Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Aug 15, 2006, 04:10 PM
Conversation between Kate and Scott, with reflections from our Seminar participants who worked for half an hour in small groups: Conversation begins with a report from each of the working groups: Group 1: Interested in the theoretical, the critical, and the political. Political economy of all of these issues slid away from discussion---what are the costs, human and socially? Group 2: What are the politics of disruption? What happens with forms of emergent subjectivity and pushing the threshold of mediated subjectivity---what if it weren?t efficient? What if it were more anarchic. Anne Balsamo pushes: What do you mean by ?the political? in your conversations? Group 1: I have two interests: media on the one hand and meaning and memory on the other. There isn?t enough connection between the two, how the archive works across media old and new. What are the points of intersection in those discourses? Private industry is huge driver of many of these technologies. What does it mean in terms of access, marketplace, and the larger economies. If we are driven by strength of narrative of profit, what happens to subjectivity that is not profitable? KH: Much media and literature has exactly political point. She recommends a book forthcoming by Galloway and Thacker that centralized power is in no way incompatible with network organization and, in fact, we are being forced into networked situation by terrorism and Bush administration. Movements from centralized to networked models are complex. Alexander Galloway and EugeneThacker, THE EXPLOIT? http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/books.html THE EXPLOIT coauthored with Eugene Thacker Prolegomenon: "We're tired of trees" A Global Dynamic ? Political Atomism ? Unilaterialism v. Multilateralism ? Ubiquity and Universality ? Occultism and Cryptography ? Networks Fighting Networks ? The New Sovereignty I. Nodes Introduction Technology (or Theory) Theory (or Technology) Protocol in Computer Networks Protocol in Biological Networks An Encoded Life Toward a Political Ontology of Networks The Defacement of Enmity Biopolitics and Protocol Life-Resistance The Exploit Counterprotocol II. Edges The Datum of Cura I The Datum of Cura II Sovereignty and Biology I Sovereignty and Biology II Abandoning the Body Politic The Ghost in the Network Rhetorics of Freedom Political Animals Ad Hoc Sovereignty and the State of Emergency Fork Bomb I Epidemic and Endemic Network Being Good Viruses (SimSARS I) Medical Surveillance (SimSARS II) II. [Continued] Birth of the Algorithm Feedback vs. Interaction I Feedback vs. Interaction II A Google Search for my Body Fork Bomb II The Paranormal and the Pathological I The Paranormal and the Pathological II Universals of Identification RFC001b: BmTP Fork Bomb III Unknown Unknowns Tactics of Nonexistence Spinoza-as-programmer Disappearance, or, I've Seen It All Before Allegory of Asymmetry I Allegory of Asymmetry II A Political Ambiguity Codification, not Reification Stop Motion Pure Metal The User and the Programmer Fork Bomb IV The Hypertrophy of Matter Interface There is No Content Notes for a Liberated Computer Language Coda: Bits and Atoms Technology operates through network model but the network model is not confined to internet and www but is also a mode of political organization and a mode of political resistance. Galloway and Thacker argue about strategies learnable from the networked model v. sovereign model. AB to SF: What is relationship between memory and lifelogging and archive and politics? AB: Singapore?s interest in the technology and urge to codify the culture, the Singapore-ness of the culture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore Essentially, Singapore is a one-party state with notoriously restrictive laws re. free speech. What does it mean to archive a ?culture? under such a situation? Archive v. trash? Artist who was grilled by FBI after 911 has responded with what he calls ?Aggressive Compliance? where he films everything and then sells everything, enormity of data. AB believes in this for all kinds of art. Getting laptops in hands of poor youth---a banal gesture that has nothing to do with liberatory impulses. We have to think about how technology is made and so forth. KH interestingly asks if the audience-appreciation measures of Hollywood test audiences or advertisers could be measured and then translated into self-tailored stories, to make into a narrative that is absolutely irresistible. But narrative always has ideology. So, in such a hypothetical self-generating narrative of desire, endlessly repeated, what would the ideology be? Lotus land? Infinite realization? Or , I wonder inspired by this provocation, would such infinite self-realization of narrative desire result in shut down syndrome . . . would infinite seduction of the self, fulfilled, lead to the annihilation of the self? Statis as desire. Group 3: What do the modes of presentation and memory encourage? What of the interplay of attention and distraction? Who is able to make sense of noise? What specialized knowledges are required to make sense of certain kinds of readings?Ulysses or MMPOG. AB: In a space of multiple flows of information, what is signal and what is noise? KH: I?m interested in two simultaneous cognitive modes in our culture, sustained attention (ie reading long Victorian novel) and hyper-attention (characterized by low threshold for boredom and preference for multiple streams of stimuli). Psychologists are studying these phenomenon and proving that multitasking is extremely inefficient and takes longer cumulatively to accomplish tasks than if they were done sequentially one at a time. So twelve-year old multitaskers not efficient but requirement for multistimuli. It has been medically stigmatized as ADD but dysfunctional only in terms of a traditional pedagogy. SF: Need to adjust to continuous partial attention (Glenda Stone) . . . more of a scanning behavior and Google behavior than other behaviors. AB How to make available multiple viewpoints simultaneously. I am concerned that we canonize or demonize ?traditional pedagogy? rather than also recognize it as a political creation of a recent generation, as typified by Leave No Child Behind, the most regimented pedagogy of the last fifty years and entirely regulatory of public education, with standardized tests, required flunking of whole grades for substandard test scores, textbooks designed for the tests, aftershool school to prep for the tests, and, of course, rocketing drop out rates, especially of boys. All those meds aren?t ?curing? the ADD or helping them pass the tests. Cynically, I wonder what the connections are, in other words, if a high drop out is a socially desirable phenomenon in terms of providing justifications for private schooling (class differentiated privilege) or religious schooling (state subsidized) and a permanent underclass of drop outs who are not educated. The discrepancy between multiply stimulated technology and under-stimulated students is one that we need to exploit in new forms of learning but we have to be aware that we are operating against a politics of extreme social repression that (as is always the case) exerts force on education to enforce social norms and a social agenda. The stigmatizing of children with labels like ADD goes back to early labeling of dyslexia that was also related to gender, race, immigration, and class factors. AB: Agency of creation and imagination. I have a different kind of anguish when I look at these new creations. By avant garde performance artists, for example, how can I get my hands on them? If they are not saleable and marketable, then how can I get them? How can those who are not brilliant coders and brilliant technologists get our hands on these things such that our creative agency and political imagination could use these things to play out possibility? O?Reilly conference: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/ Important for humanists to participate in these, to be part of the development of the new technologies. When is it appropriate to ask a question that has a political valence and what would that political valence be? SF: Researchers must be brought into this conversation. Funders sometimes are horrified by what comes from funded research. How can you get into situation where you are able to make changes, make difference, make innovation, despite the expressed wishes of the funding agency. Humanists and artists need to be part of the research! Hey! That is the HASTAC manifesto!!! Yes, yes, yes. KH: Ender?s Game: two games, one is ruthlessly exploitative, by military establishment to prepare him to be military commander of all their forces. Ruthless exploitation of the small child, justified by fate of entire human face. But other powerful force of virtualization in the novel is a game programmed by alien race that is determined to end the human race. What are Ender?s possible sources of human resistance? Dramatization of the internal struggle. Virtual character could be tied to actual to challenge person in real life, and for what ends? Force of powerful ideological conditioning. Audience: Interesting turn in your talk between Japanese culture, and modernist object, as in Turrell, the minimalist transformation into maximalist environment. Have you tried to produce enhanced environments in minimalist environment? SF: He is more interested in volcano project than light projects. But with embedded objects like millstones in Japanese gardens, bordering on techno-animism, means another kind of narrative. Plays back into assignment of mirror by me as the viewer. Context. There is no meaning without context. What I find fascinating in the Japanese allusion is that, in both cases, there is tremendous technology/artifice to create something in which, in the Japanese case and in Turrell, in fact looks evacuated of technology/artifice. Yet, if you come from a Japanese tradition of training in any of the landscape or martial or other arts, you are aware of how much training is necessary to look effortless. It?s no postmodern insight to think about the way artifice and nature, technology and nature, are codependent and interdependent. We?re back to Kate Hayles? idea, deconstructionist, of narratives and subversion of narratives and the codependence of different contextual frames that disrupt one another?s ?naturalness.? And, if we are to politicize the economics of such naturalness, the training and the upkeep and the tourism are all expensive. They all have a cost. Audience Member: Company produces ?autonomous purchasing creature? that programs doll to purchase things that other dolls desire. Ultimate parental nightmare. No economic control of child. I want a toy! I want a toy----as articulated BY a toy. So is this the same or the opposite of the perpetually desire-filling narrative that always makes one happy? The purchased item that purchases the items that the purchaser would want based on a sampling of its previous purchases. AM: technologies as actors, as participants, as drivers, as economies, as relations and networks of relational and economic desires. AM: Forget the doll! What about PC that comes with Microsoft installed. How to go to open source to launch a basic operation to critique and subvert. Furbiees have been hacked, of course! Ann: The things that get designed and end up showing up as consumer products are not fixed but themselves go through moments in transition or response or participation. This animates many researchers, to do off-the-shelf product hacking, modding, remixing. KH: we need kinds of strategies where different cognitive modes are combned to allow new kinds of inquiry. . . that is a worthy cultural project for all of us. AM: Intertextality and metatextuality in literary theor. Idea of various readings, not one authoratitive interpretation. Each is different from the previous and each reading changes what was read before hand. Combination of different streams of information in real time changes texts, the written word, but also digital media, and esp mitate, and evocation of previous experiences and previous readings. Interactions between artifacts make new forms of reading . . . not just theauthor. Creation of new information changes previous information. AM: What I?m hearing is need for more complext thinking about new technology. It?s not that every technology is a blank slate, any more than any text, and there is some mediation of the fixed with the personalized, the performance with the devices. They are not mere tools, they carry with them strong determinations to do some things and not others. But they are not only that. Theory can take us so far. And then, beyond, when we make pronouncements, we cannot make it at a global scale but must bound it by specificities of both the technology and the context, politics, users. The wrestling is not an either/or or a both/and---more than zero, less than many. Range of possibilities and propelling. Answers may need to be worked out in a different register, in something you build, something you deploy in a way different than it was intended. Theory exemplified . . . another HASTAC motto. And now lunch!!!
Conversation between Kate and Scott, with reflections from our Seminar participants who worked for half an hour in small groups: Conversation begins with a report from each of the working groups: Group 1: Interested in the theoretical, the critical, and the political. Political economy of all of these issues slid away from discussion---what are the costs, human and socially? Group 2: What are the politics of disruption? What happens with forms of emergent subjectivity and pushing the threshold of mediated subjectivity---what if it weren?t efficient? What if it were more anarchic. Anne Balsamo pushes: What do you mean by ?the political? in your conversations? Group 1: I have two interests: media on the one hand and meaning and memory on the other. There isn?t enough connection between the two, how the archive works across media old and new. What are the points of intersection in those discourses? Private industry is huge driver of many of these technologies. What does it mean in terms of access, marketplace, and the larger economies. If we are driven by strength of narrative of profit, what happens to subjectivity that is not profitable? KH: Much media and literature has exactly political point. She recommends a book forthcoming by Galloway and Thacker that centralized power is in no way incompatible with network organization and, in fact, we are being forced into networked situation by terrorism and Bush administration. Movements from centralized to networked models are complex. Alexander Galloway and EugeneThacker, THE EXPLOIT? http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/books.html THE EXPLOIT coauthored with Eugene Thacker Prolegomenon: "We're tired of trees" A Global Dynamic ? Political Atomism ? Unilaterialism v. Multilateralism ? Ubiquity and Universality ? Occultism and Cryptography ? Networks Fighting Networks ? The New Sovereignty I. Nodes Introduction Technology (or Theory) Theory (or Technology) Protocol in Computer Networks Protocol in Biological Networks An Encoded Life Toward a Political Ontology of Networks The Defacement of Enmity Biopolitics and Protocol Life-Resistance The Exploit Counterprotocol II. Edges The Datum of Cura I The Datum of Cura II Sovereignty and Biology I Sovereignty and Biology II Abandoning the Body Politic The Ghost in the Network Rhetorics of Freedom Political Animals Ad Hoc Sovereignty and the State of Emergency Fork Bomb I Epidemic and Endemic Network Being Good Viruses (SimSARS I) Medical Surveillance (SimSARS II) II. [Continued] Birth of the Algorithm Feedback vs. Interaction I Feedback vs. Interaction II A Google Search for my Body Fork Bomb II The Paranormal and the Pathological I The Paranormal and the Pathological II Universals of Identification RFC001b: BmTP Fork Bomb III Unknown Unknowns Tactics of Nonexistence Spinoza-as-programmer Disappearance, or, I've Seen It All Before Allegory of Asymmetry I Allegory of Asymmetry II A Political Ambiguity Codification, not Reification Stop Motion Pure Metal The User and the Programmer Fork Bomb IV The Hypertrophy of Matter Interface There is No Content Notes for a Liberated Computer Language Coda: Bits and Atoms Technology operates through network model but the network model is not confined to internet and www but is also a mode of political organization and a mode of political resistance. Galloway and Thacker argue about strategies learnable from the networked model v. sovereign model. AB to SF: What is relationship between memory and lifelogging and archive and politics? AB: Singapore?s interest in the technology and urge to codify the culture, the Singapore-ness of the culture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore Essentially, Singapore is a one-party state with notoriously restrictive laws re. free speech. What does it mean to archive a ?culture? under such a situation? Archive v. trash? Artist who was grilled by FBI after 911 has responded with what he calls ?Aggressive Compliance? where he films everything and then sells everything, enormity of data. AB believes in this for all kinds of art. Getting laptops in hands of poor youth---a banal gesture that has nothing to do with liberatory impulses. We have to think about how technology is made and so forth. KH interestingly asks if the audience-appreciation measures of Hollywood test audiences or advertisers could be measured and then translated into self-tailored stories, to make into a narrative that is absolutely irresistible. But narrative always has ideology. So, in such a hypothetical self-generating narrative of desire, endlessly repeated, what would the ideology be? Lotus land? Infinite realization? Or , I wonder inspired by this provocation, would such infinite self-realization of narrative desire result in shut down syndrome . . . would infinite seduction of the self, fulfilled, lead to the annihilation of the self? Statis as desire. Group 3: What do the modes of presentation and memory encourage? What of the interplay of attention and distraction? Who is able to make sense of noise? What specialized knowledges are required to make sense of certain kinds of readings?Ulysses or MMPOG. AB: In a space of multiple flows of information, what is signal and what is noise? KH: I?m interested in two simultaneous cognitive modes in our culture, sustained attention (ie reading long Victorian novel) and hyper-attention (characterized by low threshold for boredom and preference for multiple streams of stimuli). Psychologists are studying these phenomenon and proving that multitasking is extremely inefficient and takes longer cumulatively to accomplish tasks than if they were done sequentially one at a time. So twelve-year old multitaskers not efficient but requirement for multistimuli. It has been medically stigmatized as ADD but dysfunctional only in terms of a traditional pedagogy. SF: Need to adjust to continuous partial attention (Glenda Stone) . . . more of a scanning behavior and Google behavior than other behaviors. AB How to make available multiple viewpoints simultaneously. I am concerned that we canonize or demonize ?traditional pedagogy? rather than also recognize it as a political creation of a recent generation, as typified by Leave No Child Behind, the most regimented pedagogy of the last fifty years and entirely regulatory of public education, with standardized tests, required flunking of whole grades for substandard test scores, textbooks designed for the tests, aftershool school to prep for the tests, and, of course, rocketing drop out rates, especially of boys. All those meds aren?t ?curing? the ADD or helping them pass the tests. Cynically, I wonder what the connections are, in other words, if a high drop out is a socially desirable phenomenon in terms of providing justifications for private schooling (class differentiated privilege) or religious schooling (state subsidized) and a permanent underclass of drop outs who are not educated. The discrepancy between multiply stimulated technology and under-stimulated students is one that we need to exploit in new forms of learning but we have to be aware that we are operating against a politics of extreme social repression that (as is always the case) exerts force on education to enforce social norms and a social agenda. The stigmatizing of children with labels like ADD goes back to early labeling of dyslexia that was also related to gender, race, immigration, and class factors. AB: Agency of creation and imagination. I have a different kind of anguish when I look at these new creations. By avant garde performance artists, for example, how can I get my hands on them? If they are not saleable and marketable, then how can I get them? How can those who are not brilliant coders and brilliant technologists get our hands on these things such that our creative agency and political imagination could use these things to play out possibility? O?Reilly conference: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/ Important for humanists to participate in these, to be part of the development of the new technologies. When is it appropriate to ask a question that has a political valence and what would that political valence be? SF: Researchers must be brought into this conversation. Funders sometimes are horrified by what comes from funded research. How can you get into situation where you are able to make changes, make difference, make innovation, despite the expressed wishes of the funding agency. Humanists and artists need to be part of the research! Hey! That is the HASTAC manifesto!!! Yes, yes, yes. KH: Ender?s Game: two games, one is ruthlessly exploitative, by military establishment to prepare him to be military commander of all their forces. Ruthless exploitation of the small child, justified by fate of entire human face. But other powerful force of virtualization in the novel is a game programmed by alien race that is determined to end the human race. What are Ender?s possible sources of human resistance? Dramatization of the internal struggle. Virtual character could be tied to actual to challenge person in real life, and for what ends? Force of powerful ideological conditioning. Audience: Interesting turn in your talk between Japanese culture, and modernist object, as in Turrell, the minimalist transformation into maximalist environment. Have you tried to produce enhanced environments in minimalist environment? SF: He is more interested in volcano project than light projects. But with embedded objects like millstones in Japanese gardens, bordering on techno-animism, means another kind of narrative. Plays back into assignment of mirror by me as the viewer. Context. There is no meaning without context. What I find fascinating in the Japanese allusion is that, in both cases, there is tremendous technology/artifice to create something in which, in the Japanese case and in Turrell, in fact looks evacuated of technology/artifice. Yet, if you come from a Japanese tradition of training in any of the landscape or martial or other arts, you are aware of how much training is necessary to look effortless. It?s no postmodern insight to think about the way artifice and nature, technology and nature, are codependent and interdependent. We?re back to Kate Hayles? idea, deconstructionist, of narratives and subversion of narratives and the codependence of different contextual frames that disrupt one another?s ?naturalness.? And, if we are to politicize the economics of such naturalness, the training and the upkeep and the tourism are all expensive. They all have a cost. Audience Member: Company produces ?autonomous purchasing creature? that programs doll to purchase things that other dolls desire. Ultimate parental nightmare. No economic control of child. I want a toy! I want a toy----as articulated BY a toy. So is this the same or the opposite of the perpetually desire-filling narrative that always makes one happy? The purchased item that purchases the items that the purchaser would want based on a sampling of its previous purchases. AM: technologies as actors, as participants, as drivers, as economies, as relations and networks of relational and economic desires. AM: Forget the doll! What about PC that comes with Microsoft installed. How to go to open source to launch a basic operation to critique and subvert. Furbiees have been hacked, of course! Ann: The things that get designed and end up showing up as consumer products are not fixed but themselves go through moments in transition or response or participation. This animates many researchers, to do off-the-shelf product hacking, modding, remixing. KH: we need kinds of strategies where different cognitive modes are combned to allow new kinds of inquiry. . . that is a worthy cultural project for all of us. AM: Intertextality and metatextuality in literary theor. Idea of various readings, not one authoratitive interpretation. Each is different from the previous and each reading changes what was read before hand. Combination of different streams of information in real time changes texts, the written word, but also digital media, and esp mitate, and evocation of previous experiences and previous readings. Interactions between artifacts make new forms of reading . . . not just theauthor. Creation of new information changes previous information. AM: What I?m hearing is need for more complext thinking about new technology. It?s not that every technology is a blank slate, any more than any text, and there is some mediation of the fixed with the personalized, the performance with the devices. They are not mere tools, they carry with them strong determinations to do some things and not others. But they are not only that. Theory can take us so far. And then, beyond, when we make pronouncements, we cannot make it at a global scale but must bound it by specificities of both the technology and the context, politics, users. The wrestling is not an either/or or a both/and---more than zero, less than many. Range of possibilities and propelling. Answers may need to be worked out in a different register, in something you build, something you deploy in a way different than it was intended. Theory exemplified . . . another HASTAC motto. And now lunch!!!
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