Doyle

Zero

“Wetwares had probably become irreversible, kneading and needing the future.  ‘Life may not advance, but it expands’” (p. 2).

“The book featured various bits of language that did much of the work in the story and allegedly were not confined to it.  These were rhetorical softwares, unpredictable algorithms of textual hazard whose results were subject to change.  They were part of the variable character of the book, its consistency of variation.  Version N.0, he liked to call it, if only to register it with the proper authorities.  Only the importance of nothing kept him from iterating the variable to N.N.” (p. 3).

“A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)…Every machine, in the first place, is related to a continual material flow…that it cuts into.” (p. 4).

“If machines are composed of cuts that connect – ‘Connecticut, Connect-I-cut!’ – it is sometimes useful to carve a distinction between two ecologies of machines: weapons and tools.” (p. 4)

“A tool ‘prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Tools are thus tendrils of repetition, bringing matter back to the self or its external doublet of order” (p. 5).

“Weapons, by contrast, incite not territory but deterritorialization: a horse, rather than being eaten, treated as energy for an interiority, becomes a vehicle, a way of linking one space to another, a shifting range or territory whose border if formed by speed.  Perhaps the most compressed articulation of this machinic difference in kind reads: The tool summons repetition, weapons transformation” (p. 5).

“In this context, the weapons/tool distinction describes different styles of networks whose capacities for transformation differ in kind – they are qualitatively as well as quantitatively different” (p. 5).

“Weapons, as agents of detrritorialization, introduce novel surfaces of contagion, opening up the system to new forms of connection as K goes through the roof.  Tools, as components of territorialization, tend to insulate ecosystems from other habits and habitats, as K (connectivity) stays low enough to thwart most contagions at a distance, sheltering equilibrium” (p. 6).

“To link to the assemblage of gun one must untie the knots between visuality, tactility, and temporality.  Carsons experiences the muzzle as an orifice, a flowing, feeling deterritorialization of an eye that can now act at a tremendous distance, an action whose limit is contact with the future – an accomplished fact.  The orifice composes a space of both activity and passivity, a locale of seduction rather than decision.  Bang.  The gun even periodically surprises him” (p. 6).

“Conjunction and ellipsis become, in Burrough’s hands, machines from connection, an entanglement with another, even if that other be silence…’Silence takes on the quality of a dimension here…’ Entangled with the future, the ballistic collision of flesh and metal becomes an accomplished fact when the future is a familiar” (p. 7).

“Familiars – a zone of interactivity between humans and animals, ‘psychic companions’ that blur the contours of human subjectivity – supplement Burroughs’s analysis of weapons and their ecologies” (p. 7).

“As a refrain – ‘draw aim and fire will become a reflex’ – the arm/eye/gun complex shrugs off its relations to distance, perspective, and light and becomes a machinic feeler, trolling for interiority, ‘a steel eye feeling for your opponent’s vitals’” (p. 8).

“Carsons enables a very specific contact with the future – death.  Making contact with the future becomes less a metaphor than a rigorous, proleptic hospitality, a welcoming of technological ensemble – gun, arm, eye. This technoecology is forged out of cuts, a severing of connections that erases old networks of reflex and solicits new architectures of flesh, metal, and time” (p. 8).

“Sociologist Michel Maffesoli describes the flows of a generalized orgiasm in terms of a refraining, the iterative constraint of a ‘bridle’: ‘The same thing holds for spending as holds for violence: bridling it in its expression is in fact encouraging its perverse and exacerbated irruption” (p. 10).

“What sorts of events and organisms do such novel flows select for? Put another way, what sorts of ecologies cultivate such contingencies and communities? As an engagement with multiplicity – one is ‘beside oneself’ – encounters with panic, rather than reactions against it, are fostered by a counterintuitive ethos of subtraction” (p. 10).

“And ‘to be carried away’ by such a flow, one must often instigate a blockage. If the multiple must be ‘made,’ it is because its unfolding demands a refrain.  Through continual repretition, for example, Carsons ‘dissociates’ and learns to ’stand out of the way’ of gun, hands, and eyes” (p. 11).

“Pan, appearing as an observer, ‘awakens’ the viewer with a start…our observations are doubled, mimed by a human/animal hybrid who does nothing but make disturbingly visible the mechanisms of the very outside of paint.  Pan, in his visibility, renders indiscernible the interior and the exterior of painting” (p. 13).

“I am watching a watcher watch me watching it watch, I have lost count, where was I? We have become observing Pan.  Less a failure of observation than the production of and capacity for indiscernibility – becoming – Pan – the appearance of Pan” (p. 13).

“These ruptures, too, are anything but locatable – neither here nor there, they are less absences or nonbeings than bodies in the midst of becoming, what hole theorists Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi characterize as immaterial bodies” (p. 16).

One: Representing Life for a Living

“In short, life is no longer confined to the operation of DNA but is instead linked to the informatic events associated with nucleic acids: operations of coding, replication, and mutation.  I will argue in this segment that the emergence of artificial life signals more than the liberation of living systems from carbon – it maps a transformation of the scientific concept of life itself, a shift from an understanding of organisms as localized agents to an articulation of living systems as distributed events” (p. 19-20).

“…life is just an interesting configuration of information” (p. 21).

“‘Life’ as a scientific object, has been stealthed, rendered indiscernible by our installed systems of representation” (p. 21).

“By analogy, I want to suggest that alife, too, emerges only through the complex of translational mechanisms that render it articulable as ‘lively’” (p. 23).

“It is perhaps due to this uncanny distribution of life that the parallel rhetorical formulation of ‘localization’ and ‘ubiquity’ have particular force on artificial life, even as these effects are in tension” (p. 23).

“A missing term – one that may possibly arrive in the future – completes abduction’s argument.  The ‘possibility’ that inheres in any specific abductive enterprise is tethered to the pathos of ‘hope,’ an encounter with the future without grounds but with calculation, anticipation, and a bit of desperation” (p. 25).

“The very impetus for artificial life research – the lack of sufficient knowledge of the formal attributes of life – stymies what Langton will call the ‘big claim’ of artificial life, a claim that defines in silico creatures as ‘alive’ (p. 27).

“What I want to suggest is that at each level, acts of translation occur. ‘Within ‘the screen, alife organisms survive based on their interactions with both their virtual environment and other alife creatures.  So, for example, the strange dogs called ‘Moofs’ that sometimes populate SimLife emerge as ‘translations’ of their digital genomes, and one can tinker with the genomes in the hope of tweaking Moof success and behavior, but the ecology even of a simple program like SimLife is sufficiently complex that one cannot predict the effect on the Moof phenotype, at least in terms of its behavior within the virtual ecology that it inhabits” (p. 28-29).

“As Pierre Levy, following Deleuze’s discussion, writes, ‘the real resembles the possible whereas the actual responds to the virtual” (p. 30).

“I want to be clear that I am not claiming that alife organisms are simply the result of human ‘decisions’ or that it is only the rhetorical softwares bundled with alife organisms that make them lively” (p. 30).

“The virtual is not, therefore, ‘unreal.’  Nor does it lack actuality – such a description would depend on an abduction of the future, a retroactive understanding of the virtual in terms of its instantiation as actual” (p. 31).

“Not all creatures can be rendered equally visible, narratable and therefore abductable, so some rhetorical tactics would seem to be more successful than others in the evolving ribotyple of alife and its operations of transhuman sexual selection” (p. 34).

“Such a lengthy and tangled definition reminds us of Von Neumann’s observation cited above: that an event as complex as a living system is easier to achieve than to describe” (p. 37).

“…then the cybernetic argument of Maturana and Varela renders life as an interiority, one constantly making itself as a self” (p. 38).

Three: Simflesh, Simbones: At Play in the Artificial Life Ribotype

“As I have argued in the first segments of this book, this intense distribution and outsourcing of life is more than a shift in scientific perception – it alters the contours of corporeal experience, as life ceases to be confined to the interority of a body and becomes capable of inhabiting locations between bodies: networks, futures, virtualities” (p. 43).

“As an ‘avatar’ of the Western dream, genetic engineering and its attendant fantasies are not merely the natural outcome of a scientific and cultural polymerase chain reaction that began sometime in the 1970s…Instead, biotechnology and its signs stitch together an avatar, a virtual site of interactoin where nucleic acids, science fictions, softwares, the New York Times, and some persistent dreams of the West flash on and off in a complex morphology of the ‘gene’ or ‘DNA’” (p. 45).

“This recipe for becoming – a disciplined practice of transforming the relations between human interiority and its diverse outsides – is cultivated in the new fluidities of inside and outside rather than their disappearance” (p. 46).

“But if it is sometimes difficult to tell which side of the screen technoscientific practices are on, it is equally difficult to extricate artificial life techniques from lay and popular discourses that suffuse them” (p. 48).

“Thus I will argue for the screen otherwise: Conceived as a space of becoming that suffuses humans as much as it ‘contains’ the world, the computer screen and its beyond becomes some other topology, an ecstatic multiplex of fluctuation. Neither inside nor outside the computer network or its other, ‘the world,’ this wetware is the material, corporeal skin of contemporary transforations of powerknowledge, a material and biological membrane that is contemporary capital and its work of deterritorialization” (p. 49).

“Rather than external perspectives on a flow, itineration breeds new forms of complicity in which perspective and identity are the very media of response – they are at stake in the observation” (p. 50).

“While little may be seen to be at stake here in a genre distinction – what matter if we are dealing here with a toy, a game, or a weapon? – the emergence of simulations as ‘flexible’ forms of inter-tainment and inquiry marks not only the blurring of distinction between lab and living room and the subsequent distribution of knowledge production” (p. 53).

“As I argued earlier, this response is most easily understood in terms of the tactics of Darwinian sexual selection, where the ‘antics’ of a male bird and his plumage seductively renders female reproductive agency through intense interaction” (p. 53).

“History’s status as a sequence of discrete, static events instantiates the view of life expounded by Watson above: Life exists in the gene, genes are the actors of life, and bodies mere supplements or extensions of the miraculous software called DNA” (p. 55).

“I want to suggest that the screen that orients alife is on a plane of immanence, a massive assemblage of machines, users, and rhetorics that semiotically and materially distribute the ‘vitality effect’” (p. 56).

 

Barthes

1.

“I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it” (p. 3).

2.

“We might say that Photography is unclassifiable” (p. 4).

“A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered – from the start, and because of its status – by the way in which the object is stimulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection” (p. 5).

“Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurences; it aspires perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of a language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does” (p. 6).

3.

“the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the hears of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis – but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it might be) : a desperate resistance to any reductive system.” (p. 8).

4.

“I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions) : to do, to undergo, to look.  The Operator is the Photographer.  The Spectator is ourselves…and the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emmited by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (p. 9).

5.

“Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image” (p. 10).

“I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it” (p. 11).

“I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image – my image will be generated: will I be born from an antipathetic individual or from a “good sort”?” (p. 11).

“What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and “myself” which is light, divided, dispersed” (p. 12).

“In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares)” (p. 13).

“Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the “intention” according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph” (p. 15).

“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing” (p. 15).

6.

“I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate” (p. 16).

“without asking; they are only “images,” their mode of appearance is heterogeneous” (p. 16).

7.

“So it seemed that the best word to designate (temporarily) the attraction certain photographs exerted upon me was advenience or even adventure.  This picture advenes, that one doesn’t” (p. 19).

“Without adventure, no photograph” (p. 19).

“So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation” (p. 20).

8.

Borrowing from Phenomenology – “I stooped, keeping with me, like a treasure, my desire or my grief; the anticipated essence of the Photograph could not, in my mind, be separated from the “pathos” of which, from the first glance, it consists” (p. 21).

9.

“I understood at once that its existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of contrast): the soldiers and the nuns” (p. 23).

10.

“What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training.  I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity” (p. 26).

“This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefor call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice.  A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (p. 27).

11.

“But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium.  The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste” (p. 27).

“The studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the “in reverse,” according to my will as a Spectator” (p. 28).

12.

“Photography can tell me this much better than painted portraits.  It allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this “me” which likes knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it” (p. 30).

13.

“The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediatry (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death” (p. 31).

14.

“The first surprise is that of the “rare” (rarity of the referent, of course); a photographer, we are told admiringly, has spent four years composing a photographic anthology of monsters (man with two heads, woman with three breasts, child with a tail, etc. all smiling)” (p. 32).

“A fourth surprise is the one which the photographer looks for from the contortions of technique: superimpressions, anamorphoses, deliberate exploitation of certain defects” (p. 33).

“All these surprises obey a principle of defiance (which is why they are alien to me): the photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes “surprising” when we do not know why it was been taken;” (p. 34).

15.

Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask” (p. 34).

 

Jenkins

Convergence for Jenkins is about new media creations that attract larger amounts of audience participation which then fosters a type of storytelling from the fan base themselves.

Introduction: “Worship at the Alter of Convergence”

“‘Bert Is Evil” and its following has always been contained and distanced from big media.  This issue throws it out in the open.  Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (p. 2).

Book about media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence

Convergence – “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (p. 2).

“This circulation of media content – across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders – depends heavily on consumers’ active participation…convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (p. 3).

Participatory culture – “Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands.  Not all participants are created equal” (p. 3).

Convergence not through media appliance but through the brains of consumers and through social interactions.

Collective intelligence – “Consumption has become a collective process.  None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.  Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power” (p. 4).

“If the digital revolution paradigm presumed that new media would displace old media, the emerging convergence paradigm assumes that old and new media will interact in ever more complex ways” (p. 6).

1. Convergence is coming and you had better be ready

2. Convergence is harder than it sounds

3. Everyone will survive if everyone works together (Unfortunately, that was the one thing nobody knew how to do) (p. 10).

Ithiel de Sola Pool – “the prophet of media convergence” (p. 10).

Pool – “Freedom is fostered when the means of communication are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available, as are printing presses or microcomputers.  Central control is more likely when the means of communication are concentrated, monopolized, and scarce, as are great networks” (p. 11).

Pool thought the transition from old to new media would take a longer time than most thought, “There is no immutable law of growing convergence; the process of change is more complicated than that” (p. 11).

Pool – political culture

Jenkins – popular culture

“Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve.  Recorded sound is the medium.  CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies” (p. 13).

Gitelman – define media – “a medium is a technology that enables communication; a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology”(13-14)

“Old media are not being displaced.  Rather, their functions and status are shifted by the introduction of new technologies” (p. 14).

Black Box Fallacy – “Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms” (p. 14).

Why a fallacy – “It reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels we are considering here” (p. 15).

“Convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” (p. 16).

“Entertainment content isn’t the only thing that flows across multiple media platforms.  Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels” (p. 17).

American media environment shaped by two things

1. “new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enabled consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways” (p. 17-18).

2. “There has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry” (p. 18).

Convergence is both top-down corporate and bottom-up consumer grassroots

Old consumers vs. New consumers – old passive, new active, old stationary, new migratory, old silent and invisible, new noisy and public (p. 18-19).

Survivor and American Idol – “relations between producers and consumers are breaking down as consumers seek to act upon the invitation to participate in the life of the franchises” (p. 20). How much participation is too much and when do producers exert too much power over the experience?

Transmedia storytelling – “refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence – one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities.  Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making” (p. 20-21).

“Again and again, citizens were better served by popular culture than they were by news or political discourse” (p. 22).

1. Spoiling Survivor

“The age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes reception.  Not every media consumer interacts within a virtual community; some simply discuss what they see with their friends, family members, and workmates.  But few watch television in total silence and isolation” (p. 26).

“My focus here is on the process and ethics of shared problem-solving in an online community…I am interested in how the community reacts to a shift in its normal ways of processing and evaluating knowledge.  It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them” (p. 26).

“Collective intelligence refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members.  What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively” (p. 27).

“Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in practice” (p. 28).

“Play is one of the ways we learn, and during a period of reskilling and reorientation, such play may be more important that it seems at first glance” (p. 29).

“Spoiling follows a logical sequence.  The first phase is focused on identifying the location, because the impact of the production is felt first where the series was shot.  The second phase is focused on identifying the contestants, since the second impact is felt on the local communities where these “average Americans” come from.  The collective has its feelers out everywhere and responds to the slightest brush” (p. 36).

“Earlier, I described these emerging knowledge cultures as defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations.  Because they are voluntary, people do not remain in communities that no longer meet their emotional or intellectual needs” (p. 57).

“We can see such knowledge communities as central to the process of grassroots convergence” (p. 57).

2. Buying into American Idol

“The shift is one from real-times interaction toward asynchronous participation” (p. 59).

Affective Economics – “By affective economics, I mean a new configuration of marketing theory, still somewhat on the fringes but gaining ground with the media industry, which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions” (p. 61-62).

The Paradox – “to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified.  On the one hand, to be commodified expands a group’s cultural visibility.  Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored.  That said, commodification is also a form of exploitation” (p. 62).

Fans or loyals – More likely to watch a series faithfully

“My own view is that this emerging discourse of affective economics has both positive and negative implications: allowing advertisers to tap the power of collective intelligence and direct it toward their own ends, but at the same time allowing consumers to form their own kind of collective bargaining structure that they can use to challenge corporate decisions” (p. 63).

Audience measurements ineffective, TV ads just as ineffective as internet banner ads.

Whiting – DVR “the VCR on steroids”

“The American viewing public is becoming harder and harder to impress” (p. 67).

Expression – “Expression charts attentiveness to programming and advertising, time spent with the program, and the degree of viewer loyalty and affinity to the program and its sponsors” (p. 67-68). “Expression may start at the level of the individual consumer, but by definition it situates consumption within a larger social and cultural context.  Consumers not only watch media; they also share media with one another” (p. 68).

Brand extension – Multiple contacts between the brand and the consumer.  Not a single media platform. Intensified meanings about brands “no longer just intellectual property, they’re emotional capital” (p. 69).

Lovemarks – “That are more powerful than traditional “brands” because they command the “love” as well as the “respect” of consumers: “The emotions are a serious opportunity to get in touch with consumers.  And best of all, emotion is an unlimited resource” (p. 69-70).

“Brand loyalty is the holy grail of affective economics because of what economists call the 80/20 rule: for most consumer products, 80 percent of purchases are made by 20 percent of their consumer base” (p. 72).

Inspirational consumers or brand advocates – Promote and advocate for a particular brand

Roberts – companies must pay attention to inspirational consumers, “When a consumer loves you enough to take action, any action, it is time to take notice. Immediately” (p. 73).

Zappers – “people who constantly flit across the dial – watching snippets of shows rather than sitting down for a prolonged engagement” (p. 74).

Loyals – watch less hours than general population, watch same show more than once, talk about their shows more, and more likely to pursue content across media channels. “Loyals watch series; zappers watch television” (p. 74).

Casuals – “They watch a particular series when they think of it or have nothing better to do” (p. 74).

Loyals more valuable than zappers, have a higher rate of brand recall, less likely to leave the networks for cable, and more likely to pay attention to ads and recall them.

Serialization – American Idol is a contest across an entire season rather than on a single episode. “The reason loyals watch every episode isn’t simply that they enjoy them; they need to have seen every episode to make sense of long-term developments.

Brand communities -”trying to better understand why some groups of consumers form intense bonds with the product and, through the product, with fellow consumers…Communities exert pressure on members to remain loyal to the collective and to the brand” (p. 79).

3. Searching for the Origami Unicorn

“The Matrix is also entertainment for the era of collective intelligence. Pierre Levy speculates about what kind of aesthetic works would respond to the demands of his knowledge cultures.  First, he suggests that the “distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend” to form a circuit of expression, with each participant working to “sustain the activity of others” which is a Cultural Attractor.

Cultural Activator – “drawing togehter and creating common ground between diverse communities” (p. 95).

“A good transmedia franchise works to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently in different media” (p. 96).

“The Matrix was a flawed experiment, an interesting failure, but that its flaws did not detract from the significance of what it tried to accomplish” (p. 97).

Eco – Casablanca as a cult artifact

1. “The work must come to us as a “completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian world” (p. 97).

2. “The work must be encyclopedic, containing a rich array of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered my devoted consumers” (p. 97).

“We experience a cult movie, he suggests, not as having “one central idea but many,” as “a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs” (p. 98).

“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling.  Media convergence makes the flow of content across multiple media platforms inevitable” (p. 104).

“The level of integration and coordination is difficult to achieve even though the economic logic of the large media conglomerates encourages them to think in terms of synergies and franchises” (p. 106).

“More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium.  The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise – since fan speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions” (p. 114).

Murray – encyclopedic capacity – To make these worlds seem even more real, storytellers and readers begin to create “contextualizing devices – color coded paths, time lines, family trees, maps, clocks, calendars, and so on” (p. 116).

Film critics dislike the disjoined nature of transmedia storytelling yet, “we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by expanding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end” (p. 119).

Odyssey and Matrix

Greeks got the Odyssey because they had a background, a frame of reference. “This is why high school students today struggle with The Odyssey, because they don’t have the same frame of reference as the original audience” (p. 120).

“These new mythologies, if we can call them that, are emerging in the context of an increasingly fragmented and multicultural society…Its goals are not so much to preserve cultural traditions as to put together the pieces of the culture in innovative ways” (p. 121).

Blade Runner – Origami Unicorn – If we add the director’s cut scene, the entire movie changes, Deckard might be a replicant, which changes our experience.

Additive comprehension – For Matrix, after the series was completed, Morpheus was killed off in the Matrix Online (p. 125).  Used to motivate player missions.

“The film’s attempts to close down its plot holes disappointed many hardcore fans.  Their interest in the Matrix peaked in the mmiddle that tantalized them with possibilities.  For the casual consumer, The Matrix asked too much.  For the hardcore fan, it provided too little” (p. 126).

4. Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?

“What has shifted is the visibility of fan culture” (p. 131).

Interactivity – “refers to the ways that new technologies have been designed to be more responsive to consumer feedback” (p. 133).

Participation – “is shaped by the cultural and social protocols…participation is more open-ended, less under the control of media producers and more under the control of media consumers” (p. 133).

Prohibitionists – “the media industries have increasingly adopted a scorched-earth policy toward their consumers, seeking to regulate and criminalize many forms of fan participation that once fell below their radar”

Collaborationists – “new media companies are experimenting with new approaches that see fans as important collaborators in the production of content and as grassroots intermediaries helping to promote the franchise” (p. 134).

Napster generation – “Media companies are giving out profoundly mixed signals because they really can’t decide what kind of relationships they want to have with this new consumer” (p. 138).

“Digital filmmaking alters many of the conditions that led to the marginalization of previous amateur filmmaking efforts” (p. 142).

Lucas was great for fan fiction, but had to pull the reigns back because “Up until the moment the actors spoke, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether that was a real Star Wars film or a fan creation because the special effects are soo good” (p. 155).

Men create fan parody, women create fan fiction

Two tier system

1. “Some works can be rendered more public because they conform to what the rights holder sees as an acceptable appropriation of their intellectual property, while others remain hidden from view.

“Fans and other subcultural groups are not going to return to docility and invisibility.  They will go farther underground if they have to – they’ve been there before – but they aren’t going to stop cheating” (p. 158).

Fans know the Star Wars world better than the game designers (p. 162).

“For the moment, the evidence is contradictory: for every franchise which has reached out to court its fan base, there are others who have fired cease and desist letters” (p. 166).

5. Why Heather Can Write

“Corporations imagine participation as something they can start and stop, channel and reroute, commodify and market” (p. 169).

Potter Wars – Intellectual property and the Conservative Right

Literacy – “literacy is understood to include not simply what we can do with printed matter but also what we can do with media” (p. 170).

“Heather has suggested that many kids come to The Daily Prophet because their schools and families have failed them in some way” (p. 173-174).

“What’s striking about this process, though, is that it takes place outside the classroom and beyond any direct adult control.  Kids are teaching kids what they need to become full participants in convergence culture” (p. 177).

Affinity Spaces – Informal learning cultures, that offer powerful opportunities for learning “because they are sustained by common endeavors that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender, and educational level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching” (p. 177).

Scaffolding – pedagogy in a step by step process that promotes children to try new things.  In the classroom it is fostered by the teacher, in a participatory culture, the entire community takes responsibility (p. 178).

Beta readers sort through and offer suggestions to writers

Writing skills are a secondary benefit for the fan fiction community (p. 185).

Rowling all for fan fiction, Warner Brothers not so much (p. 185).

Defense Against Dark Arts – much more organized than Warner Brothers thought, they had a naive approach (p. 187).

“Current copyright law simply doesn’t have a category for dealing with amateur creative expression” (p. 189).

“Here, the conservative critics seem to be taking aim at the very concept of transmedia storytelling – seeing the idea of world making as dangerous in itself insofar as it encourages us to invest more time mastering the details of a fictional environment and less time confronting the real world” (p. 193).

“Rather than ban content that does not fully fit within their worldview, the discernment movement teaches Christian children and parents how to read those books critically, how to ascribe new meanings to them, and how to use them as points of entry into alternative spiritual perspectives” (p. 203).

Virilio

The Media Complex

“The fourth estate – still the agreed term – is thus the only one of our institutions that can function outside any effective democratic control, since the public at large does not get to hear any independent criticism of the media, or of any possible alternative, simply because such criticism does not stand a chance of being broadcast widely and of consequently reaching the general public” (p. 1).

“The masses are seriously in the dark when it comes to the mass media” (p. 2)

“laws are based on customs dictated by the fluctuating seas of a people’s or a prince’s opinions.  If this is so, then the mass media, which enjoy the power of managing information and thereby of whipping up the fluctuating sea of public opinion, would have a field day with social customs and morals and with them the whole set of vague rules and prohibitions that go to make up legislation they have secretly been inventing for ages” (p. 2).

Here’s where we first see “secret” which will become a recurring theme.

Jefferson – “The freedom of the media of the media is the most effective way to the truth or that information processing is ‘objective’” (p. 3).

“The real problem of the press and television no longer lies in what they are able to show as much as in what they can still manage to obliterate, to hide” (p. 3).

“It is the disappearance of censorship that has gradually sterilized cinematographers’ and viewers’ imaginations before going on to bring down the commercial cinema, with theaters closing down and film studios being sold off all around the globe” (p. 3).

“Without visual limits there can be no, or almost no, mental imagery; without a certain blindness, no tenable appearance” (p. 4).

So here we get another runner throughout the book, blindness.

“Smith remains convinced that the fourth estate cannot be divided.  No doubt he has not forgotten that in the beginning MEDIATIZATION was the opposite of COMMUNICATIONS; it was a relic of feudal barbarity, of ancient ostracism” (p. 6).

Again we get another runner throughout the book, mediaization

“Napoleon founded the industrial press in France, indirectly engendering what would become a modern communications complex” (p. 6).

“‘Whenever a people can be put down, they are.” Today it would be no exaggeration to say that, ‘Whenever a people can be mediatized, they are!’” (p. 6).

“Everyone knows that for human beings, as for every living species, the ability to communicate is the indispensable condition of being in the world, that is, of survival” (p. 7). Some Burke influence here?

“The projector, designed to optically replace the alter ego (the other me) by enabling the viewer glued to his seat to see as present what is naturally absent and outside the restricted circle of their visual reach, in fact eliminates the stereoscopic couple that previously composed and gave life to the social depth of the real” (p. 8).

Reichenbach – “Having a camera changed my life.  With it, through it, I could project a different way of looking at everything…I no longer left the slightest interest in being with people, in living among them, unless I could get them on film” (p. 9).

Felix Dzerzinski – “This joker died in 1926; in his day, he had been head of secret Soviet diplomacy and genial mastermind of strategic disinformation, which he summed up in one sentence: ‘Westerners take what they want for reality, so let’s give them what they want!’” (p. 12-13).

“Beating an enemy involves not so much capturing as captivating them” (p. 14).  This sounds like all the hearts and minds rhetoric from the Bush administration. Or from the Usual Suspects (2:00 into the clip)

“The United States, have pushed for further expansion of their capacities to include the services trade, which they argue ought to encompass the cultural and the audiovisual – that is, 35 percent of world trade.  In Europe, the image market is already 70 percent American-dominated; in Africa, over 90 percent” (p. 14).

“Advertising is democracy” (p. 15).

“At a time when a simple ban on cigarette or alcohol advertising is threatening to wipe out most the periodicals of the written press as well as certain private TV channels, it seems that the commercial break and the news bleak constitute a perfect paradigm” (p. 16).

The question being, “Who is mediatizing whom these days?” (p. 17).

“Taking  a leaf from terrorism’s book, advertising would rush to make official its status as a major communication player.  Like terrorism, it would destroy the last remaining taboos, complacently presenting suffering, agony, death, and ecological disaster” (p. 18).

“After thirty years of audiovisual activity, the communication network faces a new equation: a person = a ghetto” (p. 18).

Michel – “‘Ads are not supposed to make things sell, they are supposed to create attitudes”‘ Manson “If you hadn’t told me drugs existed, I never would have taken them” (p. 19).

“From the optical illusion of the cinema motor (the truth twenty-four times a second!) to the final resolution of human clairvoyance through the absolute speed of electromagnetic waves, technical mediazation has progressively revived the techniques of primitive mediatization” (p. 20).

THE DATA COUP D’ETAT

“The communications industry would never have got where it is today had it not started out as an art of the motor capable of orchestrating the perpetual shift of appearances” (p. 23).

Beaverbrook – “Whenever I find things organized, I disorganize them” (p. 24).

“‘Eliminating distance kills,’ Rene Char once said.  When you endlessly increase the liberating power of the media, you bring what was once hidden by distance and the secret – which was distant and naturally foreign to each one of use – far too close; you then run the risk of reinventing, here and now, some kind of barbarism (barbaros = foreigner, one who does not speak the language).  In other words, you run the risk of inventing the enemy” (p. 25).

Here we get another runner throughout the book of distance.

“The New York Tribune (two hundred thousand copies a day in 1860) was nicknamed ‘The Great Moral Organ.’ F. Luther Mott ranked it second only to the Bible!” (p. 26).

“When the use of language or writing spreads and comes to guarantee democratic laws, an antidote immediately appears in the form of epistolary” (p. 27).

“The change in scale of war with the end of local combat and the emergence of the great Hellenic states would require an essential division of information and would soon lead to a theory of mediatization” (p. 28).

“You cannot effectively improvise a citizen any more than you can become a killer on your own” (p. 28).

“Because it is easier to fool a crowd than it is to fool a single person, the forming of public opinion in Greece is associated with the military trance” (p. 28).

“Plato also notes that democracy certainly has its ‘charms’… but the philosopher asks in conclusion, are there any states of existence that are not perverse?” (p. 30).

“it is a battle against the inertia of images that one could make people see but that would have no movement or signs of life” (p. 31).  We get some sense of this later with the motion picture references.

“We have thus, without realizing it, gone from simple statistical management to a new phenomenon of representation, the virtual theatricalization of the real world” (p. 33).

“We had to wait for the fusion/confusion of the secret of speed” (p. 33).

Again another runner is speed.

“The principle of this new interactive game has been on the drawing board for a long time” (p. 34).  Game theory is talked throughout the book too.

“This final phase of political mediatization – which becomes, once more, the privilege of smaller and smaller groups, keepers of that ultimate strange brew composed of the speed of light (the secret) and the exorbitant eloquence of figures, messages, and images (information)” (p. 34).

THE SHRINKING EFFECT

“The many theatrical ventures with which the vivid imagination of the French revolutionaries embellished the tale of their struggle for liberty. It is easier to fool a crowd than a single person” (p. 38).

Republic of France – “Unlike previous republics in history, this republic was born not of sedition, but of the instant implementation of a form of mediatization with totalitarian ambitions, as well as of the establishment of an irrefutable technical fact, as opposed to some legitimate state that would then become dependent on the technology” (p. 39).

“The telegraph shrinks distances and in a way joins an entire, huge population into a single point…with this invention distance between places vanishes” (p. 40).

“Since we never stop thinking in dimensions, we cannot possibly see, and since space and time are merely something we intuit, tools of apperception and communication finally manage to pull off that paradox of appearances whereby the greatness of the universe is compressed in a perpetual shrinking effect” (p. 41).

“Lakanal claimed that the optical telegraph was a speedy harbinger of thought rivaling thought in speed…The press would reveal imagination to be excess thought speed able to overcome the relative slowness of cottage industry transmission technology and eternally ahead of the event” (p. 43).

“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists, then believe what they’ve said when they see it in print.’ The thing described takes over from the real thing” (p. 43).

“The loss of speed further promoted the print media, which would remain first with the news right up until the wireless, initially reserved for military purposes, joined the ranks of the mass media” (p. 47).

“The old adage that information is almost the only product that is worthless the next day thus needs careful reconsideration…when the press was in its heyday, the issue, as we have seen, was not so much ‘making news’ as getting in before it, while it was happening, so as to finally sell it before it was literally overtaken, passe” (p. 49).

“But he does not have the power to coerce, which is just as well.  Between two evils we must never choose censorship.  It’s up to the heads of the television channels to show proof of judgment” (p. 52).

“Better still, it implies that only government censorship is unacceptable and that the censorship exercised by TV chiefs is as perfectly legitimate as it is legal” (p. 52).  Secrecy here

“Speed guarantees the secret and thus the value of all information.  Liberating the media therefore means not only annihilating the duration of information – of the image and its path – but with these all that endures or persists” (p. 53).  Speed, secrecy, and values

“Soldiers, though should talk differently, and not like journalists talking like soldiers, but like soldiers.  Though it is probably impossible to tell the difference” (p. 54).

Charles I – “newspapers like a good crime, but they like a good war even better and that without the press, the bloodbath of 1914 would never have occurred” (p. 55).

“With the telegraph, distances and territorial boundaries evaporate; with real-time technologies, real presence bites the dust” (p. 57).

“The abominable amalgam of a certain emotional life and an everyday object accepted on trust is now complete” (p. 58).

“Everything industrial mediatization since the nineteenth century was supposed to be based on and that was supposed to make literature and the social sciences, scientific thought itself, subservient to the interpersonal schema of a minimal linguistic exchange, which would for a long time run on the dubious concept of ’cause and effect’ … as long as the question were worded correctly” (p. 60).

A TERMINAL ART

“In May 1992, a Harris poll conducted in France and published in Sante Magazine, also revealed a disturbing state of dependence in the mediatized: 43 percent of those interviewed claimed they would suffer if deprived of television, although 64 percent say they experience nausea after watching it” (p. 63).

F117- since what is seen is already destroyed, it’s better to be destroyed before being seen in the new optoelectronic war…Stealth is paving the way for an ultimate iconoclasm entirely cleansed of the contingencies of communication; it participates in a TERMINAL ART whereby the object itself restores the opacity of distancing, the blindness speed creates, of which the liberation fo the media was supposed to have rid our vision of the world…But are we still talking aeronautics here?” (p. 65).

“‘Blindness is thus very much at the heart of the coming ‘vision machine’” (p. 65).

“The cinema motor of the scientific camera – all of these new apperceptual techniques essentially tended to cover what was invisible to the naked eye with the mask of the visible” (p. 65).

“We cannot naturally perceive its going slowly any more than we can perceive its speeding up, any more than we can perceive what might be the reality of time itself in which movement occurs.  Movement is blindness” (p. 68).

“The plastic arts will come to immobilize movement, thereby offering the illusion of of having the time to see” (p. 69).

“Since technological generations succeed each other, the man of the written word (books, the press) can no more recognize his son of the screen generation (cinema, television) than the latter can recognize his own vid-kid, prey the tyranny of video” (p. 74).

“All this foreshadowing the Gulf War, which no one would compare to video game, a war game” (p. 75).

“Lagging behind the war and soon to be cobbled by the economic recession, the ‘fourth estate’ was on the way to becoming itself mediatized” (p. 75).

Film Project

When thinking about creating a new media object, I immediately wanted to do it in the realm of film.  However, I struggled (and still am) about what type of new form or style that I could produce.  I’ve looked back at some of the previous innovations in film for some guidance.

Eisenstein

He was one of the originators of the montage which he was led to from Marxism based on a conflicts of scale, volume, rhythm, motion, and speed.

Jean Luc-Godard

French new wave filmmaker, he brought about a new style evidenced through Breathless which introduced jump cuts, character asides, and breaking the eyeline rule in continuity editing.

Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock’s movie Rope is influential for me as well because he made the movie in four takes.  Hitchcock does not create a new technology here, but he takes from what is already existing.

Martin Scorsese

In Taxi Driver, Scorsese broke some of filming tradition where the camera had either a first (POV) or third person point of view.  This is most evident in the hallway scene where the camera continues to track where were not sure whether we’re looking from Bickle’s or someone else’s perspective.

The two authors that have provided some guidance for me are Lyotard and Ulmer.  With Lyotard, I wonder if it is possible to create a new film style through paralogy, where the camera moves in ways that produce paradox and the unknown.  With Ulmer, I think it is possible to try and practice chorography through film.  I might take a look at Soviet montage theory and try to revise the montage and create something new.  Like Ulmer, I’ll be using Eisenstein’s work to create a work of my own.  At this point, I’m still looking for ideas, trying to see where the connections exist and how I’ll create something new from theory.

Maffesoli

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

“The following relection explores, via such notions as puissance, sociality, the quotidian and the imaginary, the deep foundations of the everyday life of our societies in these closing days of the modern era” (p. 1)

Puissance – “in French conveys the idea of the inherent energy and vital force of the people, as opposed to the institutions of ‘power’ (‘pouvoir’)” (footnote, p. 1).

“The anthropological path I have indicated puts us in a better position to show that a quasi-animal life is deeply embedded in the various manifestations of sociality.  This explains the emphasis on reliance (from the verb relier, to connect, link, bind) and on the religiosity which is an essential ingredient in the tribalism we shall be considering” (p. 3).

“it is possible to speak of the development of a genuinely holy dimension to social relationships that Durkheim, in his positivist way, called the ’social divine’.  This is how for my part I understand sociality’s puissance which, by abstention, silence and ruse, is the opposite of the politico-economic power” (p. 4).

“In the comprehensive tradition, to which I subscribe, one always proceeds by approximate truths” (p. 5).

“The use of metaphor is quite pertinent: aside from its pedigree and the fact that it has played a part in all times of intellectual ferment, the use of metaphor permits those precise crystallizations of approximate and momentary truths” (p. 5).

“Instead of attacking head-on through positivizing or criticizing a fleeting social reality, it would be wiser to approach stealthily, from the side.  This is the practice of apophatic theology: we can only know God indirectly.  Thus, rather than trying to fool ourselves into thinking we can seize, explain and exhaust an object, we must be content to describe its shape, its movements, hesitations, accomplishments and it various convulsions” (p. 5).

“The ambience is built on a fundamental paradox: the constant interplay between the growing massification and the development of micro-groups, which I shall call ‘tribes’ (p. 6).

“As for the metaphor of the tribe, it allows us to account for process of disindividuation, the saturation of the inherent function of the individual and the emphasis on the role that each person (persona) is caled upon the play within the tribe” (p. 6).

“It is as a function of this double hypothesis (shift and tension) that, true to form, I will incorporate various theoretical readings and empirical research which seem to me to contribue to the present discussion” (p. 6).

“If this is a work of fiction, that is one which pushes a certain logic to its limits, this book ‘invents’ only that which already exists, preventing it, of course, from proposing any solutions for the future” (p. 7).

THE EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY: RESEARCH ARGUMENTS

Doxa

Greek word meaning common belief or popular opinion, from which are derived the modern terms of orthodoxy^[1] and heterodoxy

Bourdieu used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”

“The main thrust of my arguments will be to show, to describe and to analyse the social configurations that seem to go beyond individualism, in other words, the undefined mass, the faceless crowd and the tribalism consisting of a patchwork of small local entities” (p. 9).

“The rational era is built on the principle of individuation and of separation, whereas the empathetic period is marked by the lack of differentiation, the ‘loss’ in a collective subject: in other words, what I shall call neo-tribalism” (p. 11).

“We can say that we are witnessing the tendency for a rationalized ’social’ to be replaced by an empathetic ’sociality’, which is expressed by a succession of ambiences, feelings and emotions” (p. 11).

“History may promote a moral (political) attitude, but space will favour an aesethetics and exude an ethics” (p. 15).

“We may wonder about the community and the nostalgia underlying it or about the political uses to which it is put.  For my part, and I reiterate it, this is a ‘form’ in the sense that I have defined this term” (p. 16).

“To pick up against on the classic opposition, we might say that society is concerned with history in the making, whereas the community expends its energy in its own creation (or possibly recreation)” (p. 16).

“History, politics and morality overtake death in the drama (dramein) that evolves as problems arise and are resolved or at least confronted.  Destiny, aesthetics and ethics, however, exhaust death in a tragedy that is based on the eternal moment and therefore exudes a solidarity all its own” (p. 17).

“The term ‘proxemics’ proposed by the Palo Alto School appears to me a good way of accounting for both the cultural and natural elements of the communication under consideration” (p. 22).

“One need only remember that custom, as an expression of the collective sensibility, permits, strictly speaking, an ex-stasis within everyday life” (p. 25).

“Alongside a purely intellectual knowledge, there is a knowledge [connaissance] which encompasses the feeling dimension, an awareness that, taken to its etymological origins, we are ‘born with’ [co-naissance']” (p. 25).

“Let us say that, in the case of the masses which are diffracted into tribes, and the tribes which coalesce into masses, the common ingredient is a shared sensibility or emotion” (p. 28).

THE UNDERGROUND PUISSANCE

Question of puissance

“Worringer develops his famous opposition between abstraction and empathy (Einfuhlung).  Briefly, empathy is intuitive in terms of its representation and organic in terms of structure” (p. 31).

Kunstwollen – (refers to the masses and to the collective force which drives them – in short to this remarkable vitalism” (p. 31).

“the role of puissance is continually at work.  However, its action may be either secret, discreet or displayed” (p. 32).

“It is possible that the puissance at work today may not be separate from the fascination which Eastern thought and customs currently have for us…we are in the presence of a ‘dynamic rootedness’” (p. 33).

“it is now possible to understand what I have termed ’social perdurability’, a rather uncivilized term which describes the ability of the masses to resist” (p. 34).

“Although there is a decline in the great institutional and activist structures – from political parties, as required mediator, to the proletariat as historical subject – there is on the other hand the development of what might be termed very generally the basic communities.  These are built on a proxemic reality whose finished form is nature” (p. 35).

“This surprising ‘vitalism’ which is the condition for understanding the puissance of the life without qualities, can be understood only by abandoning the judgemental (or normative) attitude which generally belongs to the keepers of knowledge and power” (p. 38).

Social divine – “the aggregate force which is the basis of any society or association” (p. 38).

“It is only because the ’social divine’ functions in a minor key of adaption, or even a sort of preservation, that we notice its presence, in a major key, in revolutionary explosion” (p. 42).

He’s concerned with puissance and how ideas change over history and how they influence the “mysterious puissance”

“This then is how an ‘expenditure’, whether commercial or recycled, as some cynics would put it, is an indication of resistance and puissance.  To seek everyday pleasure, to live for the present and enjoy its fruits, to take pleasure in the good things in life – any analyst not yet detached from everyday life is able to observe such behaviour in every situation and instance which occur throughout the life of societies” (p. 53).

SOCIALITY VS. THE SOCIAL

Intellectuals have a “mistrust of the common sense of the masses.  This mistrust is lacking somewhat in originality; but it is deeply rooted in the collective memory of the scholar for two reasons (people are shamelessly preoccupied and they are unconcerned about numbers)” (p. 56).

“imminent transcendence – another say of describing the puissance which binds together small groups and communities” (p. 59).

“Popular religion is truly a symbolic whole which permits and reinforces the proper functioning of the social bond” (p. 60).

“to understand the evolution from a global economy to a global ecology, which is less disposed to master the world, nature and society than collectively to achieve societies founded above all on quality of life” (p. 62).

“One can thus see how this principle of similarity, which is the basis of the ‘we’, the people and the mass, is an intermediary between the natural and the social worlds.  There is no longer a separation between the cosmos and the social, nor within the social whole.  On the contrary, we are witness to what may be deemed the culturalization of nature and the naturalization of culture” (p. 66).

Individualism – “the simplest and most prospective expression of the saturation of the political and its supporting structure”

TRIBALISM

“In more than one respect, social existence is alienated, subject to the injunctions of a multiform power; however, there still remains an affirmative puissance that, despite everything, confirms the ‘(ever-) renewed game of solidarity and reciprocity’” (p. 72).

“in order to seize the shared sentiments and experiences at work in the various social situations and attitudes of today, it is a good idea to take a different tack: the aesthetic angle seems to me to be the least bad” (p. 74).

“Thus can be explained the rise of these doxa which are the mark of conformity, and which can be found in every group, even the one claiming to be the most detached: the intellectuals” (p. 76).

“In order to serve as the basis of what might be deemed the socio-anthropological structure of tribalism, that social life can be determined only in relation to the group, whether directly or a contrario” (p. 79).

“Just as the artistic form is created from the variety of real or fantastic phenomena, the societal form could also be a specific creation based on the minuscule facts that make up everyday life.  This process thus treats the common life as a pure form, of value in and of itself” (p. 81).

“It is not necessary to delve into this question in these pages; it is sufficient to point out that it is as a result of this trend that a self-confident civilization, a set of representations dominated by the clarity of concepts and the certainty of reason, is at present giving way to what I shall call the twilight of organizational models and ways of thinking of the world” (p. 90).

“For our part, we might say that modernity has experienced another paradox: that of uniting by blurring differences, and the division that this engenders.  At the very least, it attempts to attenuate their effects, which, it will be agreed, is not without a certain grandeur and generosity .  The entire political order is built on this” (p. 100).

POLYCULTURALISM

“While modernity has been obsessed with politics, it may be equally true that postmodernity is possessed by the idea of the clan, a phenomenon which is not without its effect on the relationship to the Other and, more specifically to the stranger” (p. 104).

“Neo-tribalism reminds us that consensus is not uniquely rational, something that is too often forgotten.  To be sure, this hypothesis of ’shared sentiment’ obliges us to rethink the role of the third person or outsider, that is, of the plural in the societal structure” (p. 104).

“Puissance, as I have show, has nothing to do with power and all that surrounds it: that is, fear and anxiety both experienced and inflicted” (p. 107).

OF PROXEMICS

“These are the day-to-day histories: time crystallized in space.  The history of a place now becomes a personal history” (p. 123).

“Myth versus History: to return to the spatial image, the extension (ex-tendere) of History is confronted with the ‘in-tension’ (intendere) of myth which will favour that which is shared and its inherent mechanism of attraction-repulsion” (p. 124).

“as the least mobile class, the mass is stricto sensu the ‘genius of place’.  Its day-to-day life assures a link between time and space; it is the ‘non-conscious’ guardian of sociality.  It is in this sense that we must understand collective memory, the memory of everyday life” (p. 125-6).

“This relates to my hypothesis of the underground centrality that characterizes sociality, hence the importance of the ‘genius of place’.  This collective sentiment carves out a space, which has in turn an effect on the sentiment in question” (p. 130).

“It would thus appear that, due to one of those frequent short-cuts in human history, postmodern sociality is reinvesting some rather archaic values to say the least.  Referring to bourgeois monumentality, to its institutional expressions and its projective preoccupations, these can be called ‘non-contemporary’ values.  And yet, they are no less real and gradually spread throughout the societal whole in their entirety.” (p. 148).

Ulmer

Kojak leading the French Legion?

Part One: How to Make a Theory of Method

1. Grammatology

Heuretics – Artistic Experiment

“The relevant question for heuretic reading is not the one guiding criticism but one guiding a generative experiment: Based on a given theory, how might another text be composed?” (p. 4-5).

The question is of invention.

“A comparison of Breton’s manifesto with the various classics of method reveal that they tend to include a common set of elements, which are representable for mnemonic reference by the acronym CATTt” (p. 8).

CATTt

C=Contrast (opposition, inversion, differentiation)

A=Analogy (figuration, displacement)

T=Theory (repetition, literalization)

T=Target (application, purpose)

t=Tale (secondary elaboration, representability)

“The lesson is that any existing discourse on method may be analyzed, and any new method generated, in terms of the CATTt” (p. 15).

“The modest proposal is: to invent an electronic academic writing” (p. 15).

2. Hypermedia

Grammatology -concerned with the history and theory of writing

“For grammatology, hypermedia is the technological aspect of an electronic apparatus” (p. 17).

“It may be that eventually the screen will replace the page (and the database replace the library) as the support of all academic work” (p. 17).

“My project is to find an electronic theoria” (p. 20).

“My assumption is that the theory is no more fixed or ‘arrested’ than is the technology (or than is writing itself)” (p. 21).

Perception of educational hypermedia – “that hypermedia computing is inherently poststructionalist (postmodern, deconstuctive, textual) raises several issues immediately…There is no inevitability, no technological determinism leading to some dystopian (or utopian) future social condition” (p. 23).

“Chorography is designed to bring into invention the thought of ‘nation’ as ‘place’: ‘the Idea of a nation, the Idea of the creation of value” (p. 26).

Frontier Metaphor

“An electronic method cites this metaphor because the first theorists of hypermedia, the founders of educational computing, used terms associated with the frontier to characterize their invention” (p. 26).

“The computer is responsible for the most recent ‘frontier of knowledge’ then, bringing into existence a virtual if not a literal new world.  Chorography, as a heuretic approach to inventing a ‘method’ useful for this ‘world,’ takes into account the present state of imagination and curiosity” (p. 27).

“few of the notions of classical rhetoric can be used in constructing a hyperdocument” (p. 27).

Interface

“Another name for ‘rhetoric’ in a computer context is ‘interface’” (p. 28).

Ulmer interested how the electronic apparatus will influence scholarship

“Hypermedia ‘automates’ scholarship (the finding and linking of information), thus making available to ‘amateurs’ the resources once produced and consumed solely by small groups of specialists” (p. 29).

“The new metaphor, which is replacing the book or desktop in recent interface design theory, is that of navigating an ocean of information – in short, Bacon’s metaphor of Columbus beyond the Pillars of Hercules turned into a working model for traveling in an information environment” (p. 30).

New millennium hero will not be Ulysses because there will be no homecoming.  “Instead, the feeling of method (in design or invention) will be close to that of the double bind or paradoxes of myth – a holding together of what does not ‘fit,’ enacted by an ‘anyone’ that is ‘ a stranger of itself, foreign to itself” (p. 31).

“The electronic apparatus, however, is a social machine: the frontier metaphor is in our habits, our conduct, our emotions, in curiosity itself” (p. 31).

3. Experiment

Concerned about what research will look like in the electronic apparatus

“The electronic apparatus, however, is introducing, at every level of individual and institutional behavior, a decentered structuration in which maps designed in terms of centers and peripheries, of frontiers and adventure, no longer corresponds to the territory.  Choral work, that is, puts the ‘adventure of knowledge’ under erasure, which is to say that it is only prelusive, a mere beginning, a proposal, an experiment” (p. 33).

“The project is then to replace topos itself (not just one particular setting but place as such) with chora wherever the former is found in the trivium” (p. 33).

Barthes noted that when we shifted from oral to print, delivery and memory went by the wayside

Ramas noted that changes in the apparatus involved changes in institutions as much as technology.  Invention gone from writing.

Computer memory – “‘Information is not stored anywhere in particular.  Rather, it is stored everywhere.  Information is better thought of as ‘evoked’ that ‘found’” (p. 36).

“It is not that memory is no longer thought of as “place,” but that the notion itself of spatiality has changed” (p. 36).

The change in databases goes from indexing to networks.

“An important aspect of chorography is learning how to write an intuition, and this writing is what distinguishes electronic logic (conduction) from the abductive (Baker Street) reasoning of the detective” (p. 37).

Chorography – place and space

“Within geography ‘chorological analysis” produces a sense of place ‘that is similar to the sense of time that comes from the study of history’, trying to capture a more subjective dimension of spatiality in specific rather than in generic terms” (p. 39).

“‘Chorography’ as a method is inscribed in other words within a tale – a remake of Beau Geste – the remake being the form that evokes the scene of learning appropriate to electronic invention” (41-42).

4. Folie

“One of the features of the method, chorography, is that it does not lend itself to direct communication, at least not yet.  Even if I cannot define chorography, however, I can show something of what it is like” (p. 45).

“Chorography is like commemorating the Columbus quincentary” (p. 47).  “Electronic logic is commemorative” (p. 47).

“For now a dictionary definition must suffice: Chora is ‘an area in which genesis takes place’.  Chora is not thinkable on its own but only within a field, a diegesis, considered as my premises.  ‘Premises’ in logic are propositions that support a conclusion, explicit or implicit assumptions, or a setting forth beforehand by way of introduction or explanation” (p. 48).

“Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)” (p. 48).

“‘The term folies had developed into an expression used for many year to describe a ‘field’ where clandestine lovers spent their romantic evenings.”‘ (p. 50).  Then extended to drinking, dancing, entertainment.

Saloons taken from the French word Salon, represents patriarchy.

“Electronic learning is more like discovery than proof” (p. 56).

5. Chora

“My problem, in inventing an electronic rhetoric by replacing topos with chora in the practice of invention, is to devise a ‘discourse on method’ for that which, similarly, is the other of method” (p. 66).

“What I have been calling the ‘field’ and the ‘premises’ of chorography may be recognized as attempts to translate this theoretical chora into a method” (p. 67).

“Mohr notes that a common feature of all uses of chora is its positioning between, in the middle” (p. 68).

“Chora thus evokes electronic media, keeping in mind that the spirit of the analogy concerns no this or that machine, not a narrowing basket or a convex mirror, not a computer monitor, but machinery or technology as such” (p. 69).

Geschlecht

“The writer using chorography as a rhetoric of invention will store and retrieve information from premises or places formulated not as abstract containers, as in the tradition of topos, but by means of Geschlect.  Chora, in other words, as a figure of spacing, is another name for what has concerned Derrida in nearly every text he has ever written: differance” (p. 73).

“The choral quality of ‘Atlantis’ concerns this power of fascination, this capacity to motivate the practice of search” (p. 76).

“Chorography has to learn from ‘Atlantis’ something about curiosity, about how to motivate a search.  The database of Columbus, with its 900,000 links, is already available, as a hint of what an online learning environment might be (cyberspace)” (p. 77).

6. Beau Geste

“Here is explained the relationship of enlightenment to Geschlect, of reasoning according to vision and by means of the mark (the coup of force).  The mark provides the premises for the light.  The ‘fabulous event’ refers to the foundational act of revolution creating ‘America,’ an act that may be generalized to all acts of invention, demonstrating the foundational – and idiomatic – nature of invention.  My own premises and the invention of chorography are part of this process” (p. 83).

“Chorography is a response to this appeal for invention, however impossible, based on the assumption that invention may not be undertaken ‘in general’ solely by means of abstractions that leave out the foundation of thought in the practices constituting the cultural identity and ideology of the inventor” (p. 84).

Gunga Din’s racist overtones could be overlooked and measured by its film prowess

“But this ‘discounting’ is just what does not happen in chorography, tuned to Geschlect” (p. 86).

Flusser

Chapter 1: What is Communication?

Flusser states that “communications theory is not a natural science, but rather is concerned with the human being’s unnatural aspects” (p. 3). The humanities.

“If he has not learned to make use of the instrument of communication (i.i., language), he is an idiot (originally: a “private person”)” (p. 3).

“The purpose of human communication is to make us forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (p. 4).

“He is a ‘political animal,’ not because he is a social animal, but because he is a solitary animal who cannot live in solitude” (p. 4).

“At the end of the 19th century, it was generally agreed that the natural sciences explain phenomena, whereas the ‘human sciences’ interprets them” (p. 4).  This seems to be a topic that Flusser wants to donate time to. What is communication and how is it different than “natural” studies?

” As a result, ‘communication theory’ is understood as an interpretive discipline (for instance, in contrast to ‘information theory’ or ‘information sciences’), and human communication is seen to be a meaningful phenomenon that must be interpreted” (p. 5).

Negentropy – Flusser notes that, “the accumulation of information is not seen as a process that is statistically improbable [due to the second law of thermodynamics] but possible.  Rather, it is seen as a human intention-not as the result of accident and necessity, but of freedom” (p. 6).

Two ThesMediaes

1. “The thesis that human communication is an artistic technique directed against the solitude unto death” (p. 6)

2. “That human communication is a process directed against the general entropic tendency of nature” (p. 6).

In essence, rather than something being lost between a sender and a receiver in communication (expenditure of energy) the amount of information is built upon.

Chapter 2: On the Theory of Communication

Communication

1. Wide – “A process by which a system is changed by another system” (p. 8).

2. Strict – “A process by which a system is changed by another system in such a way that the sum of information is greater at the end of the process than at its beginning” (p. 8).

“Seen thus, the lecture is not a thermodynamic process, but is of a different order.  The sum total of information in the room increases as the lecture goes on, if seen thus.  And this is in fact the reason why it increases information, why it is negentropic” (p. 9).

“Negentropy cannot be observed objectively” (p. 9).

“Although no objective observation of cultural negentropy is possible, it is still possible to observe it with a rigor that approaches the rigor of the natural sciences” (p. 9).

Codes

“Codes are results of conventions that establish symbols and rules” (p. 11).

“Three types of structures: those that order the symbols in linear sequences (the diachronical ones); those that order them in surfaces (the plain synchronical ones); and that order them in space (the tridimentional synchronical ones)” (p. 15).  Structure of the messages influences the translation.

Three types of symbols

“Those that mean phenomena (substantives) those that mean relations (verbs) and those that mean rules (copulas)” (p. 16).

“The ultimate aim of the theory of communication is to ‘explain’ the negentropic character of human communication, an aspect of man in his opposition to the world” (p. 20).

“Aside from the theory of communication, and in part within it, a purely quantifying discipline, the theory of information is developing, and it is dedicated to the study of negentropy” (p. 20).

Chapter 3: Line and Surface

“Lines are discourses of points, and that each point is a symbol of something out there in the world (a ‘concept’).  Therefore, lines represent the world by projecting it as a series of successions, in the form of a process” (p. 21).

Adequation of “Surface Thought” to “Line Thought”

Difference between reading a book or pictures, we read language left to right, up to down.

Reading a picture “This double method – synthesis followed by analysis (a process that may be repeated several times in the course of a single reading) is what characterizes the reading of pictures” (p. 23).  We read to get the message, when reading pictures we get the message first and then decompose it.

“The theater represents the world of things through things, and the film represents the world of things through projections of things” (p. 24).

Historical freedom – “For those who think in written lines, the term means the possibility of acting upon history from within history.  For those who think in films, however, it will mean the possibility of acting upon history from without.

“Visually, films are surfaces, but to the ear they are spatial” (p. 25).

“Official Western thought had expressed itself much more in written lines than in surfaces.  Written lines impose a specific structure on thought, in that they represent the world by means of a point sequence.  This implies a ‘historical’ being-in-the-world of those who write and read written lines” (p. 25).

“It means that ’surface thought’ is absorbing ‘linear thought,’ or is at least beginning to do so” (p. 26).

“This means that imaginal thought is becoming capable of thinking about concepts.  It can transform a concept into its ‘object,’ and can therefore become a metathought of conceptual thinking” (p. 30).

“At present we dispose of two media between ourselves and the facts – the linear and the surface.  The linear are becoming more and more abstract, and are losing all meaning” (p. 31).

“A new kind of medium may thus emerge, permitting us to rediscover a sense of ‘reality’; in this way, we may be able to open up fields for a new type of thinking, with its own logic and its own kind of codified symbols.  In short, the synthesis of linear and surface media may result in a new civilization” (p. 31).

“A difference in the temporality of the two positions.  The historical position stands in historical time, in the process.  The structural position stands in that sort of time wherein processes are seen as forms” (p. 33).

New Civilization

1. “There is the possibility that imaginal thinking will not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking.”  Would lead to victory of consumer society and to the totalitarianism of the mass media.

2. “That imaginal thinking will succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking.”  Structural position, a new sense of reality would articulate itself, within the existential climate of a new religiosity (p. 34).

Chapter 4: The Codified World

“We are exposed to a constant stream of colors.  We are programmed by colors.  They are an aspect of the codified world in which we have to live.  Colors are the manner in which surfaces appear to us.  Thus, if a significant number of the messages programmed for us appear in color, it means that surfaces have become important as carriers of messages” (p. 35).

“The face that humankind is being programmed by surfaces (images) should not be considered a revolutionary piece of news.  On the contrary, it apparently signifies a return to a primitive origin” (p. 36).  A return to the Middle Ages yet not illiteracy.  “The difference is this: premodern images are the products of skilled handworkers (‘works of art’), and postmodern images are the products of technology” (p. 36).

“A code is a system of symbols.  Its purpose is to make communication between people possible” (p. 36).

‘”imagination’ means: the ability to reduce the world of situations to scenes.  And vice versa: to decipher the scenes as substitutes for situations, to make ‘maps’ and to read them – including the ‘maps’ that designate desired situations” (p. 37).

“The invention of writing consisted not so very much in the invention of new symbols, but rather in the unrolling of the image into rows (lines)” (p. 38).

“If one considers scientific thinking as the highest expression of historical consciousness – because it raises the logical and procedural thinking of the linear text  up to the level of method – then one can say: the victory of texts over images – of science over magic – is an event of our most recent history and far from being counted as conclusive” (p. 39).

“The new generation, which is programmed by techno-images, does not share our ‘values.’ And we still do not know for what meaning the techno-images that surround us are being programmed” (p. 40).

“That is what we mean by ‘crisis of values’: that we step out of the linear world of explanations and into the techno-imaginary world of ‘models’” (p. 40).  They are the image of a concept of a scene.  Crisis because it gets rid of old programs (politics) yet does not replace them with new ones.

Chapter 5: Criteria – Crisis – Criticism

“Critical thinking results from the praxis of writing…Counting is the act of tearing things out of their context, to arrange them in rows.  Counting is the core of critical thinking” (p. 42).

“Linear writing is both the origin of critical thinking and its tool.  Its original purpose was not to critique objects in the world out there or the phenomena of the interior world, but rather to critique images” (p. 43).

“The result of critical thinking is Western history, with all its triumphs and its barbarities” (p. 43). Resulting in Western science and technology.

“If we consider how the criticism of images has been elaborated during the course of our history, then critical thinking cannot be applied to photography or other technical images, because these images are based on science and technology – produced by apparatuses – and are therefore themselves based on critical thinking” (p. 43).

“Critical thinking is presently experiencing its own crisis, because it does not possess the appropriate criteria allowing it to critique its own products” (p. 44).

“The critics have expelled beauty from daily life” (p. 45).

“This means that we, as the addressees of photographs, have to critique the criteria according to which photographs have been produced: that is, those criteria according to the apparatus that produced them has itself been produced and programmed, and through which they have been distributed, until they finally reach us” (p. 45).

“As long as we do not recognize that we need to critique photography’s struggle against criteria – against programs – we remain incapable of working out newer and more appropriate criteria” (p. 46).

Crisis – “I use this concept to describe the critical point where critical thinking beings to turn on itself” (p. 46).

“The term truth is experiencing a moment of crisis in the scientific realm.  But, in a photograph, the relationship between a statement and its meaning is even more opaque than in scientific propositions” (p. 47).

“‘Photo criticism’ signifies a critical, judgmental, decision-making activity that programs photographic apparatuses and directs the photographs pouring from them into channels through which we receive them. On the other hand, ‘photo criticism’ signifies the attempt to critique photo criticism in the first sense” (p. 48).

“Therefore, it is first necessary to invent an anti-apparatus, to program this sort of antifunction” (p. 49).

“Thus, the task of this sort of photo criticism is to emancipate the photographer and, through him, to contribute to the emancipation of society as a whole” (p. 50).

Chapter 6: Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion

Second law of thermodynamics translated into English

“The statement is radical because it proposes quantifiable aesthetic criteria: it states that mathematical categories may be applied to art criticism.  It translates the second law from an algorithm into an English sentence in order to use that algorithm as a criterion to judge art by” (p. 51).

New

“The word new here means objectively any situation that emerges from the tendency toward ever-increasing probability, and such an improbability may be exactly quantified by probability calculus…And the word new means subjectively any situation that makes us tremble because it is unexpected” (p. 52).

Art

“Art is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situation…Thus art is that human activity which aims at producing hateful, ugly situations, situations that cause terror” (p. 52).

Habit

“Habit here means the aesthetic equivalent of ‘entropy’ in physics” (p. 53).

“This is the central point of any future art criticism – that point at which habit turns into terror, kitsch into what is ugly” (p. 56).

Chapter 7: Betrayal

“To divulge means to betray a secret” (p. 58). The purpose of this essay is to consider the connotation of treachery hidden within the concept of publication.

“Whether to divulge secrets, to betray, is a good or a bad thing” (p. 59).

Chicken vs. Egg

1. Chicken – We’re becoming more vulgar because the middle class is becoming the proletariat.

2. Egg – Vulgar because science and technology make comm gadgets that make the media a silent majority

“Those who try to establish secret codes to which the masses do not have easy access (computer codes) are doing the right thing” (p. 60).  Elites

“The elite that is emerging at present could lead society nowhere, and it is precisely this lack of purpose that would constitute its secret” (p. 61).  New Dark Ages could be darker than the first.

Chapter 8: The Future of Writing

“The tendency away from linear codes such as writing and toward two-dimensional codes such as photographs, films, and TV, a tendency that may be observed if one glances even superficially at the codified world that surrounds us” (p. 63).

“Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called ‘historical consciousness’” (p. 63).

“The imagined world is the world of myth, of magic, the prehistorical world” (p. 64).

“The conceived world is the world of religions, of salvation, of political commitment, of science, and of technology – the historical world” (p. 65).

“The purpose of writing is to mean, to explain images, but texts may become opaque, unimaginable, and they then constitute barriers between man and the world” (p. 66).

“Therefore, prehistoric myths mean ‘real’ situations and posthistoric myths will mean textual prescriptions, and prehistoric magic is meant to propitiate the world, whereas posthistoric magic will be meant to manipulate people” (p. 67).

“The future of writing is to write pretexts for programs while believing that one is writing for utopia” (p. 67). \

Crisis – It is an inversion of the historical roles of reason and imagination…It is one of reason’s prostitution, of a ‘betrayal of the intellectuals” (p. 68).

Lyotard

This blog post will be much longer (and dryer) than the first because I’m leading discussion.  As such, the majority of what will be posted will be highlights from each section (mostly verbatim) for the sake of trying to piece Lyotard’s thoughts together for myself.

1. The Field: Knowledge in Computerized Societies

The status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is know as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.

In the postmodern age, science will maintain and no doubt strengthen its preeminence in the arsenal of productive capacities of the nation-states.  Knowledge in the form of informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major stake in the worldwide competition for power.

The State has even gone to the wayside through multinational corporations.  These forms of circulation imply that investment decisions have passed beyond the control of nation states.

Transformation in the nature of knowledge could well have repercussions on the existing public powers, forcing them to reconsider their relations with the large corporations and, more generally, with civil society.  New technologies increase the urgency of reexamining them since they make the information used in decision making even more mobile and subject to piracy.

2. The Problem: Legitimation

Our hypothesis should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the question raised.

Scientific knowledge does not represent the totality of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition and conflict with, another kind of knowledge: narrative.

Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm.

The point is that there is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics: they both stem from the same perspective.

That knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?

3. The Method

Lyotard begins the third section by defining pragmatic.  “A denotative utterance such as ‘The university is sick,’ made in the context of a conversation or an interview positions its senders (the person who utters the statement), its addressee (the person who receives it), and its referent (what the statement deals with) in a specific way: the utterance places (and exposes) the sender in the position of ‘knower’ (he knows what the situation is with the university), the addressee is put in the position of having to give or refuse his assent, and the referent itself is handled in a way unique to denotatives, as something that demands to be correctly identified and expressed by the statement that refers to it” (p. 9).

He refers to prescriptions as orders, commands, instructions, etc. where the sender has authority over the addressee like, “Give money to the university.”

Language Games – The various categories of utterances can be defined by the rules they attend to, like in the game of chess, pieces can only move a certain way.

Agonistics of language – A feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language or connotation.

4. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Modern Alternative

Two basic representational models for society: either society forms a functional whole (Postwar Parsons) or it is divided in two (Marxist schools).

1. As a whole – Society forms an organic whole, in the absence of which it ceases to be a society.  Parson’s conception of society as a self-regulating system.

5. The Nature of the Social Bond: The Postmodern Perspective

Lyotard states, “I chose language games as my general methodological approach” (p. 15). Language games are the minimum relation required for society to exist: even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him, in relation to which he will inevitably chart his course.

6. The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge

Lyotard begins this section stating, “Knowledge is not the same as science, especially in its contemporary form; and science, far from successfully obscuring the problem of its legitimacy, cannot avoid raising it with all of its implications, which are no less sociopolitical than epistemological” (p. 18).

Knowledge cannot be reduced to science nor learning (describe objects which may be declared true or false).  Science is a subset of learning with two extra conditions: objects must be available for repeatable access and it must be possible to decide if a given statement pertains to the language judged by experts.

Knowledge is composed of more than denotative statements, it includes know-how, how to live, how to listen, meaning it is a question of competence.  Knowledge allows a person to make good denotative statements, perscriptive, and evaluative utterances.

Principal feature of knowledge – it coincides with an extensive array of competence-building measures and is the only form embodied in a subject constituted by the various areas of competence composing it.

The relationship between knowledge and custom is important as well because utterances are judged as “good” because they subscribe to a certain criteria.  The criteria of “good” is what constitutes a culture of people.

“Narration is the quintessential form of customary knowledge, in more ways than one” (p. 19).

Narratives

1. Allow the society to define its criteria of competence and evaluate what is performed or can be performed within it.

2. Lends itself to a great variety of language games.

3. Their narration usually obeys rules that define the pragmatics of their transmission (intrinsically). The narrator’s only claim to competence for telling the story is the fact that he has heard it himself.  What is transmitted through these narratives is the set of pragmatic rules that constitutes the social bond.

4. Its effect on time – Follows a rhythm.

7. The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge

What is “proof” according to science? Two rules

1. A referent is that which is susceptible to proof and can be used as evidence in a debate.

2. The same referent cannot provide contradictory or inconsistent proofs.  “God” is not deceptive.

Comparing pragmatics of science to that of narrative knowledge

1. Science requires one language game, denotation, be retained and all others excluded.  A statement’s truth-value is the criterion determining its acceptability.

2. Scientific knowledge is set apart from the language games that combine to form the social bond.  Unlike narrative knowledge, it is no longer a direct and shared component of the bond.

3. The competence required concerns the post of sender alone.  There is no particular competence required of the addressee or of the referent.

4. A statement of science gains no validity from the fact of being reported.

5. The game of science implies a diachronic temporality, that is, a memory and a project.

8. The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge

Modern science brought two new features in the problem of legitimation.

1. “It leaves behind the metaphysical search for a first proof or transcendental authority as a response to the question: ‘How do you prove the proof?’ or ‘Who decides the conditions of truth?’”

2. “Narration is no longer an involuntary lapse in the legitimation process.  Who has the right to decide for society?  Who is the subject whose prescriptions are norms for those they obligate?”

“The ‘people’ (the nation, or even humanity), and especially their political institutions, are not content to know – they legislate.  That is, they formulate prescriptions that have the status of norms” (p.31).

9. Narratives of the Legitimation of Knowledge

Narrative of legitimation, political and philosophy

1. Political – Humanity as the hero of liberty.  People have a right to science.  Yet deemphasizes higher education.

2. Philosophy – This narrative of legitimation influenced higher education in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The university should orient its constituent element, science, to “the spiritual and moral training of the nation.”  Philosophy must restore unity to learning, which has been scattered into separate sciences in laboratories and in preuniversity education; it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moment in the becoming of spirit, in other words, which links them in a rational narration, or rather meta-narration.

10. Delegitimation

The grand narrative has lost its credibility. The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since WWII, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means and that of a resurgence of liberal capitalism.

Knowledge is only worthy if it reduplicates itself.

Problems with legitimation – The difference between a denotative statement with cognitive value and a prescriptive statement with practical value is one of relevance, therefore competence.  For example a closed door.  Between “the door is closed” and “open the door” there is no relation of consequence as defined in propositional logic.  The two statements belong to two autonomous sets of rules defining different kinds of relevance, and therefore of competence.

This allows for an open current of postmodernity – science plays its own game; it is incapable of legitimating the other language games.

11. Research and Its Legitimation through Performativity

Axiomatic – That includes a definition of symbols to be used in the proposed language, a description of the form expressions in the language must take in order to gain acceptance (well-formed expressions), and an enumeration fo the operation that may be performed on the accepted expressions (axioms in the narrow sense).

How do we know that what an axiomatic should or does contain?

1. There has to be a metalanguage to determine if a language satisfies the conditions of an axiomatic; that metalanguage is logic.

Back to proof – How do we prove a proof?

1. Scientific observation? No our senses deceive us.

2. Technology? Used by humans whose function is to receive data or condition the context.  Technology maximizes output while minimizing input.  It is therefore a game pertaining not to the true, the just, or the beautiful, but to efficiency.  A technical move is “good” when it produces more with less energy expended.

Capitalism solves the problem of research funding by creating research departments.  The State abandons the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in favor of power.  Scientists, technicians, and instruments do not provide truth, rather they augment power.

12. Education and Its Legitimation through Performativity

Skills indispensable to the system

1. Designed to tackle world competition – Certain skill labor (computer scientists, cyberneticists, linguists, etc.) will get priority in education to increase the number of experts.

2. Higher learning will have to continue to supply the social system with the skills fulfilling society’s own needs, which center on maintaining its internal cohesion.

The idea of interdisciplinary approach is specific to the age of delegitimation and its hurried empiricism.  The relation of knowledge is in terms of the users of a complex conceptual and material machinery and those who benefit from its performance capabilities. They have no metalanguage or metanarrative to formulate their goals or correct use of machinery.

13. Postmodern Science as the Search for Instabilities

Determinism is the hypothesis upon which legitimation by performativity is based: since performativity is defined by an input/output ratio, there is a presupposition that the system into which input is entered is stable; that system must follow a regular “path” that it is possible to express as a continuous function possessing a derivative so that an accurate prediction of the output can be made.

Debate between stable and unstable systems, determinism and nondeterminism

1. The more or less determined character of a process is determined by the local state of the process.  Determinism is a type of functioning that is itself determined: in every case nature produces the least complex local morphology compatible with the initial local circumstances.

Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta” catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical.  It is changing the meaning of knowledge, it produces the unknown and it suggest a model of legitimation that has nothing to do with maximizing performance.

14. Legitimation by Paralogy

Little narrative remains a quintessential form of invention, particularly in science.

Will add more to section 14 this weekend.

McLuhan

This blog covers Marshall McLuhan’s book “Understanding Media: The Extension of Man.”  I’ll focus on Part I primarily as the Part II provides more of an application of what he talks about in Part I.

Chapter 1 – The Medium is the Message

“The medium is the message” is one of the phrases that McLuhan is well known for.  “The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (p. 8).  I think the light example helps to explain the focus on content by media scholars.  He states that light has no content (“the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”) and states “For it is not till the electric light is used to spell out some brand name that it is noticed as a medium.  Then it is not the light but the ‘content’ (or what is really another medium) that is noticed” (p. 9).  McLuhan is pointing out that earlier scholars focused too much on the “content” of a message rather than examining the medium of the cultural context.

Sarnoff

The quote by Sarnoff is really telling of how he felt about people questioning the possible harm his technological advances might have.  Sarnoff stated, “We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them.  The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines thier value” (p. 11).  This what communication media scholars struggle with, how are new media technologies influencing the world?  Who benefits and who are harmed by new media?  Is Facebook the great social bridger or the school work killer? McLuhan states, “It has never occured to General Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are” (p. 11).

Literacy

McLuhan spends a decent amount of time on literacy and how the literacy of a people can determine how a new technology is used and or perceived.  “We have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.  Thus in the electric age man seems to the convential West to become irrational” (p. 15).  He states that the electronic age has numbed Western man as we are, “No more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that tames him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation” (p. 16).

Chapter 2 – Media Hot and Cold

This chapter discusses the differences between media that are “hot” and “cool.”  McLuhan states, “A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition.’  High definition is the state of being well filled with data” (p. 22).   He goes on to state, “Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience” (p. 23).  McLuhan remarks that radio is a hot medium where TV (at the time then) and the telephone were cool mediums.  The basic difference between “hot” and “cool” mediums is the amount of information the audience has to fill in.  With radio there is little to fill in by the audience, the medium has done it for them.  However, with a speech, the audience has to fill in the gaps that are not supplied by that medium.

Maybe General Ripper’s collection of radios did make sense.

Hot and Cool Cultures

McLuhan talks about how cultures are “hot” and “cool” and how that can influence the literacy of that culture.  “The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, say in England or America, where radio is felt as entertainment.  A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio as entertainment.  They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world” (p. 31).

Chapter 3 – Reversal of the Overheated Medium

I think one of the interesting things to think about (at least from a communications perspective) is the intercultural aspect of new media theory.  The idea of “hot” and “cool” cultures communicating with each other, what should the medium of communication be?  The hot line example at the beginning of the chapter where the hot line started with a “hot” teletype instead of a “cool” telephone (which it became later).  When we usually think about the US and Soviet relations during the Cold War we almost always think about the message rather than the medium.  And during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the teletype was still the hotline and on the next to last night of the crisis President Kennedy received two teletypes from Moscow, one which was labeled “hard” and the other “soft.”  Kennedy’s cabinet deliberated over it throughout the night about which message to respond to.  Had the hot line been a telephone instead of a teletype the negotiations probably would have gone differently (for better or worse).  One might guess that the “cool” telephone might have stopped the crisis earlier as President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev would have talked privately on the phone.

Maybe negotiations would have looked like this.

Chapter 4 – The Gadget Lover

The Greek myth of Narcissus is used throughout this chapter and is characterized as being numb.  “He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system” (p. 41).  McLuhan goes further about Narcissus being numb, “This is the sense of the Narcissus myth.  The young man’s image is a self-amputation or extenion induced by irritating pressures.  As counter-irritant, the image produces a generalized numbness or shock that declines recognition.  Self-amputation forbids self-recognition” (p. 43).   With regards to new technology McLuhan stated, “The selection of a single sense for intense stimulus, or of a single extended, isolated, or ‘amputated’ sense in technology, is in part the reason for the numbing effect that technology as such has on its makers and users” (p. 44).  Man becomes numb to irritants that allows for “social consciousness” presented in society.

Chapter 5 – Hybrid Energy

McLuhan states, “The hybridizing or compounding of these agents offers an especially favorable opportunity to notice their structural components and properties.  ‘As the silent film cried out for sound, so does the sound film cry out for color’ wrote Sergei Eisenstein” (p. 49).  The media are extensions of ourselves and we are the means for their upkeep and evolution.  Media hybrids have impacted our lives greatly, which are noted by the Pentagon example of plane travel.  Air travel allowed for reporters and agents to be around the world at any time, taking time away from employees in travel and from watching reports abroad.

Chapter 7 – Challenge and Collapse

McLuhan notes Werner Heisenberg’s comments about new technology’s influence on society.  “He points out that technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation” (p. 63).  He goes further, “For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected.  The area of impact and incision is numb.  It is the entire system that is changed.  The effect of radio is visual, the effect of the photo is auditory.  Each new impact shifts the ratios among all the senses” (p. 64).  The influence of new technology is pervasive on society as McLuhan notes, “Perhaps the most obvious ‘closure’ or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it” (p. 67). With new technology there just appears to be a sense of when you get a new piece of technology it becomes an extension of yourself.  When traveling now back and forth to Illinois, I’m attached to satellite radio.  I have driven a car without it now and the experience is brutal.  Like McLuhan’s metaphor to one’s senses, once I have the ability to use a new technology, I want to use it.

Maybe there really was a doomsday gap.