ACCESS AS COMMODITY


In The Author as Producer Walter Benjamin writes: "His [that is, the author-as-producer's] work will never be merely work on products but always, at the same time, on the means on production." Well, the Millenarianism of Benjamin's Marxism is an anachronism by now, but the problems of the adequacy of the author's work & the production means are still unsolved.
We are authors of pictorial art, but working with & in a medium which dissolves the physis of pictorial art. Without any euforic Utopianism we regard the Internet simply as a medium for communication. Its only real potential is as a space for art to avoid being objects & to be a practice instead.
The art work has to be a commodity of commerce to be distinctively an object. Is art not a commodity it cannot be fetichized, can art not be fetichized it cannot distinctively be art (in other words, it becomes a process). Even the meta-objects of action & installation art is still possible commodity objects, a residue of fetichization is still lingering in these.

But like any other information piece here the art work is not the commodity in the cyberspace of telecommunication technology. To enter cyberspace you have to buy yourself access.
This access service as commodity of commerce is merchandise as pure exchange value. Even with teletechnologies like faxing, interactive TV & CD-ROMs the service commodity remains being the book merchandice, the access to pay libraries, the telephone communication or mail, the TV programme, id est, the information transport incarnated in vehicles for exchange & use value.
But the spatiality of cyberspace is different, it is a terrain of information use value. - "A set of transformations of all sorts (in particular, techno- scientifico-economico-media) exceeds both the traditional givens of the Marxist discourse and those of the liberal discourse opposed to it. Even if we have inherited some essential resources for projecting their analysis, we must first recognize that these mutations perturb the onto-theological schemas or the philosophies of technics as such." (Jacques Derrida: Specters of Marx)

Mads Ranch Kornum, art sp@ce text editor 1995


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