Weinstone’s Avatar Bodies

Ann Weinstone
Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism
Area: Digital Media
From Robert Pepperell’s Review
•    “Posthumanism thus far has focused nearly exclusively on human-technology relations.”
•    Technology is often cast as a greedy and acquisitive external force, gradually gnawing away at the core of what it is to be human.
•    “Ann Weinstone largely avoids this problem, preferring to develop instead a posthumanism of human-human relations in which the rupture between selves–between one human and another–is abrogated: “In order to create the conditions for the emergence of a nonexemptive, nonelitist ethics . . . we will have to give up our reliance on concepts of the radically other, or the other as such” (p. 14).
•    a poetic iteration of the word ‘post’, with its dual associations of ‘coming after’ (as in posthuman) and as a form of communication (as in the postal service) manages to connect the renunciation of what has gone before and the ethics of personal communication (p. 185).
•    “If we want to fundamentally alter our experience and conception of self, we must break the law of the other, the law of the alien, the irremediably unfamiliar, of exteriority (or interiority) as such. We need to get drunk with each other so we can become posthuman (p. 107).
•    a doctrine of absolute undifference is unsustainable in the longer term since it contradicts habitual experience, which consists of an infinite series of differentiations embedded in our conscious state of being
•    “I am proposing, then, as a gesture that would invite a posthuman ethics to come, a commitment to an every day practice of writing in relationship via e-mail relations with those we have never met” (p. 206).
•    That we are not humans on our own, but become human through our intimate relations with others–what Weinstone calls our “entanglement” (p. 217).
From Kathryn Farley’s Review
•    Weinstone’s mode of inquiry stresses the interconnected nature of human relations in which notions of the self are inextricably tied to understandings of “otherness”. In fact, she interrogates the self/other binary classification, stating: “I am concerned with events that suspend the terms self and other and with the ethical consequences that flow from these events-in-common” (27).  She then goes on to cite trauma, pleasure love, devotion, illness and inebriation as examples of such events.

Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age

Allucquère Rosanne Stone

The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age

Area: Digital Media

·      Root v. Floating identity

·      In the absence of a prosthetic, Hawking’s intellect becomes a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it

·      The machine can only respond to an on-off situation (i.e. mouse click)

·      Interaction: mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both participants, usually working toward the same goal (Lippman)

·      Five corollaries of interaction

o       Mutual interuptibility: each participant must be able to interrupt each other mutually and simultaneously

o       Graceful degradation: unanswerable question must be handled in a way that doesn’t halt the conversation

o       Limited look-ahead: Limit to how much the shape of the conversation can be anticipated by either party

o       No-default: no preplanned path—must develop fully in the interaction

o       Impression of an infinite database: an immersive interactional world should give the illusion of not being much more limiting in the choices it offers than an actual world would be

2: “That’s well and good, but still more people take some primary subject position for granted.  When pressed, they may give lip service to the idea that perhaps even their current ‘root’ persona is also a mask, but nobody really believes it. For all intents and purposes, your ‘root’ persona is you.  Take that one away, and there’s nobody home.”

7: “Further, what was being sent bask and forth over the wires wasn’t just information, it was bodies.  The majority of people assume that erotics implies bodies; a body is part of the idea of erotic interaction and its concomitants, and the erotic sensibilities are mobilized and organized around the idea of a physical body which is the seat of the whole thing.  The sex workers’ descriptions were invariably and quite directly about physical bodies and what they were doing or what was being done to them”

Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts

Vivian Sobchack

Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

Area: Digital Media

Introduction

·                  Embodied existence ‘in the flesh’ lays the concrete foundations for a materialist – rather than idealist – understanding of aesthetics and ethics

·                  The body and consciousness is an irreducible ensemble

1: “The major theme of Carnal Thoughts is the embodiment and radically material nature of human existence and thus the lived body’s essential implication in making ‘meaning’ out of bodily ‘sense.”

2: “The focus here is on what it is to live one’s body, not merely look at bodies—although vision, visuality, and visibility are as central to the subjective dimensions of embodied existence as they are to its objective dimensions.  In sum, the essays in CT foreground embodiment—that is, the lived body as, at once, both an objective subject and a subjective object: a sentient, sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities and agency that literally and figurally makes sense of, and to, both ourselves and others.”

2:  “Don Idhe characterizes existential phenomenology as “a philosophical style that emphasizes a certain interpretation of human experience and that, in particular, concerns perception and bodily activity.”

3: “Contemporary scholars tend to ‘study the body and its transformations while still taking embodiment for granted,’ but ‘this distinction between the body as either an empirical thing or analytical theme, and embodiment as the existential ground of culture and self is critical.’ Hence the need to turn our attention from the body to embodiment.”

Chapter 5: Susie Scribbles: On Technology, Techne, and Writing

·                  Today we write with technologies we differently incorporate into our bodies and our experience of writing

·                  Five key features that inform activity and production of writing

à           Directness: suspension in time and directness in space

à           Uniformity: whether letters are shaped by hand or pre-formed

à           Speed: potential speed of transcription relative to other tools

à           Linearity: the extent to which the tool allows the user to jump around in a text

à           Boundedness: limits on the frame size of a particular writing and reading surface

·           Pen and ink are more thoughtful—the marking is a permanent commitment

à           Not so much technologically challenged as temporally challenged

110: “Which is to say that writing is as much about mattering as it is about meaning.  Making things matter, however, requires both a technology and a technique.”

111:  “These five features all ‘relate to the handling of space and time both by the tool and by the writer, and, since, as phenomenologists argue, such relationships are fundamental to our structuring of experience, it is hardly surprising that they may be experienced as transforming influences.”

132:  “Heidegger reminds us, technology consists not merely of objective tools, nor is technique merely their objective application.  ‘Technology is…no mere means,’ he tells us.  ‘Technology is a way of revealing.’ Thus, he returns us to the Greek notion of techne: ‘the name not only for the activities and the skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts.  Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.  Furthermore, techne is a way and manner of knowing.  Making, bringing forth, and revealing are integral not only the existence of matter but also to why and how some ‘thing’ is known and understood as ‘mattering.’”

Levy’s Becoming Virtual

Pierre Levy

Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age

Area: Digital Media

Introduction

·        Virtuality is the process of humanity’s ‘becoming other’—it is heterogenesis

à      Analyze the process of transformation from one more of being to another

Chapter One: The Nature of Virtualization

·        Reality: “I’ve got it”

·        Virtuality: “You’ll get it”

·        Possible v. Virtual

à      Possible: Already fully constituted, but exists in limbo

·        Virtualization is the movement of actualization in reverse

28: “However, the fact of not being associated with any ‘there,’ of clinging to an unassignable space (the one in which telephone conversations take place?), of occurring only between things that are clearly situated, or of not being only ‘there’ (like any thinking being)—none of this prevents us from existing.”

Chapter Three: The Virtualization of the Text

·        Relationship between writing (intellectual technology) and memory (cognitive function)

à      Memory—virtualization: the partial detachment of a living body, sharing, heterogenesis

·        Writing desynchronizes and delocalizes

·        When reading on a screen, the extensive presence that precedes the act of reading has disappeared

à      Digital media doesn’t contain text that can be read by a human being

·        Digital Storage = potentialization

·        Display =  realization

·        The computer is a means for potentializing information

50: “Yet, having enabled us to conceive of memory as a kind of record, it has transformed the face of Mnemosyne.  The semi-objectivation of memory in the text has helped promote the development of a critical tradition.  In effect, writing creates distance between knowledge and its subject.  It is most likely because I am no longer that which I know that I am able to question my knowledge.”

Chapter Four: The Virtualization of the Economy

·        Knowledge has an increasingly shorter lifespan

·        Why is the consumption of information not destructive, and why is the possession of information not exclusive?

75: “Actualization is not an act of destruction but, on the contrary, an inventive act of production, and act of creation. When I use information, when I interpret it, connect it with other information to create meaning or help make a decision, I actualize it.  In doing so I accomplish a creative act, a productive act.  Knowledge is the product of apprenticeship, the result of a virtualization of immediate experience.”

78: “There are two possible methods of increasing the efficiency of labor: (1) reification of labor power through automation; or (2) virtualization of skills using means that augment collective intelligence.”

Hansen’s Bodies in Code

Mark B.N. Hansen
Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
Area: Digital Media
Preface
•    Bodies in code: a term designating embodiment as it is necessarily distributed beyond the skin in the context of contemporary technics
Ix: “My explicit aim is to show how Merleau-Ponty’s final ontology of the flesh, with its postulation of a fundamental indifference between body and world, requires a technics—a theory of the originary technicity of the human.  Because the human is essentially a being distributed into nonoverlapping sensory interfaces with the world, it is characterized by a certain ‘gap’ or ‘divide- by what Merleau-Ponty calls an ecart.  As I show, the most primordial form of this ecart is the transduction between embodiment and specularity, the transduction that informs the emergence of the visual from primordial tactility.  This transduction (a relations that is primary with respect to its terms) is an instance (indeed, it is the protoinstance) of the inherence of technics within embodied life.”
Intro
•    The virtual now denotes a space full of information that can be activated, revealed, reorganized, and recombined, added to and transformed as the user navigates ewal space
•    Motor activity—not representationalist verisimilitude—holds the key to flux and functional crossings between the virtual and physical realms
•    The first generational model of VR as a disembodied hyperspace free of all material constraints simply no longer has any purchase in our world
•    The priority (or the ‘superiority’) of the analog: always on arrival a transformative feeling of the outside, a feeling of thought (Massumi)
o    Outside coming in
o    The analog creates reality out of forms or mixing realms, out of transformations
•    All reality is mixed reality
•    Theory has become almost simply coextensive with the claim (Sedgwick and Frank)
•    What makes the passage from one realm to another so seamless, so unnoticeable, so believable?
•    Blindspot (the photo montage of the parts of the body the artist cannot see) recognizes the inescapability of a cofunctioning of ‘natural’ perception and technically extend perception
•    Across the virtual body our culture constructs its own body image
•    Rigid Waves: the ‘mirror’ art—movement creates distortion, proximity shatters the image
•    To think of the body as a body-in-code is to think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with
3: “Natural three dimension” demotes a more immersive, data-rich visual simulation.  In contrast, for Krueger, ‘natural formation’ means information produced through an extension of our natural—that is, embodied, perceptuomotor—interface with the world.”
3: “The development of 3-D simulations puts us in touch with out most primative perceptual capacities: ‘the human interface is evolving toward more natural information.  3-D space is more, not less, intuitive then 2-D space…3-D space is what we evolved to understand.  It is more primitive, not more advanced 9than two-dimensional space].”
4: “First, the mixed reality paradigm radically reconfigures a trait that has characterized VR from its proto origin as the representationalist fantasy par excellence: namely, a desire for complete convergence with natural perception.  This trait serves to distinguish it from all discrete image media, including cinema, which as underscored by Gilles Deleuze’s correction of Bergson’s criticism of the ‘cinematic illusion,’ function by breaking with natural perception.”
4: “Atonion Damasio’s analogy for consciousness: if consciousness can be likened to a ‘movie-in-the-brain’ with no external spectator, then VR would comprise something like a move-outside-the-brain, again, importantly, with no external spectator.”
5:  “Rather than conceiving the virtual as a total technical simulacrum and as the opening of a fully immersive, self-contained fantasy world, the mixed reality paradigm treats it as simply one more realm among others that can be accessed through embodied perception or enaction (Varela).  In this way, emphasis falls less on the content of the virtual than on the means of access to it, less on what is perceived in the world than on how it comes to be perceived in the first place.”
8:  “Mixed reality specifies how ‘media determine our situation’ (following Kittler’s media-theoretical deepening of Foucault’s epistemo-transcendental historiography), it does so in a way that foregrounds, not, (as in Kittler) the autonomy of the technical, but precisely its opposite: the irreducible bodily or analog basis of experience which, we must add, has always been conditioned by a technical dimension and has always occurred as a cofunctioning of embodiment with technics.”
12:  “The social-technical-psychological condition of psychasthenia, meaning ‘a state in which the space defined by the coordinates of the organism’s body is confused with represented space’”
20:  “Such a technical mediation of the body schema (of the scope of body environment coupling) comprises what I propose to calls a body-in-code.  By this I do not mean a purely informational body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body.  I mean a body submitted to and constituted by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization—a body whose embodiment is realized, and can only be realized in conjunction with technics.”

Castells’ The Information Age

Manuel Castells
The Information Age: vols. 1-3
Area: Digital Media
From Felix Stadler’s Review
•    Castells’ main argument is that a new form of capitalism has emerged at the end of this century: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. It is challenged around the globe by a multitude of social movements on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their own lives and environment.
•    This tension provides the central dynamic of the Information Age, as “our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self” (1996, p. 3).
•    The Net stands for the new organizational formations based on the pervasive use of networked communication media. Network patterns are characteristic for the most advanced economic sectors, highly competitive corporations as well as for communities and social movements.
•    The Self symbolizes the activities through which people try to reaffirm their identities under the conditions of structural change and instability that go along with the organization of core social and economic activities into dynamic networks.
•    Transformations amongst the trilogy
o    First: Changing relationships of production
o    Second: relationships of power and experience: crisis of the nation-state
o    Third: ties together the loose ends
•    Technology and society can’t be understood or represented without its technological tools
•    Rather than seeing identity as an effect, as a traditional Marxist would, he argues the opposite: identity-building itself is a dynamic motor in forming society
•    “A new society emerges when and if a structural transformation can be observed in the relationships of production, in the relationships of power, and in the relationships of experience” (1998, p. 340).
•    The first assumption structures Castells’ account of the rise of the Net: the dialectical interaction of social relations and technological innovation, or, in Castells’ terminology, modes of production and modes of development.
•    The second assumption underlies the importance of the Self: the way social groups define their identity shapes the institutions of society. As Castells notes “each type of identity-building process leads to a different outcome in constituting society” (1997, p. 8).
•    A society produces its goods and services in specific social relationships–the modes of production.
o    Since the industrial revolution, the prevalent mode of production in Western societies has been capitalism, embodied in a wide range of historically and geographically specific institutions to create and distribute profit.
o    The modes of development, on the other hand, “are the technological arrangements through which labor acts upon matter to generate the product, ultimately determining the level and the quality of the surplus” (1996, p. 16).
•    Identity is defined as “the process of construction of meaning on the basis of a cultural attribute, or related set of cultural attributes, that is/are given priority over other sources of meaning” (1997, p. 6).
•    Castells concludes that information technology evolves in a distinctively different pattern than previous technologies, thus constituting the “informational mode of development”: a flexible, pervasive, integrated and reflexive, rather than additive evolution. The reflexivity of the technologies, the fact that any product is also raw material because both are information, has permitted the speeding up of the process of innovation.
•    This new economy is informational because the competitiveness of its central actors (firms, regions, or nations) depends on their ability to generate and process electronic information. It is global because its most important aspects, from financing to production, are organized on a global scale, directly through multinational corporations and/or indirectly through networks of associations.
•    Rather than creating the same conditions everywhere, the global economy is characterized “by its interdependence, its asymmetry, its regionalization, the increased diversification within each region, its selective inclusiveness, its exclusionary segmentation, and, as a result of all those features, an extraordinarily variable geometry that tends to dissolve historical, economic geography” (1996, p. 106).
•    Its most distinct result is the emergence of what Castells calls the space of flows: the integrated global network. It comprises several connected elements: private networks, company Intranets; semi-public, closed and proprietary networks such as the financial networks; and public, open networks, the Internet. Social organizations reconstitute themselves according to this space of flows.
o    Technology: the infrastructure of the network.
o    Places: the topology of the space formed by its nodes and hubs.
o    People: the (relatively) secluded space of the managerial elite commanding the networks,
•    The space of flows has introduced a culture of real virtuality which is characterized by timeless time and placeless space.
•    Binary time expresses no sequence but knows only two states: either presence or absence, either now or never.
o    Within the space of flows everything that is the case is now, and everything that is not must be introduced from the outside: that is, it springs suddenly into existence.
•    Sequence is arbitrary in the space of flows and disorders events which in the physical context are connected by a chronological sequence.
•    Binary space, then, is a space where the distance can only be measured as two states: zero distance (inside the network) or infinite distance (outside the network), here or nowhere.
•    Power is concentrated in the intricate space of flows, to the extent that “the power of flows takes precedence over the flows of power” (1996, p. 469).
•    The classic embodiment of legitimizing identity, the nation state, is losing its power, “although, and this is essential, not its influence” (1997, p. 243).
•    Trapped between the increased articulation of diverse, often conflicting identities and the need to act on a global scene, the traditional democratic institutions–the civil society–are being voided of meaning and legitimacy: they lose their identity. The power of the political democracy, ironically at the moment when it reaches almost global acceptance, seems to be inevitably waning.

Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer

N. Katherine Hayles
My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
Area: Digital Media
Preface: Computing Kin
•    Materiality—construction of matter that matter for human meaning
•    The complex dynamics through which the Computational universe works simultaneously as a means and metaphor in technical and artistic practices
•    Intermediation = complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media
o    The posthuman will be understood as effects of media
2: “’Postbiological’ future: the expectation that the corporeal embodiment that has always functioned to define the limits of the human will in the future become optional, as humans find ways to upload their consciousness into computers and leave their bodies behind.”
4: “In the contemporary period, reading as ‘hallucination’ has been displaced in part by the instant messaging, chat rooms, video games, e-mail, and Web surfing that play such a a large role in young people’s experiences.  To an extent, then, the mother’s voice that haunted reading has been supplanted by  another set of stimuli: the visual, audio, kinesthetic, and haptic cues emanating from the computer.  If the mother’s voice was the link connecting subjectivity with writing, humans with natural environments, then the computer’s beeps, clicks, and tones are the links connecting contemporary subjectivities to electronic environments, humans to the Computational Universe.”
Chapter 1: Intermediation: Textuality and the Regimes of Computation
•    Comparison of speech, writing, and code
•    Code: synecdoche for information
•    Emergence
o    25: “This term refers to properties that do not in here in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components.”
22: “Even if code is not originally ontological, it becomes so through these recursive feedback loops.  In Wetwares, Richard Doyle makes a similar observation about the belief that we will someday be able to upload our consciousness into computers and thereby effectively achieve immortality.  Doyle comments, ‘’Uploading,’ the desire to be wetware, makes possible a new technology of the self, one fractured by the exteriority of the future….Uploading seems to install discursive, material, and social mechanism for the anticipation of an externalized self, a techno-social mutation that is perhaps best characterized as a new capacity to be affected by, addicted to, the future.”
33: “’Remediation’ has the disadvantage of locating the starting for the cycles in a particular locality and medium, whereas ‘intermediation’ is more faithful to the spirit of multiple causality in emphasizing interactions among media.”
33: “I want to expand its denotations to include interactions between systems of representations, particularly language and code, as well as interactions between modes of representation, particularly analog and digital.  Perhaps most importantly, ‘intermediation’ also denotes mediating interfaces connecting humans with the intelligent machines that are our collaborators in making, storing, and transmitting informational processes and objects.”
Chapter 4: Translating Media
•    If the text is stored accurately on a second storage medium, the text remains the same though the signs for it are different
o    Braille v. Print versions: the text is the same but the sensory input is very different
•    “The materiality of an embodied text is the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies.”
101: “With electronic texts there is a conceptual distinction—and often an actualized one—between storage and delivery vehicles, whereas with print the storage and delivery vehicles are one and the same.  With electronic texts, the data files may be on one server and the machine creating the display may be in another location entirely, which means that electronic text exists as a distributed phenomenon. The dispersion introduces many possible sources of variation into the production of electronic text that do not exist in the same way with print, for example, when a user’s browser displays a text with different colors than those the writer say on her machine when she was creating it.”
102: “Certainly the time lag is an important component of the electronic text, for it determines in what order the user will view the material.  Indeed, as anyone who has grown impatient with long load times knows, in many instances it determines whether the user will see the image at all.  These times are difficult to predict precisely because they depend on the individual computer’s processing speed, traffic on the Web, efficiency of data distribution on the hard drive, and other imponderables.  This aspect of electronic textuality—along with many others—cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.”

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)

Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual

Brian Massumi
Parable for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation
Area: Digital Media
Intro: Concrete is as Concrete Doesn’t
•    Body: it moves, it feels
•    Body – (movement/sensation) – change
•    Body as sight of resistance—signifying gestures can also unmake sense by scrambling significations already in place
•    There is “displacement,” but no transformation.  The body simply leaps from one definition to the next
•    Abstract: never present in position, only ever in passing
•    Incorporeal dimension of the body
•    Positionality is an emergent quality of movement
o    “passing into” and “emerging” aren’t binarisms—they’re dynamic unites
•    Difference between social determinism and sociality
•    Habit is an acquired automatic self-regulation—it resides in the flesh
o    Cultural? Natural?
•    The feeling of having a feeling is the “perception of perception” (Liebniz)
o    Occurs without characters and therefore memory does also
o    Wait…memory, sensations, and perceptions occurring without ‘characters’? Without determinate form or content?—what is memory without content?
•    Just “pastness”? –but this would make the past contemporary to the present of sensation and perception
•    Spinoza: body as relations of movement and rest: the capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest—power to affect or be affected
•    Massumi takes seriously the idea that writing in the humanities can be affirmative or inventive (experimentation)
•    When you uproot a concept from its network of systematic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility
o    Connectiblity without the system
4: “Even though many of the approaches in question characterize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in indirectly: as mediated.  Matter, movement, body, sensation.  Multiple mediated miss.”
4: “When a body is in motion, in does not coincide with itself.  It coincides with its own transition: its own variation.  The range of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through.  In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary.  That relation, to borrow a phrase from Gilles Deleuze, is real but abstract.”
10: “The retrospective ordering enables precise operations to be inserted along the way, in anticipation of a repetition of the movement—the possibility that it will come again.  If the movement does reoccur, it can be captured.  It comes to a different end.  At that terminus, its momentum may be diverted into a new movement. The back-formation of a path is not only a ‘retrospection.’  It is a retroduction: a production, by feedback, of new movements.  A dynamic unity has been retrospectively captured and qualitatively converted.”
12: “Perhaps ‘productivism’ would be better than constructivism because it connotes emergence.  ‘Inventionism’ wouldn’t be going too far, for even if you take nature in the narrowest sense, it has to be admitted that its inventive in its own right.  There is a word for this: evolution.  There is no reason not to use the same word for the prolongation of ‘natural’ processes of change in the emergent domain of ‘culture.’ Is a constructivist evolutionism conceivable? An evolutionary constructivism?
21: “Aside from that, poaching a scientific concept in no way prevents it from continuing to function it its home environment.  It’s not a zero-sum game.  It’s additive.  The concept still belongs to the culture of science but has also been naturalized into the humanities.”
Chapter 1: Autonomy of Affect (pagination from Cultural Critique)
•    The affective is marked by the gap between content and effect
•    Depth reactions are associated with expectation, which depends on positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity
o    How does this differ from Gadamer??
o    They are conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another.  Intensity is beside that loop, a non-conscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder
•    Intensity will be equated with affect
•    Emotion and affect—if affect is intensity
o    Follows different logics and pertain to different orders
•    Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed (free will experiment)
•    The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual
•    Deleuze: question of emergence—two sided—actual and virtual
•    The entire field (the universe) is limited and infinite
•    The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual
o    Its autonomy is its openness
86: When on the other hand it doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something to it in the way of meaningful progression-in this case a sense of futurity, expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression-then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future.
91: Intensity is asocial, but not presocial-it includes social elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to different logic.
100: It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness. The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the non- human in and through its active connection to the human, and vice versa.