ERRARE HUMANUM EST: The pursuit of error

Dear Stephen Wright,

I read your introduction to Error(ism) and
I was struck strange enough by this one line:

"...and then engaging a conversation in no particular direction with everyone and all error involved...."

In no praticular direction?
What do you actually mean by this?
Wouldn't you run into the risk of making unforgivable "errors" if you start to wonder around with/in no particular direction?

Waiting for you reply,

Best regards,

FA Vedett

The need for an international Errorist Movement

Hello! Here some lines by Etcetera… from Argentina.

We are excited by the debate that Stephen brings to the table and the commentaries by Mat and FA Vedett. We see this Forum as a possible way to continue developing and researching around the “Errorism”.

This issue is one of the concerns of our actions/experiences of our artistic/political life because since some years ago we are involved in the errorism and the variables of interpretation, actions and debates around the error.

Today the errors are present more than ever in all aspects of life.

Some examples about how the “error” is use to justified some non-error plans:

The case of Charles de Menezes in 2005 when he was shot in the head seven times at close range by Metropolitan Police officers who misidentified him as a suicide bomber about to explode a device on the London Underground. Within hours police discovered that he was not involved in any terrorist act, but was actually an innocent victim. They justified that act as an “error”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menezes

Or recently, the “error” was accepted one time more:

The idea of a "war on terror" is a "mistake", putting too much emphasis on military force,
Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said. Thursday, 15 January 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7829946.stm

…and not only about the logic of Terror/Error , in terms of Contemporary Economy

IMF, World Bank Warn Global Cooperation Could Falter
Saturday, 03 October 2009
http://www.independent-bangladesh.com/2009100211377/business/imf-world-b...

"There will be a natural tendency to return to business as usual, and it will become harder to convince countries to cooperate in order to address many of the problems that led to this crisis, that put millions of livelihoods of people at risk."

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, speaking as top financial officials from across the globe arrived in Istanbul for semiannual IMF and World Bank meetings, also used the word "complacency" in describing the risk of policy errors. He said governments might be tempted too early to unwind expensive rescue measures for their economies, such as fiscal stimulus programmes and injections of huge amounts of money into their banking systems.

"My worry is governments say, 'That's it, we're out of the crisis, it's time to go back to normal' -- that would be the real error and it's one of the risks we must be sure to ward off."

And the health:

“Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=afrdATVXPEAk

For that: NOT EVERY ERROR IS ERRORIST

“Errorist Error” is the “error” that interlaces the error into the same errorist in the “game of errors”. The Errorists are “conscious about the unconsciousness of erring” and act, live from that point on.

Extracts of the declaration of 2005:

1. We are all Errorists.

2. The basis of Errorist action is Error.

3. Errorism is a mistaken philosophical position.
Ritual of negation. Disorganized organization.

4. Errorism’s field of action includes all practices tending toward the LIBERATION of human beings and of language.

5. Failure as perfection, error as triumph.

7. Errorism: It Isn’t, and it Is. It gets nearer, it slips away. Self-creates and self-destroys.
Lives up to its old and new forms.
(sometimes without explanations, and who knows, maybe it’s totally banal).

For an International Errorist movement

Historically, there have been numerous instances of movements that later, under the yoke of postmodern thought, would be reduced to tendencies. The historical movements have almost become myths. This strategy, woven from academic thought, is meant to frustrate any chance of taking over or rethinking the sense of the collective in philosophy and art , and uniting the same context with each and every juncture.

Despite the distance between generations, we were profoundly touched by the idea of being part of the engine for change not only in culture and language, but also in society as a whole.
We found that the mistakes acted as lubricant for the idea of a movement that proposed changing life.

Is time to find the groups and individual peoples that would try to be part of a movement of errors. Since we started with our “disorganization” we had to fight on two fronts: against the widespread feeling that nothing could be changed and against the notion that this was the only possible economic and social model. The past years the idea of globalization was expanding, and it donned a cloak of jokes and ironies when confronted with any proposed politicized cultural movement. The “end of history” and the “death of ideology” brought on a widespread skepticism that was cleverly packaged in mega cultural events, large concerts, festivals, exhibitions.

The idea of cultural consumption culture as a basic value of the business field, “sponsorship” was apparently the only possible factor in the field of art and culture. So the field of culture came to occupy the place of the sensible and to produce human subjectivity. It was transformed into the “washing machine" of transnational capital.

But now we are entering a new historic moment where once again the relationship of art and society will turn. It seems that each time this turn takes the elements of cultural representation that are presented by the lived socioeconomic model. The brand functions aesthetically as a good guide to the paths of subjective social life at all times and places. Clashes of trends and movements, however contradictory, are indispensable to the survival of a renewal in the arts and thought. They are the raw material of all intellectual production.

The search for new systems of representation and the formation of movements are challenges for any society that needs to remake its values. Participation in this process is an essential gesture for the times through which we are living. An experience of social and spiritual renewal, in which the bonds of the social will be reclaimed, awaits us in the midst of the contemporary life’s endless contradictions. We will take part in the construction of this movement through trial and error. We will revive the “isms” taking these mistakes as something positive for our future as a society. We will install them subtly criticized in everyday language, turning terms into actions and actions into situations. By expanding these errors, we will make a contribution and make the movement we are building together more dynamic.

With the “Errorism” as a keyword , now is necessary go more and more deep , for that reason the First International Congress of Error and Errorism will be an important moment to meet the comrades around the globe , to write a collective declaration and think about the upcoming actions. For this we call to all who feel represent to be involve in the next error together.
At the moment in Latin America (in our case, Argentina) the errorism is essential and we would like to make a big encounter with other errorists.

The times of the perfection are over!
Is time to recover the real sense of the error.

In the next post we will invite other errorists to the debate and the support of the movement.

Finally we invite to see this action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1nYWjXrGWM

Urban Errorist Cartography

carried out by the people and collectives supporting errorism in Argentina, took place in Buenos Aires, there is the only urban zone in the world where (the streets) Palestine and Israel intersect on a map.

Etcetera...

The sentence that better captures the methodology of Marxian philosophy, is the well know eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
This sentence may be understood in two different ways: the philosopher must understand the world, interpret it, because this is the only way to change. But also: the philosopher must take part in the process of changing the world because this is the only to really understand it.
Let’s hypothesize that our understanding leads us to the conclusion that to change the world is impossible, because of its complexity and of the irreversibility of the prevailing trends. In this case the error would be the only way to act.

In July 2009 we decided to end the Rekombinant project, started in 2000.
The project Rekombinant, a weblog connecting almost two thousands persons all over Europe – large part of them Italian researchers working abroad – was based on the idea that the actual process of intellectual labor may become an autonomous process of self organization of knowledge, technology and social production.
At the end of the XX century the digitalization of global production materialized the Marxian concept of general intellect.
Assuming that social emancipation and autonomy of knowledge and technology tend to coincide in the sphere of the general intellect, Rekombinant was intended to give the cognitive labor a platform for sharing social consciousness and techno-scientific knowledge.

But the history of the zero decade began with a dark reversal: identitarian fanaticism and economic dogmatism took the lead in the West and elsewhere. The shattering of the general intellect was the prevailing trend of the past decade: war, militarization of knowledge, precarization of labor, and fragmentation of the cognitive process.
Industrial labor has been under attack during the last thirty years. The effects of this attack are now crystal clear: a huge increase in productivity, and a parallel decrease in the average salary worldwide. The total amount of necessary labor time is falling, and is destined to fall more and more, as a consequence of two factors: the application of intelligent technology and the flexible organization of labor subsuming every cell of social life in a flow of time at disposal of capital. The working hours per person are not decreasing, but increasing, and this is generating unemployment, underemployment and marginalization. The mother of all the bubbles, the labor bubble is growing and growing.
The only way to counteract this tendency would be a cut in working hours per person. But the workers movement did not understand the crucial importance of reducing the individual amount of working time. So the work bubble has grown and grown, and the paradox of jobless expansion has become the norm.

Economic globalization and cultural identitarianism, in their contradictory convergence, have destroyed the consciousness of the common interest of workers, while the precarization of cognitive labor and the depletion of the cognitive workers have weakened the possibility of worker’s autonomy. Today at the beginning of the second decade, we cannot predict any process of recomposition of social labor, and we cannot predict any process of self organization of the cognitariat. Instead we are facing a simultaneous increase in unemployment and in exploitation, impoverishment of daily life of the population, collapse of the social infrastructures, identitarian violence, and a general decay of the modern social civilization. Global capitalism has divorced from Modernity, and in the span of three decades the legacy of Humanism, Democracy and Social Welfare has been squandered. Now de-civilization is on its way, and no conscious collective resistance is in sight.

So, what is the point of radical thought, what’s the point of critique engagement, if no conscious collective subjectivation is possible, and no way is left for hijacking the criminal train of capitalism?
What possibility is supporting hope and dissidence and revolt?
The only possibility is in the limits of our knowledge and understanding.
Tertulliano said “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd) in order to establish his faith in God. I’m not speaking of faith, here. I’m rather speaking of the contrary, the obstinate refusal of believing in the reality of our daily experience.
The only possibility of reinventing a future is based on the assumption that we are in error.
To err means exactly this: to wander in the infinite sphere of the excess of possibilities that our present stance makes invisible. To roam in the infinite sphere of excess that is irreducible to knowledge and predictability.

My knowledge and my understanding show no room for solidarity in the coming time, given the present conditions techno-totalitarianism. But the catastrophe is exactly (etymology: kata and strophein) the point where a new landscape is going to be revealed.
I do not see that landscape because my knowledge and my understanding are limited, and the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
My knowledge and understanding are missing the event, the singularity.
So I must act “as if”. As if the forces of labor and knowledge may overcome the forces of greed and of proprietary obsession. As if the cognitive workers may overcome the fractalization of their life and intelligence, and give birth to a process of self-organization of collective knowledge. I must resist simply because I cannot know what is happening after the future, and I must preserve the consciousness and sensibility of social solidarity, of human empathy, of gratuitous activity, of freedom, equality and fraternity. Just in case, right?
Just because we don’t know what is going to happening next, in the empty space that comes after the future of modernity. I must resist because this is the only way to be in peace with my self. In the name of self-love, we must resist. And self-love is the basic ethic rule that an anarchist prizes.

The present ignorance has to be seen as a space of possibility. Error is action in this space of ignorance. We have to start from the error of the general intellect.
The force of the collective intelligence is boundless. Theoretically. But it lacks any consciousness of itself. Intelligence without self-consciousness.
I am talking of the self-consciousness of the general intellect, millions and millions of people worldwide producing the info-flow that makes the planet go round.
Creating a form of self-consciousness of the general intellect is the political task of the future. And it is not only political, but philosophical, epistemological, and in the end therapeutic.
Why the cognitarians are weak, and disunited, and unable to assert their right as laborers, and their knowledge as researchers? Because they live in a dimidiated form, because their brain is detached from their body, because their communication is less and less communicating, more and more freezing sensitive life.
The new space of activism is here, in the connection of poetry and therapy and paradigmatic creation. The error is the gate to this space.
Poetry and therapy (thera-poetry) will be the forces leading to the creation of a cognitarian self-consciousness: not a political party, no organization of interests, but the reactivation of the cognitarian sensibility.
The error of the general intellect is the starting point, after the future.

Deploying Gardening as a metaphor with which to arrive at a proposal for principles for the management of systems of systems. please hear 3 fresh drafts on

http://www.myspace.com/TheErrorists

I would appreciate comments to
the.errorists@googlemail.com

lots of love,

Hilary

Faith in Infrastructure Hilary Koob-Sassen
An Errorist Manifesto

Presented at the Serpentine Gallery
London, October 18, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am an Errorist.
I announce my error. In exchange I ask for liberty- to practice being in time.
Being-in-time-terror has a suitably slow-rolling and tepid name:
Global Warming, Finance Crisis.
Such tepid names are dangerous, but us Errorists, we are Syntactical Elaborationists
here to give it a new name.

Durability is traction on change.
Durability is a measure of how closely the momentum of a structure’s change navigates the actual contours of reality as they unfold- in the ever-passing-mo- A genome undergoing natural selection is like a phrase constantly trying to name reality more accurately. ‘Adaptation’ is the successful inclusion of experiences into that range of reality to which a lineage of creatures can respond.

With the accumulation of shit, the artificial residues of life create evolutionary feedback ¹, favoring the development of a materialism. Materialism’s creature builds structures, and then adapts to them. Eventually the creature comes to fit so perfectly to the built structure, that its success relies less upon the genetic evolution of its own body than upon the material elaboration of these built external organs.

Elaboration moves along when structures subside from direct experience to a position of foundational relevance. The aqueducts have disappeared- we have faith in subterranean pipes. Upon this faith we buy a house. Upon this faith we live in New Orleans. An evil experience is the same for the living and the built: the floods were outside of that range of reality to which the structure could respond. The levee breaks and no hidden capacity reveals itself: no preternatural burst of adrenaline allows the slipping deer to spring to a foothold, no particularly well-fashioned piece of levee exceeds its nominal strength and endures. No response. These two syntaxes- genetic and materialist- must name reality faster than it changes. Otherwise, reality deletes them.

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The Elaborative Trajectory from economies to organs is Paracultural- it advances across the lifetimes of many cultures, in the same way that evolution advances across the lifetimes of many creatures. Life builds and climbs its paracultural ladder up and out, Life seeks a divinely realistic structural solution to the constraints inherent in this scale of reality. Life seeks the exit of the cave- to pierce the scalar pellicle and deposit itself outside- naked and quivering and blind and alone- on a new landscape of possible formations.

These attempts are almost certain to fail. And yet, the five instances of success- the five instances of a culture of one scale successfully attaining the next- these are the 5 major punctuations of biological history. In the original big mineral mud puddle (between the mountains) a culture of replicating molecules arranged itself into the first virus. The rampant protein trading of a virus culture finally formalized its capital city into the first ever bacteria and today virus can’t really live outside a city. Amidst the heightened diverse exertions of a culture of bacteria- orgiastically plunging in and out of each other- the origination of single cells with organelles. After not so many millennia of refining and specializing economy in a place, a culture of single-cells managed to carve their place into a body and become the first multi-cellular organism. Each of these opened up a new terrain for life, a new scale of biological complexity.

Cultures of all scales follow a historical template to a predictable outcome. Once a foundational traction on time is established, Life scrambles to pile up an ascent to traction on scale. Life tries to leap from the pile- before the changes brought about by the pile-up conspire to bring the pile down. The further the elaborating culture structure or evolving body cantilevers-out from a foundational capacity, the more susceptible to foundational change it becomes. The power of high elaboration lies in its ability to abstract- in its capacity to attend to non-foundational things, precisely because it has placed so much faith in its foundation. For a highly elaborated culture structure there are only three responses to a collapsing faith in foundation: anticipatory reversion to rudimentary form, death in abstract splendor – or - an attempt to exit the cave and be the birth of the next scale. To hold that fruiting endpoint present to the mind. Present to the highest abstract power of culture. Present perhaps, to the arts.

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Before “Organific Economics 101” and “How to be Paracultural”, It is extremely important / for me to refresh / my errorist credential/ and for you to sharpen your criticality to an axe-murdering edge. I long for that chop, for I am in no way convinced of what I propose, tho very committed to proposing it.
For- Proposal is to culture what mutation is to creature: Often dull, rarely harmful, and every now and then it is just what we need: The fancy curved beak to suck the nectar… out of the flower…better.
So, how do we become Paracultural?
How do we take on the trajectory of life, consciously as our own?

I propose an exit from the Latin mass of biology. I propose this curvaceously updated old god Life. We need a new word game and a direct relationship with the godmaths.

We must not confuse development and origination. To say a nation develops is to imply that a highly perfected map of a final fruiting structure exists within that nation- that it merely awaits the set of experiences- a mother- which would allow it to unfurl its perfection.

In actual fact, the main work at hand is to find out what- if anything- could be astutely considered analogous to DNA- to its syntactical structure and to its meaning.
I will tell you what I think- almost definitely wrong:
No structure song is complex enough to be sung into world body, except,
that standard human system of organs. In that garden 4 billion cells sing in schizophrenic unity- a single human consciousness. That system is the only song complex enough for us each to sing it together. The translational diversity of our minds. The universal sameness of our bodies.
Maybe.
But definitely and for sure embryonic development is not evolution. It is a highly refined process-product of evolution. And again, no guide to where we stand. Furthermore, evolution is over- its time frame is so slow that it is no use to us. We are agents of extinction, but not of evolution. Far beyond all else, we are agents of elaboration. We are practicing and building a world body around ourselves. The first body of that scale. We are a scalar leap in complexity from the cell culture that built the first body. And yet, that is our closest analogy.

We must embrace the messy process of becoming, of first origination! and forget all ideas that the world is a fully evolved thing in some stage of embryonic development.
Instead let us say, “The nation state system is like a proto-organ in so far as it is a universally inclusive structure. As the organs of a body are universal to its cells.”
We must be rigorous in our science and also in our poetry.
We must be pious and poetic scientists, performing exegesis on the analogy map of the experiences of other scales of culture. We must seek to be like the five cultures that pushed their art across the threshold between the built and the alive.

Humanity stands inside a framework of its own creation. We have sung this paracultural ladder into existence. From a spore: from a way to navigate reality and endure; planting, irrigation, harvest unchanging. To a bridge: a materialism, which supports the procession of humanity forward through time and changing hegemonic formulations. And now we have come to a more open place where things shake and start to break. We put our faith in multiplication of a new kind of structure: the web, the market and the bubbles. The bubbles, which are like an unsatisfied hunger. The bubbles, which long to be cathedrals- to be proper investment vehicles. In elaborating global economies, we evoke world organs. How do we sing them into structure?

Bailing-out banks, sandbagging levees and subsidising ethanol must be characterized as “thrashing about”- an attempt to surmount an evil experience by rampantly generating small proposals- in the hopes of developing a response. We must move from pushing sugar into over-loaded liver and set out to formalize some lovely kidneys- solar seas and roiling greens. We must be Organific Economists- seeking-out new systems in the Pattern of the Plans; advancing the trajectory onward from economies into organs.
For example, the web is a global- but not universal- economy of information. It evokes a world organ of meaning: the super-nucleus of a rampant design democracy. A spherical digital google cathedral earth map mosaic- flipped outside-in. Inside, 8 billion humans' incarnations are surveying the entirety of what could be. The overlapped transparencies of all humanity’s dreams. So difference is detectable, tho majority creates a denser line. Our syntax octopus of proposals and our pattern of the plans replaces the lack of plan plan and the invisible hand. With a higher resolution name. High resolution in the sense of high informational density, and in the sense of inspiring resolve to act. That is the organ / which our unfinished web economy/ seeks to be. It is natural, but not inevitable.

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Organific Economics Equation 101 allows us to assess the GLD:
The durability of a creature or a culture—or indeed the durability of all of Life itself––the horsepower of its traction on change—the speed with which it advances into future experience—Life’s durability is a function of the efficiency of its experiential metabolism and the domain of its activity.

Life’s metabolism: Its capacity to translate an experience into a foundation for further experience. How quickly and how absorbently- to how many of its constituents. To how much of itself can Life present the opportunity to know an experience, develop a structural response, and then move that structure on down into the faith zone.
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X Times X –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Life’s Domain: The breadth and depth of matter to which and with which Life can develop a response. How realistic is Life’s picture of reality and how realistic is its materialism. Can we sculpt atoms, molecules, life forms, planets….just about. Our over-cantilevered bridge cannot support a response to the warming waters below. It cannot frame the sky as organs. It suffers an unjustified faith in infrastructure.

We must hope that we cannot design the world organs themselves- we must pray that they will be too complex. We can only build a structure to support them, and leave the sky open, for their growth-explosion. We can transform our bridge into a trellis- a Rankgitter- a growth grid. We can switch from procession through TIME to an inhabitation of the M.T.I.E. The economies of preparation for the next scale. The Multiple Transnational Infrastructure Economies. We can cease to progress, and shift to preparation for ascent.

With our ancient extracted, refined and recombined modernista materialismus we can build the structures that will support the new materialism. The materialism of a garden of organs on earth, which will be lush if we provide it good handholds for ascent. We must be furious builders of structures, which scream NO to progress as such. That are steady machinegun perfection tempered steel bridges that are forever, that Life can get to know like bones and grow around. Life seeks to mount the built trellis, to climb up and out into the cosmos. It seeks to climb the square god of culture and manifest the next round god of life.

Life seeks to bring all of itself into itself--into its experiential metabolism. Life seeks the Mental Jordan genius who is starving in a desert. Life screams for her to help it explosively reorganize the moon. The moon- that ancient image of the exit of the cave. Life longs to devastate its simplicity with rampant green complexity. To unleash its viral hordes onto the helpless dust of Venus. To suck the iron out of Saturn. If we are to be Paracultural, that is the holy war we must take up. Sneaky Life launched its attack in a province of the cosmos. Sneakily it worked a space between the atoms and the planets. And now through We- so super fancy- a frilly life fractal complexity- We must dance out on the palate of the desert, We must dance the lack of life into complexity. We must finally conquer this damned shifting stone, which threatens to chuck life off like a clinging skin, to rub it off on the sun. We must conquer the world for life and claim its next domain!

Hilary Koob-Sassen, 2008

hksassen@hotmail.com

Notes : ¹ F. John Odling-Smee, Laland, Feldman; “Niche Construction”, Princeton University Press, 2003

ABOUT ERRORIST.COM

errorist defines itself through the contradiction of the established! It wants to cultivate fallibility and make it its normative principle.

errorist believes that you are right if you are wrong: as an art project, it uses this antinomy to reproduce itself. As a political instrument, errorist scans the constitutive contradictions of social systems in order to illuminate their organizing principles via internal disruption.

Errorist operates interdisciplinary between art, technology, fashion and politics and defines itself as a workshop for political art-ivity. For errorism the word art refers to that social freespace where it is possible to develop different viewpoints about society and social processes.

www.errorist.com is the platform, in which the potential of actors can be channeled.

Are you an errorist already? Send your project ideas to:
art(at)errorist.com

Support the errorist action: qwx– show ur lingua http://www.qwx2009.org/

Found this food for thought in Istanbul, thought you might enjoy...

Errorism is a word that suggests that there is a difference between intent and effect. Well then why not just say so? There is a difference, a dynamic principle.

I'm looking to flesh out this idea on my blog: antivigilante.livejournal.com.

I'll give you something to play with:

Reality is fundamentally discrete. A video camera cannot capture itself.

Reality is fundamentally static. Actions are the result of provable active elements.

Reality is fundamentally dynamic. All actions are the result of a potential difference.

Reality is fundamentally entropic. All activity is oriented toward static elements of higher organization.

Reality is fundamentally accountable. Change in the static is bound to change in the dynamic.

Reality is fundamentally balanced. Change preserves identity.

Reality is fundamentally fractal. It is possible to nearly infinitely disect without losing identity.

All error is in calling for equality instead of humility. Or rather treating various options as equal or irrelevant.

Error is a matter of omission at one step or another. In the case of Bangladeshees being flooded that means the actors have omitted reality itself and are oblivious. The behaviour of the Indian authorities is precisely aimless institutionalism.

I should have something later today on this.

STEPHEN..We need you for 30anniv. FUSION reunion.
Dave tgfond@yahoo.ca