As soon as my thesis is done, I have BIG plans for this space. I just want to jot down some ideas for now.
Posthuman(ism) and:
ornithology
conchology
the beach
Dynamic flash site:
humanism/antihumanism/posthumanism
the cyborg
the posthuman
the human outline and potential updates to her form
3x3 navigation boxes via magnetic central launching node
The website is envisioned as a space for continually developing posthumanist notions (critically). Academic rigor and animated representation and incorporation included.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Simulation/Madness
"The first Gulf War was the first "live" war. World War Two was a world war in space. It spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union, etc. World War Two was quite different from World War One which was geographically limited to Europe. But in the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in space, but global in time, since it is the first "live" war. And to those, like my friend Baudrillard, who say that this war did not actually occur, I reply: this war may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thans to CNN and The Pentagon. This is a new form of war, and all future wares, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents.
(Wilson: How will this removal affect people?)
Firstly, a de-realization, the accident of the real. It's not one, two, hundreds or thousands of people who are being killed, but the whole reality itself. In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real. Imagine that all of a sudden I am convinced that I am Napoleon: I am no longer Virilio, but Napoleon. My reality is wounded. Virtual reality leads to a similar de-realization. However, it no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world.
By the way, this might sound like drama, but it is not the end of the world: it is both sad and happy, nasty and kind. It is a lot of contradictory things at the same time. And it is complex."
--Virilio, Cyberwar, God and Television: An Interview with Paul Virilio
Conducted by Louise Wilson, from Digital Delerium
Virilio's comparison of madness with simulation is really interesting because if we've been taught as liberal academics to treat madness as an interesting singularity in personality, simulation must be able to divulge similarly interesting points. Of course, we may not seek out madness, but we do seem to seek out simulation, at least on some level. Taking, for example, Massive-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), the real player can become Napoleon consciously and willingly, interact with others as Napoleon. But perhaps the previous example is "active" simulation, whereas something like television and CNN is "passive" simulation because one does not choose the way in which it overtakes the body.
(Wilson: How will this removal affect people?)
Firstly, a de-realization, the accident of the real. It's not one, two, hundreds or thousands of people who are being killed, but the whole reality itself. In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real. Imagine that all of a sudden I am convinced that I am Napoleon: I am no longer Virilio, but Napoleon. My reality is wounded. Virtual reality leads to a similar de-realization. However, it no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world.
By the way, this might sound like drama, but it is not the end of the world: it is both sad and happy, nasty and kind. It is a lot of contradictory things at the same time. And it is complex."
--Virilio, Cyberwar, God and Television: An Interview with Paul Virilio
Conducted by Louise Wilson, from Digital Delerium
Virilio's comparison of madness with simulation is really interesting because if we've been taught as liberal academics to treat madness as an interesting singularity in personality, simulation must be able to divulge similarly interesting points. Of course, we may not seek out madness, but we do seem to seek out simulation, at least on some level. Taking, for example, Massive-Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), the real player can become Napoleon consciously and willingly, interact with others as Napoleon. But perhaps the previous example is "active" simulation, whereas something like television and CNN is "passive" simulation because one does not choose the way in which it overtakes the body.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Beginning Life on the Screen
I've just begun Sherry Turkle's book Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet, finish the introduction and the first chapter. Turkle begins her book, which is mostly about MUD-based interactions (think self-designable chatrooms, for now), with an interesting distinction between Modernist and Postmodernist of computer technology. The modernist defines the computer in the sense of an enlarged, more powerful calculator, capable of "computation" in the very literal sense. Postmodernist views, which she obviously prefers and embraces for the book thus far, see computer technology and the internet as an embodiment of itself; computers decentralize and fragment themselves, link (or hyperlink) between objects in infinite number of ways, and allow individual or unique creations in both hardware configurations and representation of the self (MUD chat rooms are her example).
Briefly summarizing the latter, a user can enter a chatroom and become who they want to be. They can become someone of a different gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. and design a world and a simulated life around this persona that they've chosen to adopt. She asserts that some of these users feel more Real in their simulated environment, as if they've final constructed the life they were always meant to have had. Turkle moves on to lay out a history of computer-culture before the internet, while maintaining her modernist/postmodernist binary. What becomes most interesting for me is when she moves into the subsection "objects-to-think-with"...
Computers have become objects of orientation, of remembering, and of life processing. Much like what Sontag says of the photograph at a wedding re-membering the experience, the computer creates a tension between the user and their input and the way it is re-received. But, like photographs, they have become a part of remembrance, so much that we can often rely on photographs (now digital) to recall an event or experience. (Virilio talks about this too, in The Information Bomb in a totally different light). Further than that, like the way certain knowledges are appropriated by the masses and become a part of the way we think about the world (such as Freudian Slips or Dream Analysis from Freud), computers shape ours:
"Today, life on the computer screen carries theory. Here is how it happens. People decide that they want to buy an easy-to-use computer. They are attracted by a consumer product -- say, a computer with a Macintosh-style interface [note, Turkle is writing 11 years ago]. They think they are getting an instrumentally useful product, and there is little question that they are. But now it is in their home and they interact with it every day. And it turns out they are also getting an object that teaches them a new way of thinking and encourages them to develop new expectations about the kinds of relationships they and their children will have with machines. People decide that they want to interact with others on a computer network. They get an account on a commercial service. They think that this will provide them with new access to people and information, and of course it does. But it does more. When they log on, they may find themselves playing multiple roles, they may find themselves playing characters of the opposite sex. In this way they are swept up by the experiences that enable them to explore previously unexamined aspects of their sexuality or that challenge their ideas about a unitary self."
-- Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet
...
My apologies for the vague and overlong summary. My purpose was to get down exactly what I liked about the introduction and the first chapter. The book is extremely pro-digital technology and has done little to complicate that thus far. But it is very informative in drawing a map of the sort of subjectivity-grounded-in-postmodernism. By far the biggest problem with the book is that it is 11 years old and a considerable amount of technological advancements have happened since then.
My main concern at the moment comes from the idea of computer technology (and, more related to the present moment, cyber- or internet technology) as an extension of the self. I hope Turkle goes into more depth here, because she rejects the equation of the computer with the human mind, so the usage of the computer for the mind doesn't quite connect. Virilio and Baudrillard (and Lyotard?) seem to address this from the other point of view. It will be interesting to dive deeper into both sides.
Briefly summarizing the latter, a user can enter a chatroom and become who they want to be. They can become someone of a different gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc. and design a world and a simulated life around this persona that they've chosen to adopt. She asserts that some of these users feel more Real in their simulated environment, as if they've final constructed the life they were always meant to have had. Turkle moves on to lay out a history of computer-culture before the internet, while maintaining her modernist/postmodernist binary. What becomes most interesting for me is when she moves into the subsection "objects-to-think-with"...
Computers have become objects of orientation, of remembering, and of life processing. Much like what Sontag says of the photograph at a wedding re-membering the experience, the computer creates a tension between the user and their input and the way it is re-received. But, like photographs, they have become a part of remembrance, so much that we can often rely on photographs (now digital) to recall an event or experience. (Virilio talks about this too, in The Information Bomb in a totally different light). Further than that, like the way certain knowledges are appropriated by the masses and become a part of the way we think about the world (such as Freudian Slips or Dream Analysis from Freud), computers shape ours:
"Today, life on the computer screen carries theory. Here is how it happens. People decide that they want to buy an easy-to-use computer. They are attracted by a consumer product -- say, a computer with a Macintosh-style interface [note, Turkle is writing 11 years ago]. They think they are getting an instrumentally useful product, and there is little question that they are. But now it is in their home and they interact with it every day. And it turns out they are also getting an object that teaches them a new way of thinking and encourages them to develop new expectations about the kinds of relationships they and their children will have with machines. People decide that they want to interact with others on a computer network. They get an account on a commercial service. They think that this will provide them with new access to people and information, and of course it does. But it does more. When they log on, they may find themselves playing multiple roles, they may find themselves playing characters of the opposite sex. In this way they are swept up by the experiences that enable them to explore previously unexamined aspects of their sexuality or that challenge their ideas about a unitary self."
-- Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity and the Age of the Internet
...
My apologies for the vague and overlong summary. My purpose was to get down exactly what I liked about the introduction and the first chapter. The book is extremely pro-digital technology and has done little to complicate that thus far. But it is very informative in drawing a map of the sort of subjectivity-grounded-in-postmodernism. By far the biggest problem with the book is that it is 11 years old and a considerable amount of technological advancements have happened since then.
My main concern at the moment comes from the idea of computer technology (and, more related to the present moment, cyber- or internet technology) as an extension of the self. I hope Turkle goes into more depth here, because she rejects the equation of the computer with the human mind, so the usage of the computer for the mind doesn't quite connect. Virilio and Baudrillard (and Lyotard?) seem to address this from the other point of view. It will be interesting to dive deeper into both sides.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Optics in 20th Century
"As the century of unbounded curiosity, covetous looking and the de-regulation of the gaze, the twentieth has not been the century of the 'image', as is often claimed, but of optics -- and, in particular, of the optical illusion.
Since pre-1914 days, the imperatives of propaganda (of advertising) and, subsequently, during the long period of Cold War and nuclear deterrence, secuity and iintelligence needs have gradually drawn us into an intolerable situation in which industrial optics have run wildly out of control.
This has produced the new opto-electronic arsenal, which ranges from remote medical detection devices, probing our 'hearts and loins' in real time, to global remote surveillance (from the street-corner camera to the whole panoply of orbital satellites), with the promised emergence of the cyber-circus still to come.
'The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform,' claimed Kafka. What are we to say, then, of this dictatorship exerted for more than half a century by optical hardware which has become omniscient and omnipresent and which, like any totalitarian regime, encourages us to forget we are individuated beings?"
-- Virilio, The Information Bomb, pages 28-29.
I'm interested in the connection Virilio makes with the age of curiosity, because the use of curiosity invokes an image of childishness and wonderment. There is a notion of innocence that comes with this excuse for the gaze, as if this sort of optical technology is a toy for man (Virilio elsewhere in this book talks about 1900s visions of the new century as a vision of blown-up toys for adults). Carelessness comes with curiosity and, just as "curiosity killed the cat" is a horrible saying used to prevent children from sticking their noses into other peoples' business, we can take this age of curiosity as a warning. But perhaps digital technology has made up for this by also making this an "age of consent".
We click 'agree' license and privacy agreements in digital technologies without reading them. We willingly submit details about our lives in the hopes that others will find them interesting (or dateable, or sexy, or intelligent). We post photos of ourselves, tagged with our own full names, searchable by any moderately competent search engine. We allow 'cookies' to show us form-fitted advertisements. Conversely, behind the veil of the screen, we turn and look at all these things in other people. We can browse profiles on dating or social networking sites, look at pictures of thousands of people we don't know -- and their friends and family -- without feeling like a peeping tom. Have voyeurism and consent allied themselves in digital space? Such a question is totally superficial, but worth thinking about in the sense that we can no longer strictly define what is private and what is public.
Since pre-1914 days, the imperatives of propaganda (of advertising) and, subsequently, during the long period of Cold War and nuclear deterrence, secuity and iintelligence needs have gradually drawn us into an intolerable situation in which industrial optics have run wildly out of control.
This has produced the new opto-electronic arsenal, which ranges from remote medical detection devices, probing our 'hearts and loins' in real time, to global remote surveillance (from the street-corner camera to the whole panoply of orbital satellites), with the promised emergence of the cyber-circus still to come.
'The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform,' claimed Kafka. What are we to say, then, of this dictatorship exerted for more than half a century by optical hardware which has become omniscient and omnipresent and which, like any totalitarian regime, encourages us to forget we are individuated beings?"
-- Virilio, The Information Bomb, pages 28-29.
I'm interested in the connection Virilio makes with the age of curiosity, because the use of curiosity invokes an image of childishness and wonderment. There is a notion of innocence that comes with this excuse for the gaze, as if this sort of optical technology is a toy for man (Virilio elsewhere in this book talks about 1900s visions of the new century as a vision of blown-up toys for adults). Carelessness comes with curiosity and, just as "curiosity killed the cat" is a horrible saying used to prevent children from sticking their noses into other peoples' business, we can take this age of curiosity as a warning. But perhaps digital technology has made up for this by also making this an "age of consent".
We click 'agree' license and privacy agreements in digital technologies without reading them. We willingly submit details about our lives in the hopes that others will find them interesting (or dateable, or sexy, or intelligent). We post photos of ourselves, tagged with our own full names, searchable by any moderately competent search engine. We allow 'cookies' to show us form-fitted advertisements. Conversely, behind the veil of the screen, we turn and look at all these things in other people. We can browse profiles on dating or social networking sites, look at pictures of thousands of people we don't know -- and their friends and family -- without feeling like a peeping tom. Have voyeurism and consent allied themselves in digital space? Such a question is totally superficial, but worth thinking about in the sense that we can no longer strictly define what is private and what is public.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Transitions -- Quotebook to Notebook -- and a Pseudo Thesis
This post is necessary in the sense that I feel like I need to state, for my own records (though I do not currently keep records, I am told I should), this blog's transition. Previously - ie. all the posts below this one - I had laid out quotes from books I was reading and then commented on them. This will not change. I enjoy reflecting on these quotes and processing them for myself afterwards. However, the intention of the blog has changed, or better yet has been amended. Now, this blog will be regularly updated as a requisite of my Division III project in my final year at Hampshire College. Though the Div III has no title yet, the topics I will begin to explore (starting now) include:
-->Critiques of Technology, in particular Digital Technology.
-->Accessibility to Knowledge and the Encyclopedic Nature of the Internet.
-->Digital Culture, Techno-culture, Cyberculture, and any other clever configurations of culture which relies on technology or is significantly shaped by technology.
-->Communication Studies, in particular the reduction of distance (as manifested in this blog) and hyperproliferation of communicative devices
-->Visual Culture on the internet and New Media Studies, looking at diverse topics such as art on the internet and personal profiles.
I plan to draw these topics out and position them inside Subjectivity - how the subject is constituted by the world around him - from the schools of continental philosophy, critical theory, and EGS-style mass communications. Thus, my Division III will be theoretically rigorous and include a large written element. However, I also plan to explore, to no lesser degree, creative expression through technology, attempting to question digital technology's reproducibility, temporality, and utter solitude in massive sea of webpages.
Also, though I doubt anyone read this blog before now, I want to be more personal in the way I respond, while still maintaining my previous (supposed) academic demeanor.
-->Critiques of Technology, in particular Digital Technology.
-->Accessibility to Knowledge and the Encyclopedic Nature of the Internet.
-->Digital Culture, Techno-culture, Cyberculture, and any other clever configurations of culture which relies on technology or is significantly shaped by technology.
-->Communication Studies, in particular the reduction of distance (as manifested in this blog) and hyperproliferation of communicative devices
-->Visual Culture on the internet and New Media Studies, looking at diverse topics such as art on the internet and personal profiles.
I plan to draw these topics out and position them inside Subjectivity - how the subject is constituted by the world around him - from the schools of continental philosophy, critical theory, and EGS-style mass communications. Thus, my Division III will be theoretically rigorous and include a large written element. However, I also plan to explore, to no lesser degree, creative expression through technology, attempting to question digital technology's reproducibility, temporality, and utter solitude in massive sea of webpages.
Also, though I doubt anyone read this blog before now, I want to be more personal in the way I respond, while still maintaining my previous (supposed) academic demeanor.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Notes on Passwords
"Alongside commodity value there exist moral or aesthetic values which operate, for their part, in terms of a set opposition between good and bad, between the beautiful and the ugly . . . It seemed to me, however, that there was a possibility for things to circulate differently, and other cultures did indeed offer the image of a form of organization in which the transcendence of value, and with it the transcendence of power, was not established, since it is on the manipulation of values that that transcendence is constituted. It was a question of attempting to strip the object - but not just the object - of its status as commodity, to restore to it an immediacy, a brute reality which would not have a price put on it. Either a thing is 'worthless', or it is 'priceless'; in either case we are dealing with what cannot be evaluated, in the strongest sense of the term. From that point on, the exchange that can be effected operates on foundations that are no longer of the order of the contract - as in the usual system of value - but of the pact. There is a profound difference between the contract, which is an abstract convention between two terms or individuals, and the pact, which is a dual, collusive relation."
-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "Value"
The chapters "Obscenity" and "The Transparency of Evil" distinguish the fact that revealing-all or total sight becomes obscene, as in pornography, whereas something which is secret, which is not visible, takes on an evil disposition in light of its lack of transparency. Once again the limits of visibility are the restricted areas, the outer limits of itself.
"But if our world is indeed inventing a virtual double for itself, we have to see this as the fulfillment of a trend that began long ago. Reality, as we know, has not always existed. We have talked about it only since there has been a rationality to express it, parameters enabling us to represent it by coded and decodable signs.
In the virtual, we are no longer dealing with value; we are merely dealing with a turning-into-data, a turning-into-calculations, a generalized computation in which reality-effects disappear. The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon, just as we talk about the event-horizon in physics. But it is also possible to think that all this is merely a roundabout route towards an as yet indiscernible aim.
There is a positive fascination today with the virtual and all its technologies. if it genuinely is a mode of disappearance, this would be an - obscure, but deliberate - choice on the part of the species itself: the decision to clone itself, lock, stock and barrel, in another universe; to disappear as the human race, properly speaking, in order to perpetuate itself in an artificial species that would have much more efficient, much more operational attributes. Is this what is at issue?"
-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "The Virtual"
-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "Value"
The chapters "Obscenity" and "The Transparency of Evil" distinguish the fact that revealing-all or total sight becomes obscene, as in pornography, whereas something which is secret, which is not visible, takes on an evil disposition in light of its lack of transparency. Once again the limits of visibility are the restricted areas, the outer limits of itself.
"But if our world is indeed inventing a virtual double for itself, we have to see this as the fulfillment of a trend that began long ago. Reality, as we know, has not always existed. We have talked about it only since there has been a rationality to express it, parameters enabling us to represent it by coded and decodable signs.
In the virtual, we are no longer dealing with value; we are merely dealing with a turning-into-data, a turning-into-calculations, a generalized computation in which reality-effects disappear. The virtual might be said to be truly the reality-horizon, just as we talk about the event-horizon in physics. But it is also possible to think that all this is merely a roundabout route towards an as yet indiscernible aim.
There is a positive fascination today with the virtual and all its technologies. if it genuinely is a mode of disappearance, this would be an - obscure, but deliberate - choice on the part of the species itself: the decision to clone itself, lock, stock and barrel, in another universe; to disappear as the human race, properly speaking, in order to perpetuate itself in an artificial species that would have much more efficient, much more operational attributes. Is this what is at issue?"
-- Baudrillard, Passwords - "The Virtual"
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Nostalgia as Utopia
Alexander R. Galloway writes in Warcraft and Utopia (ctheory.net):
"There is a second model of utopia that is less often identified: nostalgia as utopia. This utopia privileges life before capitalism, minimalism and disengagement from the world system. Thus, in the historical period in which the commodity is no longer primarily an object, but has become an image -- the so-called society of the spectacle that emerged in the middle twentieth-century -- one sees the emergence of minimalism as an aesthetic project."
This strikes a personal note. Reflecting on nostalgia, memory seems to have re-cast the past in a light that is pleasing. We find ourselves trying to re-live certain moments that are only pleasing in recollection.
"There is a second model of utopia that is less often identified: nostalgia as utopia. This utopia privileges life before capitalism, minimalism and disengagement from the world system. Thus, in the historical period in which the commodity is no longer primarily an object, but has become an image -- the so-called society of the spectacle that emerged in the middle twentieth-century -- one sees the emergence of minimalism as an aesthetic project."
This strikes a personal note. Reflecting on nostalgia, memory seems to have re-cast the past in a light that is pleasing. We find ourselves trying to re-live certain moments that are only pleasing in recollection.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Expression of Thought
"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help lbut liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of existence, in its very dawning, is in itself and action -- a perilous act."
--Foucault, from the opening leaf of Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
--Foucault, from the opening leaf of Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Quick Note on Foucault
The Subject and Power in "Power" is a masterful, concise, and clear essay on the workings of power. It deals with the the situating, categorizing, naming, and isolation of the subject in order to normalize him.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
From the Just comes the Unjust, in Arrogance
"You must nevertheless bear in mind what I am about to say to you: in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right -- and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do."
-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, from Hidden Cities 5
This is the last city Marco Polo describes in Calvino's book, wrapping up the tour by explaining the virus that grows within what must inhabit the city: Justice. The call to order mankind makes beautiful monuments which elevate its stature and make ever more grand statements about its existence. But as Hidden Cities 4 describes, immediately before, nothing else may flower:
"The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living specieis existed to cast any doubts."
-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, from Hidden Cities 5
This is the last city Marco Polo describes in Calvino's book, wrapping up the tour by explaining the virus that grows within what must inhabit the city: Justice. The call to order mankind makes beautiful monuments which elevate its stature and make ever more grand statements about its existence. But as Hidden Cities 4 describes, immediately before, nothing else may flower:
"The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no other living specieis existed to cast any doubts."
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Foucault and Continuum
Foucault takes Merleau-Ponty's essential philosophical task as his own, making a beautiful treatise on academic work and literal self-consciousness in thought:
"Never to consent to being completely comfortable with one's own presuppositions. Never to let them fall preacefully asleep, but also never to believe that a new fact will suffice to overturn them; never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms, remembering that in order to give them the necessary mobility one must have a distant view, but also look at what is nearby and all around oneself. To be very mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored. The most fragile instant has its roots. In that lesson, there is a whole ethic of sleepless evidence that does not rule out, far from it, a rigorous economy of the True and the False; but that is not the whole story."
--Foucault, For an Ethic of Discomfort
In my studies of Foucault thus far (the never ending quest and digestion of his thought, the rotation and rearticulation of all points), this passage is one of the most meaningful in light of his work. At the beginning of the essay, he encounters the question asked in a German journal: "What is Enlightenment." Kant responds, but Foucault sees the question more important than the answer. For him, the question implies a sort of self-consciousness that manages to rupture the Enlightenment simply by calling it into question; there are no static periods of time, only fluid movements of thoughts and discourses which, when called into question, double back on themselves and analyze, reinterpret, and rearticulate towards a horizon of distance. The question is an important thing in life -- the self and the public or society -- because it asks for reexamination, and thus an understanding that we are located in an infinite continuum where our beliefs and practices constantly change around us. We must ground ourselves in the middle of the stream in order to understand its current.
"Never to consent to being completely comfortable with one's own presuppositions. Never to let them fall preacefully asleep, but also never to believe that a new fact will suffice to overturn them; never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms, remembering that in order to give them the necessary mobility one must have a distant view, but also look at what is nearby and all around oneself. To be very mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored. The most fragile instant has its roots. In that lesson, there is a whole ethic of sleepless evidence that does not rule out, far from it, a rigorous economy of the True and the False; but that is not the whole story."
--Foucault, For an Ethic of Discomfort
In my studies of Foucault thus far (the never ending quest and digestion of his thought, the rotation and rearticulation of all points), this passage is one of the most meaningful in light of his work. At the beginning of the essay, he encounters the question asked in a German journal: "What is Enlightenment." Kant responds, but Foucault sees the question more important than the answer. For him, the question implies a sort of self-consciousness that manages to rupture the Enlightenment simply by calling it into question; there are no static periods of time, only fluid movements of thoughts and discourses which, when called into question, double back on themselves and analyze, reinterpret, and rearticulate towards a horizon of distance. The question is an important thing in life -- the self and the public or society -- because it asks for reexamination, and thus an understanding that we are located in an infinite continuum where our beliefs and practices constantly change around us. We must ground ourselves in the middle of the stream in order to understand its current.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Blogging / Bookwriting
While reading on sexuality I came across this quote, seemingly unrelated.
"I also reminded myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble ofr making books if they failed to teach the author something he had not known before, if they did not lead to unforeseen places, and if they did not disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and pleasure of the book is to be an experience."
--Foucault, Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two
Though blogging is not the same experience as writing a book, my project views the experience in much the same way. I am reaching for limbs of knowledge I've not yet encountered, and the processing of them is what is rewardingly transformative.
"I also reminded myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble ofr making books if they failed to teach the author something he had not known before, if they did not lead to unforeseen places, and if they did not disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and pleasure of the book is to be an experience."
--Foucault, Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume Two
Though blogging is not the same experience as writing a book, my project views the experience in much the same way. I am reaching for limbs of knowledge I've not yet encountered, and the processing of them is what is rewardingly transformative.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Rhizome metaphor
Rhizome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A rhizome is, in botany, a usually-underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. They are also referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks. A stolon is similar to a rhizome, but exists above ground, sprouting from an existing stem.
Many plants have rhizomes that serve to spread the plant by vegetative reproduction. Examples are asparagus, Lily of the valley and Sympodial Orchids. The spreading stems of ferns are also called rhizomes.
A tuber is a thickened part of a rhizome that has been enlarged for use as a storage organ. They are typically high in starch. An example is the common potato.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A rhizome is, in botany, a usually-underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. They are also referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks. A stolon is similar to a rhizome, but exists above ground, sprouting from an existing stem.
Many plants have rhizomes that serve to spread the plant by vegetative reproduction. Examples are asparagus, Lily of the valley and Sympodial Orchids. The spreading stems of ferns are also called rhizomes.
A tuber is a thickened part of a rhizome that has been enlarged for use as a storage organ. They are typically high in starch. An example is the common potato.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Herzog lecture
I saw Werner Herzog give a talk today at Amherst which was truly brilliant. He's such a charismatic fellow. He filled my head with thoughts and I hope I can get some of them down for processing and perhaps editing into a Div III of sorts.
Most potent: The way Herzog shifts the focuses of his movies and riffs off tangents which truly isolate the "reality" of his films. He showed a clip from The White Diamond, which I haven't seen, in which the camera moves from the scientist to the local man who is formally uneducated but really quite wise. For me, this sort of work goes to show the ways in which narratives can fragment themselves in search of what Herzog referred to as a "truth". He distinguished fact from truth, asserting that truth was something more profound and emphemeral than a solid fact. Information, particularly the new realms of information brought on by digitality, present ways in which tangential elements can form a more individualized space and what is actually taken from "an exploration" is quite unique. This is obviously related to my hypertext project from the collector. Perhaps I could use his films as a catalyst to re-explore some of the themes I was trying to articulate through hypertexts.
I'm in the midst of passing my Division II. I hope to be able to work out some of the groundwork for my Division III in this space.
Most potent: The way Herzog shifts the focuses of his movies and riffs off tangents which truly isolate the "reality" of his films. He showed a clip from The White Diamond, which I haven't seen, in which the camera moves from the scientist to the local man who is formally uneducated but really quite wise. For me, this sort of work goes to show the ways in which narratives can fragment themselves in search of what Herzog referred to as a "truth". He distinguished fact from truth, asserting that truth was something more profound and emphemeral than a solid fact. Information, particularly the new realms of information brought on by digitality, present ways in which tangential elements can form a more individualized space and what is actually taken from "an exploration" is quite unique. This is obviously related to my hypertext project from the collector. Perhaps I could use his films as a catalyst to re-explore some of the themes I was trying to articulate through hypertexts.
I'm in the midst of passing my Division II. I hope to be able to work out some of the groundwork for my Division III in this space.
Monday, April 03, 2006
From a recent meditation of Space, Knowledge, and Power
From Foucault's Space, Knowledge, and Power
Another interesting aspect of power that Foucault touches on in this section is the relationship of architecture, and more generally space or geography, to power. For him, infrastructure had a great effect on the way that society in the modern sense was molded; the development of railroads and later electricity definitively changed the ways that people interact within a space and, more broadly, feel about themselves as a nation. On a more microscopic level, the development of architecture was both liberating and confining depending on its usage: an enclosed square could be a very nice open public space while simultaneously being available for unending surveillance. Thus, there is a tension with individual’s interaction with space, and their tendencies within. This relates to Foucault’s important idea of the Panopticon and Panopticism, which draws the connections between action and surveillance. The element of knowledge and communication comes forth in both the micro and macro levels; accessibility and mobility increased, communication increased. This notion of infrastructure is even more interesting in light of more advanced technology that he didn’t live to see in an operable state. The internet in particular, with its ability to traverse the globe and glean information from millions of sources changes the way in which we interact with the world. A new power relation is formed in the way this accessibility and knowledge effect us, one where control is perhaps (optimistically) further relinquished in favor of the individual.
Conversely (and sticking with the internet tangent), the internet also allows greater surveillance in the sorts of information that is digitally transmitted. Take, for example, Google’s recent move into China under the pretense of government controlled censorship. Further, the inexplicable advertisements that seem to know exactly where you live and the sorts of products you consume, due to the advancement and manipulation of “cookies” embedded within folder in your hard drive.
Another interesting aspect of power that Foucault touches on in this section is the relationship of architecture, and more generally space or geography, to power. For him, infrastructure had a great effect on the way that society in the modern sense was molded; the development of railroads and later electricity definitively changed the ways that people interact within a space and, more broadly, feel about themselves as a nation. On a more microscopic level, the development of architecture was both liberating and confining depending on its usage: an enclosed square could be a very nice open public space while simultaneously being available for unending surveillance. Thus, there is a tension with individual’s interaction with space, and their tendencies within. This relates to Foucault’s important idea of the Panopticon and Panopticism, which draws the connections between action and surveillance. The element of knowledge and communication comes forth in both the micro and macro levels; accessibility and mobility increased, communication increased. This notion of infrastructure is even more interesting in light of more advanced technology that he didn’t live to see in an operable state. The internet in particular, with its ability to traverse the globe and glean information from millions of sources changes the way in which we interact with the world. A new power relation is formed in the way this accessibility and knowledge effect us, one where control is perhaps (optimistically) further relinquished in favor of the individual.
Conversely (and sticking with the internet tangent), the internet also allows greater surveillance in the sorts of information that is digitally transmitted. Take, for example, Google’s recent move into China under the pretense of government controlled censorship. Further, the inexplicable advertisements that seem to know exactly where you live and the sorts of products you consume, due to the advancement and manipulation of “cookies” embedded within folder in your hard drive.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Sleepiness
The problem with narrative which relies on sleep as its launchpad is that its rhythm and movement resemble sleep too much. I realize that this is the point, but also beside it. However, reading such work slows the mind, inducing it into a sleep which is both brilliant (for its catalyst and its self-realization) and unfortunate (because it closes the text and makes it inaccessible). I read books on memory and sleep in order to reveal worlds in web-outlines and periscopic views on individual moments. This is beautiful. But like a dream you never remember it all and feel as if you are doing an injustice to the author by only half-completing their book and half-forming your own memories about what was actually drawn from the page. Nonetheless, reading these sorts of books can still be enjoyable, if only because of the happiness of realizing what's going on between you and the piece.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Beyond Good and Evil
The notion of the Will to Power describes the will as both commanding and obedient; the orb that floats between magnets, constrained by both positive and negative elements.
"It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every "causal connection" and "psychological necessity" something of constraint, need, coompulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings -- the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "unfreedom of the will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class). Others, on the contray, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for themselves somewhere else."
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The will is classically indicted for some form of manipulation. It seems that both strong and weak willed, as examples, mingle with each other. Most often one wants true credit for their merits, but will take no responsibility for an error or failing.
Nietzsche also talks about the way that the modes of interpretation affect truth. One takes a necessary jumping-off point and assumes correctness because of fluidity of connections. Different intentions reveal different readings.
[As an aside, I mistakenly sat down at an extremely well concealed Christian cafe. A missionary group wandered in as I was reading this quote, and I was struck by it:]
"Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people eat and drjnk, even where they venerate, it usually stinks. One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air."
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Here Nietzsche is showing his nihilism and dislike of humanity, because he sees it as ignorant and superficial. The intelligent man, he claims, recognizes the ignorance and superficiality in other men. There is a repression of awareness and a laziness to question in the indigent, causing them lie to themselves for the sake of themselves.
"A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there -- and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profuound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpreation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.--"
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
So the common man constitutes an image of the intelligent man(a philosopher for Nietzsche) by the way that his words are misinterpretted and taken to mean different things than their honest meanings. A mask is grown around this man because he is considered in the way others see him; he is alienated from the common man because his views must be digestible and accessible.
"It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every "causal connection" and "psychological necessity" something of constraint, need, coompulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings -- the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the "unfreedom of the will" is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their "responsibility," their belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races belong to this class). Others, on the contray, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for themselves somewhere else."
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The will is classically indicted for some form of manipulation. It seems that both strong and weak willed, as examples, mingle with each other. Most often one wants true credit for their merits, but will take no responsibility for an error or failing.
Nietzsche also talks about the way that the modes of interpretation affect truth. One takes a necessary jumping-off point and assumes correctness because of fluidity of connections. Different intentions reveal different readings.
[As an aside, I mistakenly sat down at an extremely well concealed Christian cafe. A missionary group wandered in as I was reading this quote, and I was struck by it:]
"Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them. Where the people eat and drjnk, even where they venerate, it usually stinks. One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air."
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Here Nietzsche is showing his nihilism and dislike of humanity, because he sees it as ignorant and superficial. The intelligent man, he claims, recognizes the ignorance and superficiality in other men. There is a repression of awareness and a laziness to question in the indigent, causing them lie to themselves for the sake of themselves.
"A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there -- and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profuound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpreation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.--"
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
So the common man constitutes an image of the intelligent man(a philosopher for Nietzsche) by the way that his words are misinterpretted and taken to mean different things than their honest meanings. A mask is grown around this man because he is considered in the way others see him; he is alienated from the common man because his views must be digestible and accessible.
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Judicial and Juridical
Distinction:
An anthropological penal system punishes the person(ality) for their ability or dispostion to commit a crime. It is purely psychological.
A Juridical system punishes the act, not the personality. It is purely circumstantial.
The current system is a mixture of the two. This system is set within a true binary: Free and Confined.
An anthropological penal system punishes the person(ality) for their ability or dispostion to commit a crime. It is purely psychological.
A Juridical system punishes the act, not the personality. It is purely circumstantial.
The current system is a mixture of the two. This system is set within a true binary: Free and Confined.
Language as a weapon
"To condemn someone to a perpetual prison term is to transpose a medical or psychological diagnosis onto the judicial sentence; it is to saqy, "He is irredeemable." To impose a detminate sentence on someone is to ask a medical, psychological, or pedagogical practice to give a content to the judicial decision that punishes."
Foucault, To Punish is the most Difficult Thing There Is
The marking of a criminal, or perhaps rather the creation of one, is based on the judicial and medical language that occurs before conviction. There, the narrative is constructed which shows that the accused is predisposed to commit the crime. No bother his very predisposition labeled on him may be out of his control. To send someone to prison for life is to give up on them, to make the extreme discision that they will never be able to control themselves, that they will never be able to be just.
Foucault, To Punish is the most Difficult Thing There Is
The marking of a criminal, or perhaps rather the creation of one, is based on the judicial and medical language that occurs before conviction. There, the narrative is constructed which shows that the accused is predisposed to commit the crime. No bother his very predisposition labeled on him may be out of his control. To send someone to prison for life is to give up on them, to make the extreme discision that they will never be able to control themselves, that they will never be able to be just.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
OuLiPo and Structures of Texts
Abilities to harness a structure, to bend it to your will, allow a flexing of a work which further brings out the elements written within it. OuLiPo, for example, used mathematic structures or formulas for constructing works; it is in these structures that they are most able to exploit and subsequently articulate an idea, ultimately breaking it free of the mold or pattern. It is this method - a method of constraining a text - that allows it to grow and develop within certain bounds. Once properly developed, it is released, and it can serve as an example of an exploitation while simultaneously representing itself as a unique specimen of thought, of a potentiality.
Perec's meditation of spaces and structures of our lives resonate with the unthought; it is precisely what certain spaces represent and go unnoticed that is most interesting.
Perec's meditation of spaces and structures of our lives resonate with the unthought; it is precisely what certain spaces represent and go unnoticed that is most interesting.
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