"Who speaks of victory? To survive is everything." - Rilke
The socialist in his real form, that of a government official,
may have disappeared behind the horizon like a shot, but as a
potential figure he can look forward to an unbelievable future.
He was spoon-fed on programming (the 1.0 version of the socialism
program was out by 1930). Lacking suitable hardware, he was
forced for 150 years to install his program in society. The
social question this raised caused a reaction which led to an
extension of the original design and a formidable number of new
applications. With each setback the socialist produced a new
plan, refusing to be daunted by illegal copiers like spartacists,
revisionists, Leninists and Christan socialists.
When Hitler and Stalin coupled socialism with incompatible
software like nationalism and totalitarianism, the development of
leftist programming stalled for quite a while. Of the many
applications, only data storage and file management, for which
historic socialism showed a true obsession, survived. Think of
the spreadsheets with the production figures of the five-year
plans, the intelligence services' miles of files, the Leaders'
collected speeches, the endless series of forms and applications
which had to be filled out at the drop of a hat. This was a
social format that got entangled in papers, a Leviathan that was
too big to be computerized. All the memory in the world wouldn't
have held the data overload that was heaped in the archives.
Yet the urge to program reared its head again in the 80s in the
person of Gorbachev. He discovered that contemporary social
programs require hardware other than society. The plan is now
merely PR material which presents a corporate image. When the
investors had Gorby's chain investigated, the bankability of the
Soviet Group was finished. But with the disappearance of
communism, the socialist finally got another chance to vent his
programming lust in the media which do it the most justice:
computer games, media banks and virtual realities.
In the West, the School of Life took learning from the past off
the syllabus a long time ago. Historical writing is complete, on
all levels, nano to cosmic. All phenomena and objects have been
fitted into a chronology which runs from the first attosecond
after the Big Bang, the cigar, the bathroom and bedroom,
anorexia, teddy bears, the sublime, medieval cuisine and going to
the beach to the image of the vagina, death and the subtle nose
of the night owl. All of history is reprocessed into information
and made into news. In contemporary historical writing,
miscellany is next to world politics and the stock market
quotations; determining factors (infrastructural or
superstructural) as historical materialism knew them can no
longer be distinguished. Information is ultimately just
information; Western historical consciousness has been lost
through the too great availability of the past. Information never
penetrates deeper than the working memory of the democratic
citizen. Everything can be forgotten, because storage is always
left to others (expert systems). Until we are forced to admit
disconcertedly that virtually all episodes of certain TV series
have been erased.
The socialist has a good relationship with his own hard disk.
Like the ex-Marxists, he learned the hard way, with mnemonics of
steel. To him, history isn't just one of many possible areas to
click into, but the domain where the driving principles at the
root of recent data can be found. The socialist's relationship
with the past has always been a technical connection. From birth,
he was not so much a revolutionary or a heretic, but a media
engineer. Books, pamphlets, newspapers, proposals, manifestos,
interventions, polemic and criticism - socialism was a literary
movement that believed in the word's power of persuasion in
manoeuvring the revolting horde in the right direction. For the
socialist, the words did not underlie the event, but they could
direct it so that it could discriminate between the chance
circumstances of riots and the iron dynamics behind them. For him
an event is not a fait divers, but an omen. Since the socialist
never erases files and always has memory space for more
information, his future is not a blank page, and unlike the
modern Westerner, he need not start over and over again at 0. The
Westerner is already tired before starting from all the patient
digging and searching that needs to be done.
For the socialist, events are imbedded in a universe of old and
new writing. Whether a text discussed prerequisites or end
results, it always resulted in yet more text. The goal was to
fabricate one massive interactive hypertext out of socialism.
Everyone read each other thoroughly and wrote reviews hundreds of
pages long. Paper was not just a mass of dead letters, but a
stimulus to written reactions. Rereadings of detestable authors
were always possible, after which debate was energetically thrown
wide open, resulting in a new supply of bulk text. Independent
of technological innovations and new media like photography, film
and radio, the socialist continually developed new connections,
but always exclusively inside his own media system. This practice
makes him an ideal candidate for the management and expansion of
cyberspace, which also shirks parallel media and constructs
rhizomes. The 1980s showed that retraining the scribes as
programmers is a relatively small step. The absence of
illustrations in soctext is no obstacle to the socialist's
entering the new world of images. He was already operating in a
larger context than the single picture all along, because 3-D
society was his medium.
As a storage specialist, the socialist has three options for the
preservation of socialism. First, the complete text edition will
be available on CD-ROM. But the market is decidedly not waiting
for this, especially now that the sugar daddies have left Moscow.
The acidiferous text tradition is yellowing and crumbling in the
hands of desperate archivists. Only a Band-Aid "Save the
Archives" concert could yet provide the necessary resources. Now
that further writing on the socialist project is slowly being
taken over by historians, who judge "objectively" with the
outsider's academic eye, the socialist is becoming destructive
against his nature and destroying his archive while he still can.
As the ex-socialists own up to their past mistakes, others act in
an attempt to prevent socialism degenerating into information.
The soctext is approaching dark times of nostalgia and memoirs,
while the basic texts have lost their medial potency. On the
socialism diskette the tab has been moved from "write data" to
"read only". Storage of the entire socialist discourse is not
only impracticable but objectionable.
The second option consists of scanning existing socialism. With
the trend of providing insight into every pernicious side of the
twentieth century in a museum context, the crimes, lies, and
total failures of the Eastern Bloc will get all the (disk) space
they need. At the same time there will arise a worldwide
fascination with the strangeness of the fact that for decades,
hundreds of millions of people acted as though another system
besides democracy and market economy was possible. The aesthetics
of socialism consisted of its managing, between definite
beginning and end points, to develop a complete system of its own
products, artistic styles, fashion and design with stunning
simplicity. Theme parks and sensory spaces will be installed to
make this historical phenomenon understandable: a tour past
collapsing housing developments, consumer queues, barking police
officers, informers, military parades, moral dissidents. Ascetic,
modernist nondesign will be shown to pass through the cycle of
avant garde, hype and timeless styles, allowing socialism to fit
into the 50s-60s-punk-80s series. This recycling will not address
the great possibilities anticipated by the socialist.
The third option is that of storing and managing socialism as a
potential. Finally the medium is at hand with which socialism can
be instituted without troublesome side effects like politics,
management, environment and militarism. Socialism as a model is
motivated by the realization of total free time. The Soviet
states got quite a distance with this. The workers' paradise knew
many opportunities for getting away: you went to work to have
breakfast in the people's kitchen, and then after the coffee to
find some friends to have a beer with and catch a movie.
Existence was of a relaxed idleness in which the dialectic of
production and consumption had been transcended. The socialist
work ethic can be understood as an early form of VR. In the data
environment too, there is nothing to do, and the aura of goods is
missing. Pressure to perform can be easily got round (by acting
like you're working). Socialism as a VR environment is an atopia
where one may act or watch without consequence. For the
socialist, VR is not an archive or museum, but a parking lot for
an ideal society in a period when the New World Order is imposing
the same pressure to work on the whole world population. The
socialist understands that you mustn't fight this monopoly, but
wait it out. He does not wait on the îVerelendungï and the
subsequent class consciousness; he just keeps tinkering with his
virtual model, as he used to keep writing on his text galaxy.
Until the moment when VR implodes in reality. Then the socialist
will be ready.