http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/shizzos.txt HC Dany, 9/10.95 SHIZOS STILL WANNA HAVE FUN After descriptions of cyberspace, which sound like heaven or the wild west, I would like to introduce you to the virtual world as a hospital. Before this little travell trough the phantasies of flying doctors turns to it`s central issue, multiple systems, I will take a little visit at the tradition of binary constructions. The last years it seemed to be more hip calling them 0 / 1. The hegemonial western society loves to operate since centuries on dualisms like - femine / maskuline, sense / nonsense, wrong / right, nature / technique to have and to be poor - they are practical like choclate bars. They taste good, but it could taste much better. How questionable two-pole solutions are you can explore, if you take a look at psychological fabrications like sado-masochism. A construktion of the 19.century psychatrist Krafft-Ebbing, who sandwiched names and writings of the two autors and developed a new catigory of the perverse, which Sigmund Freud brought to it`s full blossom. The clinic Krafft-Ebbing brought the switchable and stand- alone-funktioning sexual desires in a mechanical interdepence - in which his sciencetific phantasies create a masochist who needs a sadistic counterpoint. In Sacher-Masochs writings the hero is more some one who educates the none-sadistic women in fur to torment him. Also the libertin in de Sades- Cosm is less interested in voluntary slaves. The S hypen M bond could be read as an creation of 19.centuries clinic. There are hundreds of examples, in which the sciencetific text reproduces the fairytale of the binary to promote it`s industrial strategies. Now a days favorit toy to explain bipolarity is the computer. In uncounted theories the O hyphen 1 are brought on stage to show a little dance, which mostly says nothing. It seems to be an academic way to suround the after effects. So I prefer today a vist on the surface, were we meet some doctors again. A while ago I visited a so called audio- cyber-space, financed by the most succesful german porn company and constructed by a bunch of ex-Hackers. This virtual >Audioland< tries to give it`s users the chance finding new friends, partners or to quote a contributor of the projekt, "it`s the cheapest phone-sex in town." I think it`s still quiet expensive. You ring into >Audioland< with an ordanary phone, which you switch from pulse to touch tone when you are inside. Now you should be on board of a space- shoutle in which the other users name themselves as personalities out of the spacesoap Enterprise. I still called myself Dany, which means in german something like - there not. My Phone is now changed into a joy stick, easy to handle. While pressing the numbers 5 - 2 - 5 - 2 - 5 - 2 - 5 - 4 - 5 - 2 my voice walks trough the Spark- Computers. An voice out of the off tells me: "welcome you are in the hospital of starbase, you sit on the OP, if you press 3 you can lay down. You are allone in the room." When I press the 4, I can talk. So I`d asked the room: "where is the doctor and it`s nurses?" The Room didn`t answer. He must be quiet stupid, such an easy question. So my remote controlled voice continued it`s travell to the spacebar. A real bore, but remote controlled. When I grow up as a tv-watcher I was highly fascinated by secret- service- personalities on the screen. Especially the french TV-gangster >Phantomas< and the english dandy James Bond. Well today most people watch less excited TV and also prefer to believe mysteries an desires of the multiple personality are hidden in world of processed data. My interest in this talk will be how infected doctors, who are in trouble with difference of ataris an atheries could be pushed to party. It`s a theme which magazines for woman, especialy >Cosmopolitan<, circle around since a while. May be not with the wish bringing the contradictions of the issue to it`s implosion. But will can be extremely counterproductive. So may be the weak-will of >Cosmopolitan< is much more effektiv. In late postfordism it seems to so usual producing split- identies, that multiple popstars like madonna totally lost there seduction. What should we projekt on a star, who started to be like us or we like her. The german pop-critik Kerstin Grether analysed Madonna as a aesthetic role modell for nowadays organisation of work - split- job, job-sharing, flexible identites etc. so on one hand we can say identy- hoping is a pleasure in sparetime, on the other side the administration of unemployment and misery. 18 ours a day we work out in plenty different roles, which sometimes nearly couldn`t be seperated any more into spartime or work. In House-music for example the most shouted word by the dj is "work it", when he means dance. Or if you buy a computer and educate yourself at night, it`s free service for the slave-trade. No doubt, slavery could be fun, but in postfordism, we can definitly be shure that out dominator doesn`t loves us. But in case of a doubt, we can pray for sleep with psychotechnics like multimind. To be many works as a pride, to be more than one death and produceses more workpower and simulation of privacy out of one mouth to feed. The net-hype or the hype of social-custody can also be read as the industrialistion of the question, could we be an unique ego or not. To the answer the question (how much we can stretch or split it), we have to believe the hye as usual. Madonna or the media theorist Donna Haraway developed their multiple modells from black culture, where multiple or hybrid Identies were used to subvert ascriptions of the white oppressor. Madonnas strategies got irrelevant by the neverending analysis of her publishing fans. The monsters, crossbreeds and cyborgs in writings of Donna Haraway, whom are also used a lot by the vulgar rezeption and handling of the postmodern identity resist this occupation much better. The Cyborg Haraway describes is partly intigrated into the techno- logical circuits of the formating info-capitalism. The feminine Cyborg is not to classify in a dual gender-descriptions of male written biology. The Cyborgs half intigrated state allows her to crawl deeper into the system, to vitalize the contradictions from inside. Donna Haraway starts her thoughts for "a manifesto for cyborgs" from the novells by a new generation of science fiction autors. Woman like Olivia Buttler or the afro-american writer Samuel Delany invade this white-male occupied genere in the early seventies to turn it`s technophobe issues arround and construct utopian strategies. There Novells and Haraways manifesto from the mid eighties still mirror nowadays working conditions. Haraway put`s special attention on the computer-industry in south- east asia, where the integration of woman and machine starts at kindergarten, to feed the insatiable hunger on hardware in the first world. This industrialized child abuse at millions of asian girls, boys are on less interest for the production, marks for Haraway a new come to a head in the history of late capitalism. The western user of the faster and faster taiwan spring-boards don`t seem to feel any guilt on this, but also use them to leave there idea of being an identity. For that companies like >Lucas-Film< constructed in the mid-eighties playgards like the cyberworld >Habitat<, were the mostly white and male users could change there name, gender or somethingelse. >Habitat< got a big success and hundreds of copies followed. Today there are thousands of this funhouses crowded by third- class-drag-queens dressed in cyber. The most popular ones are still the mostly selfdesigned >Multi User Dungeons< in the >Internet<. In a another way the issue of anonimity got really important in the last months. A good chance to be a real no-name in the net is the >Anonymus Remailer<. An Internet-Funktion, which allows the User to be nonindentifiable. What should be definitly a human right in times, were it`s necessary to be paranoid for understanding politics. But also this right is illegal. At the moment especially the sect >Scientology< tries to criminalize this possibility. The sect put childrens-porn as data on a well known >Anonymus remailer< in Finnland and also reported the >XS4ALL<-Provider in the Netherlands, because of an >Anonymous remailer< to the police. But also police, justice and secret services are highly interested to keep identity catchable in the net. Companies are mostly interested in credit-card- identities, which they can cash for the virtual travelling expenses. So the legal for phantoms seems to be with narrow bounds. So forced multiple identities are a way to think about `no-borders'. In the medical slang multiple identity names a traumatic psychosis, which results out of child abuse. The raped child splits itself into further identities to compensate the event. The psychosis is also named >multiple personality disorder<. For a long time MP was not known and diagnozed as shizophrenia. Some thesis follow the history of MP up into the middle-age. 1980 MP got an entry into the medicine-bible >Diagnostic Statistical Manual<. In 1994 MP got submitted under the title >disosiative identity disorder<. The renaming fall together with a rapid increase of patients in a clinical sense. Official statistiks talk about 300 tousand US-victims on the disease. Some `experts, like the psychologist Richard Loewenstein, speculate that 3 percent of the US-population are concerned, what means 7 million people. A result of the late academical aceptance was, that the psychosis were at first investigated in pop-kontext, journalism and film. A legend is the book `Sybil', which the journalist Flora Schreiber wrote in 1976. My personal favorit is the books - >Minds of Billy Milligan<, which was written in 1980 by the science fiction autor Daniel Keyes. The biographie of milligans nightmare trough justice and hospital isn`t typical for MP, because there are only two percent male patients. This year the first german non-fiction book appeared. To me the book seems quiet paranoid, but this should not lower the quality. I love consparicy theories, but still think it`s a question, who conspires against whom. The autor Michaela Huber is a well versed psychologist specialized on the treatment of traumatized woman. Huber points out germano- fascist-satanic-cult- clubs as one of the main sources from >multiple personality disorder<. This satanic-cult-clubs are told as networked with the mafia, drug-buiss, old nazis and as you could imagine, the CIA. This gold old wonderboys exported technics of brainwashing from german concentration camps into the US and developed out of them a neurolinguistic programm to remote multiple personalities. Something like a global village of satanic-clubbing enlarged by multiple subdirectories. The modified brainwash implantates reactions on signs like touch-tone- combinations, words, sound and pictures. You can also call it multi- media. For example a satanic puts a touch-tone-message on the answering machine of a brainwashed and the multiple does it`s job. So in Mrs Hubers World the psychologist becomes something like a de- programmer. In difference to the media-ecologist Huber, Donna Haraway would recomend such illegal networks in a way. Hubers quasi sciencetific phantasma remembers me to the 20 year old Don Siegel-Film >Telphone<, in which The KGB placed hypnotized agents in the US. I love the scene in which the KGB sergant explains the main- actor Charles Bronson: "the best agent is an agent, who does not know, that he is one." A stalinistic deserter starts to let the human time- fuser detonate, for that he has to ring them up and speak a russian poem into the phone, which let the sublimnal funktion start. In the end Bronson strangulates the derserter in a public-phone-cell. Well, may be Mrs Huber recyceled a holywood-film from the times of cold war. The multiple personality Billy Milligan asks the nurse in his doctor- novell. Do you really believe, that all this computers are connected? How often connections do not exist is the happy knowledge of every succesful credit- card-swindler. Before I finish, a short chronic of Bills observation between clinic and prison. In october 1977 Billy got arrested by the police. He is under suspekt that he raped three woman at the campus of ohio state university. Billy don`t know anything about it and could not feel guilty. He`s just astonished and shocked about what the policemen told him. At the 4th of november Billy tries to commit suicide by running against the walls of the cell. In january a doctor locates the typical wrong diagnosis scizophrenia. At the 28th of january, Billy sleeps, an identity who names himself David is on Billies Spot, while a psychologist starts to crack Billies secret. Even though David is affraid getting spot- prohibition, he chats: we are 8 nearly 9. David introduces himself as the servant of pain. Because of the headegg from running against the cell- wall, he the one, whos on the spot now. The spot is something like a homestage of the awareness, which is allways occupied by one of the identities. The other actors sleep in the beds behind the stage and perceive a this as time-holes. The one who`son the spot nearly keeps the conciosness until the moment he`s exchanged. I think we can say, the description of the spot shows a lot of analogies to an open window of a microsoft-programme. In the end of the seventies, when billies-story came into the bookshhops, >Microsoft< worked on a copied up-date of the apple-programm >Visicalc>. Bill Gates, the chief of microsoft said about >Visi-Calc<, "I programm that with three or four idiots in >Basic<". And he did the misery >MS-Dos< which mutates over the years to now a days net-access >Windows95<. It`s imaginable that Billy was one of this idiots and Bills success the blow up of a psychosis. As work in progress the IBM-financed projekt was named >Electronic Paper<. Later the programm was called >Multiplan<. Bills different identies / roles are equiped with special abilities. Tommy is an electronic expert, Arthur has biological and medical knowledge, Allen plays piano and drums, Dany paints nice still-lives etc etc. The funktions work hyrachial structured like >X-tree> or >DOS<. The first feminine Billy-identity that appears in the observation of Billy is Adlana. In closet she writes poems and gives herself the guilt for the clinical destiny of the boys. Daniel Keyes marks that Adlana is a lesbian and you might imagine the end of the story. Adlana used the male body of Billie to seduce the woman, who another Billy identity rapes afterwards. The totally network obsessed Dr. George suggested to install communication- lines between the different identies in Billies body. With small videoclips Allen, David, Adlana and the others shall be introduced to each other to fuse them afterwards into one Mindpiece. Some of Billies identies are lucky that someone wants to bring them on screen. The idea of the doctors is also to giving they Billies explanations for the timeholes they allways go trough. Windows has this nice funktion, which seems to be very similiar. The icon is a camera. With the recorder you can make shure that you`ve really worked at the electronic paper. In the third step Dr. George wants to inform Billy about the non-identifikatable voices and un-known names he sometimes notices in his body. George calls this appearing voices cross-pass-connections, which we know from the phone. In billies into a telephone-net mutated body it comes to cross- pass-connections when the hierachies of the identities get`s confused. Thats in a way of technical description the same like in the phone-net, were it`s possible to push this mechanism with special combinations out of a touch-tone- dialer or a Dat-recorder to get free long distance calls or take a audio-peep in other phone-chats. Dr George compiles the result of the video-surveilance. The only hope of the holistic-psychic, Dr George, is to create a all-billy or fixed I to terminate the multiple Hybrid of an I-collection. Billy at first loves the idea, cause it remembers him to his favorit sherbet Powder - >Cool Aid<. But one of the hidden identities, a non wished android destroys the process. In the end nothing is known about a fusion of the billies, may be, because Daniel Keyes planned a second part. But he just wrote scifi- novells. To me one of the most interessting issues is that communcation technique doesn`t work. The Hype of it startet shortly after the collapse of the socialist experiment in the eastblock - as a poor-substitute for an utopie of community we`ll get now eletronic communication. I prefer to enjoy and force the missunderstandings, failures and break downs, which still represent the hope for a better future. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de