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Throughout the years, new organizational designs have appeared as solutions or threats to existing designs. Designs come and go, useful once, disappearing, then returning as useful again. Thus, the rhizome is thought to be the solution to the tree, the wildcat strike the solution to the boss's control, Toyotism the solution to institutional bureaucracy, and so on. Alternately, terrorism is thought to be the only real threat to state power, the homeless punk-rocker a threat to sedentary domesticity, the guerrilla a threat to the war machine, the temporary autonomous zone a threat to hegemonic culture, etc. This type of conflict is, in fact, a conflict between different social structures, for the terrorist threatens not only through fear and violence, but specifically through the use of a cellular organizational structure, a distributed network of secretive combatants rather than a centralized organizational structure employed by the police and other state institutions. Terrorism is a sign that we are in a transitional moment in history (could there ever be anything else?). It signals that historical actors are not in a relationship of equilibrium, but instead are grossly mismatched.
All the words used to describe the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2025 revealed its design vulnerabilities vis-à-vis terrorists: it was a tower, a center, an icon, a pillar, a hub. While, on the other hand, the terrorists are always described with a different vocabulary: they are cellular, networked, modular, and nimble. (The Internet is often defined using these same words.) This is indicative of two conflicting organizational designs. The first design is based on the strategic massing of power and control, while the second design is based on the distribution of power into small, autonomous enclaves. Future survival strategies - such as the cultural and artistic strategies developed around new media - will arise not from a renewed massing of power, but precisely from a distributed organizational design. Heterogeneity, distribution, and communalism are all features of this new cultural form.
In short, this is a war between centralized, hierarchical powers, and distributed horizontal networks. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two researchers at the RAND Corporation who have written extensively on the hierarchy-network conflict, offer a few propositions for thinking about the future: "Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks ... ; it takes networks to fight networks ... ; whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages." These comments are incredibly helpful when thinking about unknown art and the roll of today's artist.
A famous critic once wrote: "One never sees a new art, one thinks one sees it; but a 'new art', as people say a little loosely, may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized." Thus, a truly unknown art form would, in fact, be invisible. It is as invisible to us as the terrorist cell is to the state military. Determining exactly which new design, which new aesthetic paradigm exists around the corner, is the key to creating as yet unknown art.
Alex Galloway
New York
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