PREFACE
Because my 9:30a bus home was overbooked, i am rather than IN Providence for my evening meeting now headed to Port Authority in the hopes that by arriving an hour and a half early, i will actually be able to return to Rhode Island sometime tonight. Unfortunately internet access wasn't quite at the ready in the interim, and now I have about 15 minutes to try to form something coherent out of my diasporic thoughts of recent, in regards to this book. The addition will come whenever I get home, in terms of LAYERS (see below).
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One of the most seductive passages of Terranova's work for me came on page 142: "If this world could appear to some as a world where appearances or spectacles have triumphed over reality, this is only because of a metaphysical prejudice that needs images to uphold the value of a truth that must always be uncovered." This by itself of course is nothing new in the face of postmodernism, so I was trying to see how the bio/informational -political structure in which it has come to light makes a significant difference. I see the overabundance of information argument as productive in terms of causality, but from an ahistorical viewpoint I am still planning to examine tonight (and hopefully we will discuss tomorrow) precisely what is included in the kind of fundamental framework of her ideas, and what about it is so different or important. (Yes, I am trying to avoid the phrase "at stake," but yes, that is more or less what I am talking about)
My overall fascination in this text was her emphasis from chapter to chapter, with no overarching thesis to unite it, on layers and the interim. This has come up the last two weeks (or at least, did two weeks ago and did in what I remember in the midst of illness last week). Reference p. 59, 122, others. This is the part on which I'd like to elaborate once I get home.
Questions / Issues
I apparently decided when I came to Brown as a freshman computational bio student that it was a good idea to take with me to Providence every Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, and old genetics text book I owned, so I couldn't skim through _Selfish_Gene_ to double-check precisely Dawkins's argument, but I was a little confused by Terranova's attempted argument that "selfishness closes the open space of a multitude down to a hole of subjectification." On the one hand, I kind of get it, at least if Dawkins was trying to explicitly anthropomorphize or generalize anything (which I don't particularly feel if I remember properly he was), but on the other hand genes in some sense operate quite similarly to CA's, especially since some genes effectively act as on/off switches of others, so in theory one could construct a CA out of a genome.
I was disappointed by the "Free Labour" chapter. This is neither Terranova's nor her text's fault-- 2004 was sort of before the golden age of Wikipedia and Youtube ("'YOU' weren't person of the year until two years later!) but I hope we will have more discussion in class about where the world has taken us in this regard since then.
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Well computer/Internet access as an entity seems to have parted its way from me (although were this on the larger scale of Internet access and political power I find this pretty interesting).
In any case, LAYERS!
In the Langlois, I was interested in her insistence that software's "role as yet another mediator needs to be taken into account" (49) in contrast to its reduction to electrical voltages. I thought through this quite a bit then, writing "as long as it functions then it is, but I just today mentally coined it to myself a bit clearer: software cannot merely be reduced to voltage differences, because historically it is based on and in the moment it embodies particular (human) decisions, by developers, based on user-friendliness, &c.
Where this is intriguing me in regard to Terranova's book is that she too focuses on layers-- which I think are important not just because they "build" on each other (59) but because of this same kind of mediation.
"Mediation" for Terranova is in some sense an inadequate process-at-work (the social decomposition into "closed enclaves coexisting but not interacting with each other outside the mediation of symbols" (61); mediation, that is, prohibits more direct contact. But elsewhere, it is attributed different characteristics. Mediation is (trivially) implicated in the social (87); and I think the mediation-not-reduction process at work in code functions in the same way that labour does vis-a-vis human work (waged labour vs human labour (88).
Where I'd like to go with this is a comparison of these underlying processes compared with those that underlie the image-as-not-representation (141). But as a result of classes, locked doors, and faulty Internet, it's later than I wanted it to be and our last class is starting!!
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