BLANKNESS (Search Engines and Monochromes)

[after talk with Darby, 6.25.08]

Beacon teases one with its unavailability. You can inhabit it, but have to co-exist with all those desires, all those search terms. You have to be willing to get crowded out. To inhabit a crowd. But a para-social one; just to the side of the social. What do we know when we see someone else's search term? Do we know what they want? Do we know what they know? Do we know what they expect? Certainly, expectation, desire and knowledge are thematized, that is, made available for us to inhabit, imaginatively (is there another way?).

The search engines that Beacon re-sites, re-configures, tantalize with their open field of possibilities. The whole world seems to be arrayed there, just on the other side of that square. Through the square, via the search string. One's imagination for searches, one's capacity to improvise a question in a special idiom, part regulated, part nonce, is the channel for getting somewhere. Given the vast possibilities, one feels responsible for the failure, or success, of a search. There is very little traction to believe that it is the search engine that has failed. Rather, one's imagination for how to access it failed. What else to think, when the database is so large? So the field of knowledge, of possible knowledge, is organized such that the individual has to become adequate to that world, not the other way around. A minimum, but significant, point of interest being that pressure is placed on the individual. It is not the state, or the search engine, that is responsible for the making available of knowledge, the creation and maintenance of libraries and etc.; it is the individual (now that search engine indices are so vast) who has to learn to improvise means of access (a neoliberal version of the knowledge regime? cf. Poovey). Search engines teases with its availability, and teases with its hermeticism. In order to improve their service, search engine engineers try to embed subtle and not-subtle pedagogical cues in the search engine interface to force people's search idiom to sync up with the was search indices are organized; or, to get their desires to be articulated in a form that can 'interface' with a search engine database (here, I might want to borrow a phrase from Stoller: "the re-education of desire"). In this way, search engine workers take it as their job to modify people's imaginations for search, the ways people go about search, the possibilities for inhabiting a search field. They do this in the interest of helping people get better search results. They also do it so that the ads they serve up are more relevant to the desires of the searcher. So there is a syncing of three languages here: 1. a searcher's language for conducting searches, 2. the language in which a search engine index is organized and by which it can therefore be accessed, and 3. the language by which ads form relationships with people's articulated and nascent desires. The search query is the nexus for those three language streams; a good search query is not only good for the searcher, it is good for the search engine because it is good for the companies who advertise with them, and for whom the "relevancy" of search results is the key to them driving revenue through those ads.

If this entails an education or re-education of desire, then it runs up against the lived experience of having one's imagination crowded out by the powerful, by more visible, louder discourses. Here, maybe a pedagogy of the oppressed becomes relevant. And the question of habitation and blank space becomes a question of political resources: who has that space, who creates it, who crowds it out of others, who makes it for themselves. Or, materialized another way: where are the resources for clearing blank space to think; where are the forms that cramp those spaces? And what role do search engines play in this process, esp. insofar as search engines stand more and more for knowledge itself, and therefore, for access to knowledge, tout court.

A monochrome painting teases with its availability. It seems open because free of figuration, free of precedent, free of history. Fried finds himself alone there, and crowded by objects. On the other hand, people have suffered under the openness of monochromes Feel it to be too open, too free of history and available figuration; too free of skill, the hand of an artist, footholds for a viewer. It too (like the search engine) seems to be a field of infinite possibility. What couldn't happen in the field of a monochrome? Does that feeling terrorize or scintillate?

WHO ARE WE WHEN WE ARE MARKETED TO?

And what kind of marketing happens on search engines? By Battelle's accounts, an increasingly fine-grained marketing, so that we're no longer hailed into demographic groups, but more like tiny individualized units, almost singularities.

BOLTANSKI AND CHIAPELLO, THE NEW SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

[having read to p. 86]

The "new spirit" of capitalism is the set of arguments made, at a given time (it's a periodizing concept), for the value of capitalism over and above the justification internal to it (i.e. its ontology): to invest capital in order to make more capital. Assumed is the fact that financial gain alone is not enough to motivate people to invest in companies as thoroughly as they need to invest to produce the labor that they company needs produced. But this is not just an ideological concept in the sense of a veil over the real. It describes the real, lived conditions of people's lives, both of the capitalists and the wage workers.

B and C are concerned with two eras and the changes btw them: the 60's and the 90's. The triangle of concepts their book is located within is: capitalism, spirit of capitalism, critique. Critique is internal to and an engine of the spirit of capitalism. It drives the move from one spirit to another. In that sense, capitalism always internalizes critique. The critique that drove the spirit of capitalism in the 60s was a critique of "familial capitalism," capitalism wherein promotions and value generally at companies was driven capriciously, nepotistically. As a effect of this critique, capitalism was re-organized around a more "accountable" set of goals and objectives, which could be known, and counted on. Companies thus came to look more transparent, internal value more fair. Business seemed more meritocratic, so managers [their main source of data is management lit in France] could invest more, personally, in the job.

In the 90s, the critique of hierarchy continued, now pursued all the way to the critique of large companies, bureaucracies and inflexibility. Touted now was the networked company, who focused on a core business and contracted the rest out. Who was organized around flexible teams and projects. In this system, control was internalized (self-control) and externalized (the client becomes the boss). The control of direct management was also replaced by the control of company "vision" and "core values," with which one is supposed to identify, and which thereby becomes an instrument of self-control. This is true at the level of factory workers, who (e.g. in Toyota, held up as a model) become responsible for day to day production demands, and the "health" of the line. On average, everyone needs more education and is said to be more autonomous.

When critics talk about capitalism as the enemy of, say, avant garde art, what part of capitalism do they mean? And is art world capitalism (galleries) organized like the capitalism operated and modeled by Toyota? What period of capitalism do they mean? Are they talking about the changes to capitalism or its constants (exploitation, capital re-investment, homogenization)?

If the problem that Beacon faces is incorporation by the institutions of capitalism, and the goal it seeks is critique of it, what part threatens to incorporate it? Or, in a rosier model, what part does it critique?

Rate of Change v. Direction of Change (Slowing v. Stopping)

Why should the ultimate victory of a trend be taken as proof of the ineffectiveness of the efforts to slow down its progress? And why should the purpose of these measures not be seen precisely in that which they achieved, i.e. in the slowing down of the rate of change? That which is ineffectual in stopping a line of development altogether is not, on that account, altogether ineffectual. The rate of change is often of no less importance than the direction of the change itself; but while the latter frequently does not depend upon our volition, it is the rate at which we allow change to take place which may well depend upon us [Polanyi, Karl: Origins of Our Time, p. 44-5].

Maybe it's...

Maybe the searching chapter, as its main point or as its supporting point, posits a form of critique that is neither institutional nor failed-institutional. Maybe it forces us, in reckoning with its placement w/r/t search engines and the processes put in place by searching, to establish its relation with capitalism, the art world, galleries, critique...differently. Some other place, some other relation.

In my earliest incarnation of the paper, I guess this other mode was what I called the "failed calligram," referring with that to its particular, strange mode of publicity.

Critique v. Complaint

What is the difference between "critique" in Boltanski's and Chiapello's terms (marks the difference between a desireable and an actual state of affairs, p. 27) and "complaint" in Berlant's?

WEB BEACONS

[web beacons, defn.: http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webbeacons/details.html]

Web beacons are small electronic files that, e.g., Yahoo! uses to produce quantitative data about site use, including accessing certain cookies stored on the user's computer in order to provide "personalized" experience searching (meaning, in practice, serve up ads that are more likely to be clicked on and to produce revenue for Yahoo and its advertisers).

This file can be embedded anywhere on a page: in a banner ad, an image, etc. Yahoo! also embeds beacons in its html email messages so they know which emails were opened and which were not.

So beacons area way for them to provide data for themselves and their partners about how effective advertising is on their site. They help them make sales pitches to potential, new advertisers, retain old clients, and track their own business internally. Beacons help Yahoo! make more money from ad revenue, and drive ad revenue (from the other direction) by improving the "relevancy" of their search engine.

The goal of "personalization" that beacons serve runs into the issue of personhood that I wrote about yesterday: what kind of encounter is it to encounter a version of oneself given back via "personalized" features of a search engine, where those features are always advertisements that try to predict, based on your searches, what you might like to buy, what you might need, what you might aspire to own and wear and incorporate into your person. So in the technical definition of a web beacon, beacons are a technology that produces an encounter with oneself, where that encounter has a particular, split quality: 1. one encounters the results of one's search, which involves a complicated interaction with results that are often not the results one wanted, and that then demands successive retoolings in order to have the search results more accurately and helpfully mirror the desire one brought into the search; 2. and one encounters the advertisements served up as a result of one's search, which, on google, for instance, are the result of a real-time auction in which advertisers bid to be the one whose ad shows up in a search for any given word, and where the searcher, as a result, has to live with the funny mirror of the version of oneself that gets returned when one's search (desire, wish, curiosity, question) causes advertisements and the companies behind them to make educated guesses about who that person IS or WANTS TO BE based on the way that search term aggregates the searcher with other searchers who searched the same term and subsequently purchased a particular item. One finds oneself as a reflection assembled from bits of knowledge that line up, that mirror, only as well as the search term bids them to. And one finds oneself as a reflection of a statistical aggregate, a public whose coherence lies in the data that a company can collect about (what Battelle calls) intention, how the intention to find a certain piece of information correlates with the intention to buy certain products.

Note: the coherence of biopolitical populations is in the physiognomic and sociological traits that form the basis for ascribed identity AND in the goal of a biopolitical power to organize those populations in a particular way, allotting shares of the common (Ranciere), allotting state resources, marking boundaries and territorial lines in ways that benefit some and harm others (managing life). [check this: how does a biopoliticized population cohere? through what means? by what principles of unity?]

Ads on search engines manage life in a different way, with different goals, but no less intensely. Maybe "encounter" names some aspect of this other way of managing life, thus, a concept that is collaborative with "biopolitics," but not the same. Google et al manage life in the way advertising and marketing and capitalism in general have always tried to manage life [cf. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism], with this enormous shift: it does its work by attaching itself to the process of searching, wanting, finding out, desiring, seeking, being curious, being ignorant, wanting to know, desiring contact...etc.

Personhood and Search Engines

What do search engines know about us? http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2189531

Inside the question of what search engines know about you after you've used them is a question of subjecthood: what kind of person we are and become through our use of search engines. If google records a history of my searches, and uses these to serve certain ads up for me...or even just notices what I'm searching for right now and uses these to simultaneously serve up "relevant" ads, what kind of encounter does a search engine state with oneself or with personhood itself? Does it force people to consider who they are as an aggregate of what they look for online? Or what they go to the internet for? Of what they don't know? Of what they desire? Of what they fetishize? Of what they worry about? Of what they check obsessively? Of what they write about (e.g. uses google as a spellchecker)? Is looking at the ads in AdSense like looking at our own reflection, but as reflected by a mirror of capitalism, in this case, the part of capitalism that strives to make money off of how people search? The capitalization of search, curiosity, desire, unknowing itself?

[note: the kind of unknowing that proceeds and sometimes persists through and sometimes follows using a search engine makes interesting reference to Sedgwick's "privilege of unknowing." Here, the privilege seems to be not heteronormative, exactly, but somewhere in the vicinity of the advertisers who make money off the back of our searches].

Beacon, Institutional Critique, Capitalist Monstrosity

[having read laterally from Battelle, into writing on search engines, privacy, the government's attempts to subpeona data, how to count comprehensiveness among search engines...then also read Shaviro's post on "Monstrous Flesh"...]

Shaviro writes about Hardt and Negri's attempts to reverse Marxist metaphors of monstrosity vis. capital. This is, ultimately, the argument about capitalism v. the powers that try to resist it, e.g. Boltanski and Chiapello's thesis on the new spirit of capitalism or Buchloh on institutional critique or Adorno on The Culture Industry, although Adorno is different for his lack of a dialectical movement here; i.e. he's FAR more pessimistic about resistance, although someone optimistic about avant garde art). Shaviro writes that H&N appropriate for the multitude the characteristics of creativity and parasitism that Marx attributes to capital. Marx says that capital always comes after, appropriates the creativity of the masses, makes it its own, privatizes what is public...etc.; H&N say that it's actually the multitude who are monstrous in this way, monstrously creative, lateral, productive. Indeed, capital is ONLY a parasite. Shaviro counters that capital doesn't just come after and take what it finds; it spurs production. So, in an argument about the expanded purview of capitalism's thefts, they not only appropriate affective labor + physical labor, they incite it, they produce the conditions under which it can happen (e.g. Google's famously good labor conditions). They also produce the conditions under which people come to love and identify with their work, the very labor that Marxism says that capital always appropriates and steals the value of.

The question of institutional critique is a version of this story (e.g. in Buchloh, the storms works its way through H&A's culture industry argument, where capital in the form of the CI appropriates culture by gaming the systems that produce it, which is more like Shaviro's story than H&N's). Art, in this system, either reflects on those dilemma, or is trapped by them. Broodthaers seems to be the artist who can reflect on anything, who is trapped by nothing; and it's the voracious meta-tactics of his art that lets him float above anything, provide a critique of anything (or let a critic feel as though they themselves can provide a critique of anything in Broodthaer's aesthetic idiom).

Beacon's relationship to the search engines it appropriates can be cast in the same conceptual terms, and within the same conceptual relationships: it either exceeds and reflects on the way that, e.g., search engines monetize desire, wishing, curiosity, knowledge, or Beacon can be attributed with the voracious critical intelligence and prescience that lets us believe that it sees, reflects on, predicts, visualizes, spectacularizes all of these problems. Something in its form predicts the cooptations of capital, or lets us believe that we are witnessing them being reflected up and predicted.

So, in this view, there would be two versions of the story:

1. Beacon helps us to think about the problem of "relevancy" in search by giving us the search terms divorced from their answers, and from their identifying data. We can neither get back to the searcher, nor get forward to the results of their search. We see the search engine stripped of its source of capital (advertising represents 99% of Google's revenue). We see the search stripped of the identity markers that makes that searcher a source of potential revenue for the companies who buy rights to certain search terms. Beacon shows us a non-monetized identity, organs without a body (Shaviro explains the BwO as D&G's way of describing how capitalism separates people/bodies from what they can do, as a way of monetizing those actions, appropriating them), just what bodies can do, not the discourses under which they become sources of value. ... Etc. Or this could go less in the direction of performative critique and more toward revelation critique: it lays bare the processes by which...

2. Beacon is trapped by the very processes it would or should set out to critique. By failing to show the ads, the culture of advertising, the various ways in which knowledge itself (the common in H&N's and Marx's terms) becomes capitalized through search engines, Beacon succumbs to the illusion that search engines need to foster in order to be trustworthy, in order that people trust them with their "personal" data, and in order that people trust them to provide knowledge, objective, trustworthy facts.

These two options only? The tradition of avant garde critique seems to dictate yes (e.g. R. Krauss would say, in the mode of post-medium argumentation, that we cannot critique search engines unless they are VERY new [they are not] or nearly obsolete [they are not]).

It seems obvious that some version of the story whereby search engines are capitalizing knowledge itself, searching itself, curiosity itself, the desire to know, to find out (cf. J. Dean) is true and operative and worth critiquing. It also seems clear that there are sources of awareness about this process: not just art like Beacon, but even Google's own Zeitgeist and dogpile's own Trends monitor and more explicitly critical sources like SearchengineWatch, which wield knowledge in order to disabuse us of any thought that search engines are objective or innocent. Maybe a question that starts to break the impasse of institutional critique is: given a capitalist project in motion, and given some sources of critical thought about that process, what is the role of an artwork like Beacon? What does Beacon do that other things don't do? Or, to put it in terms of value that don't come directly from capitalist discourses of originality and unique value: what does Beacon contribute to a collaborative awareness of the capitalist process in question?

Another tack: does it help to identify the problem as broadly capitalist and the solution as broadly critical? As we know, critique itself is not not-capitalist; it's not even anti-capitalist at all times. Criticism runs on, is produced in the context of, if not produced by, the same systems of values that drive capitalism writ large: originality, incisiveness, communicability, some sense of hard or cutting edge.... The point of noting this wouldn't be to say that critique itself is a fool's game, is itself appropriated. It would be to say that noticing its value should not hinge on bracketing capital and capitalism. This is where work like Jose Munoz's on coca-cola, warhol and O'hara is useful and interesting: not for its more celebratory rhetoric, but for the project it models whereby some sort of response to capitalism and capitalist processes can be produced without bracketing the awareness of capitalism as a source of motivation, energy, productivity, in the process of critically reflecting on capitalist processes. What can be done with capitalism, not just against it.

This is part of the problem of institutional critique: it has to see its most effective models as being not-capitalist, if only in the moment the critique is working most effectively, is being written or read. I can't tell is Shaviro's work is moving in this direction, or moving towards a soberting, more depressive view of our contemporary affairs.

Getting from Beacon to What Will Happen Next

[in haste...]

-description of Beacon
-complexity of it
-draw in as much as I can draw in
-then ask the art history question of institutional critique: is it aware of its implication in the industry of search or just implicated?
-then ask: is this the only question art history can ask?
-what other questions are there?
-what other question does Beacon invite?
-how to disaggregate the problem, the parts of the problem that are fused and unquestioned (e.g. capitalism, industry, all such monoliths of capital)

What Will Happen Next (CAW 6.9.08)

[In attendance: Manol G, Anna L, Christa R, E. Capper, Christina ? (visiting DOVA scholar), Stephanie B, Lisa Z, Daniel (MAPH), Darby E, Matthew JJ, Ian B]

(Christa) What about the avant garde? Why don't you mention them? Do they need to be mentioned? Maybe it's more exciting to leave that formulation out of it?

This strikes me as useful because it's so closely related to what I had in mind by defining the field of my project, or the object of my attack, as "politicizing art history." That framing and the AG are not synonymous, but they are clearly related, depending on how specifically one defines the AG (on the most general end, it could be something like "politicizing art;" on the other, closer to P. Burger, it could be art that takes the goal of its politics to be the interruption of the autonomy of art).

I'm not sure its an egregious omission (I was already self-conscious about focusing too much on Buchloh; there is some usefulness to ignoring their work, if the goal is to make some space outside of or around it). But conversations around the AG has monopolized the politic conversation around art, to the extent that Ranciere develops an elaborate theory whose point is to overturn that story of modernism, to set the clock back further into the 19th c, to prioritize realism, to evacuate the false efficacy of the distinction between art and life. At the very least, re-reading in this area is going to be essential for the next draft (H. Foster, more Buchloh, A. Fraser, P. Burger; see also Crimp's refusal to deal with the AG).

In that spirit, I re-read H. Foster's "Whose afraid of the neo-avant garde?" this morning. It's an attempt to recuperate P. Burger's theory of the AG from its simplistic, and disastrous temporality. Burger defines the AG by its efforts to resist the assumed autonomy of art. In that, the project was always going to fail, but it was a heroic failure. Foster's concern is with his dismissal of the neo-AG (c. 1970) as a dismal repetition of the AG, a failed attempt to repeat the gestures of the original AG. Farce following tragedy. Foster wants to clear space for a better, more hopeful model of repetition, and a model of critique that can understand a return as something more than a failed recuperation attempt. Where he arrives is a traumatic model of history, where the "historical AG" (as he calls it) produces a trauma in the Real that subsequent artists and AGs are forced to work through again, to expose as traumatic or repair. So the temporality in his terms is a return that happens from the future; the neo-AG returns to work through the historical AG, to push it further or make it right or just reveal its traumatic structure.

The temporality Foster takes issue with is one that sees the present as a failed version of the past. He wants a temporality that allows for a more efficacious present, one that has the power to deal with the past, to work it through, improve on it, not repeat it.

This is not what I call a retrospective temporality, which returns to the past in order to freeze it in place, to "copyright" it, mark it as failed, reveal the ongoing victory of the Culture Industry. Although Foster employs this temporality when he makes a distinction btw an early and a late neo-AG, the early (e.g. Rauchenberg) being a failure and the late (Buren and of course Broodthaers) being a successful institutional critique. Why, if his thought is to empower a temporality of return, to let the present re-work the past for its own ends, bother relegating a moment in the past to failure? Mightn't that moment simply contain a trauma that Foster himself can't work through yet? By what standard does it fail? I think another problem here is an incompatibility between Foster's model of critique and the mode of temporality he tries to elaborate here. Critique for him still contains the possibility of total failure, where failure is something like Buchloh's model: a work that, in its myopia, its narcissism, its uncritical love of culture or money or industry or institution or pop anything, makes things worse, which usually amounts to failing to see the conditions of its own capitalist enmeshment. Thus, the work that Foster calls failed doesn't fail formally, it fails because it fails to successfully critique the institutions of art. Maybe the problem, then, is not critique itself, and certainly not negativity itself (this has been hanging me up for a long time), but the concept of failure. Maybe Foster and Buchloh's conception of failure is too totalizing, too generalizing, and too beholden to a particular model of the Culture Industry as THE only worthwhile object of aesthetic critique. This would be related to a problem of restricted, restrictive temporality (failure is related to a work failing to achieve what the future defines as the most incisive AG tactic of attacking the CI and the institutions of art; e.g. Rauchenberg fails according to standards set by Buren and Broodthaers; this happens in Buchloh as well), but not reducible to it entirely.


(Matthew and Darby) Your discussion of Buchloh seems right on, but your discussion of On Kawara seems not to have taken on the implications of your own argument, i.e. seems not to be benefiting from the more agile structure of temporality you advocate. Matthew went on to say that maybe the problem is that I just don't have the vocabulary to apply my argument to artworks yet, and maybe the problem is that the artworks I choose are too canonical. Darby differs here slightly in that he wouldn't reject the canonical out of hand, but does advocate a more careful working through of Kawara's formal aesthetic tactics. A more specific, careful address to the art. They both agreed that my space-clearing gesture would be stronger if I spent some time with the conventional reception of artists like Kawara and Darboven, discuss how their work has become reducible to the discourses about them (Matthew says "absolutely equivalent"), and as such, their work has become indissociable from a broader argument about historical modernism.

(Darby) In discussing On Kawara, think about the role of leisure vis. work (reading the newspaper); also think about the newspaper in its role as evidence (this painting actually did happen here; even sometimes when it did not; e.g. he often started a painting in one city, but finished it in another).
(Emily) Also might think about the different fonts he uses.

(Lisa and Christa) What is my own privilege in looking at On Kawara? Does my reading of temporality rely on a certain citing that is extra-insitutional, e.g. knowing the he often doesn't finish a painting in a day? And if so, what does this say about the "ordinary" experience of seeing an On Kawara?

(General) There was still some question about whether or not I had stated my goals clearly enough, forcefully enough, especially vis. copyright law. There seemed to be some consensus that I still hadn't come right out and said that Buchloh seems to work the same way as copyright law does.

I don't know what that means, given that I DO come right out and say that.

Cracking Up (Bollas)

Selfhood is known by a rhythm. Intensity then dissemination. Thought, feeling, event, then cracking up. The cracking up is a process of re-appropriation. This is our relationship to our own history: and when it's not, we inherit our own history as a traumatic loss and nothing else. To crack up our own history is to creative transform it, make it available for new uses, new pleasures and laughs. Cracking up can mean laughter, where laughter is the effect of a process which re-appropriates old, traumatic, disturbing material and represents it for experience, maybe no less damaging, but accompanied in any case by laughter which is a kind of pleasure, albeit sometimes a sick one.

Cracking up can be a relief or the start of something new, a new relationship to oneself, one's past, one's world. A momentary diversion or a break. when situated in this process of self-experience, the debate over the political uses of laughter btw Benjamin and Adorno is defused: not a polarity but a spectrum between, a distance between two poles in a range of self-experience, ways of being with oneself.

This imagination of self-experience also moves my sense of encounter closer to Bersani's Intimacies, where the sense of experience is closed intertwined with the role the other (person, object, image) plays in cracking oneself up: dissemination is a kind of impersonal intimacy. It is impersonal in Bersani's sense because in it, the process, I gets confused with the forces that crack up the I, the You or the It. Someone else's words or unconscious idiom interrupts us, gets in the way of where we were going, even though we didn't know we were going anywhere until we got waylaid. In persona intimacy, one would see this as an interruption; in impersonal intimacy, one would be encouraged to see it as an opportunity, a letting go, a way to shatter and take pleasure in the shattering, or learn from it anyway.

Silence (Cracking Up and Intimacies)

Bollas' Cracking Up and Bersani/Phillip's Intimacies both take the psychoanalytic situation as a model for intimacies in the broader social field.

The exemplary relation for B is linked through the way B theories the availability of selves to the world, to sensing, to reaction and feedback. The self cannot be represented fully, it can only be sensed, as a texture. We register our own selves and other selves affectively. B calls the object of this sensing a "psychic texture." He says that it occurs through the unconscious communication of one self with another, pointing to the conversation that happens underneath or to the side of every communication. This is the case in the analytic situation, which builds explicitly on this formal structure, but is also the case in the world at large, although in any given social scene, there might be deflections (are almost guaranteed to be deflections) from the awareness of this sub-conversation, this intimacy below intimacy. B calls this sub-intimacy a formal one: each self is aesthetic in that it gets registered as an affective shape, converted into feelings (some people make us bristle; others make us fall in love).

B/P are more deliberate in their linking of the analytic scene to the world: it happens because the analytic scene is a model for "impersonal intimacies," or "impersonal narcissism." The system of transference and counter-transference, when elevated to the kind of equality that Phillips wants, creates a place where two people can learn to love each other, create a future, without being attached to the love, the future, or each other via a project of defining the self. Rather, the process disseminates the self, scatters it in a relation where self and other become indistinguishable in a love that shatters. Previously, for Bersani, sex and sexuality were the greatest chances for people to shatter their attachment to selfhood (as he calls it in Intimacies).

In both books, silence plays a central role, is a key to the possibility of pleasure and the pleasureable experience of the self. For B, this is explicit: he talks about the "generative blankness," related to the Imaginary, that people need to have access through throughout their lives in order to have and project desires onto, to screen desires [see Cavell on screens]. He also talks about the silence that analysis provides for the generation of "self states," a possibility for sensing the self, for sensing the self's potentials. For asking the question "what is my self?" For B/P, the generative presence of silence is implicit in their hopes for analysis (it is part of the formal structure of analysis, even in analysis which gets re-shaped around a new equality, I presume), but also seems to be a kind of formal effect of a love which does not take the consolidation of self to be a given: in a sense, the self goes quiet in its shattering [interesting implication of Bersani's choice of vocabulary here: "shattering" implies a dramatic sound. One could from here either think about the moment just after shattering, where all goes quiet, or where the shattering rings in one's ears; or, re-think his choice of word: maybe the process he describes, a love that loses the self, that disperses selfhood, is a quiet process, or requires quiet anyway].

The possibility here is to think about the role that silence plays in encounters, in the projections that get screened within and onto any communication, for the workings of intimacy. In the kinds of intimacy I'm studying, mediated via the Internet, the role of silence seems obvious (albeit underexplored). So many online interactions are done in silence, without the noise of another person's body, the noise of another person's full or familiar presence, without the noise of a scene (although we create our own scenes for online interactions). If we pen a flame, we do it in the relative silence of our own home. Or anyway, even if we play the music loudly, sit in an internet cafe, or wherever, we are not proximate to the object of our communication in the same way. The internet screens it [like Cavell's movie screen, which institutes a kind of silencing of the world, screens the world, so that we are not present to it, while it is present to us]. The form produces a silence into which the communication can unfold like the form of the analytic encounter produces a form into which its communication can unfold. This would be a characteristic of the encounter: a relative level of silence or noise, related to a process of screening the world.

B would also seem to suggest that we could link the silence/noise of any encounter not to the presence/absense of the object of the encounter, the encountered, but to a formal/affective layer of every encounter: the communication of one self with another that propagates via the unconscious. In the first model, each encounter has a relative level of noise/silence that affects how one maps themselves onto the potential of a situation. In the second, every encounter has a silent level, or a characteristic noise pattern of layering--not exactly manifest/latent or conscious/unconscious, but more affective/rational (if we don't get too carried away with thinking the rational is super-organized and systematic).

Maybe an impersonal narcissism is a more silent relation to self: one where the self isn't amplified via the feedback loop of mistaking input for output, but successively quieted as in the echo, dispersal and silencing of a sound in a room where there is no recording device [imagine I Am Sitting in a Room without the recording device, without the microphone], where the sound reverberates, but where the people there aren't wedded to capturing it [I link recording here to a project of consolidating and elaborating the self, a personal narcissism, so I analogize the self to sound], but instead spend their energies listening.