Seriality

Beacon's seriality is not the endlessness of Fried's modernism (an assembly line of object production) and not the endlessness of chronophobia (the fear of digital technologies replacing History with the repetitive time of one thing after another), but the endlessness of data-as-knowledge. It is the database replacing the need for theory (models, "provisional generalization"). Thus, my nagging sense that there is something sociological about Beacon's seriality without it ever quite being sociology. Something of a public about it, without the self-reflexivity or self-awareness of a public (it's not the mirror it seems; it offers the form of sociology, data points presented en masse, serially, but not the content). A broken calligram of a public. It is sociology without theory, without models, without representations. Just the data points. As such, Beacon necessitates some other theoretical configuration of publics than Warner's, Fraser's, or Berlant's: e.g. publics as data entities, without need of representation. They exist, for someone, as publics, but less for the people who comprise the public than for the people who collect the data given off by that public's actions, that is, the people who collectivize that action by compiling search data. This means that the broken calligram of the public that Beacon registers breaks at the point of its reflection, its representation. Habermas theorized an audience-oriented subjectivity constitutive of public actions. The broken calligram of Beacon's public does not sever this audience-orientation; it deflects it, steals its reflection, so that the part of a public that produces a representation of that public is available only for the people who collect and can get access to the data, and NOT for the people whose actions comprise that public.

Beacon, then, materializes both of these situations: the public as a serially arranged data set, and the stolen or deflected representation of that public.

Archaeology of Knowledge 1

Foucault's 'knowledge' is comprised of statements. Statement are enunciative events: they crop up in a system of discourses, between that which makes the statement possible (institutions, that time, that place, that subject or mode of subjectivity) and that which the statement makes possible. Thus, they are not entirely singular, like events, but also not entirely idealized (like natural laws or mathematical theorems). Discourse names the location (the field or system or network); archaeology names the process, the mode of analysis, by which statements are studied within discursive systems. The focus on discourse and archaeology is a move away from experience, away from transcendental laws or subjectivity, away from the solace of ouevres and authors and books as stable units of identity or experience or analysis; it identifies something that no one person could intend, nor experience as such, even though people experience elements of it. He wants to know how things got stabilized. Anything that is stabilized, like authorship, like the novel, like subjectivity, archaeology is the process of investigating the conditions under which that stabilization happened and under which it shifts and moves over time.

By knowledge, he means what it's possible to know at any one time, given the various interconnected discursive formations and discourses. He means what it's possible to think, and the conditions under which the possibilities for thought shift, slowly, in history, becoming history, laws, codes, theories, ideas.

He wants not to move away from the old comforts of history, the old pillars, but to look at how they got to be the way they got, among other things, incl: and all of the grain of history that lies between. Not micro-histories; more like macro-histories that have to be constructed from a foundation of micro-histories, the single statement, spidering out from a statement to what it implicates, what made it possible (sayable, writable), what it made possible.

So what does knowledge come to mean when referred to or through google? There's a way to make it sound Foucauldian: google and its index and its algorithm are the conditions of possibility for the searches for knowledge conducted by people through google. Like archaeology, google's knowledge base is not the product of a single subject or set of subjects and their intentions (the algorithm was constructed, but acts semi-autonomously, or at least does not remain the direct product of an engineer's intention). Nor is it something that can be experienced as such or as a whole. It's base unit seems to be the search query, including all of the resourcefulness that someone can muster in an extended search. People touch knowledge through their individual searches. They make contact with the database or index. The enunciative field might be something like all of the links and keywords that get a site the ranking it has in relation to any given query, along with all of the sites and sub-sites and links and ads that make up the tendrils of possibility once someone actually arrives at a url (the result of a search: a new location for oneself, for one's desires).

So, if I'm learning anything from Foucault's approach to studying knowledge, what am I learning? Foucauldian questions: What are the discursive formations of knowledge as it is configured by google? What had to happen for google to happen? What had to happen to the ways we understand and organize knowledge for google to be possible? Legible? For it to be considered useful? What are the discourses that prop up people's day to day use of it? What languages, idioms, conventions, laws, vernaculars does it bring into being?

SEARCHING and SCALES OF BEING

[having just read a little more about the technical side of search engines]

HowThingsWork claims that to search google is to only search half of the searchable web. There are many reasons why a particular search engine may fail to index some sites: they think they're spamming search engines, their spiders don't find it, or they do index it but it never shows up in a user search because they rank the page so low.

So it's interesting that beacon mainly uses dogpile. I think this is because they could get access to it, and it's hard to imagine that this has anything to do with the nature of the queries people type, but it does mean that the results of any particular query (notably outside the frame of beacon) are a smaller-than-50% portion of the web, as dogpile doesn't even rank in the top 5 of search engines in terms of the size of their database. The online version of Beacon does make a point of telling us that it's searching dogpile. I don't think the projected version they installed in NYC mentioned the source.

But inside or outside the frame of the work, just the idea that any given search engine only provides access to a portion of the web (and the WWW itself is only a portion of the Internet, while the internet is generally not searchable in the search engines that most people use, e.g. google, yahoo, ask) is useful. It always feels to me like I'm searching the entire web, that any shortfalls in the results of my queries are more about the fit between my query and the world than about any paucity in the world. But in fact, the vastness of the world opened onto by any given search engine is far smaller than I tend to imagine, although still vast. Does this matter? Do variations in numbers of this size matter? If so, to what? Or whom?

An idea which drives the thought of biopolitics is that power, knowledge and self-knowledge work different at large scales than they do at small. At a biopolitical scale (e.g. the population of single mothers), the knowledge is statistical, kept in databases, indexed...much like the information stored by search engines (accumulated by spiders). It is relevant and not relevant to any given person to whom it applies: they are described by it, they may choose to believe what it tells them about themselves, but the very fact of its statistical being means that there will be some excess, some ill-fit somewhere when experienced at the small scale of individuality. But to the person wanting the large scale view, wanting to experience personhood through the lens of the large scale biopolitical technology, the sense of relevant personhood (single mothers) not only perfectly fits the stats, it exemplifies them. This is the point, because you want to be able to do work with those large numbers, those averages: make distinctions, provide care to some and not to others, etc.

Beacon seems to work at a very small scale: one search at a time, one searcher at a time. The seriality reinforces the sense of individuality given. So does the idiosyncrasy of the searches themselves. Any laugh we might derive, shock, disbelief, etc., any emotional response we have to the voice or intent of a particular search is attributable to exactly one anonymous somebody out there. They are perfectly distinct, perfectly isolated, and this is more true the more idiosyncratic we find the query to be. It's like whatever being+1: plus one quality. Being defined by the single quality or small cluster of qualities named in that search, the one we see until another one fades into view.

But another perspective on seriality says that what gets reinforced by the series movement is not the individuality of any given query in the series (or the singularity of any given painting in Kawara's date paintings, say), but the collection, the population, the X being accumulated slowly over time. Beacon voices this perspective on its work by referring in the supporting documentation to its role as a sample of where "we" are now, or our collective activity. It wants to teach us something about "us." About the sort of collective activity we're about when we do searches. About "our" interests, desires, quirks, loves, confusions, ignorances.... The pace of movement in the series, 1 every 1.5 seconds (online, I think the projected version is a little slower) reinforces this collectivization: the way it accumulates into something like a sociology, reads like a ticker tape of ethnographic data.

But a resonance of the name, Beacon, calls to a third function of the series movement: a beacon stays steady, repeats, so that other changes can be noticed as events. In the case of a beacon on the shore, the beacon lights up steadily, a steady pulse, so ships can recognize the presence of land as a potential change to their path...and avoid it. Steer clear. In that sense, the pulses of Beacon, the individual queries passing by 1 by 1, are more alike than different. The point is that they pulse, one then another; this is the formal view of what Beacon presents that is like the action of a beacon. The action, change, variability, in this sense, lies in the encounter with Beacon (like a ship encounters the light of a lighthouse as a beacon). The encounter marks the potential change that has already crept up on one (following the lighthouse as an exemplar of beacons). Once you've encountered a beacon, something has already changed in your situation. The change is at hand, maybe an immanent danger, maybe just an immanent shift, change, perturbation. Beacon warns of other encounters, more dramatic ones. Beacons produce an encounter that is not dramatic so people can avoid the more dramatic, impactful ones. Here we seem again to be working at a small scale, because the kind of accumulation specific to the repetitious pulse of a beacon is never something that adds to anything: it simply continues, unchanged, never progressing beyond One. One, then one, then one....

So isn't that something that's important about each individual query, understood now for its idiosyncratic content (wish, desire, confusion...), the way that it is a pulse (never changing in order to mark changes elsewhere) and a near-singularity, a whatever being+1 and a piece of ethnographic data, important for itself but only insofar as it sits within a set. And what is THAT status, vis a vis subjectivity? Are those three states that we move between? Being a pulse in the social (voting, buying groceries, or anything branded...despite what the brands tell us about individuality), being whatever being+1 (that is, defined by a single quality, known and knowable only through that quality), and being biopolitical (a piece of data, important for the particular bit we add to the collection, but only insofar as we add up to something bigger, something that is knowable at another scale). Three scales of being, all of which seem strobically present in any online encounter, all of which are telegraphed by, and constitutive of, the strangeness of the queries we see flash by serially in Beacon. [in which case, what of the forced analogy between query or search string and subjectivity?]

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?