tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35544242007-12-13T19:02:58.014-08:00Hair-splitting commentaries on society, culture, and current eventsadrian chanBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-78590547104569798652007-01-31T09:45:00.000-08:002007-01-31T09:46:12.643-08:00I can see (myself) for miles and miles and....Cross-posted to my <a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/" target="_blank">social software blog</a>...<br /><br />I don't normally write personal posts. But last night, during one of those proverbial late-night-staring-at-the-ceiling attempts to sweep the cobwebs from the corners of my mind in order to prepare it for rest, I had what felt like a small-to-middling realization. I remembered realizing, out on the playa one night at Burning Man, that I'd lived all my life unable to tell the difference between anger and resentment. Coming from others, I mean. That when a person was angry with my I immediately thought they resented me. What mattered of course was how this affect my response. <br />I realized last night, thinking about this project to define the "user" of social software as a user in conversation with him/herself as much as with "real" others, realized that there are some emotions that are easily mistaken online. Really big, important emotions. Though they're not really emotions; they're aspects of communication that involve emotion. But it's precisely because they're not expressed, they're read, that they are easily confused. Empathy and projection. A person might be empathetic or sympathetic, compassionate, in an email, or post, or comment. That would be our reading, our impression. But the person being compassionate might be projecting. Transactional Analysts described these kinds of phenomena as "crossed transactions." <br />For example: Bossman: Mary, get me a hundred copies of this report by lunch please. Mary: You don't own me you know! I do have other things to do! (They were a bit less PC back then; but you probably recognize the dynamic. Think of Chloe in 24). TA would have called this an adult-child transaction, wherein Mary responds as a child to a demanding parent. <br />So the thing that hit me was that there are certain kinds of communications, affective or emotionally rich ones, that are handled in face to face talk by use of body language, face, and of course the fact within seconds we can establish, by walking up or down the ladder of intensity and risk, each other's intentions. But in blogging, commenting, emailing, (less so in IM -- because it cycles through short turns and is actually connected to another person), we are required to read/interpret the intention behind what others say. And so we can read them generously, that is assigning to their words what seem to be their intentions. Or we can read them internally, that is through our own emotional complexes, including of course all the things we tend to hear because we're sensitive to them. <br />Some of the most important aspects of communication, those having to do with interest, with liking a person, with being acknowledged, ignored, agreed with or disagreed with, are essentially up for grabs. If we have emotional cobwebs and detritus, and I don't know a soul who doesn't, we recognize/encounter our own crap in other's words, and assign it to them (unless we're enlightened, in which case we can catch ourselves before answering!). Same with ideals, fantasies, wishes, etc: we might believe they mean it (when in fact *they're* engaged perhaps with their own idealizations). This would explain the tendency in dating sites for people to ascend the ramp to intimacy at great speed, only to then fall from the peak disastrously and walk away in great disappointment. The medium engages us with our own means of understanding another's intentions, but brackets their ability to correct where our heading.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-68746483116178298932007-01-30T11:00:00.000-08:002007-01-30T11:03:23.854-08:00The Social Engine that Drives Review SitesI just posted this to my <a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/" target="_blank">social software blog</a>, but thought I should cross post it here also. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.gravity7.com/AdrianChan_SxD_Review_Sites_1-30-2007.html">Social Interaction Design Guide: The Social Engine that Drives Review Sites</a> 2007, pdf, 16 pages. <b>NEW!</b> A Social Interaction Design guide to the social engine and engineering of user motivation and participation on review sites. This lighter-than-usual white paper looks at the social practices engaged in web sites built around user reviews. In particular, the paper examines the way in which reviews can become a kind of personal profiling system for reviewers. It also looks at how reviews create and add value, and poses the question of how business might participate in social marketing of this kind.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-49901855762879572402007-01-21T13:04:00.000-08:002007-01-21T13:05:37.851-08:00Children of Paradise: Pynchon's Against the DayFor a book that travels so far and wide, the traveling itself is strangely told. Places are not separated by the distances, at least not distances crossed. Vehicles, whose retinue includes airships, navy destroyers disguised as passenger ships, manned torpedoes that buzz Venetian canals like vespas sawing through water on two-stroke fashion engines (Ciao! Ciao!), camels, horses, eagles (is that Mordor down below, Frodo? What is it you carry and that weighs upon your heart, so, Frodo?), not to mention time machines, are too imaginary to provide reliable transportation. What is the reader to make of all this? <br /><br />I have intentionally avoided reading any reviews of the book, so as to plough through it on whatever strange connections my own head is capable of (a Rube Goldberg design, useful for traveing far as long as getting anywhere is not of any real consequence). And though I still believe that our characters are playing cards (I believe each family has four members in its suit, but those of you earlier in the book, help me) I've not yet checked out the Tarot deck to see if our characters' descriptions match those of Tarot cards. <br /><br />But there's another realization creeping up on me (and ain't this the distinct pleasure of reading a Pynchon novel? Those sneaking moments when you're not sure whose reading whom, when author and reader seem to suddenly occupy the same head-space? Pynchon has a gift for engaging the reader to such a degree that the space between the novel and reader collapses into some strange zone of indeterminibility, the reading and the thinking now being one and the same, reader propelled forward by the sheer proximity of his own thoughts to the author's fantastic prose...), and it's that we're still at the Chicago World's Fair... Never left it folks. <br /><br />By means I'm not certain of, we are making our way from pavilion to pavilion, as if in some weird Toy Story-Lord of the Rings odyssey set in a theme park featuring carnival rides, shooting galleries, Tarot readings, ferris wheels, balloon rides, Venetian gondolas, a hall of mirrors, Western saloons, bucket rides along cables and powered scooters and bicycles? A fantastic cartoon-like pursuit whose narratives bubble and froth with mythic as well as mystic force, but are enacted by a hapless and hopeless cast of marionnette dolls whose personalities include Darth Vader, Bilbo Baggins, Alice in Wonderland, Little Nemo, Houdini, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, Willy Wonka, the Wizard of Oz, Gandalf, and lord only knows who else... <br /><br />Against the Day is at times incredibly unstable and uncertain, as if the book itself is a heaving, shaking, wheezing, and sputtering compendium of yarns unravelling, a Gargantuan rip-roaring roller coaster of a ride through frollicking revelries and reveries hoist on a petard un-tethered to the taut matrix of paranoia that structures Pynchon's earlier efforts, manic and modern, fantastically filled with illusion and trickery, and simply howling with the pleasures of children given over to games and gibberish. <br /><br />People, what have we done to ourselves?!<br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books" rel="tag">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+reviews" rel="tag">book reviews</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pynchon" rel="tag">pynchon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/thomas+pynchon" rel="tag">thomas pynchon</a>,adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-10069101505013064692007-01-19T16:13:00.000-08:002007-01-19T17:04:12.053-08:00Gilles Deleuze on film, in Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Gilles_Deleuze_2_H-737107.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Gilles_Deleuze_2_H-734665.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />I was flipping through Deleuze's books on cinema this morning, with cinema, not literature, on my mind. But this just leapt out at me. We know that there's a connecting line between Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze. And Against The Day, like his previous novels, is at times incredibly cinematic (in a sort of impossible way). So check these passages out. They deal with the kinds of films that create worlds. Deleuze uses philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas on the relationship of Past and Present to Time map well to film (since each film creates a strip of its own time, and can create movements through time within itself: flashbacks, dreams, parallel times, etc.). Deleuze describes these cinematic worlds as crystals, each having a kind of genetic purity, or organizational structure. What grabbed my attention were the numerous similarities between the role Iceland Spar plays in the book and this description of the crystal image. The notion that the characters have an actual and virtual image corresponds with the book's constant population of ghosts, the doubling, the bilocations, deja vus, and so on. Even the references here to mirrors, and the Venetian mirror and multi-sided mirors is particularly weird. The Serpent, postcard, Augustinian Illumination are even mentioned! <br /><br />Full excerpt is at our Against the Day Pynchon blog, here: <a href="http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/?page_id=52" target="_blank">Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Crystals of Time</a> <br /><br />From Gilles Deleuze <i>Cinema 2: The Time Image</i><br /><br />If we take this direction to its limit, we can say that the actual image itself has a virtual image which corresponds to to it like a double or a reflection. In Bergsonian terms, the real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the real: there is 'coalescence ' between the two. There is a formation of an image with two sides, actual and virtual. It is as if an image in a mirror, a photo or a postcard came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual, even if this meant that the actual image returned into the mirror and resumed its place in the postcard or photo, following a double movement of liberation and capture.<br />....<br />But here we see that the opsign finds its true genetic element when the actual optical image crystallizes with its own virtual image, on the small internal circuit. This is a crystal-image, which gives us the key, or rather the 'heart,' of opsigns and their compositions. The latter are nothing other than slivers of crystal-images. <br /><br />The crystal-image, or crystalline description, has two definite sides which are not to be confused. for the confusion of the real and the imaginary is a simple error of fact, and does not affect their discernibility: the confusion is produced solely 'in someone's head.' But indiscernibility constitutes an objective illusion; it does not suppress the distinction between the two sides, but makes it unattributable, each side taking the other's role in a relation which we must describe as reciprocal presupposition, or reversibility. In fact, there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible. These are 'mutual images' as Bachelard puts it, where an exchange is carried out. The indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, or of the present and the past, of the actual and the virtual, is definitely not produced in the head or the mind, it is the objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double. Hence two orders of problems arise, one of structure, the other of genesis. First, what are these consolidates of actual and virtual which define a crystalline structure (in a general, aesthetic, rather than a scientific, sense)? And, later on, what is the genetic process which appears in these structures? <br /><br />The most familiar case is the mirror. Oblique mirrors, concave and convex mirrors and Venetian mirrors are inseparable from a circuit, as can be seen throughout Ophuls work, and in Losey, especially in <i>Eve</i> and <i>The Serpent</i>. This circuit itself is an exchange: the mirror-image is virtual in relation to the actual character that the mirror catches, but it is actual in the mirror which now leaves the character with only a virtuality and pushes him back out-of-field. The exchange is all the more active when the circuit refers to a polygon with a growing number of sides: as in a face reflected on the facets of a ring, an actor seen in an infinity of twins. When virtual images proliferate like this, all together they absorb the entire actuality of the character, at the same time as the character is no more than one virtuality among others. This situation was prefigured in Welles's <i>Citizen Kane</i>, when Kane passes between two facing mirrors; but it comes to the fore in its pure state in the famous palace of mirrors in <i>The Lady from Shanghai</i>, where the principle of indiscernibility reaches its peak: a perfect crystal-image where the multiple mirrors have assumed the actuality of the two characters who will only be able to win it back by smashing them all, finding themselves side by side and each killing the other. <br /><br />--Chapter 4: The Crystals of Time<br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books" rel="tag">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+reviews" rel="tag">book reviews</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pynchon" rel="tag">pynchon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/thomas+pynchon" rel="tag">thomas pynchon</a>,adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-74573958534958741512007-01-18T10:09:00.000-08:002007-01-18T10:25:13.342-08:00Did Thomas Pynchon write Against the Day by playing Solitaire?<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/cardsglow380-770753.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/cardsglow380-768366.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />I've been posting details at our <a href="http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/" target="_blank">Pynchon blog</a> on a weird reading of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day as a card game, or set of card games, in which the book's characters are unaware that they're playing cards. At 700 pages in I'm beginning to think the book might be a single card game, and not several, and I'm suspecting that it's Solitaire, though I don't play the game myself, so I'm out on a limb. <br /><br />The possibility being that Thomas Pynchon might have written out his characters, given them plot lines, and then played a game of cards, inventing the connections as required by his need to create four of a kind, arrangements by suit, numerical order, etc. As if he had taken the challenge of post-modernism to heart, to unwrite the writing of the book, and to realize the "thrown-ness" of being by bringing his characters to life as he turns cards over and places them with others. If this were the case, the book's writing was "in the cards," arbitrary but fated, a world of possible books, but in which the one we are given is the one that was necessary. If we just tender this proposition, that Thomas Pynchon wished to write a book that could be written by chance, that might be about Life and Ideas in the abstract and general but that would take specific form not through authorial authority alone, he might have written it by playing cards with his own book It's entirely possible. To write as God and the universe, but to include an element of blind luck or fate in the writing itself, but throwing down card upon card and thus allowing narrative construction to fall out of the game play. There's still a third of the book to go, but for now I'm thrilled to bits with this possibility.<br /><br /><br />If you're reading the book, page and thematic references are over that our <a href="http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/" target="_blank">Emanating Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon blog</a>.<br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books" rel="tag">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+reviews" rel="tag">book reviews</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pynchon" rel="tag">pynchon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/thomas+pynchon" rel="tag">thomas pynchon</a>,adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-47825858795635305112007-01-15T13:58:00.000-08:002007-01-15T14:24:43.830-08:00I wager a key to Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day"I'm willing to bet that Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, is a multi-faceted card game, in which a deck of cards is taken out for play, by people in different places and times, playing different games (each with its own rules). And that our main characters only come into the light when they are played. Two layers of agency are involved, the characters, who try to get find each other, and who think they have the freedom of will to do so. And the players, who try to play winning hands by getting rid of their cards, and who have various strategies of cheating at the game. Consequently we have a proliferation of fourth dimensional patterns or logics (four of a kind, suits, face cards); we have a deuce who is high or low; we have those trying to separate colors; those trying to get a run (numerical sequence), and so on. Our little characters are thrown in to Being, but as beings, are always becoming other by virtue of the different rules among games in which they are played (and which include Tarot and magic, hence invisibility). It is possible that the cards experience their lives as an eternal return. It is possible Pynchon offers this hope to us. Aces high folks, but correct me if I'm wrong!<br /><br />The Pynchon blog is picking up speed, as we all discover tha this is no ordinary book at all. I've created a number of thematic series pages, and a section for page by page references, as well as a section of secrets. Join us at:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/">Emanating Against the Day blog</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-42436685442633271652007-01-14T23:23:00.000-08:002007-01-14T23:25:43.774-08:0024 Premieres in the Oblong Office...<img src="http://www.gravity7.com/moviestills/Photo_011407_003.jpg" vspace="2" hspace="2"><img src="http://www.gravity7.com/moviestills/Photo_011407_004.jpg" vspace="2" hspace="2"> <img src="http://www.gravity7.com/moviestills/Photo_011407_006.jpg" vspace="2" hspace="2"><br /><b>24, featuring Jack Bauer, Episodes 1 & 2</b><br /><br /><b>White House, Oval Office... 24 has just ended on its first cliffhanger of the season. The Pres and pressman Stony No and VP of Vice sit amidst the baked rubble of broken pretzels...</b><br /><br /><b>Pres</b>: I want everyone in the Situation Room!... We have a situation.<br /><br /><b>VP</b>: How'd I look?<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>: Huh? Now Stony, who's behind thiis? We're supposed to driving this war on terror. Did that look like me as President?<br /><br /><b>Stony No</b>: It was just a television program<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>, a look of genuine surprise on his face: ?<br /><br /><b>Stony No</b>: ... Now look, we got you on 60 minutes.<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>: 60 minutes. 60 minutes! How'd they get 24 hours?! Hunh? Stony?<br /><br /><b>Stony No</b>: It's only a drama, Mr President. It's not some reality TV show, you know. Honestly, I don't see the big fuss here.. Nobody believes <i>that's</i> what the war on terror looks like. In reality.<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>, reprising his look of genuine surprise on his face: ?<br /><br /><b>VP</b>: I thought we were the reality TV show.<br /><br /><b>Stony</b>, with sarcasm: Well, yes, Mick, we're all your reality show, yes. It's just a bit, well, dark, for television.<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>, confused, finger in ear: Whatsat? Uh. Listen, I-I don't know how we're going to get through tomorrow.<br /><br /><b>Stony </b>Snow: We'll spin it. No problem.<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>: Spin it? Just tape it! I mean, isn't it on that Tee-vo thing? There are ways of getting tapes into the screening room you know (Pres waves a victory salute and attempts to shake his jowls in an impersonation of one of his predecessors, and some would say, kindred spirits, departing the White House lawn)... I'm not going to wait all day like everybody else....<br /><br /><b>Stony</b> muttering to himself: Should have thought of that before you got your war on. <br /><br /><b>VP</b>: Eh, now, uh, I get credit for that (finger swaggering in the air)<br /><br />...(a pregnant, or is it abortive, silence)....<br /><br /><b>VP</b>: Well look, the government handled it pretty well. I think we looked in charge. Lays the foundation for our domestic...<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>, fumbling with his earphone: I'm sorry Mick, I didn't catch that.<br /><br /><b>Stony</b>: ...spying, Mick? Domestic spying program program? To be frank, having you appear during commercial breaks wasnt, exactly, reassuring...<br /><br />...Pres with his fingers in his ears, custom earbuds hanging from wires now twisting about his head<br /><br /><b>VP</b>, giving Snow the eye of silence, makes a zipping motion across his mouth and nods in the Pres's general direction...<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>, his earphone back in place: What's this? What are you talking about here? Sorry, my earphones fell out there for a second. You know I can't hear you without it in. Mickl. ... Now where were we? I want to see the next episode now. Stony, can't you call Fox or something?<br /><br />...<br /><br /><b>VP</b>: I feel a hunting trip coming on...<br /><br /><b>Stony</b>: Now Mick. No.<br /><br /><b>Pres</b>: Oh wait fellas. I think I can get it on this iPlod thing.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-76153406756327665022007-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:002007-01-13T03:18:08.533-08:00Planes and Lines in Against the Day, by Thomas PynchonAgainst the Day is organized like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Plateaus-Capitalism-Schizophrenia/dp/0816614024/sr=8-1/qid=1168686906/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0233463-4694511?ie=UTF8&s=books" target="_blank">A Thousand Plateaus</a> by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It is constructed of planes and surfaces, each a continuum of either space or time. These planes intersect, as do the novel's subplots and concepts, through a series of dots or plot points connected by narrative arcs, each a line of flight, each borne on the wing and whimsy of Pynchon's mad characters and historical doubles, and drawn by the invisible hand of an agency whose intrinsic logic is algorithmic, artistic, atomist, ballistic, bled, blown, buried, chemical, conjured, counter-transferred, detonated, differential, disappearing, dug, energized, explosive, forensic, forlorn, found, hallucinated, harmonized, illuminating, impregnated, internalized, literary, lived, logarithmic, lost, loved, melodic, modal, orphaned, passional, painted, played, plotted, political, projected, probabilistic, pursued, pursuing, quantum, recollecting, reflecting, refracting, scientific, screened, screwed, shuffled, spun, strummed, strung, subjective, telegraphed, transferred, vector-based, wired, wirelessly transmitted, or blown by trade wind or un-ticketed time-travel (the two primary modes, and two shadows produced on the book's jacket cover). Each of Thomas Pynchon's works has featured both structures favoring death and the lines of flight that escape them, for he recognizes that a structure is defined by that which escapes it. This book is nothing less than the production and reproduction of subjectivity itself--which is an organization of perceptions, affects, and actions. For Pynchon, I believe, subjectivity emerges within the given, not outside it. The deeply Spinozist and Bergsonian ground on which this narrative unfolds provides opportunity for the synthesis of space and time, in the subjective mind, on the basis of images and transformations. Light, here, is connected with matter, and Einstein's theory of relativity is set against the atomist's and empiricist's conviction that the real is concrete. Either space and matter, or time, provide the rule of transformation for any particular line of flight and plane or surface of narrative and event. Points are connected either by the travels of balloonists in space, or time travelers. They meet in a strangely doubled (bi-located) and refracted four dimensional world. The key to live, or death, is in the hands of competing forces seeking to unlock time, light, or matter, each of which are distributed according to a co-ordinal logic of number-location or a logic of movement-time. Whether those who travel by location/position or those who travel by history/time will win remains to be seen, as I'm only half way through. Happy trails fellow readers!<br /><br />These series will be developed further at our <a href="http://www.emanating.com/wordpress/" target="_blank">Pynchon blog</a><br /><br /><a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books" rel="tag">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+reviews" rel="tag">book reviews</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pynchon" rel="tag">pynchon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/thomas+pynchon" rel="tag">thomas pynchon</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-87387940190157973052006-12-31T15:21:00.000-08:002006-12-31T15:25:25.482-08:00Thomas Pynchon Against the Day: the play of surfacesI've decided to read Against the Day as a multi-dimensional inter-narrative of coinciding realities in differentiated time and space. There are simply too many references to the Big Bang, to altered states of consciousness, alternate realities, to versions of history that could have been, to the inaccuracies, refractions, distortions, and bias introdcced by instruments of mediation, observation, recording, and communication. The tales told are themselves shadowed by events but in light refracted so that we can see them as multiplications and complexifications. Shadows and light, shadows of light.<br /><br />There is a deep "anthropic principle" behind the cosmology of Pynchon's Against the Day, a presence of ghosts and memories, a tracing of some kind of weak subjectivity (a post-modern position if there ever was one) whose agency is as erroneous, silly, and misguided as it is also passion-bound to defend liberty and freedom, if not also joy. There is, to cite Deleuze, "A Life" lived, as if behind the backs of our characters. A Reality realized, an Agency actualized, and a Virtual whose vectors suggest that for Pynchon, what could have or might have been are as compelling as what was. Though nothing matters in the end, there's nothing the matter in the matter that matters to us, so what is the matter with us, since we're all what matters and what matters to us is the matter of it all? <br /><br />Constructed out of conceptual, political, social, literary, scientific, and historical plateaus, each a field of research and discovery (indeed, light, crystals, tarot, ghosts, gunpowder, flight, and the earth herself are all planes on which concepts are extended, Beings becoming), connected by lines drawn by families, as threads of a narrative, arcs of a plot, or roped together like the drum kit badly beaten by John Bonham of Led Zeppelin (himself a balloonist and ungainly Chum of Chance whose Chance was ended when he choked on his own chum), Against the Day itself blurs the line between fact and fiction. To Zeppelin's lead balloon, it's a Spinal Tap, a mockudocumentary of a work as much pictured in the style of color-by-numbers as written in series of connecting dots and ellipses.... <br /><br />There are many ways to play with surfaces, as there are ways to plumb depths. There is the conventional and proven fact that our ability to perceive reality depends on the reflection (minus absorption) of light off a surface. Without light as a medium (read: Mcluhan, for whom the lightbulb was a medium, and Pynchon, for whom Byron the bulb stole the limelight in a well-lit and lengthy but ultimately finite filmament in Gravity's Regenbogen), we could not see anything. But if an author is to shed light on history, and if his interest involves the play of surface and depth (a theme of post modernism as well as of linguistics, semiotics, and hermeneutics), he may disassemble his own sight, may use his peripheral vision to catch things seen only when looked at from askance, might employ a prism and separate his light into its component colors. But Pynchon is an artist of the gonzo and it can be hard to tell a kaleidoscope from a prism when you're looking at it from the other side. Clarity arrives when you set the book down.<br /><br />Each of the plateaus on which Pynchon has written Against the Day has its own internal consistency. The planes intersect as the novel's characters pass through them, across them, drift over them, break through them or become lost beneath them. It might be that our balloonists, the Chums of Chance, are like Super Mario and his pals in some strange Rube Goldberg-esque time machine video game, bouncing from level to level and gathering or chucking lives like ballast from a dirigible, their passage around the globe threading its way through the skies, but fading more like the contrails of a modern airplane marking where it has been, than projecting its destiny forward as if threading the eye of a needle whose very point could seal its fate. Pop. <br /><br />Culture and art, literature, psychology, philosophy, music, and science are the perspectives from which Pynchon sees his subject as well as his craft. If one dominates, it might in fact be film, for Pynchon's versions are much like visions. Pynchon sees, as Proust smells, and where readers might suffer his editorial style, it is an editing as montage, not as the drifting and lapsing of consciousness it might suggest. I read Against the Day sometimes with the feeling that I'm looking through a Viewmaster, each click bringing a new scene into view, and each seemingly unrelated to the next but for the round circle of time to which they all belong: a surface of infinite depths. For each is a perspective, and in each, we see what we are looking for. And I for one am looking forward to the rest of it!<br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/books" rel="tag">books</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/book+reviews" rel="tag">book reviews</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/pynchon" rel="tag">pynchon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/thomas+pynchon" rel="tag">thomas pynchon</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-62507832563338759732006-12-16T15:12:00.000-08:002006-12-16T15:28:56.480-08:00Channeling Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Burning Man, and the MatrixThere has been enough on Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon, to indicate the extreme likelihood that his latest work can be read in more ways than one. There is a debate, if a Wiki entry may be called a debate, a monolog, or hypothesis, or heck, a wiki entry, concerning the shadows dropped behind the title of the book (which was apparently released in two versions, and whose graphic translates: "The Tibetan Government Commerce Chamber", an allusion, if an allusion can be performed visually, perhaps to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which deals I am sure with doubling, though I say so with absolutely nothing to go on but the obvious doubling that concerns the living and the dead, which is to say, I go by gut instinct that this work of historical fiction is also a work concerning the writing of a fictional accounting of fact, Pynchon being meta and all of that...)<br /><br />There has been enough said to beg the question, What other tale may be buried herein? We know that Mr Pynchon is a fan of technology, is a fan of narrative arcs and of the rocket's line of flight, as parable or parabola of life's own arcing story, and arc also being that which bridges the gap between poles, two poles also suggesting bipolarity, the earth's poles, or the anti-node from which our Chums of Chance sought to measure the electric communication of Dr. Tesla's own arcing narrative. <br /><br />To wit and a pro pole I couldn't help but find myself aroused to a meta reading last night of the pages leading up to and around chapter two, Icelandic Spar, which seemed to me (and of lucid mind I must insist, I was) to suggest Don De Lillo, William Gibson, The Matrix, Hunter S. Thompson, and, and here is where it gets wonderfully sketchy, Burning Man.<br /><br />To wit I submit a Chan-nelling of said authors and references, and solicit herewith fellow contributions. <br /><br />And in all seriesnous, I must add, I do believe this to be a work of several arcs, each of which may be traced through points defined by the operation of differential and differentiating equation.... A work of several series, each a statement, a discursive curve, a Foucauldian diagram (See Deleuze on Foucault, the "new archivist" and the "new cartographer") by which to map the Real....<br /><br />From Wikipedia:<br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_day#Historical_events">Doubling</a><br />"Pynchon makes much of a variety of calcite called Iceland spar, valued for its optical quality of double refraction; in Pynchonland, a magician can use it to split one person into two, who then wander off to lead their own lives", Seligman writes. [16]<br /><br />Sam Leith identifies the same theme:<br />"The book is shot through with doubling, or surrogacy. There are the palindromic rival scientists Renfrew and Werfner. [...] Events on one side of the world have an occult influence on those on the other. 'Double refraction' through a particular sort of crystal allows you to turn silver into gold. Mirrors are to be regarded with, at least, suspicion. It gets more complicated, and sillier. We're introduced to the notion of 'bilocation' — where characters appear in two places at once — and, later, to that of 'co-consciousness', where someone's own mind somehow bifurcates. 'He wondered if he could be his own ghost,' Pynchon writes of one character."[19]<br /><br />Reviewer Tom Leclair notes light in various flashy appearances: "God said, 'Let there be light'; Against the Day collects ways our ancestors attempted to track light back to its source and replaced religion with alternative lights. There is the light of relativity, the odd light of electromagnetic storms, the light of the mysterious Tunguska event of 1908, when a meteorite struck Siberia or God announced a coming apocalypse. [...] the dynamite flash, the diffracted light of Iceland spar, the reflected light of magicians' mirrors, the 'light writing' of photography and movies, the cities' new electric lighting that makes the heavens invisible at night".<br /><br />Channeling now....<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />Ref: More signs that the fair was Burning Man<br />"Rolling into city after city, St. Louis, Wichita, Denver, she caught herself each time hoping that somewhere in it, some neighborhood down the end of some electric line, <b>it'd be there waiting for her, the real White City again, list up all spectral and coo</b>l at night and shimmering by day in the bright humidity of its webwork of canals, the electric launches moving silently through the waterways with their parasoled ladies and straw-hatted men and little kids with Cracker Jack pieces stuck in their hair." p. 70, (boldface is mine)<br /><br />From <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson">Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</a> (1971), by Hunter S. Thompson<br />"What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel."<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />At first she begged Merle, tearfully as she knew how, to please bring back, please, and he never quite found the way to tell her that the fairground was most of it surely burned down by now, pulled to pieces, taken away to salvage yards, sold off, crumbled away, staff and scantlings at the mercy of the elements, of the man-made bad times that had come upon Chicago and the nation...<br />p. 70<br /><br />What is not burnt at the end of Burning man is disassembled and all of it taken away...<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"Planted rows went turning past like <b>giant spokes</b> one by one as they ranged the roads." p. 70, (boldface is mine)<br /><br /><img src="http://www.burningman.com/preparation/maps/06_maps/06brc_map_sm.jpg" alt=""><br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"They pushed out into morning fields that went rolling all the way to every horizon, the <b>Inner American Sea</b>, where the chickens schooled like herring, and the hogs and heifers foraged and browsed like groupers and codfish, and the sharks tended to operate out of Chicago or Kansas City..." p. 71, (boldface is mine)<br /><br />From <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson">Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Vintage, 1971), pp 66-68</a> by Hunter S. Thompson<br />It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. .... There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.... And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"Foley was ordinary-enough looking, not having yet taken on the more menacing aspect that the years in their peculiar mercy would provide him—what might've been exceptional was his idea of social or phatic conversation. "Took a Reb bullet for you, sir..." p. 100 <br /><br />...here now a description of <a href="http://www.wtblock.com/wtblockjr/polecat.htm#1">Prince Polecat</a> from Shelby Foote<br />"Later, a Union prisoner described Polignac's Confederates as "charging demons," moving forward "like a cyclone" as they bellowed their Rebel yells, and scorned every minie ball that whined around them........" footnoted as from Shelby Foote, The Civil War, A Narrative: Red River To Appomattox, p. 44<br /><br />...And if Foley Walker isn't Shelby Foote, who died in 2005, it should have been....Listen to Foote's phatic style, in perfect mason-dixon relief to that of his northern interviewer, Terry Gross, on <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4723073">Fresh Air</a>. <br /><br />[At 5:20 into the interview, Foote discusses the rifle and musket technologies of the time. The Minie Ball was made of lead, and did not find a place to rest in the human anatomy until after some amount of dul-headed back and forth.]<br /><br />I now interrupt this exegesis to include this for comic relief...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.visi.com/~tomcat/poetry/Grant.shtml">IF GRANT HAD BEEN DRINKING AT APPOMATTOX</a> -James Thurber<br /><br />"General Lee will be here any minute now," said the Corporal firmly, swinging the hammock again.<br />"Will you cut that out?" roared Grant. "D'ya want to make me sick, or what?" Shultz clicked his heels and saluted. "What's he coming here for?" asked the General.<br />"This is the day of surrender, sir," said Shultz. Grant grunted bitterly.<br />"Three hundred and fifty generals in the Northern armies," said Grant, "and he has to come to me about this. What time is it?". "You're the Commander-in-Chief, that's why," said Corporal Shultz. "It's eleven twenty, sir."<br />"Don't be crazy," said Grant. "Lincoln is the Commander-in-Chief. Nobody in the history of the world ever surrendered before lunch. Doesn't he know that an army surrenders on its stomach?" He pulled a blanket up over his head and settled himself again.<br />"The generals of the Confederacy will be here any minute now," said the Corporal. "You really ought to be up, sir." Grant stretched his arms above his head and yawned. "All right, all right," he said. He rose to a sitting position and stared about the room. "This place looks awful," he growled. "You must have had quite a time of it last night, sir," ventured Shultz. "Yeh," said General Grant, looking around for his clothes. "I was wrassling some general. Some general with a beard."<br />Shultz helped the commander of the Northern armies in the field to find his clothes. "Where's my other sock?" demanded Grant. Shultz began to look around for it. The General walked uncertainly to a table and poured a drink from a bottle. "I don't think it wise to drink, sir," said Shultz. Nev' mind about me," said Grant, helping himself to a second, "I can take it or let it alone. Didn' ya ever hear the story about the fella went to. Lincoln to complain about me drinking too much? 'So-and-So says Grant drinks too much,' this fella said. 'So-and-So is a fool,' said Lincoln. So this fella went to What's-His-Name and told him what Lincoln said and he came roarin' to Lincoln about it. 'Did you tell So-and-So was a fool?' he said. 'No,' said Lincoln, 'I thought he knew it.'" The'General smiled, reminiscently, and had another drink. ""That's how I stand with Lincoln," he said, proudly,<br />The soft thudding sound of horses' hooves came through the open window. Shultz hurriedly walked over and looked out. "Hoof steps," said Grant, with a curious chortle. "It is General Lee and his staff," said Shultz. "Show him in," said the General, taking another drink. "And see what the boys in the back room will have." Shultz walked smartly over to the door, opened it, saluted, and stood aside.<br />General Lee, dignified against the blue of the April sky, magnificent in his dress uniform, stood for a moment framed in the doorway. He walked in, followed by his staff. They bowed, and stood silent. General Grant stared at them. He only had one boot on and his jacket was unbuttoned.<br />"I know who you are," said Grant.'You're Robert Browning, the poet." "This is General Robert E. Lee," said one of his staff, coldly. "Oh," said Grant. "I thought he was Robert Browning. He certainly looks like Robert Browning. There was a poet for you. Lee: Browning. Did ya ever read 'How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'? 'Up Derek, to saddle, up Derek, away; up Dunder, up Blitzen, up, Prancer, up Dancer, up Bouncer, up Vixen, up -'".<br />"Shall we proceed at once to the matter in hand?" asked General Lee, his eyes disdainfully taking in the disordered room. "Some of the boys was wrassling here last night," explained Grant. "I threw Sherman, or some general a whole lot like Sherman. It was pretty dark." He handed a bottle of Scotch to the commanding officer of the Southern armies, who stood holding it, in amazement and discomfiture. "Get a glass, somebody," said Grant, .looking straight at General Longstreet. "Didn't I meet you at Cold Harbor?" he asked. General Longstreet did not answer.<br />"I should like to have this over with as soon as possible," said Lee. Grant looked vaguely at Shultz, who walked up close to him , frowning. "The surrender, sir, the surrender," said Corporal Shultz in a whisper. "Oh sure, sure," said Grant. He took another drink. "All right," he said. "Here we go." Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed it to the astonished Lee. "There you are. General," said Grant. "We dam' near licked you. If I'd been feeling better we would of licked you."<br /><br /><br />...And now to return, on the blue pill (or is it the red pill), the hallucinatory series, in which Thomas Pynchon shrooms on the playa in Black Rock, Nevada, during the week of Burning Man, and, tripping, encounters Doctor Megavolt with his bipolar Tesla coil performance on a bus, sees visions of green pixellated screens rendered in the Matrix, pixels (quaternions) being a lossy way of storing the image when compared to vector-based flash files, De Lillo's postcard section in White Noise now coming to mind, Webb Traverse now sounding a lot like Web TV, a Finnish street on webcam being a memorable point in that author's dialog with memory, recollection, the image, and the real, a hyper-reality of Baudrillardian proportions now threatening to map the surface before there's anything on it, Pynchon traversing the flat earth, pencil in hand, with a burning need to record, to write, to get it down as it is, the whole lossy storage of image now more than a matter of mere dithering...<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"Later in the shack, Kit came upon Telsa, frowning at a pencil sketch. "Oh. Sorry, I was looking for—"<br />"This toroid is the wrong shape," said Tesla. "Come, look at this a moment."<br />Kit had a look. "Maybe there's a vector solution."<br />How's that"<br />"We know what we want the field to look like at each point, don't we. Well maybe we can generate a surface shape that'll give us that field". p. 104<br /><br />...Vector graphics are of course the faster, better way to draw a screen, store an image, and avoid the loss and artifacting of pixel-based file formats. Now a clearer image might solve that problem with the image we get in the Matrix, all green running-down pixels, wouldn't you say? ... <br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br /> "...in the sea's reasserted emptiness, they had raised the volcano, dark and ruinous, which was their destination." p.109<br /> <br />"Pallets and nails from opened crates soon littered the area." p. 109<br /><br />"Explosion without an objective is politics in its purest form" p. 111<br /><br />....And does not Burning Man resonate, a boom to concuss the open mind across twelve square miles of inland sea, lakebedded flatland, if even as a raved-up historical after thought to the more explosive, surely more political, July Fourth trestle-blasting celebrations of the American Fin de Siecle?....<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"what does this suggest to you about the trajectories of your own lives?" p. 112<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"Electrodes sputtered and flared, and giant transformer coils droned afflictedly, almost in human accents, fed by electrical generators whose steam was being supplied by the local hot springs." p. 112<br /><br />....Well if that doesn't sound like dr megavolt performing on the playa, call me mudd, or deaf, mudd, and blind. And of course, there are hot springs next to the black rock desert playa ....<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"mushrooms unknown... with new properties of visionary enhancement." p. 115<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br /> ....Miles picks up communication from the tesla coil.... "There is traffic on the Tesla device" p. 117<br /> <br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />...the Chums of Chance are at the center of the earth now, picking up a call for help on the Tesla line "They are calling for help..." p. 116<br /><br /><br />....I picture Thomas Pynchon on the playa, the sky falling as if black rock city were now curtained by the northern lights themselves, imagining Morpheus, Trinity, Neo and the whole lot trying to find a landline by means of which to exit the Matrix...<br /><br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"They claim to be under attack by a horde or hostile gnomes, and have set out red signal lamps, arranged in concentric circles" p. 118<br /><br />...At this point our author has clearly turned from the perimeter fence and made a bee-line to the Man, a light-seeking moth of a human, clod-hopping his flat-footed self across the playa, a mad jabber-jawing post-modernist packing genius, his hand in a bag of gibberish, propelled as if by the great thruster of Life itself on a vector for the center of the many-spoked wheel, only to stall in mid-flight Brenschluss as he comes upon what must have, surely was, Ishtar and it's calamitous operatic unfolding, a pell-mell of half-clad fire dancers adrift in lurid imprecision as the orchestra tunes to two measures of loop and the whole gathering at large waits for Pepe, an E major, and the damn thing to please begin already....<br /><br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />117: "the Chums swept through the interior of the Earth and at last out her Northern portal, which they beheld as a tiny circle of brightness far ahead.." 116 <br /><br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />Quaternions. "one who cannot come to terms with the one, one must say sinister unknowability of Light, projects an Aether, real in every way, except for its being detectable." "Fairies under mushrooms..." p. 132-3<br /><br />...pixels, pixies....<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"Earlier members of the Expedition had visited the great Library of Iceland behind the translucent green walls facing the sunlit sea. Some of these spaces were workshops or mess-halls some centers of operation..." p. 133<br /><br />...yes, definitely in the Nebucadnezzar, Dozer at the helm, surrounded by green screens all dripping a pixellated view of the Matrix...<br /><br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />"the subsctructure off reality. The doubling of the Creation, each image clear and believable...." p. 133 which "makes it possible for them to move through the world that thinks of itself as real..." p. 134<br /><br />From <b>Against the Day</b><br />134: Down where the the 'Hidden People' live, inside their private rock dwellings, where humans who visit them can be closed in and never find a way out again." p. 134<br /><br />....poor Zion...<br /><br />Against the Day<br />"The sun came up a baleful smear in the sky....A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world.... The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral density gray than blue." p. 134<br /><br />and finally... <br />Neuromancer by William Gibson<br />"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." opening line....adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1166209127564726172006-12-15T10:57:00.000-08:002006-12-31T16:11:38.956-08:00Chums of Chance, Lines of Flight, Thomas PynchonReading Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon...<br /><br />"Structures are defined by that which escapes them..." V2, hyperbolic narrative arc traced across the sky, its silent and unannounced arrival among the humble homes of wartime wine-jelly-feasting Londoners known only by the anticipation manifest by Slothrop prescient anatomy... An arc drawn out by Brenschluss, motivation on the launch pad is matched by motivation at the landing site, that is, a hard on for culture and women... Arcs are drawn also by Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, each of whom permits himself a little divine intervention: earthquakes, frogs, and an operatic moment to bind coincidental relationships with song. Vineland, a mad defenestrator has worked out that it takes but one annual performance to obtain government funds... Structures are defined by who escapes them... And a Line of Flight, yes, no doubt now that Deleuze and Guattari's Book of Italian Wedding Cakes contains some useful recipes, is drawn by the Chums of Chance (again, chance in the V2, chance in altman/anderson) as the Inconvenience drops from the sky to mark points on the map of the world. Distributed according to Poisson, Deleuze, or God himself, points on a line are described by our man Pynchon's narrathmatical and aerognostical operation...<br /><br />"The new archivist proclaims that henceforth he will deal only with statements. He will not concern himself with what pervious archivists have treated in a thousand different ways: propositions and phrases. He will ignore both the vertical hierarchy of propositions which are stacked on top of one another, and the horizontal relationship established between phrases in which each seems to respond to another. Instead he will remain mobile, skimming along in a kind of diagonal line that allows him to read what could not be apprehended before, namely statements. Is this perhaps an atonal logic?....<br />"But in the space of two chapters Foucault rigorously demonstrates that contradictions between statements can be measured only by calculating the concrete distance between them within this space of rarity. Comparisons between statements are therefore linked to a mobile diagonal line that allows us, within this space, to make a direct study of the same set at different levels, as well as to choose some sets on the same level while disregarding others (which in turn might presuppose another diagonal line.) It is precisely the rarefied nature off this space which creates these unusual movements and bursts of passion that cut space up into new dimensions. To our amazement, this 'incomplete, fragmented form' shows, when it comes to statements, how not only few things are said, but 'few things can be said.' What consequences from this transportation of logic will find their way into that element of rarity or dispersion which has nothing to do with negativity, but which on the contrary forms that 'positivity' which is unique to statements?<br />"Foucault also tries to reassure us, though: if it is true that statements are essentially rare, no originality is needed to produce them. A statement always represents a transformation of particular elements distributed in a corresponding space. As we shall see, the formations and transformations of these spaces themselves pose topological problems that cannot be adequately be described in terms of creation, beginning or foundation. When studying a particular space, it matters even less whether a statement has taken place for the first time, or whether it involves repetition or reproduction. What counts is the <i>regularity</i> of the statement: it represents not the average but the whole statistical curve. In effect the statement is to be associated not with the transmission of particular elements presupposed by it but with the shape of the whole curve to which they are related, and more generally with the rules governing the particular field in which they are distributed and reproduced."<br />Foucault, by Gilles Deleuze pp 1-4adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1161292156526003102006-10-19T14:08:00.000-07:002006-10-19T14:09:16.543-07:00Finally, a table of contents to all four blogsHey folks, I finally have a <a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blogs.html" target="_blank">table of contents to all four of my blogs</a>: Social software; Cultural Commentaries; Film; and Music. If you're like me, you probably don't navigate blogs by archive postings; so here's to one of the most basic navigation inventions ever, the TOC.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1160933512456441972006-10-15T09:36:00.000-07:002006-10-16T10:52:21.600-07:00Webocracy, Mass media, mini media, MySpace, YouTube<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/10/15/BUG4KLP3CL1.DTL&type=tech" target="_blank">An article in today's SF Gate</a> caught my eye. It's title included the word "Webocracy," so I knew right away that it must have to do with web 2.0, Silicon Valley, and the like. Like the term "folksonomy," "webocracy" captures the new in something old. In this case, democracy done online, retooled and perhaps even improved. Folksonomy, similarly, refers to a kind of social economy that bypasses traditional markets but which uses online markets and economies instead. I'm no fan of analogies used as explanations, especially when the new thing isn't well understood yet. Analogies refer us to something familiar -- in this case democracy and the web -- but the claim that this thing is like that thing has a communicative function but little more. <br /><br />Let's unpack this one real quick then. Webocracy. Is the internet, and more specifically, the world of web 2.0, a new kind of democracy? It is grassrootsy, it does invite direct participation, it does threaten traditional modes of political engagement (e.g. bypass the lobby(ists), go straight to the back, where the power is...) but it's not a political system. The web is a communication and publishing technology, one that now delivers audio, video, and other modes of information and communication. But it's not just a technology. It's becoming an integral part of all manner of social phenomena (to wit, <a href="http://www.youtube.com" target="_blank">YouTube</a> as the new TV, <a href="http://myspace.com" target="_blank">MySpace</a> as the new marketing media). Technology plus culture give us new social practices. <br /><br />It's the new techniques (technology = technique or application of a rationalized method) for communication that fascinate me, and the ones that seem to affect us at the core most of all. I don't think web 2.0 companies or phenomena represent a new political system, as might be suggested by the term webocracy. The same could be said for the term folksonomy. But there's a change of mode, of connection, of the relationship between individual and information, individual and individual, and individual and mainstream media taking place whose engine is web 2.0. <br /><br />I call them talk systems. And where they get interesting is when they offer a marketplace, and they create an economy. I think those are the phenomena catching our attention these days: online markets in which economies based on recommendations and social networking create a different kind of consumption, one that is moved by communication between consumers instead of messaging and marketing by mainstream media. I call mySpace mini media, in opposition to mass media: it's got all the stuff off a medium, but its content is its own culture (a culture which often refers to mass media messages, images, events, celebs, etc.). <br /><br />If you figure that a market simply makes goods and services available, and connections between buyers and sellers possible, but that an economy involves the people, their consumption habits, desires, choices, motives, etc, then clearly an online marketplace isn't enough to get anything going. It'll need users, and those users will need to know how the market works. It needs to exist, to find expression in common culture (it needs to be seen and talked about). So in addition to a market that connects goods, buyers and sellers, and an economy to organize the people and their economic consumption (note that an online dating service has a market, and an economy), the system has to be seen, has to exist. Here's where "mini media," or online phenomena like YouTube and MySpace, veer off from the phenomenon of mass media to launch something new: they exist through the communication of their members. <br /><br />So where traditional mass media use magazines, newspapers (e.g. print media), radio, and television, all of which broadcast their messages, these new web -based media reproduce themselves through communication among members. Like other media, they exist by observing themselves, but these observations are given us not by pundits, djs, hosts, anchors, journalists... Observations of the medium are produced as ratings, votes, tags, bookmarks, blog posts, comments, etc. A very simple flow gets going (it's been called viral but it's got nothing to do with viruses. viruses are duplicated perfectly when transmitted. communication doesn't work that way, it has to be compelling if it is to circulate). That flow is an economy, one that picks up signs, assigns value, has speeds and crowds... <br /><br />Talk, talk, talk, is the observation mode of web media. User participation. Social interaction. Instant messaging, posts, comments, email to friends, forward, bookmark, tag and rate, vote, vote, vote. What does all that do? It assigns value, assigns value. It's a different medium: a mini medium in comparison to the mass media (if you think money), a medium that for the most part serves as commentary on and observation of the mass media (hence its value to marketers), and which is "susceptible" to its own delusions, rumors, gossip, trends, and wipeouts. YouTube and MySpace are not produced by corporations, they don't occur over those media (radio, print, tv). It's no accident that these phenomena have remained where they are: online. That's where they can lay claim to a new social practice: the talk system. And perhaps the talk marketplace, the talk economy. (The term is social media, social software, but the social is talk).<br /><br /> <br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Youtube" rel="tag">Youtube</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/webocracy" rel="tag">webocracy</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/google video" rel="tag">google video</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/videos online" rel="tag">videos online</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/social media" rel="tag">social media</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/media" rel="tag">media</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/media theory" rel="tag">media theory</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/social software" rel="tag">social software</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/christopher alexander" rel="tag">christopher alexander</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/long tail" rel="tag">long tail</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/myspace" rel="tag">myspace</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/analysis" rel="tag">analysis</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/analysis" rel="tag">andrew keen</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/analysis" rel="tag">internet democracy</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/analysis" rel="tag">p2p</a><br /><br />(cross posted in my <a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/" target="_blank">social software blog</a> also)<br />related:<br /><a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2006/07/of-you-me-mini-me-mass-media-and-mini.html" target="_blank">Myspace as mini media</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1160597584080051042006-10-11T13:11:00.000-07:002006-10-11T13:13:04.093-07:00Pay Attention to YouTube!I don't normally post the same thing to two of my blogs, but this one's an exception. This one also differs in one respect. It's got an extra period in it. See if you can find it. Just kidding. It's the same.<br /><br /><br />I'm on a bit of a Marshall McLuhan kick this week, with YouTube's acquisition to Google still in the air. And Kim Jong Il leaping up and down at the far eastern edge of the map: living, ridiculous proof that power is all about getting attention (Dumb and Dumber: starring Bush and Kim Jong Il). I don't think Robin Williams could've scripted a better skit; nor the South Park team have animated it any better than Kim did himself. Let's all pay attention to lonely wittle Kim Jong Il.<br /><br />But back to our original news... YouTube. Why did Google take it when they had their own video service? Because Google's wasn't as popular. And why not? Because Google approached video as information. Youtube saw it as television. <br /><br />This is not about videos, it's about television, and the future of television most importantly. Which will be why Sumner and Ballmer and Murdoch are still awake at night unsure of whether they just were too stingy. Marshall McLuhan claimed that television was a social medium. Film was not. YouTube is the present-day television, not television. YouTube, aptly named, since "You" (= My) and Tube (= Television) precisely describe television's reconfiguration in the Communication Age. Yes, and MyTube would've sounded a bit weird. But MyTube would've seemed a bit, well, narcissistic (ah, the truth about teenagers and MySpace is written in the name!). And it would've missed the function of Communication as it's applied to television. Since television is configured as a broadcast medium, it's reconfiguration is as a communication medium. MyTube would've missed the point. YouTube captures it: television communicates only if it's seen by others with whom one is communicating (namely, one's friends, or social network). <br /><br />The social aspect of television is the reflection: to see others seeing what you're seeing. To share the experience of watching. Well, we don't often watch television that way any more. Sharing couches and armchairs, turned and tuned into the same network broadcast, primetime, dinner tray, dog splayed out on the floor thinking it's all about him. We live in a play-shifted, time-shifted day and age in which communication is as likely to happen asynchronously as it is to happen at all: that is, over the internet and not face to face. YouTube is about watching socially, but of course from one's own computer, out of synch in time, but in synch in terms of the content. <br /><br />Google missed this because Google saw video as indexable, searchable, categorizable and taggable content. Flickr misses this because photos aren't social (they're a show and tell, which is a bit different because it takes the form of speaker/audience, not broadcast/audience). I watch you watching television. Television directs vision to itself but in the social context of watching together. There's always at least a peripheral perception of others watching (Not in film -- room's too dark. Social's not the point there. In fact movies open with a warning to turn off your cell phone. Most definitely not social...ah, but the experience is social, yes. But not the medium.). <br /><br />The new generation doesn't sit down to watch prime time tv together. It's on YouTube, which provides the asynchronicity of experience, personaliz-ability of tags, uploading, favorites lists, channels, and a play duration much better suited to consumption than tv. Content in minutes, not half hour blocks. And played, of course, over the medium that's mine, that's mobile, that's interactive, and that's connected: the computer. <br /><br />Google bought YouTube. Makes perfect sense.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1160415377855218682006-10-09T10:03:00.000-07:002006-10-09T10:36:17.866-07:00North Korea: Sticks and Stones may brreak...Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me...<br /><br />So it's happened. The event our administration has hoped to head off, to discourage and deter, happened anyways. Asian security policy ought now be chronicled with "before test" and "after test." For how can Japan and Australia now maintain non-nuclear military postures? What do the South Koreans do? It would be stupid of North Korea to strike South Korea with a nuclear weapon, and sure, the weapon's design is to deter the United States (it's as much a gesture and communication as it is a weapon); but the South Koreans can't ignore it. And the border between those two lands is a hot one. <br /><br />What a disaster. World responses show just how few options the world has now. Rogue actors -- and Kim here is like a rogue actor with a nation state (he's more nuts than Osama folks) -- leave us with no options. Kim clearly wants recognition that the rest of the world has said it will not give (no negotiation with the axis of evil). And he's succeeding in getting it with the methods he's chosen: nuclear weapons. <br /><br />I have no idea what happens next. We're outside the rules of the game now. North Korea: 1 ; World: 0<br /><br /><br /><br />Words:<br /><br />Unacceptable -- US<br />Completely Irresponsible -- UK<br />Provocative -- US<br />Fraught with danger -- Russia<br />Destabilising -- Indiaadrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1160367484843985842006-10-08T21:16:00.000-07:002006-10-08T23:18:55.986-07:00Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Accept Kim Jong IlIf it is indeed true that N Korea conducted a nuclear test today, US foreign policy will truly be turned on its head. For everything about North Korea that is true will be like a mirror image of all in Iraq that was false. Washington will wish they only had to deal with the publication of Woodward's State of Denial. For after Hastert's denial, our denial vis a vis Korea will make our insistence on Iraq even more untenable. How can any administration project power, be it soft power, moral power, economic power, or the hard military stuff, if its own policies are bipolar? Back when the world was bipolar (read US and USSR), policies at least made some amount of sense. This version of bipolar owes more to psychiatry than it does to international relations! The White House has been living in a "reality" of its own invention, a projection (or transference?) of its own <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/opinion/09krugman.html?hp">paranoid future</a>, a reality show as seen on Fox News, a narcissism whose reflection on the surface of the world reads just as well backwards as forwards: State of Denial / Denial of State. You want reality tv? Stay tuned!<br /><br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/politics" rel="tag">politics</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/North Korea" rel="tag">North Korea</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nuclear test" rel="tag">nuclear test</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Kim Jong Il" rel="tag">Kim Jong Il</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/State of Denial" rel="tag">State of Denial</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Bush" rel="tag">Bush</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1160172573349479302006-10-06T14:55:00.000-07:002006-10-06T15:09:33.366-07:00My problem with the Law...People who know me know that I live by my own principles. I have a constitutional (!) allergy to rules, as well as a generalized condition of avoidance (if not out-right hostility) to dogmatic principles. The law falls under this rubric. But so too do many things opposed to law. Dogmatic violence ("insurgents" in Iraq), dogmatic freedom (US occupation of Iraq), and so on. I'm interested in the intrinsic, the particular, and the spontaneous. That said, of course, it's not possible to run an economy, or organize society, without generalization (aka, the rub). <br /><br />Here's a great passage from Gilles Deleuze's incredible text on Immanuel Kant's Critiques. In it he describes the passage from law to imperative/command, capturing the manner in which law departs from value, and becomes oriented itself. The result can only be a shift from the good life to the obedient life.... It's through a move like this that the law comes to support stupidity. <br /><br />This became clear to the free speech movement, it became clear to the Panthers, it became clear to King, Malcolm... Why have we lost our sight again, so soon?<br /><br /><br />"The third aspect of the Kantian revolution concerns the Critique of Practical reason, and might appear in formulas akin to those of Kafka. 'The Good is what the Law says' ... 'The law' is already a strange expression, from the point of view of philosophy which only scarcely knew laws. This is clear in antiquity, notably in Plato's Politics. If men knew what Good was, and knew how to conform to it, they would not need laws. Laws, or the law, are only a 'second resort', a representative of the Good in a world deserted by the gods. When the true politics is absent, it leaves general directives according to which men must conduct themselves. Laws are therefore, as it were, the imitation of the Good which serves as their highest principle. They derive from the Good under certain conditions.<br /><br />When Kant talks about the law, it is, on the contrary, as the highest instance. Kant reverses the relationship of the law and the Good, which is as important as the reversal of the movement-time relationship. It is the Good which depends on the law, and not vice-versa. In the same way as the objects of knowledge revolve around the subject (I), the Good revolves around the subjective law. But what do we mean by 'subjective' here? The law can have no content other than itself, since all content of the law would lead it back to a Good whose imitation it would be. In other words, the law is pure form and has no object: neither sensible nor intelligible. It does not tell us what we must do, but to what (subjective) rule we must conform, whatever our action. Any action is moral if its maxim can be thought without contradiction as universal, and if its motive has no other object that this maxim. For example, the lie cannot be thought as formally universal without contradiction, since it at least implies people who believe in it, and who, in believing in it, are not lying. The moral law is thus defined as the pure form of universality. The law does not tell us which object the will must pursue to be good, but the form which it must take in order to be moral. The law as empty form in the Critique of Practical Reason corresponds to time as pure form in the Critique of Pure Reason. The law does not tell us what we must do, it merely tells us 'you must!', leaving us to deduce from it the Good, that is, the object of this pure imperative. But it is the Good which derives from the law, and not vice versa. As in Kafka's The Penal Colony, it is a determination which is purely practical and not theoretical. The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to 'know.' We come across it only through action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the sentence, and the sentence is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guild is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.<br /><br />from the preface of Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/culture" rel="tag">culture</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/philosophy" rel="tag">philosophy</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Deleuze" rel="tag">Deleuze</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/law" rel="tag">law</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/cultural criticism" rel="tag">cultural criticism</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/post structuralism" rel="tag">post structuralism</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1159974357207489282006-10-04T07:46:00.000-07:002006-10-04T08:05:57.226-07:00Media circus finds no pictures allowed in Amish country<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/newt1.amish.school2.gi-745072.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/newt1.amish.school2.gi-742844.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />I only just heard on the news this morning that the Amish don't keep photos. There are no pictures of the girls who were killed. (Let's assume everyone's telling the truth; tho if I were an Amish parent I dont think I'd want my daughter's pic pushed onto the internet by bloodthirsty journalists, would you?)<br /><br />That's fascinating. And only moreso given the sharp clash of cultures that's been the Pennsylvania countryside this week. Satellite dishes and trucks, cell phones and microphones, cameras and lenses and boom mikes and grips and PDAs, Treos, Crackberries, all rigged up and *functioning* in the midst of a culture that chose to tie off its electrical line and make do without electricity. Without radio. Without wireless... <br /><br />In scenes shot at the scene of the crime, we've been shown small groups of Amish men (it's always the fathers, sons) huddled together, obviously in prayer and contemplation, though stoically so. This is not the picture of a community ripped apart, bleeding at the eyes, wailing in grief and overcome with pain. The Amish have, instead, given the media a quite unusual media situation: calm, accepting, forgiving... No shrines to the girls, no outpouring of flowers, no hand-made signs and sendoffs. <br /><br />It's been interesting to see the media deal with this. Obviously they can't intervene, they can't become the news they're there to report. And yet the story reveals the degree to which the media is creating the news. If it weren't for the sudden descent of a thousand microphones and cameras onto that small spot on the Pennsylvania map, there wouldnt be a story. Wouldnt be a story. Wouldnt be a story. <br /><br />There'd only have been an event. A loss, a crime, a grieving, a moving along.... <br /><br />It makes you wonder, what does the media want? Does the media want blood, mayhem, sadness, desperation? <br /><br />If the media provides an observation, a culture observing itself, then this event puts as much focus on the media as it does on the crime. I've not seen much discussion of this. Are people asking the media to back out and leave the community to deal with this in its own way? Perhaps the wknd papers and magazines... <br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/amish" rel="tag">amish</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/media" rel="tag">media</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/UI" rel="tag">UI</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/commentary" rel="tag">commentary</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/news" rel="tag">news</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1158870229389036662006-09-21T13:17:00.000-07:002006-09-21T13:23:49.483-07:00Rajeev Samant at StanfordMy friend and old dorm-mate Rajeev Samant has been flown in, business class and not the class that sits on top of the airplane, to speak to the incoming freshman at Stanford this year. That's 1700 kids at Stanford's MemAud. I remember that morning back in 1984, President Donald Kennedy advising us to Question Authority. Raj was one of the crazy Indians on campus; it's good to see that Stanford can still recognize flair and character. After all, he could have been at Oracle all this time, instead of launching an Indian white wine, cultivating his own grapes, opening wine bars in Mumbai, and courting the press for social change. (see him in <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205390,00.html">Time</a> magazine.) Anyways, chalooz Raj!adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1158696214214122852006-09-19T13:00:00.000-07:002006-09-19T16:54:08.036-07:00Difference and repetitionIn lieu of an actual post (I have things cooking but they're not yet ready), I'm just going to post one of my favorite passages from Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition:<br /><br />"But perhaps the majority of philosophers had subordinated difference to identity or to the Same, to the Similar, to the Opposed or to the Analogous: they had introduced difference into the identity of the concept, they had put difference in the concept itself, thereby reaching a conceptual difference, but not a concept of difference. <br />We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it (from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus). We also have a tendency to subordinate it to resemblance (from the point of view of perception), to opposition (from the point of view of predicates), and to analogy (from the point of view of judgment). In other words, we do not think difference in itself. With Aristotle, Philosophy was able to provide itself with an organic representation of difference, with Leibniz and Hegel an orgiastic representation: it has not, for all that, reached difference in itself. <br />The situation was perhaps no better with regard to repetition: in another manner, this too is thought in terms of the identical, the similar, the equal or the opposed. In this case, we treat it as a difference without concept: two things repeat one another when they are different even while they have exactly the same concept. Henceforth, everything which causes repetition to vary seems to us to cover or hide it at the same time. Here again, we do not reach a concept of repetition. By contrast, might we not form such a concept once we realize that variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element the interiority of repetition par excellence? Disguise no less than displacement forms part of repetition, and of difference: a common transport or diaphora. At the limit, might there not be a single power of difference or repetition, but one which operates only in the multiple and determines multiplicities?" Gilles Deleuze. Preface to the English Edition of Difference and Repetition.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1156630344814839802006-08-26T15:11:00.000-07:002006-09-17T14:57:55.623-07:00The Net Effects of Affective CapitalismP2P Wiki entry on <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Affective_Capitalism">Affective Capitalism</a>. This <br /><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?m=200608&paged=2"> blog post</a>.<br /><br />This is a repost from my occasional blogging at the <a href="http:/p2pfoundation.net">P2P Foundation</a>, run by Michel Bauwens.<br /><br />Michel has posted a fascinating addition to the Relational category and asked that I blog it. Called Affective Capitalism, it draws on authors Juan Martín Prada and Michael Hardt. I have to confess that I'm not familiar with Prada's work, and have not yet read Hardt's and Negri's Multitude, though Empire was terrific.<br /><br />If you subscribe to the version of economic and social history as told by the Left, our daily lives today have become rationalized, instrumentalized, and assimilated to economic purposes more now than ever before. But things are even more complicated in the view of these authors. By their account we are beyond any conventional late stage advanced capitalism. Affective capitalism, as it's put here, has progressed even further: beyond extracting value from surplus value, to the extraction of value from our relationships, our leisure time, our desires and enjoyments. By their definition, in this phase of capitalism, economic organization "is essentially the production of sociability itself." <br /><br />Clearly though, capitalism is far beyond the industrial age, and I would argue, beyond the information age also. I've suggested elsewhere that we now live in an age of communication, and that one of the vectors behind the explosion of communication technologies is a centripetal force of decentralization. A proliferation of productive and consumptive relations expanding ever outward: into the home, into leisure, into daily practices that go go go, around the clock. "The individual serves and is served, in turn, by an economy based on desire, affectivity and pleasure." <br /><br />Capitalism is founded on growth and progress, and if it is not spreading horizontally across the world's territories, it instead colonizes the "lifeworld" (the every day) along a line that descends like hook, line, and sinker. A line of economic logic that runs from the currents and trends that send waves across the surface, downward like a vertical, (data) mining the depths of our desires and interests. Even if you disagree that capitalism eats at the soul, you have to agree that it increasingly looks as if everything is for sale... <br /><br />Indeed, a dark reading of the Long Tail (concept) might argue that all of the serendipitous dots connected by collaborative filtering engines reduce the rich spontaneity of friendships to relations based on a one-dimensional pivot around a simple data point: common interests shown by the consumption of alike objects. Renters of March of the Penguins and Winged Migration Unite! <br /><br />This dark reading is possible even with the lights on. In fact it's more enjoyable. In the words of Juan Martin Prada:<br /><br />"economic power does not intend to continue to base all of its privileges on the exploitation of its subjects as a workforce but on the increasingly lucrative regulation of their ways of life, life dynamics and personal and affective interactions, emotions, consumer habits and satisfaction."<br /><br />This is the rub of affective capitalism. It describes a mode of regulation we could conceive of enjoying. Precisely because it targets enjoyment itself. So the inclusion of affective and emotional aspects of life and experience in economic production and consumption is a positive or negative development according to how you calibrate your philosophical and critical sensibilities. Negative, if you would like to reserve some of your heart and cranium for activities outside the economic sphere. Positive, if the Venn overlap of the public and private, productive and intimate, is as good as it feels. There is nothing essentially wrong with a capitalism whose growth and reach increases with every bigger and expanded catalog of new and enriched products. And surely an open-minded view of body modifications, gene therapies, and other life-preserving medical advances could befriend affective capitalist production, whether it seeks quantity or quality of life: <br /><br />"affectivity is for once and for all liberated from its former, restrictive enclosure in the contexts of intimacy and the family and is gradually becoming the real object of production in new industries that are increasingly designed to produce new forms of life and subjectivity." Juan Martin Prada<br /><br />The evidence for affective capitalism is all around us. Entire industries now cater to entertainment of all kinds, from life-threatening location-based thrills to one-click phenomena like Amazon and Netflix. There's tourism for the ecological, archaeological, religious, even medical tourism, and with trips to Gulags and Chernobyl now possible, the pathological? If the evidence simply showed that money can be made by pleasuring the senses this would be nothing new. But by "affective capitalism," the authors mean more than the economics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of economics). I think they also mean the mobilization of "human interests" (Habermas) but with affective attributes added to those of reason. An economy not just of reason and rational choice, but of pleasure and affect. <br /><br />An economy of affect would have to generate affective flows just like any other. It would have to inspire the desires it can satisfy, and successfully market to markets it has presumably created. The argument gets interesting here, and here I depart from a strict reading of our affective capitalism entry. Backing up a few levels, what is an economy? Cultural anthropologists have described "archaic" economies as allotting deductions from a common stock (e.g. land) and apportioning amounts from shared flows (say, harvests). Pre-capitalist economies took from the land, or cultivated and farmed foodstuffs and livestock, using allotment and apportioning regimes to distribute shares to members (of a tribe). The act is deductive. It is a distributive act of dividing resources that belong to all into parts according to a social logic, with a view of sustaining not only a society but the relations among its members. Capitalist production, by contrast to the disjunctive economic logic of archaic societies, produces through conjunction, by a creative act of addition (see Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus). Goods are created ex nihilo, not given by the gods or spirits (in gift economies the gods are placed in debt to tribes through offerings and sacrifices, those divine debts repaid in the form of bountiful harvests and other interventions). As consumers of a capitalist mode of production, we do not owe higher authorities anything but a tax (which is a debt, but a monetary one only). The conjunctive economy constantly adds. It adds through relations, connections, and links. But how? Communication.<br /><br />What better to use for creating links and associations than communication (and related tools and technologies). Here's Hardt on affective capitalism: <br /><br />"Whereas in a first moment, in the computerization of industry for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and "degraded" to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process, in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and "elevated" to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital."<br /><br />From the marketing might of mass media to social marketing phenomena like MySpace (miniMedia), messaging, imagery, and the sheer sex appeal of people, goods, and services move from mouth to mouth by face to face as well as mediated connections. Word of mouth marketing, then, is an example of affective capitalism, for it establishes demand on the evidence of shared interests and likes. We're back to the long tail. Buzz marketing is marketing to affects, by means of communication tools. <br /><br />Indeed, collaborative filtering is also a means of filtering collaboration. In particular, it suggests an AND between two products based on their likeness or similarity. Connections and relations spread out like a web among products, and with the dots connected (collaborative filtering), human relations emerge (filtered collaboration). Our relations become subordinate to economic relations because they have been produced by them. Is that not an example of "human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital?" And are these relations not an example of filtered collaboration, for our communication is in the service of product promotion? <br /><br />Coda<br />This being an economy of surplus and digital duplicates, not of scarcity, getting attention is the aim of affective marketing. But it works off a logical twist: that we like things that are alike. Surely we don't like things (intrinic logic) because they are alike (extrinsic logic). We may like things that are alike, but not because they are alike. The long tail is an example of affective marketing in its early stages, because the similarities among products promoted together (linked) is only a stand-in for the real marketer's grail: the connections between personal likes. For now, connections of likeness substitute for the connections between likes. The latter suggest themselves as a frontier of resistance to author Michael Hardt, who writes: "On the contrary, given the role of affective labor as one of the strongest links in the chain of capitalist post-modernization, its potential for subversion and autonomous constitution is all the greater." Hardt seems to suggest that we thwart marketing surveys and throw a wrench into the machine, with the aim of refusing to allow capitalism its sought-after model of our desires and pleasures. <br /><br />I wonder whether Foucault, were he alive today, might write a book on the database as a concrete design equally suited to surveillance and to marketing purposes. The concepts here are rich. Affective capitalism marks a historical moment in capitalism's development. I'm with Hardt. But I've always thought that if there's one thing we have going for us (humanity), it's that capitalism can't think. It can only observe. We have a lead on it, always.<br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/affective capitalism" rel="tag">affective capitalism</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Empire" rel="tag">Empire</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Hardt" rel="tag">Hardt</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/p2p" rel="tag">p2p</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/sociology" rel="tag">sociology</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/postmodernism" rel="tag">postmodernism</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/critical theory" rel="tag">critical theory</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/left" rel="tag">left</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Deleuze" rel="tag">Deleuze</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1154475940414832852006-08-01T16:41:00.000-07:002006-08-01T16:45:40.426-07:00Bullet the cold sky<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/mn_syd17_science-725106.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/mn_syd17_science-719700.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />"On cloud nine" is said to have come from references long ago (like a hundred years ago) to the number nine cloud in meteorological descriptions. Cloud number nine was the big puffy one. Here's a picture of a rare cloud formation just formed over Antarctica. Clouds like these take temperatures of less than mins 172 F. I guess it was minus 189 in the stratosphere where these clouds formed. The pearly coloring is their hallmark. Pearly lining beats silver lining, methinks.adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1153880492468216552006-07-25T19:13:00.000-07:002006-07-25T19:21:32.503-07:00Gifts and Thefts: Married and Hitched?<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Vertigo-783711.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/Vertigo-776589.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />Hitchcock analysis is not wanting for contributions. But here's one anyways. Hitchcock made crime thrillers. He was the master of the form, working out crime and suspense stories with precision and an impeccable logic. A logic that, it's been noted, included the audience for the first time, making him also a new kind of film-maker. Think of the scene in Rear Window when Jimmy Stewart, bound by a broken leg to his wheelchair, bends over to pick something up and as he does so, misses seeing a neighbor seen by all in the audience. <br />Hitchcock not only used the camera to let the audience in on secrets, he used the genre also. <br />Where the crime per se is normally solved, this bringing the story form to resolution, Hitch's crimes weren't Whodunnits (he's quoted as saying he never made a whodunnit film) Dunnitforwhoms. The thought I've now caught up to, then, is that Hitch in his way embedded theft within a kind of gift economy. <br />Hitch's films tend to be about two possibilities for relationship: love, or partnership. Oftentimes his romantic couples form, or subtend, a detective partnership first. We get caught up in the tension between two possibilities: will they get together? Kiss kiss? And then it's Bam! He goes and throws her off the train! Commentators have written that this ambiguity of intent, identity, purpose, and possibility is psychology rooted, for Hitch, in the ambiguity of his love relationships with women (yesmothering love, Hitch?).<br />Is theft not the opposite of Gift. Gifts are an object exchanged and a relationship reproduced. The proper move following a gift is a return. Reciprocity governs the gift economy, and the obligation binds people to one another. A theft has no bearing on relationships: in fact it's about material possessions and objects so much so that victims of the crime will often complain of a sense of violation, feeling having been violated in a profoundly anonymous manner. But the theft ends there, an event whose memory may leave a lasting thirst for revenge, or not. But relationships can't be built on thefts, say by thieves and their victims, unless perhaps things are taken back, retaken, taken back, and then, hey, it's kind of a weird society built on long-term loans.... Hey, there's an idea (I'm reminded here of an Eddie Izzard joke. Robin Hood is asking a man riding through (where else?) Nottingham Forest if he's not rich, and the man replies well no, I'm comfortable, and Robin Hood retorts well that's not going to swing, is it? I can't steal from the moderately comfortable and give to the modestly impoverished). <br />The theft in Hitch is far less important than the relations among his characters, relationships which are forged by the ambiguity caused by a violence whose meaning actually produces relations. These partnerships emerge out of the scene of the crime like a spiraling staircase, each step an act of trust or faith, a gesture of hope and commitment climbing on wobbly and weakened knees, a vertiginous swoon climaxing with a fall, or is it a push, from the Church's own mission bell tower... Crimes riding the thrilling narrative of romantic coupling, of partnership, of gestures, sacrifices, offerings forged out of uncertainty but in faith, building relationships where the key event is the taking. Modern man, that Hitch, and he saw correctly that it's better to give than to take away.<br /><br />(Oh that sounded corny. Like that bell tower in Vertigo. That bell tower was matted in. There never was a second floor in that mission. To create the effect of zooming in while pulling back, Hitch required his own lenses (vision) and a long long staircase structure (they used a model). Some things are easier modeled.)adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1153419799698867002006-07-20T11:06:00.000-07:002006-07-20T11:23:21.766-07:00Acts of War, Acts of TerrorThings that have become muddled in the reasoning of our leaders, in their lexica, phraseology, in their presidential idioms, in the press, the media, and ultimately in our heads. To wit, I'm having a hard time this week distinguishing between the following. Are they clear to you?<br /><br />An act of war<br />A terrorist act<br />An act of (self) defense<br />Pre-emptive strike<br />Preventive strike<br />An Insurgency<br />A terrorist<br />A Sectarian<br />Sovereign territory<br />Cessation of Hostilities<br /><br />And conditions of the world today that worry me this morning... <br />--Russia's rollback of "democracy"<br />--America's rollback of "democracy"<br />--Iran funnels arms through Syria to Hezbollah<br />--Iran visits N Korea<br />--Japan would like to remilitarize<br />--China seems to have lost influence over N Korea<br />--Kim Jong Il's hairdo<br />--Bush might have borderline personality disorder<br />--Bolton, at the UN, has been on TV more recently than Condi<br />--Iraq is in civil war<br />--Sunnis and Shi'ites are in it for the long haul<br />--a radicalized Islam and an entrenched West seem headed for a showdown of historical proportions<br />--the world's resources are rapidly running out, and much of our oil is in unfriendly places<br />--a pandemic, natural disaster, or terrorist act could tank the US economy, rippling out into the world overnight<br />--we have no savings account for contingencies that are practically inevitable<br />--China sits on half our debt/currency<br />--we spend half the world's money on arms<br />--Afghanistan and Iraq, and now Israel/Palestine, have been failures of foreign policy of catastrophic proportion<br /><br />In short, precisely when we need to convene around shared problems and challenges, we're using bullets, bombs, and shells as means of communication, unilateral action as a preferred mode of interaction, and executive privilege as reason and justification. <br /><br />I had higher hopes than for a "might makes right" foreign policy.<br /><br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/politics" rel="tag">politics</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/northKorea" rel="tag">NorthKorea</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/missile" rel="tag">missile</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/commentary" rel="tag">commentary</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/international" rel="tag">international</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/nuclear" rel="tag">nuclear</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/israel" rel="tag">israel</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/lebanon" rel="tag">lebanon</a>adrian chantag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3554424.post-1153248404893965902006-07-18T11:46:00.000-07:002006-07-18T12:12:51.006-07:00Bush's open-mike, back-channel, gaffe diplomacy<a href="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/image014b4b27-1e72-43ec-9e30-24bfdf9af654-789172.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://www.gravity7.com/blog/uploaded_images/image014b4b27-1e72-43ec-9e30-24bfdf9af654-782704.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br />I watched a bit too much news last night, eager to keep in tune (stay tuned in?) with the unravelling of the Middle East. Bush's open mike cursing was on every channel, the word sh*t always bleeped out (one commentator requested that the White House not appoint FCC chairmen who would fine them for playing the word on television that the President said through a live mike)... What a pity that Putin's G8 picnic has to take a back seat in the media to a presidentital gaffe. <br />Well, you see, that's how our president cooks up his foreign policy, and it being thin on insight and complexity these days, we take it as we can. And if that's with a chewed up, open-mouthed, Texas cuss, then sorry, let that polite and restrained Mr. Blair turn the mike off. <br />That Bush thinks a phone call placed in Syria to Hezbollah can stop this thing though, where'd he get that from? Does he really think the whole world works by picking up a phone? What a pity we don't surveill international calls, there'd be a lot of conflicts solved if we did! Condi knows better than to fly out there unless there's progress to be made. But with Bush dissing Annan out the side of his mouth to Tony Blair, it seems that even a President who refuses to engage "states that sponsor terrorism" (not to mention terrorist states) can squash peace efforts envisioned by those who do. Most of the rest of the G8 is behind a UN intervention. <br />This is not as simple as war by proxy, peace by phone. Every day Lebanon's cedar revolution is cut and logged; whether Hezbollah lose power, or Syria and Iran lose confidence, or countless more lose lives, it's not just a phone call. We're learning, that in spite of our power to project force, peace is much harder to win. The American way of intervening has not panned out. Turn off the mike, Tony. Chew with your mouth closed, George. Now, Europeans, how ever you have to do it, back channel, tap, type, semaphore, flash, if you have to, call, but please don't shell your way through some crisis resolution.<br /><br />Technorati tags: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/politics" rel="tag">politics</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/commentary" rel="tag">commentary</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/diplomacy" rel="tag">diplomacyl</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/G8" rel="tag">G8</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Lebanon" rel="tag">Lebanon</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/international" rel="tag">international</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/conflict" rel="tag">conflict</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/israel" rel="tag">israel</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/war" rel="tag">war</a>, <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Bush" rel="tag">Bush</a>adrian chan