Last week we read Rita Raley's "Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance" (2009) and Zach Blas and Jacob Gaboury's "Biometrics and Opacity: a Conversation" (2016). Raley focuses on art works that engage in political activism or dissent by being rooted in control networks, and so able to hack, hijack, disrupt, or redirect them. For Blas, transformative politics happens outside these networks, through opacity — the intentional refusal to be measured or categorized by the biometrics that are central to many corporate/carceral algorithms. In discussing Blas's Fag Face Mask (and the other masks in his Facial Weaponization Suite), we considered the question: How instrumental are works like Blas's, really? Does it matter? What are the stakes — for Blas, or, e.g., the artists behind CV Dazzle — in claiming that these artworks are instrumentally political?
Does it matter whether Blas's masks are instrumental or not? The masks (and videos they appear in) are works of art, and maybe we can leave it at that. An artwork is a response to the cultural moment in which it is produced, as someone said in class; if it has airs of instrumentality, that may have more to do with the situation the artist is responding to than anything else.
On the other hand, we can and often do expect art to do more than that. This is especially true of so-called political art. It seems to matter, to Blas anyway, that opacity (and the mask?) does or moves toward something. Opacity, he suggests, is the end of (and means to?) a transformative politics (pg. 2). And while we can say that his masks are a reflection of / response to this political struggle (and not necessarily part of it), I think he wants to make a slightly stronger claim than that.
What is {political} art supposed to do, besides respond? What does it mean for something to be instrumental? If an instrument is a means to an end, as someone else in class suggested, what is the end of Blas's masks? What about Raley's tactical 'disturbances'? Raley opens and closes her chapter around the idea of "protest"; Blas describes his masks as part of a "utopian" project (pg. 2). (This is just a starting point, since what an artist says of their own work may have little to do with the end it achieves or effect it has.) These activities seem to go hand in hand: I protest the world as it is now, while envisioning (and modeling) utopia; the first forces small, incremental changes to the status quo, while the second does the radical imaginative work of envisioning a more free and equitable world.
Are the two as complementary as they seem? A comparison Blas made between the politics of opacity and visibility feels like it could have been made between opacity and tactical media. “[W]e must struggle for opacity," says Blas, "and while transparency, visibility, and representation to the state should be used tactically, it is never the end goal for a transformative politics but ultimately a trap" (pg. 2). Is tactical media ultimately a trap, as well? In general I tend to think so; I also wonder about what happened in the intervening years between the publication of Tactical Media (2009) and "Biometrics and Opacity" (2016) that helped produce a general shift (if we can call it that) from a politics of "minor modifications" (Raley, 27) to one of opacity and refusal. (It feels significant that Raley's book was published just a few years after the first WikiLeaks leak and about a year after Anonymous first became associated with hacktivism, while by 2016 it had become pretty plain that under technocapitalism most hacks, leaks, and 'disturbances' serve merely as diversions that lead to algorithms and the corporations that own them becoming more powerful and obfuscatory.)
I was glad that Evan brought up Audre Lorde’s quotation — For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. I thought about it while reading Raley's piece, too. But does this also apply to the politics of opacity? Opacity is after all arguably the preferred modality of corporations / the state, with their proprietary information, codes of silence, and obfuscatory language. It's one of the few conditions under which one can operate freely, without regulation. Can it then really be the goal of transformative politics?
I think the answer is yes, but I'm going to stop here for now. The last thing I'll say that I'm still trying to figure out where Blas's masks and Raley's tactical media examples would fall on Alex Galloway's aesthetic/political coherent/incoherent chart: Tactical media = aesthetically (in)coherent / politically incoherent? Fag Face Mask = aesthetically incoherent / politically coherent?
Works discussed:
Rita Raley, “Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance” (Tactical Media, 2009)
Zach Blas and Jacob Gaboury, “Biometrics and Opacity: A Conversation” (Camera Obscura, 2016)
Alex Galloway, “The Unworkable Interface” (The Interface Effect, 2012)
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