Remixing the Master's Tools

September 23, 2020

In a now famous omen, offering a stark prognosis of the pitfalls in fighting oppression with the weapons of the oppressor, Audre Lorde declared in 1984 that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Lorde, 2007). Since then this maxim—which I shall refer to as the MT—has proved both broadly applicable and highly divisive. A wide range of technologies and institutions have been considered as examples of the master’s tools, including virtual reality, the currencies or languages of colonising powers, and international law. To its admirers it has been wielded as an analytical trump card; to its critics it has often seemed a justification for cynical inaction. But despite its polarising effects, what has often been absent from the discussion is a robust attempt to clarify its interpretation. This oversight is peculiar, since taken at face value the MT is strangely ambiguous; somehow alluring, yet not obviously true. If instead it said “the master’s stones will never break the master’s windows,” the warning would ring hollow. Why not, we might wonder? Perhaps “the master’s techniques will never undo the master’s plans” would offer an improvement, but many questions still linger.

This essay represents my own attempt to untangle this ambiguity, motivated by my brief involvement with the world of critical arts. In this world one often encounters the MT—typically deployed as a critique of something outside the art world—yet at the same time one is deeply involved with exactly the kind of practices it appears to implicate. The critical artist is on the one hand someone who critiques the current state of world relations, and on the other someone who produces a particular kind of product for a particular kind of market. The extent to which it is possible for both of these roles to come together meaningfully is largely a question of whether an aesthetic object can contain, materialise or communicate a critique that retains its force when placed in circulation as a commodity. These puzzles raise questions such as: what is it that makes a critique forceful? What actually is a market relation in this context, and what effect can it have on the critique whose transmission it mediates? To what extent can these relations be subverted and reversed?

While originally targeted at an academic platform—the NYU humanities conference on feminism at which Lorde gave her original address—the ideas underlying the MT have much to offer these questions. They form a way of thinking about a wide class of problems unique to projects of emancipation that work within a system so totalising it has always already dictated the terms of action. Beyond critical arts and humanities conferences, the MT speaks to some of the definitive paradoxes of ethical and political action in contemporary life, from the extent to which ethical consumerism can achieve ethical goals to whether protest movements should leverage marketing techniques. The MT summons the pessimistic spectre that hovers above all these questions: if all tools are now under the master’s control, does this mean that resistance is impossible?

The argument I will make is that everything hinges on the difference between two forms of resistance: those with a strategy of subversion, and those with a strategy of appropriation. Roughly, this is the difference between trying to beat someone at their own game, and hijacking the deck to play something else. These two strategies correspond, respectively, to two different interpretations of the MT. The first reads it as a media theoretic claim, under which I shall argue that it is robustly true, therefore providing strong guidance as to which strategies should be discarded as hopeless. The second reading is materialist. Under this reading the MT is seen to be false—a realisation which points the way to positive forms of resistance. My recommendation will be that we abandon all attempts to subvert existing tools and channel all energies into appropriating the materials that constitute them.

A Problematic: Tools, Codes, and Carnivals

The MT’s ambiguity appears to derive from a deeper ambiguity, one that is cooked into the very concept of a tool. A tool is something with both material and social aspects: on the one hand it is an object, on the other a set of conventions establishing the object’s function as a tool. The same object can be a different tool in different contexts; a rock may be a table one day and a brick the next. If by “tool” we are referring specifically to the material object, then the MT takes on its false sense. The master’s mallet can indeed break down the master’s door—why couldn’t it? But if it does so, then there is another sense in which the master’s mallet is no longer the master’s mallet: it has become the villager’s weapon. It is in this sense, in which “tool” is held to refer to the object in its socially determined function, that the omen acquires its charge. On this interpretation the contention is that the master’s own practices, institutions, norms, or codes, cannot be used to undermine the master’s power.

Lorde’s aim with the MT was to call into question the academic platform’s neutrality as a conduit for feminist causes. Her argument was that the platform itself embodied a set of norms that worked in favour of the interests it claimed to be challenging. This would automatically and systematically bias the platform towards points of view that do not represent meaningful challenges to its underlying power structure. The platform therefore reproduces the exclusion structures of its controlling interests merely by being occupied. Content that appears to be hostile to the power structure is effectively tokenised, lending a false sense of credibility to the platform when in reality nothing of significance has been conceded. The tools are not neutral conduits, as terms like “platform” falsely suggest—their codes inscribe the master’s power. “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”

A similar problem—one that will be useful to refer to for comparison—is presented in Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the medieval carnival. The carnival represented a temporary reversal of the feudal power structure, during which the villagers were permitted to engage in transgressive behaviour typically taken to threaten the social order, including ridicule and criticism of the feudal lord. In many cases, however, the carnival only went ahead with the permission of the feudal lord themselves. In this sense the temporary freedom enjoyed by the villagers could function as a mechanism of control. By giving them an illusion of transgression, the apparent concession in reality worked to undermine the villager’s capacity to mobilise against the oppressive normality. Criticism of the master was tolerated by the master when and only when it was communicated through the platform of the carnival, because the very exercise of the platform underwrote the master’s power. (Andrew Robinson has a nice article about the carnivalesque and its ambiguities. David Graeber has also considered its relevance for political activism (Graeber, 2007).)

Medium and Message / Force and Content

Both Lorde’s conference and Bakhtin’s carnival can be considered as media bearing content subject to systematic filtering. The form of a medium establishes a set of constraints on messages exchanged across it. These include norms governing the framing of individual messages, as when the user interface of a social media platform emphasises image-heavy content, or a certain sphere of discourse limits access to only those willing or able to speak in a particular vocabulary. They may also include formal limitations placed on the relationships between messages, as when a news site presenting itself as neutral matches each left-leaning piece with a right-leaning piece, or when every article in a magazine is bookended by advertisements. There may also be context-sensitive constraints, as when a corporation’s marketing materials lend support to a political cause only once it is no longer controversial to do so.

The contention presented by both the conference and the carnival is that when the form of the medium is controlled by power, it cannot bear a message carrying a serious challenge to that power, because the norms will systematically strip it of critical force (often with a tokenistic concession). Both situations seem therefore to testify to Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964). On one common reading, this formula claims that the medium exerts a pull over its content that always takes precedence over any particular message. Insofar as the form of the medium is dictated by power, this power will ultimately be exerted, regardless of the content of the messages transmitted across it.

This picture has often been criticised as overly deterministic. While it may be granted that the medium exerts a kind of gravity over the message, does this really mean that it must swallow it completely? Say an environmental activist makes an address at a conference; the film is uploaded to Youtube and watched by thousands. The message is embedded within an academic institutional platform, which is then re-embedded in a video sharing medium governed by commercial interests. With each embedding the norms of sending and receiving are modified, often subtly by algorithms, technical interfaces, and social or professional norms. To what extent can these modifications strip the message of its critical force?

It may be tempting to say that they make little difference. The content of the message is, after all, still the content of the message. The activist’s point is the same whether one hears it in person or via Youtube. But the problem with this line of thought is that what is at issue is the force of the message, not its content, per se. And the force of a message is bound up not only with its content, but also with its context of reception. In the case of the carnival it is not suggested that a satire of the feudal lord, which may have genuine transgressive force elsewhere, has somehow changed its content when performed at the carnival. The content remains the same. What has changed is that an implicit endorsement of the carnival as medium has been made by its attendees, and this amounts to a prior ceding of power. While the message may ostensibly communicate criticism of the master’s authority, what the villagers must do in order to access it is implicitly endorse that very same authority. As such the critical force of the message has been lost, not through any distortion of its content but by a prefiguration of the authority structure contained in its mode of reception. The challenge to power is thereafter an empty performance, no more than a simulation of challenge. It is like playing poker for fake money—the hand may be played as if the stakes were real, but since they have already been abandoned there is nothing to be won.

This points to a more nuanced reading of McLuhan’s formula. In one sense it is misleading—to say that the medium is the message suggests the gravity exerted over the message is a kind of semantic gravity, a systematic distortion of its content. This is not the case—the message’s content is its own, remaining stable as the message travels across different media. However, the force of a message is inseparable from the authority structure of the social context of its reception, and it is over this structure that the medium exerts its gravity. Insofar as the medium instantiates an authority structure that implicitly cedes power to its controlling interests, it cannot bear a message that represents meaningful resistance to it. To suggest that it can is to confuse force with content. Understood in this sense, the medium really is the message.

The Culture Market is a Medium

Wall E is a film with an anti-consumerist message, which is nevertheless packaged and delivered as a consumer product (Fisher, 2009, p. 18). This message is embedded within at least two nested media: first the medium of film, and second the market for cultural products that it lives in. To consider the market as a medium is to take as its messages the goods that are traded within it and their various significations. When these goods are cultural products like films, themselves containing messages embedded within a different medium, the content of these significations will often be derived from the content of their embedded media. (Indeed McLuhan made the point that when we look inside a medium what we often find are not messages, but another medium. (McLuhan, 1964, p. 1)) As the original message is embedded within a stack of media, each layer can potentially restructure the social context dictating the horizons of its reception.

Wall E’s apparent contradiction—that its audience absorbs the critical portrayal of future humans reclining in a haze of idle spectacle and junk food, while doing more or less the same thing themselves—is not one that passes unconscious. A certain awareness of these kind of contradictions is already built into the practice of receiving a blockbuster film (and of producing it—the makers of Wall E were surely aware that they were implicitly ridiculing their audience). Similarly, when someone like Žižek appears on Youtube to point out the “contradiction,” their message is received in exactly the same register. We pay them for the laugh and move on, changing nothing in our actions. In both forms of critique—Wall E’s critique of consumerism, or the metacritique of the consumption of the critique of consumerism delivered in the Youtube video—there is little to distinguish the norms of reception.

A common response to these kind of observations is to attribute the failure of force to a deficiency on the part of the message’s recipients. Insofar as these messages lack force, does this not simply speak to a lack of willpower on the part of their audience? Is it not, ultimately, their fault? This diagnosis implicitly attributes a neutral status to the medium, shifting all agency onto the human recipients. Against it can be pitched the alternative explanation that these norms of reception—and hence the absence of force—are actively materialised by the medium itself, and that the intentions or capacities of the audience are not deciding factors.

As Marx observed and Lukacs later elaborated, the essence of the commodity structure lies in the division it installs between relations of production and relations of consumption. When the distinction between production and consumption does not exist, the value created by productive activity is intrinsically indexed to its concrete social context. When a group of friends cook a meal together, the created value lies not just in the material qualities of the meal itself, but also in the particular relationships built, sustained, and performed through the shared labour. For a product of labour to circulate on a market it must be unmoored from this concrete social context, evinced of all traces of particularised social value which cannot travel with it. One cannot wear someone else’s wedding ring; if one does it becomes merely a ring. In Marx’s terminology, commodification of a product implies it must be “alienated from its lifeworld”. The market’s constraint of context-interchangeability is what installs the rift between production for an abstract consumer, on the one hand, and consumption with no contextual stake in production, on the other. In a system of production organised around commodity exchange almost everyone will play both roles, but the transmission of all products through the abstraction mechanism of the market solidifies their difference as roles. Insofar as the market is viewed as medium, it is this division that constitutes its form.

Wall E’s anti-consumerism is ostensibly a political message, the force of which is in theory just its capacity to provide its recipient with a motivating reason to act. What is the lifeworld of a reason, and what could it mean to become alienated from it? An example that can help illustrate what is at stake here is moral hypocrisy. The hypocrite’s point may be correct (content), but it is rarely persuasive (force). The reasons for this become clear if we consider the social dimension of moral reasoning. Given the universal nature of the moral principle, the fundamental question on the table in its disputation is not “what should I do?”, but “what should we do?”, where the “we” indexes the community of all moral agents. The hypocrite who argues for a principle at the same time as acting contrary to it, and with no inclination to change their behaviour, shows, before the conversation has even concluded, that they do not in practice acknowledge the authority of the principle to bind action. This is to implicitly disavow identification with the moral community, which from the perspective of the conversation is to make it true that there is no concrete “we” that could possibly be bound by its outcome, rendering it as empty dialogue from the perspective of their interlocutor. At best they may be provided with a reason for an abstract “us” to act, but in abandoning the concrete “us” the hypocrite has in effect ensured that the conversation has no stakes. The hypocrite’s reasons are alienated in virtue of their hypocrisy.

The example of the hypocrite points to an important but often missed aspect of group reasoning: the force of a reason for collective action is dependent on the authority structure of its concrete context of exchange. In other words, group reasoning is essentially situated. But it is precisely this concrete situatedness that is abstracted away in the commodity form. When the anti-consumerist message is delivered to the individual watching Wall E, who is the concrete “we” that is posing the question it could supply the answer for? Is it the rest of the people in the cinema? Is it the world at large, fans and critics alike? The truth is that there is none, only ephemeral audiences comprised of consuming individuals. Wall E’s anti-consumerism cannot be received as a reason to act, but only as an object of consumption made from a reason to act separated from the social practice of committing to action. When someone treats it as if it can—by, for example, starting to fiercely agitate for environmental action on the way out of the cinema—and everyone rolls their eyes, as if a faux pas has been committed, it is because in a very real sense it has been: in their earnest this person has demonstrated that they have misunderstood the implicit rules of consumption as social practice. If no contradiction is felt by Wall E’s audience, it is because there is none.

Reversibility ≠ Reciprocity

In his 1967 situationist manifesto The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord linked the ability of communications technology to institute power relations to the notion of “unilateral media” (Debord, 2014, p. 8). The point was later taken up by Jean Baudrillard in Requiem for the Media (Baudrillard, 2019, p. 171), who put it like this.

TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself. There is no need to imagine it as a state periscope spying on everyone’s private life—the situation as it stands is more efficient than that: it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other, that they are definitively isolated in the fact of a speech without response. (Baudrillard, 2019, p. 181)

For Debord, what makes a medium unilateral is its fixed direction of message flow. This material property of a medium institutes a structure of authority: the viewer’s capacity to endorse or reject messages is limited to a minimal choice among predefined content which they play no active role in shaping. They have a highly restricted choice of what to receive, but no ability to respond. This is similar to the often noted point that in a political referendum, real power lies not with the voter who gets to choose an option from a pre-defined list, but with whoever gets to write the list in the first place, and to interpret the results.

Baudrillard went a step beyond Debord in realising that the authority structure represented by a medium’s unilaterality has nothing to do with message direction. If it were, then levelling the authority structure would simply be a matter of allowing the direction of message flow to reverse—social media, for example, would represent a genuine democratisation of television’s asymmetric authority structure. But as Baudrillard points out, the relevant counterpose to unilaterality is not reversibility, but reciprocity. The difference between these he illustrates by invoking Roman Jakobsen’s model of communication (Baudrillard, 2019, p. 189):

transmitter \( \rightarrow \) CODE \( \rightarrow \) receiver

The code represents the form messages are required to take before they can be transmitted across a particular medium. According to this model, a reciprocal medium is one in which the code itself is controlled by those who exchange messages within it. Think of an undirected verbal conversation, in which the meaning of terms are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated, the stakes of discussion always shifting and recrystallising. Contrast this with a highly moderated discussion, such as a formal debate, in which topic, speaking times and turns, etc, are strictly limited, and the usage of terms or styles may be stipulated and enforced. A moderated exchange is reversible—in fact a regime of alternating reversals is often strictly adhered to—but it is not reciprocal, since the code is controlled not by the participants but by the moderator. As such it is the moderator who holds the real power, since it is they who have the ability to define the boundaries of the conversation.

Reversibility, then, does not get us beyond the asymmetric authority structure of a unilateral medium. In fact by giving a shallow appearance of reciprocity, it actually provides an alibi for the deeper unilateral structure: the abstraction of the code and its control by a third party. This reflects the commodity structure discussed early, which can now be seen to be a particular example of a unilateral medium:

producer \( \rightarrow \) MARKET \( \rightarrow \) consumer

That the role of producer and consumer is reversible does not represent a meaningful democratisation of the authority structure, since the asymmetry is represented by the very fact that everything must pass through the abstraction mechanism of the market. Similarly, contemporary social media are reversible without being reciprocal, as the code—here represented by the interfaces and algorithms that constrain content and manipulate its visibility—is dictated by the commercial interests of the platform. (A social media platform with a reciprocal structure of authority would be one in which the functionality and interface are controlled by its users.)

The breakdown of reciprocity is linked by Baudrillard to the observation that power in human societies often belongs to whoever can give but not be repaid. This recalls the scenario with the medieval carnival: the master gives the villagers the power to challenge power, but by accepting the gift the villagers tacitly ratify the underlying power relation, and thus abandon the stakes of the challenge. By accepting the master’s gift of a temporary reversal, they sign away their claim to reciprocity.

In this idealised case there is an identification of the intentions with the interests of the feudal lord. But asymmetric power structures often exist without their beneficiaries having explicit intentions to institute or sustain them. The difference between interests and intentions, and the possibility of their divergence, lies at the heart of what is at stake in the MT. Lorde’s point does not depend on any intentional manipulation of the platform to the advantage of a particular group. The point is rather that since a differential privileging of those interests is built into the platform itself, it makes little difference what the intentions are of those who use it. The capacity of a medium to inscribe and mask a power relation is in fact the very thing that allows the intentions of its beneficiaries to be decoupled from their interests.

This point holds even when the intentions are explicitly hostile to the interests. The paradox of Lorde’s critique is, of course, that it is delivered on the very platform it claims can never be used to mobilise an effective critique. If it is correct it can never be successful. If it succeeds it proves itself wrong. While this is no doubt an oversimplification, it speaks to a fundamental tension harboured by critical practices that disseminate their findings via the same platforms they implicate.

2nd-order Alibis and the Critical Arts

Consider James Bridle’s Dronestagram project, an Instagram account collecting google earth satellite images of sites of US drone strikes between 2012 and 2015. Bridle’s own presentation of the project portrays its critical message as one of straightforward earnest: GPS technologies are facilitating new kinds of atrocities, here’s how we can take publicly available GPS services and turn them back on the powers that abuse them.

For a few weeks now, I have been posting images of the locations of drone strikes to the photo-sharing site Instagram as they occur […]. Making these locations just a little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real.

The political and practical possibilities of drone strikes are the consequence of invisible, distancing technologies, and a technologically-disengaged media and society. Foreign wars and foreign bodies have always counted for less, but the technology that was supposed to bring us closer together is used to obscure and obfuscate. We use military technologies like GPS and Kinect for work and play; they continue to be used militarily to maim and kill, ever further away and ever less visibly.

In reading “a technologically-disengaged media and society” one could be forgiven for thinking that the technology being implicated is Instagram itself. Yet the framing operation performed on the images by its interface is never explicitly targeted, and is in fact implicitly recruited as a neutral conduit of the project’s findings. GPS and remote control technologies are the distancing agents, the technical mediators placing interpersonal gulfs between drone pilots and their victims. But creative use of Instagram, apparently, can help us to bring things “a little closer.”

Writing about the project Nishat Awan picks up on this ambiguity, gesturing towards a different reading.

The images that Bridle uses are readily available for anyone to access through Google Earth, part of an ongoing attempt to map and visualize every place on the planet, to make it hypervisible. Yet these images that are apparently so readily available for anyone to access are also completely inaccessible, as they are difficult to find and hardly anyone chose to look at them. They are somehow rendered consumable by Bridle, allowing us to see the reality of the places that the United States and its allies might claim were remote outposts, hamlets consisting of a few buildings, but were also places where people lived out their daily lives. Of course, there were other sources of information, other narratives that we could have chosen to listen to had we the appetite. Tribal leaders and ordinary people from the affected areas were telling of the exact toll that the bombings were taking. Herein lies the ambiguity and critical force of Bridle’s work. He is well aware that the remotely sensed images from satellites count for much more than the testimonies of tribal leaders, brown bodies whose truth the West was not yet ready to hear. (Awan, 2016, p. 6)

The point almost made here is that what Dronestagram exposes is not just the distancing effect of GPS and remote control technologies, but that our own technological practices of image consumption—epitomised by Instagram—are very much part of this distancing milieu. Why, then, is this point elided at the very moment it is about to be made? Why does Awan say, for example, that these images are “somehow rendered consumable by Bridle”, as if there is some mystery about this, when rendering a series of images into a consumable unity, something that can be absorbed in a glance and then discarded, is exactly what the Instagram interface is designed to do?

If this point were acknowledged explicitly, it would read as critical of the project. Bridle would be seen not as making the atrocities a little more real, but as actively contributing to their unreality by presenting a false equivalence between visibility and closeness. What the sense of visibility provided by the images and their consumable framing actually produces is a simulation of closeness, in which the affects of witnessing are detached from the act of giving testimony, allowing them to be consumed without obligation. The effect is to provide an alibi for the whole milieu of technological distancing, thereby perpetuating very the problem it claims to be critiquing.

At work in this is a structure of authority instituted by the curatorial operation of the Instagram interface. Looking over the photos one thinks: this is awful, but isn’t it great that someone is holding the US government to account. The unilateral nature of the structure shows up here in the fact that that someone is not you—the mode of engagement itself materialises a deferral of that responsibility. Your role in this situation is (and can only be) to consume the fabricated sense that resistance is happening. This is exactly the point alluded to by Awan when she says “that the remotely sensed images from satellites count for much more than the testimonies of tribal leaders, brown bodies whose truth the West was not yet ready to hear.” Yet for some reason she presents this as a positive evaluation of the project, one that speaks to its critical force.

Nevertheless, one can empathise with the view that there is something of critical value in this work. We might point to the sense that scanning through its images, one becomes aware that the only available one-button response is to “like” them, an action which seems wholly inappropriate given the content. In this and similar ways, can’t such projects help to bring us to an embodied awareness of the boundary conditions imposed by these platforms on the public conversations we attempt to conduct within them?

In one sense this point must be right. If the communications platforms we use have boundary conditions that foreclose possibilities, then an awareness of them must be a precondition for the action required to reveal what is masked. But there is a further question we should be asking, one which is often shrouded by a mysterious silence: what can be done with that awareness? This is a question of the 2nd-order medium in which the awareness itself is communicated. The problem is that if the 2nd-order medium is the same as the original, 1st-order medium, then nothing has changed. It may be possible to represent what is masked by the boundary conditions of a medium as a message within it, but it is a mistake to think this represents any kind of movement beyond the boundary conditions—once again, to say this would be to conflate content with force. Yet is this not exactly what Awan is suggesting when she says that the critical force of Dronestagram lies in its capacity to make us aware of our complicity in tragedy as consumers of tragedy? In resolving the ambiguity between visibility and closeness in Bridle’s work, does she not simply reproduce the ambiguity at a different level, furnishing the 2nd-order medium with its 2nd-order alibi?

In fact, the feature Awan identifies as the source of critical force in Bridle’s project is exactly the opposite: it is the self-referential mechanism that systematically drains force from its message. The lesson that should be learned from this is that 2nd-order embeddings such as these actually function to neutralise resistance, even when they appear to be doing the exact opposite. By rendering critique of the boundary conditions of a unilateral medium as a message within the very same medium, this guarantees the unilateral authority structure is reproduced at a different level, leaving the 1st-order representation of the structure free to be disavowed without consequence. Generalising this point, when the medium is the market attempts to explore possibilities beyond the limitations imposed by market relations can always be effectively neutralised by packaging those possibilities as commodities to be traded on the market (as Mark Fisher pointed out, punk loses its subversive force at precisely the moment it becomes a readable identity, a mere style or aesthetic).

Both Wall E and much of what is labeled the “critical arts” demonstrate this mechanism of counter-resistance. Essential to its operation is the old cyberpunk myth of the message that can destroy its medium. There is no such message—as we have seen, the myth depends on the confusion of force with content. We should be wary of messages that are lauded as performing this function, even when (especially when) they successfully represent their own medium’s boundary conditions as a disavowable content within it. These supposed subversions in fact do nothing to undermine the authority structure of the medium, just as a description of the Möbius strip one finds oneself on does not provide a way of getting off it. What they do is the exact opposite: they supply the myth with a false credibility. Subversion is metabolised into complicity.

Remixing the Master’s Tools

I’ve tried to offer an interpretation of the MT that renders it robustly true. This interpretation understands “tools” as referring not just to material objects or systems but to the protocols of interaction that establish their social function as tools. Understood in this way, tools are considered as media. The master’s tools are those whose social protocols, usually strongly suggested or constrained by their material form, institute a unilateral structure of authority. By this I mean a structure in which the protocols are controlled by a party whose interests may diverge from those that use them. We can then read the MT in a media theoretic register: it is not possible to subvert a unilateral medium. Since power lies in the code, rather than in the content of messages, when the adoption of a medium involves a tacit acknowledgement of a third party’s authority over its code, then no message carried within that medium can surmount a meaningful challenge to that authority. This statement is in fact tautological—the master’s authority cannot be challenged not because it is inherently unchallengeable, but because to use the master’s codes is to have already implicitly ceded authority to them.

What counts as a “medium” will be extremely broad, including all rule-governed social interactions (which is indeed all social interactions). Mediations may take the form of technologies, vocabularies, protocols, or roles. When confronted with a medium, the present line of thought suggests that before we ask “how can we use or subvert this?” we first ask “what is its structure of authority?” Who controls the code? How may their interests diverge from the interests of those mediated?

The professional who works on a corporation’s ethics board is constrained by the commercial interests of the corporation, a code which dictates the horizon of the ethical conversation that occurs within it. A suggestion that improves both the efficiency and sustainability of the supply chain will be welcome; a suggestion which improves ethical credentials at a material price will be accepted if it can prove the benefit to the brand’s social capital will outweigh it; a suggestion that the company is inherently unethical and that its profitability is incompatible with its sustainability cannot be registered. A social media platform’s code is controlled by the company that owns it, and is exerted through its interface and algorithms. Its capacity for bearing subversions is constrained by the extent to which the codes subverted are bound up with the commercial interests of the platform. Generalising this point, the market itself can be seen to be a unilateral medium. The potential of a commodity to subvert or resist is always limited by what is ceded merely in virtue of the adoption of the commodity form. If an idea that challenges the market has to compete in a “marketplace of ideas” to be heard then its force will necessarily be lost, just because receiving it entails endorsing in practice the very thing critiqued. The commodity form is the code of the market, and the interests dictating it are those of capital growth.

If the market is a unilateral medium, and a unilateral medium cannot be subverted, then this paints a pessimistic picture for a contemporary world in which so many potential sites of resistance—domains of social, cultural, and intellectual life—are already mediated by market relations. How does one dismantle the master’s house when the master’s tools are all that’s available? I would like to suggest that an answer to this question can be found in the false materialist reading of the MT. While it is indeed the case that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, this holds true only insofar as those material objects and systems are understood according to the master’s codes. But they need not be—as material things the master’s tools necessarily underdetermine their code of use, and can therefore always become something other than the master’s tools. If subversion proves a hopeless strategy, the solution may be to reorient resistance around appropriation.

The difference between subversion and appropriation can be easily defined in McLuhanite terms. To subvert a medium is to transmit a message across it that undermines it—I have argued that this is a fool’s errand when the medium has a unilateral authority structure. Appropriation, on the other hand, corresponds to the moment at which a message is transferred to another medium. That it is possible to do so is a consequence of the distinction between force and content, and the realisation that the gravity a medium exerts over its message has nothing to do with content. It is this property—the capacity of a message to switch media while holding its content, what could be referred to as its remixability—that ensures that not only is appropriation always a live possibility, but that its potential materials are all around us.

In practice the line between subversion and appropriation may be hard to draw, though often we’ll know it when we see it. To make a VR experience that deconstructs the interests driving VR development is to attempt subversion; to smash a Starbucks window with an Oculus headset is to appropriate. To aggressively use Facebook’s marketing tools to push an anti-consumerist agenda is to subvert; to gather allies from political Facebook groups and then move the conversation to a private server is to appropriate. When the medium is a social role or context the situation is more subtle, and often the materials available for appropriation are people. The corporate ethics committee member may in their position be able to craft a critical message that no-one else would be able to, but to deploy it within the context of the committee is to subordinate its force to the overriding interests of the company, and ultimately to hamstring it. A strategy of appropriation calls not just for the crafting of messages but for a change of medium, which in this example would mean making the arguments elsewhere, a move which might require abandoning the professional role.

Generally speaking, this strategy suggests that our efforts are perhaps not best spent crafting new messages to be placed in existing media. There is, it has often been noted, more than enough critique—the problems of modernity have been thoroughly dissected. What it calls for is the crafting of new media in which to place those existing messages, media whose codes are controlled by their users and which therefore institute reciprocal authority structures—language games in which all players have an equal stake in the definition of the rules. These situations are not something novel or unfamiliar, indeed our private lives are full of them. Where they are absent is in public life, and it is there that these efforts must be directed. The new media must to some extent be built from the materials currently yoked to the master’s interests, both human and technological, because that is all there is. This is possible, but not if they remain yoked. To disentangle the master’s tools from the master’s interest is to remix them, to take the same messages, the same objects, the same people, and reconfigure the authority structure of the social space in which they live. It is to make the master’s tools something other than the master’s tools. Then and only then will they be capable of dismantling the master’s house.

References

1. Awan, N. (2016). Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance. GeoHumanities, 2(2), 311–330. [PDF]
2. Baudrillard, J. (2019). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (C. Levin, Tran.). Verso.
3. Debord, G. (2014). The Society of the Spectacle (K. Knabb, Tran.). The Bureau of Public Secrets. [PDF]
4. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.
5. Graeber, D. (2007). On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture. [PDF]
6. Lorde, A. (2007). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110–114. [PDF]
7. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. [PDF]

Tags

technics   social causality   baudrillard   zizek   mcluhan   marx   debord   lorde