The critical in Critical Technical Practice has its own genealogies, discourse, and armies of aca-demics hurling papers at each other over multifaceted barricades. While I'm happy to raid this battlefield from time time and remix the devastation or causation for a class, I'm certainly not intellectually or educationally equipped or sufficiently interested to reveal the intricacies of such a mire in here. I leave this to my stunning colleagues, Prof. Matthew Fuller and Dr. Luciana Parisi, who consistently feed the students' hungry appetite in this area. However, adjacent to discursive threads of criticality, there are other forms that can be easily be transposed and digested in a practice-based class. There are critical acts that surface from the struggle to survive and flourish in an unfair world. There are critical acts created by tactical media, by the deranged, or those taken from the fringes of art. Thinking with such critical acts, as discussed in the introduction, allows us to address the personal risk and ethics (or lack thereof) associated with them.
These forms of critical acts are multivalent in wider culture and it becomes important to both value and interrogate the nature of such phenomena if we are to incorporate them into Critical Technical Practice alongside intellectual critical threads. Students need to consider what might constitute a critical act at the microscopic and macroscopic scale, and to chart how it functions as a disruptor/constructor/enabler/disabler within culture and society. At the same time, students need to discriminate between considered and unconsidered critical acts, their ethics and the worth of personal or institutional risk.
One less considered example of a critical act that I came upon this year in my hometown was that of Snakey, a paranoid 34-year-old who lives on an old 16 ft plastic boat. Snakey's boat had been abandoned on the mud for 10 years with no facilities of any kind, no means of propulsion.
One night he just pulled it out of the Thames marsh and up on the mud alongside the locale cockle sheds, where his estranged dad and brother run a successful seafood business. Snakey eats and throws the rubbish out of his boat and urinates in used plastic drink bottles, throwing them overboard when the tide is out. Snakey demonstrates his contempt for those who know him and those who know he has committed something considered disgusting. People are forced to witness his light yellow urine contained in plastic bottles, a stand in for his contempt for the environment. He could have urinated straight in the sea like all the other men, but decided to dirty his nest, to contain his bodily wastes for others to witness. In this way Snakey spontaneously produces a critical act in a bottle that fractures the complacency of those that share this common space. It is a powerful act, a declaration of bodily power that resists, exposes, and exploits the preconditions that have created his current situation. It also creates an unbearable embarrass-ment for his dad and brother.
The critical act of Snakey fractures complacency by introducing turbulence into cultural and social 'common sense'. The unthinking equilibrium amongst people of the shoreline that blinds society is temporarily broken. The energy/discord produced pulls into focus what conditions the moment – not necessarily for Snakey but those that exist within the relations surrounding his acts.
The multivariate nature of critical acts and their interdependence with cultural and social norms makes them a compelling subject of study, but not necessarily a model to follow.
Searching for someone else who fractures complacency, but who does it within a pedagogy more closely related to the needs of Critical Technical Practice, I turn to the offerings of Mark Fisher. Mark, formerly of Goldsmiths, was a working class intellectual of Felixstowe, a port town on the East Coast of England. Mark, who sadly committed suicide earlier this year, was able to think through contemporary culture and mental illness in order to illuminate contemporary capitalism. His book Capitalist Realism11 drips with a politicized depression and bears witness to the annihilation of vitality both in the depressed self and wider society in the early 21st century.
Fisher's politically depressed vision is not surprising given that his lens was grounded by the exhilaration of people making culture for themselves without it first being apprehended by large corporations and turned into free labour before you have even had a chance to think about it.
Or maybe his lens was tinted slightly pink, a nostalgic hue stemming from his solidarity with the 1984/85 miners in the UK. This was the last time there was class-based political power outside of an elected dictatorship, a power which arguably has now been supplanted by Facebook and other social media.
Mark Fisher's book offers the class a critical realization of our own macroscopic entrapment within a totalized capitalist imaginary, much like Snakey's piss bottle challenges the pre/conditions of poverty and mental health at the microscopic level. Just as a critical act unfolds Snakey's piss bottle into the relations that make it real, Mark Fisher's question – is there no alternative to Capi-talist Realism? – requires us to question CapiCapi-talist Realism as a rubric of reproduction that keeps 11 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
us mesmerized by a desiring consumption. It also begs the question that he usefully does not present: how do we figure the way Capitalist Realism performs itself through technical objects?
This question allows the class to ask another: is Capitalist Realism the only thing performed through such technical individuals? Mark effectively lays out a concise mapping and a challenge – a landscape of desire, production, and consumption which in popular terms, technical critical
practice can affirmatively engage with.
References
Agre, Phil. 'Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI' in Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, William Turner and Les Gasser (eds) Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide, Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1997, pp. 131-157.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan Sheridan.
London: Routledge, 2003 (1963).
Foucault, Michel. Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock, 1988.
Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey. Evil Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin Classics, 1993 (1939).
O'Connor, T.J. Violent Python: a Cookbook for Hackers, Forensic Analysts, Penetration Testers and Security Engineers, Amsterdam/Boston: Syngress, 2013.
Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode and Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017 (1958).
YoHa. Evil Media Distribution Centre, 2013, shown at Transmediale, http://yoha.co.uk/node/666.