Toxic Archive: On Green Diamond
Xingyun Wang March 11, 2021 Word count:1288
Picture 1. Green Diamond (2020) Courtesy Rachele Maistrello
Unlike most colored diamonds which are affected by chemical impurities or defects in the structure, green diamonds acquire their hue from radiation exposure. This formation allows them to become an intriguing container for absorbing great intensity. Green Diamond is not simply a symbol of health, abundance and determination in the jewelry market. Its name and image have a memetic nature in cultural production, functioning in various technology/environment-related industries.
Green Diamond1 (2020) by Rachele Maistrello is an online fictional archive project about an eponymous company(GD company) that allegedly existed in Beijing between
1
Rachele Maistrello, “Green Diamond,” green diamond, March 2020, https://greendiamond-
beijing.com/1B.
1995 and 1999. The company specialized in sensor development made by green diamond (GD sensors), aiming to vitalize human body sensations and feelings related to nature through various body gestures. By portraying two key employees: the gesture developer Gao Yue, and the GD sensor polisher Li Jian Ping, Rachele Maistrello reconstructed the history and documented/made a fictional archive of the company and made them available online since 2020.
Like any other corporation based in Beijing in the mid-1990s, GD company used various restrictions and regulations to discipline the body activities of employees around factory- filming and talking is prohibited during the daily work. However, apart from this neo-Fordism system that forms the atomization environment, what makes the company a hybrid space is the mechanism of psychopower exercised on the operation of GD sensors. With the emergence of psychotechnologies in cultural capitalism, the term ‘psychopower’ 2 was first suggested by Bernard Stiegler, who saw it as the domination of people’s minds and soul by provoking consumer’s desire for the object that captures their attention in order to derive profit. Stiegler argued that the psychopower ‘results in an addictogenic society imposed through a drive-based capitalism’ 3 ， unavoidably leading to the dis-individuation of humanity and the destruction of the libidinal economy. 2
Bernard Stiegler, “Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat,” Ars
Industrialis, accessed March 11, 2021, http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2924. 3
Bernard Stiegler, “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal Dis-
Economy,” New Formations 72, no. 72 (2011): p. 159.
Picture 2. Green Diamond (2020) Courtesy Rachele Maistrello
In the case of Green Diamond, the mechanism of psychopower dwells in two circuits: 1) through the marketing of Green Diamond company, 2) through the use of GD sensor. The company excelled at revealing the hidden motivations of the public. By using the image of Green Diamond as a logo and the bizarre-looking poster, as well as the ‘Freshness at 4,5 A.M’ campaign, they intensively exploit the mnemotechnical system, and build a strong brand image to inspire fantasies towards nature sensation, the pulsion for consumption.
The latter circuit leads to a more toxic circuit- the physical attachment of the attentioncaptured apparatus. ‘Through a series of human gestures combined with sensors implanted in precise parts of the body, the user would be able to experience sensations such as the heat of the sun on the skin or pure air on the face.’ The sensor instruction indicated that it is essentially a mnemotechnical device designed to register sensation
towards nature, in order to compensate the ‘default of organ” 4 underling in the human interiority. In other words, humans themselves lack the ability to feel the memory of ‘heat of the sun on the skin’ multiple times. Inside, it must be through a technical agent (the sensor) that constituted the technical retention or what Stiegler referred to as ‘tertiary retention’5 , in which the repeatability of a temporal object becomes possible. Thus, we can notice a trace of pharmakon – defined by Plato and Derrida, pharmakon acts as both poison and cure6. For the sensor, even if it sounds tempting enough, it might as well bring addictive side effects.
Picture 3. Green Diamond (2020) Courtesy Rachele Maistrello
4
Bernard Stiegler, “Technics and Time, 1: the Fault of Epimetheus,” in Technics and Time,
1: the Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 188. 5
Bernard Stiegler and Stephen Francis Barker, “Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and
the Question of Malaise,” in Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 4-5. 6
Bernard Stiegler, “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal DisEconomy,” New Formations 72, no. 72 (2011): p. 151.
What happened to Gao Yue is a notable example of these side effects. As a gesture developer, she was indeed fascinated by the great intensity the sensor has conveyed – ‘as if she was drawn into a different dimension'. However, it is clear that this fascinating experience quickly turns into obsession. Compared with her old acrobatic school, which facilitates her creativity to develop body gesture. The GD company trigged the toxicity of pharmakon. Since the sensor decoded her attention and affection to reinforce the intensity of sensation. The gesture, the flesh and the body are taken over by sensors. The sensor becomes a supplement to the body, a logic of prosthesis, to give her external memory support. She was consuming while producing. She transformed from manufacturing labour to manufactured labour. Little by little, her interior consciousness leans to the prosethetization of consciousness7. This is why Gao Yue suffered from cognitive disorder after overwork - she is inseparable from technics. The sentence from Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon can describe this ‘structural coupling’ process, ‘it is the machines which act upon man and make him man, as much as man who has acted upon and made the machines.’8
What happened to Gao Yue can also apply to other consumers- the real target of Green Diamond company. The only difference is that they experience a shift from consumption to production. The duration of using the implant turns to the duration of unconscious labour, in the form of producing UGC via various gestures and biometrics 7 8
Ibid, 1. SAMUEL BUTLER, “EREWHON, OR OVER THE RANGE,” in EREWHON, OR OVER THE RANGE (OUTLOOK
Verlag, 2019), p. 171.
data. In this cybernetic digital enclosure 9, the company transfers from a producer of material goods to a producer of symbols constituting a systematic obsession. In short, the company was fed on user’s addiction to GD sensors, in which the psychopower exercises.
Although Green Diamond didn’t provide more information about the abstinence reaction after people take off the sensor. We can still have a wild assumption from the paradox of The Matrix (1999). Slavoj Zizek regards Matrix as a substance that feeds on human’s jouissance. ’When (some of the) people “awaken” from their immersion in the Matrix-controlled virtual reality, this awakening is not an opening onto the wide space of the external reality, but first the horrible realisation of this enclosure.’10 This eerie phenomenon may apply to the consumers of Green Diamond company as well. When their prosthetic consciousness internalized, the fake reality staged by the sensor turns into a new reality, then what is the next step? The question is not answered by this project. But with this work, we can certainly recognize the sarcasm of MIT's Affective Computing Group (a group aiming to create an emotional attunement between users and the machine), or the Neuralink (a project focusing on developing brain-machine interfaces).
9
Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007): pp. 295-317. 10
Slavoj Žižek • 2 years ago, “The Libidinal Economy of Singularity,” The Philosophical
Salon, July 31, 2019, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-libidinal-economy-ofsingularity/.
In terms of how this work is developed, the Green Diamond shows the similarity with other archival artistic practice, such as ‘The Atlas Group (1989-2004)’by Walid Raad, ‘The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul (2013)’by Shubigi Rao, ‘Christmas Island, Naturally (2017)’ by Robert ZHAO Renhui. These archival artworks blur the distinction between found and made materials, raising layered questions about the authenticity of the individual and collective experience. The documentation, the video, the ambiguous dialogue, and the staged imagery are woven together in rhizomatic narrative forms, vibrating between improbable and plausible. However, the difference is that Green Diamond radically deconstructed the death drive of the archive, mocking the topology structure of hyper-industrial capitalism. It should be noted that the project stems from a reconstruction that relies on the partial documents of Gao Yue and Li Jian Ping after the sudden archive removal made by the Green Diamond company. By deleting the files, the factory has made its production expendable, sentencing both the whole crew and the enterprise itself to death. The empty evidence made by GD company creates a force that exerts its pressure on the surface of the evidence that can be seen. It is a passage towards what Jean-Luc Nancy regards as an inseparable and impalpable nonspace, in which the insensible sense that is sensed as such11. The quotes from Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (2020) written by rhetoric professor Jenny Rice can make us have a better understanding of these kinds of archival artworks, ‘Rather than investing in the contents themselves, we re- reroute
11
Jean-Luc
Nancy, “The Image—the Distinct,” The Ground of the Image, 2009, pp. 7-8.
our affective energies to the dwelling of what might be, what will be, what will have been.’12
Picture 4. Green Diamond (2020) Courtesy Rachele Maistrello
12
Jenny Rice, “Awful Archives Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence,” in
Awful Archives Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020), p. 124.
Bibliography Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007): 295–317. Butler, Samuel. Essay. In Erewhon, Or Over The Range, 171–71. Outlook Verlag, 2019. Maistrello, Rachele. “Green Diamond.” green diamond, March 2020. https://greendiamond-beijing.com/1B. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Image—the Distinct.” The Ground of the Image, 2009, 7–8. Rice, Jenny. Essay. In Awful Archives Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric, and Acts of Evidence, 124–24. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020. Stiegler, Bernard, and Stephen Francis Barker. Essay. In Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, 1–5. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. ———. Essay. In Technics and Time, 1: the Fault of Epimetheus, 188–88. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. “Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat.” Ars Industrialis. Accessed March 11, 2021. http://arsindustrialis.org/node/2924. ———. “Pharmacology of Desire: Drive-Based Capitalism and Libidinal DisEconomy.” New Formations 72, no. 72 (2011): 151-59 Slavoj Žižek • 2 years ago. “The Libidinal Economy of Singularity.” The Philosophical Salon, July 31, 2019. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/thelibidinal-economy-of-singularity/.