Because it is a live feed, a beacon, the series is as endless as the search engine is takes as its feed, dogpile.com, a search engine compiler (the “dogpile” in the name refers to the “pile” of other search engines that a search query, typed into Dogpile, gives one access to). Clinton Thomas Lee. That is to say, Beacon will last as long as Dogpile’s business lasts, which could be a long time, or, if we watch the signs of Google’s ascendance and the concomitant decline of every other search engine, possibly not long at all. Endlessness, as an art historical trope, always referred to the Culture Industry and its temporality of numbing repetition, terminologically and (the hope was) phenomenologically marked off from a more dramatic aesthetic temporality (e.g. the sublime, the evental, the self-reflexive). Beacon pins the critique of the Culture Industry to a particular company, Dogpile, and by implication (of both the piece and of Dogpile’s status as a meta-search engine, or a search engine that references other search engines), calling its bluff or forcing it to specify its claims. If the Culture Industry is not to be an ahistorical concept, if it works differently in different times, transforms along with industry, then Beacon suggests that the critique might be extended by considering it in the context of a single company and the search engine industry it represents not just metonymically but competitively, within a dwindling landscape of market competition, dominated more and more completely by Google. Lesbian ass eating.
But for all the fascination of Beacon’s ethnographic verité, Beacon omits, truncates or screens a feature of search engines that is as important as the search capacity itself: advertisements. Safety codes officer job in Alberta. Google makes 98% of its revenue from advertisements. It literally could not exist with the capacity to serve ads alongside search results, turning every question into an opportunity to go shopping, literalizing every propertizing analogy between knowledge and the vast capitalist marketplace. It is an understatement, therefore, to say that advertisements are as important to search engines as the capacity for search; they are constitutive. And Beacon’s failure, or refusal (we’ll need to decide which, and why) to visualize the welding of knowledge to products, of learning to shopping, effected by search engines, performs a kind of presence by omission. New Caledonian Singles. But exclusion manifests a different kind of presence than inclusion, as every Liberal, minority, deconstructionist, and un-indexed website knows. I take it as the kind of exclusion that invites reflection on how intimately interarticulated searching for information and searching for products become through the window of a search engine. And from there, further questions: if curiosity, as played out through a search engine, stages an encounter of oneself with what one knows and what one doesn’t know, and thereby, with the imagined world of what it’s possible to know and not know, then torques are applied to personhood through the use of search engines over time. And if Beacon manifests individual curiosities (the encounter of a searcher with herself as materialized in the limits of one’s own knowledge of the world), endlessly, in series, for others, what form of knowledge does this produce, of others, of the world one lives in and desires to make a place in, of the publics to which one does and doesn’t belong? In this latter frame, the information that Beacon presents to viewers in the form of a series of searches mirrors the knowledge about searcher-cum-consumer behavior that drives the business of search engines, the linking of search results and advertisements. Flat Screen tvs. This final question thereby cues debates about privacy and data-protection that have become unavoidable as the search industry, iconicized by Google, expands and becomes the interface for the entire Web, and all that people want to access through it. Practically the portal for all forms of inquisitive encounter, encounters that begin with questions.
Showing posts with label searching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label searching. Show all posts
Monday, July 28, 2008
Beacon Chap. Draft, part 1.1
Breaking news. When did it become possible to search for breaking news? Is news always breaking? Isn’t the point of breaking news that is breaks into the ordinary stream of things, the tick tock tick of daily life? If it’s breaking all the time, then it’s no longer an interruption, it’s ordinary life. Although maybe this confusion lies outside of the act of typing “breaking news” into a search engine. Dating sites for teens. School is a dating site, isn’t it? Or maybe the person who wants to find dating sites for teens isn’t a teen. That train of thought quickly runs along well worn paths, paths worn by no one person, but by a bevy of media sites who, by running the story, make it into news that others rush to cover. Adults who prey on children on the internet. Parents who aren’t concerned enough about their child’s safety. Flax seed hulls. Is there something that can be done with the hulls? If I searched for that term too, would I find out? Robots movied. Typo or new verb? Instructions to make a bridal veil. The bridal industry hasn’t won over everybody then, although I know that a search that includes the term “bridal veil” brings advertisements for all sorts of bridal services. Sea elephant sewr. What would “sic” even mean in this context? Wallpaper. Buy? Remove? Hunted like a wolf. A spoonerism from the Duran Duran song? Or maybe there’s less distance between that phrase and its referent than I think. Although it can’t be literal, can it? Ellipsometers griffin george. The world is so busy today. “Wake me up with a blow job.” The world of people who are online now is so busy today, busy, industrious, inquisitive, horny. The world of people who are searching for something. “Searching” in that last sentence means something literal and something allegorical. To be searching for something needn’t be an existential state; it’s perfectly practical. Use a search engine often enough, however, and the existential comes back into play. Not as a way to describe a life that eschews surface for depths, but almost the opposite, a life in which the relevance of a search engine to one’s daily curiosities stretches way out to the horizon, an infinite series of events which raise questions that a quick visit to a search engine can answer. A search engine is existential because it weaves itself, for anyone who has used one often enough, tightly into the weft of an ordinary life. Attend a party with the well-connected and time how long it takes for someone to wish aloud that they had a search engine, or for someone to pull one up on a mobile device. A very well-connected friend recently told me that he’s learned not to take out his phone in the middle of conversations in order to consult a search engine and answer the latest dispute thrown up by the conversation. It’s more fun, he says, to let the conversation founder on the missing data. It’s just the sort of in-situ discovery that people make all the time when some piece of technology binds itself to daily life. New morals, new etiquettes, new normativities are discovered in order to mark out something as a unwelcome interruption to daily life and something else as an ordinariness to be recovered. Even though it was the interruption that made possible the affection for a mode of the ordinary. You can’t love everything all of the time.
The website for the online version of Thomson and Craighead’s Beacon tells its visitors that it began broadcasting other people’s search queries to the web at “00:00HRS GMT on 01st January 2005” (as I type these passages, I watch Beacon in a separate window on my desktop and intercalate its search queries, in italics, with these sentences about them). Since 01st January 2005, Thomson and Craighead have produced two different versions of Beacon, a gallery installation and a railway flap sign. The gallery installation projects Beacon, borderless, onto an unmarked painted gallery wall, search queries appearing and replacing each other every 1.5 seconds. The railway flap sign is more formally multivariate. It references an older style of public information system, common to airports and train stations from the late 1950s until the 1990s when such systems started to be replaced by LCD displays driven by networked computer databases. The three versions, considered together, reference three modes of address—an untrackably diffuse Web, a rarefied art gallery, and a historically multi-sited information display in which web traffic is overlaid onto air or train traffic as evoked by the form of the sign. Three modes of address assembling three public sphere imaginaries, not actual publics, assembled and ready for action, but three publics imagined by the technologies that address them: a public unified by its intermittent presence online; a public unified by its taste in art, its refractive desire to be part of an art scene; and a public both unified and split by its juxtaposed presence to history and to the present tense. A site-unspecific public, a taste public and a temporal public. Taken altogether as an iterative system, Beacon conjoins three distinct forms of publicness via three forms of public address and a congeries of meditative technologies.
If critical publics, or what Nancy Fraser called “counterpublics,” voice a wish for political change, Beacon’s publics are driven by a different engine: a more individualized wish, desire, curiosity, although the unit of subjectivity here is not clearly the individual (much less the liberal subject), nor is it related via a part-whole relationship to critical publics. James g. king + redmond. Beacon presents search queries that hail from one searcher, or one IP address anyway, for an uncertain audience of witnesses. It’s quite possible that I’m the only one watching at just this moment, as I write this sentence. By the time I finish the next, others may have joined me, although I’d never know. Beastly stories. That not-knowing is a feature of web publics which is not unlike a feature of print publics, as Michael Warner has described them: one’s presence to the public is a technical matter, are you or aren’t you a reader. In any case, one needn’t know anything about the other members of that public. And in the life of a public, learning something about one’s fellow members often appears as an anomaly. A book itself is enough; there needn’t be a “letters to the editor” feature for the public to be self-reflexive in the way Warner intends, for it to receive echoes of itself in the form of self-knowledge or self-awareness. The existence of a book is enough, and in that particular sense, a website is no different. Value place liberty mo. When websites do fold in forms of feedback, participatory forms, these forms can be reckoned therefore not as a constitutive feature of the site’s publicness—it’s sufficiently public on Warner’s and Habermas’ terms without those forms—but as one of the forms of communication afforded by the web, or a website, as a particular site for public action.
Beacon, however, in all of its versions, bends self-awareness around a further corner by reflecting an otherwise invisible feature of search engine use: the search queries themselves, as other people formulate them. Which is to say, other people’s questions, wishes, curiosities, desires, hopes, conundrums, memory lapses, researches, investigations, idlings, typos, misspellings, secrets, embarrassments, bored maunderings, desultory semi-free associations, and etcetera. Beacon’s formalism is both understated and camouflaged, so warrants scrutiny (fig. 1). Camouflaged because it looks like a million other websites, with nothing to single it out as anything other than any other website, let alone a commentary or meta-reflection on web culture itself: simple courier font, some lines of static text that surround the one active, apparently live window in which search queries appear, then disappear, then are replaced by the next search query in the ceaseless series, one every 1.5 seconds. Each individual search query appears, left-aligned, in Beacon’s search window. Then begins a rapid fade-to-black, blinks out to an opaque blackness, then that blackness gives way, before a cinematic wipe fade, moving left to right, revealing the next search query, fed live from Dogpile, a query typed at that moment, right then, by somebody.
The website for the online version of Thomson and Craighead’s Beacon tells its visitors that it began broadcasting other people’s search queries to the web at “00:00HRS GMT on 01st January 2005” (as I type these passages, I watch Beacon in a separate window on my desktop and intercalate its search queries, in italics, with these sentences about them). Since 01st January 2005, Thomson and Craighead have produced two different versions of Beacon, a gallery installation and a railway flap sign. The gallery installation projects Beacon, borderless, onto an unmarked painted gallery wall, search queries appearing and replacing each other every 1.5 seconds. The railway flap sign is more formally multivariate. It references an older style of public information system, common to airports and train stations from the late 1950s until the 1990s when such systems started to be replaced by LCD displays driven by networked computer databases. The three versions, considered together, reference three modes of address—an untrackably diffuse Web, a rarefied art gallery, and a historically multi-sited information display in which web traffic is overlaid onto air or train traffic as evoked by the form of the sign. Three modes of address assembling three public sphere imaginaries, not actual publics, assembled and ready for action, but three publics imagined by the technologies that address them: a public unified by its intermittent presence online; a public unified by its taste in art, its refractive desire to be part of an art scene; and a public both unified and split by its juxtaposed presence to history and to the present tense. A site-unspecific public, a taste public and a temporal public. Taken altogether as an iterative system, Beacon conjoins three distinct forms of publicness via three forms of public address and a congeries of meditative technologies.
If critical publics, or what Nancy Fraser called “counterpublics,” voice a wish for political change, Beacon’s publics are driven by a different engine: a more individualized wish, desire, curiosity, although the unit of subjectivity here is not clearly the individual (much less the liberal subject), nor is it related via a part-whole relationship to critical publics. James g. king + redmond. Beacon presents search queries that hail from one searcher, or one IP address anyway, for an uncertain audience of witnesses. It’s quite possible that I’m the only one watching at just this moment, as I write this sentence. By the time I finish the next, others may have joined me, although I’d never know. Beastly stories. That not-knowing is a feature of web publics which is not unlike a feature of print publics, as Michael Warner has described them: one’s presence to the public is a technical matter, are you or aren’t you a reader. In any case, one needn’t know anything about the other members of that public. And in the life of a public, learning something about one’s fellow members often appears as an anomaly. A book itself is enough; there needn’t be a “letters to the editor” feature for the public to be self-reflexive in the way Warner intends, for it to receive echoes of itself in the form of self-knowledge or self-awareness. The existence of a book is enough, and in that particular sense, a website is no different. Value place liberty mo. When websites do fold in forms of feedback, participatory forms, these forms can be reckoned therefore not as a constitutive feature of the site’s publicness—it’s sufficiently public on Warner’s and Habermas’ terms without those forms—but as one of the forms of communication afforded by the web, or a website, as a particular site for public action.
Beacon, however, in all of its versions, bends self-awareness around a further corner by reflecting an otherwise invisible feature of search engine use: the search queries themselves, as other people formulate them. Which is to say, other people’s questions, wishes, curiosities, desires, hopes, conundrums, memory lapses, researches, investigations, idlings, typos, misspellings, secrets, embarrassments, bored maunderings, desultory semi-free associations, and etcetera. Beacon’s formalism is both understated and camouflaged, so warrants scrutiny (fig. 1). Camouflaged because it looks like a million other websites, with nothing to single it out as anything other than any other website, let alone a commentary or meta-reflection on web culture itself: simple courier font, some lines of static text that surround the one active, apparently live window in which search queries appear, then disappear, then are replaced by the next search query in the ceaseless series, one every 1.5 seconds. Each individual search query appears, left-aligned, in Beacon’s search window. Then begins a rapid fade-to-black, blinks out to an opaque blackness, then that blackness gives way, before a cinematic wipe fade, moving left to right, revealing the next search query, fed live from Dogpile, a query typed at that moment, right then, by somebody.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Atomization of Encounter
SEARCHING: reconfigures the self as simultaneously a new type of market segment (data) and a new form of discursive subject [selfhood].
PROTEST: reconfigures critique as mediated, the self weaponized toward an other, e.g. the state, haters of democracy [counterpublics].
LAUGHTER: reconfigures being with others as arrhythmic, mediated, nonplaces of interaction through a network (Galloway) [publics].
Each of these terms is both a literary instancing of the reconfiguration of an aspect of encounter (where encounter now means the coming together of self, public and counterpublic in potential) and a figure for that reconfiguration, e.g. laughter in separate bedrooms figures the form of the kind of public sociality I'm describing. The collision of form (figural relation of event to knowledge or history of it) and fact (literal relation to event, i.e. description) is siginificant for the way it marks the centrality of form to cultural analysis and of fact or the objective world to form.
PROTEST: reconfigures critique as mediated, the self weaponized toward an other, e.g. the state, haters of democracy [counterpublics].
LAUGHTER: reconfigures being with others as arrhythmic, mediated, nonplaces of interaction through a network (Galloway) [publics].
Each of these terms is both a literary instancing of the reconfiguration of an aspect of encounter (where encounter now means the coming together of self, public and counterpublic in potential) and a figure for that reconfiguration, e.g. laughter in separate bedrooms figures the form of the kind of public sociality I'm describing. The collision of form (figural relation of event to knowledge or history of it) and fact (literal relation to event, i.e. description) is siginificant for the way it marks the centrality of form to cultural analysis and of fact or the objective world to form.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Railway Flap Sign 1 (Grid-networks and flow-networks)
Stand in front of a railway flap sign, a historical form of today's electronic time schedule, and you see, above you, a grid of numbers, letters and symbols for keeping time that changes rhythmically, but unpredictably. Changes are accompanied by a mass of noise, the simultaneous flapping of hundreds of letters and numbers, changes marking the arrival of a new train on the board, the progress of time as a schedule of arrivals and departures, all trains and their itineraries moving to the left to give way to a new train added to the right, signaling that time is moving forward and so is the schedule.
You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.
The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].
The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.
Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.
Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].
You search the board to find "your" train: the train you had planned to take, the train you always take, the train that you know is due, was due 5 min ago, 20 min ago. Or you search the board to find the train the best suits you: the one leaving soonest, the one with the fewest stops, the one that gets you to the right connection point. You scan the board for times, for place names, for changes to time or place. The board keeps you abreast of changes as they happen; it also helps you to synchronize the time of your day with the schedule of trains, to catch up, or to inhabit the lag of waiting.
The railway sign seems to lay out all that there is to know. The total corpus of knowledge about the trains at that particular moment; changes to this corpus are marked by the noise and visual disarray of the flapping sign. Because of this appearance of completeness, any ideas you might get about knowledge that is not represented makes you a paranoid (which doesn't mean that you are wrong; it simply means that you believe appearances are never all that there is). [whereas search engines work, in part, because they foster in us the radical imagination of limitless information, IF ONLY we can figure out the right sequences of letters and numbers to get us there. The flapping digits of the search engine are the flappings of our furious typing and re-typing, perfecting the query].
The railway sign also presents knowledge about a knowable, more or less visualizable entity: a network of trains. The railway sign thus offers access, through semiotics, through visual scanning, through the right positioning of our bodies beneath and in front of the sign, to knowledge about the workings of a network [whereas search engines use a network to give us knowledge that seems to be about something else: it figures content as the object of our search, while form is the network itself]. The train network, represented by the railway sign, appears as a grid of time and timings, the salient information for railway sign searchers being the timing of arrivals and departures. There is a limit to this network, although it is vast, although marketing for train transportation often tantalizes with the allure of "going anywhere." But there is an empiricism as work in even the most idealistic of train slogans: you can look it up on the sign: a train either goes there (today) or is doesn't (today or ever). There are railroad tracks that go there, or there aren't. [whereas books like "Invisible Web" hyperbolize the endlessness of our already endless imaginations for what might be out there, for what the Internet's network might contain, if only...]. Looking at a railway sign, we place ourselves amidst the possible. [Looking at a search engine's blank field, we take our chances with a space that search engines themselves encourage us to believe goes on and on without cease.] The network of trains can be visualized by a grid of symbols which is finite because the network of trains itself is finite. In this sense, it is not a network at all. But calling it a network of trains is denotatively sound; it also helps us mark a difference. Call it a grid-network.
Search engines visualize the Internet network with a blank rectangular field (the search field) in order to imply the limitlessness of the field to be searched. The search field places the epistemological onus on the searcher, not on the search engine. Search Engine's famous secrecy about their algorithm augments this implication. Older search engines, called directories (e.g. Yahoo), presented a list of categories rather than an empty field. One scanned the categories like an index, or a railway sign. The categories seemed to measure the extent of what there was to be known, to hint at, if not actually demarcate, the boundaries of that space. This was a space of places (Castells, Shaviro). The empty search field indexes a space of flows (Castells, Shaviro, Jameson), which is the space of finance capital in the midst of which search engines like Google now thrive.
Beacon thinks about the form of a search field. It visually echoes the empty search field with its austere online version. It maps that open field onto the field of projection (see Cavell on projection and screens) in its installation version. And it jams that open form, a space of flows, into the grid-network or space of places form of the railway sign [here talk very precisely about the form of the fit; the precise way that the open search field fits within the grid-network search field].
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)
Jameson 3 (New frontiers for the dispersion of culture?)
7.8.08
The severest point of change to which Jameson returns again and again in his writings on postmodernity is the becoming-culture of everything. He also refers to the complete merger of culture and economy, refereing thereby to a broad process of commodification. Since his postmodernity is constitutively spatial (a feature masked, he argues, by the visual spectacles of postmodernity), the most significant feature of the expansion of capital in postmodernity (which J also calls the third phase of capitalism) is its territorialization of the globe itself, its exploitation of land as new markets, and including its expansions into (production of and then expansion into) what J calls "cyberspace," which he describes as an information space. He often points to contemporary art to exemplify this claim: there is no longer, he argues, any art produces outside of the vast and varied processes of commodification (as there were, he argues, at the turn of the 19th c.). But also to the way that corporations (which we might formerly have thought were more or less purely on the side of the economy) benefit from, extract from, learn from, steal from, thrive on, depend on...culture and cultural production (e.g. fashion companies employing cool hunters, see: Gibson's Pattern Recognition).
But S. Shaviro argues in a recent blog post (from a series of extracts from his forthcoming book on Aesthetics, see: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=646) that capital can never be all that there is, even though it "is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning." It can never be all because capital is not self-generating, not auto-poetic; it needs people as resources to exploit and as consumers to buy. It also needs new raw materials to convert into markets. The "monstrous body of capital" or body without organs can never be complete in itself. Reciprocally, D&G figure humans as parasites on the body of capital or the socius.
In the equivalence between Capital, body (without organs) and socius, we can hear echoes of J's constitutive postmodern merger of culture with economy, the dissemination of culture to all parts of the globe, and the coeval dissemination of capital (commodification) to all parts of culture. But, J argues for a total merger while Shaviro theorizes capital as a set of processes never complete in itself, a process that is constitutively parasitic, or, better for the comparison with J that I'm after here, territorializing. Is there a contradiction here? Or is Jameson's total dissemination of culture compatible with, even reliant upon, Shaviro's version of capital as forever-imcomplete, constitutively incomplete?
I've also been reading Lewis Hyde's work in progress on creative commons (http://www.warholfoundation.org/paperseries/article8.htm, http://www.lewishyde.com/progress.html), in which Hyde argues that there is a trackable trend in contemporary culture to relegate the protection of creative culture to the market and to thereby steal from, and gut, the creative commons (obviously he's not the only one to make this argument, but from what I've read, I can't yet tell how or where his work diverges from, say, Lessig's, although in places, Hyde's emphasis on the non-incompatibility of market forces and creative commons sounds like Lessig's Libertarian slant). Thus, the commodification of the human genome project jeopardizes the potentials of human genome science by yolking all innovation to profit, thereby foreclosing on any chance that a nonprofitable discovery, or a discovery whose profitability are simply unknown and unknowable, might be pursued. Hyde's stuff is well written, and I'm looking forward to his book, which he promises will be a parallel historicization of 1. the commons and 2. the creative individual. But so far it's all a pretty standard creative commons defense (like my essay "What will happen next?" in that sense).
Still, his essays make me think about something like creativity or the creative mind or innovation or potentiality itself as the latest frontier, or gap, of the sort Shaviro theorizes from his cross-reading of D&G and Marx. The latest itch of capital. Boltanski and Chiapello's work on The New Spirit of Capitalism offers very broad-scale support for this idea (being parasitic on avant garde culture, capitalism was, throughout what J calls the end of modernism, already capitalizing (on) potentiality as such). Deleuze's essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" makes a cognate argument via D's retooling and updating of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Of course, this wouldn't surprise Jameson. In his discussion of the waning of affect, and his idea that the modernist Sublime has been replaced in postmodernity by theory, he is clearly pointing to some of the impacts of postmodernism on the human body, the sensorium, and more broadly, on the horizons of personhood itself. He refers negatively to the same problem (postmodernity's impacts on personhood) with his ideas about our disorientation in space and consequent need for cognitive mapping. Nor would drawing the recent changes to copyright and patent law into this discussion be dischordant with J's overall sense of the defining changes of postmodernity.
But there might nevertheless be value in charting the micro-movements in what J refers to, very broadly, as the total dissemination of commodity culture. Such micro-movements might materialize significant details which nuance our understanding of the overall process by establishing any number of relations with the overall trend: from contradiction to affirmation to exemplification to counter-models, etc. And (to think J and S together) we might think of these micro-movements within the wider flow as exactly the kinds of gaps that Shaviro describes in his version of capital as the "monstrous body," socius, or body without organs.
Along these same lines, Beacon charts the further excursions of capital: into the very idea of searching itself, the retrieval of knowledge, the potentiality of knowledge as such, the very idea of finding out, formulating questions, the very thought that the world contains an answer, that it's possible to know [something]. The value of placing this description within the broader changes outlined by Jameson, understanding it as a micro-flow within the wider flow of commodity culture, would be that any resistance I might find Beacon to offer up in this context could not be divorced from, or set in opposition to a more pessimistic Marxist account. Utopianism could not be set in opposition to critique because optimism and pessimism would both be set in motion within the broader currents of capitalist territorialization. Capitalism becomes the terrain, the field of operations, the conditions, not the force to be resisted (what is to be resisted, then, sits below capital and capitalism as such; this placement is one of the sought-after effects of Jameson's work on postmodernity: namely, to produce a clear-eyed description of capitalism today so that we can stop the residual form of utopianism which says that capitalism itself can still meaningfully be resisted, tout court, even though it's obvious that it bears responsibility for all sorts of lived misery).
7.8.08
The severest point of change to which Jameson returns again and again in his writings on postmodernity is the becoming-culture of everything. He also refers to the complete merger of culture and economy, refereing thereby to a broad process of commodification. Since his postmodernity is constitutively spatial (a feature masked, he argues, by the visual spectacles of postmodernity), the most significant feature of the expansion of capital in postmodernity (which J also calls the third phase of capitalism) is its territorialization of the globe itself, its exploitation of land as new markets, and including its expansions into (production of and then expansion into) what J calls "cyberspace," which he describes as an information space. He often points to contemporary art to exemplify this claim: there is no longer, he argues, any art produces outside of the vast and varied processes of commodification (as there were, he argues, at the turn of the 19th c.). But also to the way that corporations (which we might formerly have thought were more or less purely on the side of the economy) benefit from, extract from, learn from, steal from, thrive on, depend on...culture and cultural production (e.g. fashion companies employing cool hunters, see: Gibson's Pattern Recognition).
But S. Shaviro argues in a recent blog post (from a series of extracts from his forthcoming book on Aesthetics, see: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=646) that capital can never be all that there is, even though it "is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning." It can never be all because capital is not self-generating, not auto-poetic; it needs people as resources to exploit and as consumers to buy. It also needs new raw materials to convert into markets. The "monstrous body of capital" or body without organs can never be complete in itself. Reciprocally, D&G figure humans as parasites on the body of capital or the socius.
In the equivalence between Capital, body (without organs) and socius, we can hear echoes of J's constitutive postmodern merger of culture with economy, the dissemination of culture to all parts of the globe, and the coeval dissemination of capital (commodification) to all parts of culture. But, J argues for a total merger while Shaviro theorizes capital as a set of processes never complete in itself, a process that is constitutively parasitic, or, better for the comparison with J that I'm after here, territorializing. Is there a contradiction here? Or is Jameson's total dissemination of culture compatible with, even reliant upon, Shaviro's version of capital as forever-imcomplete, constitutively incomplete?
I've also been reading Lewis Hyde's work in progress on creative commons (http://www.warholfoundation.org/paperseries/article8.htm, http://www.lewishyde.com/progress.html), in which Hyde argues that there is a trackable trend in contemporary culture to relegate the protection of creative culture to the market and to thereby steal from, and gut, the creative commons (obviously he's not the only one to make this argument, but from what I've read, I can't yet tell how or where his work diverges from, say, Lessig's, although in places, Hyde's emphasis on the non-incompatibility of market forces and creative commons sounds like Lessig's Libertarian slant). Thus, the commodification of the human genome project jeopardizes the potentials of human genome science by yolking all innovation to profit, thereby foreclosing on any chance that a nonprofitable discovery, or a discovery whose profitability are simply unknown and unknowable, might be pursued. Hyde's stuff is well written, and I'm looking forward to his book, which he promises will be a parallel historicization of 1. the commons and 2. the creative individual. But so far it's all a pretty standard creative commons defense (like my essay "What will happen next?" in that sense).
Still, his essays make me think about something like creativity or the creative mind or innovation or potentiality itself as the latest frontier, or gap, of the sort Shaviro theorizes from his cross-reading of D&G and Marx. The latest itch of capital. Boltanski and Chiapello's work on The New Spirit of Capitalism offers very broad-scale support for this idea (being parasitic on avant garde culture, capitalism was, throughout what J calls the end of modernism, already capitalizing (on) potentiality as such). Deleuze's essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" makes a cognate argument via D's retooling and updating of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Of course, this wouldn't surprise Jameson. In his discussion of the waning of affect, and his idea that the modernist Sublime has been replaced in postmodernity by theory, he is clearly pointing to some of the impacts of postmodernism on the human body, the sensorium, and more broadly, on the horizons of personhood itself. He refers negatively to the same problem (postmodernity's impacts on personhood) with his ideas about our disorientation in space and consequent need for cognitive mapping. Nor would drawing the recent changes to copyright and patent law into this discussion be dischordant with J's overall sense of the defining changes of postmodernity.
But there might nevertheless be value in charting the micro-movements in what J refers to, very broadly, as the total dissemination of commodity culture. Such micro-movements might materialize significant details which nuance our understanding of the overall process by establishing any number of relations with the overall trend: from contradiction to affirmation to exemplification to counter-models, etc. And (to think J and S together) we might think of these micro-movements within the wider flow as exactly the kinds of gaps that Shaviro describes in his version of capital as the "monstrous body," socius, or body without organs.
Along these same lines, Beacon charts the further excursions of capital: into the very idea of searching itself, the retrieval of knowledge, the potentiality of knowledge as such, the very idea of finding out, formulating questions, the very thought that the world contains an answer, that it's possible to know [something]. The value of placing this description within the broader changes outlined by Jameson, understanding it as a micro-flow within the wider flow of commodity culture, would be that any resistance I might find Beacon to offer up in this context could not be divorced from, or set in opposition to a more pessimistic Marxist account. Utopianism could not be set in opposition to critique because optimism and pessimism would both be set in motion within the broader currents of capitalist territorialization. Capitalism becomes the terrain, the field of operations, the conditions, not the force to be resisted (what is to be resisted, then, sits below capital and capitalism as such; this placement is one of the sought-after effects of Jameson's work on postmodernity: namely, to produce a clear-eyed description of capitalism today so that we can stop the residual form of utopianism which says that capitalism itself can still meaningfully be resisted, tout court, even though it's obvious that it bears responsibility for all sorts of lived misery).
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Jameson 2 (What kind of fragments are search queries?)
Do the fragments [Jameson, "Culture and Finance Capital"] in Beacon [the serialized queries] emit meaning as a kind of reflex of re-narrativization, as Jameson says of postmodernist fragments? I.e. as stereotypes do, each of which reflexively calls up an entire world, an entire narrative without ever needing to materialize that world, that story (pastiche is J's favorite po-mo tactic of re-narrativization)? I don't think so. I think they're broken, although not necessarily as modernist fragments were broken. Modernist fragments of meaning (e.g. its abstractions) were critical, negative; they referenced the object to be criticized by severing its legibility, its legible relations to that world (of history painting, of narrative fiction). They accumulated into texts that were illegible, partially legible, alienating, aggressive. This aesthetic strategy mirrored a world that had become alienated, like aesthetic fragments. Subjectivity was so fragmented. Experience was fragmented. The body's experience of space and time was fragmented. In J's description of postmodernity, we experience a oneness with the world because all of the fragments (aesthetic, experiential, ordinary) are referentially replete like stereotypes are: they call up everything one needs to receive a full narrative, they fill in the blanks, make us believe that everything we need for understanding is present. Aesthetic fragments no longer need to mirror this world; they are no longer separate from it. "The Cultural Turn" marks the complete merger of aesthetics with the life of capital, and thus the closing of the Historical gap between experience and aesthetics. Beacon's fragments seem to be neither modernist nor postmodernist: they are severed, but not alienating; they are referential, replete, they seem to amount to something like a theory, a sociology, a representation of a public, but they don't get there, they tease with proximity and meaning, but only tease. The broken calligram. What might this imply about the economy of which they are a part? And what is their relation to that economy (if the economy of modernity is mirrored by the aesthetics of modernism, and if the economy of postmodernity has merged with the aesthetics of postmodernism)?
In any case, this sounds like a good articulation of my problem: what larger life do search queries point to, IF they're fragments, and how does this relate to the present economy? OR, if they're not fragments because search engines point to a new horizon of un-representability [data over theory], then what relations do they have to the world they reference [if 'reference' is the right word for their relation to the world]?
In any case, this sounds like a good articulation of my problem: what larger life do search queries point to, IF they're fragments, and how does this relate to the present economy? OR, if they're not fragments because search engines point to a new horizon of un-representability [data over theory], then what relations do they have to the world they reference [if 'reference' is the right word for their relation to the world]?
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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.
Beacon, then, materializes both of these situations: the public as a serially arranged data set, and the stolen or deflected representation of that public.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
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?
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?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
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].
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.
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.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
That Which Wants to be Found
If the CI is in the business of producing blandly homogenizing products with the appeal of uniqueness, they are also in the business of making products that are there to be found, sometimes with an appeal of being hard to find.
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
The feeling of uniqueness and the feeling of rarity would both be CI tactics, marketing tactics. Each evidence, in the POV of CI critique, for the truth that lies beneath them: all products are the same, all products want to be found.
If all products want to be found, then searching for them is a sham, a put-on, a feeling the product cultivates in people to make the product more attractive. That's all. In this sense, searching takes the form that J. Dean says it takes in Publicity's Secret (where searching for information produces the feeling that democracy is at work, is working, that a critical public sphere exists).
Example: the atrophied, vestigial adjective "indie" in the music industry signals lots of things, but one of the most important is that this band is still hard to find, still rare, i.e. finding them accrues cultural capital to the finder. Searching for art, being the one to find it, is still a valued activity with middle-brow cachet. Curation in one of it's worst modes would be this taken to an extreme, made into an art: a curator would be one who has the best taste in art, where that taste is the product of diligent, thorough, expensive, eagle-eyed searching. Knowing where to look, how to cull, how to sift. Having good taste bespeaks a skill for surfing networks, for getting around, for finding new sites. One has one's set of reliable places to look, but before that, more mysterious, and harder, is the skill of finding new places to look. Searching for new places to search.
Galloway's thesis about networks and protocols applies here. In my reading (as a start anyway), a protocol would be a set of rules for constraining the kinds of searching one can do through that network.
But I don't love the part of the CI critique which has to produce an illusion in order to produce a Real underneath (that only the critic can access, or see, or live). In part, because it makes knowledge too exclusive. But it also puts too much faith in knowledge (how would it help someone to know that their pleasure in searching for new music, their pleasure in finding something new, being the first, is just itself a desired and planned and homogeneous marketing ploy? Would they be less pleased? Would they revolt?). The feeling of pleasure in the search is something in itself; not just illusion, deception, CI administration of life.
So there is pleasure in searching. And there is also cachet, cultural capital. In searching itself (knowing how to make google give you the results you want), and in searching for particular things (new wines, new music). The cachet in searching for particular things comes from being able to make sense, or produce a system, from an overwhelmingly large market. The market for music and for wine, for instance, are bigger than any one person could get around. This is true of the Internet itself. Cultural capital comes from being able to make sense of it, to produce value and meaning out of it (good bands, good wines; stuff no one else knows about) despite its grandiosity, its near infiniteness.
Is all this to imply that finding value in skillful searching is a middle brow activity, in that it always points to having good taste (in bands, in wines, in search engines)? Are there low brow equivalents, equivalents among the poor? I'm asking how classed an activity is searching? And the value ascribed to skillful searching?
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Databases as Representations (Searching, Hits, Encounters)
(http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/06/21/google_henziger/print.html)
In order to build a database for a search engine, the search engine company must build an “internal representation” of the web, the web’s link structure, and build into that representation the potential for rank, hierarchy vis. individual searches.
This “representation” is based on the company’s “understanding” of what documents are about, i.e. their algorithms are that understanding and a representation of that understanding. They are the part of the search engine that encodes an understanding of how to understand web pages in terms of their potential relevance to an potentially infinite set of potential searches. Talk about potentiality and immanence!
Where potentiality meets hard materiality is when a person conducts a search. Then, the results of that search can only bring back what is immanent in the representation. It cannot bring back what the database does not contain, a document (webpage) that has not been indexed, a word that does not appear in the database, a combination of words that has not been cross-referenced or is not cross-referenceable in the database. The database is potentiality ONLY when the database is being built, when the web crawlers are doing their work. It ceases to be potentiality when queries are conducted: at that exact point in time, the possibilities are not endless. They are vast, but not endless. Not that anyone would notice, but it’s an important distinction (cf. the fact from a post ago that when one searches Google, one only searches about half the searchable content of the web).
A database is a representation.
The other half of the search that a search engine must “understand” is the search query itself. Here potentiality comes back in in the form of unreadability, unpredictability, illegibility of the search. If the search engine cannot figure out what the search is about, then it returns more random hits. So the query is itself a representation, in the eyes of the search engine, and some are more legible than others. Legible or their real wish or desire. “Car” is an ambiguous wish. “Car sex” is a less ambiguous wish. This is true both for human readers and search engines.
So an interesting feature of Beacon is that it puts viewers in the same position that the search engines themselves are in: both are readers of the queries, both are in a position of having to interpret what the query means, what it points to, what it indexes, what it wants. Perhaps the search engine’s reading is a more constrained, instrumental one; perhaps it wants only to know more precisely what the searcher wants to know, get, learn. Whereas Beacon’s viewers, forced into the position of search engine-as-reader, get to have a more wide-reaching curiosity, get to have pathologizing thoughts, more sociological thoughts, make the searcher into a general person rather than a singular person. But the search engine uses rules to interpret the query, which is its own form of generalization: making an individual into a general person on the basis of their wants and wishes, insofar as those wants and wishes are able to be articulated with the wants and wishes of other searchers, insofar as the wants and wishes are generalizable. Where the general probably means repeated; where something like that wish has been seen before, so that it can 1. Be predicted by the database and the crawlers and 2. Be predicted by the program that matches queries to the database, one representation to another.
When a person’s query encounters the search engine database, one representation (of the web as indexed by, say, google) encounters another (a person’s capacity to render their wish in words). A representation of the web meets a representation of a single person’s wish. The results of the encounter are called “hits.” Why hits? Literally, a hit is where a person’s wish hits, impacts, lands in the database. The search engine then returns these hits as results, but they are literally the trace of an impact.
In order to build a database for a search engine, the search engine company must build an “internal representation” of the web, the web’s link structure, and build into that representation the potential for rank, hierarchy vis. individual searches.
This “representation” is based on the company’s “understanding” of what documents are about, i.e. their algorithms are that understanding and a representation of that understanding. They are the part of the search engine that encodes an understanding of how to understand web pages in terms of their potential relevance to an potentially infinite set of potential searches. Talk about potentiality and immanence!
Where potentiality meets hard materiality is when a person conducts a search. Then, the results of that search can only bring back what is immanent in the representation. It cannot bring back what the database does not contain, a document (webpage) that has not been indexed, a word that does not appear in the database, a combination of words that has not been cross-referenced or is not cross-referenceable in the database. The database is potentiality ONLY when the database is being built, when the web crawlers are doing their work. It ceases to be potentiality when queries are conducted: at that exact point in time, the possibilities are not endless. They are vast, but not endless. Not that anyone would notice, but it’s an important distinction (cf. the fact from a post ago that when one searches Google, one only searches about half the searchable content of the web).
A database is a representation.
The other half of the search that a search engine must “understand” is the search query itself. Here potentiality comes back in in the form of unreadability, unpredictability, illegibility of the search. If the search engine cannot figure out what the search is about, then it returns more random hits. So the query is itself a representation, in the eyes of the search engine, and some are more legible than others. Legible or their real wish or desire. “Car” is an ambiguous wish. “Car sex” is a less ambiguous wish. This is true both for human readers and search engines.
So an interesting feature of Beacon is that it puts viewers in the same position that the search engines themselves are in: both are readers of the queries, both are in a position of having to interpret what the query means, what it points to, what it indexes, what it wants. Perhaps the search engine’s reading is a more constrained, instrumental one; perhaps it wants only to know more precisely what the searcher wants to know, get, learn. Whereas Beacon’s viewers, forced into the position of search engine-as-reader, get to have a more wide-reaching curiosity, get to have pathologizing thoughts, more sociological thoughts, make the searcher into a general person rather than a singular person. But the search engine uses rules to interpret the query, which is its own form of generalization: making an individual into a general person on the basis of their wants and wishes, insofar as those wants and wishes are able to be articulated with the wants and wishes of other searchers, insofar as the wants and wishes are generalizable. Where the general probably means repeated; where something like that wish has been seen before, so that it can 1. Be predicted by the database and the crawlers and 2. Be predicted by the program that matches queries to the database, one representation to another.
When a person’s query encounters the search engine database, one representation (of the web as indexed by, say, google) encounters another (a person’s capacity to render their wish in words). A representation of the web meets a representation of a single person’s wish. The results of the encounter are called “hits.” Why hits? Literally, a hit is where a person’s wish hits, impacts, lands in the database. The search engine then returns these hits as results, but they are literally the trace of an impact.
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?]
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Searching | Thinking
What do people search for?
Love
Jobs
Answers
the Truth
Signs of extraterrestrial life
Recipes
Cars
The other sock
Sex
Good sex
The name of songs
Lyrics of songs
A musician's name
The year that X happened
Inner peace
The holy grail
Lost civilizations
Rare animals (giant squid)
The right address
The perfect X
A good doctor
The cause of their pain
Their "real" parents
Their ancestors (race, ethnicity)
A better mortgage
Maybe searching is the search for relief from a want. What if wishes are burdens. Small burdens. The feeling of not being able to recall a name that you know you once knew: that's a small or large burden. It's a burden on consciousness because it's hard to think about anything else. It makes us obsessive. In those situations, search engines are a relief from that spike of desire: which is a desire to know, which is a desire to stop wanting to know. Search engines staunch a wanting, where there is little or no pleasure in the wanting.
This raises the broader question of the relation between pleasure and searching, pleasure and not knowing, pleasure and wanting to know, pleasure and wishing, pleasure and desire. Then: how much is the desire to know (or the desire to stop wanting to know) akin to desire as it has been theorized psychoanalytically? J. Dean talks about the will to know, but I'm not sure she's talking about the desire to know. The wanting subject in her account is pretty simple: they want information, they search for it. Those are the only activities she cares about, because they're what allow her to conclude that that activity feels like working democracy. But there must be a spectrum of affect related to the desire to know, and a set of activities tailored to the task of knowing, finding out: e.g. sustaining the desire to know, stoking the confusion, exploring the confusion (how much don't I/we know about this topic?), going to a favorite reference, the set of creative second-efforts when the first fails, the people we call on to know stuff we don't know, the people who know the reference sources we don't know (the people are the meta-meta-resources, but we're after the meta-resources).
Heidegger's concern in the world picture essay was that a particular mode of knowing (could we say searching here?) was dominating and so limiting what it is possible to think. Searching had become, in the era of imaging technologies, a limit to thought. So the theory here is that our resources for searching are a condition of possibility (and to Heidegger, the key one) for thought itself, for thinking itself. When our resources for searching get poorer, our capacity to think gets poorer. Is the opposite true? When our resources for searching expand, does our capacity for thought expand?
I doubt anyone evaluating search engines would say so. They make a distinction between information or data and thought itself. We might need information in order to think (copyright believes this, or used to), but our capacity for thought comes from somewhere else. This is like the Reynoldsian aesthetic relationship between mechanical skill and artistic genius. Mechanical skill is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Between the two, something magical has to happen.
So does Heidegger disagree with this? Does he believe that thought is a question of having/being able to get the right information? So that if our search engines (theories, concepts) are poor, we only have access to a limited range of information, and our capacity for thought suffers. Maybe. It will depend on how he defines world pictures: i.e. how closely they're related to the tools the produce them, how much room for creative thought he thinks there is between the tools that make world pictures (search engines) and the pictures themselves, and then, between that relationship and our capacity for thought.
Are concepts search engines of another sort? (e.g. as Deleuze defines them?)
Theories? (as Spivak defines them)
What about disciplinary methods? The tools that a discipline invents to learn the kinds of things about itself and the world that it studies that it knows how to respect: these are search engines. They provide a window, a frame, through which people (who know how to use it) can search for the right kind of information.
What limits a search engine?
What limits a theory, concept, method?
How adaptable is the tool? How adaptable is a search engine? One only has the window to work with, unless you're a designer of search engine software. Arguably, theorists are writers of concepts, although in practice it doesn't always work this way (people apply rather than adapt). But not all users of search engines are writers of the engine itself: one has at one's disposal the semantics of forming a search. And there are rules for this, and I suppose those rules can be bent or broken or adapted, but I wonder about the range of adaptation (this is a technical question). Is it possible to form search strings that work around the programmed features of a search engine? To fiddle with the semantics of search strings in a way that will work (i.e. bring back the info one wants)?
So here a technical question about search engines (their adaptability) runs closely parallel to a question about the adaptability of disciplines (their concepts, their methods). To what extent is a discipline a program, like a software is a program? What are the features of a discipline that take the writing of that discipline (and its tools) out of the hands of the people who work in it (e.g. tenure pressure, conference structure, peer review...as potentially limiting standards; also gender and race and sexuality and any form of marginalization, tokenization).
Thinking about A. Galloway, how does protocol determine search engines? What is their protocological face? And then can his concept of protocol be adapted to think about rubrics of thoughts, analytics, disciplinary tools? I.e. as a form of power that courses through disciplines, determining their outcomes (Heidegger), influencing what it's possible to think and do within them?
+++
A search engine is a mode of thinking, and therefore, an envelope for thinking. One has to produce thought to form a search string (to try to connect one's wish with what the network contains); but one also takes the results as an input for thought, both toward the production of better search strings in the distant or near future, but also toward the pursuit of whatever task is connected or might be connected to the reason one was searching in the first place.
Love
Jobs
Answers
the Truth
Signs of extraterrestrial life
Recipes
Cars
The other sock
Sex
Good sex
The name of songs
Lyrics of songs
A musician's name
The year that X happened
Inner peace
The holy grail
Lost civilizations
Rare animals (giant squid)
The right address
The perfect X
A good doctor
The cause of their pain
Their "real" parents
Their ancestors (race, ethnicity)
A better mortgage
Maybe searching is the search for relief from a want. What if wishes are burdens. Small burdens. The feeling of not being able to recall a name that you know you once knew: that's a small or large burden. It's a burden on consciousness because it's hard to think about anything else. It makes us obsessive. In those situations, search engines are a relief from that spike of desire: which is a desire to know, which is a desire to stop wanting to know. Search engines staunch a wanting, where there is little or no pleasure in the wanting.
This raises the broader question of the relation between pleasure and searching, pleasure and not knowing, pleasure and wanting to know, pleasure and wishing, pleasure and desire. Then: how much is the desire to know (or the desire to stop wanting to know) akin to desire as it has been theorized psychoanalytically? J. Dean talks about the will to know, but I'm not sure she's talking about the desire to know. The wanting subject in her account is pretty simple: they want information, they search for it. Those are the only activities she cares about, because they're what allow her to conclude that that activity feels like working democracy. But there must be a spectrum of affect related to the desire to know, and a set of activities tailored to the task of knowing, finding out: e.g. sustaining the desire to know, stoking the confusion, exploring the confusion (how much don't I/we know about this topic?), going to a favorite reference, the set of creative second-efforts when the first fails, the people we call on to know stuff we don't know, the people who know the reference sources we don't know (the people are the meta-meta-resources, but we're after the meta-resources).
Heidegger's concern in the world picture essay was that a particular mode of knowing (could we say searching here?) was dominating and so limiting what it is possible to think. Searching had become, in the era of imaging technologies, a limit to thought. So the theory here is that our resources for searching are a condition of possibility (and to Heidegger, the key one) for thought itself, for thinking itself. When our resources for searching get poorer, our capacity to think gets poorer. Is the opposite true? When our resources for searching expand, does our capacity for thought expand?
I doubt anyone evaluating search engines would say so. They make a distinction between information or data and thought itself. We might need information in order to think (copyright believes this, or used to), but our capacity for thought comes from somewhere else. This is like the Reynoldsian aesthetic relationship between mechanical skill and artistic genius. Mechanical skill is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Between the two, something magical has to happen.
So does Heidegger disagree with this? Does he believe that thought is a question of having/being able to get the right information? So that if our search engines (theories, concepts) are poor, we only have access to a limited range of information, and our capacity for thought suffers. Maybe. It will depend on how he defines world pictures: i.e. how closely they're related to the tools the produce them, how much room for creative thought he thinks there is between the tools that make world pictures (search engines) and the pictures themselves, and then, between that relationship and our capacity for thought.
Are concepts search engines of another sort? (e.g. as Deleuze defines them?)
Theories? (as Spivak defines them)
What about disciplinary methods? The tools that a discipline invents to learn the kinds of things about itself and the world that it studies that it knows how to respect: these are search engines. They provide a window, a frame, through which people (who know how to use it) can search for the right kind of information.
What limits a search engine?
What limits a theory, concept, method?
How adaptable is the tool? How adaptable is a search engine? One only has the window to work with, unless you're a designer of search engine software. Arguably, theorists are writers of concepts, although in practice it doesn't always work this way (people apply rather than adapt). But not all users of search engines are writers of the engine itself: one has at one's disposal the semantics of forming a search. And there are rules for this, and I suppose those rules can be bent or broken or adapted, but I wonder about the range of adaptation (this is a technical question). Is it possible to form search strings that work around the programmed features of a search engine? To fiddle with the semantics of search strings in a way that will work (i.e. bring back the info one wants)?
So here a technical question about search engines (their adaptability) runs closely parallel to a question about the adaptability of disciplines (their concepts, their methods). To what extent is a discipline a program, like a software is a program? What are the features of a discipline that take the writing of that discipline (and its tools) out of the hands of the people who work in it (e.g. tenure pressure, conference structure, peer review...as potentially limiting standards; also gender and race and sexuality and any form of marginalization, tokenization).
Thinking about A. Galloway, how does protocol determine search engines? What is their protocological face? And then can his concept of protocol be adapted to think about rubrics of thoughts, analytics, disciplinary tools? I.e. as a form of power that courses through disciplines, determining their outcomes (Heidegger), influencing what it's possible to think and do within them?
+++
A search engine is a mode of thinking, and therefore, an envelope for thinking. One has to produce thought to form a search string (to try to connect one's wish with what the network contains); but one also takes the results as an input for thought, both toward the production of better search strings in the distant or near future, but also toward the pursuit of whatever task is connected or might be connected to the reason one was searching in the first place.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
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?
[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?
Monday, April 28, 2008
Searching (after talk with Abby B.L.)
There is something optimistic about google searching. The very fact that it's possible makes one feel that an answer is there. Abby sometimes puts in questions that can have no answer (cf. Thomson and Craighead's tea towels) just to go through the feelings of forming the question, then sitting in proximity to the process whereby (albeit with other questions) there might be an answer. Just going through the form of searching, formulating the search, makes it feel as though one is near some possibility.
The point being that search engines seem or promise to put their users in contact with, however attenuated, however frustrating and tangential, some massive set of resources, knowledges, jokes, gossips, images, photographs, news, politics.... I think this probably wasn't true when search engines were new. I remember the dominant feeling being that there MIGHT be info that I need out there, but that I had no idea how to bring it back. I didn't know the idiom, it felt like another language, someone else's language. To feel frustrated, I didn't need to feel that I could find the answer to any question (I don't think I felt that way); I just needed to know that there might be an answer to the specific thing I wanted.
Now, I think it's different. And it's not just all felt as information. It's a massiveness, a repleteness. More entertainment than anyone could way. More knowledge. More facts. More gossip. More politics, More anger and more love and more porn. It's always n+1 to one's imagination and capacity. It's an endlessness of time and materials.
In part [because I just finished reading the Exploit, Thacker and Galloway] this is a network effect, because networks connect, they spread, they move outward, they gather. Search engines put one into contact with a network, allow one to spread out inside a network that they call into being from the larger network, with a search term. The search string conjures that network. It makes it.
Whatever one feels, it's felt in the face of that massiveness: calm, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving, exhilarated, bored, overwhelmed, confused...all felt at the portal to the web. But there is an empirical question here: how do people feel (1.) about their visualization of the web (2.). Do they visualize it as large? As impossibly big? As overwhelming? As containing the total set of anything they'd need? Or as always excluding that set? Excluding JUST that set? I imagine this would influence how people felt about their own search terms, maybe even influence how they formed their searches (e.g. formed to exclude a LOT of stuff right off the bat, i.e. very specific, or, formed to include as much as possible, i.e. very general because one doesn't think a lot will come back).
I could actually try to learn something about this by watching Beacon: i.e. watch for how general the terms are, and how specific. What they are general about (these would be things that, possibly, people don't feel there will be a lot of information about, wishes they feel alone in holding, desires they feel won't be provided by the world), and what they are specific about (the world is replete in resources for fulfilling that wish, reciprocating that desires, so much so that I want to narrow my search, cast smaller the net of my belonging, I don't want to belong to the wider set of all X. With porn, e.g., one might not want ALL the porn, might not want to feel included among a set of all porn, all fetishes, all desires, might feel that their own desire is more particular, maybe even is killed or negated or dampened by the larger set, so the search string is more constrained, one tries to produce a smaller network for oneself, where that network is a form of belonging, the form of belonging for that minute).
To create one's own network with a search string is to create a form of belonging. One might feel that they already belong to X, and the search merely instantiates it (i.e. in an instant of form-making). Or one might feel that they desire to belong to X, and the search string is a vector in that direction. A movement toward some vague something, a feeling, nearness. The writing of the string itself might be this feeling, might create the desired feeling of with-ness. To sit in a room and articulate the desire to oneself and then sit in front of a computer with the intention of forming that desire into words, but not just any words, words that use an imagination for what's our there, for the resources the world brings to one's desire, for how big or how small, for how populated or underpopulated that desire, and then types some words experimentally (knowing you can do it again, re-vise) to see what comes back. To type the search string is to materialize one's imagination for what resources the world/web has to offer one's desire. If one feels that one belongs to some world, the idiom of the search string is a sounding bell, an attempt to send out a sound that returns evidence of some place, some others, some information, some events that feel like what one was looking for.
Not to romanticize it. Not everyone is looking for porn. Sometimes one just wants to know the name of a film long forgotten. One types into google because it's easier than remembering the URL of the IMDB database. Or one doesn't have IMDB bookmarked but they do google. So it's easier and all that's wanted is a single piece of info, something that's driving you crazy. This comes up in social events all the time: the group can't think of something and someone says "google it" or "wikipedia" it. In those situations, one KNOWS the answer is there, but somewhere else, but all around in the sense that, in a city, one is sitting inside a wireless network. More than one at almost all times. It's harder to talk about belonging in these instances. Although...the form of the process is the same. And maybe the way to talk about that repetition, the fact that it's always the same process to type a search string, no matter what you're looking for, is to talk about some search strings connecting one up with one's own memory, experiences, past. The belonging one seeks, in the attempt to type a string that produces the right network, is a re-belonging to one's own experiences (cf. see if Joan Scott resonates here!), one's own memory and past. "I know I saw that," "I know I used to know that," and it will drive me crazy to know that I know but not recall. A search engine here is a relief; it relieves one of the feeling of estrangement from one's own past. I'd rather say it this way than say that search engines are destroying our memories.
And again, the important point for me is that, to the extent that I want to talk about belonging, it's a VERY undramatic form of belonging, sometimes barely there, sometimes barely a feeling. It doesn't have to fill a massive need, a big want; it can just be a momentary thing, even a feeling with no history, no past, no past of unfulfillment, but it also might. A queer in a small town (who wrote this essay that I'm thinking of???) using the internet to be connected to a community of queers (Miranda XXX, who wrote the book about belonging?), to make that community for oneself, to feel connected to sex and to bodies and to feel less alone in one's marginality. This is a kind of now-classic use of the internet to produce forms of belonging that one desires but has no resources for in daily, proximate, geographical life. Life close to home. So one types a search string with the hope of producing a nonce-network, where that network will be partially mimetic (mimetic, but with good surprises) to one's own desire for X, to one's desire for belonging to X, and then sifts the results of what returns. The results are evidence, at first, I'm guessing, not of the failing of the world to return one's desire, to reciprocate with something, but of one's errant language for finding it...
[here a very good example of what Thacker and Galloway mean when they talk about language being so important in network politics]
...so I wonder how many searches one has to type before feeling that it's not their idiom that's the problem, but the world that's the problem, e.g. that there are no foot fetishists in the world, rather than, there are none that I can find? This is an interesting tipping point: where one tips from a focus on one's own capacities for producing belonging for oneself, or finding it, to a focus on the world's resources for providing. Of course, the world here is microcosmed. Just hte net. But it is a microcosm. So it's a small version of, or playing out of the point where one thinks of oneself as the cause for all shortcomings in the world (disciplinarity) in relation to the point where one can start to think of the world as bearing some respoinsibility for those shortfalls (politics). Tipping from "depressed..." to "...it might be political."
The point being that search engines seem or promise to put their users in contact with, however attenuated, however frustrating and tangential, some massive set of resources, knowledges, jokes, gossips, images, photographs, news, politics.... I think this probably wasn't true when search engines were new. I remember the dominant feeling being that there MIGHT be info that I need out there, but that I had no idea how to bring it back. I didn't know the idiom, it felt like another language, someone else's language. To feel frustrated, I didn't need to feel that I could find the answer to any question (I don't think I felt that way); I just needed to know that there might be an answer to the specific thing I wanted.
Now, I think it's different. And it's not just all felt as information. It's a massiveness, a repleteness. More entertainment than anyone could way. More knowledge. More facts. More gossip. More politics, More anger and more love and more porn. It's always n+1 to one's imagination and capacity. It's an endlessness of time and materials.
In part [because I just finished reading the Exploit, Thacker and Galloway] this is a network effect, because networks connect, they spread, they move outward, they gather. Search engines put one into contact with a network, allow one to spread out inside a network that they call into being from the larger network, with a search term. The search string conjures that network. It makes it.
Whatever one feels, it's felt in the face of that massiveness: calm, focused, pragmatic, problem-solving, exhilarated, bored, overwhelmed, confused...all felt at the portal to the web. But there is an empirical question here: how do people feel (1.) about their visualization of the web (2.). Do they visualize it as large? As impossibly big? As overwhelming? As containing the total set of anything they'd need? Or as always excluding that set? Excluding JUST that set? I imagine this would influence how people felt about their own search terms, maybe even influence how they formed their searches (e.g. formed to exclude a LOT of stuff right off the bat, i.e. very specific, or, formed to include as much as possible, i.e. very general because one doesn't think a lot will come back).
I could actually try to learn something about this by watching Beacon: i.e. watch for how general the terms are, and how specific. What they are general about (these would be things that, possibly, people don't feel there will be a lot of information about, wishes they feel alone in holding, desires they feel won't be provided by the world), and what they are specific about (the world is replete in resources for fulfilling that wish, reciprocating that desires, so much so that I want to narrow my search, cast smaller the net of my belonging, I don't want to belong to the wider set of all X. With porn, e.g., one might not want ALL the porn, might not want to feel included among a set of all porn, all fetishes, all desires, might feel that their own desire is more particular, maybe even is killed or negated or dampened by the larger set, so the search string is more constrained, one tries to produce a smaller network for oneself, where that network is a form of belonging, the form of belonging for that minute).
To create one's own network with a search string is to create a form of belonging. One might feel that they already belong to X, and the search merely instantiates it (i.e. in an instant of form-making). Or one might feel that they desire to belong to X, and the search string is a vector in that direction. A movement toward some vague something, a feeling, nearness. The writing of the string itself might be this feeling, might create the desired feeling of with-ness. To sit in a room and articulate the desire to oneself and then sit in front of a computer with the intention of forming that desire into words, but not just any words, words that use an imagination for what's our there, for the resources the world brings to one's desire, for how big or how small, for how populated or underpopulated that desire, and then types some words experimentally (knowing you can do it again, re-vise) to see what comes back. To type the search string is to materialize one's imagination for what resources the world/web has to offer one's desire. If one feels that one belongs to some world, the idiom of the search string is a sounding bell, an attempt to send out a sound that returns evidence of some place, some others, some information, some events that feel like what one was looking for.
Not to romanticize it. Not everyone is looking for porn. Sometimes one just wants to know the name of a film long forgotten. One types into google because it's easier than remembering the URL of the IMDB database. Or one doesn't have IMDB bookmarked but they do google. So it's easier and all that's wanted is a single piece of info, something that's driving you crazy. This comes up in social events all the time: the group can't think of something and someone says "google it" or "wikipedia" it. In those situations, one KNOWS the answer is there, but somewhere else, but all around in the sense that, in a city, one is sitting inside a wireless network. More than one at almost all times. It's harder to talk about belonging in these instances. Although...the form of the process is the same. And maybe the way to talk about that repetition, the fact that it's always the same process to type a search string, no matter what you're looking for, is to talk about some search strings connecting one up with one's own memory, experiences, past. The belonging one seeks, in the attempt to type a string that produces the right network, is a re-belonging to one's own experiences (cf. see if Joan Scott resonates here!), one's own memory and past. "I know I saw that," "I know I used to know that," and it will drive me crazy to know that I know but not recall. A search engine here is a relief; it relieves one of the feeling of estrangement from one's own past. I'd rather say it this way than say that search engines are destroying our memories.
And again, the important point for me is that, to the extent that I want to talk about belonging, it's a VERY undramatic form of belonging, sometimes barely there, sometimes barely a feeling. It doesn't have to fill a massive need, a big want; it can just be a momentary thing, even a feeling with no history, no past, no past of unfulfillment, but it also might. A queer in a small town (who wrote this essay that I'm thinking of???) using the internet to be connected to a community of queers (Miranda XXX, who wrote the book about belonging?), to make that community for oneself, to feel connected to sex and to bodies and to feel less alone in one's marginality. This is a kind of now-classic use of the internet to produce forms of belonging that one desires but has no resources for in daily, proximate, geographical life. Life close to home. So one types a search string with the hope of producing a nonce-network, where that network will be partially mimetic (mimetic, but with good surprises) to one's own desire for X, to one's desire for belonging to X, and then sifts the results of what returns. The results are evidence, at first, I'm guessing, not of the failing of the world to return one's desire, to reciprocate with something, but of one's errant language for finding it...
[here a very good example of what Thacker and Galloway mean when they talk about language being so important in network politics]
...so I wonder how many searches one has to type before feeling that it's not their idiom that's the problem, but the world that's the problem, e.g. that there are no foot fetishists in the world, rather than, there are none that I can find? This is an interesting tipping point: where one tips from a focus on one's own capacities for producing belonging for oneself, or finding it, to a focus on the world's resources for providing. Of course, the world here is microcosmed. Just hte net. But it is a microcosm. So it's a small version of, or playing out of the point where one thinks of oneself as the cause for all shortcomings in the world (disciplinarity) in relation to the point where one can start to think of the world as bearing some respoinsibility for those shortfalls (politics). Tipping from "depressed..." to "...it might be political."
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