Eliminate!
Wednesday, 01 February, 2012 - 23:22
The fear lies in the elimination of meaning. There are eliminitavists out there. They stalk the land like stilt-walkers crossing fens, hunting, herding and eradicating fauna, extirpating significance, annihilating secrets, exterminating superstitions, banishing all magic, colour and purpose.
These terrorists are bent on banishing the inner world. So, the shaking hand is hormonal - an cortisone signal that mobilises a mammal response, while the living awareness of the hurt is nothing more than a ghost. The blush is merely information in a closed system - the system that catches pheromones and peacocks into a framework of fertility messages and reproductive imperatives, whose illusory reflections appear to take the form of ardour or devotion. The ongoing flourishing of life itself, with its the menagerie of species and phyla, is no more than the medium of information - a quaternary code whose successful transmission is sufficient cause. This emptied world is not just one that has been hollowed out - it has been flattened, expressed and desiccated.
The eliminativists have it the wrong way round, though. The cybernetic manoeuvre of putting humans and machines onto the same ontological plane works both ways: just as the human becomes a servo-mechanism, so the machine becomes an aesthetic organism. The same perceptive life that constitutes the world of human meaning is at work in the mechanical operations of detection and processing, judging and adjusting. The machine world is awash with sensation, interaction and appreciation. The adrenaline feeling in the stomach and the voltage generated in a photovoltaic cell; the tingle of excitement and the charge in an electrostatic field; the whole emotional-somatic range of how our senses are stimulated, how our heartbeat increases, our hackles raise, our toes curl or our eyes water - and the racing current, the humming circuit, the scattered electrons or the negative charge.
Inner and Outer
Wednesday, 01 February, 2012 - 15:04
The quantified self is a kind of nightmare. The self is not just what can be measured, transcribed and translated onto other substrates - tables, graphs, algorithms and numbers. Surely we are more than what can be summarised about us - our movements or our galvanic skin response; our imaged neuronal activity or our observable behaviour? Even were there a method for recording every outward event, each unit of information emitted from the system, it would surely be nothing more than the shell of a life, rather than the life itself? The sloughed skin rather than the being who cast it off? 'My inner world cannot be accounted for', objects the inner voice.
What is the character of the fear that haunts the rationalisation of human beings? What is the resistance to scientific accounts of human action - the behaviourist category itself, which casts the individual as a set of instinctual responses which can be conditioned; or the cybernetic vision of the human as servo-mechanism; the sociobiological thought which see cultures as mere derivatives of hunter-gatherer origins; the neurological system which turns our autonomy into something that emerges from statistical phenomena; the cosmological view which traces every event back to an origin which plays out deterministically according to unchanging laws; or the materialist explanation of the world as the extended evolution of the behaviour of atoms and particles? In a conversation, two people speak past each other: the one is monosyllabic and reluctant, elsewhere; the other is insistent, 'listen to me, I'm trying to talk to you', unrelenting. The conversation is broken, it malfunctions, since communication is fraught and meanings are cut off. The reluctant, distracted absentee conversationalist is hurting, the injuries flood into her consciousness washing out all other intentions. The pain blushes in the solar plexus and shakes in the fingers. It stiffens in the neck. The voice of the other speaker is intermittent and confusing, it feels like an insect in the air that darts in and then away, and with each invasion it brings a sensation of being pushed and stirred, knocked back and forth. The one talking barely notices the silent one's slight shiver, or the darkened brow. The lack of response is infuriating. With each occasion that the expected acknowledging nods and murmurs do not come, a creeping sense of futility is drowned by a exploding heat below and behind each ear. The voice starts to be uncontrollable, as the mid-point of every spoken breath becomes raised and petulant. 'I am uncared for, why do you not care?' The silent response is the click of a ratchet each time it intervenes where the contact should occur, and each winding moment is a slip further down the abyss, a further strain on the line attaching the voice to the world, until the snap happens, the teeth whirr back and the voice shouts incoherently 'LISTEN TO ME'.Life balance
Tuesday, 31 January, 2012 - 22:24
Bat, Bean, Beam recently wrote about the various parking, dismantling and deaths of blogs ‑ and I thought, hmmm, have I got a dead blog? Well I have several actually, but menticulture has always been where I've gone to Write Something In Blog Format, and where, recently, months have intervened without a whisper. Anyway, in true speech act style, this very clacking of keys on the bodywork and thin‑film transistors dancing on the light canvas exactly are the decision not to let the old menticulture blog sip away just yet.
In the autumn of 2010 I set myself the task of writing something every working day, in the hope (correct as it turned out) that a little writing leads to a lot of writing. I should try to be so disciplined again, though perhaps not with such stringent constraints. Lately the not‑writing has not been a symptom of gazing at the wall vacantly wondering what to do with myself ‑ quite the opposite: a family, a baby girl, a new county and other homely busy‑keeping has kept the small hours full, while I'm increasingly finding it impossible to squeeze as much out of working life as I used to. No longer willing to work moonlight hours for an increasingly demanding university, I have little time beyond what has become a grind of teaching to pursue the different strands of personal work ‑ research projects, PhD progress, digital practice ‑ not to mention the necessity of the freelance work which complements my part‑time position at the university.
All this has lately led me to wonder whether it isn't time to rethink the academic part of my life. A few years ago I had a brief conversation with a mentor who had taken a career‑path not very dissimilar to my own, bridging a primary role as a practitioner with subsequent work as a researcher and teacher. My mind blew out slightly when he suggested I should perhaps put the teaching on hold for a while and concentrate on the other things ‑ complete your research, focus on your professional work. I had gone to him hoping to find strategies for maintaining the different components in some vertically aligned way, and failed to see how jettisoning my main source of (admittedly small) income could possibly help.
Now however, I am starting to see the attraction of this option. Part of me is utterly aghast that it has come to this. For so long I've seen teaching as the most important aspect of my work ‑ teaching as the primary function of a university system which can then harness the intelligence of its community to conduct research. To be sure, I felt it would be a sort of charlatanism to 'just' teach a practical discipline which you do not also practice: if you daren't live by the wits of your practice, why should any student expect to learn anything from you? But what at the end of the day is the value of work that you don't want to share with others, to uncover the apparent mysteries of craft and invite people to experience the pleasure that attends learning how to make things?
The pressures in the institution have long been such that to achieve this balance of personal integrity and educational efficacy you have to sacrifice many other parts of your life. When I was a kidult single bachelor hedonist I could choose to subsidise the HE institution by working 70 hours a week in term time and recuperating other parts of my life in the breaks. That option is no longer open to me, and more than a decade of working in HE has shown me how people who dedicate their lives to a project like teaching, treating it as a vocation that invites devotion and commitment, often end up feeling betrayed by their institution's tendency to undergo changes of management, policy, funding imperatives and the blunt churn of turnover. When the line‑managers in your department are replaced by new suits with new executive orders and with the new odours of the political wind in their noses, those years of effort don't seem to count for as much as you hoped.
Genes and inter-disciplinarity
Friday, 11 November, 2011 - 00:13
The 'gene' is an example of a concept which means something to everyone, but different things to different interests. To mainstream geneticists it is supposed to be the 'molecular unit of heredity'; to lay people the gene is the brute fact that makes us what we are; some sociologists argue that the gene is a social construct; meanwhile a few molecular biologists might also argue that the gene is a convenient shorthand which is otherwise inadequate for the functions we expect it to fulfil.
Each of these different domains brings different conceptions of the gene, often based on disciplinary ontologies which are incompatible, using criteria for factual legitimacy which conflict with each other. The shared use of vocabulary only serves as a mask for the competing accounts of the gene's form, provenance and function. The various morphologies of the gene as they appear in the respective disciplinary approaches often reflect those domains' practices, values and self-preserving interests.
The pursuit of the basic unit of heredity during the 20th century inflected the gene with the pervasive attitudes of the times. As part of the effort to find an explanatory mechanism for heredity as articulated by Gregor Mendel, Wilhem Johannsen's coining of the word in 1909 formed part of the search for a unitary, invariant, material, autonomous and causal 'master molecule' which directed inherited characteristics, phenotypic development and evolutionary variation, which could play the same role in biology that the atom played in physics. As more was understood about the action and dynamism of DNA encoding, the scientific emphasis moved onto 'programming', in which the metaphor of contemporary technological and cultural forms were drafted in to provide a model for the gene's function. By the end of the century, even as the first sketch of the human genome was published, the very notion of a sequence of DNA which had discoverable boundaries, independent causal properties and sufficient reach to account for inheritance, development and variation, was approaching collapse.
At the same time that scientific disciplines intimately concerned with governing the definition and analysis of the gene were gradually developing their ever evolving and nuanced conceptions of its formal properties, the dominant model of genetic determinism was leaking out of the laboratories and journals and into common public understanding. Even if the scientific establishment were to publicly pronounce on the dissolution of the gene in favour of more complex, non-linear, pan-genomic and epigenetic biological development in which a dynamic network of distributed causal processes intertwine with environmental factors to influence individual morphology and heritability, such an epistemic break would be unlikely to reverse the folk-wisdom that can be mobilised to play nature against nurture, account for idiosyncratic behaviour, or even justify dogma and prejudice, by a simple explanatory abstraction which at best appeals to fate and the hand which we are dealt, and at worst ascribes contingent and malleable factors to apparently blind and deterministic forces.
What would it look like to develop shared or non-exclusive ontologies between these competing domains? How might people from each discipline negotiate models that can include different worldviews through accommodation, rather than exclude them through competition? Evelyn Fox Keller's work both as scientist and as a historian of science is instructive. Following her experiences as a woman working within the male-dominated field of science, she contributed to the analysis of the gender-related cultural and social relations that were encoded in scientific approaches that valorised 'master molecules', 'founder cells' and other causal agents in molecular biology, and thus brought into view the way that sciences, because they are caught up in the social order, often discover 'in nature' what they have already put there. However, once her work was championed in the critical field of science and technology studies, she nevertheless maintained that the choice to be either a scientist, or a historian of science, was a false one: it is not necessary to reject all of the accomplishments and affordances of a particular discipline in order to provide a constructive critique of its blind spots or weaknesses. Fox Keller's contribution is salient precisely because she engages with her discipline both as a practitioner and as an observer and critic, rather than merely as an apostate.
The lesson here then is that the bridging between different disciplinary perspectives can't depend on critique alone but must also work by engagement. For example, the partisanship that exists between scientific communities and sociologists of science has little effect on the practice of science as such by its proponents, nor on the engagement with social scientists with empirical problems. Even in multi-disciplinary approaches, such as scientists and artists collaborating in specific research fields, the participants often work in parallel isolation, with non-overlapping methods and dissemination, remaining hermetically sealed from each other's worlds. The challenge of genuine inter-disciplinarity is to bypass 'either/or' choices, and to consider 'both/and' possibilities. How does - or how could - a folk-psychology worldview map onto a scientistic worldview; how might a phenomenological and a positivist approach accommodate each other? What are the consequences for ontology and epistemology in such cases if pursued faithfully?
Fruit and flowers
Wednesday, 03 August, 2011 - 23:37
Perry Bard is the artist behind Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, a participatory reproduction of Vertov's 1929 original. We are invited to upload video clips of our own which match or interpret, shot for shot, the sequence of the original. The remake allows us to therefore see one, two, three - and more, an infinite number of films called Man with a Movie Camera, the first, the original, placed next to the second, the shot-by-shot crowd-sourced substitute, creates a third film composed of the two engaged in a concurrent dialogue, side by side. The act of montage is no longer only a diachronic suture, stitching two fragments into a meaningful utterance, but also a synchronic relation of each fragment to its reinterpreted counterpart. But a further fragment is always implied: the one you wonder might be waiting on your phone or hard drive, the one you might go out and make now. This putative fragment is just the first of an endless number of presumptive shots you now know are hovering at the edges of possibility, stretching the polygenetic, tesselated sequences out through both dimensions of now and next. If meaning is created through articulation, that is, the joining of pieces, tokens, words, or images moving and still - the basic fact of montage - then the possible expressions of meaning generated by the intertextual adjacency of source, reproduction, reinterpretation and imaginary addition are endless. The myriad thinkable paths all occur somewhere, dispersed in the matrix. The most familiar occurrences are merely those that float in the shallows.
In On the Internet, nobody knows you're a constructivist: Perry Bard's The Man With the Movie Camera: The Global Remake, Seth Feldman examines the interplay between Vertov's original and the participatory remake, and notes that the first significant aspect is the generative promise which Vertov makes for his film, which promise Bard's project fulfills. Seth writes that his thesis is that "Vertov's writing and The Man With the Movie Camera in particular are less historical texts than they are generative forces or perhaps, more accurately, generative grammars for the pure language of cinema that Vertov envisioned." What is the generative grammar that Vertov envisioned? Vertov writes of it in his notebooks, published in 1984.
When The Man with a Movie Camera was made, we looked upon the project this way: in our Michurin garden we raise different kinds of fruit, different kinds of film; why don't we make a film on film-language, the first film without words, which does not require translation into other languages, an international film? And why, on the other hand, don't we try, using that language, to speak of the behaviour of the "living person", the actions, in various situations, of a man with a movie camera? We felt that in so doing we would kill two birds with one stone: we would raise the film-alphabet to the level of an international film-language and also show a person, an ordinary person, not just in snatches, but keep him on the screen throughout the entire film [...]
An experiment's an experiment. There are all kinds of flowers. And each new breed of flower, each newly produced fruit is the result of a series of complex experiments.
We felt that we had an obligation not just to make films for wide consumption but, from time to time, films that beget films as well. Films of this sort do not pass without leaving a trace, for one's self, or for others. They are as essential as a pledge of future victories. [...]
If, in The Man with a Movie Camera it's not the goal but the means that stand out, that is obviously because one of the film's objectives was to acquaint people with those means and not to hide them, as was usually considered mandatory in other films. If one of the film's goals was to acquaint people with the grammar of cinematic means, then to hide that grammar would have been strange.
Dziga Vertov, 1984, Kino-eye: the writings of Dziga Vertov, UCP: Berkeley, pp153-155
The film does not hold up a mirror to the world, but it generates the world. It begets, leaves traces, and pledges future victories. Cinema reveals its grammar to us in order that we may learn it. Fruit and flowers. "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth" (Genesis, 1:11)
The eye of the mannequin
Tuesday, 02 August, 2011 - 22:41
Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera is, according to the first title frame's final parenthesised subtitle, an "excerpt from a camera operator's diary". It is a re-presentation of the records of the man with his camera, an excavation of an naively created archive - authentic and unspun. The film unfolds reflexively in its very name and subtitle, its title sequence, and its opening scenes which present a cinema theatre filling with spectators, gathering to watch the moving images on the screen.
An orchestra is frozen in time, the camera cutting between individual musicians poised and waiting, in tension with their instruments. Vertov stretches the sequence in time, pausing on the horns and the fingers resting on the valves, the double-bass straightening its player through the bow, the timpani, violin and trombone holding their humans taut as they anticipate the still conductor's movement at the prompt of the rolling of the film. The elongated duration in which the inert players remain motionless, braced for the introductory notes, outlasts the sense of natural time elapsing: life is fixed fast and rigid.
The projector's shutter is shown slowly to open and to begin beaming light, whereupon the conductor brings his orchestra to life: the once motionless musicians now burst and flail over their charges. Although when released the film was accompanied by live music in theatres, and subsequent audiences have enjoyed the film with a variety of audio interpretations as its soundtrack, the film artefact itself is silent, and has an extraordinary effect when viewed without sound. In silence, the orchestra works wildly, and the projector swallows its reel of film noiselessly, before finally the cinematic vision appears: a single numeral '1' is erected into view and we begin moving through a window of a house. The eerie silence augments the distances we travel: we are watching a film-maker watching a film-show. The camera watches the audience watching what the camera has seen.
Some minutes into the film within the film, we see the eyes of a mannequin, peering from a store-window, gazing out on the world. Eyes, windows, camera. The lifeless figures in the windows and the dressed busts, the posed dummies at the sewing-machine or astride a bicycle - even a stuffed dog articulated so as to seem expectant and watchful: all look out at the world, whose alienated form reflects on the inanimate almond shaped bumps painted to look like the organs of sight in a facsimile human face. The camera sees for them: their own images, their view of the streets, the paraphernalia of commerce which surrounds them, the sleeping bodies of the otherwise absent human race.
It is a puppet show in a world of matter with a transcendent intervening cinematic machinery providing an occasionalist vision and sense. An outside force runs through the world, causing actions and events, permitting sense to be made, prompting beings into life: mediating. The world's continued existence is brought about by machinery with a roving eye.
Selfhood and blind-spots
Monday, 01 August, 2011 - 23:46
On the subject of identity, and who we should declare ourselves to be: Every time I sit down to write something I am fumbling in the dark, striving to establish where and who I am - what is my subject-position. In writing I work out where I am writing from, and who it is that is writing. No-one has the right to demand I mark out my position before I have spoken. If we all knew our assumptions and blind-spots before we opened our gobs, we would all be wasting our breath.
Giovanni Tiso at Bat Bean Beam puts it very well:
Are you gay, disabled, kinky or an anarchist? You need to find yourself a nice little community of like-minded or like-bodied people with whom to discuss your marginal concerns. For everything else, you must sign your real name and constrain your personality and opinions to suit – in other words, be the kind of person who can speak their mind without the slightest fear of repercussion or unintended consequence.
In other-other words: keep the most distasteful bits of who you are the hell out of my feed.
Giovanni Tiso, 1 August 2011, True Names, [http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/08/true-names.html]
Giovanni reminds me becoming myself is more than merely about me - a personal freedom; but in fact, becoming myself is a political act, which reverberates through the world around me. It greets, challenges, insults and comforts other people, also becoming themselves. Where would we be without the cushion of ambiguity, the ability to be reflexive enough to reassess, to shift our position?
A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between to terms. Looked at this way, a human being is not yet a self [...] Despair is not a result of imbalance, but of the relation which relates to itself. And the relaiton to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed, the relation to oneself.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Since my writing is my communicative action, it produces me, and is one of the means whereby I relate to myself - which is Kierkegaard's description of selfhood - the relating of the self to itself: hence the self is not a permanent essential thing, but something constantly achieved, in the jaws of despair.
Bora Zivkovic, 1 August 2011, Identity – what is it really? [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/2011/08/01/identity-what-is-it-really/]
Alex Hudson, 28 July 2011, Why does Google+ insist on having your real name? [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14312047]
Chester Wisniewski, 27 July 2011, Google+ misses an opportunity - Privacy is an important part of openness, [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/27/google-misses-an-opportunity-privacy-is-an-important-part-of-openness/]
Tim Carmody, 26 July 2011, Google+ Identity Crisis: What’s at Stake With Real Names and Privacy, [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/google-plus-user-names]
Dave Winer, 25 July 2011, Why Google cares if you use your real name, [http://scripting.com/stories/2011/07/25/whyGoogleCaresIfYouUseYour.html]
The Deep
Saturday, 30 July, 2011 - 21:39
The web has been described as The Shallows, a perspective whose subject position is firm-footed on the far-side of the Styx. The web is deep, The Deep. The early pioneers also mourned the loss of the low-lying fens of the embryonic web as a few inches of idiocy washed over man-made territory.
... every year in September, a large number of new university freshmen acquired access to Usenet for the first time, and took some time to acclimatise to the network's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would theoretically learn to comport themselves according to its conventions, or simply tire of using the service. September thus heralded the peak influx of disruptive newcomers to the network [...]
Since that time, the dramatic rise in the popularity of the Internet has brought a constant stream of new users. Thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet user, the regular "September" influx of new users never ended. The term was first used by Dave Fischer in a January 26, 1994, post to alt.folklore.computers:
"It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended."
Wikipedia, 16 July 2011, Eternal September, [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eternal_September&oldid=439704212]
The strata in the body of the web are veined with magnetic powers - the repulsion of opposites, maintained initially by traditional class-like divides: pioneers vs carpetbaggers, early adopters vs noobs, experts vs laymen, serious cats vs your mum.
Here's one of the secrets they don't tell you when you first whip that modem out of its plastic wrapper and fight your way through arcane commands to log on: cyberspace is full of cliques.
Wendy Grossman, March 1997, The Making of an Underclass: AOL, [http://www.nyupress.org/netwars/pages/chapter03/ch03_.html]
The early, wide incursions into the rarified air of the web were not shallow. They were glacial, carving out abysses of information as they terraformed a new geology of media. The new Stygian divide became that between the commercials and professionals (academies, corporations) and auto-didacts (the amateurs that are you and I).
Another interesting point is that the old quality distinction between "authorities" & "experts" on one side and "dedicated individuals" on the other is nowadays slowly disappearing. We could even state -paradoxically and taking account of all due exceptions- that those that study and publish their take on a given matter for money and career purposes (most of those deep web "authoritative experts" and almost all the young sycophants from minor and/or unknown universities that hover around many proprietary databases) will seldom be able to match the knowledge depth (and width) offered by those that work on a given argument out of sheer love and passion.
fravia+, 12 February 2008, How to access and exploit the shallow deep web, [http://www.searchlores.org/deepweb_searching.htm]
Foundational, dialectical mythologies arose: the search engines index the useful web; the search engines get co-opted; the PageRank™ algorithm resists gaming; the indexed web becomes mere unwashed popularity. We must maintain the separate layers at all costs.
On the internet, there is no real underground anymore. So if you wanted to create an underground for yourself, the first thing you might do is generate a sort of lexical darknet by using keyterms search engines can’t parse.
Warren Ellis, 7 June 2010, †‡† (Cross Doublecross Cross?), [http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=9751]
The ongoing conflict between conservatism and progressivism continues inexorably. Emancipatory drives are reified, while solid old steadfasts melt into air: the veins migrate within the rock, metamorphically, changing state, but the strata always remain, somewhere. There are antinomies that will not be mixed.
This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.
Janneke Adema, 20 September 2009, Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing, [http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-%E2%80%98underground-movement%E2%80%99-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/]
In the metamorphism there are opportunities, Temporary Autonomous Zones which open up in moments of depressurisation, in deterritorialised spaces, but only for as long as the tectonic attention is driven elsewhere - or until the machine is hard-rebooted.
Island2 is a free software artwork by Martin Howse which creates "a semi-permanent, isolated island in the computer's memory". It's a program that firmly establishes its own space in the memory, unnoticed and inviolable. This empty, silent virtual zone, is only temporary autonomous, since it can be removed simply switching off or restarting the machine. But its "hidden territory" is fascinating, an unknown digital land invisibly established under the user's eyes, with no aim to take over any other system part.
Neural.it, 12 March 2010, Island2, a squatted computer memory zone, [http://www.neural.it/art/2010/03/island2_a_squatted_computer_me.phtml]
The destabilisation always forces immiscible elements back into to their ever-moving homogenous conglomerations, flints in expanses of chalk. The factions shield themselves, striving to make their outer edges crystallise impenetrably, cryptographically. You may trace it, but not interpret.
Freenet is effectively a shadow of the web, with its own sites, forums and email services [...] Since Freenet sites don’t sit on servers, but on data stores spread throughout the network, they can’t be taken down, and because each communication between one computer and another is routed through other nodes, with each one only "knowing" the address of the next node and that of the last, Freenet's users can maintain high levels of anonymity.
On Freenet, nobody knows who you are, or what you’re looking at. Each system also contributes hard disk space, which is occupied by a data cache containing chunks of heavily encrypted data that the program can reassemble into Freenet forums and sites [...]
Freenet was the brainchild of a young Irish computer scientist, Ian Clarke, who came up with the idea during his studies at the University of Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. He wanted to "build a communication tool that would realise the things that a lot of people thought the internet was – a place where you could communicate without being watched, and where people could be anonymous if they wanted to be".
PC Pro, 9 March 2010, The dark side of the web, [http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/356254/the-dark-side-of-the-web]
Data form into islands, inhabited but isolated; incommunicable to all but the secret agent, Charon, whose services cost one silver coin.
wget http://1010.co.uk/island2.tar.gz
tar zxvf island2.tar.gz
cd island2
make
insmod ./island.ko
Martin Howse, 5 April 2010, island2, [http://www.1010.co.uk/org/island2.html]
Stingless and making no honey
The drone is a male of the bee species, "stingless and making no honey".
drone (n.)
O.E. dran, dræn "male honeybee," from P.Gmc. *dran- (cf. M.Du. drane; O.H.G. treno; Ger. Drohne, which is from M.L.G. drone), probably imitative; given a figurative sense of "idler, lazy worker" (male bees make no honey) 1520s. Meaning "pilotless aircraft" is from 1946. Meaning "deep, continuous humming sound" is early 16c., apparently imitative (cf. threnody). The verb in the sound sense is early 16c. Related: Droned; droning.
Harper, D., 2010, Drone, in Online Etymological Dictionary, [http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=drone]
The stingless, unproductive bee is an idler, feckless and lazy. What does he do but bumble and buzz, with a deceptive lethargy, the wings beating hundreds of times every second: what an expenditure on inactivity. His bumbling is a monotony, a drone, the long low hum of the sustained repetition of difference, working into the hertz of audibility. The drone is reproduction, mediation, perception, sensation, representation, simulation.
The "sightless gaze" of the unmanned system tends to acquire exceptional power since its bearer cannot be pinned down. The reinforced gaze of the embedded eye acquires its power precisely because it can.
Perhaps it is both that turn out to be equally "unmanned" -- the latter being more insidious because it traffics in the guise of its opposite.
Crandall, J., 9 April 2003, Unmanned - Embedded Reporters, Predator Drones and Armed Perception, [http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=378]
The drone as idler is adopted to signify the drone as mindless worker: one is unproductive, the other is not. Why the apparent contradiction? The unproductive effort of one points to the futility of existence; the productive effort of the other points to servitude, the mindless repetition of actions controlled by another, a master. The drone is thus pointless through self-indulgence, or powerless through exploitation. The drone is alienated and emasculated.
The singular telescope of Gallileo has evolved into a bug-eyed drone from Northrop-Grumman. It is no longer a research instrument, but an extension of society. Technology is no longer something that can be banned or controlled. Fear of the Swarm is forever joined to love of the Swarm. As Drone Ethnography has liberated our epistemology, from the popular mindset to high level government actors, the drone-mythos captivates our imaginations. The more we use it, the further we leave the point of no return behind us in the slipstream.
Rothstein, A., 20 Jul 2011, Drone Ethnography, [http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/20/drone-ethnography/]
The drone as unmanned craft is an extension of the mind and body of human beings at war, a distribution of cognition into the framework of equipment. The drone is a delegation of responsibility to the machine, which is at the same time a means of tuning our actions to the agency of technology. The drone is the war of analysis in aerial surveillance, fetishistic transference at 50,000 feet. We watch the machine watching us control the machine controlling us. Drones.
The unmanned system does not eliminate the human so much as redistribute the agencies of warfare. The capacities of sensing, dispatching, analyzing, and alerting -- the intelligence and skill required to interpret and store information and act on the results -- are shared by an affiliation of actors, however algorithmic, organic, or systemic. The focus is on their performative practices within the functional organization of the system. It is a matter of how they are maintained as dynamically stable entities -- sustained, naturalized, and rendered discrete -- and the programs through which this is accomplished.
Crandall, J., 27 Jul 2011, Unmanned, email to nettime-l{AT}kein.org, [http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1107/msg00095.html]
Self-placebo
Thursday, 28 July, 2011 - 20:33
"Self-tracking" is the meeting of lifelogging and self-measurement: to capture and record every moment of existence, and to transform it all into meaningful units of analysis. "Hey, I'm self-tracking, I hope you don't mind", I might say as I paid the cashier, spoke to my co-worker, confessed my ailments to my doctor. I transfer my rushes to the second terabyte network drive, but I don't stop to edit. Do I pause my life to log it?
And what do I quantify? Physiological measurements are the easiest place to start, since the physiological self is that which is already registered, enumerated, quantified and counted. I count! And then the psychological self - my moods come and go in finite quanta, and sustain for certain durations. I live and last! And my lifeworld, my phenomenality? Well there, I am in the service of my archive. I am a devotee of the annals, I am my own traces, now made tangible. The more I am numerable, the more I am remedied by numbers.
Self-tracking: in that peculiar concatenated phrase, marrying selfhood and assessment, is foreshortened an arborescent branching of a myriad canyons, each chasm an ellipsis. From this distance it is beautiful, the fractal of my life. Up close, I merely count the gaps - the irreducible can be reduced in this way. It is the lifeworld equivalent of a "close door" button in the lift: a cosmetic affordance which is sufficient to my requirements for control.
Kelly, K., 26 June 2011, "The Quantified Self", [kk.org]
Ross, G., 4 November 2010, "Placebo Buttons", [futilitycloset.com]
Silberman, S., 24 August 2009, "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why", [wired.com]
Wolf, G., 22 June 2009, "Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365", [wired.com]
Knowledge and privilege
When I went to university, we still used quills and we paid maids to compile our bibliographies. There were privileges which accompanied being an undergraduate, such as the right to never attend lectures, or to study German philosophy when you were supposed to be studying economics, or to drink absinthe at orgies, or to take free aviation lessons from suffragettes, or to attempt world-record breaking states of inebriation for months on end and completely forget you were enrolled on a course with the cleverest academics who were the leading contemporary thinkers in their field.
I remember with shame, (and an admixture of triumph), being bored to death when my tutor came to a lecture on Thomas Hardy and read aloud a paper he had written for a conference. I had the arrogant young indifference to his standing as an internationally recognised scholar on the subject, and preferred to scoff at his lack of charisma on the day, rather than appreciate the magnitude of the privilege I had in actually hearing him say his own groundbreaking words. It is right that the stupid young should scorn the elderly and be restive against their authority. It is good to kick against the pricks when you're young, because the destiny of everyone who doesn't die is to become a prick against whom the young will kick.
There is something from that ancient privileged world that I do still believe in though: there is a shape to scholarship, which is generalisable: you are responsible for learning stuff yourself. My antiquated mentors were exemplars, not service-providers; they generated expectations, but they did not relieve you of your responsibility to boot-strap yourself into consciousness; you were already privileged by your admission into a system that gave you 3 years of autonomy and independence: why should you be also nannied into making something of yourself? They didn't need to teach me everything they knew, they simply needed to let me know that I should find it out. Hence I'm proud that I was almost 39 before I finally learnt what an oxford comma actually is, and I'm confident that my university masters would be comfortable with the time it took me to find it out, since their job was to encourage me to have an enquiring attitude, rather than to know any one specific thing.
Today, however, that system has been diminished to the extent that it must be subservient to the most prurient, Moloch-worshipping profit-driven coercion, and the mechanism that has achieved this has been under the the mendacious logic of "access", as though access to education is comparable to access to capital. When, o when, o when, o when, will the ideological link between knowledge and privilege be broken? Only when the link between learning and servitude is broken. Learning means thinking for yourself! It takes at least 3 years! if not 21!
Gloss
Wednesday, 06 July, 2011 - 18:50
Today I wrote a glossary for the wellbeing paper I wrote in May, following the comments I got from the reviewers. I had no idea which words to gloss, so I picked the interesting ones; and some were easy to gloss, others were difficult. Here they are.
- agency
- - the power of acting, or exerting one’s will in order to effect the course of events.
- anagnorisis
- - Aristotle’s term for ‘recognition’: the crucial moment of realisation in which a person or character either recognises someone’s authentic identity, or senses their own genuine nature, as if for the first time; the discovery or revelation of the truth.
- articulation
- - more than speaking, to articulate is to be able to connect things and join them together, such as words, sentences, ideas or narrative sequences.
- catharsis
- - literally, ‘purging’; a term Aristotle borrowed from medicine to refer to the arousal and release of emotion through dramatic narrative.
- dialectic
- - a heavily burdened word which refers to processes in which divergent views or positions are played out, through argument, conversation, dialogue or conflict, hopefully towards reconciliation; an unfolding of point and counterpoint.
- diegesis
- - the term borrowed from Greek to refer to the world of a narrative; the internal integrity of the storyworld, which is filled with people, places and customs which belong to that world.
- exotopy
- - literally meaning ‘outsideness’, this term is used by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the ability of an author to ‘speak’ the authentic voices of characters other than their own.
- fetishism
- - the transference of one’s own agency to a symbolic proxy; e.g. sexual arousal through objects (Freudian fetishism), or allocation of value away from human labour and onto commodities (Marxian commodity fetishism).
- hamartia
- - mistakes and errors of misrecognition, frequently a crucial element in ancient tragedies whose protagonists often fail to recognise someone they ought to know.
- intentionality
- - in phenomenology, ‘intentionality’ refers to the ‘directedness’ of conscious experiences: always towards objects, concepts, feelings and perceptions; hence it is related to but not the same as the common understanding which implies purpose and motive.
- mimesis
- - a Greek term used by Aristotle to refer to the ‘likeness’ of stories to the real world: their imitative capacity.
- narratee
- - the implied or actual audience to whom a story is directed.
- narrative
- - at its simplest, a narrative is a telling or re-telling of a series of events which are connected.
- narrative configuration
- - Louis Mink and Paul Ricoeur use the term ‘configuration’ to refer to the dual act of being able to grasp the different component or sequences of a narrative, while also apprehending the story as a whole, unified structure. Narrators and narratees, authors and readers, writers and audiences, all must be able to see both the figure of the entire story, and the sequences from which it is composed.
- polyphony
- - a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the diversity of languages and voices that are present in the many strata of societies, the different eras of history, or the lines of great literature.
- protagonist
- - the lead role in the story, the main actor in the drama, the self of the individual’s storyworld.
- spect-actor
- - Augusto Boal’s terms for the new fusion of spectator and actor he wishes to bring about in both his drama and wider society.
- technology of the self
- - a term coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the means and techniques by which the self is shaped, both internally by the individual, and externally by influences outside the individual’s control.
- unhomeliness
- - a neologism created by the translation of Heidegger’s term ‘unheimlich’; I prefer unhomeliness since it implies a non-supernatural lack of a sense of belonging, rather than the word ‘uncanny’ which is sometimes used as a translation.
- Verfremdungseffekt
- - Brecht’s term for drawing attention to the artifice of dramatic performance - variously translated as ‘defamiliarisation’, ‘estrangement’, ‘alienation’ and ‘distanciation’; a mechanism whereby the illusion of narrative is punctured in order to highlight the highly contingent and constructed nature of stories and their worlds.
Narrative Approaches to Wellbeing
I have recently been holed up writing a paper to be delivered at a conference later in the year. It's felt like a good exercise to express in one concentrated piece a lot of the intellectual development I've covered in the process of doing my PhD, and even though I don't address the specific issues around bereavement that I'm examining in my doctoral research, this paper captures the main thrust of my thinking. It's been a really bad time to write the paper itself - dissertation marking, bill-paying and most importantly wanting to spend time giggling inanely with my baby girl; but hey, when is it a good time? Anyway, here's the paper. Feedback welcome - it's currently under review so any comments in advance of the final draft will be gratefully received.
Narrative Approaches to Wellbeing
The Self-Annalist
The Reverend Robert Shields of Dayton, Washington, died in 2007 at the age of 89, leaving tens of millions of words of self-narration behind him. Numerous news reports from the New York Times to Boing Boing noted his production of the world's longest diary, which he wrote in considerable detail, down to five minute intervals, pausing to sleep only for brief periods. The vast majority of his output remains obscure since he bequeathed his diary to Washington State University on terms that will restrict its publication until 50 years after his death. However a few pages of his writing found their way onto the Internet following an interview with the reverend about his diligent self-documentation which aired on NPR in the mid 90s. These pages, once digitised, were low-res but readable, and showed a few of the typed sheets listing the everyday events of 25 years of his life, from moments of metaphysical contemplation to frequent instances of bodily evacuation, as in this passage from the early morning of April 19th, 1994:
12.30 – 12.55 I squatted on the throne and purged a #2, a slurry and slush and partly a solid state, while I read from the Swedenborg Concordance entries under End (conclusion, purpose, intent). I meditated as I read. Everything in man and of man is directed by, controlled by and governed by the end of his intentions, and his end is the purpose of his life's love. All else is adventitous. Whether the end is heavenly or not depends on whether the purposes are directed toward the good of the Lord, his church, and the neighbor, or towards one's own gratification. I am earnestly examining myself in respect to my motivations. I honestly don't know what governs me. I don't know whether my goals are selfless or not. In any case, the self seems to be in them. Or is it? I struggle with my thoughts.
On the subject of his intentions, there are conflicting accounts. The recirculation at the time of his death of the few available diary extracts provoked speculation and comment: some parts of the press noted his completionist approach and wide vocabulary in describing urination; other parts of the web diagnosed him at best as an obsessive and at worst a candidate for "nutorama"; editorials warn us of the numbing mundanity of his diary; meanwhile he is included in a compendium of "eccentrics, visionaries, dreamers, believers". For his own part, he offers little in the way of explanation for his "self-annalising". In interview he confesses it to be an obsession, though he is not sure what he is trying to do. He puts it down to his "make-up", his "nature"; but also speculates that the diary with its encyclopedic detail and stuck-in nostril hairs may be of use to future historians and geneticists. He allows himself a certain pride in his endeavour, describing it as "uninhibited" and "spontaneous", "No restrictions. No holds barred". "I'm doing something that no one else has ever done in the history of the world' he asserts, even though he confesses when asked why he writes: "I don't know why any of us do anything. That's the truth."
The demands of archive maintenance have an impact on his life of course: he doesn't leave town because being away overnight would get him behind - even shopping in the nearest city 30 miles away forces him to take notes which he then has to spend a day catching up on. He has many achievements to his name - ghost-writing erotic stories, producing Civil War novels, as well as a career as a minister - but these appear to date from the period of life before he turned earnestly to diary-writing. Leaving aside the interesting meeting of eroticist and ecclesiast, one might wonder whether he hasn't sacrificed living in favour of recording; but not keeping the diary, he says, would be like "stopping ... turning off my life". "I don't think it has happened unless I've written it down."
Although the portrayals of Shields in the various news reports often invite us to consider his eccentricity as pathological - either sympathetically as unhealthily compulsive or more brutally as a sheer "nutcake" - I want to avoid casting him in this role here if I can. He illuminates for me an urge to self-document which I recognise to some extent in myself and a multitude of self-archivists whose traces are daily accreting on the web in gigabytes. He is at once a paragon of journal-writers, but an outlying anomaly offering an ambiguous warning and invitation. The self-chronicle functions as a technology of the self - a device and process whereby selfhood is grasped and established as a form of intentionality - yet it instils a fear of obsession, self-absorption and narcissism. So I want to use Robert Shields, as a foil, as a text - as a tool for thinking about the function of narrative in wellbeing. Reverend Shields materialises an example of life as narrative, in which a person becomes both the object and subject of their own existence, ambiguously triangulated by an indefinite other: playwright, actor and spectator; narrator, protagonist and narratee. These triple roles are, I will argue, crucial to a formulation of narrative as a tool for personal development and wellbeing. Throughout this paper the reverend thus sits on his sun-porch with his 91 boxes of journal manuscript, begging questions of the claims I make, but reserving judgment on their fitness.
Narrative Therapy
The use of narrative is well-established in therapeutic situations. John McLeod offers a way of understanding the use of story as part of a psychotherapeutic process by contrasting narrative knowing with paradigmatic knowing. The latter emphasises abstract, propositional knowledge of the kind valued in scientific practices for its objectivity; the former by contrast emphasises the concrete knowledge of experience, context and significance. Paradigmatic knowledge strives for factuality, eliminating ambiguity and subjective evaluation and as such proves useful in systematic inquiry and instrumental endeavours, but less useful in providing the scaffolding necessary for people to understand their own lives. Narrative knowledge is precisely the kind of resource that makes it possible to contextualise facts into meaningful situations, and articulate the hazy significance that seems to surround human actions.
McLeod itemises a number of ways in which narrative knowing, and story-telling generally, are helpful in therapeutic situations: stories, he notes, give us our own personal myths, helping us to handle the multiplicity of our of selves; they offer ambiguity, allowing space for interpretive and imaginative acts, and as such they are liminal, offering "threshold" experiences which can be personally transformative or cathartic; they have sequentiality and thus impel events into an order, reducing apparent chaos, helping us to solve problems, and assimilate the exceptional; and they are shared experiences, opening windows into each others' lives, forging social bonds and implying a moral landscape where they emerge around sites of social conflict.
These tensions between selfhood and, on the one hand, the multiple selves we seem to be, and on the other, the community of social identities we live amongst, also feature in Celia Hunt's account of the therapeutic dimension of autobiographical writing. She draws on Hesse's notion of a "melody for two voices" and Bakhtin's concept of polyphony to explore the reflective acts necessary for comprehending what we might usefully call the self for-the-self, and the self for-others. For Hesse, the voices of the self both as self and as witness of the self are essential to breaking the unreflective absorption in life which breeds neurosis and peevishness. Hunt suggests that opening up and creating distance between the witnessed self and the witnessing self allows the narrative identity of each to be clarified. Meanwhile Bakhtin's celebration of the polyphony of novelistic discourse, in which a writer allows the many varied voices of the novel's world to stand on an equal footing with the author's own voice, depends on the "exotopic" self - the self who is able to experience an "outsideness", a protean ability to voice a "plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world". The process of writing exotopically, notes Hunt, "demands a greater degree of psychic flexibility than would be usual in everyday life".
Thus the recognition of and intersubjective dialogue between multiple selves, both within the individual, and in a community of people, are crucial aspects of the therapeutic potential of narrative. The act of writing is a reflective tool permitting us to open and explore facets of selfhood and otherness: the sense of the unitariness of the self and its multiplicity as many-in-one, the oneness of the self and its constitution as one-among-many. But to state in this way the powerful scope for personal development that belongs to narrative opens further questions: does the capacity for nurturing wellbeing belong to all kinds of narrative experiences, or a particular kind? Are writers the beneficiaries of a healthy habit, and ought we all to write? Is the place of narrative in wellbeing reserved for the therapeutic situation, a tool to be applied in cases of illness and malaise, or is an engagement with narrative a more fundamental dimension of both being human and being well?
I don't intend to provide exhaustive answers to these ambitious questions, but to begin outlining some broad conceptions of narrative that might suggest ways that it is implicated in wellbeing. The use of narrative as therapeutic device which I've described could be seen as a way of considering some aspects of wellness which match the characteristics of story-telling. I propose to reverse the direction of this movement, and instead try to draw out some key aspects of narrative and search for ways in which they match conceptions of wellbeing. Meanwhile, I wonder whether the reverend listens to these suggestions and reflects on his own writing. His words suggest he grapples with a faceted sense of self: "I struggle with my thoughts." Are his goals selfless, and if he finds the self in them, what would it mean for the self to be absent? As for the story - does his stupendous diary function as a narrative at all, or does the exhaustive documentation of every feature of life diminish the capacity to establish the significance of events? When does a chronicle become a narrative, and must a narrative be selective in order to establish an order that is not merely factual and chronological?
The Aristotelian Narrative
Narrative theory has a long provenance - over 2000 years if we take Aristotle's Poetics as the first work of literary theory, as Richard Janko suggests in the introduction to his translation. The Poetics defines a number of ways of thinking about what a narrative ought to be, and thus offers a set of prescriptive criteria whereby the art of epic poetry or tragic drama might be perfected. Such instructions are intriguing of themselves, but I wish to draw out three features of Aristotle's analysis of tragedy which seem particularly relevant to the questions of selfhood and wellness. These are mimesis, the verisimilitude of stories to real life; anagnorisis, the recognition of an authentic identity; and catharsis, the famous emotional 'purging' which the experience of narrative should facilitate.
In an Aristotelian view, stories achieve their effect through their believable imitation of life, without which the suspension of disbelief would be impossible. Inviting us into the diegesis, the world of the story, compels the author to present a familiar world like our own, a world of things and laws and events and causes, and of people whom we can recognise as like ourselves or as we'd like to be. Recognition thus occurs at two levels, as we recognise the authenticity of the characters of the story, and those characters themselves discover either their own or each others' true nature - a key to Aristotle's understanding of tragedy. The moment of recognition is often key to the emotional welling which should be aroused in us, since it depends on the hamartia of the protagonists - their mistakes and errors of misrecognition. It is as witnesses to the ignorance and bloody-mindedness of our fictional counterparts whose misjudgements lead to their downfall that we experience pity for their lot and terror for our own.
The cathartic effect which Aristotelian narrative aims for thus depends on the sharing of feeling - empathy for the plight of the tragic characters which manifests itself as a vicarious experience of the same emotions. The exact means by which catharsis functions has been the object of debate. Aristotle borrows the term from medicine where it refers to purification by purgation - the cleansing of the body of excesses. Interpreting it in this way encourages us to understand the role of the vicarious experiences provoked by narrative as releasing extraneous emotions which will presumably become dangerous if they are allowed to stagnate. Janko points out that this conception of catharsis suggests its purpose is best served by an audience of people who are disturbed and unbalanced, and its function is to ensure that their pent-up arousal doesn't escalate into hysteria. Meanwhile, Janko's own proposition is that catharsis instead is a device for learning to feel the "correct emotion toward the right object, at the right time, to the proper degree"; narrative is then a rehearsal space in which we should be habituated into the correct responses towards people and actions, thereby becoming "tractable for education".
Both of these interpretations of catharsis entail an understanding of narrative which is normative - whether it is through prevention of hysteria or socialisation into the correct emotional composure. The normative drive in Aristotelian theatre can be detected in the theatrical conventions that arose as the prescriptions of the Poetics were naturalised. The protagonist ought to be someone 'above the common level', such that the events of their life are of no little consequence; tragedy should befall characters not as punishment for vice but as the consequence of human frailty; the unfolding of the drama should express unity of time, place and action thus maintaining the imitative mode. The spectators of such dramas are often provided with an omniscient view of the helpless players, increasing the poignancy of dramatic irony, highlighting the catastrophe of inescapable fate and affirming the inevitability of the tragic outcome for the pawns in the world of the master author. Goethe and Schiller at the end of the 18th century reinforce this sweeping surge of emotional vicarity and epic scope, writing that the spectator of this theatre must remain in "constant sensuous exertion, is not allowed to elevate himself to reflection, he must passionately follow, his imagination is completely reduced to silence, one is allowed to make no claim upon it, and even what is narrated, must be as if it were graphically brought before one's eyes".
It is precisely this immersion into passion, this tide of predestination and its concomitant silencing of imagination, that Bertolt Brecht later reacted against so strongly in his conception of a non-Aristotelian theatre. Brecht famously argued in favour of the Verfremdungseffekt: alienation, distantiation and estrangement are all short-falling translations of this German term. These negative renderings themselves hint at the pervasive triumph of cathartic absorption that Brecht so disliked. Suzanne Langer's description of the misery of experiencing the shattering of the immersive illusion of a story captures all that was Brecht thought was wrong with the old bombastic theatre:
I ... remember vividly to this day the terrible shock of such a recall to actuality; as a young child I saw Maude Adams in Peter Pan. It was my first visit to the theater, and the illusion was absolute and overwhelming, like something supernatural. At the highest point of the action (Tinkerbell had drunk Peter's poisoned medicine to save him from doing so, and was dying) Peter turned to the spectators and asked them to attest their belief in fairies. Instantly the illusion was gone; there were hundreds of children, sitting in rows, clapping and even calling, while Miss Adams, dressed up as Peter Pan, spoke to us like a teacher coaching us into a play in which she was taking the title role. I did not understand, of course, what had happened; but an acute misery obliterated the rest of the scene, and was not entirely dispelled until the curtain rose on a new set.
Misery and obliteration: Brecht notes that indignant reactions are the correct response to the broken diegesis of a traditional narrative. Such a story presents itself as a self-contained, hermetically sealed world, outside which we must leave our imaginations when we enter; it presents a world of unchanging destiny, where disproportionate tragedy befalls people for their weakness or their hubris, rather than as a just punishment for their evil; and it is an ordered world of beginnings, middles and ends, in which the protagonists are powerless to escape their inevitable fates, since it is a world that is completely determinate, rational, explicable, inexorable. No wonder that we should, as Aristotle puts it, "thrill with fear and melt to pity at what takes place" - and no wonder, too, that, when the integrity of this spectacle disintegrates, we should, like Langer, crash to earth with misery and incomprehension.
I interpret Langer's misery at the rupture of her immersion into the storyworld as a direct analogy to the "unhomeliness" that Heidegger notes arises when our own world of being is disrupted by the obtrusiveness and obstinacy of things that seem not to belong - indeed the fracturing of the coherence of our world by traumatic events and exceptional circumstances is a key aspect of our experience of anxiety and illness. The order of our life and any sense of its providence descend into inexplicability and doubt. The "letting-be" that Heidegger suggests consists in an authentic sense of being at home in the world is lost to a sense of estrangement and unbelonging. The unity of life, events and actions no longer coheres.
9.00 - 9.05 I had to take a nitroglycerine tablet
9.05 - 9.45 I sat on the fixture voiding urine and reading Swedenborg on End, England, other subjects. I wish I knew something. Anything would do.
The Estranged Narrative
Brecht's alienation effect aimed at a different sort of defamiliarisation. Martin Esslin notes in his study of Brecht that he thought the Aristotelian theatre was a fraud. Instead he "demanded a theatre of calm contemplation and detachment, a theatre of critical thoughtfulness", where audiences should think for themselves, rather then be swept away in emotion. In his essay celebrating Chinese theatre, Brecht himself talks of a distance not only between the spectator and the world of the play, but between the actor and the role in which he is cast. This distance ensures that the performance is not imitative, but an artistic rendering of character; the actor clearly knows he is a part of a performance, and the spectators do not surrender themselves to empathy, but instead enter a reflective mode and adopt a "watchful attitude". The alienation at work here, then, does not strive to drive a wedge between the world of the spectator and the world of the performance; rather the remoteness between audience and actor is reduced, while the storyworld they are experiencing, either as observers or as players, is pushed far enough away for it to become the object of their shared contemplation.
One of the effects Brecht hoped to produce with this reorganisation of story, player and spectator was to historicise the drama. The Aristotelian theatre emphasised the unchanging universality of events, while Brecht's epic theatre emphasised their particularity. Aristotelian theatre proceeded inexorably toward endings, while Brecht's performers could "freely range forward and backward in time". Aristotelian theatre showed people at the mercy of fate, while Brecht's theatre invited the viewer to consider how things might have been otherwise. Aristotelian theatre thrilled the audience into submission, while Brechtian theatre strove to stimulate them into reflection. The challenge Brecht presented was to say that narrative was not there for us to learn the way of the world, but to provoke us into changing it. Injustice is not merely a doom that befalls hapless victims at the hands of fate, but is something that is carried out by oppressors in ways that can be contested.
In direct contrast to the normative tendency of the Aristotelian theatre, Brecht's theatre is avowedly political and aligned with the Marxist effort to disrupt dominant ideologies. However, the function of narrative in this conception is aimed at restoring the dignity of the individual not only through the wholesale restructuring of the social order, but through the transformation of the individual's consciousness. The Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal identified himself with the Brechtian tradition in his book Theatre of the Oppressed, by critiquing what he called the "coercive" nature of Aristotle's system of tragedy, claiming that "spectator" is a bad word, since the "spectator is less than a man, and it is necessary to humanise him". Boal conceives of the division of spectators from actors as an enclosing intervention by the ruling classes in the history of theatre. He writes: "First they divided the people, separating actors from spectators; people who act and people who watch— the party is over! Secondly, among the actors, they separated the protagonists from the mass. The coercive indoctrination began! " Philip Auslander helps to clarify Boal's aims here, by placing his work in the context of Marx's concern for what is human:
For Marx, alienation is pernicious primarily because it is dehumanizing: human beings, who are supposed to be autonomous, free subjects, endow things outside of themselves, whether another class, a deity, or the products of their own labor (commodities), with power over themselves and become slaves to those things. As I have suggested, Boal’s use of the basic categories of Marxism in his analysis of the body in performance suggests that, like Marx, Boal wants to overcome alienation and restore basic autonomy by eliminating actor and spectator in favor of the spect-actor, thus undoing the traditional division of theatrical labor and overcoming alienation (the audience’s surrendering of its autonomy to performers who act in its stead) and returning the "protagonistic function" [...] to the audience from which it was taken ...
It is precisely the tendency to delegate human agency to things outside ourselves which Marx, Brecht and Boal aim to challenge. Fetishism in both Marxism and in Freudian analysis refers to the way that potency is attributed to objects instead of human action. Thus it is that thrill-seeking audiences surrender their emotional lives to the characters in Aristotelian tragedy, no less than they accept that they are just as powerless to intervene in their own fate as that of the tragic characters themselves. Meanwhile the purpose of Brecht's Lehrstücke, experimental dramatic pieces in which the distinction between audience and actor is dissolved, and of Boal's 'forum theatre', in which audiences can intervene in an iterative unfolding of dramatic situations, is to restore autonomy to the individual human and remind them of their own radical empowerment. After all, if we devolve our autonomy to objects and players to act and feel on our behalf, whether they are fetishes, actors, institutions or leaders, we have deferred both our ability and our responsibility to determine our own lives.
From 'The Spokesman Review', 14th December 1995:
He says the diary doesn't control him. He says he could quit. But he won't, even though a minor stroke a few years ago slowed his typing speed. [...]
"Some people would say 'Well, he's a nut,"' said Shields, seemingly unfazed by the prospect. "Maybe I am." He'd rather be called an eccentric.
Asked if he worries about a fire or another stroke, Shields smiled like someone about to reveal a secret. "I don't worry about anything," he said. "Everything is in the hands of God."
Pasts and Futures
The tension between determinism and agency that is at the heart of the contrast between the dramatic tragedy of Aristotle and the epic theatre of Brecht, is implicated in the structure of narrative itself, and as I intend to argue, provides a way to understand how narrative is involved in a sense of wellbeing. The self is in a tension between its future and its past, its intentions and its history, its destination and its provenance - and this is a tension at the heart of every narrative which is bounded by the role of the author. Just as the author determines the intelligibility of the events of a story, so the self strives for authorship over its lifeworld, and the freedom of self-direction. This freedom apparently entails a paradox, however: the same paradox that is inherent in an author devolving free will to a character, yet maintaining the integrity of that character's world.
To help us understand the directedness of narrative, we can turn to Tvetan Todorov, the bulgarian philosopher, who proposed a very influential but essentially simple definition of narrative, which, he argues, is constituted by the progression from one state of equilibrium to another, through a stage of disequilibrium. Todorov examines a story from Bocaccio's Decameron, arguing that the presentation of a cast of characters living in Naples is not enough to qualify as narrative - it is only when Bocaccio begins to transform the states of affairs and the attitudes of the characters that we can understand his tale as a narrative. This transformation is an "unfolding of an action, change, difference", and leads Todorov to the insight that narratives have two principles: succession and transformation. Elements of stories are related to each other both by succession (following on from one another) and transformation (embodying change).
At the heart of stories, then, are transformations: upsettings and degradations, restorations and reversals. Narratives which only tell part of this transformation (which perhaps only have the degradation without the restoration), are only "half a cycle". To fulfil a complete cycle, a narrative must unfold and present succession; it requires transformation, and moves towards endings and resolutions - thus, narrative points at an implied future. Perhaps for this reason, Todorov says that death has an "exceptional narrative status": it is a reversal which cannot be restored other than in exceptional narratives - the logic of the non-exceptional narrative implies a future which death exceptionally negates.
Todorov pushes us towards a notion of a narrative as something that resolves, and that completes cycles. The structures of these transformations are implicit in their designation as "restoration" or "reversal", and in the exceptionality of death. He notes, "the passage from A to non-A is in a way the paradigm for all change" and thus sets up a dialectic between the successive elements of stories such that they are co-defined. The nature of the state of disequilibrium, which narrative demands must follow an initial equilibrium, is therefore derived from that initial state of affairs and the nature of its disturbance. Just as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so narrative sequences must be articulated with each other. From this causal structure, future states of affairs are also defined. Many narratives may gain their appeal from striving to obfuscate what the nature of that implied future might be, but in Todorov's scheme, that implied future is limited to new states of equilibrium which are configured by the preceding succession of events.
Jean-Paul Sartre provides a sense of the importance of this implied future. He offers a powerful phenomenological insight into what it is like to realise the freedom of self-direction in his novel Nausea, whose name has already told us much about the experience. His protagonist's realisation that the freedom of self-determination comes at the price of absurdity throws him into an anguish in which he feels crushed. I cannot have both a sense that I have had a meaningful life journey leading to the present moment, and have a completely open future in which I can direct my actions in any way I like. To have had a meaningful trajectory to the present, I must have a purpose whose imperative limits my freedom if I am to remain faithful to that purpose; to have complete self-determination renders whatever actions I take absurd - literally, meaningless. The existential dilemma is that one can choose one or the other - purpose or freedom - but never both.
... for the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must - and this is all that is necessary - start recounting it [...] a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. But you have to choose: to live or recount [...] When you are living, nothing happens.
We find ourselves doubly caught here - if we wish to make sense of our lives, we find ourselves turning between the future-headed path to which our life-narrative directs us, and the retrospective sense we must make of our journey on that path in order to give our future a shape; or if we wish for total autonomy, we will be suspended between the vertiginous, nauseating experience of infinite possibility, and the denial of any purpose to the events which have led us to the here and now. Meaning is oppressive; freedom is absurd. To free ourselves into an indeterminate future, we must sacrifice any sense of articulation in the succession of events in our lives, or, if we follow Todorov, recast our narrative as mere description.
2.05 – 2.10 I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary.
2.10 – 2.25 I rested on the couch.
2.25 – 2.35 I checked on whether our county tax payment had been received. It had. We were shuttling back and forth between the ledger, the study and the telephone.
2.35 – 3.00 I rested on the couch.
3.00 – 3.25 I read the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin. Matthew F[...] tried to take a baby from Walla Walla General Hospital. He assaulted four of the nursing staff, who held him for the police. He was charged with custodial interference and with assaulting the nursing staff. Boise Cascade’s loss of $421 million over the last 13 quarters has "embarrassed" the chairman of the board and Chief Executive Officer, but he will not quit.
3.25 – 3.35 I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary. I drank two cups of orange juice.
3.35 – 4.30 I prepared a 10-ounce tin of Campbell’s vegetable soup and ate it with saltines as I read Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton. I washed out the soup pan and a frozen food tray left by Cornelia.
4.30 – 4.35 I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary.
Annalist and Analyst
Contrary to Todorov's assertion that description alone does not qualify as narrative, a strand of thought that I will trace through Louis Mink, Arthur Danto and Paul Ricoeur suggests that there is no substantial difference between history and narrative; thus there is no chronological account of events that does not impose narrative order onto them, no description of events that is not "always already" structured by narrative. And if this is the case, then the existential autonomy which Sartre describes is unobtainable, and in any case, it doesn't play a helpful role in a conception of wellbeing which is grounded in sense-making, belonging or self-direction.
In debates about the value of narrative in the discipline of history, Louis Mink has argued that narrative is a primary cognitive form, rather than a derivative one. Hence, instead of thinking of narrative as a device by which a historian might present events of the past, he asserts that when historians present histories, the entire processes of research, selection, comprehension and dissemination are structured by narrative. Thus, events "are not the raw material out of which narratives are constructed; rather, an event is an abstraction from a narrative". To speak of a "narrative of events" is a tautology, since it is the narrative form of understanding that defines and constructs an event as such: its commencement, its closure, its causal connectedness and its transformative significance - these are the narrative criteria by which it can be construed as an event at all.
An objection to Mink's line might be that since narrative knowing, as it has been developed by McLeod, is attuned to the ambiguity and significance of events, it cannot therefore get at the facts of the matter. Narrative processes are partial and selective, rather than objective and comprehensive. An ideal history in this conception would precisely be a "non-narrative" - a pure record of everything. Arthur Danto imagines this ideal history, in the shape of the "Ideal Chronicler" (I.C.), who is a godlike figure with the powers of omniscience and instantaneous transcription, recording every action and event, every thought and motive: "everything that happens across the forward rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens, the way it happens." We might imagine the mortal historian is now redundant, since the work of recording a faithful history of the past is taken care of. Alternatively we may ascribe to the fallen historian a new role, whose task it is to use the I.C as evidence as though it were an eye-witness account. The point, Danto urges, is that even though all of history is laid before us, it will still not tell us everything we wish to know about events. Even a complete account of the past is not enough. "The truth concerning an event can only be known after, and sometimes only long after the event has taken place," he tells us, and crucially: "What we neglected to equip the Ideal Chronicler with was knowledge of the future."
I take Danto's argument to be that just as the significance of past events changes as the catalogue of new events is enlarged in the passage of time, so readings of history are shaped by an anticipation of the future. "Our knowledge of the past [...] is limited by our knowledge (or ignorance) of the future." And just as much as we are able to make claims about the past, just so much are we also making claims about the future. The horizon of our interpretive action moves forward and backward in time, like the estranged Brechtian performer whose character's destiny resists being fixed. Our intentions for the future shape how we view our past, while what sense we draw from our journey into the present shapes our future purpose.
I find the figure of the "last historian" helpful here: succeeding in bringing to light the truth of history will also be to succeed in predicting the shape and significance of the future. Danto compares this striving with prophecy itself - to see the present as though from the future. The last historian must see the past from the perspective of the end of time - the last, exceptional narrative event of history. It is in this sense that we all strive to be the last historians of our own life-narratives. To assimilate the past and future into an articulate form, we interpret the past from an imagined future, and the future from an always re-imagined past.
Paul Ricoeur borrows terminology from Mink to express this double mode of narrative apprehension:
The art of narrating, as well as the corresponding art of following a story, therefore require that we are able to extract a configuration from a succession [...] every narrative can be conceived in terms of the competition between its episodic dimension and its configurational dimension, between sequence and figure [...] to narrate and to follow a story is already to 'reflect upon' events with the aim of encompassing them in successive totalities.
It is in the movement of configuration that we may see narrative implicated as an existential aspect of wellbeing. The extent to which we are able to apprehend the totality of a life from its discrete episodes, including those phases of it which have not yet occurred, ensures that we are able to feel both purpose and self-direction - indeed they become the one and the same. Ricoeur's own approach to expressing and resolving the tension between the discreteness and continuity of self that is captured in a single figure of many parts is to consider the duality implied in the word "identity" itself. Using the terms "idem-identity" and "ipse-identity", Ricoeur draws attention to identity as both sameness and selfhood. The idem-identity is that which is recognisable as the same, unchanging self, and asserts itself as the recurring identity that is and will be continuous through all the moments of a life. The ipse-identity is that which is present at any given moment - the one who voices the words, "Here I am!" It is in what Ricouer calls a "narrative identity" that the idem and the ipse meet, since it is only through access to the experience of self-sameness (idem) that the self (ipse) is able to answer the question "Who am I?"
To conclude, I wish to take these understandings from the writers and thinkers I have touched on. As much as I am willing to absolve myself of my autonomy by permitting others to define and direct me, just so much I become a spectator of my own life rather than its protagonist, living through vicarious emotions and fearing the dispersal of an illusion over which I have little control. Yet, if I am able to apprehend my life as meaningful, in even the merest details, then I begin to be the creator of my own life-story. Without access to the dimension of the self with a "history and a mortal future", my self is no self at all. The self which emerges for me at their intersection is justified in feeling that my life-narrative is coherent: the many episodes of my life are articulated into a unified whole, and the self-authorship of this "configuration" offers me a sense of self-determination. A pure freedom, which detaches itself from my past, is desirable only in so far as I am willing to forgo a sense of historical identity and personal heritage; but a directedness to a future which is faithful to my journey to the present is what gives my life purpose.
Coda
The Reverend Shields' diary is exhaustive, but if our guides have been right, there is no chronicle that is not a narrative, and therefore no diary which does not aim to configure events and episodes into a totality. In Washington State University are tens of millions of his words, of which we have read only a miniscule extract. Many of them inventively describe urination, and attract our prurient attention. Some of them elicit pathos, and provoke curiosity. A few might even seem mundane, but as Mink notes, annals are "fascinating to the teller, whose recollections they are, and boring to the listener, who has only the pointless story without the vividness of recollected content." But some of them invite us to see a glimpse of the self of their author on the page, and his apprehension of his own life. The reverend is reading from the The Swedenborg Concordance, a reference work which accompanies the theological writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a philosopher, scientist, theologian and, in the latter part of his life before his death in 1772, a mystic. He is claimed to have predicted the date of this own death. He refers often to the "proprium" – an archaism referring to properties that belong to something – what is its "own". His concordance tells us that the flesh is the "proprium of man, thus the evil of the love of self", and the "voluntary proprium of man, which in itself is nothing but evil ... Fully ill."
1.05 - 1.10 I lip-read Psalm 97
1.10 - 1.30 I affirmed my conviction in the faith of the heavens: 1) The Lord reigns; 2) The Lord is the life of all; 3) All salvation is of mercy; and 4) The proprium is evil. Then I reviewed the things I want most before this life is over: 1) To write Thunder in Heaven or Up With the Star or both; 2) to endow the University so as to perpetuate the preservation of my papers; 3) to use the annuity to help six people and six causes. But I conceived of a way to do that. I would give the whole of the WSU annuity to the American Bible Society and use the annuity from the ABS to help the six people and the causes. I would save a bundle in taxes, both immediate and deferred, by doing this, and would bestow an immense benefit on the American Bible Society which is dear to my heart. I give credit for this intention to the Divine Providence. I realize that the achievement of any of those goals is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.
Bibliography
Auslander, P., 1997, From Acting to Performance : Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge
Bakhtin, M., 1984, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson, Minnieapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Boal, A., 1993, Theater of the Oppressed, New York: Theatre Communications Group
Brecht, B., 'On Chinese Acting' in Martin, C., 1999, Brecht Sourcebook, Florence, KY: Routledge
Danto, A., 1965, Analytical Philosophy of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Esslin, M., 1969, Brecht, a choice of evils, London: Heinemann
Frauenfelder, M., 2006, Pages of obsessive diarist, BoingBoing, 5 Dec. Available from: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/05/pages-of-obsessive-d.html
Geranios, N., 1996, Dear Diary: Every Second, Every Minute, Every Hour, Every Day, The Oregonian, 3 Mar
Goethe, W., & Schiller, F., 1827, On Epic and Dramatic Poetry. Available from: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/schil_epic_dram.html
Heidegger, M., 2008. Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell
Hunt, C., 2000, Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing, London: JKP
Isay, D., 1997, Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics, and Other American Heroes, London: Norton
Janko, R., 'Introduction' in Aristotle, 1987, Poetics, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Langer, S., in Ryan, M., 2001, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
MailOnline, 2007, Discovered: The world's longest diary - all 3.75 million words of it, 30 Oct. Available from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-490674/Discovered-The-worlds-longest-diary--3-75-million-words-it.html
Martin, D., 2007, Robert Shields Wordy Diarist, Dies at 89, The New York Times, 29 Oct. Available from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/us/29shields.html
McLeod, J., 1997, Narrative and Psychotherapy, London: Sage
Mink, L., 'Everyman His or Her Own Annalist' in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer, 1981), pp. 777-783
Mink, L., 'Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument' in Roberts, G., (ed) 2001, The History and Narrative Reader, London: Routledge
Neatorama, 2006, World's Longest Diary, 5 Dec. Available from: http://www.neatorama.com/2006/12/05/worlds-longest-diary/
Potts, J., (ed) 1888, The Swedenborg Concordance, London: London Swedenborg Society. Available from: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23412205M/The_Swedenborg_concordance.
Ricouer, P., 'The Narrative Function' in Thompson, J., (ed) 1981, Paul Ricouer : Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Ricouer, P., 1994, Oneself As Another, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Sartre, J., 2000, Nausea, London: Penguin
Shields, R., 1994, Pages from unpublished diary. Photograph. Available from: http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/worlds_longest_diary/diary_entry1.gif
Sound Portraits, 1994, Robert Shields, World's Longest Diary, 27 Jan. Available from: http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/worlds_longest_diary/
The Cincinnati Post, 1996, Dear diary: You fill 81 boxes on my porch. Journal obsession keeps author busy, 22 Mar
Todorov, T., 1990, Genres in discourse, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Turner, P., 1995, A Life's Work - Robert Shield's Diary Chronicles Every Minute of Every Day of the Last 20 Plus Years of his Life, The Spokesman Review, 14 Dec
The Machine Starts: Computers as Collaborators in Writing
Thursday, 28 April, 2011 - 23:33
Earlier this week I presented a paper at the Narrative Research Group Symposium on 'Nonhuman Narratives', at Bournemouth Unversity. It was a day filled with very interesting papers ranging through the posthuman and nonhuman, the monstrous and inhuman, and the nonhuman animal. The text of my paper is copied below, but I wanted to make a few remarks about the paper and the symposium first.
As usual, I found it incredibly difficult to compress the things I wanted to discuss into a 20 minute talk. I'd have liked to have talked more about the practice-led side of the ideas that provoked the paper, discussed a wider range of 'flat ontologists' (e.g. Jane Bennet, as Anat Pick suggested in the Q&A following my talk), and I'd have liked to have gone on to explore both playful and serious consequences of machine agency, from Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines to Kevin Kelly's arguments for The Technium.
The huge depth of subjects from the day make it impossible to sum up or do justice to the ideas, but I want to pick out a couple of insights from the day that really got me thinking.
David Herman talked about understanding (and writing, in graphic form) animal narratives, which was derived from a post-Cartesian approach to mind influenced by Uexküll's idea of an animal's 'Umwelt'. This hinged on a conception of mind as distributed in the environment, rather than sealed inside a thinking being (reminding me, incidentally, of the work of my colleague Dr Paul Stevens), thus permitting questions such as 'what's it like' to be a dog, mollusc, even doorknob. In particular I was intrigued by a remark in the Q&A following David's talk in which he suggested that because mind is a phenomenon distributed through body, environment and institution, we therefore do have access to it. Access to mind! - literally mind-blowing.
Anat Pick's talk, which examined Robert Bresson's portrayal of the donkey Balthazar, offered a way of thinking about determinism and agency that I'm not familiar with, but that I found really intriguing. The tension here is less determinism 'vs' agency, and more determinism 'and' grace; grace in the face of the necessity of the world which involves a form of assent, but is neither mere acceptance, nor does it preclude the resistance of persecution. In the Q&A she cited a Spinozan approach to understanding the necessities inherent in a deterministic universe, which then enables an agent to act within those necessities. I will have to learn Spinoza...
Finally an interesting phenomenon on the day was the frequent dismantling of binary oppositions. In the summary, it was noted that many tensions were explored in the day - human and nonhuman, humane and inhuman, normal and other, known and unknown - but that the categories kept breaking down. In the case of my talk for example, taking a relatively uncontroversial interpretation of nonhuman and following the logical paths such notions suggested, ended in dissolving the distinctions entirely. Human and nonhuman writers are indistinguishable; human and nonhuman texts are too...
I think of this as the inevitable consequence of any dialectic: the definition of a category depends on the splitting off of that category from it's other; it is as though we halve an apple, and are then surprised that the one half is very much the same as the other half... To define good, we create the not-good in the image of the good. Arbitrary categories are susceptible to and dissolve under systematic analysis. The difficulty (even impossibility) is in finding non-arbitrary distinctions. Humans are animals, humans make machines in their own image, monstrous killers are humans; the challenge thrown up by the dissolution of firm distinctions are all ethical: why might eating animals be morally different to cannibalism? what happens when you recognise nonhumans as 'persons'? does dehumanising serial killers absolve the social realms in which they occur from any blame? There may well be a boundary between human and nonhuman, but it is not necessarily where we conventionally think it is.
So I'm grateful to Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round for organising the day, Einar Thorsen for live-blogging it, and to the other speakers and participants for their ideas and openness. I am however, sad that no-one seemed to recognise the opening slide I used. While I was preparing the presentation, I woke in the middle of the night, unable to get back to sleep, going over and over in my mind the ideas I had for the contents of this paper; my mind had been possessed by a parasite, and as its host I was powerless to resist it. I lay there and remembered an album cover from 1981: The Police, 'Ghost in the machine'. I was barely 10 when I acquired the vinyl LP, and it fascinated me - the songs' lyrics about spirits in the material world, the ethereal synthesisers, the images of circuit boards on the inner sleeve. So I got up at 5 in the morning and went downstairs and pulled out my 30-year-old record, amazingly still unscratched, and played it, and felt a strange mixture of sadness and pleasure that none of my machine collaborators were scrobbling it to last.fm...
The Machine Starts: Computers as Collaborators in Writing
While I was preparing this paper, the 11-year-old I live with asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was preparing a presentation about how great machines are at telling stories. "How can machines tell stories?" he asked incredulously. I realised that should have been my title! I originally chose to reference E. M Forster's short story, 'The Machine Stops' in my title because I think it is necessary to invoke at once the dystopian vision that the idea of storytelling machines conjures. The idea of sentient machines - which surely they must be to compose tales - is popularly horrific, alienating, and dangerous. Intelligent machines always turn out to be evil. Often popular adaptations of this trope present clear lines between human and nonhuman 'intelligences', thereby permitting a war between them in which the happy outcome is the one in which the unfeeling machines are vanquished.
Forster's story is dystopian and has the contours of such an ethical boundary, but is more subtle, exploring the way in which the humans who inhabit the machine world are shaped by its demands and imperatives. A transgressing wanderer reaches close to the surface of the subterranean world of the machines, and later reports:
"There was a ladder, made of some primӕval metal. The light from the railway fell upon its lowest rungs, and I saw that it led straight upwards out of the rubble at the bottom of the shaft. Perhaps our ancestors ran up and down it a dozen times daily, in their building. As I climbed, the rough edges cut through my gloves so that my hands bled. The light helped me for a little, and then came darkness and, worse still, silence which pierced my ears like a sword. The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power. Then I thought: "This silence means that I am doing wrong." But I heard voices in the silence, and again they strengthened me." He laughed. "I had need of them. The next moment I cracked my head against something."
The Machine Stops, (Forster, 1909)
I love the idea that the all-pervasive rumble of the machine is so constitutive of life that it withdraws from consciousness even as it guides our thoughts, and I'm going to return to the idea that how we think is shaped by the machines we live with. First though, I'm going to quickly talk about some work I've been doing with the digital writer, Tim Wright. In a project called 'Hauntology', we've been exploring how we can create interactive and participatory narratives using a combination of poetry, software, antique objects and digital sensors and circuits - and increasingly now - walking. In one piece, a chest of drawers was 'haunted' by the spirits of its previous owners. A user could access snippets of their lives by interacting with the chest of drawers and objects on and in it, as well as eventually 'haunting' it themselves with the sounds they left behind for the next users to hear.
We're currently exploring how we can use an old wooden box, wired up with an audio device and some sensors, to act as the focal device for a walking, talking, poetic experience based on the poetry of Thomas Hardy and the geography of the outskirts of Dorchester. In this we are trying to compose a narrative experience which is absorbing, authentic, haunting and provocative - out of antique bric-a-brac, digital sensors and media, physical space, sounds, smells, scenes, embodied and interpersonal interactions, and both reading and writing poetry. To this end I've been experimenting with wiring electronic devices into old wooden boxes.
One of the things I've noticed about the process is the feeling that the electronic systems and circuits, and the antique wooden boxes and drawers, are all exerting their own influence on the proceedings. They only allow certain sorts of behaviours and affordances to get the go-ahead. At first I thought this is an artefact of my own imprecision and inexperience. The further I get, though, the more I'm sure that the objects I work with have intentions of their own. Just as a sculptor seeks to find the form already within the matter at hand, as if discovering the spirit in the material, so I am collaborating with the devices I coerce and adapt to perform as they want to, as though I am obeying a ghost in their machine.
I'm now afraid that I'm sounding crazy, so I want to run through a quick and very partial history of writers collaborating with devices, to see if I'm alone in my craziness. I'm thinking here about the production of textual artefacts through the action of some sort of device - something I'm therefore going to call a device-oriented narrative - produced by some sort of rule or algorithm or heuristic process. I think this is a fairly good, low-level definition of a 'writing machine' - an apparatus or assemblage which performs some sort of function on the raw materials of textual production.
Here's an example of an electronically produced poem:
"Sentences begins.
money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken."
Sentences, (Hartman and Kenner, 1995)
Nick Montfort explains the provenance of this piece of text, taken from a book by Hartman and Kenner, "Sentences":
"To write Sentences, Hartman and Kenner took 457 19th-century "Sentences for Analysis and Parsing, Thayer Street Grammar School" and providentially generated an intermediate text, using Claude Shannon's Markov chain technique as implemented in TRAVESTY by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke. The resulting text was corrected and used as input to Hartman's program DIASTEXT, which carried out diastic selection as developed by Jackson Mac Low."
Sentences in 1k, Grand Text Auto, (Montfort, 2008)
I don't want to dwell on the detail of the particular processes that were used to produce these texts - just to note that Montfort's description illustrates very clearly the notion that a non-trivial operation has been performed to produce the work: the raw input is worked on in some way to produce a text at the end. In this case at least two sets of iterative actions were performed on the input to produce strangely evocative words. This therefore is a machine text.
I want to draw a distinction here from what Espen Aarseth has refered to as a 'cybertext' - a text which requires work on the part of the reader to traverse it. I want to think of texts which require some act of delegation by the writer to a machine to produce them. We could get horribly metaphysical about what constitutes mechanism, machinism and what does not. Is a pen a machine? A typewriter? While it is tempting to say that in the term 'machine' I exclude devices which merely reproduce mechanical extensions of the writer's actions, this may become a moot point as we proceed. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman in 1999, deals with the difference, for example, between a typewriter and a computer by noting the non-linear disruption that occurs when dematerialisation is introduced into the machinic action. I want to avoid this distinction, as there are perfectly good examples of writerly delegation that can occur within entirely material parameters.
I'm going to go with Richard Sennet's understanding of the machine in 'The Craftsman' of 2008, which I read as an intermediary device between the hand of the craftsman and the work itself, which effects some non-trivial transformation. This allows me to include devices such as horoscopes and Tarot cards, runes and tea-leaves, dice and difference engines, as well as electronic circuits, random algorithms, neural networks and artificial intelligences.
As the inclusion of Tarot hints, divination or possession by a deus ex machina seems to have a provenance in machine thinking. The 'I-Ching' was not only a repository of confucian wisdom, but a device for answering questions. Aarseth describes it thus:
"The I Ching is made up of sixty-four symbols, or hexagrams, which are the binary combinations of six whole or broken ("changing") lines [...] A hexagram [...] contains a main text and six small ones, one for each line. By manipulating three coins or forty-nine yarrow stalks according to a randomizing principle, the texts of two hexagrams are combined, producing one out of 4,096 possible texts. This contains the answer to a question the user has written down in advance (e.g., "How much rice should I plant this year?")."
Cybertext, (Aarseth, 1997)
From a European, humanist point of view, there is no particularly significant difference between a blind algorithm and the pronouncements of oracles and fortune-tellers - both are equally meaningless, and in the post-Enlightenment mind it is difficult to think otherwise. Educated people are supposed to scorn horoscopes and prophecies. Yet this adoption of a rational, materialistic ontology doesn't extend to our celebration of the transcendence of human agency and intelligence, with which we persevere in cherishing against the blind heuristic principle of automatons.
The automative principle of composition is evident in the work of Raymond Roussel, such as in Locus Solus from 1914. Although after his death he inspired the OuLiPo writers and the nouveau roman, during his lifetime, after some initial popularity amongst the surrealists, he was largely ridiculed and certainly critically panned. His works are very unusual, as can be gleaned from this account of his composition technique from John Ashbery:
"Sometimes he would take a phrase containing two words, each of which had a double meaning, and use the least likely ones as the nucleus of a story. Thus the phrase 'maison á espagnolettes' ("house with window latches") served as the basis for an episode in Impressions of Africa about a house (a royal family or house) descended from a pair of Spanish twin girls. [...]
"Just as the mechanical task of finding a rhyme sometimes inspires a poet to write a great line, [...] "rhymes for events" helped him to utilise his unconscious mind. "
'Introduction' to Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, (Ashbery, 1995 [1962])
The French surrealist writer Michel Leiris suggested that Roussel is tapping into an ancient tradition of eliciting myths from words, seeking out the 'disease of language', which is the source of mythology or collective unconscious." (ibid) Here, though Leiris is still perhaps seeking to legitimise the text for its inner human truth, its interpretation of the human unconscious. The text may be unconventionally produced, but its defender still seeks to recuperate it into the realm of human desires, motives and meanings, against the criticism that the work is a joke of no obvious inherent merit.
Similar recuperations might be made of other device-oriented narratives. In the 1920s the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, cited by Burroughs and Gysin later as an inspiration for their employment of the composition algorithm called 'the cut-up', apparently started a riot by pulling a poem out of a hat. In his dada manifesto, his wrote:
"TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love, (Tristan Tzara, 1920)
It is difficult not to see the dada movement and Burroughs' later adoption of the cut-up as much a political gesture as one of literary exploration - though this was certainly an ingredient in Burroughs' extensive use of it throughout novels like The Soft Machine, Cities of the Red Night and others. Burroughs describes it in 1961:
"The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and , still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident [...]
Take any poet or writer you fancy. Here, say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like."
The cut-up method of Brion Gysin, (Burroughs, 1961)
The casual abundance of poetry produced this way directly challenges the idea that a specially gifted and inspired writer is the essential ingredient in the writing - all that is necessary is a heuristic device and some raw materials on which to act. The results are often extremely powerful, as any reading from Burroughs' work will attest:
"Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of years and centuries - Wind through dusty offices and archives - Board Books scattered to rubbish heaps of the earth - Symbol books of the all-powerful board that had controlled thought feeling and movement of a planet from birth to death with iron claws of pain and pleasure - The whole structure of reality went up in silent explosions - Paper moon and muslin trees and in the black silver sky great rents as the cover of the world rained down - Biologic film went up.. . "raining dinosaurs" "It sometimes happens. . .just an old showman" Death takes over the game so many actors buildings and stars laid flat pieces of finance over the golf course summer afternoons bare feet waiting for rain smell of sickness in the room Switzerland Panama machine guns in Bagdad rising from the typewriter pieces of finance on the evening wind tin shares Buenos Aires Mr. Martin smiles old names waiting sad old tune haunted the last human attic."
The Soft Machine, (Burroughs, 1961)
The production of literary texts through machinic devices seems to proliferate in the middle of the 20th century. Writers like Barthelme, Beckett, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Robbe-Grillet, Perec and Calvino all produce texts which can be said to have been written with the aid of a heuristic device in the tradition of Roussel and Tzara. Often they are consciously political - David Porush in his work on cybernetic texts named after Burrough's novel, The Soft Machine, argues that such fiction:
"...far from being representative of a class of fiction in its decadence, is the most meaningful and hopeful sort of fiction. It cannot as a body be understood without constant reference to its source in a highly technologised society. For that very reason, however, it has the power to invent a new way of seeing, it offers a new language, and along the way it tells a fine, often amusing, often grim story about how far along we are."
The Soft Machine, (David Porush, 1985)
This odd combination of decadence and Brechtian self-reference and estrangement is also reminiscent of the flâneur and the psychogeographic movement: Benjamin's flâneur walked, either to revel in decadence, or to ambiguate the scopic regimes of the city's imperative to consume. No doubt, as in the situationist dérive and later psychogeographic texts and actions, there is an important emancipatory element: situationists walked to resist a 'world moving away in to representation'. The algorithmic obedience of tracing out a route that is arbitrarily pre/pro-scribed, but through the elective and playful devices of our own choosing, is actually, (ironically), a way to reassert the agency of the human and the individual against a machinic world of capital and convention.
However I'd like to go much further than Porush goes. He argues that one of the tropes of cybernetic fiction is that of self-dismantling. This is a deconstructive move, and resonates with the late 20th century concerns of continental philosophy, which seeks to dislodge the layers of meaning that stratify human existence in order to bring to notice the complex shifting network of linguistic and textual currents which inform our lives and institutions. However, I'd like to go further than seeing cybernetic texts and device-oriented narratives as merely deconstructive.
Consider that, even though we accept the premise of the intentional fallacy, we still privilege human intentionality as both qualitatively different from and somehow better than the nonhuman world of relations. So, even though we accept the notion that a text might be a device which can surrender novel meanings and effects which the author didn't intentionally encode there, we still find it hard to accept that an algorithmically generated text could offer anything of equal value: note that we still conventionally attribute the richness of a text, and its capacity for renewed interpretation, to the skill of its author - to have written something that 'transcends' the finitude of its human creator.
As I've suggested, we have tended to think of automatically produced texts as somehow lesser than those originated by acts of human imagination alone. It is with this tendency that we also consider the possibility of artificial intelligence as a watershed: the achievement of machine consciousness will be equivalent to lifting those machines up to some lofty, hard-to-reach transcendental threshold which makes them finally equal to humans. I'd prefer to see the problem from the other side, and wonder what it is we think is so different about human agency that separates us from the rest of the universe. This is not to reduce humans to mindlessness; Zizek puts it:
"It is here that the "reductionist" project goes wrong: the problem is not how to reduce mind to neuronal "material" processes [...] but, rather, to grasp how mind can emerge only through being embedded in the network of social relations and material supplements. In other words, the true problem is not "How, if at all, could machines IMITATE the human mind?," but, "How does the very identity of human mind rely on external mechanical supplements? How does it incorporate machines?"
Organs Without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze, (Zizek, 2008)
This is not just deconstruction (in which a philosophy of consciousness gives way to a philosophy of linguistics and signification), but a shift towards "placing humans and nonhumans on an equal footing". To go further then, we have to re-equate humans with the menagerie of other things in the world, the nonhuman - what object-oriented ontologists have called a flat ontology.
Levi Bryant has outlined a book-project called The Domestication of Humans in which he considers the way that plants and microbes have transformed human beings:
"The whole point of such a project, of course, is to develop enhanced techniques for thinking in terms of flat ontology. When posing questions in the humanities our tendency is to think in terms of unilateral determination. We talk about humans structuring reality through their perceptions, concepts, and signs, treating the process of structuration as proceeding from the human towards a sort of gooey chaos that then gets structured by the human. Flat ontology calls for bilateral determination, where determination doesn't simply run from human to world, but where all sorts of other entities structure humans and societies as well."
The Domestication of Humans, (Bryant, 2010)
Bryant derives this notion of a flat ontology alongside Graham Harman, who in turn cites Latour's Irreductions as a breakthrough in terms of escaping the realm of the human. Adrift on a sea of other agents and irreducible entities, Harman argues that we should start to rethink the bustling nature of the world of objects, amongst whom the human object is a mere one among many:
"Even as the philosophy of language and its supposedly reactionary opponents both declare victory, the arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of "access" to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.
"All of these entities roam across the cosmos, inflicting blessings and punishments on everything they touch, perishing without a trace or spreading their powers further, as if a million animals had broken free from a zoo in some Tibetan cosmology."
Object Oriented Philosophy, (Harman, 1999)
Andrew Pickering considers the consequences of putting human and nonhuman agency on the same footing. His work The Mangle of Practice from 1995 looks at the way that scientific work proceeds in practice, and argues that far from being the logical, deductive unfolding of evidential knowledge, this picture is a retrospective portrait imposed on a messy sequence of stumbling events in which human goals have strived and struggled with the material agency of machinic experimentation. Work of this kind (and I argue that there is a direct parallel here to the way that writers write and texts are produced) is the product of a mangling of ideas and forces, machines and hunches, objects and products. This is a dance of agency between the human and nonhuman, in which such apparently crucial phenomena as human intentionality emerge from the interplay of possibilities and events, "brought to heel by the cultures in which they are situated":
"Scientists do not simply fix their goals once and for all and stick to them, come what may. In the struggles with material agency that I call tuning, plans and goals are at stake and liable to revision. And thus the intentional character of human agency has a further aspect of temporal emergence, being reconfigured itself in the real time of practice, as well as a further aspect of intertwining with material agency, being reciprocally redefined with the contours of material agency in tuning."
The Mangle of Practice, (Pickering, 1995)
So I want to conclude by suggesting that I was right to feel that my machines are trying to have their own way. Me and my machines are, to use Pickering's terms, tuning each other to our own 'agenda'. We are both devices which perform machinic captures of input material and transform them into artefacts which, in Tzara's phrase, resemble ourselves. So the computers, circuits, dice, algorithms, typewriters, pens - and even the words themselves - are cybernetic machines with which we are forced into collaboration and partnership, rather than mastery.
Italo Calvino confirms this from his own experience of writing:
"Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to make one word stay put after another by following certain definite rules; or more often, rules that were neither definite nor definable, but that might be extracted from a series of examples, or rules made up for the occasion - that is to say, derived from the rules followed by other writers. [...] The "I" of the author is dissolved in the writing. [...] Writers, as they have always been up to now, are already writing machines; or at least they are when things are going well. [...] And so the author vanishes - that spoiled child of ignorance - to give place to a more thoughtful person, a person who will know that the author is a machine, and will know how this machine works."
Cybernetics and Ghosts, (Calvino, 1967)
Bibliography
Forster, E. M., 1909, The Machine Stops [Online: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html]
Hartman, C. O. & Kenner, H., Sentences, Sun and Moon Press, New American Poetry Series: 18, 1995
Montfort, N., 2008, 'Sentences in 1k', Grand Text Auto [Online: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/12/31/sentences-in-1k/]
Aarseth, E., 1997, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Baltimore: JHUP
Hayles, N. K., 1999. How We Became Posthuman, Chicago: UCP
Sennett, R., 2008, The Craftsman, London: Allen Lane
Roussel, R., 1914, Locus Solus, [Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19149/19149-h/19149-h.htm]
Ashbery, J., 1995 [1962], 'Introduction' in Roussel, R., 1995, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Cambridge, MA: Exact ChangeLeiris, M., 1987, Roussel l'ingénue, Paris: Fata Morgana
Tzara, T., 1920, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love, [Online: http://www.391.org/manifestos/19201212tristantzara_dmonflabl.htm]
Burroughs, W. S., 1961, 'The cut-up method of Brion Gysin' in The Third Mind, New York: The Viking Press
Burroughs, W. S., 1966 [1961], The Soft Machine, Paris: Olympia Press
Porush, D., 1985, The Soft Machine, New York: Methuen
Zizek, S., 2008, Organs Without Bodies - Gilles Deleuze [Online: http://www.lacan.com/zizsalsation.html]
Bryant, L., 2010, 'The Domestication of Humans', Larval Subjects [Online: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/the-domestication-of-humans/]
Harman, G., 2010, 'Object-Oriented Philosophy' in Towards Speculative Realism, Ropley: Zero Books
Pickering, A., 1995, The Mangle of Practice, London: Duke
Calvino, I., 1997 [1967], 'Cybernetics & Ghosts', in The Literature Machine, London: Vintage
Tim Wright, digital writer / cross-platform produce [Online: http://timwright.typepad.com
The Internet as a public arena for research: how do we balance the pursuit of knowledge with care for those we want to know?
Wednesday, 12 January, 2011 - 14:13
Today I presented a brief paper to Bournemouth University's Postgraduate Research Conference. Not trusting myself to say off-the-cuff what I wanted to say inside the 12 minute allocation, I read this pre-written piece. I have obfuscated the sources I critique, for reasons which will become clear.
My presentation is about the ethics of Internet research, especially with regard to vulnerable people, and the problems that arise from the models we use to conceptualise the environment in which we carry out our work.
It seems easy to grant that aside from some edge considerations, there is a sort of equivalence between face-to-face and online interactions, between physical and virtual spaces - particularly in academia, where our textual outputs are intended to be sufficient for the advancement of our work. The trade-offs seem to be marginal: some loss of informal face-to-face contact is off-set by the advantages of efficiency, speed, cost-saving, and maybe even innovation.
Indeed, the fact that we successfully import metaphors from the real world into the online world is what enables many different walks of life to achieve in digital environments what they would also normally manage in the real world. These are metaphors that aren't necessary properties of the web, but that we use to make it manageable: models from the material world such as pages and buttons, activities like surfing and networking, and concepts like sites and spaces. We call it cyberspace, and it can feel very like the other spaces we inhabit with our bodies.
I want to suggest that the easy equivalence we make between online and offline, and physical and virtual space, is much more problematic. This issue has arisen for me through considering some of the ethical problems that arise from using the ever-expanding wealth of raw material on the web as evidence in research.
I'm interested in how people use the online world when they are bereaved. As time goes by, more of us are exposed to death on the web - what to do with the Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles of loved ones who have died, online commemorative websites, and so on. How do people who are mourning loved ones use online spaces to express their grief, or seek out support from others? Photo-sharing sites have groups dedicated to expressing grief through images; fashion sites find themselves hosting users who repurpose the site tools to discuss their loss; and forums dedicated to supporting bereavement through both informal support and professionalised services proliferate.
These phenomena raise questions about how seeking out online support might be helpful, perhaps through the chance to memorialise loved ones, or perhaps because sometimes the ambiguity of anonymous strangers on the web makes disclosure easier. Mourning is often a difficult subject to deal with in day-to-day life - we expect the grief-stricken to absent themselves from the office or social occasions until they are competent to cope with them. Unwelcome expressions of grief can be embarrassing or even seen as pathological. Do these questions of etiquette and emotion prevail online much as they do offline? Do online spaces provide therapeutic opportunities which might be more scarce in the fleshy world? Does the availability and peculiar permanence of online talk make mourning problematic - perhaps by extending the grieving period, or by exposing people to the trolls?
My research therefore is partly an investigation into the differences and similarities between virtual and real spaces. There are many comparable studies which ask this question through the lens of some specific issue, and there are guidelines as to how to deal with the ethics of this kind of research. After some reflection on some of those other studies, I have taken a somewhat hardline approach, and placed rather more burdensome ethical constraints on my research project than I might otherwise have done.
To explain these constraints, I'm going to mention a study from 2009 of an online space which is dedicated to the subject of gynecomastia - or the 'moob-job'. Men who are considering the procedure, undergoing it, or who are post-operative, regularly contribute to the site, which was studied by a group of psychologists in 2007, using interpretive phenomenological analysis to understand the experiences of these men. I wish to show that the ethical approaches and arguments they used, quite legitimately, are flawed in ways that force me to rethink the priorities at work in this sort of academic exercise. Perhaps even more than the bereaved, men with concerns about body image are a group who should not lightly be objectified by an academic project.
The authors cite the guidelines drawn up by the British Psychological Society for conducting research online. One might summarise them by saying that participants in Internet Mediated Research (IMR)
"can be identifiable or anonymous; they can explicitly consent to participate, or they can be invisibly observed without their knowledge."
The guidelines go on to state that strong justifications should be provided for covert non-participant observation - what we might in this context call "lurking" - and that consent should be sought unless the environment is such that "people would 'reasonably expect to be observed by strangers'."
Exactly what criteria qualify public spaces as those in which people would reasonably expect to be observed is not specified in the BPS guidelines, but left to be established in the body of work which grows around the discipline.
The authors of the gynecomastia support group study note that it is the contributors' expectation of their messages being visible to other anonymous users of the web which brings their content into the public domain. Content accessible without registration or password barriers effectively passes into public ownership. They also cite an earlier paper reporting about a website supporting anorexia nervosa which argued that study of content in the public domain is akin to "naturalistic observation in a public space" and that the openness of the web therefore "does not raise concerns of invading privacy."
The gynecomastia study also notes the possible disruption that disclosing the investigators' presence might cause to the integrity of the environment that they are studying. It is evident that they are trying to ensure that their work is ethically sound and demonstrates a care towards their subjects, and I don't wish to imply otherwise. But I do want to suggest that this implementation of research guidelines is flawed because it wants to accept certain equivalences between the open internet and public space (such as a supposed ability to undertake naturalistic observation without disturbing the phenomenon being observed), but ignore non-equivalences (such as the fact that covert observation of such intimate communications is ordinarily impossible in public spaces, not least because open discussion of sensitive topics is very rare).
The study in question makes further trouble for itself where it creditably seeks to anonymise sources. Obfuscating quotes is generally thought to be a sound tactic in protecting the individuals who may have made their own efforts to conceal their 'real-world' identity in their online profiles, but may have done so inexpertly. They may, for example, have chosen an obscure 'handle' or login-name, but have nevertheless signed off posts with their actual forenames. To avoid these individuals being found via search engines, the authors state that they performed identifiability testing by searching for direct quotes from individual posts were in Google, which did not retrieve the site in question or the messages that had been appropriated.
This test sadly demonstrates a poor understanding of the operation of Google's index: that it does not find sources at any given moment does not preclude the index being updated to include them at a subsequent date. Indeed when I searched Google for the quotations presented in the article, direct links to the original sources were listed. Again, this error does not show unethical behaviour: merely that an ethical guideline has been followed in letter but not necessarily understood in practice.
These critiques of the ethical approach take just some of the more obvious problems with abstract guidelines as they are implemented; and doesn't even start to address other problems with lurking and appropriation, such as the hit counts, visible to site-admins, that researchers contribute to sites; or the eye-balls they bring which may in some cases contribute to advertising revenue; or the general tacit deceptions they must engage in simply to carry out observation.
I want to suggest that importing the metaphor of "public space" into an intimate online discussion is problematic because it buys the researcher the ethical justification they require, but largely ignores the epistemological and ethical non-equivalences. I'd argue that people simply don't go online and talk to each other as though their words are being recorded and broadcast, and the permanent visibility of online discourse is a side-effect, rather than a primary concern, when it comes to a user's motivation to participate in online discussions or contribute their creative work to a community. I'd prefer to argue that the actual space that the user occupies when contributing to an online forum plays a much more crucial role in determining the level of disclosure they are willing to engage in, not to mention the level of trust and intimacy that the visible community creates. This may often actually be the workplace, or bedroom, rather than a public space.
Even where forum users are in public spaces, there may be a huge mismatch between what they will willingly write in the context of a post from a mobile phone, and what they will say to the person sitting next to them. To discard these sorts of considerations is, I would argue, to make epistemological errors, as well as ethical mistakes, and ultimately is a consequence of prioritising the academic generation of knowledge over the well-being of subjects.
The consequence of these concerns for me is to adopt an alternative approach, which does not solve the problems raised, but swaps one set of challenges which I find ethically unjustifiable for another set which I am more willing to defend. So I will be making full disclosure in any online spaces I enter before I undertake any observation; I will not be using material without the full informed consent of the original contributor; and in the event that any community feels my presence as a researcher to be intrusive enough to ask me to leave, I will promise to do so. This strategy at least offers the hope that the research process will be a consensual collaboration with participants, rather than a deceptive objectification of them: when dealing with communities of people we might class as vulnerable, this must surely be the preferable option.
So the project is now such that it makes no claim to be objective in a positivist sense, but rather is a fully-blown form of participative and ethnographic phenomenology. This brings another set of epistemological challenges and ethical quandaries, but I'd also suggest that Internet research which does choose to use covert observation may need to find alternative justifications.
Media & The Body
Thursday, 16 December, 2010 - 22:36
This week I finished teaching a new unit - Media & The Body. As is often the case when I teach a new unit for the first time, there's some openness and uncertainty about where exactly it will go. I've just written up the essay questions - taking topics which the students themselves suggested they'd like to write about and agreed in the final session, and I've firmed them up into nice academic-sounding words. As I did so, I noticed just how much material we managed to cover and the breadth of ideas the participants brought to each session. The questions tell the story really. Thanks to all students for making it so stimulating!
In games, websites and other online spaces, complex psychological relationships evolve between computer users and their avatars. Discuss these relationships, and the way that the body features in their development.
Contemporary commercial developments in the creation of virtual realities, video-game worlds, and other digital environments are striving to push the limits of verisimilitude and naturalism. Discuss ways in which a consideration of embodiment can inform or explain these developments.
Futurists and other commentators on advances in human sciences speak of transhumanism - the human who is a hybrid of biology and technology. What are the consequences of self-directed evolution for humans and their bodies?
Humans augment their bodies in cybernetic ways. Discuss the nature of cyborg bodies and the practical and ethical challenges they present.
A body is both something that we have, as well as who we are. In what ways are our bodies integral to our identities?
The disembodied performances of identity that online media permit open up questions of authenticity and fantasy. Discuss the issues that are called into question by identity play.
In what ways are the spaces, architectures and environments we produce and inhabit extensions of the body?
By casting humans into a universe of alternative and alien species, science fiction offers a imaginative space for us to meditate the limits and possibilities of our bodies and minds. Discuss.
Contemporary consumer electronics, alongside locative social tools, are fostering a hybrid or augmented experience of public spaces. Examine the nature and significance of these phenomena.
The human, their body, their mind and their technology are fundamentally entwined, and as humans evolve, so do the relationships between each of these aspects. What do past examples of technological, cognitive and embodied change tell us about future possibilities?
The body is a canvas on which meanings can be inscribed - from self harm, through tattoos, to body paint, make-up and adornment. Consider the body as a medium for coping and self-expression.
Anachronistic workers
Wednesday, 15 December, 2010 - 22:59
Someone asks, who are the workers? In so asking they suggest my Marxist reference to 'the worker' is anachronistic, or that by workers I must mean the 'chavs', or the immigrants who routinely take up the most menial jobs in society (and therefore could not possibly benefit from a Higher Education system).
Paradoxically, many people rebut polemics against the Coalition government's spending cuts, or criticise 'whinging' protesters, by demanding that they should get a job and stop relying on those who WORK! (The word is usually capitalised, thereby denoting what a RADICAL POLITICAL ACTION going to work really is).
The good honest worker, that mythical hero we all become when we think of how we sacrifice our precious free time to pay our way. All we must do is work, and the world around us magically transforms into a place of merit and recognition, advancement and reward, or a benign adventureland in which the vulnerable can finally sip from the luxurious cup of welfare.
The sign-system mobilised by such appeals to work carry the implication that the harder we work, the more deserving we are, and the better off we will be. He who works longest reaps the most reward. It feels almost insulting to point out the obvious fact - how can it be necessary to point it out!? - that it is generally those who work longest who earn the least, that value is transferred from the worker (whose labour value is diminished) to the commodity (whose fetishisation 'magically' creates value), and that those with the luxury of capital make a profit from those without it? It's Marxism 101, and I'd tire of teaching it if it were not so fucking fundamental to understanding the inequality in society.
Who I Am and Where I Am
Tuesday, 14 December, 2010 - 22:00
I like the regular synopsis Warren Ellis posts every month or so, in which he sums up his working identity in a short blog. I want to do the same, as I'm now planning to formally move my PhD research into the public arena. The academic name for what I'm starting soon is 'data-collection' or 'data-gathering', as though there are data just out there, lying around waiting for a naive researcher to come and stumble over them. However, research is not neutral, it is an intervention. Data are made, not found.
So my working identity is a marker, outlining my research and the ethical approach I promise to stick to. If I am going to make some data, this outline will be the public statement as to how I shall go about it. It is a first draft, needing amendment, and I'll need to make a shorter, bullet version, which I can use as a signature or profile description. I'll also need a longer version explaining in more depth the code of conduct I'll be guaranteeing, and the support or counselling I can arrange or facilitate for anyone who finds themselves affected by my work. And I am also presenting a short paper in the new year in a postgrad conference at BU, in which I'll outline how the priority of ethics over knowledge works epistemologically. I'll post that too, and anyone who needs to check up on me and my academic provenance will be able to do so easily. If you have any comments, suggestions or insults, I'll be very glad to hear them.
My name is Joe Flintham. I am a lecturer and researcher at Bournemouth University. I teach Interactive Media in The Media School, and am working towards a PhD in the School of Health and Social Care. The subject I'm researching is how people who are bereaved use online spaces. I'd like to understand how virtual communities offer support for people who are mourning, and what it means to them to be able to memorialise their loved ones, in words or pictures, in online spaces.
I would like to understand more about these online environments by entering them and becoming one of the people who participate in them, in order to learn more about how support for the grieving process can be found online; I'd also like to ask any individuals who are willing to do so, to talk to me in depth about their online lives, so that I can learn more about their experiences and draw on this knowledge for my academic work.
I will make every effort not to intrude in an unwelcome way on the grief of any individuals, or abuse the hospitality of any community. I guarantee that I will not quote or appropriate anything that anyone writes or submits to any online space without their express consent. I also understand that individuals or communities may feel my presence interrupts or interferes with the trust and support that their environment provides, and in such cases I promise to withdraw if asked to do so.
I hope that the research work I do might contribute to the life of online communities and the support they offer to people who are bereaved, and I undertake to share all of the outcomes of the work with all who contribute to it. My aim is to try to ensure that my work is guided by a duty of care to people who are involved in it and any others whom it touches. As such, my first priority will be an ethical concern for people's well-being, and that concern will then guide the direction of the research.
Workers and intellectuals
Monday, 13 December, 2010 - 23:57
While thinking about Gramsci last week, I was reminded of his emphasis on the solidarity of intellectuals with workers. Who are these intellectuals he talks about? He distinguishes between two different kinds: the "traditional" and the "organic". The former, traditional, intellectuals emerge, seemingly legitimately, from the pre-existing structures of society, and thus appear to have relative autonomy, and somehow represent independence from political interference or interest: clericy, academics, philosophers, theorists - he calls them a "stratum of administrators". The latter, organic, intellectuals are those who are created as part of the emergence of social classes and structures. Gramsci offers the example of capitalist entrepreneurs who, as part of their endeavour, produce a host of technical advisors, organisers, managers and specialists who aid, lubricate and support their entrepreneurial adventures.
As I've said, I read Gramsci as a teacher who is wiser than me, so when troubled by something he suggests, I am forced to grapple with it seriously, rather than gloss over it. Gramsci is famous for his assertion that "all men are philosophers", but this simply entails the further question - what is the function of the intellectual dimension of each person, in the struggle for emancipation and enfranchisement?
The answer may seem to lie in the "traditional" intelligentsia, who have retained their autonomy from the dominant political class, rather than the "organic " intellectuals whose knowledge is infected by coercion into the dominant mode of production. What would be necessary, were this true, would be for the "traditional" intellectuals, the academics and scholars, scientists and theorists, to teach the lowly, "organic" intellectuals. Indeed much contemporary discourse on the threat to the university implies this analysis: rising tuition fees and withdrawal of funding from arts and humanities means that the university system is in danger of being co-opted into subservience to the dominant mode of neoliberal production, being stripped of its historical intellectual autonomy, and directed at instrumental, commercial subjects which will drive capital growth in the economy, because under the new arrangements it will be limited to the richest in society and through privatisation, arcane or unprofitable subjects will go to the wall in favour of crowd-pleasing employment-guaranteeing degrees.
But here's what Gramsci says:
The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the muscular-nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the muscular-nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world. The traditional and vulgarised type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist. Therefore journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers, artists, also regard themselves as the "true" intellectuals. In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual.
The Formation of the Intellectuals by Antonio Gramsci
Technical education, not education which aims at the production of the man of letters, must inform the new, necessary stratum of intellectuals - and this emphasis inverts the obvious answer outlined above. Far from valuing the autonomy of a layer of intellectuals detached from the dominant mode of production, Gramsci seems to critique intellectual activity that is not engaged with 'muscular-nervous' (i.e. practical) effort. Instead of lumping the "organic" intellectuals in with the dominant classes their efforts serve, he argues that it is this body of intellectuals that need to be fostered - and at that, through development of their practical, instrumental abilities, rather than their elevation into lofty academic "eloquence":
The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, "permanent persuader" and not just a simple orator (but superior at the same time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique-as-work one proceeds to technique-as-science and to the humanistic conception of history, without which one remains "specialised" and does not become "directive" (specialised and political).
Or, you might say, all talk, no action. What is it in this critique of the "eloquence" of the traditional intellectual that is not enough? Isn't it the very separation of the academy from the consciousness of the worker that renders it extraneous? If that were all, then it might be enough simply to educate the worker into the concerns of the academy. But that would simply be an attempt to assimilate and thereby eradicate the very consciousness of the worker, in the mold of Matthew Arnold's vision of a universal education system that taught all children ancient Greek so that they could avoid being too anarchic. Actually Gramsci seems to be arguing that progress towards a new emancipatory hegemony requires a class of intellectuals that is not separate from the workers, but embedded in it and thus with its hands on the machines, engaged in the reproduction of the organs of society.
One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer "ideologically" the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals.
The dominant class wishes to colonise and normalise both classes of intellectuals. The problem for the university is that it imagines itself to be separate from the bourgeoisie, but in solidarity with the worker. In fact the reverse is all too true. The university should be invaded by the masses, not because the academy can transform them into lofty thinkers, but so that the workers can put knowledge to their own ends. Resistance must be on those terms, not the protectionism that characterises much of the current defence of the HE sector. As Armin Medosch wrote a couple of days ago,
"[the university system] reproduces internally the class structure of society, where the show is run by non-teaching managers, while a few celebrity professors benefit and the majority are just intellectual wage workers adjusting to different levels of exploitation and alienation. If the students really care for education as a public good they would be well advised not only to defend the status quo but raise maximalist demands, and simultaneously, as already happens in the many occupations and self-teaching experiments, to seek to re-invent university from below, redefine what counts as knowledge and science, and to experiment with new learning and teaching techniques and devices which are more egalitarian and less tainted by the fetishisation of knowledge in the class structure of 'cognitive' informational capitalism."
The university is already private, rich-favoured, neoliberal. The fight should be to seize the opportunity to reform it in the image of the worker, rather than the rich.
Promises
Thursday, 09 December, 2010 - 21:05
Here's a message for the Liberal Democrats if ever there was one. There's little condemnation of the Tories (we know they're robber barons); Labour are essentially invisible but did what oppositions do and voted against the coalition's bill. But the Lib Dems are the king-makers, the party that want to say they are the key to ensuring progressive policies are tabled and adopted. "Progressive" is the word they try to buy. Well Paulo Freire, the Brazilian teacher and thinker, has something to say about being a progressive.
If we are progressive, if we have more experience as opposition than as government, we must be reminded that, in such a historic moment as ours, it is easier to win elections than it is to govern. As we strongly react against the defamatory accusations leveled against us, may we not allow ourselves to adopt the same untruthful language used against us?
We must also observe, with ethical rigor, our right and our duty to speak about how we intend to govern and avoid demagogic promises or impossible dreams. If, in order to win an election, I needed to make a false promise, it would be preferable to lose and continue my political-pedagogical militancy, persevering in my ethical position.It is fundamental not to give in to the temptation of believing that the ends justify the means, making condemnable agreements and deals with antagonistic forces. If I am progressive, I cannot join forces with those who deny the popular classes a voice.
Pedagogy of the Heart by Paulo Freire
If, in order to win an election, I needed to make a false promise, it would be preferable to lose . . . Are we supposed to think that Paulo Freire is somehow naive for believing that ethics should play a role in political decisions? Does some discourse of realpolitik mean we should discard the means in favour of ends? That is exactly what he calls "banking education": manipulating education to ensure that its beneficiaries don't go "above and beyond ideology". Give me an education of naivety any day, and hound those charlatan hypocrites out of Westminster.
Screenspace
Wednesday, 08 December, 2010 - 23:25
No time to write anything today. Except to say that the object that forms from the components of a human being and a web connected interface, comprises a paradoxical combination of public and private: at once intimate and facilitating disclosure, yet at the same time superficial, inattentive, surface-skating.
Gramsci on education
Tuesday, 07 December, 2010 - 21:49
I agree with pretty much everything that Gramsci wrote. My admiration for the man, who wrote a lot of his most important work from a prison cell during an 11-year incarceration at the hands of Mussolini, which ended only months before his death, only deepens the more I learn about him - his outsider status, his compassion, his intellect, his political commitment, and the almost uncanny resonance with and relevance to the contemporary world his writing still offers. So I'm going to quote him at length, since he puts it all better than me.
A proletarian, no matter how intelligent, no matter how fit to become a man of culture, is forced either to squander his qualities on some other activity, or else to become a rebel and autodidact - i.e. (apart from some notable exceptions) a mediocrity, a man who cannot give all he could have given had he been completed and strengthened by the discipline of school. Culture is a privilege. Education is a privilege. And we do not want it to be so. All young people should be equal before culture. The state should not be financing out of everybody's money the education even of mediocre and gormless children of wealthy parents while it excludes the able and intelligent children of proletarians. Middle and high schools should be only for those who can demonstrate that they are worthy of it. And if it is in the public interest that such forms of education should exist, preferably supported and regulated by the state, then it is also in the public interest that they should be open to all intelligent children, regardless of their economic potential. Collective sacrifice is justified only when it benefits those who are most deserving. Therefore, this collective sacrifice should serve especially to give the most deserving children that economic independence they need if they are to devote their time to serious study.
The proletariat, which is excluded from the middle and high schools as a result of the present social conditions - conditions which ensure that the division of labour between men is unnatural (not being based on different capacities) and so retards and is inimical to production - has to fall back on the parallel educational system: the technical and vocational colleges. As a result of the anti-democratic restrictions imposed by the state budget, the technical colleges, which were set up along democratic lines by the Casati ministry, have undergone a transformation that has largely destroyed their nature. In most cases they have become mere superfetations of the classical schools, and an innocent outlet for the petty bourgeois mania for finding a secure job. The continually rising entrance fees, and the particular prospects they open up in practical life, have turned these schools too into a privilege. Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the proletariat is automatically excluded from them on account of the uncertain and precarious life which the wage earner is forced to lead - the sort of life which is certainly not the most propitious for fruitfully following a course of study.
What the proletariat needs is an educational system that is open to all. A system in which the child is allowed to develop and mature and acquire those general features that serve to develop character. In a word, a humanistic school, as conceived by the ancients, and more recently by the men of the Renaissance. A school which does not mortgage the child's future, a school that does not force the child's will, his intelligence and growing awareness to run along tracks to a predetermined station. A school of freedom and free initiative, not a school of slavery and mechanical precision. The children of proletarians too should have all possibilities open to them; they should be able to develop their own individuality in the optimal way, and hence in the most productive way for both themselves and society. Technical schools should not be allowed to become incubators of little monsters aridly trained for a job, with no general ideas, no general culture, no intellectual stimulation, but only an infallible eye and a firm hand. Technical education too helps a child to blossom into an adult - so long as it is educative and not simply informative, simply passing on manual techniques.
Of course, meanly bourgeois industrialists might prefer to have workers who were more machines than men. But the sacrifices which everyone in society willingly makes in order to foster improvements and nourish the best and most perfect men who will improve it still more - these sacrifices must bring benefits to the whole of society, not just to one category of people or one class.
It is a problem of right and of force. The proletariat must stay alert, to prevent another abuse being added to the many it already suffers.
Men or Machines? by Antonio Gramsci, 1914
I'll be protesting against the government's forthcoming proposals. I'll be demonstrating in favour of free education, the abolition of fees, the abandonment of the government's cuts-agenda, the expansion of the welfare state, the support of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, the taxation of the very wealthy, the nationalisation of banks and public amenities, the dismantling of the financial system, disarmament - and then, when the electoral choices that we're trying to decide between are not neoliberalism, venal opportunism or outright philistine exploitation, but are instead socialism, communism or anarchism - then, I will be satisfied.
Objects, knowledge and ethics
Monday, 06 December, 2010 - 22:08
It's been a fascinating few days watching the SR / OOO and the Metaphysics and Things conferences unfold online in the last few days - Bogost, Bryant, Morton, Harman, Haraway, Stengers, Shaviro and others on objects and units, processes and procedures, rhetoric and semiotics. It's very stimulating to see ideas open up and develop nuance as they get pulled in different directions by new combinations of cast members. I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into the detail soon - particularly what strikes me as a very Latourian atmosphere clinging to some of the outcomes, (by which I mean, a healthy and indiscriminate abundance of agents together translating and transforming the world). In the meantime, I want to return to the stubborn subject of withdrawn objects.
A few days ago Graham Harman called out a certain approach to making philosophical arguments, naming it trumpery - "the triumphalistic one-upping of positions that are defined as naive/traditionalistic" - particularly with reference to arguments which want to "denounce hidden unities behind the plurality of surface-effects . . . It's time to recover these bemoaned hidden unities lying behind appearance, rather than trumping them with easy avant garde positions that are now much too banal to be avant garde."
I don't know whether this was specifically in reference to a post of mine Graham linked to earlier; in that post I said, "I just want to dispel hidden realities which betray their appearances, or illusory facades which belie some more authentic realm" - which is pretty close to the position Graham dislikes.
I should point out that I think my position is more a form of specious dilettantism than avant garde trumpery. I'm an autodidact when it comes to philosophy, and have no real interest in making deep ontological commitments one way or the other; I am deeply interested, though, in how philosophies make me feel - their affect and the aesthetic experiences they evoke. So far as I am a professional academic / researcher (which is not very far), I'd say I'm in the phenomenological camp which denies that we can speak of things lying outside our experience without chasing ghosts and hallucinations. One of the things I love most about engaging with philosophy is the sense that I'm entering a world of abysses, ghouls, hauntings and the supernatural...
This position is often written off as a sort of postmodern cop-out: it flies in the face of common sense (because spades are spades and arche-fossils are arche-fossils); it insults scientific progress whose methods, its proponents constantly remind us, are the only valid means of investigating the world; it always escapes affirmation and, cowardly, never risks itself in defence of a particular worldview or outlook; it disappears (often accompanied by obscurantism) into surfaces, play, simulacra, language, representation - or, inevitably, up its own arse.
However, there is something about this position (which I prefer to call anti-foundationalist than postmodern), which seems to me to be crucial. Rorty describes it in Consequences of Pragmatism:
Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form "There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you." This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre's remark:
"Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are."
This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together - the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.
Consequences of Pragmatism by Richard Rorty
If there is no universal truth to which we can appeal when the secret police come to the door, then all we can do is decide what we want to defend, and defend it as best we can. If there is no fallback position, no 'criterion' outside of human dealings to appeal to, no God, or universal morality, or even genetic imperative, all that is open to us is to make our case - the last thing we can be is complacent. It is, no doubt, undergraduate philosophy 101, but I see no way to go about epistemology, ontology, metaphysics or practical philosophy of any sort, without first taking up an ethical position.
Attendant to this position, for me, there must also be two further consequences: a suspicion of anything that might claim to be a more "authentic" or "foundational" realm than the surfaces amongst which we live our effervescent, sensual lives; and also a recognition that a world without foundations is one where the irresistible force can be resisted, the unstoppable object can be stopped, the impassable obstacle can be passed, and the hard kernel of things can be cracked.
That was all a long, round-about way of saying that I'm not so much a trumper as a dilettante, and not so much a dilettante as a double agent. I also don't want to imply that objects that withdraw are the harbingers of enslavement. Just that I want to understand the meaning of hidden realities. What is it that is hiding? Does it hide from everything? And why is it hiding from me?
Inextinguishable
Thursday, 02 December, 2010 - 23:52
- on lines from Rilke
Gouge out my eyes:
I still see you.
Burst my eardrums:
I still hear your voice.
Hack off my hands:
I still feel you.
Pluck out my tongue:
It still probes your mouth.
Chop off my genitals:
I still have carnal knowledge of you.
Bleed me to death:
I am still hot for you.
Cut out my heart:
It still beats for you.
Dash out my brains:
You are in my bones.
Cremate me:
You are in my ashes.
Scatter them:
You are in every particle.
Variations On A Theme Of Rilke by Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is my grandfather. This poem has always been one of my favourites. I was reminded of it last night, while watching Graham Harman's fantastic lecture on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology at the "Hello Everything" conference. He uses an analogy about cotton and fire to illustrate the withdrawn dimensions of reality that can never be accessed by any kind of relation. Knowledge can never exhaust the objects it encounters: even fire does not exhaust the cotton it encounters.
I imagine a sudden spark catch hold of the cotton, triggering a whooomff of flames engulfing the soft cotton. The fibres glow and crackle, but quickly start to blacken into sooty embers, and disintegrate. As they sliver and spread, there are specks and motes of pitchy, carbonised cellulose dispersing in the air, jetting upwards on the crest of fiery waves or drifting sideways and earthward. Somewhere in that conflagration the cotton is destroyed - the object that was some cotton is now a crowd of particles dispersing in the air, a de-condensing collection of new, smaller objects. Exactly where it is, in the process of that disassembling, that the cotton's destruction occurs - at which point the cotton is translated into its disaggregate particulate components - is ambiguous: is it the instant the fire first catches the flammable edges of the white plant fluff, or when each last part of coherent fibre is finally desiccated and splintered? Is there a gradient of dispersal, or a quantum jump - is "being" on a spectrum or is it a lump?
Michael at Archive Fire uses the example of a horse eating an apple:
An apple is partially 'withdrawn' from a horse who holds it in its teeth because the teeth of the horse are only in contact with the skin of the apple, leaving the inner non-skin parts of the apple "hidden" and temporarily in excess of the horses bite. So the horse can be said to be in direct contact with the real apple, however not in its entirety. There are aspects of the apple that are partially withdrawn. But when the horse bites into the apple a 'deeper' kind of access is granted, the apple's individuality has been compromised, and when the horse subsequently begins to digest the apple the very distinction between the apple and the horse begins to break down. In this example the interaction between apple and horse goes from partial contact and withdrawnness to deeper disclosure and eventually to absorption in such a manner that completely obviates the need to posit any sort of unbridgeable 'gap' between either the two objects in themselves', or between the horse's encounter with the apple and its experience of it. In an intimately enmeshed and complicated cosmos these things often touch, mix and mingle in ways that are specific to what they in fact are.
The Depth of Things - Part 1: Conjuring the Gap by michael of Archive Fire
Here's what I feel, even if I don't really know it - my intuition: my identity is not hermetically sealed from the world - rather my consciousness is ecologically entwined with the environment in which it moves; my body is not a finitely bounded unity, but a breathing, drinking, leaking density plugged into the material world. Perhaps less intuitively - my mind is not an encapsulated mirage hovering around my brain, nor a mere emergent epiphenomenon which is the effect of a billion grey cells, but something more difficult to understand, such that it feels more like magic. In any case it's just as hard for me to think of my individuality as absolute, as it would be for a believer to let go of the essential existence of the soul. Merleau-Ponty says:
I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness, standing in the way of my being totally individualised: a weakness which exposes me to the gaze of others as a man among men, or at least a consciousness among consciousnesses . . .
My grandfather's poem pictures an indestructible essence, in the guise of the obsessive lover. The subject who loves can never be exterminated by any action of his object; but at the same time the loved one can never extract themselves from the grasp of the lover. I know you, even though you emasculate me. But the essence does in fact de-individualise, and the lover is no longer himself alone - his object is absorbed into his bones and his blood; into every particle. Each last speck still remains the "I" of the lover, and yet completely mingles with "you" of the loved. You and I, inextricably intermixed.
We are discovered
Wednesday, 01 December, 2010 - 22:06
- on being a puppet
Therein resides the paradox of the notion of the "performative," or speech act: in the very gesture of accomplishing an act by way of uttering words, I am deprived of authorship, the "big Other" (the symbolic institution) speaks through me. It is no wonder then, that there is something puppet-like about the persons whose professional function is essentially performative (judges, kings...): they are reduced to a living embodiment of the symbolic institution, i.e. their sole duty is to "dot the i's" mechanically, to confer on some content elaborated by others, the institutional cachet. The later Lacan is fully justified in reserving the term "act" for something much more suicidal and real than a speech act.
This mystery of the symbolic order is exemplified by the enigmatic status of what we call "politeness": when, upon meeting an acquaintance, I say "Glad to see you! How are you today?", it is clear to both of us that, in a way, I "do not mean it seriously" (if my partner suspects that I am really interested, he may even be unpleasantly surprised, as though I were aiming at something too intimate and of no concern to me - or, to paraphrase the old Freudian joke, "Why are you saying you're glad to see me, when you're really glad to see me!?"). However, it would nonetheless be wrong to designate my act as simply "hypocritical," since, in another way, I do mean it: the polite exchange does establish a kind of pact between the two of us; in the same sense as I do "sincerely" laugh through the canned laughter (the proof of it being the fact that I effectively do "feel relieved" afterwards).
The Interpassive Subject by Slavoj Zizek
I love Zizek's reversals. I like to call them Zizekian switcheroonies. "Is not your love for Zizek the very condition for your hatred of Zizek?" In this particular switcheroony, the speech act is turned on its head. It is not the speaker who makes the world such by the act of speaking, but the Other which expresses and enacts its will through the speaker - the subject supposed to believe.
Today I was discussing Wikileaks with students, and I was reminded of the interpassive subject, ("Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity?"), who in their very participation in the digital realm become the means of the digital realm to "enjoy the show". Wikileaks now knows everything. Wikileaks has every document there is. Wikileaks is the panopticon, the subject supposed to know.
When rumours emerge that Wikileaks will publish the internal documents of a large bank, I half expect every bank immediately to surrender and publish everything, just as one of Arthur Conan Doyle's friends is supposed to have left the country and fled for good upon receiving a hoax message from the author, stating just "We are discovered. Flee now!"
My machine enjoys the show as I perform my part for it, my VCR enjoys watching my TV; we are puppets amongst the arguing objects that populate our environment, and Wikileaks will publish every thought I have ever had, so that you (and I) can realise what I feel.
