In the summer of 2008, the Hamburg Kunstverein and the Theater Kampnagelfabrik held the »First Hamburg Artists’ Conference« as part of the project »We call it Hamburg.« Artists, dancers, actors, curators and directors were invited to strike up a dialogue at an »Open Space Conference« (from Open Space Technology - OST). Harrison Owen invented this conference format in 1985 with the aim of achieving a more effective division of labor. The president of a successful management consulting firm, which, among others, advises Shell, Boeing and the World Bank, was inspired by the »uncontrolled« markets and ritual festivities in small Liberian villages. There, he reached the conclusion that the circle is the basic geometric form of communication. With the help of the coffee-break metaphor, he incorporated a familiar image in this exotic adaptation. He had discovered that coffee breaks were the most efficient forums during conferences; this is when the real essentials are discussed. Owen thus invented the conference as an endless coffee break, a concept that quickly became a great success. Not only companies, but also communities were soon using this form of discussion to talk out their problems. After a few years, the method was taken up by social groups, whether »job-seeking « youth or, as in this case, Hamburg artists. With its milieu-type structures, OST offers an opportunity to transform open contexts into closed systems for a short time, creating a micro-model with a transparency that sheds light on otherwise impenetrable social fabrics.

»Open Space« technology can be considered as belonging to what Gilles Deleuze described as »control forms with a liberal appearance.« The »open« is meant to describe an open space, but it is really about opening up things in order to look inside. OST is designed to illuminate energies and desires in order to reassemble them in ambitious new orders. Any resistance or friction losses encountered are to be subject to re-interpretation.

OST is favored in situations of crisis involving a loss of identification among employees, consumers or others. Management – almost all steering units consider themselves management nowadays – uses it as a way of inviting people to develop new role models. The first assurance this staged state of emergency gives is that a situation will be created in which all participants are equal. In the OST, management is meant to listen to the people it wants to steer and to answer them in a language they all understand. In order to create an exceptional status that is conducive to discussion and communication, management pretends it is passing on its authority to the presenter, called »facilitator« in OST jargon.

In Open Space, there is no podium and there are no speakers to address the group. That hierarchical arrangement is replaced by a level »marketplace« where small groups gather and communicate. Within the circles, which gather to discuss individual issues they have themselves proposed having to do with a predetermined main topic, whoever wants to speak takes a pen and makes notes on a sheet of paper placed in the middle of the circle. These notes are posted on partitions, creating hanging newspapers. If someone loses interest in his group, he simply gets up and meanders among the circles until a different discussion grabs him. The facilitator explains this as the »Law of Two Feet«; participants should regard themselves as »butterflies« or »bumble bees«.

At the beginning, the members of the conference, most of them unasked and now turned into animal images, are a bit reserved and suspicious. Discussion ripples along. After a while, some participants emerge from their cocoons and turn into beautiful »butterflies« because this transformation is after all an assignment; otherwise the »Law of Two Feet« might lead them out of the room. More and more mouths open, partly because their bodies believe that is what everyone else is doing. Astonished, softened by the vibes, people realize that the others are listening to them, looking at them with wide-open eyes.

The facilitator’s assignment – »Today, all those who are unequal will speak as equals« – has the effect of mixing up relationships based on dependencies; it harbors a contradiction between two incompatible sets of content. When systematically metered out, such paradoxical assignments barely leave the addressees a chance to elude the message’s paradox. Their bond with the sender keeps them from rejecting the assignment as meta-communication.

The initiators of the conference, aware of the strategy but pretending to be clueless, are in turn granted twice the power due to their head start in knowledge. Soon, some of them have to restrain themselves so as not to immediately deduce control techniques from what they are hearing, and to try them out on those who are verbally baring themselves. The facilitator wants them instead to let the people hold forth for hours; the aim being to find redundancies in what they are saying, i.e. repeatable sequences of human interaction that could be integrated as feedback loops into the targeted control commands of the firm or the social structure.

This micro-model in addition creates what cybernetics describes as homeostasis. Usually, this state appears in self-organizing systems. It involves compensating for any threats to equilibrium in order to maintain the unit’s stability. Artificially created homeostasis creates the seemingly real atmosphere of a self-organizing organism in order to reap its dynamics in the form of externally imposed work and a controlled community.

When, in the evening, the conference’s perfidious comfiness comes to an end, people quickly disperse. Some appear to be embarrassed by their bared subjectivity. Others wonder whether all that talk was worth their valuable time. People did not really get to the point, but somehow it was nice to experience everyone as relaxed, open and without a mask.

Since simulated homeostasis does not by any means clarify everything that has gone wrong, management must finish the rest. Evaluating the minutes gives them material that shows what promises must be made to keep people going, how opposition can be turned into goals for reforming the structure, and what deviations from the norm must be reinterpreted. Here, reinterpretation means the substitution of the verbal and emotional framework used to judge questions regarding content with a different framework, thus changing the overall meaning without touching upon the conditions of the control cycle.

Finally, the participants are presented with a model or something similar, as well as the embarrassingly chatty minutes that mirror the consensus of their empty desires. Should major revisions have to be made in the »soul of the company,« management uses the rallying cry of »lifelong learning « in order to demand special efforts or even change.

[b]Cybernetics and Revolution[/b]
It is no coincidence that an OST evaluation is reminiscent of the systemic transaction analysis with its »family constellations«; both psychological technologies build on the findings of cybernetics. Unfashionable for awhile, the science of cybernetics derives its name from the Greek »kybernetes« for helmsman; in Latin it became »gubernator,« and then in English »governor«. A consideration of biological and technological behaviors is at the center of this interdisciplinary field of research, which was developed in the mid-20th century. The widespread assumption until that time of a causality in the relationship between cause and effect is superceded here by the assumption of circular operations instead. This change in paradigms was at first prompted by military demands. Bombers were flying too fast for anti-aircraft to be able to take direct aim without missing them. For that reason, it was important to ascertain the attacker’s position at the point of time in the future when the projectile would reach him. Mathematician Norbert Wiener was commissioned to construct an apparatus to calculate the enemy pilots’ expected behavior. If the attackers began to stray from the behavior determined to be the norm, the apparatus tried to incorporate that deviation in order to maintain control and continue to annihilate the enemy. To deal with this challenge, the pioneers of cybernetics studied the learning processes of polyps, and the growth of huge shells on some freshwater fish. They planned to formulate their mathematic-technological translations from biology into theorems and mechanisms that were to have »the smoothness of a Brancusi egg«.

The planned arms development failed, but their findings laid the groundwork for previously unknown ways of controlling human behavior. What had been designed to protect the population was now turned on that very group, naturally, and as always, for its own good.

»Feedback« was the new concept’s central tool. The relationship between the world and a set goal was to be made controllable using optimal communication via feedback, that is loops between sensors, and its computer evaluation and transmission to the effectors, called »grabbers.«

The concept of a control society Gilles Deleuze vaguely defined in 1990 hinted at the communication loops that were to pervade a population fleeing in all directions. Meanwhile, the totalitarian claim of control in an open space unerringly continues to move toward the realization of Deleuze’s prognosis.

In many of its applications, as perhaps at the »First Hamburg Artists’ Conference,« it is not even a case of the perfidious control technology’s deliberate application. There, too, a fatal mixture of self-optimization, opportunism and a lack of political instinct seems to be at work, which half-conscious agents everywhere use to stabilize control over society’s affairs. In fact, these cultural caretakers of time and space are actually trying hard to get in touch with, and to obtain insights into what they call, in their bureaucratic words, »scenes.« In short, they are merely trying to function.

The French authors collective Tiqqun coined the term »cybernetic capitalism« to denote these and other fatal efforts at trying to function. It describes surprisingly clearly what should be enforced in the future under the key themes security, control and sustainability now that the financial capital crisis has heralded the end of the neoliberal regulation regime. In view of this vehement attack on what is left of life, the question of how people can communicate without being caught up in the circles of control, or better: how to disrupt this form of capture, is becoming increasingly urgent. The Tiqqun essay »Cybernetics and Revolution,« translated into German in 2007, offers a proposal for opposition that has unfortunately received far too little attention.

In contrast with many other critics of the control society, Tiqqun does not demand the right to an intact private sphere. It is precisely this middle-class idea of a right to separation – be it of property or of nations – and the fear of its loss that the control society uses all the time to legitimize violations. Without fail, Tiqqun circumvents Toni Negri and Michael Hardt’s neo-Marxist misunderstanding that the new communication technologies’ possibilities could be reinvented while en route to communism, where everyone is a recipient and at the same time is transformed into a sender, which in turn would let the voices of the damned of the earth be heard. Tiqqun responds to this speculation: »People will not share riches but information, and everyone will be producer and consumer at the same time. Everyone will be his ›own medium‹! Communism will be a communism of robots!« Subsequent to Deleuze, Tiqqun continues to evoke »empty in-between spaces of non-communication« as opposed to what is, after the ugliness of the digital revolution, merely an obscene analogy of communication and a liberalized society.

They recognize creating nebulousness and panic as possible means of opposing a form of control that builds on communication. »To become as inscrutable as fog means to recognize that you represent nothing, that you are not identifiable (…) It means opposing with a vengeance every battle for recognizability and recognition.« It might be possible to prepare the revolution beyond the flow of information in »anti-social singularities« in zones so diffuse that the imperative of clarity that controls society no longer prevails.

The resulting panic in the cybernetic texture could trigger destructive chain reactions in the structure of communicating loops. What form such attacks might take or what artistic means they could use is less an issue to be described and thus communicated than one to be tried out.

Tiqqun, Kybernetik und Revolte. Zürich/Berlin 2007.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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