Archive for the 'Pheremones' Category
August 30th, 2008 by
I don’t know anything about the woman, but I would not be surprised were she to draw significant support for McCain, but I wonder whether his running mate makes all that much difference, for I wouldnt be surprised were McCain to win the election. When Bush won over Kerry four years ago, I had said that this was a nightmare for the country, that we were going to feel the effects of our stupidity in electing an imbecile with a corrupt, war monger in Cheney. The only positive outcome in making this mistake is that after another four ridiculous and painful years was that the country’s reputation and situation would become so dire that only pain and suffering would teach us not to elect another Republican in ‘08. I mean, how could the Dems possibly lose this election? Not long ago, I was hyperbolizing that if they lost this time around, that they ought to hang up their hats and go home. Just hand the whole process over because they just can’t do anything right to be attractive to the country. Is it that the Dems can’t communicate their message effectively? Maybe. Obama’s slogan is “change we can believe in,” and “yes we can,” etc. etc. But notice that McCain’s slogan is “country first,” and it is this appeal to patriotism that implies that the Dems don’t love their country and, secondly, that the Republicans have the inside track towards healing the country because they love it more. It does not matter what the past’s mistakes have been. The party who loves the country the most will be the party to elect.
But what about direction, policy, thought, strategy, details, collaboration, and most obviously, information? Working from the perception that a president has such power (rather than the actual complexity of converging forces), isn’t how you are going to heal the country just as important as you love your country ? In fact, one could easily say that if you don’t have the details about how you will lead, then saying you love your country exposes that your grounds are helium, and, that those without the work and dedication to thinking through problems don’t care enough to heal anything. Ahh, but I’m not going to go down that road and make arguments against the Republicans because there is one thing that the current state of affairs and the state of affairs for the past eight years reveals: information, arguments, and appeals to reason and judgment are not what elections are about. The Dems are actually fairly good at communicating ideas and pointing out flaws in thinking and strategy. The Republicans are not. So why is the race even close?
When I first heard Obama speak at the ‘04 Democratic convention, I thought that this is guy was young but was going to be good. When he started his campaign, I thought he was a breath of fresh air, but I thought that he would never, ever win the nomination, that John Edwards would have had a better shot. When I heard Obama won in Iowa, like many others, I was floored. I listened to that speech after Iowa, and I was moved. Here was Quintillian’s the “good man speaking well” with the desire to move others to action. But at the hands of Hillary, Obama was quickly cast as a charlatan, not the good person speaking to persuade, but the otherside of the Quintillian coin, the misguided person seeking to display. Whatever the arguments made that tried to recast Obama, his speeches continued to deliver one thing that I had not heard in politics in my lifetime. He exhibits a belief that, as a group, Americans are intelligent. His appeals are made to those who already reject politics of fear, are made to those who are disgusted and dissatisfied with the way politicians shoot for the lowest common denominator. His speeches reveal that he believes that we read, that we stay informed, that we take responsibility for our citizenship, that we don’t veg out watching terrible tripe on TV. And so, here’s this charismatic person who has just pulled off the impossible by winning in Iowa, delivers a speech that says, “This is the moment. Right now. Right here. This is the moment that started it all. We are not a campaign. We are a movement that will bring back our dignity, and it didn’t start with me. It started with you. You will take your country back. This moment.”
And so, he goes on to carry that message and becomes a force, a movement? For a while, it seemed so. The most promising occurrence during the primaries is that those who came out to vote on the Democratic side severely outweighed those who participated in the Republican primaries. And so, if those uneven numbers were any indication that of who’d get the vote out in the general election, it would be a landslide for the Dems.
But while the determining factor is how many will get out to vote, the media bombards us with how tight the race is. But to me the most important question is whether Obama’s belief in the American people is naive. From my perspective, there is a correlation between ideology and laziness. When you do no work to be informed and to learn, when you sit back and passively absorb material from a single news outlet, then, you invariably wind up on the right. Obama doesn’t believe that this group constitutes our majority; he believes Americans are active and they care. That’s a positive message. I may be jaded, but when we were failing miserably in Iraq in ‘04, we still re-elected Bush. The scandals that have racked this presidency are endless: Halliburton, Valerie Plame, Abu Grhaib, Gitmo, Jack Abramoff, Katrina, US Attorney firings, stop losses and extended tours, election phone jamming, and on and on, yet still this race is close? Bill Tancer’s recent book Click reveals that (porn and gamblig aside) some of the most popular internet search categories are celebrity worship and gossip; such a fact is quite revealing when you take into consideration that the Web is the place where people now turn to for information. When the searches are for Barack Obama, you still get overwhelming numbers on people looking for the link between Obama and the Antichrist (a story that also ran on the news channels a few weeks ago). I’m not torn about the election, but I’m torn about what I should think about the American people. On one hand, I want to believe in them/us as Obama’s speeches reveal, that we’re intelligent, hard-working, informed and active citizens. On the other hand, the Republicans, who are magical in their abilities to lure voters to their side, are only able to succeed by the shallowest, most pathetic appeals to liberty, emotion, and fear. Yeah, so we’re both idiots and savants? More like idiot-savants every one, but for different reasons. The Dems (at least Obama and co.) are idiots for not recognizing the banality of Americans. And Americans are idiots for not recognizing the banality of the Republicans. The most brilliant of them all are those who are the most inable to lead the country. The GOP appeals to a significant portion of the American people because, like them, they exhibit minimal effort to think problems through or to understand situations sufficiently. There is no way they could be so successful in their persuasions by design. They share common ground that is not ideological but is the worst form of stasus. The Republicans succeed because indolent bovines appeal to torpid sloths.
The Dems have recently been critical of Obama for not being negative enough about McCain, and so what does McCain’s campaign do as a response? Put out a commercial blasting Obama for being overly negative. You got to give it to them for their ability to seize the moment. What people need to hear is what they have not learned in the past eight years. They need to hear a litany, spelled out over and over, of the specifics of the abuse of power of this administration. When Biden or the Clintons say, “abuse of power,” that means nothing at all. Americans need to hear the specifics of Cheney’s office and the CIA, Valery Plame, the firing of the US attorneys, the deception of the American public. Obama neither needs to talk about hope nor does he need to talk about how McCain is “more of the same.” Obama needs to talk about this administration and link it to republicanism. Leave the enthymeme open. Even torpid sloths can figure out that McCain and Palin are Republicans. Does it matter that they’re coming across are reform republicans? What the Dems don’t realize is that such a distinction is too fine. They’re republicans. One thing at a time. Don’t give us too much information. Stop making sense! Stop being right! Stop with all the facts! All we want are bottom lines that appeal to our simplicity and lassitude. The Dems fail over and again to recognize the appeals to mediocrity that constitute a significant portion of the American spectrum. As election after election has been telling us, American mediocrity is a formidable opponent. It’s time to wake up not to the best in us as Obama says but to the mediocre in us. Am I jaded in my belief in the American public? You bet I am. It’s time to wake up. Now. This moment.
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I don’t know anything significant about Sarah Palin. But this is what I received in my mailbox this morning:
Who is Sarah Palin? Here’s some basic background:
- She was elected Alaska’s governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage.
- Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
- She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000.
- Palin thinks creationism should be taught in public schools.
- She’s doesn’t think humans are the cause of climate change.
- She’s solidly in line with John McCain’s “Big Oil first” energy policy. She’s pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won’t be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered species—she was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.
March 15th, 2008 by cutter
Before Spring Break two weeks ago, I mentioned my frustration with having to use the Blackboard CMS systems in my comp classes. As I said back then, I was pretty fed up with the clunkiness of the system and the lack of intuitive movement it allowed. I spent a good portion of Spring Break migrating my courses from that system to using Blogs in the classroom, and I knew then as I know now that it was going to be a challenging pedagogical maneuver.
Many of my students had started getting accustomed to the Blackboard system, and while they didn’t like it, they had begun to adapt. At right about that moment, I told them that they were going to love this new way of doing work, that it would make their writing more relevant, and, overall, the electronic mode would be easier to use. The majority of the students welcomed the change and they have told me in conferences that they like using their blogs better than they did the earlier system, so all-in-all, the move has gone well, but, still, the hardest part was getting them weaned off of something they had grown accustomed to and onto something new.
Overall, I’ve been rather pleased with their blogging and am turning to their posts as a matter of interest and hobby and learning a lot from what some of them have to say. They’ve been given the freedom to write about whatever they want, just like any blogger, and they’re responding in turn. I often find myself laughing and engaging their posts. Some of them are starting to get noticed in the larger blogosphere, and just about all of them are seeking to bring traffic to their sites. So far, things are looking up with the use of blogging in the class, and while I’ll need to make some tweaks for future courses, particularly in the areas of design and other media, I feel like this is shaping up to be a productive pedagogical approach.
Still, a CMS like BB, while clunky, is designed for classroom space, and blogs are not, and while it’s fairly easy to use blogs as a management platform, I can imagine other ways. There’s a company called 21Classrooms that lets you create an account for a class with students in it that incorporates a home page where announcements can be posted and allows you to navigate to individual student blogs. But this site has its limits. The largest being that the site is teacher controlled, and so while this is a good idea for middle school bloggers, I’m not so interested in being the blog police at the university level. The second limitation is cost. You can create an account and get access for free, but the space you’re given is paltry, and to make the system work, you’d almost certainly need to purchase the upgrade. Hardly worth the trouble.
On a similar note, I happened to catch Chris Anderson (editor for Wired, author of The Long Tail, etc.) on Charlie Rose not long ago, and Chris had mentioned how he saw that social networking, in its Facebook and Myspace iterations, was currently still in its infancy.
When pressed, Chris recommended Ning for a more localized platform of social networking. I have just begun to explore Ning, but it appears to do two particular things quite well. First, it allows someone (anyone) to create their own social network and invite members to join that network. The creator can include options such as forums, multimedia pages (photos and video), upload documents, and create blogs. So if you think about running a drupal CMS (which I’ve toyed with and decided against, particularly because it doesn’t allow the member to design their own blogs), Ning offers the same ability. Individual members can run their own websites, blogs, post their own videos, forums and so on. They have a genuine sense of autonomy but they happen to be connected to a social network. So the second advantage is that the heirarchical order of CMS’s seems to fade into the background and each member enjoys the same freedoms of the network’s creator.
March 6th, 2008 by cutter
I can’t deny it. It could be cleaner, a little sharper, less clunky. It’s those arrows I think. I wanted to use Jing for this tutorial that I put together for my students, but I was having issues with my account (or, more likely, I was having issues pulling up my username and password from the depths of identity protection), so I figured it would take less time to photoshop my screen shots (command+shift+4) then it would be to resolve the issue. In any case, here’s a tutorial for importing an xml file into google reader that could be useful for students. Feel free to beg, borrow, or steal (well, keep the begging–just have at it.)
The original post:
Over the past couple of days, I have been collecting your various blog addresses. I’ve been getting a lot of notes from you concerning the places to find your fellow bloggers for the floating workshop.
I’ve been able to compile a list of all the blog addresses for my classes. I added them to my reader and I’ve exported them in a special kind of format that will allow you to import them into your google reader account.
I’ve done all the work for you, and since I have, there’s no reason in having you add everyone to your reader accounts. Instead, I can just share my work with you, and you can automatically have what took me two hours to compile and organize.
The file that you should import is a collation of my classes. This way, you can see the blogs that my other classes are doing, and you can read and comment across classes. By blogging, I’ve just networked our three classes together, and if you guys want to work across classes later on the semester, I’d be open to that suggestion.
Please note that once you import the file, you won’t have every single class member. I have not received emails from all my students giving me their URLs, so there are a few missing. We’ll all be able to add them later on, however, when we find out what their addresses are.
Ok, Here’s what you need to do to import the file.
- Click on the file and save it to your desktop.
- Open google reader.
- In the upper right hand area, you’ll see a menu. Click Settings
.
4. In the new window, click import/export
5. Find the file on your desktop and upload it.
6. After it uploads, it will take you to the subscriptions page. Just select Back to Google Reader and you’ll see your imported subscriptions. Vala!
February 26th, 2008 by cutter
It’s spring break, and I have a little extra time to return to my manuscript whose working title is Kairos, Nomos, Techne: Writing and the Possibility of Invention. The beginning of the post will be about the first chapter and will skip over the whole middle, touch base at the end, and suggest something new to my own thinking.
The major premise of the book is the relationship between the first two rhetorical terms (kairos and nomos). First of all, I find it crucial to reject the common rhetorical definitions of both of these terms, primarily because, to our secreting hivemind, the histories have been all too tacit in accepting them at face value. That’s why it’s so much fun to read someone like Agamben, since he reads the ancients archeologically, with both eyes focused on the spirit of the letter that’s never dead. As it is known in popular rhetorical studies, kairos is a term that means the “opportune moment,” so whenever one even mentions the idea, the typical response is to think about the popularization of the readings of Plato (especially the Phaedrus) where Plato said that kairos is the “capstone to the art of rhetoric,” that once the orator learns the skills of being an effective speaker, he learns when to speak and when to delicately pinch his eloquent mouth closed. I make the counter-move of not using Plato as the exemplar for kairos but using the sophists, and particularly the Pythagoreans. Gorgias, heavily popularized in today’s pomo academy as the sophistic “bad-boy,” can be said to have benefited from the two schools of the Pythagoreans. It’s discussing these two different schools (Heracliteans and Paremenideans) of the Pythagoreans where things get interesting. I’m influenced by an Italian rhetorician/philosopher/philologist (are there philologists anymore?) that has had some work recently translated. (Yeah, Italian is on my “bucket” list–but that’s a long list.) I’m talking about Augusto Rostagni. (Who I wish didn’t look like such a banker. The dude needs a beard and some crocs or something!)
Rostagni is ideal for many reasons, not the least of which is that he is not American, and his geographical separation from the states appears to afford him the advantage (from my perspective) of not having to be bothered with the party lines between philosophy and rhetoric that many working rhetoricians have grown accustomed to. Like Agamben, he reads the ancient texts conceptually rather than across disciplinary lines. I remember Stanley Fish, the fav of various “antifoundationalist” rhetors, saying that this quarrel was THE quarrel of Western civilization. Wait, I think I feel a yawn coming on . . . .
I’m glad that Rostagni takes us out of these territories (I’m over it—but thanks for asking!), since playing the role of victimed other does not appeal to me, and I appreciate the division between the disciplines even less. Talking about that split doesn’t help the role of rhetoric in relation to the academy or philosophy and has almost nothing to do with the conceptual relationship between the two histories, especially when we’re talking about what Heidegger called the “primordial thinkers.” In any case, Rostagni helps collapse the distinction between the disciplines through the term kairos and opens up the rather complex relationship between the many and the one. Kairos, I argue with Rostagni’s help, is not the “opportune moment,” but is every moment, and, as such, it is a force that bonds with the speaker, and the speaker, does not grab hold of the moment, but becomes an expression with, of, and for the moment.
I don’t mean to put the speaker in a position of being passive, because I don’t think that’s what’s happening here, but I certainly reject the speaker as some kind of spokesperson for carpe diem—which is what kairos in the Platonic lineage largely amounts to. (Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day Speech,” for example.) There is a relationship between the speaker and each moment, but it’s a feedback loop, or “a back-and-forth relatedness,” as Theodore Kisiel calls it.
But I can’t really bypass the issue between agency and passivity that pops up here. Sinthome at Larval Subjects has a very interesting post on this problem, and I have to thank him here for actually helping me realize some problems with my thinking for my book. (I’ll try to get around to this later in the post.) One might think that the reason I turn to these ancient discussions about kairos, nomos, techne, poeisis and so on is that I feel obligated to situate my writing in the rhetorical lineage, and that is partly true, but it is more true that I’m drawn to these ancient problems because they continually surface in the problems our collective hivemind faces today and that some of the most provocative members of our thinking colonies continue to grapple with them.
Take Deleuze, for instance, and specifically, the way in which Sinthome articulates the same problem of the relationship between speaker and kairos in Deleuzian terminology. Sorry for the upcoming lengthy quote, but I really like the way Sinthome puts this:
Deleuze’s account of individuation is that it overcomes the peril of thinking about entities abstractly by underlining both how entities emerge or come to be in relation to a milieu and how they are characterized by ongoing processual relations to that milieu. However, the danger here is that we end up with a sort of determinism or social and political “physics” where no agency is possible because the agent is simply the actualization of a pre-personal field not of its own making. For Deleuze Ideas or Multiplicities are problems. An Idea is not something that an agent thinkers or conceives, but is rather an ontological category characterized as a field of differential relations and singularities (potentials) that are solved over the course of an actualization. Thus, for example, any particular tree is the result of an Idea or Problem in the sense that it revolves a set of potentials characteristic of both its own genetic constitution in larval state and its unique environment. Similar, for Deleuze, agents are not the agents of their Ideas (multiplicities), but are the patients of our Ideas. We are results of these problematic fields, not the ones directing the course of events.
Rostagni gives an understanding of the paradoxical relationship of the many and the one that would help us see a strong relation with the kind of kind of kairos I’m advocating for and the situation that Sinthome describes. Resonating from Rostagni’s reading of the Pythagoreans is how he frames the discussion of kairos through two different forms of topos as they relate to kairos. In a fragment found in Anaximander Rostagni explains that these topoi or starting places, monotropia (one kind of speech) and polutropia (many kinds of speeches) are contingent upon a particular moment (an event as Deleuze would call it) but that moment has to be understood according to the paradox of the many and the one. In other words, take, for instance, Henry V’s St. Cripin’s Day speech I mentioned above. Before the battle, Henry understands that in order to motivate his soldiers, he has got to fill them with fire by arguing that they can overcome the crushing defeat they all expect to happen, or, if not, that they will die with a glory that will change, even in defeat, the course of England’s history. In Kenneth Branagh’s version, the soldiers gather round and as Henry speaks, there is a slow and gradual acceptance by the group that his words are true and even if they die, their deaths will have been mattered more than their lives. The artifice of the speech lies less in the words and the argument but in the acceptance of the soldiers. It points to the kind of moment that is seized upon by the orator, and by doing so, it abstracts the speaker from the environment or nomos (place). This is what Rostagni would call a monotropic speech that is given to those who all hear the same thing. But the artificial quality of Henry’s speech is overlooked if we don’t recognize that the soldiers are different, and that because they are, when Henry delivers a speech that is designed for one, it will not be received the same by all because each soldier hears a different speech because it is the same speech. The only way that each soldier would be able to hear the same speech would be if Henry delivered different (polutropic) speeches custom made for each soldier. This problem gets exacerbated when you group people together (childrens speeches should be made for children, political speeches should be made for the polis and so on). We all know that different groups hear different things based on a multiple number of factors (culture, history, education, class, and so on).
The natural philosophers would agree with Sinthome’s description of Deleuze: “An Idea is not something that an agent thinks or conceives, but is rather an ontological category characterized as a field of differential relations and singularities (potentials) that are solved over the course of an actualization.” That ontological category, although it is more robust and developed in Difference and Repetition has its roots in the paradox of the many and the one. Notably, this paradox does not simply relate to speeches but it is, for these thinkers, the geological condition of all things being in temporal flux and that any one actualization (a speech or a hiccough or the ripening of a grape or the starting of a car or the tree example above) is the expression of a moment that in our sensory awareness of it blinds us to the entire rest of the unactualized lifeworld. As Heidegger was fond of saying, truth is aletheia, a constant motion into oblivion.
Interestingly, Gorgias’s famous challenge to ask him to speak on any topic was followed by that he trusted in kairos to allow him to deliver a pleasing speech, but Gorgias had been influenced by the Pythagoreans and likely never thought that being in touch with the moment was a matter of losing one’s agency. I like to playfully imagine that he thought of himself as being a catalyst where he recognized his connection to the world. In any case, given the episteme and the language, the concept likely never crossed his mind. As Pierre Vernant has said, the rise of the subject is a very modern way of thinking, one that draws a line between humans and the earth, and one that, while expressed in the grammar of English, it does not exist in the ergative languages still in existence today.
Nonetheless, I really appreciate Sinthome’s explanation of how he reads how Deleuze resolves the tension between being an expression of a field of potentials and having a position from which to claim authority over them. I find the image of the torus in his post an interesting piece of information (a tell, maybe?). Do those images suggest another answer to the problem? I won’t venture there as I’d have to return to my long-neglected readings of Lacan, but I’d love to hear someone discuss how those images integrate with the rest of the post. In any case, Sinthome’s explanation for how Deleuze resolves the tension between agent and patient is interesting for me, particularly because he has helped me see something about the relationship between reading, writing, new media, and temporality that I could not quite fit together before. So a big thanks here.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze hooks us by talking about his different syntheses of time. Oh, if he’d have given us a bullet list of what they are. Between the various explanations are just about the whole book. Sinthome explains the second synthesis of time in a way that is similar to how Michel Serres has put it many times, but it is only now that the click has occurred for me. Basically, Serres (in Genesis) has said that we are in a continuous conversation with the ancients or writers of any time period, that the things separating us from other writers (time, culture, language, and so on) do not take their ideas out of circulation but those ideas, while their meanings have varying influences and speak to different ages according to the epistemologies of a particular age, they are not, to borrow Sinthome’s phrasing, “overcoded by that particular social field” (not a direct quote). Sinthome explains that memory works similarly. As beings occupying linear time, we are materially bound to our place in time, whether we are moving towards the future or the future is moving towards us (or both) doesn’t really matter as our bodies cannot leap over when we are. But the potentialities of the artifacts of history as well as our memories, however, are not also bound. In fact, it would appear that natural memory works according to a different logic than linear temporality. Just think about the thousands of day dreams you’ve had. If you’re like me, you’ll understand me when I say that there have been times where I have been absolutely transported to places and times in my past, times and places that had much more resonance than anything that was happening in the present. Sinthome writes: “The rediscovery of the text itself also introduces something into the field, creating a marginal space of freedom in which the subject can become agent, enjoying adventures that take him in directions other than the predominant structurations characterizing the social field.” So both of these things, memory and media, are time machines.
What is most interesting to me about this, especially as it ties to the subfield of computers and writing is how these two real temporalities are duplicated by our traditional and emerging reading and writing practices. Sustained long reading is analogous to chronic time (chronos), and the elements of digital writing (blogging, images, video, rich applications, and perhaps above all, social software and the coming virtual environments) are analogous to this kind of freedom associated with memory and transtemporal media consumption and enjoyment. Ironically, however, if we feel bound to chronos in our daily lives (same shit different day as the cliché goes), the hallmarks of literacy (the recent NEA report on declining literacy, for example) would proclaim that when speaking in terms of readin’ and writin’ that students are being shortchanged if they do not engage in sustained long reading.
But what I want to ask, what I am curious about, is to what extent the effects of Web 2.0 are having on the linear continuum that has been pretty much part of our common experience. Also, to what extent, then, is the rapid movement that can be explained by the continuous pushes and pulls of social-networking shifting our primary ways of living? We’re online writing our blog and our phone beeps. We see we got a text. We check it, reply, go back to our blog, a thought about something other than what we’re doing occurs to us, perhaps we’re thinking that maybe we should get one of those blog editing tools like Windows Live Writer (but support Microsoft?-yuk), but what open source tools are out there? Our email dings, the phone rings. . . . Surf the internet for a while and hop around reading all those pro-bloggers who make their living writing online or the many many developers writing blogs and so many others whose work and paycheck depend solely on their online productivity. Should we be surprised that there are so many microblogs or the popularity of facebook, Digg, Shareaholic, Friendster, Bub.blicio.us, sezwho, and so many other social networking sites? But it is just this social interconnectivity that is the cause for the push and pull. This social economy calls, tweets, reads, friends, comments, meets friends and friends of friends. In other words, social networking and internet writing calls us to follow multiple directions. Many of us are not living linear lives.
We and our students are continuously being invited to rapidly and schizophrenically switch codes and to follow many paths and to switch them again. If time spent on the internet engaging in social networking (both with others and with other machines) is a phenomena that sends us in multiple paths, to what extent is nonlinear temporal experience becoming dominant? If in our daily experience, we–like media and memory–travel across time instead of in or with time, at what point does this new conceptual and material orientation become common?
In my manuscript, I speak at length at the need to incorporate non-linear forms of invention from outside writing studies and bring them into the fold. I speak about the work of conceptual artists such as John Cage, Paul Miller, Fiona Tan, Eric Loyer, William Burroughs, Bill Viola, Dziga Vertov and others in order that we may learn lessons from them and 
begin incorporating similar methods into our pedagogies and research. Geof Sirc is one person who has been doing similar work for some time. I think that this is important work, but I am just now beginning to think that it’s not enough and that it relies still too heavily on the concept of the writer as working artist. Isn’t social networking already an example of multilinear forms of invention taking place? And even better, it’s something that has begun to happen on its own.
What I am now considering is how can the power of social networking be harnessed in a productive way where various forms of writing, using whatever media are relevant, can collectively emerge. There is one company that I came across last night who has already begun thinking in this direction. While they have systematized the problem solving process, they have done so in a way where communities come together in a systematic fashion to help bring ideas to fruition. This company is kluster, and while I need to check them out more thoroughly, I’m wondering what kind of application or inspiration might an organization like this have in solving the problems of collaborative writing.
February 24th, 2008 by cutter
After my discussion of an article idea yesterday, I received three pieces of helpful information to continue thinking about emergence and CMS’s. One came from a colleague over email and another shows up on Donna’s Blog where Scot adds a riff. I’ll start with the blog and then move to the email, which adds an interesting way to build the article more.
Reading Donald Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Donna pulls the following quotes:
How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior?
Although genes, like people, exist as identifiably individual units, they function by interacting, and the corresponding patterns of interaction can display almost unlimited complexity.
the particular manner in which they interact can have profound consequences for the sorts of new phenomena–from population genetics to global synchrony to political revolutions–that can emerge at the level of groups, systems, and populations. (27)
The post mentions that people who are interested in social action should be “studying networks.” I couldn’t agree more. Speaking about old school forms of protests driven by ideologies, Johnson in Emergence writes: “What they fail to recognize is that their can be power and intelligence in a swarm, and if you’re trying to do battle in a distributed network like global capitalism, you’re better off becoming a distibuted network youself” (226).
Scot makes a really good point about disconnections and friendships, reminding me of why I was reading Jean Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community in grad school. Of course, Scot is talking about, in my mind, a whole ‘no.ther theoretical territory, The Great Excluded Middle. What he says is very provocative, so let me quote him here.
Put somewhat differently, is there a productive place for disjunction or dis/connection within network models and if so what might this look like? I don’t have the best answer yet for this, but the abstract I wrote suggests that friendship (or at least Blanchot and Derrida’s version of friendship) might suggest a possibility for imagining networks less as near-limitless possibilities for connection and more as “communities without community,” to borrow Blanchot’s phrase. Such a network, if it’s right to call it that now, would highlight interruptive contacts over associative linkages, contacts extended, though not necessarily with commensurability, to an other who may or may not ever answer the call for aggregation.
One way to reinscribe the issue of disconnections into emergence theory is to consider them, as in cybernetics, as noise, i.e., as part of a larger field that cannot be inscribed into a system. If you approach this difficulty from the position of ethics and politics, then the reinscription that I am suggesting is a violence and a reduction to the important thought of the refusal to be connected.
In our field, we often hear arguments about the digital divide, between those who have access and those who don’t. But while those arguments are made, we hear little to nothing about the choice not to connect. This choice, as I see frequently, is not limited to students, but it is very strong in the humanities among everyday professors. We could speculate as to why, but I think we’d be close to offer the explanation that some people just don’t want to change, or to do more, or whatever. But what is at work in a situation like this, is a subject taking a position of resistance, a subject who does not write (or connect) because that subject is attached to an identity. This is different from, say, the Bartleby who “prefers not to.” The difference between those who resist and Bartleby is that Bartleby has no attachments to subjectivity or identity, he is what Agamben would call a “whatever being.” If you read through Agamben in the Coming Community, what you see is “The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why in the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name is Qalam, “Pen,” and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write” (37).
To return to Scot’s thoughts, the difficulty involves this transition of moving from subject positions to whatever beings, and it is here where the inoperative community, the coming community, and the community without community is perpetually arriving.
In any case, there is a part 2 to this post. I have to think about how these ideas work with the email I received concerning anxiety in networked environments.
