De Montaigne’s “On Liars”

Michel de Montaigne
“On Liars”
Area: History of Memory and Memory Studies
•    Considering how necessary it is, Plato was right in calling memory a great and powerful goddess-in my country
•    They can see no difference between memory and intellect.
•    But they wrong me, for experience shows that, on the contrary, excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.
•    For lack of memory is an intolerable defect in anyone who takes on the burden of the world’s affairs.
•    Again, my speech is consequently briefer, for the storehouse of the memory is generally better stocked with material than that of the invention. If my memory had been good, I should have deafened all my friends with my chatter, since any subject that calls out such powers as I have of argument and development warms and extends my eloquence.
•    Particularly dangerous are old men who retain the memory of past events but do not remember how often they have repeated them.
•    Not without reason is it said that no one who is not conscious of having a sound memory should set up to be a liar.
•    If liars make a complete invention, they apparently have much less reason to be afraid of tripping up, inasmuch as there is no contrary impression to clash with their fiction. But even this, being an empty thing that offers no hold, readily escapes from the memory unless it is a very reliable one.

Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900

Friedrich Kittler
Discourse Networks: 1800/1900
Area: History of Rhetoric and Memory Studies
From Thomas Sebastian’s Review
•    The book is “‘thoroughly informed by post-structuralism’” but especially because it avoids a discussion of post-structuralist theory altogether, engaging instead in a radical application of its practice.
•    Post-hermeneutics: a criticism that “stops making sense”
•    “Discourse analysis, he argues, must be transformed into an ‘archaeology of the present’ by considering the material and technical conditions that permit discourse storage in the first place.”
•    “It follows that the status of literary texts is also determined by what one might calls this technicist perspective:
o    Discourse analyses…have to be materialistic.  An elementary datum is the fact that literature (whatever else it might mean to readers) processes, stores, and transmits data, and that such operations in the age-old medium of the alphabet have the same technical positivity as they do in computers.”
•    “As a result Kittler takes the fictive content of literary texts at face value as though the projections of a literary text are tantamount to eh historical reality from whci it emerges.”
•    “The epochally inopertune is thus excluded by the fable of two mutually exclusive historical orders.  Their relationship, determined by a categorical paradigm clearly recognizable as a construct, is based on a simple oppositional series: 1900 is to 1800 as signifier to signified, writing to speech, insanity to sanity, untranslatability to translatability, anarchy to state, outside to inside.  Kittler’s history describes the inversion of one order unto the other.”
•    “Kittler advances ‘woman’ somewhat crudely as a ‘presignifying talking machine’ in order to conceive of literature around 1800 as a recording system in the sense of technical medium.  ‘Woman,’ however, does not refer to ‘the women’ around 1800 as historical individuals, but rather those ‘mothers’ who Kittler believes to have discovered in the metaphoricity of literary, philosophical and pedagogical texts of that time as the instance which, according to Lacan, ‘causes speech but does not itself speak.’”
•    “A shift was made form learning complete words and phrases to the phonetic approach of oralizing the consonants and syllables of the alphabet. But the success of this ‘coercive act of alphabetizing’ was not merely initiated by a pedagogical shift to phonetics in High German orthography but rather, according to Kittler, because this measure was associated with the body of ‘biographical’ mothers.”
•    “’Man’—a word not simply problematic, but one that has become utterly devoid of content for Kittler—is a machine in a larger complex of machines […]  The principle governing this universe is energy consumption or ‘exhaustion.’ Just as machines ultimately break down and wear out, so, too, does Man as machine.”
•    “For Kittler, translating around 1900 is no longer the translating of signifieds (as he claims it was in 1800), but is instead simply based on relationships between signifiers.  Kittler calls these interlinear translations ‘transpositions of media’; he presumably uses this term in order to metaphorically rule out all doubt that this transposition of media is still a hermeneutical procedure.”
•    “Kittler thinks of technology merely as a technical apparatuses in their empirical facticity and not, like Foucault, as a function of knowledge.  And Kittler does not recognize that if he replaces language by technologies—conceived of as such empirical apparatuses—then everything that Foucault says about language holds true precisely for technology.”
•    “As Heidegger, for example, would argue, this is precisely an anthropological definition of technology, namely technology as man’s supplementing instrument, since man has been considered a zoon technocon since Aristotle at the latest.”

Stengers’ Power and Invention

Isabelle Stengers

Power and Invention: Situating Science

Area: Digital Media

Foreword ( by Bruno Latour)

·                    “Stengers looks for a touchstone distinguishing good science from bad not in epistemology, but in ontology.”

·                    The modern tradition in anthropology and science studies is to study “up” not “down”

·                    Modify our definition of science: not to look at the limits of human representation but the world’s ways of marking these limits

·                    What is a science? (Contra our class discussions on what is a rhetoric of science)

·                    CC: “cosmopolitically” correct

·                    The world is not outside, the mind is not inside

·                    Distinction: not between true and false statements, but between well-constructed and badly-constructed propositions

·                                Proposition: (opposite a statement) includes the world in a certain state                          and could be called an event (Deleuze)

·                                A  construction is not a representation form the mind or dorm the society                                   about a thing, an object, a matter of fact, but the engagement of a certain                                    type of collective

Xi: “First, a world outside untouched by human hands and impervious to human history; second, a mind isolated inside its own mind striving to gain an access to an absolute certainly about the laws of the world outside; third, a political world down there, clearly distinct from the world outside and the mind inside, which is agitated by fads and passions, flares of violence and eruptions of desires, collective phenomena that can be quieted down only by bringing in the universal laws of science, in the same way that a fire can be extinguished only by water, foam, and sand thrown form above; and fourth, a sort of position ‘up there’ that serves as a warrant for the clear separation of the three spheres above, a view from  nowhere that is occupied either by the God on ancient religions or in recent times by a more reliable an watchful figure, that of the physicist-God who took upon himself—it is definitely a he!—to make sure that there are always enough laws of physics to stop humans from behaving irrationally.”

Xiii: “The mind is not an isolated language-bearer place in the impossible double bind of having to find absolute truth while it has been cut off from all the connections that would have allowed it to be relatively sure—and not absolutely certain—of its many relations.  It is a body, an ethological body, or to use Deleuze’s expression, a ‘habit of thought.’”

Xiv: “Constructivism, for Stengers, is not a word that would have an antonym.  It is not, for instance, the opposite of realism.  Thus, constructivism is the opposite of a pair of positions: the twin ones obtained after the bifurcation, as Whitehead says, between world and word.  In this way, ‘social construction’ is not a branch of constructivism, but the denegation of any construction, a denegation as thorough as that of realist philosophers.”

Xv: “The same principle strikes twice with the opposite result: once should not eliminate from a discipline what constitutes its main source of uncertainties and risk, reversible time in the case of nonhuman phenomena, susceptibility to influence in the case of human phenomena.”

Chapter Nine: Who is the Author?

·                  “Any definition, we will say, is a fiction, tied to an author”

·                  Who is the author of the fiction concerning the movement of bodies that Galileo opposes to Aristotelian science?

·                  The “author” would then be an abstraction

·                  Authors, in the medieval sense, are those whose texts can act as an authority

·                              Scientists recognize nature as the only authority

·                  When an experimental fact is accepted, in the very process of its acceptance, a new question, a new history begins

155:  “An absurdity is not a contradiction.  Absurdity relates to the idea of rationality that would establish, in one way or another, a common meeting ground for human reason and the reasons nature obeys, in such a way that rational argumentation is able to claim the power of distinguishing between the possible and the impossible, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the thinkable and the unthinkable.”

160:  “Thus one can see in the modern sciences that the invention of an original practice of attributing the title of author, playing on two meanings that it opposes; the author, as an individual animated by intentions, projects, and ambitions, and the author acting as authority.”

160: “Every scientist knows that both he and his colleagues are ‘authors’ in the first sense of the term and that this does not matter.  What does matter is that his colleagues be constrained to recognize that they cannot turn this title of author into an argument against hum, that they cannot localize the flaw that would allow them to affirm that the one who ‘claims to have made nature speak’ has in fact spoken in its place.”

160-1:  “The question is to know if this title of author can be ‘forgotten,’ if the statement can be detached form the one who held it and be taken up by others from the moment that they welcome into their laboratory the experimental apparatus whose meaning is given by this detached statement.”

 

Burnett’s How Images Think

Ron Burnett

How Images Think

Area: Digital Media

Introduction

·                  MRIs and image quality: many issues arise in the relationship between images and diagnosis

·                  Middle space: combines the virtual and the real into an environment of visualization that has the potential to displace conventional notions of subjectivity

Xiv: “How Images Think explores the rich intersections of image creation, production, and communication within this context of debate about the mind and human consciousness.  In addition, the book examines cultural discourses about images and the impact of the digital revolution on the use of images in the communications process.”

Xviii: “However, a great deal of intelligence is being programmed into technologies and devices that use images as their main form of interaction and communications.  The screens that mediate the relationships humans have to the technologies that surround them have become increasingly sophisticated both in texture and detail as well as in content and what can and cannot be done with them.  I use the term image to refer to the complex set of interactions that constitute everyday life within image-worlds.”

Chapter 6: Humans—–Machines

·                  Rather than thinking about human and machine as a collapse, think of it as a convergence

·                  Computers have the capacity to talk to each other

·                  What do “listen” and “talk” mean with computer-computer communication?

·                  Humans transform machines into surrogates

125: “Communications networks to some degree are about autonomous relationships developed and maintained by machines with connections that are generally sustained without too much human intervention.  Of course, machines do not literally speak to each other.  They do communicate although the assumption is that humans mediate the interchange.  However, a great deal takes place that is not governed by humans even if they may have been the progenitors of the interaction.”

126: Can a machine feel pain? “On the one hand, computers are related to as if they have no bodies. On the other hand, when a hard disk crashes and wipes out its ‘memories,’ it also takes something from the humans who may have used it.”

Chapter 8: Computer Games and the Aesthetics of Human and Nonhuman Interaction

·                  There is intelligence in the game, but the question is does the game know?

·                  Technology has always been mapped into and onto human bodies

·                              And…human bodies have always been mapped into and onto technology

·                  Customization is the game

·                  Even though open source may be messy, writing code appears to be the most concrete of activities

·                  When playing video games, there are actually very few choices.  The “trick” to winning is to figure out the limitations

170: “The computer is a trope, a part-for-whole-figure, for a world of actors and actants and not a Thing Acting Alone.  Computers cause nothing, but the human and nonhuman hybrids troped by the figure of the information machine remake worlds.” (Haraway)

171: “Latour suggests that machines and humans form a collective and are continuously acting together in an associative chain of relationships that is only interrupted as people move to different levels of complexity in the process.”

175:  “Current frameworks for developing technological products reflect a limited conception of their role.  In designing such a product, the emphasis is placed on what can be preconceived about its use, as expressed in its functional specification, its optimization to meet specific functional needs, and the evaluation of its performance by predetermined metrics.  This perspective on design is not sufficient to address the agenda of cognitive technology; it takes too little account of the interaction between a technology, its users, and its environment.” (Beynon)

177: “When an individual says something to a friend and he or she responds, there is not direct way to fully comprehend all the intentions that governed the communication.  Instead, both parties agree by convention, habit, and the desire to understand each other that, to a certain degree, the gaps between them will not affect the content f the exchange.  Although the gaps are present, they are part of the process.  Awareness of the gaps, however, pulls the process of communications into a netacommunication, where individuals must develop an awareness of what works and what doesn’t.  They also have to be aware of the constraints that the gaps introduce into every part of the exchange.  It is the combination of exchange, awareness, and communications that produces additional spaces of interaction and conversation—these are third spaces that can only be examined by looking at all parts of the exchange.” (Bateson)