Steven Henry Madoff reviews Never Alone, Except for Now

Kris Cohen. Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 196 pp.

11 April 2019

A tone of mournfulness for the state of contemporary personhood pervades Kris Cohen’s compelling study, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (2017). Any notion of individual agency is complicated today by the regimes of digital management that shape our lives, and a literature of analysis and speculation is now taking coherent shape that attempts to frame what is happening to each and all of us—what self now means, what choice and decision are, what it is to speak to one another in the din of the crowd. To be private, to be public, to be a part of a plurality of publics, to move among shifting shapes of populations––these questions in the age of what Cohen calls networked life are rooted in the very old question: How can we live together to underwrite our happiness and care?

Michel Foucault helped to frame that question for our time in his late writings about technologies of power and technologies of the self. Gilles Deleuze, in “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” added to this his grim and entirely prescient reformulation of the individual as the “dividual,” each of us no longer a who, but now a what, an item of data collection parsed and commodified by those regimes of digital control. Foucault and Deleuze ask in these texts what freedom is, and their speculations ramify in other works that visit the subject of the self in the bleaching light of what can be called neoliberal capitalism’s technomics. This range of works—from Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s foundational two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) to Manuel De Landa’s A New Philosophy of Science: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006); Benjamin H. Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (2016); Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (2017); Judith Butler’s Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Assembly (2017)—all attempt to describe the disposition of individuals and groups under the technological mutation of the social contract.

The most recent and perhaps most dire reality check comes in the form of Shoshana Zuboff’s exhaustive diagnosis of what she calls “surveillance capitalism.”[1] Citing Google and Facebook as exemplary villains, she notes: “Surveillance capitalism depends upon undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioral data to feed markets that are about us but not for us.”[2]

Against this backdrop, cultural production has its own speculative literature in which artistic practices take on accustomed roles of witness and bellwether. Cohen’s book joins David Joselit’s After Art (2015); Anna Munster’s An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (2013); Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015); Patrick Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics (2016); and Ed Finn’s What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (2017) as texts that reckon with the ways artworks reflect on their own forms as collisions with and critiques of social relation and agency, their status and fate. In all of these writings, an ethics of belonging and reciprocity are borne up, embraced, and twisted by the metastasizing might of capitalism in its invasive and fecund technological sweep. So Cohen writes early in Never Alone, Except for Now: “The history of the mediation of social relation through commodity forms is (unfortunately) what predicates and motivates the conversation, for me, about group form and aesthetics in the context of networked life," (p. 3).

Propelled by this, Cohen’s thinking in his preliminary theoretical chapters (largely informed by the cultural and sociological writings of Frederic Jameson, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, and Lauren Berlant), lead him to the clear and plaintive sense that our relations of care toward the self and others are at once drained by capitalism’s relentless vampirism and produce new formations of group dynamics, categorized by him as publics and populations. The former possesses an older potential of the demos to sustain discourse toward self-determination, but also sits alongside the latter, which overtakes and exploits individuals and the agora of reciprocal selves through the genius of surveillance capitalism’s technomics.

Cohen elaborates on this in three insightful chapters at the core of the book. Analyzing works by Sharon Hayes, Félix Gonzáles-Torres, and the lesser known duo Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead, the condition of the contemporary self is shown as it struggles to latch on to the gravity of earlier forms of social relations and the ways in which these artists coopt the alienated affect of technological capitalism in forms of resistance that deploy disruptive replication and transformation. Here, in Hayes’s performance work I March in the Parade of Liberty, but as Long as I Love You I’m Not Free (2007–2008), the inversion of the intimacy of epistolary speech as a disorienting public act underscores the mélange of expectation, wishfulness, and difficulty to correspond with others that signifies experiential disjunction. The inside out and not enough of her performance of dissevered, frustrated, and subverted communication represent this condition, which Cohen uniquely identifies with what he calls “broken genre” and parallelism. So he proposes: “The geometry of group form in electronic networks . . . is not that of the intersecting line but of the parallel, that which proceeds together but does not touch," (p. 4).

The device of the broken genre implicitly signals both sadness and rupture, while simultaneously reframing the aesthetic and rhetorical conventions of artistic forms toward new expressive ends. Cohen suggests that the broken genre, as deployed by his model artists, variously embodies “intimacy without reciprocity.” This revised status of personhood in the setting of the network and the way it bleeds into physical sociality detaches the self from others. Through this lens, he analyzes the now iconic candy pieces of González-Torres. The artist, who died of AIDS in 1996 at the age of thirty-eight, created these untitled works, comprised of piles of brightly wrapped candies sited in the corners of art galleries or laid out in minimalist oblong formations, with the invitation to visitors to take a piece away, thus symbolizing a body wasting, yet being carried out into the world. His breaking of sculptural form, with its static corporeal solidity now becoming a form of distributed messaging, proleptically captures the poignant lonesomeness of the artist, of any Other on the margin, and of all of us in the network condition of hypercentrifugal but diffuse, random, or unreciprocated connection.

Cohen borrows Jean-François Lyotard’s term “differend” to bear this out. “When the differend is operative,” Cohen explains, “what occurs is not so much an argument or conversation as it is a disappearing act, a radically asymmetrical encounter that denies one party even the most schematic form of reciprocity” (p. 45). Aptly descriptive of the condition of populations that are algorithmically produced and harvested in the negative status of “about us but not for us,” the differend could be said to be the author of a technologically driven tonelessness, a quality of numbing distance, that Cohen suggests González-Torres’s work seeks to redress, as well as what he sees in the art of Thomson & Craighead.

He turns to their work Beacon (2005), for example, which offers a screen displaying a ceaseless stream of search terms delivered live from the internet. Beacon derives its cool irony precisely from the torrent of algorithmic processes of sorting and retrieval we all know well from search results that include both the specific and arbitrary, the useful and bewilderingly alien. In this work and others by the duo, Deleuze’s dividual is mated to the differend in the echo chamber of networked life that underscores asymmetrical intimacy without reciprocity; likeness and distortion replacing any sense of sui generis personhood.

What Cohen implies in these trenchant analyses is a universal state of technomics, as well as a resistance to it. The visual artists he considers (along with a brief meditation on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition [2003]) can be seen as totems for an accelerationist view of technology’s overarching erosion of the old Enlightenment social contract; of what Robin McKay summarizes as the dashed hope that “on the horizon of the deterritorialization opened up by capital, there would be disclosed an originary desire that could flow free of instituted structures of power.”[3] Broader issues of governmentality and asymmetrical projections of power can be adduced from these challenges. Yet Cohen’s artistic examples show, at least for the moment, that the totalizing urge of technomics has not yet surmounted the enticing stubbornness and contagion of individual agency. That sense is also alive in Never Alone, Except for Now—an essential contribution to our evolving cultural study of who we are and what, in the tightening embrace of computational superintelligence, we will come to be.

[1] See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, 2019).

[2] Quoted in John Naughton, “'The goal is to automate us’: Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism,” The Guardian, 20 Jan. 2019, www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

[3] Robin Mackay, “Immaterials, Exhibition, Acceleration,” in 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory, ed. Yuk Hui and Andreas Broeckmann (Lüneburg, Germany, 2015), p. 238.