The delusion that the ordo idearum (order of ideas) should be the ordo rerum (order of things) is based on the insinuation that the mediated is unmediated. (p. 158)
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Essay as Form, Adorno
Monday, July 28, 2008
Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.3
Web-based
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault links the formation of knowledge to the formation of personhood, prefiguring a link that search engines historically and technologically re-mediate. Foucault’s suggestion is that the historical procedures which require that individual books and oeuvres be conceived of as diachronically and synchronically stable units of knowledge provide shelter for the human subject conceived as sovereign: self-contained, and stable, able to make decisions whose outcomes determine the horizon of the subject’s continuance and transformation. With this link in place between the ways knowledge is organized, visualized and manifest, Foucault then begins to vary the units of knowledge as part of a project—still nascent in 1972 when Archaeology was published in English, but pursued into the eighties and Foucault’s last writings—of varying our conception of the human subject. If a book is a “node within a network” (23), then human sovereignty might be similarly distributed. If knowledge is therefore re-conceived as a “dispersion,” a “series of series” (7, 54-5), then personhood might similarly be something to be found, laboriously traced, dispersed among the various site where people appear for others, where they act in the world, where they encounter themselves and one another. To have an encounter with the world, with a person or thing in it, is to map the contours and distributions of subjectivity, not to manifest personhood across a series of sites. “Horse sucker molds.”
But Foucault does not abandon all familiar units, all representations of knowledge. An archaeology instead shifts the focus to a form of knowledge—his concept “discursive formation” points explicitly to the centrality of form (33)—a form that is more mobile, and therefore more trackable across distributed networks of knowledge, between books, oeuvres, disciplines, sciences. The archaeologist’s faith in statements rewards a curiosity about where they might lead, the paths they might trace. Beacon presents search engines as statement machines, but where statements assume a historically particular form: the search query. And Beacon is the archaeologist of search engines. You are what you eat.
In the 1970s, the mobility of statements drove a poststructuralist re-conceptualization of history. In the 2000s, the mobility of statements substantiates the business plan for search engines. A search engine works because it can mobilize a search query, efficaciously and quickly, within a vast indexed database of websites, calling up the sites that that particular search engines calls the most “relevant.” A search engine works because it can simultaneously mobilize a search query within a network of advertisers, each of whom wants their ads to appear next to and within certain search results, and not only generate a real-time price for an ad in the time it takes to return search results (a market economy in .25 seconds), but serve up a small series of ads as the marginalia of what Google calls its “objective results.” Free catchy phrases. The archaeology of knowledge, as materialized by Beacon, thus connects historical analysis to market analysis, showing them to be conjoined and historically contiguous.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault links the formation of knowledge to the formation of personhood, prefiguring a link that search engines historically and technologically re-mediate. Foucault’s suggestion is that the historical procedures which require that individual books and oeuvres be conceived of as diachronically and synchronically stable units of knowledge provide shelter for the human subject conceived as sovereign: self-contained, and stable, able to make decisions whose outcomes determine the horizon of the subject’s continuance and transformation. With this link in place between the ways knowledge is organized, visualized and manifest, Foucault then begins to vary the units of knowledge as part of a project—still nascent in 1972 when Archaeology was published in English, but pursued into the eighties and Foucault’s last writings—of varying our conception of the human subject. If a book is a “node within a network” (23), then human sovereignty might be similarly distributed. If knowledge is therefore re-conceived as a “dispersion,” a “series of series” (7, 54-5), then personhood might similarly be something to be found, laboriously traced, dispersed among the various site where people appear for others, where they act in the world, where they encounter themselves and one another. To have an encounter with the world, with a person or thing in it, is to map the contours and distributions of subjectivity, not to manifest personhood across a series of sites. “Horse sucker molds.”
But Foucault does not abandon all familiar units, all representations of knowledge. An archaeology instead shifts the focus to a form of knowledge—his concept “discursive formation” points explicitly to the centrality of form (33)—a form that is more mobile, and therefore more trackable across distributed networks of knowledge, between books, oeuvres, disciplines, sciences. The archaeologist’s faith in statements rewards a curiosity about where they might lead, the paths they might trace. Beacon presents search engines as statement machines, but where statements assume a historically particular form: the search query. And Beacon is the archaeologist of search engines. You are what you eat.
In the 1970s, the mobility of statements drove a poststructuralist re-conceptualization of history. In the 2000s, the mobility of statements substantiates the business plan for search engines. A search engine works because it can mobilize a search query, efficaciously and quickly, within a vast indexed database of websites, calling up the sites that that particular search engines calls the most “relevant.” A search engine works because it can simultaneously mobilize a search query within a network of advertisers, each of whom wants their ads to appear next to and within certain search results, and not only generate a real-time price for an ad in the time it takes to return search results (a market economy in .25 seconds), but serve up a small series of ads as the marginalia of what Google calls its “objective results.” Free catchy phrases. The archaeology of knowledge, as materialized by Beacon, thus connects historical analysis to market analysis, showing them to be conjoined and historically contiguous.
Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.2
Because it is a live feed, a beacon, the series is as endless as the search engine is takes as its feed, dogpile.com, a search engine compiler (the “dogpile” in the name refers to the “pile” of other search engines that a search query, typed into Dogpile, gives one access to). Clinton Thomas Lee. That is to say, Beacon will last as long as Dogpile’s business lasts, which could be a long time, or, if we watch the signs of Google’s ascendance and the concomitant decline of every other search engine, possibly not long at all. Endlessness, as an art historical trope, always referred to the Culture Industry and its temporality of numbing repetition, terminologically and (the hope was) phenomenologically marked off from a more dramatic aesthetic temporality (e.g. the sublime, the evental, the self-reflexive). Beacon pins the critique of the Culture Industry to a particular company, Dogpile, and by implication (of both the piece and of Dogpile’s status as a meta-search engine, or a search engine that references other search engines), calling its bluff or forcing it to specify its claims. If the Culture Industry is not to be an ahistorical concept, if it works differently in different times, transforms along with industry, then Beacon suggests that the critique might be extended by considering it in the context of a single company and the search engine industry it represents not just metonymically but competitively, within a dwindling landscape of market competition, dominated more and more completely by Google. Lesbian ass eating.
But for all the fascination of Beacon’s ethnographic verité, Beacon omits, truncates or screens a feature of search engines that is as important as the search capacity itself: advertisements. Safety codes officer job in Alberta. Google makes 98% of its revenue from advertisements. It literally could not exist with the capacity to serve ads alongside search results, turning every question into an opportunity to go shopping, literalizing every propertizing analogy between knowledge and the vast capitalist marketplace. It is an understatement, therefore, to say that advertisements are as important to search engines as the capacity for search; they are constitutive. And Beacon’s failure, or refusal (we’ll need to decide which, and why) to visualize the welding of knowledge to products, of learning to shopping, effected by search engines, performs a kind of presence by omission. New Caledonian Singles. But exclusion manifests a different kind of presence than inclusion, as every Liberal, minority, deconstructionist, and un-indexed website knows. I take it as the kind of exclusion that invites reflection on how intimately interarticulated searching for information and searching for products become through the window of a search engine. And from there, further questions: if curiosity, as played out through a search engine, stages an encounter of oneself with what one knows and what one doesn’t know, and thereby, with the imagined world of what it’s possible to know and not know, then torques are applied to personhood through the use of search engines over time. And if Beacon manifests individual curiosities (the encounter of a searcher with herself as materialized in the limits of one’s own knowledge of the world), endlessly, in series, for others, what form of knowledge does this produce, of others, of the world one lives in and desires to make a place in, of the publics to which one does and doesn’t belong? In this latter frame, the information that Beacon presents to viewers in the form of a series of searches mirrors the knowledge about searcher-cum-consumer behavior that drives the business of search engines, the linking of search results and advertisements. Flat Screen tvs. This final question thereby cues debates about privacy and data-protection that have become unavoidable as the search industry, iconicized by Google, expands and becomes the interface for the entire Web, and all that people want to access through it. Practically the portal for all forms of inquisitive encounter, encounters that begin with questions.
But for all the fascination of Beacon’s ethnographic verité, Beacon omits, truncates or screens a feature of search engines that is as important as the search capacity itself: advertisements. Safety codes officer job in Alberta. Google makes 98% of its revenue from advertisements. It literally could not exist with the capacity to serve ads alongside search results, turning every question into an opportunity to go shopping, literalizing every propertizing analogy between knowledge and the vast capitalist marketplace. It is an understatement, therefore, to say that advertisements are as important to search engines as the capacity for search; they are constitutive. And Beacon’s failure, or refusal (we’ll need to decide which, and why) to visualize the welding of knowledge to products, of learning to shopping, effected by search engines, performs a kind of presence by omission. New Caledonian Singles. But exclusion manifests a different kind of presence than inclusion, as every Liberal, minority, deconstructionist, and un-indexed website knows. I take it as the kind of exclusion that invites reflection on how intimately interarticulated searching for information and searching for products become through the window of a search engine. And from there, further questions: if curiosity, as played out through a search engine, stages an encounter of oneself with what one knows and what one doesn’t know, and thereby, with the imagined world of what it’s possible to know and not know, then torques are applied to personhood through the use of search engines over time. And if Beacon manifests individual curiosities (the encounter of a searcher with herself as materialized in the limits of one’s own knowledge of the world), endlessly, in series, for others, what form of knowledge does this produce, of others, of the world one lives in and desires to make a place in, of the publics to which one does and doesn’t belong? In this latter frame, the information that Beacon presents to viewers in the form of a series of searches mirrors the knowledge about searcher-cum-consumer behavior that drives the business of search engines, the linking of search results and advertisements. Flat Screen tvs. This final question thereby cues debates about privacy and data-protection that have become unavoidable as the search industry, iconicized by Google, expands and becomes the interface for the entire Web, and all that people want to access through it. Practically the portal for all forms of inquisitive encounter, encounters that begin with questions.
Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.1
Breaking news. When did it become possible to search for breaking news? Is news always breaking? Isn’t the point of breaking news that is breaks into the ordinary stream of things, the tick tock tick of daily life? If it’s breaking all the time, then it’s no longer an interruption, it’s ordinary life. Although maybe this confusion lies outside of the act of typing “breaking news” into a search engine. Dating sites for teens. School is a dating site, isn’t it? Or maybe the person who wants to find dating sites for teens isn’t a teen. That train of thought quickly runs along well worn paths, paths worn by no one person, but by a bevy of media sites who, by running the story, make it into news that others rush to cover. Adults who prey on children on the internet. Parents who aren’t concerned enough about their child’s safety. Flax seed hulls. Is there something that can be done with the hulls? If I searched for that term too, would I find out? Robots movied. Typo or new verb? Instructions to make a bridal veil. The bridal industry hasn’t won over everybody then, although I know that a search that includes the term “bridal veil” brings advertisements for all sorts of bridal services. Sea elephant sewr. What would “sic” even mean in this context? Wallpaper. Buy? Remove? Hunted like a wolf. A spoonerism from the Duran Duran song? Or maybe there’s less distance between that phrase and its referent than I think. Although it can’t be literal, can it? Ellipsometers griffin george. The world is so busy today. “Wake me up with a blow job.” The world of people who are online now is so busy today, busy, industrious, inquisitive, horny. The world of people who are searching for something. “Searching” in that last sentence means something literal and something allegorical. To be searching for something needn’t be an existential state; it’s perfectly practical. Use a search engine often enough, however, and the existential comes back into play. Not as a way to describe a life that eschews surface for depths, but almost the opposite, a life in which the relevance of a search engine to one’s daily curiosities stretches way out to the horizon, an infinite series of events which raise questions that a quick visit to a search engine can answer. A search engine is existential because it weaves itself, for anyone who has used one often enough, tightly into the weft of an ordinary life. Attend a party with the well-connected and time how long it takes for someone to wish aloud that they had a search engine, or for someone to pull one up on a mobile device. A very well-connected friend recently told me that he’s learned not to take out his phone in the middle of conversations in order to consult a search engine and answer the latest dispute thrown up by the conversation. It’s more fun, he says, to let the conversation founder on the missing data. It’s just the sort of in-situ discovery that people make all the time when some piece of technology binds itself to daily life. New morals, new etiquettes, new normativities are discovered in order to mark out something as a unwelcome interruption to daily life and something else as an ordinariness to be recovered. Even though it was the interruption that made possible the affection for a mode of the ordinary. You can’t love everything all of the time.
The website for the online version of Thomson and Craighead’s Beacon tells its visitors that it began broadcasting other people’s search queries to the web at “00:00HRS GMT on 01st January 2005” (as I type these passages, I watch Beacon in a separate window on my desktop and intercalate its search queries, in italics, with these sentences about them). Since 01st January 2005, Thomson and Craighead have produced two different versions of Beacon, a gallery installation and a railway flap sign. The gallery installation projects Beacon, borderless, onto an unmarked painted gallery wall, search queries appearing and replacing each other every 1.5 seconds. The railway flap sign is more formally multivariate. It references an older style of public information system, common to airports and train stations from the late 1950s until the 1990s when such systems started to be replaced by LCD displays driven by networked computer databases. The three versions, considered together, reference three modes of address—an untrackably diffuse Web, a rarefied art gallery, and a historically multi-sited information display in which web traffic is overlaid onto air or train traffic as evoked by the form of the sign. Three modes of address assembling three public sphere imaginaries, not actual publics, assembled and ready for action, but three publics imagined by the technologies that address them: a public unified by its intermittent presence online; a public unified by its taste in art, its refractive desire to be part of an art scene; and a public both unified and split by its juxtaposed presence to history and to the present tense. A site-unspecific public, a taste public and a temporal public. Taken altogether as an iterative system, Beacon conjoins three distinct forms of publicness via three forms of public address and a congeries of meditative technologies.
If critical publics, or what Nancy Fraser called “counterpublics,” voice a wish for political change, Beacon’s publics are driven by a different engine: a more individualized wish, desire, curiosity, although the unit of subjectivity here is not clearly the individual (much less the liberal subject), nor is it related via a part-whole relationship to critical publics. James g. king + redmond. Beacon presents search queries that hail from one searcher, or one IP address anyway, for an uncertain audience of witnesses. It’s quite possible that I’m the only one watching at just this moment, as I write this sentence. By the time I finish the next, others may have joined me, although I’d never know. Beastly stories. That not-knowing is a feature of web publics which is not unlike a feature of print publics, as Michael Warner has described them: one’s presence to the public is a technical matter, are you or aren’t you a reader. In any case, one needn’t know anything about the other members of that public. And in the life of a public, learning something about one’s fellow members often appears as an anomaly. A book itself is enough; there needn’t be a “letters to the editor” feature for the public to be self-reflexive in the way Warner intends, for it to receive echoes of itself in the form of self-knowledge or self-awareness. The existence of a book is enough, and in that particular sense, a website is no different. Value place liberty mo. When websites do fold in forms of feedback, participatory forms, these forms can be reckoned therefore not as a constitutive feature of the site’s publicness—it’s sufficiently public on Warner’s and Habermas’ terms without those forms—but as one of the forms of communication afforded by the web, or a website, as a particular site for public action.
Beacon, however, in all of its versions, bends self-awareness around a further corner by reflecting an otherwise invisible feature of search engine use: the search queries themselves, as other people formulate them. Which is to say, other people’s questions, wishes, curiosities, desires, hopes, conundrums, memory lapses, researches, investigations, idlings, typos, misspellings, secrets, embarrassments, bored maunderings, desultory semi-free associations, and etcetera. Beacon’s formalism is both understated and camouflaged, so warrants scrutiny (fig. 1). Camouflaged because it looks like a million other websites, with nothing to single it out as anything other than any other website, let alone a commentary or meta-reflection on web culture itself: simple courier font, some lines of static text that surround the one active, apparently live window in which search queries appear, then disappear, then are replaced by the next search query in the ceaseless series, one every 1.5 seconds. Each individual search query appears, left-aligned, in Beacon’s search window. Then begins a rapid fade-to-black, blinks out to an opaque blackness, then that blackness gives way, before a cinematic wipe fade, moving left to right, revealing the next search query, fed live from Dogpile, a query typed at that moment, right then, by somebody.
The website for the online version of Thomson and Craighead’s Beacon tells its visitors that it began broadcasting other people’s search queries to the web at “00:00HRS GMT on 01st January 2005” (as I type these passages, I watch Beacon in a separate window on my desktop and intercalate its search queries, in italics, with these sentences about them). Since 01st January 2005, Thomson and Craighead have produced two different versions of Beacon, a gallery installation and a railway flap sign. The gallery installation projects Beacon, borderless, onto an unmarked painted gallery wall, search queries appearing and replacing each other every 1.5 seconds. The railway flap sign is more formally multivariate. It references an older style of public information system, common to airports and train stations from the late 1950s until the 1990s when such systems started to be replaced by LCD displays driven by networked computer databases. The three versions, considered together, reference three modes of address—an untrackably diffuse Web, a rarefied art gallery, and a historically multi-sited information display in which web traffic is overlaid onto air or train traffic as evoked by the form of the sign. Three modes of address assembling three public sphere imaginaries, not actual publics, assembled and ready for action, but three publics imagined by the technologies that address them: a public unified by its intermittent presence online; a public unified by its taste in art, its refractive desire to be part of an art scene; and a public both unified and split by its juxtaposed presence to history and to the present tense. A site-unspecific public, a taste public and a temporal public. Taken altogether as an iterative system, Beacon conjoins three distinct forms of publicness via three forms of public address and a congeries of meditative technologies.
If critical publics, or what Nancy Fraser called “counterpublics,” voice a wish for political change, Beacon’s publics are driven by a different engine: a more individualized wish, desire, curiosity, although the unit of subjectivity here is not clearly the individual (much less the liberal subject), nor is it related via a part-whole relationship to critical publics. James g. king + redmond. Beacon presents search queries that hail from one searcher, or one IP address anyway, for an uncertain audience of witnesses. It’s quite possible that I’m the only one watching at just this moment, as I write this sentence. By the time I finish the next, others may have joined me, although I’d never know. Beastly stories. That not-knowing is a feature of web publics which is not unlike a feature of print publics, as Michael Warner has described them: one’s presence to the public is a technical matter, are you or aren’t you a reader. In any case, one needn’t know anything about the other members of that public. And in the life of a public, learning something about one’s fellow members often appears as an anomaly. A book itself is enough; there needn’t be a “letters to the editor” feature for the public to be self-reflexive in the way Warner intends, for it to receive echoes of itself in the form of self-knowledge or self-awareness. The existence of a book is enough, and in that particular sense, a website is no different. Value place liberty mo. When websites do fold in forms of feedback, participatory forms, these forms can be reckoned therefore not as a constitutive feature of the site’s publicness—it’s sufficiently public on Warner’s and Habermas’ terms without those forms—but as one of the forms of communication afforded by the web, or a website, as a particular site for public action.
Beacon, however, in all of its versions, bends self-awareness around a further corner by reflecting an otherwise invisible feature of search engine use: the search queries themselves, as other people formulate them. Which is to say, other people’s questions, wishes, curiosities, desires, hopes, conundrums, memory lapses, researches, investigations, idlings, typos, misspellings, secrets, embarrassments, bored maunderings, desultory semi-free associations, and etcetera. Beacon’s formalism is both understated and camouflaged, so warrants scrutiny (fig. 1). Camouflaged because it looks like a million other websites, with nothing to single it out as anything other than any other website, let alone a commentary or meta-reflection on web culture itself: simple courier font, some lines of static text that surround the one active, apparently live window in which search queries appear, then disappear, then are replaced by the next search query in the ceaseless series, one every 1.5 seconds. Each individual search query appears, left-aligned, in Beacon’s search window. Then begins a rapid fade-to-black, blinks out to an opaque blackness, then that blackness gives way, before a cinematic wipe fade, moving left to right, revealing the next search query, fed live from Dogpile, a query typed at that moment, right then, by somebody.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Search Engines and Transference
Lacan: "As soon as there is someone presumed to know, there is transference."
With google, there is someone presumed to know, but is there transference? What do we have transference with?
With google, there is someone presumed to know, but is there transference? What do we have transference with?
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Atomization of Encounter
SEARCHING: reconfigures the self as simultaneously a new type of market segment (data) and a new form of discursive subject [selfhood].
PROTEST: reconfigures critique as mediated, the self weaponized toward an other, e.g. the state, haters of democracy [counterpublics].
LAUGHTER: reconfigures being with others as arrhythmic, mediated, nonplaces of interaction through a network (Galloway) [publics].
Each of these terms is both a literary instancing of the reconfiguration of an aspect of encounter (where encounter now means the coming together of self, public and counterpublic in potential) and a figure for that reconfiguration, e.g. laughter in separate bedrooms figures the form of the kind of public sociality I'm describing. The collision of form (figural relation of event to knowledge or history of it) and fact (literal relation to event, i.e. description) is siginificant for the way it marks the centrality of form to cultural analysis and of fact or the objective world to form.
PROTEST: reconfigures critique as mediated, the self weaponized toward an other, e.g. the state, haters of democracy [counterpublics].
LAUGHTER: reconfigures being with others as arrhythmic, mediated, nonplaces of interaction through a network (Galloway) [publics].
Each of these terms is both a literary instancing of the reconfiguration of an aspect of encounter (where encounter now means the coming together of self, public and counterpublic in potential) and a figure for that reconfiguration, e.g. laughter in separate bedrooms figures the form of the kind of public sociality I'm describing. The collision of form (figural relation of event to knowledge or history of it) and fact (literal relation to event, i.e. description) is siginificant for the way it marks the centrality of form to cultural analysis and of fact or the objective world to form.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Algorithmic Identity
Your identity is what search engines say it is (cf. advice from senior academics to young academics: be careful what you post online. Also: M. Gregg's response)
This might not seem different than identity has ever been, i.e. reputation always has made identity extimate in just that way (an effect of the outside).
The difference with search engines is that they not only have cultural capital (analogous to a very reputable source ruining the reputation of someone with less cultural capital and therefore fewer means to fight back), they exist within a system that codes them as neutral, objective, informational, algorithmic.
This might not seem different than identity has ever been, i.e. reputation always has made identity extimate in just that way (an effect of the outside).
The difference with search engines is that they not only have cultural capital (analogous to a very reputable source ruining the reputation of someone with less cultural capital and therefore fewer means to fight back), they exist within a system that codes them as neutral, objective, informational, algorithmic.
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