Searching, Beacon

I argued before that Beacon operated like a broken public, invoking Foucault's broken calligram: the figure that invokes its parts only to show their non-fit (as an ongoing condition). For a public, that would mean reflecting people back to themselves in what feels like a public way (having the feeling of looking at information that seems to reach toward some universalized representation), but that never achieves publicness in that sense, never becomes universal, never becomes a picture, remains a series of searches that are hard to read. That don't seem to add up. But that still feel, and maybe for that fact feel, evocative, mysterious, strange, odd, repulsive, confusing. My sense of its publicness, then, was an effect of its status as data. It seems to present us with data, culled from the web, streamed in real-time. It's formal markers point to its status as data: real-time, quoted, simply cut and paste or streamed and not manipulated, one after another...like ticker tape.

[aside about ticker tape: how did it work, when did it stop, who invented it and why? 1867, Edward Calahan, for stocks, from a Telegraph company. Edison too. Text output in readable text, not morris code. Obsolete in the 1960s with computer tech and faster real-time]

Also its plainness. It presents as very little but the search strings themselves. Data here would be the stuff that gets made into representations of the public: census, voting stats, pre-poll stats, demographics, marketing. But data has an unofficial status too: that which we all collect, our own nonce-polls, our own observations of how many women are wearing heels this year, of how many men are or are not wearing suits, or the color pink. Berlant calls this the stuff that forms the lineaments of individuality, where individuality is a shell of conventionality lived in as specific (particular details) and generic (genre: a genre of self). I think Beacon presents data in that idiom: the idiom people use, and read (Ranciere) as the basis for trying to know something about the world. Here, how people search, but maybe more centrally, more obviously, what people desire. And less generously: what people do when they're alone, when they think no one is looking, when they are indulging their grossest fantasies, etc. The kind of individuality Berlant describes, a way of living inside conventionality as a life, as one's own life, needs data. It needs to track btw its own behaviors and what it takes to be conventional; it needs to notice the difference in the small details, the small deviations from center, but also notice, however consciously or un-, the bigger shell of conventionality one inhabits as normativity, as a mode of power or invisibility or just getting by. I think Beacon presents data in that general genre of data. It looks like it, functions like it.

But my sense of brokenness before was an intuition that it doesn't finally work that way, it can't get you there, it doesn't add up, even though it adds and adds, serially, endlessly. Still though, something does change over time with the watching. Maybe it's not knowledge that results (although i guess one could count the number of porn searches; one could count all sorts of things; one could make proper data), but it's something more than random. Affective data? Data that only registers as feelngs in a body: fascination, boredom (I wonder), prurient curiosity.... I think if Beacon captures people in any way, it starts with affective data: the registration of data on/in the body as affects. Something seems fascinating or weird or off. This is true even before one understands what one is seeing, when one thinks it's just a strange serial text piece.

Two fascinations that might arise:
-how could someone want that?
-how could someone type that?

So Beacon figures a relation between desire and articulation, the intimate space we may or may not hide from others (or be able to hide from others) and the unfolding of those desires into the world in the form of searches: tactics for getting what we want. How to make the world respond to you, to give you what you want. How to carve out a little place for yourself where your desires get met. The semantics of the search string ARE those tactics. Writing one's self becomes the means for making a world for oneself, for one's desires [this is speaking only of searching in general; not necessarily how it manifests in Beacon]. Is it ever so correlated? So direct? You write to get what you want. A recipe, gay porn, relief (pictures of cute animals in google image). Is this a quality of the impact of reading the strings in Beacon? Their directness, the tight correlation between desire and means for getting it? It is fascinating to watch that correlation write itself in the form of short banal strings of words that skip grammar in favor of directness. Even the grammar of the strings mirrors the correlation: skip the words that don't help, that don't extend a referent toward the object of desire. "The" and "a" won't get you there, specificity and generality, the and a. Skip those. Adjectives help (big, gay, hot), nouns are the bedrock of any search (recipe, roses).

How does desire normally write itself? What idioms? How direct? What indirections and why those indirections? Self help books that encourage people to ask for what they want encourage people to make tighter the correlation between their desire and their language for getting it. Just ask for it. But first you have to know it. That's another feature of Beacon: every search string seems to be authored by someone who knows just what they want. Some are VERY specific. Others are more vague, as though they are looking around for their desire, where desire is an open space, where it could be many things. And if they don't appear to know what they want, isn't this an effect of being unskilled at the idiom? We might imagine that people are frustrated, knowing what they want, but not able to make the world return it to them. It's out there, why can't I find the words to bring it back. (This is a different sense of "it's out there" than J. Dean's, which is a treadmill goad to producing the false sense in people that they are participating in democracy, and that therefore democracy is working. Search engines formalize (make possible) the hope that, if only one can find the right words, just the right string of un-grammatical words, one can make a little moment in the world where the world returns what they wanted, however small. But here the form counts. Maybe getting a small thing contains a very small, static, formal version ofgetting a big thing. It takes the form of satisfaction, worlding oneself, but with less intensity. Although, is intensity everything here?