The utmost in shaping … is to arrive at no ascertainable shape
Sun Tzu

The culture of immanence

Although as yet unnoticed by some, a radical change is beginning to take place in world culture that will astound even the most learned. Profound changes are occurring within postmodern societies and giving rise to transformations that will have unpredictable and immensurable consequences. We are on the threshold of catastrophic events, with paradigm changes that defy definition. Previously solid institutions, groaning under the weight of historical tradition, may well be blown away by cultural storm winds. In every discipline - from mathematics to the arts, from biology to economics - we see profound modifications in our feelings about the preconceived canons, and we are heading for a generalized state of crisis in contemporary culture. We still see the world from the historical vantage point of the culture of transcendence, although its dominance is now being challenged. From Plato’s Ideas and Aristotelian metaphysics, to the Hobbesian Leviathan, through to the teleological ideals of modernity, the culture of transcendence has imposed its univalence and

supercodification on institutions and cultural trends emerging within them, thus flattening all their cultural features. It took part in every type of sovereignty as it constituted and consolidated its power through cultural institutions: academies, museums, and universities. The culture of transcendence was a culture for the "few" to the detriment of the "many". However its modern version is for the masses, it functions in the interests of capital and has invented cultural dissimulation, the perverse allure we call culture of transcendence for the mass. This mass media pseudo-culture maintains most of the behaviors and principles of the culture of transcendence of the "few", without modifying them for the supercodifying procedure imposed on the "many" – who are now "culturally" atomized and tragically disconnected among themselves, who are connected only to analogical media that provide unilateral information as part of the process of homogenizing their subjectivities. All of this was sustained by technological development that seemed to corroborate with the de-potentialization of the "many"; however technological acceleration led to an unexpected and catastrophic turn that involved a break from the system of linearity on which the culture of transcendence was based. Non-linear systems began to emerge everywhere. Mathematical fractals, dynamic complexity

systems, chaos theory in physics, micronarratives and agonistics of languages announced the end of the linear world and provoked a paradigm crisis within the culture of transcendence. This crisis, known as postmodernity, was probably the last stage of the culture of transcendence. In spite of its polyvalence, it was incapable of breaking from the premises of transcendence and was limited to dueling with moribund modernity. It was a cry of despair, but it was lifeless. The multiplication of non-linear systems spawned another phenomenon alongside postmodernization: a set of procedures known as digitization. On this basis, the culture of immanence was able to proliferate on the world scenario. In the history of Western culture, there have been several attempts to replace the culture of transcendence with one of immanence. Since the 'god-as-the-world' of the Stoics and the followers of Spinoza, through to the Dionysian spirit of Nietzscheans, the cultural trend of immanence had been relegated to the sidelines of history. With the advent of virtual networks, however, the trend toward immanence was for the first time able to constitute a world to act in. Online cultural works were the first developments in an independent and virtual world that is parallel to the physical-cultural world, which is outside its laws and codes, but also beyond the art culture of transcendence as we know it.

Virtual networks constitute a plane of immanence. They are transcendental. Both digital works and digital culture are part of the plane of immanence and their proliferation precipitates them toward unprecedented potentialization. There is a constant process of heterogenization, mainly due to free replications and procedures of alterity driven through decodified flux. Hence, anarcho-culturalism emerges the main development in the culture of immanence. This is the free play between all the performances taking place in the world of immanence. It is the breaking free from transcendent institutions based on authority and uniqueness and it is provoking irretrievable breakdown everywhere. Hence we can only speak of "digital art" in the metaphorical sense, since for anarcho-culturalism "digital art" means all other disciplines potentially interconnected in a process of trans-codification. Anarcho-culturalism emerges when cultural authority can no longer exercise any power over cultural manifestations or their producers; when their products are no longer marketed; when the value of cultural products is no longer dependent on official consecration or on property, but on their ability to potentialize agents they connect to; when cultural producers are freed of their egos, freed of their names, and released from the innocuous pretension of making history, and so by deterritorializing

themselves can take part on a more complex plan where author-constructed meaning is replaced by multiple-meaning strategies authored jointly by the interagents involved; when cultural work is no longer linear and analogical and becomes an ubiquitous system of interactive complexity emphasizing its immersive and bio-cultural aspects, so becoming a cultural transformation machine; when no there is no longer a world of the arts as such, or of the sciences, or any other discipline, instead there is free interplay between their codes, the free play of diagonals crossing all the planes, all disciplines and that interlink heterogeneous multiplicities in unrestrained play. The culture of immanence proceeds through replication. This is an event that brings the virtual world of networks closer to the world of life, since both are digital. Clones, auto-poetics and viruses are shared features of both worlds. Replication is its mode of production and invention. The notion of life developing through the differential survival of replicating entities becomes the norm for digital culture. It is not species, genders or disciplines that matter, but the digital genes through which they replicate. They emerge from codes; from deviation and recombination, through topological changes enabling the emergence of new bio-cultural futures, producing the inconstant flux of the bio-digital-sphere. Life in culture is not just

another metaphor; it is true in the literal sense. In the world of digital immanent bio-culture, the fixed and the constant can only be transitory states. There are no constants, only variables of variables. Their nature has the power to stretch, delete, cut, twist, cut out, tear up, explode, multiply, and contaminate. Digital instrumentals were made to potentialize transformative capabilities. Transcendental contemplation - of beauty or of the sublime - gives way to immanent participative and transformative interaction. All cultural production is there to be destroyed, its duration depends only on its replication, because it can be altered, torn apart and cut in pieces. But when this happens new digital productions emerge and in turn are connected to others, but any talk of digital productions involves networks. Each digital production, through its immanent interconnections, is involved in a network. So one may also see each interagent as possessing a network of immanence. Digital networks connected with synaptic networks. Immanence of both networks. The culture of immanence goes beyond the subject-object relationship. The network is transcendental, but has no subject. Objects are no longer things, but only flows or performances. Therefore it is not a question of the subject's fruition of a work of art. What matters is that performance is moving across non-linear networks flowing

from digital networks to synaptic networks and vice versa.
It was a new non-linear mentality that moved digital builders and engineers to build the interface between the two networks that is known as digital hypertext. This became the condition sine qua non for the existence of non-linear communication. Digital hypertext, however is not a structure, not a linear linguistic vision based on transcendence of digital hypertext. It is a machine, a digital machine for non-linear performance based on the mouse as interface. It has nothing to do with text, but has to do with triggers and performances, so there are two evolutionary procedures in hypermachines: one the one hand the triggers or buttons that unleash performances and guarantee non-linearity for extensive topological simultaneity. The multiple triggers thus constitute commutation fields, but will tend to disappear in their unfolding and be incorporated into the course of the performances. On the other hand, performances as the actions produced by interagents and programming; in the case of the latter we will find actors and scripts, but also other triggers that execute these actions. So all media become part of digital hyper machines, as do other non-linear machines, due to their digitality: imagetic machines, textual machines, musical machines, but also simulator machines, intelligent machines, thinking machines, emotive machines, living

machines. With the growth of networks and the multiplication of interconnected digital hyper-machines, the mega-hyper-digital machine emerges where performances circulate: remote controls; values; knowledge; education; spiders. This is the destiny of shared cultural products that produce deterritorialization in cultural productions and expand collective creativity and increase cultural heterogenization. Thus a mega-digital production is formed by multiple micrological productions conceived by several artists, scientists, philosophers, and cultural activists scattered around the world and no one would even know where one cultural production ends and another starts: 1) sharing with cultural productions already published: 2) sharing by those involved in conceiving unprecedented cultural production - in both cases creating a network of undetermined growth. Besides these hyper-machines and mega hyper-machines, there are also archiving machines that emerged to fill needs for accessibility to contents on digital networks. There are hundreds of them, but only a few are employed by digital users. However, archiving-machines do not fulfill their main function, they can no longer provide what they are supposed to provide: accessibility to any subject on any material connected to the network. This inaccessibility arises from the difficulty of finding something in a

world where the astronomical amount of content on different subjects is growing exponentially. It is also due to the method of classification and priorities that archive-engines produce. Although some work on a Boolean basis in an attempt to overcome these limits, they remain insufficient - despite achieving greater coverage. Thus an enormous volume of digital material is inaccessible, despite being connected. Only the tip of the iceberg is usually available, most is in the digital depths, which we could call the digital unconscious. In a way, this digital unconscious is important because it produces an opacity and digital flattening in the network that obviates control by the state apparatus. Digital police can only reach the surface of the network. On the other hand, the digital networks' unconscious becomes crucial in the relationship with the agents of digital culture, because new mechanisms can be established to bring up inaccessible materials by setting up a transformative combat force. Let us recall that it was crypto-anarchism that created the conditions for messages sent over the network to maintain privacy.
Another auxiliary force is the power of the free products that are destabilizing digital capital with unexpected consequences for the world market. For each digital product that is marketed, another similar one emerges, sometimes an even better one, but in any

case free. This is not a reference to pirated products, but on the contrary to products created by programmers or cultural agents who do not want to sell or distribute their products for any form of payment. There are programs that cost nothing and are open source so that anyone may contribute to their development, thus showing the power of collective creativity. All this points to the anarcho-cultural nature of digital networks. Other forms are being adopted too, mainly in education. Free digital education worldwide, distance learning based on self-centered learning and initiative by those taking part, thus undermining academic teaching based on discipline and control and usually supported by state and church. So anarcho-culturalism can not only confront control-society but the society of the spectacle too. The culture of immanence and immersive participation poses the possibility of an agonistic in relation to the analogical mass media that brutalize thousands of people through introjection of memes and signic programs for the perverse purpose of selling their products. Let us recall that virtual networks can absorb everything. There is no control of what may happen, despite attempts to exercise control, but there will always be means and strategies to avoid this control imposed by the culture of transcendence. Hackers multiply to the extent that there is an attempt to control them. The nature of networks is

one of anarchical immanence. They belong to no nation or political state. They are pure potentiality. Legal systems have no competence over them, since they are beyond the domain of states, however they can absorb modes that are foreign to them without being basically altered or having their nature threatened with crisis, so they are treated in an analogical (linear) way, in which case there is a flattening of their potential, because treatment is lineal and supercoded by their authors or producers, it does happens. Or through ignorance of the potentiality of hyper-machines, or through simple reproduction of analogical behaviors for the purpose of massification. In both cases all the potential that digital instruments can provide is despised by an extemporaneous mentality that has failed to move away from the linear mode of thinking and has remained territorialized in the world of transcendence. On the other hand the techno-digital progress and the culture of immanence lead to a different mentality. This can only take place if there is deconstruction of academic education procedures and de-mimetization of the behaviors and pragmatics imposed on contemporary subjectivity. It is crucial for people to actually know how to produce hyper-machines and hypertexts and just not manipulate them. There will only be a new mentality, going beyond the current one based on writing, if there is a non-linear

way of thinking and this requires a hypertextual pragmatic. Hypertexts should be on the curriculum of every elementary school in the world as preliminary studies for digital culture. That is why it a policy of cultural immanence is so important to create conditions to not only bring about digital inclusion of the disadvantaged, but particularly their inclusion in digital culture and this can only take place through the pragmatic of digital performances. It means starting by learning hypertexts, but also providing accessibility to cultural productions that are being developed on networks. This is the aim of the several events such as digital festivals that succeed in bringing together a large number of cultural productions involving the multiplicity of events flowing across the networks. They provide the public with access to the problematics that producers, programmers and researchers are currently developing. However, some of them are showing digital productions as mere innovation and usually from the angle of the forced analogical unity of the culture of transcendence. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking that the general public is taking part in these great digital changes, since economic conditions do not allow such a development and on the other hand massification - imposed mainly by the mass media - obliterates inclusion in digital culture, despite the fact that they are

often themselves connected to the network, although not really part of digital culture, and confined to programs as products of the mass media. Several traditional cultural institutions such as galleries, museums, etc. have been attempting to show virtual works but they do so from the transcendent angle of the curator. Now these institutions are under the culture of transcendence, which is based on a certain cultural axiom, i.e. principles and concepts based on discursive authority and on meta-narratives and meta-languages. Both art critics and curators operate as the apparatus of cultural cooptation in so far as their speeches are always meta-linguistic and transcendent speeches that subsume concepts or works of art with the aim of submitting them, semioticizing them to judgment of authority, to judgment of axioms, so that works and artists are always on a secondary level and the public is submitted to passive contemplation through this cultural spectacle. The culture of immanence operates on a different basis, it is the culture of virtual (potency), of digital networks in the agonistic of micro narratives; it does not work through apparatus, because they are cultural war machines for enduring transformation of all codes. Instead of curatorships and curators the culture of immanence operates with strategic organizers who work not with an axiomatic approach, but with a

network of performances, a network of problematics that incrementally empower interagents and the general public. Instead of contemplative exhibitions, the aim is a digital eco-system built with strategies for contextualizing the public in relation to biodigital problematics. A performance network that interlinks the presentation of works by cultural producers, interactive and intelligent manipulation by the public, dialogue between public and producers, presentations of theoretical works by producers. There would then be an eco-cultural environment of interactive immersion enabling passive spectators to become active interagents and so produce their own cultural connections. The atomized "many" would become culturally interconnected to form a sociocultural nanotechnology.

Ricardo Barreto and Paula Perissinotto
Organizers of the FILE - electronic languageinternational festival