Linguistic Weapons: An Essay on K-House 

Words By Marina Otero Verzier

Formulas, spreadsheets, codes. The abstract language of the data management business moves between the efficient and the sublime. It is a language intended for machines – or for those working bodies that are rendered as such. However, we are not talking here about factory labourers, but of the cognitive worker in late twenty first-century capitalism.

With his latest work K-House (2021), James Clarkson takes us to the otherwise empty architecture of the office space. A large desk, shelves, and boxes placed on an unassuming grey carpet appear as relics of the architecture whose end has been foretold by automation tales and, more recently, by the events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. In this office space there are no chairs. No screens. No workers.

Over the last few years, James Clarkson has contributed his labour to a business supply company. While navigating between seemingly banal and repetitive tasks assigned to his job role, the initial bewilderment gives space to melancholy. Melancholy to boredom. And boredom to the realisation of the bodily and political implications of the abstract labour to which he was subjected. In considering the extent and meaning of his contribution to a system that tends to negate the agency of workers, Clarkson resorted to his artistic practice. From that position, he was able to look beyond tasks and codes and into the ideological nature of the visual language through which he was communicating.

Clarkson, as a data management worker, was bound to the techno- social framework of contemporary subjectivation, semiocapitalism, as formulated by philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. As Berardi points out;

Social labour is the endless recombination of myriad fragments producing, elaborating, distributing, and decoding signs and informational units of all kinds. Every semiotic segment produced by the information worker must meet and match innumerable other semiotic segments in order to form the combinatory frame of the info-commodity, semiocapital.1

According to Berardi, semiocapital submits cognitive worker’s neuro- psychic and emotional energies to the stress of mechanistic speed, the assembly line of networked production now controlled by and moving at the pace of algorithms, AI and management software.

This ever-growing flow of stimuli to which cognitive workers are relentlessly exposed, without being barely able to deal with, have been, in Clarkson’s work, disarticulated, recombined and re-semiotisatised into an artistic and poetic language. The arrows, acronyms, numeric codes that guided his shifts, took in the studio a different scale and materiality. Now, these signs and codes are installed as sculptural pieces in the gallery space, pointing to the unknown immediate future of the labour force. Not only has Clarkson denaturalised these immaterial systems by making them physical and spatial, he has also made visible how these supposedly knowledge-carrying codes are, in fact, information concealers. Behind their radical logic and unquestioned automated functionality lies no meaning after all.

As I have written previously elsewhere, the abstract language of manage- ment carries and imposes a visual order on the functioning of society.2 Whereas logistical, bureaucratic and data infrastructures are often discussed in terms of invisibility and seamlessness, they actually rely on aesthetics to convey the idea that it is possible to run the world, and capital, smoothly.

Aesthetics are an essential component to enable command over space and time, over territory and resources without friction. It is this – and not efficiency – that is visual language’s great achievement: a ubiquitous visual and conceptual order that stimulates humanity’s Modernist dreams. A seamless façade that forecloses other possible alternatives and leaves no other agency than to keep on improving the system; the endless cycle of a new technology, a new software update, a new algorithm that will convey the current aspirations of the time. Once a part of our imagination, this language and its visual order cancel out any other understanding of the world.

In the hands of Clarkson, the technical, rational language of flows is rendered aleatory and charged with a meaning excess. In K-House cut out coloured metal arrows appear twisted, bent, superimposed, intertwined. These graphical signs create diagrams of unknown and probably not yet existing processes. When presented outside of the screen and Excel spreadsheets, they are now empty signifiers. Yet this temporary emptiness is perhaps what allows for the amplification of the otherwise saturated human’s attention span. Outside of the rhythm of semiocapitalism, these signs create a surplus of time, as their initial suspension of meaning is soon followed by a process of poetic (re)signification.

Clarkson’s arrows, numbers and codes surpass their assumed catego- ries under the universal language of economy. The result is an artistic language that aligns, yet again, with Berardi, in an understanding of poetry as a linguistic political weapon. Language, through poetry, cannot be reduced to information and treated like currency, as it exceeds the field of signification.3 Instead of striving for generalisation, standardisation and homogeneity, the markers of logistical, data management and bureaucratic language are here able to accommo- date contingent articulations and forms of difference.

No, in K-House there are no chairs or screens. We are not entering this office space in our role as receiving, isolated, terminals. We are, instead, invited to mingle as social and physical bodies. Invited to question this abstract, long-standing model for organising social relations and politics under the rules of the productive and functional. While we do so, however, we also know there are countless other receiving terminals, precarious underpaid workers and intelligent machines processing information flows linked to chains of value production. Some of them are seated in data management offices, and others are in the ateliers labouring under the global art market.

Citations

1 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘Cognitarian Subjectivation’, e-flux Journal #20, November 2010

2 Marina Otero Verzier, ‘Logistics’, AA Files, no.76, Architectural Association, 2019, pp.119–121.

3 See Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On

Poetry and Finance, Intervention Series, vol.14, Semiotext(e), 2012 and Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Intervention Series, vol.26, Semiotext(e), 2019.