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?