Searching | Thinking

What do people search for?

Love
Jobs
Answers
the Truth
Signs of extraterrestrial life
Recipes
Cars
The other sock
Sex
Good sex
The name of songs
Lyrics of songs
A musician's name
The year that X happened
Inner peace
The holy grail
Lost civilizations
Rare animals (giant squid)
The right address
The perfect X
A good doctor
The cause of their pain
Their "real" parents
Their ancestors (race, ethnicity)
A better mortgage


Maybe searching is the search for relief from a want. What if wishes are burdens. Small burdens. The feeling of not being able to recall a name that you know you once knew: that's a small or large burden. It's a burden on consciousness because it's hard to think about anything else. It makes us obsessive. In those situations, search engines are a relief from that spike of desire: which is a desire to know, which is a desire to stop wanting to know. Search engines staunch a wanting, where there is little or no pleasure in the wanting.

This raises the broader question of the relation between pleasure and searching, pleasure and not knowing, pleasure and wanting to know, pleasure and wishing, pleasure and desire. Then: how much is the desire to know (or the desire to stop wanting to know) akin to desire as it has been theorized psychoanalytically? J. Dean talks about the will to know, but I'm not sure she's talking about the desire to know. The wanting subject in her account is pretty simple: they want information, they search for it. Those are the only activities she cares about, because they're what allow her to conclude that that activity feels like working democracy. But there must be a spectrum of affect related to the desire to know, and a set of activities tailored to the task of knowing, finding out: e.g. sustaining the desire to know, stoking the confusion, exploring the confusion (how much don't I/we know about this topic?), going to a favorite reference, the set of creative second-efforts when the first fails, the people we call on to know stuff we don't know, the people who know the reference sources we don't know (the people are the meta-meta-resources, but we're after the meta-resources).

Heidegger's concern in the world picture essay was that a particular mode of knowing (could we say searching here?) was dominating and so limiting what it is possible to think. Searching had become, in the era of imaging technologies, a limit to thought. So the theory here is that our resources for searching are a condition of possibility (and to Heidegger, the key one) for thought itself, for thinking itself. When our resources for searching get poorer, our capacity to think gets poorer. Is the opposite true? When our resources for searching expand, does our capacity for thought expand?

I doubt anyone evaluating search engines would say so. They make a distinction between information or data and thought itself. We might need information in order to think (copyright believes this, or used to), but our capacity for thought comes from somewhere else. This is like the Reynoldsian aesthetic relationship between mechanical skill and artistic genius. Mechanical skill is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Between the two, something magical has to happen.

So does Heidegger disagree with this? Does he believe that thought is a question of having/being able to get the right information? So that if our search engines (theories, concepts) are poor, we only have access to a limited range of information, and our capacity for thought suffers. Maybe. It will depend on how he defines world pictures: i.e. how closely they're related to the tools the produce them, how much room for creative thought he thinks there is between the tools that make world pictures (search engines) and the pictures themselves, and then, between that relationship and our capacity for thought.

Are concepts search engines of another sort? (e.g. as Deleuze defines them?)
Theories? (as Spivak defines them)

What about disciplinary methods? The tools that a discipline invents to learn the kinds of things about itself and the world that it studies that it knows how to respect: these are search engines. They provide a window, a frame, through which people (who know how to use it) can search for the right kind of information.

What limits a search engine?
What limits a theory, concept, method?
How adaptable is the tool? How adaptable is a search engine? One only has the window to work with, unless you're a designer of search engine software. Arguably, theorists are writers of concepts, although in practice it doesn't always work this way (people apply rather than adapt). But not all users of search engines are writers of the engine itself: one has at one's disposal the semantics of forming a search. And there are rules for this, and I suppose those rules can be bent or broken or adapted, but I wonder about the range of adaptation (this is a technical question). Is it possible to form search strings that work around the programmed features of a search engine? To fiddle with the semantics of search strings in a way that will work (i.e. bring back the info one wants)?

So here a technical question about search engines (their adaptability) runs closely parallel to a question about the adaptability of disciplines (their concepts, their methods). To what extent is a discipline a program, like a software is a program? What are the features of a discipline that take the writing of that discipline (and its tools) out of the hands of the people who work in it (e.g. tenure pressure, conference structure, peer review...as potentially limiting standards; also gender and race and sexuality and any form of marginalization, tokenization).

Thinking about A. Galloway, how does protocol determine search engines? What is their protocological face? And then can his concept of protocol be adapted to think about rubrics of thoughts, analytics, disciplinary tools? I.e. as a form of power that courses through disciplines, determining their outcomes (Heidegger), influencing what it's possible to think and do within them?

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A search engine is a mode of thinking, and therefore, an envelope for thinking. One has to produce thought to form a search string (to try to connect one's wish with what the network contains); but one also takes the results as an input for thought, both toward the production of better search strings in the distant or near future, but also toward the pursuit of whatever task is connected or might be connected to the reason one was searching in the first place.