[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.
Showing posts with label biopolitics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biopolitics. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Friday, May 2, 2008
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?]
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?]
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Laughter (after talking with Stephanie B.)
Why start with laughter and not with comedy, or humor, as genres which produce laughter?
Laughter is a bodily response.
It is public (even if someone is alone, it sounds it registers somewhere, maybe imperceptibly, in the social).
Laughter can be ambivalent, maybe always is. It has many motivations, and a range of effects. There is sick laughter, laughter that makes you sick. And laughter that keeps us from being sick, laughter as a defense or a deflection. There is joyful involuntary laughter. Lots of laughter is involuntary, it starts in the body and emerges before editing can stop it (sometimes). There is laughter as avoidance (not involuntary). We laugh because we are uncomfortable. This is a tic, another kind of body-behavior.
Because laughter is a comment, it can be political; it is maybe always political, if we dilate the meaning of political to include critical interactions with others.
Laughter is a comment, a mode of critique, because it reacts to a provocation. The reaction it registers expresses identification or dis-, anger or lightness, compliance or resistance (one can not laugh at a joke, even a funny one). You can hurt someone's feelings with a laugh, or with the withholding of a laugh. Laughter is also public, which means that it is a reverberation through a situation—it can't not be a comment. it is a Lyotardian phrase. It can be more or less legible (e.g. one can laugh and someone in the room might not know what the laughter is about). It bounces off others, at least their hearing. When it does, it changes the sense of the scene, the feel and texture of that place. It makes it a different place. This is about laughter's liveness. Which means that it also bounces off people's hearts, their own laughter and politics. Laughter alone can start a room laughing (there is a formalism of laughter; e.g. the sound of it, the bounce, the movement of the stomach (up and down), how silly it sounds when repeated, when divorced from its provocation).
I don't want to deal with a genre; I want to deal with an encounter. Laughter is an encounter. A response to one and it forces one, another one, or amplifies the same.
I don't want to deal with a structure of intention, where the analytic categories of encounter that fall out involve getting it or not, liking it or not, seeing it or not.... I want to deal with structures of impact. They don't need to be dramatic; laughter isn't always dramatic. Laughter can cut drama, de-fuse tension. Laughter isn't dramatic because its comment, its effects, it provocations don't always last. The sound of laughter fades (but it is awkward to stop laughing...why? Does it want to have a history? Does it want to proceed into something cognate, something equally or more intense? Does laughter want to produce more laughter, is that our inclination? Is it awkward to acknowledge in public that laughter dies, that it yields to more bored locutions? Is the cessation of laughter an acknowledgement that intensities require collaborative work to get to them, requires bodies working together to produce the intensity of a scene that escalates to laughter? To stop means that participants have to start again, and that it takes time and work to get there. We might not get there. Laughter is confirmation that the situation is as fun as people wanted it to be; laughter is confirmation of the success of some social situations. It's working. People don't want to stop laughing. But laughter is also tiring; faces get tired. But something about the affect of amusement, or mirth, gets taxed, or is taxing of something else.).
Structure of impact, or structures of encounter. Something happens, then adjustments. People laugh with you or do not. They might ask what you're laughing at, wanting to participate. They may ask what you're laughing at, not wanting to participate but to kill the laughter at the root. Laughter mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. It registers the presence of something you know with some detourning of that something (Bergson says this, I think; maybe Baudelaire too; satire presupposes repetition/familiarity; superiority suggests the process of making something familiar so as to dominate it). Laughter is the adjustment, the process of adjusting, to the unfamiliarity aspect of something that had been familiar.
Laughter is an adjustment. This is also why it is critical and/or a comment. This is also why it's political.
Adjustments can be like coping, but coping might involve getting numb to a bad situation, or making gestures toward moving something, changing something. A situation can be adjusted or one can adjust oneself. Laughter might lead in either direction. Adorno's fear is that, in the culture industry, where laughter itself is coded for, marketed for, studied, it can only lead to adjustment as numbing.
If an adjustment is something that can operate on the self or operate on the social, then it will be responsive to historical shifts in the operations of power on the self. The disciplinary self makes adjustments by looking inward, by constructing a sense of self that can be adjusted, by accepting responsibility for the impacts of the social on the self, by accepting that the only thing that can really be changed with any sort of reliability is the self. The biopolitical self...it's unclear actually. How much does one experience biopolitical being? Or is it not a structure of experience? If one did experience it, incorporate it, where would adjustments be made? it's not like people don't believe in self-help anymore; it's that governmentality has shifted its ways of conceptualizing people, selfhood-as-population-life. ???
An adjustment: this is the sense in which FGT's spills might register laughter as a mode of critical response to minimalist sculpture. It adjusts that sculpture's relation to a situation, to the movement of bodies, to a space/place, to the nonplace of galleries, to consumption, to sexuality (sucking), to participation. FGT's spills laugh at Carl Andre, at Serra. Meaning not that they mock them, necessarily. Rather, they adjust them and adjust to them. At their most grandiose, they might also help them adjust to a new political situation: not '68 but AIDS. Laughter then would be a specific affective modality of appropriation. It would also have a relation to re-enactment.
Laughter is a bodily response.
It is public (even if someone is alone, it sounds it registers somewhere, maybe imperceptibly, in the social).
Laughter can be ambivalent, maybe always is. It has many motivations, and a range of effects. There is sick laughter, laughter that makes you sick. And laughter that keeps us from being sick, laughter as a defense or a deflection. There is joyful involuntary laughter. Lots of laughter is involuntary, it starts in the body and emerges before editing can stop it (sometimes). There is laughter as avoidance (not involuntary). We laugh because we are uncomfortable. This is a tic, another kind of body-behavior.
Because laughter is a comment, it can be political; it is maybe always political, if we dilate the meaning of political to include critical interactions with others.
Laughter is a comment, a mode of critique, because it reacts to a provocation. The reaction it registers expresses identification or dis-, anger or lightness, compliance or resistance (one can not laugh at a joke, even a funny one). You can hurt someone's feelings with a laugh, or with the withholding of a laugh. Laughter is also public, which means that it is a reverberation through a situation—it can't not be a comment. it is a Lyotardian phrase. It can be more or less legible (e.g. one can laugh and someone in the room might not know what the laughter is about). It bounces off others, at least their hearing. When it does, it changes the sense of the scene, the feel and texture of that place. It makes it a different place. This is about laughter's liveness. Which means that it also bounces off people's hearts, their own laughter and politics. Laughter alone can start a room laughing (there is a formalism of laughter; e.g. the sound of it, the bounce, the movement of the stomach (up and down), how silly it sounds when repeated, when divorced from its provocation).
I don't want to deal with a genre; I want to deal with an encounter. Laughter is an encounter. A response to one and it forces one, another one, or amplifies the same.
I don't want to deal with a structure of intention, where the analytic categories of encounter that fall out involve getting it or not, liking it or not, seeing it or not.... I want to deal with structures of impact. They don't need to be dramatic; laughter isn't always dramatic. Laughter can cut drama, de-fuse tension. Laughter isn't dramatic because its comment, its effects, it provocations don't always last. The sound of laughter fades (but it is awkward to stop laughing...why? Does it want to have a history? Does it want to proceed into something cognate, something equally or more intense? Does laughter want to produce more laughter, is that our inclination? Is it awkward to acknowledge in public that laughter dies, that it yields to more bored locutions? Is the cessation of laughter an acknowledgement that intensities require collaborative work to get to them, requires bodies working together to produce the intensity of a scene that escalates to laughter? To stop means that participants have to start again, and that it takes time and work to get there. We might not get there. Laughter is confirmation that the situation is as fun as people wanted it to be; laughter is confirmation of the success of some social situations. It's working. People don't want to stop laughing. But laughter is also tiring; faces get tired. But something about the affect of amusement, or mirth, gets taxed, or is taxing of something else.).
Structure of impact, or structures of encounter. Something happens, then adjustments. People laugh with you or do not. They might ask what you're laughing at, wanting to participate. They may ask what you're laughing at, not wanting to participate but to kill the laughter at the root. Laughter mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. It registers the presence of something you know with some detourning of that something (Bergson says this, I think; maybe Baudelaire too; satire presupposes repetition/familiarity; superiority suggests the process of making something familiar so as to dominate it). Laughter is the adjustment, the process of adjusting, to the unfamiliarity aspect of something that had been familiar.
Laughter is an adjustment. This is also why it is critical and/or a comment. This is also why it's political.
Adjustments can be like coping, but coping might involve getting numb to a bad situation, or making gestures toward moving something, changing something. A situation can be adjusted or one can adjust oneself. Laughter might lead in either direction. Adorno's fear is that, in the culture industry, where laughter itself is coded for, marketed for, studied, it can only lead to adjustment as numbing.
If an adjustment is something that can operate on the self or operate on the social, then it will be responsive to historical shifts in the operations of power on the self. The disciplinary self makes adjustments by looking inward, by constructing a sense of self that can be adjusted, by accepting responsibility for the impacts of the social on the self, by accepting that the only thing that can really be changed with any sort of reliability is the self. The biopolitical self...it's unclear actually. How much does one experience biopolitical being? Or is it not a structure of experience? If one did experience it, incorporate it, where would adjustments be made? it's not like people don't believe in self-help anymore; it's that governmentality has shifted its ways of conceptualizing people, selfhood-as-population-life. ???
An adjustment: this is the sense in which FGT's spills might register laughter as a mode of critical response to minimalist sculpture. It adjusts that sculpture's relation to a situation, to the movement of bodies, to a space/place, to the nonplace of galleries, to consumption, to sexuality (sucking), to participation. FGT's spills laugh at Carl Andre, at Serra. Meaning not that they mock them, necessarily. Rather, they adjust them and adjust to them. At their most grandiose, they might also help them adjust to a new political situation: not '68 but AIDS. Laughter then would be a specific affective modality of appropriation. It would also have a relation to re-enactment.
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