gcraighobbs /201 /all

In reverse chronological order...

11/28 - Embodiment

Material presented for lecture -

Stelarc clips

Bjork - All Is Full Of Love (1998, Directed by Chris Cunningham)

Spatio-Temporal Video - http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/members/alvaro/Khronos/Khronos_Projector.htm

Robert Lazzarini - http://www.robertlazzarini.com

Chris Cunningham - Rubber Johnny (2006, Written and directed by Chris Cunningham)

Note: As I proposed at the end of our class session, the above clip provides an effective platform to engage with questions of embodiment, disembodiment, and morphological aspects of bodily representation, both in the physical and political sense. Rubber Johnny problematizes the notion of disembodiment. In as much as a disembodied experience can fluctuate from overwhelmingly spiritual, to horribly frightening, it seems to me that Rubber Johnny is an excellent site of engagement on matters of disembodiment. The questions of disability is brought to the fore, with an effective move toward aesthetic embrace of the grotesque. In one sense, this is a hyperbolic and synaesthetic attempt to counter presumptions of the disabled through a visual and rhythmic counterproposal of intense affection. Is it affective? Empowering? Of disabling? Only a disabled person may truly know. The original I clip I considered for the function of further problematizing this question of disembodiment is Windowlicker, also by Aphex Twin and Chris Cunningham. Windowlicker's layered problematic of race, sex, and class tied to body morphology as disembodiment seemed too intense to be addressed in a single lecture, and without adequate representation.

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson's excerpt from Matter and Memory provides the opening salvo of an extended ontological inquiry into matter, memory, duration, intuition, perception, affect, and the body. For Bergson, the body exists distinct from all images, from perception, and from consciousness. Interspersed between perceptions received from without and processed within, leading to movement and change in the world, we find the body as a center of indetermination. The body is the recipient and processor of affective experience, and the site of affection through memory.

In the first sentence of his introduction to Matter and Memory Berson states, "This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory." For Bergson, matter is an aggregate of "images" halfway between representation and thing (in the philosophical sense). As a matter of common sense, "the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image."

Through embodiment, we complete the philosophical circuit of phenomenological experience. Bergson writes, "The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them." Thus implying the body as source of meaning and action upon material reality. Matter is the aggregate of images; perception of matter, "these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body."

In as much as a cursory reading of Bergson is possible, the text provides a basis for embodiment because the body is proposed as the medium into and from which meaning emerges from matter. The body is matter, but it is also our matter. And therefore the only known ontological substrate gifted to us in the pursuit of experience, meaning, spirit, and a means for the inquiry into "the reality of matter" itself.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Bergson's ontology is a source of great influence to post-structuralist theorists such as Deleuze and Lyotard. Lyotard's apocalyptic treatise Can Thought go on without a Body? is like a bad LSD trip for the philosophical elite. Lyotard opens his essay as Slayer might rip open a song, "You philosophers ask questions without answers, questions that have to remain unanswered to deserve being called philosophical." The refrain? Too late, you're dead. Lyotard riffs, "But after the sun's death there won't be a thought to know that its death took place." And thus, a simultaneously nihilistic and ambient discourse proceeds on thought, matter, the body, and our inevitable endings.

Like a blissed out rastafarian, Lyotard's appears both intensely enlightened and ridiculously paranoid. But his paranoia is put to good service for the plight of civilization is indeed one of peril. Of thought, and in praise of jah, his prophesy, "In 4.5 billion years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there'll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a 'life of mind' that will have been nothing else than a covert form of earthly life."

Unlike Slayer, Lyotard's intensity does not betray his humanity when he concludes in an ecumenical tone, "A form of life that was spiritual because human, human because earthly - coming from the earth of the most living of living things." What emerges is a call to arms - in the philosophical sense - against the autonomous mind, crystallized in the primal ooze of our earthly existence, its environment, and the body; which I am in no hurry to reveal is THE ONLY PLACE where thought can go on. Lyotard arrives at a similar conclusion.

He surveys phenomenology - Husserl, Claudel, and Merleau-Ponty - to reveal human death as a form of non-being, whereas "solar death implies an irreparabley exclusive disjunction between death and thought." Which is to say no body = no thought, no precursor to thought, no afterthought, no nothing.

Lyotard then reveals the subject of his anarchistic disdain, the vampiric technologists in their efforts to simulate human thought. The disaster in the making, "the job of simulating conditions of life and thought to make thinking remain materially possible after the change in the condition of matter," is fully underway. "This and this alone is what's at stake today in technical and scientific research in every field from dietics, neurophysiology, genetics, and tissue synthesis to particle physics, astrophysics, electronics, information science and nuclear physics." Which is to say, the desire to suspend death through the extension of consciousness into disembodied matter is the modus operandi of utopian technologies.

Lyotard utilizes the metaphor of the body as computer to reveal the inadequacy of binary systems in replicating human thought. "Our disappointment in these organs of 'bodiless thought' comes from the fact that they operate on binary logic." The body, on the other hand, produces thought analogically concurrent with our experience of perception, which differs radically from a logical progression of disembodied thought alone. The difference is that thought and the body are inseparable, "each of them is analogous to the other in its relationship with its respective (sensible, symbolic) environment."

It is clear at this point that Lyotard's theoretical proposition is answered. Then, unexpectedly, a phase-shift appears in the form of "SHE". Lyotard's mysterious SHE appears in a cloud of uncertainty, yet parallels his continuing thesis on vision, perception, and analogous relations. Another revelation appears, "Thinking and suffering overlap." This plateau, Lyotard's intended destination, is fertile... almost new age. "The body and the mind have to be free of burdens for grace to touch us." Yogi-like, he calls for, "a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think."

SHE opens up a new chapter in Lyotard's bodily thesis. One indebted to eastern spiritualism as much as to Bergson. Under this bodhi tree we discover, "In what we call thinking the mind isn't directed but suspended. You don't give it rules. You teach it to receive." And hence the pain and suffering of thought, the path to no thought, the 4 nobel truths, the 8-fold path, and plenty more where Lyotard is heading. To heaven? To solar death? To the gendered differend?

"So that suffering of thinking is a suffering of time, of what happens. To sum up - will your thinking-, your representing machines suffer? What will be their future if they are just memories?" And suddenly, a flashback to Blade Runner. In Deckard's apartment Rachel muses, " the egg hatched and hundreds of baby spiders came out and ate her." Is this Rachel's encoded suffering in the form of memories? Or embodied affection designed to manipulate Deckard into believe that she posses real emotions, real memories. In fact, it It does not matter. Deckard is a replicant too. And in this instance machines CAN love each other, passionately.

SHE is revealed. It is gender difference. For Lyotard, "It's an accepted proposition that sexual difference is a paradigm of an incompleteness of not just bodies, but minds too." A matter Lyotard believes out of our control, no matter how manipulable the difference in our lived realities. Sexual difference, "quite probably defines suffering in perceiving and conceiving as produced by an impossibility of unifying and completely determining the object seen." Grant Lyotard this leap of faith from object of desire to object of affection, and you are lead to desire in the form of a demand.

"Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable differend of gender." Humans exceed the most sophisticated logical machines because they possess form in body, the conduit for affective, perceptual, and sexual experience. Experience driven by difference not in some simplistic, dualistic sense but rather in the infinite complexity of pluralistic multiplicity. As infinite as possible, yet with one undeniable causative condition. That is, the ability to replicate, perpetuate, and differentiate. And so on, and so on... until solar death proves otherwise.

Lyotard's answer then is two-fold. In one aspect the human body, inseparable from intelligence, serves the very real function of hosting complex thought within an organism which can not be replicated by machines, aliens, crop circles or any one, or thing, else. A self-replicating system by design and function of thought, and existence. Secondly, this analogical function of body and mind, "is inconsequential compared to an irreparable transcendence inscribed on the body by gender difference."

"This difference makes thought go on endlessly and won't allow itself to be thought. Thought is inseparable from the phenomenological body: although gendered body is separated from thought, and launches thought." He concludes, "difference causes infinite thought - held as it is in reserve in the secrecy of our bodies and thoughts. It annihilates only the One."

And thus, Spaceship Exodus carries the One to its solar death, and perhaps, all other lurking theories of unification. Lyotard wields solar death to prevent the erasure of difference, alternately propagating multiplicities and pluralities of desires, thoughts, meanings, perceptions, bodies, and though tacit in his thesis, sex itself.

Hansen

Mark Hansen in the Introduction and The Affective Topology of New Media Art, select essays from his book New Philosophy for New Media seeks to explore the philosophical problems, create a unique nomenclature, and establish antecedents in the pursuit of meaning for "new media art". The search is illusive as it turns out. But like all of us who fear, Hansen finds comfort in old friends and new friends to guide him along the way. I am talking about Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, his old friends; and Robert Lazzarini, Craig Kalpakjian, and Friedrich A. Kittler, his new friends. We explore a fascinating and troubling space in reading Hansen.

Hansen's precursor is a healthy dose of Benjamin, or rather homage to Benjamin's "problematic of the medium" vis-a-vis technology. Hansen establishes philosophical ground compatible with Kittler, proclaiming, "digital convergence promises to render obsolete the now still crucial moment of perception." Hansen is quick to define embodiment. His embodiment is inseperable from the cognitive activity of the brain. An embodiment he authenticates in neuroscience, but which owes much more to Henri Bergson's affective temporal body.

His is a brisk tour of Bergson, intentional with wit and warp. For Hansen, "Bergson's theorization of perception as an act of subtraction installs the affective body smack in the center of the general deduction of perception." And like a software company, Hansen installs the software of his theoretical hardware into the reader. Another homage emerges, it is Deleuze. "Deleuze's great insight is to have realized that Bergson's conception of the image finds perfect instantiation in the cinema."

I would modify this statement, Delueze's great insight is to have authored a compelling history of narrative cinema in the 20th century - Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Texts written as both art historical survey and ontological inquiry, revisting and expanding upon the philosophical foundation of matter, memory, movement, perception, intuition, body, and affect of Henri Bergson. Of course, Deleuze's greatest (my emphasis) insight is to have written Mille Plateaux along with Félix Guattari.

Hansen's affective turn reveals unrest with Deleuze. "Deleuze's neo-Bergson account of the cinema carries out the progressive disembodying of the center of indetermination." Which is to presume Deleuze can divorce perception from the body, and situate it within the cinema, or more accurately within the screen. Hansen's doubling of his own words "the universal flux of images", equating this flux, "to divorce perception entirely from (human) embodiment," is the schema of Hansen, not Deleuze.

I'll call the above parenthetical what it really is - Hansen's human: pitted against Deleuze. Coordinating voodo logic and mirrored symmetry, this textual construct folds back upon itself like an infinite mirror of the ego mind. Hansen wishes so badly to enter into a relationship with Bergson, he is willing to ridicule Deleuze through slanderous misconstrual. This is not the work of a philosopher, rather the ramblings of an anxious theorist.

Hansen's goal? Redemption. He proselytizes, "To deploy Bergson's embodied understanding of the center of indetermination as the theoretical basis for our exploration of new media art, we will have to redeem it from Deleuze's transformative appropriation." Structuralist analysis never felt so good. And this is not Hansen's only referent to redemption. The irony is that Hansen loves Deleuze like a father.

Hansen discovers for himself a few new terms. Terms such as digital image? He actually writes in 2004, "This is what I propose to call the digital image." Again, with italic force, "This is what I propose to call the digital image." And he qualifies this statement. It is no longer a matter of 2d surface, but of process made perceivable through embodied experience. Unfortunately, Hansen's digital image is nothing new.

It is not that Mark Hansen doesn't want to be a good theorist, it is that he doesn't yet know how to be a good philosopher. Perhaps he lacks wisdom, humility, and experience. I can not say. But I believe his shortcuts to affiliation appear as an inexcusable form of posturing. In the end, Hansen does produce the goods, at times however awkward.

"Indeed, contemporary media artists appear to be doing nothing else than adapting this Bergsonist vocation to the concrete demands of the information age: by placing the embodied viewer-participants into a circuit with information, the installations and environments they create function as laboratories for the conversion of information into corporeally apprehensible images." We are in fact doing much more than being Bergson's automatons. Are we to actually believe that Hansen, "aims to theorize the correlation of new media and embodiment." I do not believe that is Hansen's aim as much to embody himself as the theoretical correlate of new media. May we say, "the authoritative body of new media?" Hansen is not the first in line, RIP Lev Manovich.

I can buy embodied affection (thanks to Bergson), I can handle the ensuing shift from perception to affectivity (notably a shift decades, if not centuries away from completion), and I can accept that, "the image (as) delimited product of a complex bodily process." BUT I CAN NOT ACCEPT REDEMPTION. Again, Hansen preaches, "the philosophical redemption of Bergson's embodied theory of perception from Deleuze's transformative appropriation." Compare this to the above "redemption" statement. Notice the similarities?

Before we leave Hansen's posthumous introduction... Yes, for this reader Hansen is, in some sense, dead. We are reminded once again of, "my defense of Bergson against Deleuze." And then suddenly, important new media concepts appear such as, "continual self-production through an ongoing process of emergence to presence," and, "the embodied processing of time itself."

It is as if, using the concept Bergson shuns, Hansen has created for himself the "false problem" of Deleuze to authenticate and justify his entry into an otherwise compelling art historical and theoretical effort to categorize and expand upon the term "new media art." But there is nothing new about one-up-manship. Hansen, by equating himself as the redeemer, fails to convince this reader that his undertaking is sound. It is Lyotard's suffering of thinking, a suffering of time.

I must profess a desire to deliver Hansen's final blow through the "exemplary example" of Robert Lazzarini's skulls. I radically differ with Hansen's overblown explication of skulls. I truly wish to understand how he could be so wrong although the concept he could be "right" is a question not worth asking. Hansen, as much as he tries, can not wrench affect from perception. No matter how many times he calls up the skulls, Deleuze has already turned those dead heads into dust. Hansen has Deleuze-envy, and we must do our best to provide a safe plateau on which he can proselytize Bergson's redemption in an effort to synthesize a new philosophy for new media art, however tentative.

Wiki links of interest

11/14 - Virtuality

N. Katharine Hayles essay Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers addresses aspects of embodiment, codes of representation, and the morphological nature of the text and the body in the last decade of the twentieth century. For Hayles, information circulates as a pattern, rather than a presence. The pattern of information, coupled with noise (or randomness) allows for system reorganization with increased complexity, as we recently learned in studies of systems theory. For Hayles, "Pattern and noise are bound together in a complex dialectic."

Hayles creates a parallel between the emergent systems of pattern/ noise relationships in technological society, and presence/absence historically aligned with its analogue in psychoanalysis. She asserts, "The displacement of presence/absence hints at how central pattern/ randomness may be in informing contemporary ideas of language, narrative, and subjectivity."

Hayles thesis converges with her analysis of virtual reality and motion capture technology. As a precursor, Hayles preserves a space for the resistant materiality which, "has marked the experience of living as embodied creatures." She then turns to Haraway's concept of informatics to site a theoretical proposition -

"The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomess and away from presence/ absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body (the material substrate) and a change in the message (the codes of representation)."

Hayles generates a term - flickering signifiers - which addresses fundamental changes in the relationship of signified to signifier in the age of rapid development of information technologies. Her fireflys then bounce about in the textual ether of Lacanian critique we all know and love. Hayles trips merrily through castration and mutation, causality and probability, "human" and "posthuman"; rendering a compelling analysis of transformational readings of the text of the body, and the textual body. For Hayles, "flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and the machine."

With a sense of embodied self, Hayles makes the narrative leap to cyber-culture via the fictional works of William Gibson, particularly his seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer. She grants Gibson two discreet innovations in the course of generating his mutagenic style of cybercult literary hippness. These are, a) POV (point of view) as a positional marker substituting for the absent body, and b) The transformation of a data matrix into a landscape where narratives can happen within space/time.

Within Gibson's bag of tricks, space is given a temporal dimension asynchronous to, yet bound within the absent bodies pov movement through it. "The pov is located in space, but exists in time."

Narratives serve as encoded sites within which information is substituted for durable goods (as we witness in the shift from a Fordist regime to a regime of flexible accumulation a la David Harvey), the encoded knowledge determines authorship, readership, and access privileges. Much like the top-down hierarchical nature of power in UNIX system administration, a type of hacker culture pervades cyberculture encoding, knowledge production, transmission, access, and control.

Systems of engagement are invented and granted authority. Access is a matter of patterns, not presence and therefore opens the door for mutable subjectivity, disembodiment, de-personalization. And millions walk willingly, or reluctantly, through this door in everyday technological experiences of private and public, science and fiction, knowledge and privilege, life and death.

In matters of knowledge production, Hayles summons Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (funny, I did the same thing last week : )). Professionalization serves to provide a locus "in which the authority to tell the story is constituted by possessing credentials that qualify one as a member of a physically dispersed, electronically bound professional community." Thus rendering indigenous campfire stories effectively mute.

In conclusion, Hayles is certain this might not necessarily be a "good thing". She states, and I concur, "In my view, one of the most serious of these implications for the present cultural moment is a systemic devaluation of materiality and embodiment."

And in a coup de grace, Hayles calls up my all time favorite - Paul Virilio - who is certain that this matter of dematerialization and embodied virtualities is not going to slow down, but rather accelerate. For Hayles, human autonomy combined with agency suggests, "embodiment is always instantiated, local, and specific." Hayles rails, "Embodiment can be destroyed, but it can not be replicated."

In conclusion, a conscious call for environmental awareness is tempered by its hard theoretical precursor. Hayles warns with compassion and common sense -

"As we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of of a material world that cannot be replaced."

Such matters of the body, materiality, compassion, and common sense are refeshingly alive in N. Katharine Hayles theoretical treatment of 80's cyberculture. Long live the 80's.

11/07 - Emergence

The Quotidian Triviality of Artificial Complexity

(aka How to make love to a disembodied humanist)

In the course of class discussion regarding the above two authors, I was intrigued by the degree to which participation and inclusion was lacking in our typically lively class dialectic. Myself included, it was apparent that many readers were unable to fully complete and/or comprehend the depth of dialogue in and around complexity, emergence, artificiality, and Artificial Life (ALife) existing within Sarah Kember's essays.

Having recently completed a close reading of Kember, and now able to put these essays in context, I am more adamant than ever that reading Mark C. Taylor's account of Emerging Complexity was a trivial, frustrating, and time-consuming precursor to an otherwise brilliant account of the same topics by Kember. I would suggest that - in this instance - juxtaposition fails to increase dialogic understanding, and that Taylor serves the tactical, rather than creative function of critique. Taylor's seemingly complex exposition of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ALife ultimately introduced an as-of-yet redefined term into the complexity equation: confusion.

Taylor renders privileged, scientific epistemologies in precise detail. In a pedagogical petri dish, he gives agency to cultural arguments for the emergent and "digital" qualities of Chuck Close paintings, along the way espousing a linear history of AI and ALife apparently designed to enlighten the reader on matters of complexity and emergence.

Taylor's leap from painting to AI and ALife is an effort to reinforce the validity of cultural arguments by reinforcing them within the context of scientific complexity. In statements verging on the obvious he affirms the urgency of this effort. "As complexity grows, the need to understand the implications of its dynamics becomes urgent." Which is to demand urgency void of the situated knowledge necessary for agency (human autonomy), which might bother to ask the question, "Why?"

Once engaged in matters of complexity, the cultural references subside, and Taylor' essay begins to reveal an interesting schizophrenia. Though trivial, Taylor's pedagogical undertaking is not insignificant. He touches on the metaphysical desires inherent in the scientific enterprise, but neglects to mention their origins and implications to ALife research. He reveals the insistence by ALife researchers for synthetic (silicon) domains of scientific practice able to engage philosophically with matters of the biological, social, and cultural systems, yet bearing no responsibility to those environments or bodies outside of, and into which, it hopes to transmit its results.

Taylor articulates the terms of the AI/ALife discussion in a series of lists, statements, systems, flows, smoke and crystals padded with a copious chinking of knowledge statements leading to a few compelling concepts such as phase transitions, the hive mind, and bifurcation points.

Ultimately, Taylor's thesis rests on highly reductionist and suspect conclusions -

"With this understanding of the way in which complexity emerges through networking, we have solved one of the problems creating our current critical impasse. At then end of Chapter 2, I claimed that any adequate interpretation of emerging culture must be able to describe the nonlinear dynamics of systems that act as a whole but do not totalize."

Suspect are the words "our", "critical impasse", and "I claimed". Imbedded in Taylor's approach are presumptions of truth and beliefs which to this reader are not forgone conclusions. Which is to say I posses an intuitive mistrust of Taylor's epistemological approach not only to the topic of ALife, but also to science and culture in general. This mistrust is inexplicable, until now -

"One of the primary reasons for the critical emergency we are facing is the insistence of deconstructive critics that systems and structures inevitably totalize and thus necessarily exclude otherness and repress difference."

Until then, I had no idea Taylor was addressing matters of "critical emergency" in his essay. The term appears completely out of context. Interestingly, emergency is an etymological variation of emergence. However, an emergency implies urgency and danger, whereas emergence does not. It is this urgency to which Taylor refers earlier in his essay when the god-trick begins. Much like a direct marketing mandate, propagate the notion that an offer has urgency and the consumer acts.

But I can not act on Taylor's offer. I am new to complexity and emergence. My presence is this field is tentative, eager, and non-commital. I am a reader, and a potential subject of experimental practice and/ or pedagogical manipulation. And so I am wary of all claims of authority, power, and control. The only thing clear is that Taylor has lost the plot -

"After considering the logic of networking, it should be clear that systems and structures - be they biological, social, or cultural - are more diverse and complex than deconstructive critics realize."

Not much happens after Taylor's cover is blown. His load is released. Mind at ease. Complexity once profound yields to oppositional rhetorics. Taylor's involuntary nervous system engages in the call-and-response battle mechanism of western, male-dominated, creationist, reductionist, and disembodied humanist duality.

If given the opportunity, I would put into the hands of Mark C. Taylor a copy of Jean-Francois Lyotard's seminal 1979 text _The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge_ I would ask that Taylor read this text closely, and then revisit his knowledge statements and resulting epistemological assumptions.

Note: Give time constraints, and the degree to which Kember's essay engages this reader in matters of embodiment, situated knowledge, post-humanism, difference - its erasure and elision, Bakhtin's dialogic method, autopoiesis, bioethics, hubris, irony, functionalism, vitalism, naturalism, and bottom-up vs. top-down theories of ALife... Given all that, and more. I will redirect my analysis of Kember's writing toward my DANM 201 research paper, the topic of which is emodiment.

10/31 - Cyborgs

Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

Donna Haraway's radical treatise A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s is/was designed to challenge socialist feminism(s) and radical eco-feminism(s) at a time when, historically, these feminism(s) reigned supreme. Haraway used the cyborg as her embodiment of a feminism freed from epistemology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and various other dogmas against which she rails in the cyborg body.

Haraway's project is mind-bendingly complex at times, although subsequent readings of this text reveal more and more her open-ended, technocentric agenda. Haraway's playful abuse of language seeks to affect the reader, enacting upon the text aspects of a radical critique of knowledge acquisition, reification, and transmission. It is disturbing, enlightening, frustrating, fun, and deadly serious all at the same time.

Haraway states, "This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction." And in this way reveals her project as post-modern, non-naturalist, genderless, in a world without beginning or end. She takes psychoanalysis and Marxism on for a good lashing and then releases them into the intellectual ether to free-float as possibilities.

Impressively, she takes on the most powerful figures of her time - notably Catherine Mac_Kinnon - in a relentless critique. She writes, "Catherine Mac_Kinnon's version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action." Haraway calls for affinity, not identity, and does so in her ideal form - the cyborg. For Haraway, the cyborg myth she constructs is about "transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities."

Haraway's critique does not end with feminism, patriarchy, or epistemologies. She is relentless in her efforts to unearth oppression within the systemic application of textual readings. She takes on one of the classics, "Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism." At the time, I can only imaging the degree of resistance and rejection she must have experienced in the larger world of feminism and identity politics.

The essay is full of quotable material. The prose is complex, yet playful; dense, though navigable; and at times exhilarating and dangerous. And it is the image of the machine/ animal hybrid - the cyborg - which allows Haraway incredible freedom of discourse. Granted, she creates this freedom by definition, through risk, and as a result of intellectual agency.

So what is Haraway's goal? Beyond shredding the playing field, what does she seek so intently to reveal. Perhaps this quote is one of those reveals, "It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex."

So, Haraway is a utopian technocrat! But of course, it is not that simple.

Haraway proceeds to define the "Informatics of Domination", a charting of old hierarchical dominations to the "scary new networks". She articulates the transformation from an industrial to an information society, addressing "systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations." And she prophetically (for the 80's) suggests that communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. In as much as microelectronics drive and control these systems, the computer and the microchip create the possibilities for inscription, encryption, rendering, reading/ analysis, and manipulation.

Haraway, in defining the role of women within the integrated circuit, expands dominate notions (circa 1985) of feminism, and techno-praxis. And her critique is remarkably contemporary 20 years later. Haraway does possess a degree of hope in her weaving of the cyborg myth. Toward her conclusion she suggests, "There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations." She calls for a focus on hope, rather than defeat. And states quite clearly that a totality is not necessary to work well.

For Haraway, the complexity of the intellectual enterprise is tempered by the autonomy and agency required of women living outside of academic privilege. It is why she has created an inter-being, the cyborg, as a site of being for the fractured boundaries of feminism and identity politics in a technological and scientific world. She calls for a struggle of language, imperfect communication against one code that translates all meaning perfectly. She insists on "noise" and advocates, "pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine." And completely rejects a kinds of organic holism rooted in mother earth origin myths.

I have read Haraway. I have faced the Cyborg, once again. Each time I feel imbued with a sense of relief that the Cyborg has spared me. I fall into the place between, I am the genetic code re-engineered. I am the offspring of an industrial civilization gone wrong, and the by-product of an information society seeking to map and encode its way out.

As the unknowing victim of biological warfare gone wrong (genetic mutation as illness), my journey as an immunological guinea pig begins with Haraway's infamous essay. I am just too young at the time to comprehend it. This seed, this Cyborg, awaited my appearance to activate. Once activated it is a being through which I find agency, empowerment, and ingenuity within the oppositional matrix. But my Cyborg walks over this matrix, and its view is one of the triangulation of meaning, not its false conclusion or infinite suspension, but of interlinking, interweaving, and infinite openings.

Haraway then is a type of hero to me. A hero who redraws the terms of engagement, shreds the dogmatic mandate, and opens wide the potentialities and possibilities through affinity, hope and compassion based on common threads giving due to respect to irreconcilable differences and the infinite complexities therein.

However, I do not pretend she is a hero to all. We should choose our heros carefully. And when they no longer serve their purpose - be heroic enough ourselves to allow their influence to dissolve.

10/24 - Games

Defending Games Against Theoretical Imperialism?

Narratology vs. Ludology: the battlefront of video game theorists. The ludologists want to study games for games sake, to study the mechanics, rules, game space, and play of games. And the narratologists, want to study games within the historical continuum of storytelling media such as cinema. How did these two worlds collide? And what is the current state of their "blood feud"?

Henry Jenkins in Game Design as Narrative Architecture address the debate through compromise. Recognizing the demands of gamers, game designers, and industry executives for unfettered critical control within their chosen creative domain, Jenkins unwittingly absolves this camp by suggesting, "one gets rid of narrative as a framework for thinking about games only at one's own risk."

At what risk? The average game player, deep in game play engaged within a world of fictional risk could care less about the risks of not thinking. I would suggest that games provide the very conditions for "turning off" the critical apparatus. The goal being to disengage from the real world for half-real fictional experiences in which the player has a degree of autonomy and agency, in that world.

Jenkins wishes to inject a degree of narratology within the argument. He does so through causal progression of logical arguments defending the narrative angle. He then attempts to expand the discussion through "spatiality", introducing and arguing for, "an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects."

In doing so, Jenkins does in fact expand the argument of the narratologists. He does so through a classification of 4 narrative types - evoked, enacted, embedded, and emergent - as they relate to video games. He then concludes with a reiteration of his theoretical premise: to think of game designers as narrative architects.

For the critical theory community, I believe Jenkins argument holds water. As for his other audience - gamers, game designers, and industry executives - I have a greater degree of skepticism that this essay will have any impact whatsoever. The problem is that Jenkins critique lacks specific game examples, and is deeply rooted in theory, not practice. The gaming community is one which seeks agency within their fictional world.

A critical theorist expanding the boundaries of his or her argument pales in comparison to Rock Star Games expanding the boundaries of Grand Theft Auto v.X. Which is to say for gamers, game designers, and industry executives, practice wins over theory every time.

Jesper Juul in Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds takes a post-modern approach in his effort to re-engage the narratologists. His current approach is one of rules and stories. I say re-engage because in 1998 Juul had taken "an alluring position" in game theory by denying fiction a role. At that time he stated, "As you can see, the symbolical or metaphorical meaning of the game is not connected to the program or the gameplay. The relationship is, in a word, arbitrary" (Juul, 1998).

Juul now believes otherwise. In Half-Real, he directly refutes his own argument by including narrative dynamics within the ludologists strict understanding of rules-based gaming. Juul's revised thesis is formidable. He frames the debate within the narratology vs. ludology debate, and then wields history, theory, aesthetics, and a plethora of game examples, even bringing Saussure to the forefront of the argument (thus appealing to the critical/hypertext theorists).

Saussure is an appropriate participant in both Jenkins and Juul's efforts in as much as a structural linguistic effort to understand games is clearly underway. Juul, like Jenkins, seeks to expand the argument outside of the dualistic approach. And in doing so creates a vital game ecology, a general space in which video games can be seen and understood within a larger cultural context.

It is within this magic circle (Juul's term) that we begin to understand the complex dynamics driving game culture, its consumption and critique. Still, I wonder if Juul's 1998 sentiment expressed in the title of my reading notes does not in some way invalidate his compromise with the narratologists, and by extension the hypertext theorists. It seems critical theorists might want to develop tools to defend themselves against ludological imperialism, or suffer the existential fate of the typical game character - impermanence.

10/17 - Surveillance/ Biopolitics

A Generalized Surveillance : The Disciplinary Society

eye.jpg

What Zizek, Burgin, and Foucault all have in common is the all-seeing eye of our colleague/neighbor, webcams/surveilance cams, and the state (encompassing myriad forms of observation and control). It may help us to focus, initially, on that classic all-seeing eye: the Eye of Providence on the back of the US $1 bill. God is money in the form of a system of total observation and behavioral control.

Zizek, in Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye addresses themes of observation and fantasy vis-a-vis Lacan's bold statement, "there is no sexual relationship." For Zizek (and Lacan), "Fantasy proper is not the scene it self which attracts our fascination, but the non-existant imagined gaze observing it." Through psychoanalysis, we are told that "real sex" is actually just "masturbation with a partner". Sexual enjoyment within this viewpoint originates within, and is amplified by the secret fantasies invested into it.

Zizek goes on to present several sites of sexual fantasy and social control imagined - Disney's Celebration, the british reality TV show Big Brother, and Milan Kundera's La lenteur. Through these examples, Zizek - by way of Lacan - sets up the preconditions for understanding Foucault's ideas of generalized surveillance and the disciplinary society.

Victor Burgin's essay Jenni's Room: Exhibition and Solitude sets out on a path not unlike Zizek's. By focusing his analysis on Jennifer Ringley's Jennicam web portal, Burgin attempts to provide a deeper understanding of her intentions and the psychoanalytical underpinnings of her behavior. Through complex analysis via Lacan's mirror stage and Donald Winnicott's transitional object, we are led to believe Jennicam is less about Ringley's exhibitionism than our own voyeurism as we observe Jenni's transitional rites from the, "protective circle of the family to a potentially hostile outside world."

This suggests to me a sort of global campfire setting masking itself as geek chic. Plato's electronic cave of Jenni's fascinating emergence heightened by the inherent visual intermittence of early web video. The vicarious danger we feel for Ringley as she embarks on a very personal journey into the net, becomes a world we are still only beginning to explore critically (witness the Web 2.0 social networking frenzy).

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Burgins' fascinating explication of Jennicam is rooted not in a simplistic reduction of surveillance technology to exhibitionism, or the male gaze. Jennifer Ringley poses more challenging questions of agency, loneliness, maternal identification, violence, and emerging paradigms of social "connectivity" in a wired world.

The window she provides is a two-way mirror in which her public self-reflection becomes a two-way commodity of emerging experience - from her to them and back, as information. The osmosis taking place between the inside and the outside includes imagery, economy, psycho-sexual data in the form of email, and a commerce of critical theory and news media fascinated with her ritual transformation within the public sphere. David Blane clearly learned something from Jennifer Ringley.

I believe Jennifer Ringley was a pioneer, of sorts, in a net which appeared full of connective tissue, but void of bodily authenticity. She took risks no average computer geek could imagine. And therefore, as Homi Bhabha suggests at the end of Burgin's article, produces her own net identity as the transitional object. And in that way encourages Burgin's theoretical summation -

"New technologies confront image theorists with questions which may be most productive when they are least questions of technology." And therefore, more questions arise in the morphogenisis of identity, sexuality, the self, and the other.

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A canonical text, Foucault's essay Panopticism elucidates the power matrix of disciplinary control spawned by Jeremy Bentham's architectural system, the Panopticon. Foucault's analysis begins with plague protocol, "a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism," and this rich metaphor continues with such beautiful allegories as, "the capillary functions of power," given life by efforts to constrain, organize, and order societies in times of plague and rebellion.

It is unnecessary here to describe the architectural Panopticon in detail (instead see the wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon - where knowledge is pluralistic). To summarize, its function is to create a system of control which extends well beyond the architectural model into everyday life. The notion that we are always under observation, and therefore our behaviors are modified a-priori is both compelling and disturbing.

Foucault's agenda is to draw and quarter the allegorical architecture of the Panopticon. To demonstrate how it functions well beyond totemic power, a system symbolic of a much more profuse and wide-reaching forms of social control. What he defines collectively as, "The Disciplinary Society." This society, presumably the one we are living in, is one subjected to and simultaneously the subject of the automatic functioning of power.

The below examples I provide from a personal perspective illustrate the "truth" of Foucault's analysis in the course of daily life,

Organized protests become organized individuals on My_Space - "The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individuals."

Olympic park bombing becomes a surveillance camera ring around Atlanta, GA - "The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen."

Former US Special Ops becomes police department protest basher - "...the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing."

But the operative function of the Panopticon is not limited to architectural systems of control. As Foucault states the Panopticon was also a laboratory, "The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them."

Its power is derived not from the fact that it is implemented as an architectural and/or optical (read: surveillance) system, but that, "it is in fact a figure of political technology that may be and must be detached from any specific use."

It is a silent, deadly, pervasive, and therefore fascistic effort to control society by suggesting self-observation as a pragmatic form of safety and security. And it exercises this control spontaneously, from within, by, of, and for its own citizens in the course of their freedom and salvation.

Foucault describes these social systems designed to illicit submission. He calls them "swarming mechanisms" for their combined totalitarian effect. They include the school, the military, religious groups, charity organizations, the hospital, the police (state), and fellow graduate students, amongst others. I would also include the entire suite of websites known as Web 2.0, the CIA's insect surveillance technologies, and moths on campus amongst the newly emerging swarming mechanisms.

More on insect surveillance systems-

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10/10 - Ideology of Media

Reflections on Benjamin and Aarseth

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin’s classic text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction forces Marxist praxis upon art history in a wonderfully vicious manner. Benjamin’s end game is the refutation of fascism vis-à-vis the politicization of art history. This makes for a compelling read, and his text continues to inspire me as an artist decade after decade. Through Hegelian means, Benjamin’s elucidation of art history and the role of emerging technologies in its morphogenesis is both seductive and revolutionary.

It is difficult to critique The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - a text so dense in art, philosophy, politics, history, and conjecture. But I do take issue early on when Benjamin states, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitic dependence on ritual.”

I would rephrase this sentence, “for the first time in world history, a mechanism exists to sever the ties between ritual and systems of control such as the church, the state, the RIAA and the MPAA. That mechanism is reproduction. A ritual of reproduction designed to replace outmoded concepts of productivity. Its methods include sampling, noise, re-appropriation, re-cycling, copyright infringement, hacking, and system entropy.”

Ritual, of course, also serves a key function in spiritual practices emerging at the intersection of technology, culture, and nature. Practices which pay homage to sectarian pursuits outside of the destructive tendencies of organized religions. And though emerging rituals – informed as much by ancient traditions as by digital technology – can just as easily engender the same power dynamics of organized religion, they at least embark from fertile ground void of thousands of years of sexual oppression and bloodshed.

Benjamin predates the mechanical art practiced by organizations such as Psychic TV, Indymedia, and You_Tube, although his essay clearly presages ensuing global movements of ritual technology and the decentralized information hierarchy. Today, the proletariat reveal their interests, desires, and opinions daily. But I sometimes wonder if that is necessarily a good thing.

I must commend Benjamin for his bold rejection of fascism. In this sense, his political half-life is extended indefinitely. For fascism is indeed alive and well in America. However silent, its spiked claws are buried deep in the flesh of everyday Americans. We can blame George Bush for this, or ourselves. I guess it depends on how you define yourself as an “American”. Either way, it would do us well to heed Benjamin’s prophetic statement,

“Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”

We All Want to Change the World

Espen Aarseth in his essay We All Want to Change the World sets out on a path not unlike Benjamin. He updates the argument, draws it out, and attempts to “revolutionize” the terms of discussion though structuralist analysis of digital nomenclature.

Aarseth’s elucidation of ideology is perhaps the sole aspect of his project I respect. The subconscious, tacit, collective worldview, transparent, seeing and feeling before thinking notion of ideologues he borrows from Althusser and Kavanagh. This critique of “digital culture” is one I think Aarseth could explore through a broader application of Hegelian dialectics and a deeper analysis of computing, in general.

The problem rests with Aarseth’s lightweight approach. Resting his key argument upon 3 words alone – interactivity, hypertext, virtuality – mining the safest vestibules of philosophy, history, and semiotics with barely a hint of politics. Aarseth would be advised to polish up on his Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and Adorno.

I can accept his attempts to reclaim media from the “new”, I can accept the need to clarify and expand upon the term “interactive”, and I can honor his cursory knowledge of computing history enough to accept clarification of the term “hypertext”. (Aarseth does situate himself “in the know” with a chronological history of modern networking – email, usenet, linux, sms, etc.)

But I firmly disagree with Aarseth’s statement, “The virtual as a communicative mode parallel to stories, represents something truly new (?): an innovation not only of technology but of how we interpret and represent the world.” (Note: My ?, not his.)

After taking the new out of new media, Aarseth’s above quote stands in direct contradiction to his ideological enterprise, revealing once again the compulsion of the critic to become the ideologue. I can hardly blame him. It is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual enterprise and of subject/object language itself.

In the end, I feel talked down to by Aarseth. I simply do not need a re-definition of terms which work perfectly in the colloquial sense. Words like hypertext and interactive. In this way, Aarseth attempts to expound upon ideas I would originally credit to Benjamin, a man who knows what side he is on.

And that is the problem, Aarseth suffers from a limp wrist, or at least a bogus understanding of what is, and what isn’t “real”. I will conclude my short rant with two examples.

In the first, Aarseth states, “To imply that there is functional or cognitive equality between human and machine is ludicrous.” I suggest Aarseth posit that question to Kasparov. Displaying characteristics of fight-or-flight behavour in his chess battle with IBM’s Big Blue, it is clear that in this instance the computer has not only taken on an anthropomorphic character for its contendor, but that its functional and cognitive superiority in an assigned task – winning at chess – is now proven. Aarseth might also want to ask this question of a robot on an assembly line previously occupied by the proletariat.

The problem here for Aarseth is that he resorts to a certain wholistic worldview when, and only when, it is convenient. When speaking of computers, we are speaking in material – not spiritual - terms. A material reality that intersects with our cognitive function as humans. And when a computer – the by-product of human intellect and material reality - can complete with a human on a segmented task (such as chess), then that object has been imbued with human intellect which can, and will, compete with a human.

The second is as follows… Regarding Aarseth’s disillusion with the academic use of the term “interactivity,” he comments on, ”its unfortunate tendency to equate human qualities with machine capabilities.” And suggest that this undertaking is futile.

The desire to imbue machines with human characteristics is the driving force behind robotics, artificial intelligence, and androids in space movies. The desire to imbue humans with machine capabilities is the driving force behind capitalism, religious dogma, and war mongers. That these bedfellows – scientists and dictators – seek to create the ultimate man/machine and use it to destroy the human race, supplanting us with genetically engineered clones and artificial life forms: that should not confuse Espen Aarseth. But it does.


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