

"Our time seems to be one of limitless possibility. Ideas and money 
travel at the speed of light through virtual networks, and capital 
can accumulate in boundless quantities". Saskia Sassen could have 
taught us the lesson at the time. In fact she already had done so 
before, in 1991, with her book Global Cities. But she was wise. She 
let us to find it out for ourselves...

In The Global City ('91) Sassen already explained that the 
deterritorialising effects of electronically networked globalisation 
(primarily as an economic process that has all kinds of social and 
cultural implications) needed sites where these effects could be 
produced. Loci that concentrated such enormous power that it could be 
projected, by means of a.o. electronic networks, across a vast 
international (theoretically 'global') terrain.

Beyond the edge? Here is the paradox of globalisation: The process of 
transnational operation, coordination and control relies on extreme 
decentralisation of operations combined with an enormous 
concentration of power in a few central places to control them.

Which places?

New York, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt....

The Center!

Turning the entire world outside of these centres into a giant 
periphery. Talk about "beyond the edge"....

So, Estonia simultaneously entered the information era, globalisation 
and the EU. All within a matter of little more than ten years. Its 
position was poised from the beginning in the right way. Because of 
it's size as a country (1.5 million), and the size of it's capital 
Tallinn(0.5 million) it could not possibly make any claim to centre 
status. But the strategic position of Estonia and (the port of) 
Tallinn also prevented it from disappearing in the margins. Estonia 
became part of the new networked orders of economy, politics, and 
ultimately also of global culture.

Under the new conditions the EU is but a unit in a much larger 
integrated system, in which the power centres are at the same time 
larger (transnational capital), but also much more localised (in 
global cities).

Is there a division, still, between 'inside' and 'outside'?

You bet!!

Manuel Castells pointed out the problem in 1996 in The Rise of the 
Network Society, where he suggested that there is a growing disparity 
between two types of spatial logics. While the life experience of the 
vast majority of the world's population is organised in places, power 
is increasingly organised in the interconnected system of networked 
economy, politics and its accompanying essentially non-located 
post-geographic cultures (the "Space of Flows"). As a result he 
concludes:

"Experience, by being related to places, becomes abstracted from 
power, and meaning increasingly separated from knowledge. It follows 
a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens 
to break down the communication channels in society. The dominant 
tendency is toward a horizon of a networked, ahistorical space of 
flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, 
increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share 
cultural codes".2

Maybe one of the fallacies of the nineties could have been the belief 
that in a sense history was over because everybody wanted to belong 
to the new networked, ahistorical system of worldwide integration 
(economic, political, and ultimately cultural integration). This was 
not only a tremendously arrogant assumption, but also a desperately 
naïve one.

The first sign that 'some' wanted, emphatically, to remain 'outside' 
the system became apparent in May 2001 when a local group under 
Taliban commander Mullah Wahid blew up two of the world's tallest 
ancient statues of Buddha, in Bamyan, Afghanistan. Their motivation 
was that these statues where 'idolatrous and an insult to Muslims'. 
But this destruction of religious imagery, not at all a new 
phenomenon in human history, can much more clearly be read as a 
rejection of the liberal and pluralist cultural politics of 
globalisation. The economic trajectory of globalisation, after all, 
relies on the assimilation (i.e. not the destruction) of all cultural 
forms to enhance its expansion towards the infinity of its own 
horizons.

If we hold that the thesis of Castells is still true, that power, on 
a global scale, is increasingly organised in the networked 
integration of an ahistorical space of flows, then we must also 
concede that 90 percent of the world's population is not part of this 
space. This is what my respected friend and colleague Shahidul Alam 
from Dhaka, Bangladesh calls the 'Majority World'3.

The 'Long Boom" existed only for ten percent of the global 
population. Such a thing is not meant to last. It could not but turn 
into the 'Big Bust', and we didn't have to wait long for it to 
happen. Interstanding 3 - Beyond the Edge was in November '99. Nasdaq 
crashed in April 2000, the European tech stocks a few months later. 
The Western economies slid into stagnation. In November 2000 the 
Bush-Ghunta rigged the US election, and again a year later on the 
symbolic date of 9-11 (the US general emergency phone number) two 
passenger planes hit the WTC twin towers in lower Manhattan.

The latter was not a work of art, but an act of ultimate defiance. 
The negative sign of the imploded towers constituted an inverted 
symbol for the rejection of the system of networked economic, 
political and cultural integration. The terrorist act was not about 
breaching a hole for access. Much on the contrary it was an 
expression of a deep desire to stay out, to impose boundaries on the 
infinite expansion of the ahistorical space of flows. The global 
system indeed needs centres of power where its decentralised 
operations, their coordination, and their control can be produced. 
The New York World Trade Center was one of those condensation points 
of power where they could actually be produced: the attack signalled 
that the lessons were well understood.

Welcome to the Real World!

After the NYC/WTC crash came 'The Great Telcoms Crash' (The 
Economist).  This time the western economies dived straight into 
recession, and politics into confusion. In Europe the rise of the far 
right was one of the responses. In the US the build up for an 
ultra-violent hypercycle a distinctive other...

Estonia during all this remained in the Interzone, between the SU and 
the EU. Borderland. Outside of the greater political systems it 
seemed to float in an ahistorical and apolitical vacuum. After May 
1st it has been flung into the maelstrom of the opaque politics and 
hyper-bureaucracy of "Brussels".

Where did it leave Estonian culture, during these momentous years?

In the Interzone Estonian artists where quietly observing; the new 
'freedom', the fabrication of history, the 'mark' of Estonian 
history, the impending 'invasion', the new architectures of global 
capitalism, and much more...

I left Tallinn the last time in 1999, in another era. I haven't been 
back. I heard good and bad stories from my dear friends in the 
Interzone. Now we are here, five years later, on the other side. I am 
contemplating our joint return to history along such different 
trajectories. I'll be going back soon.

I'm so curious...

Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, June 2004


Notes:

1  - http://www.interstanding.ee/i3/
2 - Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell Publishers, 
1996, p.428
3 - http://www.majorityworld.com/