A Network of Reference and Implications: Electronic Revolution & its Peers

William Burroughs' "Electronic Revolution" is a fascinating text, both proto-cyberpunk in its technological fetishism (a la Neuromancer) and discomfortingly pseudo-medical in its aspirations to a higher biological causalties of human development (possibly related to the bionuclear power of Akira and/or the apes & monolith opening of 2001) . Additionally, "Electronic Revolution" functions as a possible antidote to Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" by arguing for exactly what Enzensberger believes is only half the battle, namely, equipping the populous with the tools of mediation through which they are controlled and to thus overturn the order of things as they are. Hence the title "Revolution." I think that tracing out this idea of the 'guerrila media producer' who be a fascinating study, particularly as it intersects with economic criterion, and inevitably must be considered along with the production of "prosumer" audio/visual products that have been a force in the politics of the everyday as long they were seen as documenting reality, not reconstructing it as Burroughs seems to prefer.

When I think over, there is a bizarre erasure (or perhaps it is a more naive overlooking) in the Burroughs text, in regard to the 'guerrila media,' and this is the nature of the devices used for capturing, playing back, and editting tape. As proprietary objects, how does Burroughs feel he can subvert order using the same devices order uses to propigate itself? Are not the technologies involved in the undermining of politics also the means by which that politics is maintained? So is Burroughs simply substituting?

Here, it would probably good to interrogate Burroughs' emphasis on "scrambling," on the intense, disorienting, recombination of recorded mediums. Is this a radical discourse? What exactly does Burrough's believe it achieves? And what do you do when commercial media recuperates the scrambling (such as MTV's "switching channels" aesthetics of the 1980's, or high speed montage of commercial film that has become so mainstream that it is a naturalized filmic device)? Has Burrough's recombiant spirit been so absorbed by culture (in musical mash-ups or remixes, or youtube parodies) that it can no longer show culture a new part of itself?

Snow Crash & Electronic Revolution

Perhaps more interesting is the idea of the virus and the belief that the virus through words might actually have a more direct physical impact that society typically gives it credit for. While Burrough's was describing how "scrambled words and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will" (Burroughs 32), I could not shake the eerie connection of Burrough's idea to the concept of the "me" and "nam-shub" of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash." In that text, Neal Stephenson employs the idea of code-mediated viruses that effect human hackers, and not necessarily their computer hosts. These viruses, are related to Sumerian mythology, where the "me" is a sort of human software, actually programming them to execute certain tasks. The success of these programs was predicated on the existence of the Sumerian language, which essentially worked like a common operating system through which "me" were compiled and executed. The "nam-shub" is a sort of anti-virus, which caused people to forget Sumerian and thus become free from being human-computer slaves. The fascinating thing about the comparison between Snow Crash and Electronic Revolution is that the virus is the danger of the former, and the promising subversive liberator of the latter. However, at one point, Snow Crash's protagonist wonders like Burroughs does, about the origins and meanings of the idea of a virus: "I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true..." (Stephenson 233).

Does it matter? It seems to matter to Burroughs, who not only acknowledges von Steinplatz's theory of the origin of spoken langauge (Burroughs 8) but also wonders if he can "write a passage that will make someone physically ill" with the emphasis on the idea of the written effecting physicality(Burroughs 39). Like the Christian-Right villain of "Snow Crash," Burroughs believes "a far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from ... language" (53). And it's at that point if not sooner, that we as readers suddenly must confront the violence and power that has been at work throughout not only Burroughs' writing but everything we've read. Is language an operating system and the texts merely programs as in "Snow Crash"? Or have we been wounded and indoctrinated at the hands of fascists like Burroughs, who at least, near the end, has the decency to reveal what's been happening to us.

scrambles is the american way

The Burroughs text this week has a lot of potential to be enacted by working with it in different media. In part because I have been thinking about the project assignment, I noticed that Burroughs makes a lot of explicit suggestions for “research” and experiments in sound, video and performance.

But not only that, I think that the text in written form also performs some of the scrambling that he repeatedly calls for. Right off the bat, I found that the fact that the text has already been marked up by a previous reader had the effect of thought control. On page 7, I found myself wondering how mitochondria could be viruses that wouldn’t “necessarily be recognized as a virus.” This seems to me like a small scale version of how “riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation” (20).

The ideas for action that Burroughs presents also recall the talk by Erkki Huhtamo this past week. Huhtamo argued against accepting Jonathan Crary’s claim that the screen is the “detachment of an image from a larger background,” especially in pre-cinematic media because attractions such as magic lanterns were often presented in public spaces where the external noise of a fairground was never separated from the image. That argument intersects with Burroughs’ ideas for guerilla scrambling at demonstrations. External playback and cut-up tape recording interact with the people, “continually subject to random juxtaposition” (21). In any case, Burroughs numerous suggestions were a very fruitful read in the week before we have our presentations.

semiotics student seeking group!

I've spent several hours looking into ideas for this project but haven't come to anything in particular on which I'm determined to settle. Fed for years the advantages of agile programming, I would really prefer to brainstorm specifics with my group members, so I'll restrain this post to generalities specific enough to help with group selection!

Some of the general and recurrent ideas about which I love reading include schizophrenia-as-metaphor, bricolage, and little narratives, which have come up in the readings in conjunction with information studies. More specifically to this class I'm quite interested in the disembodiment of information (from its material form), and then in its fallout the notions of disembodiment, bodies, information, and power that are discussed by many of the authors we've read. I've become very alert to and fascinated by juxtapositions with capitalism, although I think that would perhaps better be suited to a more general and theoretical study and possibly less to this particular project.

Many of the specific ideas I was looking at involved either (1) analyses of the structure and characteristics of the World Wide Web (or more narrowly of Google/Wikipedia/&c. as its heralds), or (2) juxtapositions/comparisons with print media arts... but even here, there are some ideas that attract me more for which I just could not come up with a particular object or referent, so I'm quite open.

Which authors are tied into the project is highly dependent for me on the topic, and I'd be happy with most. I found Hayles especially rich; also Plant, Derrida as usual, and the Von Foerster, actually.

Please let me know by comment here or e-mail (Jenny_Filipetti@brown.edu) if you share some similar general interests, and we could meet sometime in the next couple days to start thinking through specific ideas!

On expression, control entropy and the struggle over the signifier

Cartography

I found Deleuze's description of Foucault as a cartographer to be quite interesting. It contrasts with an idea of Foucault as a sort of architect, a builder or creator of a edificial structure. I don't think that they downplay Foucault's genealogical aspect. Rather, genealogy becomes another part of an assemblege of analysis.

What constitutes for me this difference between cartography and artitechture is the place in which objects and subjects become situated within their particular structures and non-structures. An architectural genealogy would build, for an example, a house out of constituent elements. In the case of discpline, we would have the state, the laws, the penal system, and all that stuff. For a proper functioning house so to speak we would need all these elements in a specific combination. Once all these elements come together then we can analyze the structure as such. But, to extend the metaphor just one step further, we can only engage in the house as structure, by going through the front door and looking around.

Cartography precisely contrasts with this structural view. If Deleuze is correct, Foucault is precisely not building any sort of edifice. Rather, cartography is a kind of topographical imaging of elements that have no fixed places. Thus, topographical multiplicity is a geneaology of relational points that contribute to a mapping. When Delueze describes Foucault's Discpline and Punish, what becomes important is the relation of differening elements such as prisons, laws, states rather then their particular structural places. Additionally, it seems that these relationships are always shifting, simutanously working and being worked on by the mapping they produce. This in effect creates a cartography of discipline, or biopower, or govermentality, or whatever else.

Then new developements such as technology get placed into this cartography. Deleuze says that" Technology is therefore social before it is technical." I think it is interesting in the vein of Deleuze to think about how emerging technologies fit into the sort of Foucauldian assemblege that he describes. From an edificial viewpoint this would mimic already existing structural elements under the names of confession, servilliance, or power. I think that what Deleuze is saying is that from a Cartography emerging technologies can only be analysed through comparison in very superficial ways. What really happens is that emerging relational apparatus alter the very social mapping. This in effect would transmute Foucauldian cartographies.

No relationship at all

“the value of displacement, of transport, etc, is precisely constitutive of the concept of metaphor with which one claims to comprehend the semantic displacement which is brought about from communication as a non-semiotic phenomenon to communication as a semio-linguistic phenomenon.”

Again, even keeping in mind that “Signature, Event, Context” is a seminal piece of work on semiotics, I can’t help but wonder if Derrida is laughing at us behind this screen of absence-nonpresence-possiblepresence(?) words and meanings.

In any case, despite an incredible attempt to hide his point in clutters of ivory-tower language, I thought Derrida’s point in this phrase was quite interesting (once I managed to unpack it). He seems to be pointing out that we can’t view linguistic communication simply as a metaphor for oral or physical communication because that would assume that the metaphor is itself a form of communication. However, because there is still a subjective shakiness in bridging the gap between the metaphorical and literal context of a word, we cannot just assume that such metaphor is concrete and defined.

For me, this raises interesting points on Derrida’s later arguments/examples on the “iterability” of the sign. Obviously, the written word can be placed in any context, giving it whatever new meaning the author so chooses- this is something Derrida points out when he writes, “every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written . . . can be cited, put in quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable.”

It seems then that it is not simply an arbitrary relationship that the signifier has with the signified, but simply no relationship at all. If the bridge between metaphor and literal, even the pure citation of text, is so tenuous and shaky as to have an infinite set of meanings…well, instead of a bridge that just seems like a hole to me. A hole that can be filled with whatever we choose to do with it.

Which is maybe what I just did with my quote.

Statements

This time around history and language are investigated in their assumptions and methodology to both be predicated on ideas of origin. Foucault's method appears as a contrast to the standard, concentrating on the development of institutions in their contexts realizing the multiplicity of their creation and the possible hindsight bias of the historian. This goes back essentially to his affinity with Nietzsche and his genealogical method of investigation which seeks to view the emergence of things as a result of several lines of evolution and parentage as opposed to linear movement from an origin and to pass judgment on present forms in their present form and not via their method of emergence. This consideration of multiplicity and context in history as something that is not linear and necessarily precedent to the modern is the quality that Deleuze looks on and analyzes. In describing discursive formations, for example, Deleuze states:
"[A] science never absorbs the family or formation which defines it; the scientific status and pretensions of psychiatry cannot quell juridical texts, literary expressions, philosophical reflections, political decisions and public opinions, which all form and integral part of the corresponding formation" (19).
What this seems to imply in addition to history's nonlinearity is its undividability. To study economic history without studying political history, natural history, and cultural history is in a sense to lose important parts of the topic that is being considered and when the topic is something like power, it's expression comes in many forms.

All this appears as a complement to Derrida's deconstruction of language, his emphasis on the text as being conditioned by absence while representing a past presence and his consideration of the performative citation.

I'll answer: "Perhaps."

So, here's Derrida doing what he does best: defining a specific concept and then suddenly revealing its universal application. What most interests me in "Signature Event Context" is how it bears upon the communities of rational consensus that people like Habermas hold so dear. What Derrida does is to pierce into these communities and introduce a third (supplemental) term between sender and receiver that alters the game--or, rather, he exposes this third term as the infected heart of the language community itself. This notion of "infection," of "illness," "parasitism," and "abnormality" within communication, bothers Derrida. These moments of "infelicity" reproduce and mutate, spread their iterations through the weave; Austin and Habermas seem threatened by this viral activity and so attempt to quarantine it in the outskirts of language. The dissemination of language beyond the contextual and intentioned community become outbreaks of contagion that threaten to infect the heart of rationality that, supposedly, drives consensus forward. Here I think back to Patrick's account of the "terror" implicit in Habermas' utopian, rational communities.

Derrida does not wish to negate, to sew confusion and undermine meaning. Rather, he wishes to make room for the deferred, the multiplicitous, the other, within the previously closed system. He makes room at the very heart of it, founding rationality and consensus upon those very substitutions and mutations that once terrified: the supplemental. In so doing, he avoids the trap of reifying an "absence" that merely buttresses a "present." Derrida's is the absence of differance, of endless but productive difference and deferral.

Derrida does not deny performativity or the specificity of communicative acts. I think he is simply reacting to the danger inherent in a community that believes in the transparency of its intentions, the unity of its goals, the cleanness of its contact. The notion of writing/signature offers an escape route between the constraining walls of author and reader, though the third term is never clear. Perhaps this third must always be blurry, in motion, potential. I still find it difficult to wrap my mind around the "legibility" of a coded piece of writing whose coders no longer exist (or have never existed). But it feels necessary.

Signing off. Eli.

presence/absence/source

In signature, event, context, Derrida handily dismantles dominant conceptions of language and communication as primarily a means of transmitting meaning or content. In his treatment of communication, he touches on Condillac and Austin, both of whom seem to be (I haven't read either) concerned with notions of presence, absence, and source. Writing, for Condillac, is reducible to a speech act predicated on the absence of both the sender and the receiver of the message contained. Within this model, speech is representative of thought, and writing is representative of speech, creating a chain of direct signification between our thoughts and our writing. Elaborating on the notion of writing as defined by absence, Austin treats signature as a marker of the "presence" of a source--or writer--within a written text marked fundamentally by said writer's absence.

Addressing these two accouts, Derrida writes: "By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer."

I am particularly interested in Derrida's selection of the word "nonpresence" as opposed to the more conventional choice of "absence." What is the difference between nonpresence and absence? Is nonpresence marked by a "trace" of the once-presentness of the author, while absence is devoid of this trace? Does the written signature constitute this trace? There is no doubt in my mind that Derrida chose this word very specifically and intentionally, yet I can't establish why exactly that is.

Perhaps it has something to do with the notion of "source" as treated by Austin, specifically the idea that a signature indicates the "presence" of the source of communication in the written word. It is clear that the source of an oral utterance must be present to the utterance, but I find problematic Austin's assertion that "appending a signature" to a written utterance constitutes the "presence" of the source of the utterance.

The emergence of new media is creating huge problems for such notions of presence and source, because the rise of open source languages and remote internet discourses is turning inside-out our cultural and philosophical understandings of self, agency, and individuality. As meg mentioned in her discussion of email signatures, the validity of a signature is no longer predicated on“the pure reproducibility of a pure event.” We live in an era of automated payroll machines that print out 50000 "signed" cheques every other friday, cheques that, to a bank, are no different than a cheque signed by an individual in a discreet, purely reproducable event. We update blogs and databases such as wikipedia which, until a few years ago, never required "sources" to "sign" their contributions with a username or ip address.

In light of these technologies and new forms of discourse, it seems like we need a revision of the notion of signature as a singularly reproducable pure event. As we log onto the web and visit websites, post on blogs, and share information, we are silently and unknowingly leaving signatures of our momentary presence at each of the virtual spaces we visit. In this instance, I am reminded of the student in Alabama who hacked Sarah Palin's email account, probably assuming he would get away with it. By tracking the "signature" of his IP address and computer information, authorities pinpointed his identity and proved his guilt. How such unintended, automatically-produced virtual signatures come to bear on issues of privacy, neutrality, and surveillance will play out in the very near future on our cultural and virtual landscapes.

understanding and ownership

I'm amused by the term surrounding Derrida, Foucault, and the other French post-structuralists of the 60s called "terrorist obscurantism," coined by Foucault himself, describing the opaque and esoteric nature of their writings. Foucault coined the term referring to Derrida, arguing that his style of writing refutes criticism; since it is so difficult to understand and unpack, the author can always respond to criticism by claiming that "you just don't understand me, you're an idiot."

This term is particularly pertinent in the context of Derrida's discussion of signature as something that can be recognized and repeated, and therefore copied and co-opted. Terrorist obscurantism becomes a way to maintain permanent ownership, or signature, because while the text exists in the public domain one can still always return to the uncounterable claim that the critic simply doesn't understand.

On Foucault's interesting analysis of the constructed frameworks within which discourse takes place (through categorization and labels), and his chapter on the gaze, I find that facebook is an interesting microcosm for analysis and example in which "subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity." This ultimately is what the network and communication are all about. In facebook subjects are objects, and subjects become their own objects in the reflexive act of profile narcisim. Text and information get removed from the context and authorship through the newsfeed, and speech acts are solidified through the very structures of the system, the signifier preceding the signified in the act of 'friending.'

Derrida's and Foucault's opposite approaches

There is a stark contrast between Foucault’s and Derrida’s treatment of concepts. In the Preface to Las Meninas Foucault is concerned largely with –topias, be they utopias or heterotopias, which he defines as “operating tables” upon which we can manipulate, examine, and compare concepts in a consistent and valid way. In this sense, Foucault’s perspective is holistic. He is explicitly concerned with the reduction of a certain uneasiness and the achievement of a wide understanding.

On the other hand, in Signature, Event, Context, Derrida tries to demonstrate the essential independence of concepts or utterances and their removal from the people who originate them. I’ve only got a sliver of an idea why he wants to perform this operation of absolute reduction and isolation (and I am sure he has an agenda). But at the end of his piece he summarizes several inversions he has executed: First, that “writing” is “not the means of transference of meaning” but a “historical expansion of a general writing” which includes consciousness among its consequences—in other words, writing is not the product of the author but the other way around. Second, that writing is not the locus of meaning but rather that which is read. Third, that all oppositions of metaphysical concepts constitute a hierarchy which may be disturbed through an operation of identification and inversion called “deconstruction”

While Foucault is searching for truth in modernity, a quest which necessarily involves the disentanglement of contradictory concepts, he maintains an approach grounded in the aesthetic or holistic. Las Meninas is centered on a text designed with aesthetic perception in mind which also happens to constitute a locus of Classical thought. He also explicitly tries to decode “the Same,” an extremely inclusive topic. Derrida, on the other hand, tries to disentangle the same culture with a divisive, quantum approach. Rather than trying to understand culture as a whole Derrida looks for wedges he can strengthen between people and words.

I’ve struggled to understand why he does this when another esteemed philosopher takes a diametrically opposed approach. My conclusions so far are that both are trying to tie everything together. Foucault is willing to deal with the uncertainty of a large field of view. Derrida, uncomfortable with the lapse in “rigor” that approach necessitates, prefers to split and divide all concepts, thus leveling the structures of thought to rubble and building them anew. But he neglects the aesthetic or holistic point of view. Operating strictly on ideas tends to introduce strange inconsistencies with reality, and Derrida’s approach is no exception…

half-witted commentary

Foucault rejects the label “structuralist” as a term thrust on him by “certain half-witted ‘commentators’” in France, and to my understanding Derrida also rejected the labels ‘structuralist’ and ‘post-structuralist.’ Perhaps I can’t get in through my tiny mind, but Foucault does indeed seem to use many of the “methods, concepts, [and] key terms that characterize structural analysis” (xiv). If I am not part of the “serious public” that Foucault hopes his English language readers can be, perhaps I am a non-serious parasite on his intentions. But seriously, I think that many of the concepts that both he and Derrida use to indicate structures or structuring structures overlap, and I’m not always sure how they are distinguished.

Foucault’s terms: “system”/“system of elements” (x, xx), “positive unconscious” (xi), “rules of discourse” (xiv), “order” (xx), “codes of culture” (xx), “episteme” (xxii)
Derrida’s terms: “ideology” (6), “logocentrism” (20)

Regardless of the distinctions between each of these concepts, they all contribute to a “theory of discursive practice” (Foucault xiv), which is a major project of (post-)structuralism. The question that Sinje brings up, of how the mapping or displacement of the rules of discourse that both of these texts engage in can open up new spaces, if not outside the order of things then between the categories of its taxonomies, is a persistent one within this discourse.

Foucault's Mirror (Reflexivity in Visuality)

Foucault's "Las Meninas" was a welcome new twist on the ideas of reflexivity that has been traced thus far in the course through N. Catherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman, as well as in Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings. In particular, I found myself coming back to a quote of Hayles',

"Reflexivity entered cybernetics primarily through discussions about the observer... The objectivist view sees information flowing from the system to the observers, but feedback, can also loop through the observers drawing them into become part of the system being observed (Hayles 9)."

"Drawing" becomes an interesting verbal choice when this statement is considered through Foucault's writing on Las Meninas. Indeed, it seems that Foucault is utterly fixated on this idea of the Velaquez painting as an articulation of reflexivity, and what's more, Foucault's approach, like that of Velazquez smiling within his own painting, seems to be that of the reflexive author, cybernetically unable of distancing himself from his observations. To return to Hayles, "It is only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary critical theory is produced by the reflexivity that it also produces (an observation that is, of course, also reflexive)" (Hayles 9).










From the Western schema of perspective (shown above in a Durer etching), with unifying vanishing points located at the eye of the observer and in the background of the painting, Foucault points out the inherent reflexivity of "Las Meninas."

From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers, have no power of evading, it runs through the real picture and emerges from its surface to join the place from which we see the painter observing us... in appearance, this locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity (Foucault 4).

In this visuality, the gaze of "the painter" as well as the perspectival orienation of the painting, situates the observer has not outside the painting, but within it, which is not to say that a material situating takes place, but rather than the construction of the visuality of "Las Meninas" can only take when the viewer enters the necessarily reflexive point of observation. And in that moment, with the connecting line uniting painted subjects and the observing eye (recast from objective external perspective to subjective vision of reciprocal construction), one can understand why "the painter" stands poised with his paint brush and palette eying the observer. His gaze as drawn the observer into the painting. His drawing draws.

So we assess the mirror. A mirror which situates not as what we think we are, but what the painting casts us as, sovereign in perspective, from whom the painting (and its field of vision) is oriented. But it is a paradoxical sense of reflexivity, for though we recognize our engagement (and necessary intrusion) into the visual field of the painting, we recognize that our engagement with it seems to yield no effective way of looking at ourselves. Of establishing who we are to the painting, "Because we can only see that reverse side, we do not know who we are, or what we are doing. Seeing or seen?" (Foucault 5).

And indeed we can never know this other reality. Because to know would really be to nullify our intrusion by quantifying our change to the system. Which is why we endeavor towards contained reflexivities, and why the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner wanted to only allow reflexivity to happen at a quantified depth. Because the mirrors are too many, and the reflections to dynamic, to allow us a empirical look at a world, that does not (perhaps cannot) be measured without remembering to measure ourselves, the eyes that produce the painting but are not the painting themselves.

language in derrida & deleuze

Citations:

1. "No sense of possibility or potentiality exists in the realm of statements. Everything in them is real and all reality is manifestly present. . . . A statement always represents a transmission of particular elements distributed in a corresponding space." (Deleuze, 3)

2. "What counts is the regularity of the statement: it is not the average, but rather the whole statistical curve" (Deleuze, 4) 

3. "What seems accidental from the viewpoint of words, phrases, and propositions becomes the rule from the viewpoint of statements" (Deleuze, 9)

4. "This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called 'normal'" (Derrida, 12)

5. "Given that structure of iteration, the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content. The iteration structure a priori introduces it into a dehiscence and a cleft [brisure] which are essential" (Derrida, 18)

Presence

In his explication of the statement in Foucault, Deleuze seems to claim a role for statements that opposes Derrida's notion of writing in general. Deleuze speaks of manifest presence and transmission (1), terms that Derrida questions with recourse to the fundamental iterability of language. I don't claim to be able to reconcile this difference or to privilege one theorist over the other. Rather, I would like to pose some questions:

If the statement is not a phrase or a proposition, can it be considered a linguistic phenomenon? How might we think about the "statement" non-linguistically? Does it introduce a problem viewed in light of Derrida's deconstruction of the signified? Does Derrida's essay enable us to point out the limit(s) of describing a statement in language/writing?

Regularity

Deleuze's "statement" and Derrida's "writing" seem to share one fundamental aspect: a constitutive internal deviation, drift; an apparent "accident" that is actually a rule (this recalls the statistical "taming of chance," which I discussed in an earlier post). Yet given that the statement and writing seem to have different relationships to presence,  I wonder if the statement would contain or transmit this deviation in the plenitude of the "whole statistical curve", while the dehiscence of writing leads only a possibility of reading engendered by the determined absence of intention or fixed meaning. While I'm not sure how accurate this hypothesis is, I think that it does beg some interesting quesitons:

Are Deleuze and Derrida writing about the "same" regularity? What are the stakes of claiming that language / the statement always work even when they seem prone to accidents? Might Derrida's text problematize Deleuze's notion of a totalizable statistical curve? Or does Deleuze's concept of the statement point to an overlooked category or function of language in Derrida's writing in general? 

I think that part of the challenge of reading Derrida and Deleuze side by side was that while they use much of the same language, their essays seem to talk past each other. I hope that these questions might provide some possible points of contact between these texts in order to draw out how each conceptualizes discourse.

reflexivity and discourse

while I feel like I am having a slightly blasphemous moment here, especially since to coming from a cultural studies background the notion of discourse is a very important key concept of making sense of any current or past scholarship. and while i still believe that the notion of discourse makes a lot of sense. I am surprised at how much it worries me to see in how far the concept of discourse is deeply interwoven with the cybernetic concept of reflexivity.

While Deleuze takes up Foucault's phrase of the immanent causes stating that:

"the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that executes its relations; and these relations between forces take place 'not above' but within the very tissue of the assemblage they produce" (p.37) Derrida argues that: "every concept, moreover, belongs to a systematic chain and constitutes in itself a system of predicates"(p.21)

Both turn to the question of how it is possible to rewrite the system within the system describing the process of rewriting as a mechanism, which hopefully results in either drawing new maps, or reversing and displacing meaning. Since there is no outside, there is nothing else which can be done. So the question I have is essentially in how far this notion of discourse might actually be quite problematic as it plays into a cybernetic concept of regarding society and human beings as part of a mechanism or a machine? And if it is problematic, in which other way might it be possible to think?

Understanding Derrida

I hadn't read this Derrida text before, it's pretty awesome. He touches on something that I've been wondering about for a while, the accessibility of the structure of information/communication. Most linguistic and semiotic analyses attempt to categorize and compartmentalize the various fragments that compose either the field of written language (which is dead language) or the field of immediate apprehension (which is to say, the trace, or dasein, or something like that). The problem in both cases is that, as Derrida paraphrases somebody else, "men are already in a state that allows" both kinds of communication--in order to begin a study of language, one must already be operating under the auspices of language, which necessity seems to preclude a truly comprehensive hermeneutics of language. Despite the various attempts of analytic disciplines to articulate a comprehensive model of communication, there is always an absence which causes the possibility of a failure. In this essay Derrida, rather than delineating this absence with his own words, shows that Austin's work on performatives (interesting and respectable though it is) simultaneously encounters, attempts to understand, and discards the operation of this absence as intrinsic and unavoidable.

The absence of which I speak is the absence of the self, which is constructed by language. In the idea of performative utterances (as I understand it, though from the Derrida piece it appears that Austin changed his mind on some points after his better-known work) there is the possibility of the failure of the utterance: to Austin, the performative fails to function if the context is incorrect. However, as Derrida points out, there is no such thing as context.

It seems that there are only two things: there is the self, whether it is named trace, dasein, presence, etc. Then there are other things. Writing is not another thing, because all language is writing, which is more or less the same thing as being, or at any rate one requires the other ("the essential predicates in a minimal determination of the classical concept of writing ... are ... to be found in all language, in spoken language for instance, and ultimately in the totality of 'experience'"), and all attempts at delineating the boundaries of experience, as far as I can tell, have failed. "Communication" is something that takes place within the inaccessible "self," as is "writing," because writing requires reading to truly function as writing, and reading is not an attribute of the material text, but of the immaterial reader. The context of an utterance is ultimately determined by the reader and no one else, hence the intrinsic possibility of the failure of a performative.

For instance: Derrida quotes Austin discussing the situation of the personal signature. For Austin signatures are inherently performative: in a spoken utterance, the word I functions in the same way that a signature does with a written text, it indicates the speaker and allows the recipient of the communique to situate himself in a contextualized situation, validating the utterance as a performative. However, the same slippage that is characteristic of the word I (its meaning is context-specific) applies to the signature: for example, it is entirely possible to falsify a signature, or to simply refuse to acquiesce to its supposed authority. In both of these cases the failure of the performative is caused by the context, but again, the context is simply the absence of the I. To Austin the possibility of this failure is a parasite on language, to Derrida it is the point at which Austins analysis fails.

So there seem to be a few conclusions (though inconclusive ones) to which we are drawn: all writing is language, or all language is writing; regardless of the order of terms, they both refer to a problem, to wit: there is writing, and there are books, but they only exist as such when they are apprehended by a cognizant reader. The problem is that, as I said earlier, "writing" and "reading" are both attributes of the inaccessible subject, but anything that can be demonstrated as writing (a written text, or anything else) is simply an object: in order to be transformed (transsubstantiated) into the function of reading or writing, it requires the supplementary addition of the reader, who grants the object the qualities of existence, otherness, and iterability, though none of these inhere in the object: they are attributes of the subject as object. When I look at the computer screen I am hypothetically "seeing" something real, but really there is only a process I call "myself" or "I," which includes the computer screen: if I see it, and understand it, it is only because I am understanding the way that that piece of myself functions in relation to the other pieces of myself.

So in the last analysis, if I understand correctly, all we can do is continue to exacerbate the différance, spiraling inwards towards a continually inaccessible center. Is that what Derrida's saying? It appears that since Plato, or more recently, since the Cartesian Cogito, people have been trying to situate the subject in an appropriate location (so to speak). The greatest innovation of semiotics, as I understand it, was to propose that the subject should be sought in the (supposedly comprehensible) operation of the dead universe of writing. Derrida is wonderful but maddening, because no matter how hard I try to follow him all I end up with is the Hindu admonition from master to student: neti, neti (not that, not that); an understanding of things as their own negatives. But Derrida mentions occasionally that logical negativity isn't what he's looking for, so I guess I have no idea.

About the dog

Velásquez's painting Las Meninas, reproduced doubly in the frontispiece to Foucault's The Order of Things and in the introductory chapter of its same name, is demonstrated as a transition point, a barrier object, between what he terms the "two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture:" the advents of the Classical and the modern ages. Interestingly enough, the painting dates from precisely the same period of time as Foucault cites as the inauguration of the classical age--which is "roughly half-way through the seventeenth century" (Las Meninas has been dated as created in 1656). What explanation is there then for this strange anachronism? Perhaps Velásquez was simply a visionary, as underlined by the fact that notable artists and critics have described this same painting as the "theology of painting," and "the philosophy of art." Foucault may seem to agree, for in this particular choice of art he sees the act of representation unbounded, "freed finally from the relation that was impeding it... representation in its pure form." It is "observation-as-spectacle."

This term, "observation-as-spectacle," is intriguing for its use here since it robs what should be the proper spectacle in a painting by a artist in the employ of a royal court, which are the sovereigns themselves. This optics of sovereignty that is subverted places the burden or locus of its effects instead on the painting's audience, or rather on the act of vision performed by said audience. When Foucault asks us to "pretend to not know who is to be reflected in the depths of that mirror," he is asking us to remember that the mirror exists only as an object or actor in one of the potential networks that can be drawn in the painting. The mirror, as much as it appears to reflect the position of the invisible audience, is simply revealing what is or will soon become the side of the canvas we, at first glance, "cannot see." In this way, the painting inhabits this seminal position in Foucault's thought: the painting allows its viewer to be implicated in a new position in regards to her or himself: a blending of subject and object, of the mundane viewer with the sovereign.

Yet when Foucault says that the "pure reciprocity" of the image is uncoupled by the canvas' back and the dog in the lower-right corner, I do not agree. The canvas, acting itself as a boundary object, for all intents and purposes is the image we see on the mirror (a mirror which sits strangely among a wall flush with paintings)--it does not break the continuity of the two scenes constructed for each other. What interests me the most is the dog in the lower right corner, what Foucault claims is solely an "object to be seen." The dog, its head bowed in deference to the invisible they on the other side of the painting it inhabits, and its eyes cast respectfully to the side, acknowledges the non-presence of the viewer as sovereign. It lays out at our feet, at the feet of also the figures in the painting itself. It reinforces the importance of the viewer by interacting with us fully, giving the human as subject of inquiry the respect deserved.

Taxonomy & the tabula

Foucault's interest in taxonomy in the Preface to The Order of Things seemed to implicitly conjure the Adamic theory of language that Saussure argued against, with the purpose in mind of interrogating the "order" resulting from enumeration or naming, whether or not it is related to some kind of primary, "unspoken order" which exists, which preexists language (xx). An Adamic theory of language would propose that words are essentially linked to their referents, with the illustrating example being that Adam, the Biblical first man, pointed at and named all animals and things, and this is how they got their names. (I just realized this is the second week in a row I have posted on the figure of Adam or noticed the figure of Adam haunting something...)

The particular taxonomy Foucault chooses, one of animals appearing in a Chinese encyclopedia appearing in a Borges' story, brings to bear questions of the real and the illusory, the fantastic and the natural, the normal and the monstrous. The quality of monstrosity "would not even be present at all in this classification had it not insinuated itself into the empty space, the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another" (xvi). It is in fact the "space" of or for language that then becomes Foucault's concern, for where else would the "propinquity of things listed" be possible but "in the non-place of language?" (xvii). This concern with space or place is related to his having noted in the foreword that this text is a project of archaeology and is to be considered an open "site" : in his story, Borges "does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed" (xvii).

The table, or tabula, is this site: the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space (xvii). A more concise definition can also be found on xviii. As Foucault continues on to talk about aphasia, and the aphasics failure to group objects together except in "tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets," I am reminded of Sadie Plant's discussion of hysteria, the idea of wandering or of women's inability or lack of desire to identify themselves with a metier for their entire lives. I then became interested not only in how these unconnected islets are phrased in an order that keeps unraveling, for lack of any governing semantic order, but also in how this notion of the tabula and of connections between objects in an order can be related to the idea of a network.

"Atopia, aphasia," says Foucault. How does the table relate to, for example, cyberspace, or the disembodied definition of information. Is the internet a "ceremonial space, overburdened with complex figures, with tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, and unexpected communications" (language that recalls to me, again, Zeros and Ones) (xix). What is the pure experience of order, then?

Signatures and Emails

Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context” is a crucial text for any discussion on communication. My interest with the text was in the end section on signatures because of what it means for signatures in the most prevalent form of written communication today - email. What is the state of the online email signature?

Derrida writes that for a signature to be effective its must be iterable: “the pure reproducibility of a pure event” (20). This iterability allows a signature to denote the person not present at the time of reception. An email signature is by nature reproducible with cut and paste options. Also one is not held to keeping a continuous signature as with the signed, written signature. I have noticed the trend of turning signatures into signs for personal emails – a simple M or shortened version of ones name becomes the signature. While professional emails require a long list of signatures, each line denoting another layer of important information. For example for my radio station I sign my emails:

Meg Goetsch

Publicity Director

Brown Student and Community Radio

Bsrlive.com

88.1 fm

There is yet another layer to email that connects to Derrida’s discussion on context. He writes about context as the rupture of a written sign. This open system of writing “one can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility and impossibility of writing, of its essential iterability” (9). An article I read this weekend pointed to email’s “asynchronous” communication, the fact that exchanges do not happen between people in real time. The “delay” between sending and receiving is nearly erased by the marking of the time it was sent. Also with the increase of iphones and blackberries constantly on and connected there is no delay. One begins to assume that when an email is sent it is immediately viewed. With these points in mind what does this mean for the signatures relation to the present - what has happened to the signature-event? What happens to presence when signatures are by nature multiple online? Can there be signatures online?

Narrative (Dis)organization, natural philosophy, the weaving of words

Sadie Plant’s narrative—if it does, in fact, constitute one narrative—astounds me in the scope of its broad appeals to scientific history, theories of gender and sexuality, developments in cybernetic science and literature, and so many other tangential but almost always relevant tropes. Structurally, Zeroes and Ones presents a formatting and organization of content fundamentally unprecedented in the printed word. Hypertextual by nature, Plant’s narrative is spliced with quotations from hundreds of other sources, running the gamut from the theoretical to the historical to the scientific. I found these “blurbs” at once interesting, useful, and frustrating. The bolded blurbs were interesting mainly because they brought so many other texts to bear on the lines of argument and examples presented by Plant herself. She seamlessly incorporates other works into her narrative as a means of elucidating the intertextual connections between these works and her own work as well as between the bolded quotes themselves, shedding new light on old texts and historicizing her own words within the context of a larger field of study.

For this reason, Plant’s organizational schema was useful to me, allowing me to better understand her narrative in terms of the references that she used. In addition, the bold terms and quotations served to break the text into more palatable bits, an effect that itself reminded me of the computerization of knowledge and the transformation of books, theories, and equations into streams of informational code, zeroes and ones. While certainly useful and interesting, I found Plant’s organization frustrating in that I found myself at times not understanding either her references themselves or her reasons for invoking them at a specific time. For this reason, I would propose a hypertextual edition of the book, allowing readers to “click through” to each referenced person or work to evaluate the reference in its own context and determine how it comes to bear on Plant’s larger work. With this setup, the work of reading zeroes and ones might be more efficient and effective due to the ease of accessing “linked” information i.e. the bolded captions.

Focusing on the content of the book, I was intrigued by Plant’s weaving of the history of natural philosophy throughout her feminist account of cybernetics. At the time when Charles Babbage was building his adding machine, the word “science” had barely come into play, and Babbage himself was considered as much a “natural philosopher” as an engineer. What are the differences between science, natural philosophy, and engineering, and how do new ideas about cybernetics and computers conform to or call into question these categories?
I also found myself drawn to Plant’s discussion of textiles and the art of weaving, a skill that she equates with technology manufacturing as a site of widespread low-wage female employment. It seems that Plant is herself a weaver of words. Her work, viewed in these terms, can be seen as a complex patchwork of contemporary analysis stitched together by historical, scientific, and cultural themes that allow seamless transition between ideas of old and theory of new, between antiquated forms and new media.

I look forward to discussing how effective this work is, and whether people think that Plant’s organizational schema and unique style of “écriture féminine” are more or less helpful in advancing her ideas and creating questions and textual problems for analysis.

the dynamics of Plant's cyborg subject

I’m interested in how exactly the body emerges for Sadie Plant in the virtual space, how her notion of the “cyborg” departs from other cyborg subjects we have discussed in class and how if at all terror/danger is elicited by her conception.

I think that her move to historicize the connection between technology and femininity effectively reveals the overlooked feminine properties of the virtual space. Her move back into history appears at first to be an attempt to reveal a kind of lost origin of technology—this origin being fundamentally female. She seems to want to bring the peripheral “means” of the ends to the forefront, in which the female view from the periphery emerges as an exalted, technological standpoint, “a new conception of the world..,” one which reveals, “the interconnectedness of everything” (3). However, it is interesting how the very tracing of the intimate and dynamic relationship between technology and femininity denies the possibility of any kind of liner, origin-driven historical structure.

I like her depiction of the Net as a parasite, which exemplifies a rejection of a central authority or power structure as the hub of generating technological processes. I also think that her depiction of bacteria which, “replicate and mutate without regard for any individuation” (242) is an especially provocative metaphor in terms of thinking about Plant’s newfound cyborg subject which I believe she argues has properties, “continually interacting with each other, constituting new systems, collecting and connecting themselves to form additional assemblages” (162).
What is at stake in this lack of orientation and lack of a central/organizing structure, lack of individuation-- and how may it infuse terror in its production of cyborg bodies?

I’m also interested in Plant’s narrative form and how people have been talking about its metatextualily in its interweaving of quotes and dislocated texts. I’m wondering if it is in fact effective in epitomizing the matrix of the female, technological body/space.

Cause modern world will build things high

I think I will have to disagree with Eli.
The thought of flying anuses terrifies me.

That being said, I think that Sadie Plant makes a really interesting point regarding the nature of automated/technological work. She makes the point throughout the text, but I found the analysis on page 118 especially salient. There seems to be two parts to the argument that she is making.

The first is that there is some portion of information technology that is imminently feminine. I think that there might be slight problems with that view in so far as the kind of historical examples that she chooses to utilize run the risk of an auto-essentialization. Sure, it might be important to talk about the differences between male and female that are entrenched in discourses or the possibility of very real material sexuations. However, it is still dangerous to take that argument to far.

The second portion of her argument is a lot more interesting in my opinion. Technology changes the nature of work itself. There is a fundamental difference between typing out notes with a typewriter and handwriting(whether or not that is actually sexed in the way that Plant argues is another matter). But, I think what is the most important is that we can expand that line of thought to understand how technology expands the horizons of roles and opportunities, even if these changes aren't immediately borne out in reality. Mundane tasks become sort of transfigured in so far as information technology and automation technology redefine who can do a job, how many people are necessary to do a job, and the speed at which a job can be done at. I think that will have implications for our later readings as well.

"Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration."

That's my new rallying cry.

Anyhow, I was really interested in Plant's talk about counting systems, how Roman numerals consist of lots of phallic I's just added on top of each other, and how 1 in the Sanskrit system is not so special in a scheme of numbers each of which has its own identity--in this way, the Sanskrit system is a more lateral and plural one (though Plant admits that the West was pretty much able to retain strong senses of oneness and nothingness).

Plant recognizes zero as that which appears as nothing but which bolsters, reproduces, and gives value to other numbers, much in the way that women operate as invisible means of reproduction and organization. The introduction of zero, that multitasking figure, makes coding possible as it introduces a nonlinear manipulation of numbers, a complex operation beneath a surface of hard value. (I'd never really thought about the advent of zero, but I like the image of the Church panicking about its introduction, even if it was eventually subsumed under the old system.) Plant argues that zero is not absence, that it is "neither something in particular nor nothing at all." As emphasis is shifted to code and process (the product of weaving is process, pattern, code), zero gains its value as a kind of movement (a flickering?), a flow of electrons. (Interestingly, zero comes from the same Arabic and Sanskrit root as the word cipher, which refers to coded messages and the transposition of symbols, a secret writing--herein, perhaps, lies a way for zero to be linked to a structuralist scheme.) I really like the idea of holes being "charged particles running in reverse"(57), despite my ambivalence toward pseudo-science. This idea hearkens back to that notion of Ada's inventing in reverse, of reinventing invention (26). Time's linearity challenged.

Time to dream about flying holes.

Bricolage

The act or art of organization is a management of tensions. Yet while organization plays a great role in her text, Plant is untrusting of the notion of self-organization, most probably because she is leery of the concept of the unity implied by the "self," a thing she goes to great depths in the beginning quarter of Zeroes+ Ones to problematize. Organization, however, is not the same as hierarchization. An organized network does not necessarily have to be composed of the linear progression that hierarchy implies.

Plant's writing style is a testament to this. She mentions the term "bricolage" on page 79, in reference to the "wildcat activities of technical invention." Her style, a collection of vignettes dotted with quotations, is told in a particular order so that the reader is constantly bombarded and made aware of connections between topics within the text and with the text and the "outside" world of history and contemporary culture--certainly as hypertextual as a paper-bound object could be. This piecemeal, patchwork process of writing, departing significantly from the usual academic style of "this here is my thesis and the rest of the X00 or so pages will be a defense of it," implicates Plant as a bricoleur as well.

On page 80, there is a fantastic paragraph regarding the "diagonal route" that this bricoleurs navigate. In the analogy made to the carpenter, who not only planes the wood by following its fibers, but also must "follow" the wood to find it where it lies. This paragraph ends with the statement: "They are 'intuition in action.'" The intuitive aspect of bricolage is another point to highlight in this text which deals so heavily with sex: if the male-dominated scientific route is constructed by priority, by hypothesizing a problem and objectively seeking it's solution, the act of bricolage is a move away from this, one which relies upon the subjectivity of the participant. The "intuition" referenced by Plant is part of the way that the distinction between self and object is blurred.

The act of bricolage is actually alluded to much earlier in the text, though it is not called by that name. While writing on the Analytical Engine, it becomes apparent that what this object's would-be creators were attempting to incorporate into its design was a feedback system. On page 20, Plant states "The Engine 'could make judgments by comparing numbers and then act upon the result of its comparisons--thus proceeding upon lines not uniquely specified in advance by the machine's instructions." This act, one we have referred to earlier in the class as "learning," I believe could also be termed bricolage due to its self-referential aspect. The comparisons Plant makes between machine and woman is furthermore underscored by this additional tension between the two: I am particularly thinking of page 123, when the author discusses how women teleoperators began to communicate with one-another, instead of acting as the conduits through which information could pass through. These women were becoming embedded and part of the systems they seemed to operate: the links they create and the exchanges they made were the creation of networks, the negotiation of tensions, and they were bricoleurs in that they had to pick this all up amongst themselves.

Man and (wo)machine

What caught my attention the most in Sadie Plant's book was the kinship that appears between the woman and the machine. This was something that I didn't quite expect to come out. The description of binary code and its similarity to the gender binary via the 0 + 1 = 1 relation of historical presence and movement appeared as an expected techno-rendering of the feminist critique of patriarchy, however, the addition of the machine not as a third element as much as an outgrowth of the female element kindred to it brought a fresh consideration of what exactly is the machine and our treatment of it. The machine appears analogous to the woman in the text because of the importance and closeness of the task at hand while still being an inane redundant task. The greater project is to be overseen, supervised, and organized by the man while the gruntwork, computation, and fine construction is to be done by the hand of the woman or the power of the machine.

As far as her description and expression of networks and networking goes; the implication is that as technology has advanced, the system has become increasing friendly towards the female. Networking as social quality of the woman is now ubiquitous to us in its digital counterpart. In both cases, the woman and the machine challenge the legitimation of the male whether through sex or thought.

The significance of the female in technology is made especially evident in the many references to Ada Lovelace and in the description of the beginnings of industrialization as a weaver's revolution.

The need for efficiency of the male thus necessitates the creation and inclusion of the female and the machine but only inasmuch as they can be exploited. In this gesture, however, both wield power that cannot be wholly controlled by patriarchal supervision. In this sense, the situation arises where the leeway of necessity yields a new multiplicity. No longer in control, the mutations of the system, the diffusion of the network, the anonymity of interaction decentralize power and what appears is the weakened patriach trying to halt the technological progress leading to the automation of his own function.

Eliza and Barry

me too. impressed. amazing connections between theory fiction history and narrative structures, a crazyly associative read and have by now given up to be actually able to disentangle all of the lines of argumentation. Plant seems to be weaving a serious net herself. 

I was really interested in Sadie Plants historical exploration of the Turing Test. Especially the moment in which the first machine which almost manages to pass as a human being is ELIZA a computer which answers in a psychonanalytical manner, was very funny. It is as if she, just while she is on her way somewhere else silently whispers into our ears: "Have you ever noticed that psychoanalysts can be kind of like machines?"Also the progression of her argumentation in which she then launches into setting the BARRY's distincly male sexual behaviour as something not-human, she reclaims the human in a very effective way. 

Furtermore the connection in the instances in which Plant connects her view on hysteria as being a distinctly female condition, which requires the fremdzuschreibung/assignment of meaning/naming (p.134 "She is driving the psychatrist mad." You are, 'She'" I said "No, I am not." "I say you are.") is really convincing in the way she illuminates how the category of hysteria is structurally designed. 

found Plant’s connections between women, weaving, and the rise of computer technology and the Net extremely engrossing, particularly as her writing style so conscientiously weaves an enticing web around the reader, drawing connections between things much like her telephone operators connecting message ‘senders’ and ‘receivers.’ Her text becomes an active agent of her argument, convincingly embodying her proposition that women and networks conceive of information differently than men and linear text: like her book, “hypertext programs and the Net are webs of footnotes without central points, organizing principles, hierarchies.” (10) With no clearly defined thesis, labeled center, or linear organization, it sets off an explosion of mental tangents, that frustrated by my training in de-tangling and responding with linear arguments.
Several times I found Plant’s recursive writing pattern developing interesting permutations in her various lines of thought. For example, Plant’s portrayal of women as infrastructure in a male-dominated world gets turned on its head: initially the female operator is “kept in a cage or a booth, under the strict supervision…Like Foucault’s prisoners, she was ‘the object of information, never a subject in communication.’”(120) Yet, like working around a loom, these pools of ‘connectors’ developed connections among themselves, becoming an entity in and of themselves. I liked the Deleuze and Guattari quote she included: “A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own.”(123)
Like the threat of artificial intelligence one day overcoming man, women’s very role as infrastructure (and the rise of the computer) has, according to Plant, allowed a ‘genderquake’ without men realizing it’s cause. “It is in spite of their tendencies to reduce, objectify, and regulate everything that moves that computers and the networks they compose run on lines quite alien to those which once kept women in the home.” (38) I thought this a beautiful iteration of the [central?] concept of hysterisis, “the lagging effects behind their causes.”(26) Ada was coding for a machine that wasn’t built for another century; if women are the second gender it is because they emerge victorious with the end of male dominance; the loom, like writing code, is entirely ‘done’ before it beings to run.
This lack of linear one-ness does not fit into the male perception. Hysteria is man’s misunderstanding of woman and woman’s attempt to escape male-dominated hierarchies. Hysteria, the womb, the matrix, a tactile rather than perceptive relationship with one’s surroundings, rhizomes, multiple identities, and the Internet all come together as ‘female.’ In contrast to Plant’s narrative of the Net and the development of technology as tactile, immersive, and multidimensional, Wiener’s cybernetic theory of technology is comically masculine: technology develops for the creation of appendages to man, extending the human boundary through enhancement.

Process and data

In Zeros and Ones, Sadie Plant lays bare the discrepancy between data and process, between male and female. First, she shows that women are woven through the history of the modern computer. Then, in a breathtaking expansion of focus, she redefines the female role in society. Working through the Freudian analysis of femininity and showing the parallels between Anna Freud and Lady Lovelace, Plant disposes with the idea of women as empty shells. She then begins to discuss the problem of the binary.

She points out the parallels between the "ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off... light and dark... male and female." But she rejects the Lacanian conclusion that zero only exists in relation to one -- that women exist only "as excluded by the nature of things." She shows that women have historically been the processors who made male actions possible and draws the parallel between women and computers: "When computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. Hardware, software, wetware -- before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines." She continues on to show "eggs are computers to the simple floppy discs of sperm."

I find the scope of Plant's argument wonderful and strange. By drawing a very concrete parallel between the female and the computer, a host of implications flow into her interrogation. The corollary of process as female is data as male. A computer without data is empty structure, just as data without process or perception is meaningless. Taking the parallel further, matter has no consequence without energy. And energy, process, and computation have eluded theorists in ways similar to those in which femininity eluded Freud.

Plant's arguments pertain to the social history and biological implications of gender, as well as the essence of computation, matter and energy, and binary complements in general. But I am less convinced that her claims apply to the social present of gender. In a sense some Americans, at least, have been degendered by the last few decades. Traditional roles have been inverted, traditional sexuality subverted... people are, for the most part, people these days. But then where to place the truths of Plants argument? How can we claim to be genderless while accepting the essential differences of sex? How can we ascribe gender to abstract lenses with which we make sense of reality, while claiming that we, the observers, have lost that same sense of gender? When we call a thing female or male, what do the terms mean? Are they biological? Or do they pertain more deeply to essential process or essential data underlying the described?

Technology: Techno vs. Nomos

Patrick is right on in terms of the text's fragments; these dipping ins and outs, these chaotic patterns of history, theory, and critique. The translation of the book itself into a woman's language where the reader must multi-task, anticipate passages, and create connections on the fly (the tasks of the female) intrigues me. This book emphasizes itself what technology is.

Plant appropriates (or by her definition, takes back what was already stolen from the silent women who manifested it) technology as a feminine characteristic. From the repetitive, process intensive, and laborious nature of needlework to the textile mill, we can see the entire progress of technology from Plant's point of view.

We now speak a feminine language with technology!
"The roundabout, circuitous connections with which woman have always been associated and the information networking at which they have excelled now becomes protocols for everyone" (144).

However, when trying to think of some concrete definitions of this language, my arrival at page 48 and 50 lead me to believe I need to unpack this section in class in order to understand a major point of Plant's- the introduction of the techno vs. the nomos.

On page 48, Plant tells of the US adopting the guerrilla fighting techniques of the Viet Cong (essentially distributed networks) for use with ARPAnet (a govt. sponsored network). Plant then goes on to describe how technology itself is a fusing of these two realms: the techno, or "the faculty that distinguishes parts," and the nomos, a nomad "without property, enclosure or measure."

She then goes on to say that this is the "same ambivalence is inscribed in computer code... the binary and the digital, or the symbols of a logical identity which does not indeed put everything on one hand or the other, and the digits of mathematics, full of intensive potential, which are not counted by the hand but on the fingers and, sure enough, arrange themselves in pieces of eight rather than binary pairs" (50).

These two realms must always co-exist, or exists simultaneously: "The techno and the digital are never perceived to run free of the coordinating eyes and hands of logic and its binary codes. But logic is nothing without their virtual plane. They are the infrastructure and superstructure" (50).

I kept feeling like I was misreading this section, so I wanted to make sure I understand Plant's use of techno, digital, logic, and binary. I understand this "productive" aspect of the nomos, but why still rely on the unified aspect of the techno? Is this what she means by a self-organizing system that constantly changes identity? Why do we need the techno here at all then?

I feel this section relates to our previous discussion of flickering signifiers and I will try to think of another way to map these relations down. I came up with the idea of the loop (from programming languages) as a possible example of this concept- it is so logical (it takes in an input as its function and produces an output after it runs a predetermined algorithm on the input), but it can also become infinite, destroy itself, become recursive, or traverse and morph an entire database (all of these properties which are much more in tune with feminine language). Perhaps her discussion of perceptrons on page 143 could better inform this passage (the inclusion of a self-mutating homeostasis system with no fixed identity)?

This discussions seems like it also feeds into why technology is a destructive force, where "masters who are liable to get replaced" (88) happens in the first place. The domination of women in the new information economy, the success of the east over the west, the failure of those that tried to pioneer this new system (American science and military) to take advantage of it. It really plays against the idea of technology = power = wealth that we read about last week. Why would the privileged destroy themselves in such a way ties back to the techno needing the nomos.

The Body in Digital Art

Sadie Plant’s discussion of art in the digital age or digital art, specifically in the “Tact” chapter, is very interesting in relation to her discussion of the current state of the body. Plant discusses how we are in an age that undermines the previous traditional separation of “science and art, means and ends, individuated creativity and expertise, isolated media and areas of specialized knowledge and experience” (198). The fact that now “hierarchically arranged systems of knowledge and media find themselves increasingly interconnected and entwined” (186).

The most basic definition of digital art and new media art can be consolidated to art created by a new media technology. The tool of these new forms of art is then some technology. Plant discusses how tools have changed in the digital age. She gives a primitive definition of tools as more or less a variation on a stick or an object to create distance. The safe distance tools provided no longer functions because tools have become extensions of our bodies with new technologies. However, this transformation is productive in art as it brings back the “tactility of woven fabrications” (185). With this “tactility” art then communicates the way “touch,” communicates as ”interplay of the senses” (185). If art acts as “touch” and the tools are extensions of the body, then skin no longer acts as a border between the exterior and the interior as it had been previously.

But, does digital or new media art “touch” its viewers through this interweaving of previously separated elements, tools and artists? Or does it point to something more like the “synaesthetic, immersive zone in which all the channels and senses find themselves embroiled in the “unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance"” (186)? What does this mean for the state of artists, spectators, authors, etc…if the body is no longer a protective border between inside and outside, tools and artists, images and spectators?

I would highly suggest looking at the work of new media artist Jeanne Jo, who is teaching at Brown this semester, for her work with yarn in relation to Plant’s discussion of weaving and femininity. (http://www.jeannejo.com/) 

hyperlinks, tags, and stumbles - progressing in Ada's footnotes/footsteps

"All, and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume I could write on this subject."
- Ada Lovelace

Information and its need of organization and structuration, serves as an elusive topic of discussion throughout Sadie Plant's Zeroes + Ones. It appears to be a both a central concept, treated as a static object whose manipulations occur via systems of use but never in it's "nature," and also as an item of shifting value, meaning, and form- the sort of treatment we have seen it take in Catherine Hayles. In fact, it is this exact tension, between the static and the dynamic nature of information, that Plant points out in the work of Ada in translating Louis Meabrea's text on Babbage: "When Ada wrote her footnotes to Menabrea's text, her work was implicitly supposed to be reinforcing these hierarchical divisions between centers and margins, authors and scribes... but her notes made enormous leaps of quantity and quality beyond a text which turned out merely to be providing the occasion for her work" (8). Indeed, in this example, Plant shows how the secondary information can overthrow the primary information of a text. In the process, not only is the ordering of a hierarchy overthrown, but the hierarchy itself is undone. Information, in the example, is not an additive commodity that builds up, but a material whose expansion seems to actually overwhelm any regime structuring it's previous permutations.

One of many questions that emerges here, is how then how (or should) information be structured. Plant posits, almost immediately after demonstrating Ada's subversion of traditional information patterns, that information must be related. In cannot existed as the bounded and separated text and footnotes (which Ada overthrows) but as related texts, engaged in one another, but without hierarchical considerations. This is the hyperlink, the "from here to there" link that follows the lead of footnotes, in pointing from one text to another. "Only by 'criss-crossing the complex topical landscape' can 'the twin goals of highlighting multifacetedness and establishing multiple connections' even begin to be attained. Hypertext makes it possible for 'single (or even small numbers) of connecting threads' to be assembled into a 'woven interconnectedness..." (11).

While the hyperlink seems to be a step past the footnote, it is unclear how far it really progresses Plant's idea of a "woven interconnectedness." Not only does the hyperlink still remain in the world of the one-to-one, the A to B, the expression of a linear teleology, but it also seems to remain embedded in the ideas of separated (bounded) texts, distinct from one another, bridged only in a single note or link. In this way, the hyperlink alone does not seem to fulfill the dreams of Ada and Plant, a structure which will assist rather than close down pathways of connectedness. The world that Plant, at least, hopes for is one in which the "master copies lose their mastery," and in the hyperlinked world, the "central" text is only bolstered by its amount of connections in (which Google privileges as a primary component of page rank) and out. When paths must exist in this way through texts, there is the danger that "All roads lead to Rome."

Something that Plant does not consider is the "tag," the emergence of the metadata culture which enables information to be linked by type (species) rather than teleology. In "tag" culture, there is no progression, no linearity, but rather and in or an out, a reinscription of a the 0/1 binary. If the information is 'in,' then there is no differentiation between the objects, save for other groups designated by tags, to which they belong. Tags, like markers of identity, work by creating categories of inclusion (and thus exclusion). But in that potential, they can often show in what way two informations are related, rather than requiring explicit hypertext links. In this capacity, the tag seems to be an ideal way of working towards depicting Ada's maxim, that "all and everything is related."

Tags, however, are necessarily unable to be related to everything. Like Saussure's semiotic scheme, which required showing that a given is signifier is not everything except what it "is," the tag gains meaning by bounding off information from another piece of information, relating texts with pre-programmed relationships. Here, it seems clear that one flaw in the premise of relating information is that our ideas of relatedness exist in a world in which relation is opposed to "not related" a state/situation for things seen as entirely (or at least categorically) differentiated. So Ada's maxim is a sort of paradox. If all and everything is related, then nothing is not related, which means the whole idea of relation becomes somehow meaningless. Right?

The differentiation of information, across categories of "tags," or through teleologies of hyperlinks, demonstrate the fact that we can still not escape entirely from the paradigm of in/out, here/there, 0/1. But Plant does point at a nuerological phenomena that may be the overturing of those distinctions. She calls them "intuitive leaps, the 'aha-experience' and the sudden 'insight' ... surprising phenomena arising from situation of fluctuations and instability" (168). In other words, the overcoming of relational connections, defined by their associative qualities, to the irrationality of connections beyond relationships, a terrasect through the network if you will, that tests Ada's idea that all information is related by showing that no information is not related. The connection can be made, even if the connection does yet exist, because their is a way to connect all things.

You've seen this in practice before. The genius cannot find a way to solve his/her problem, so he goes out for a beer, a walk, to the movies, for coffee, has sex, etc. And in the process of this unrelated activity, a connection not yet imagined emerges and allows the breakthrough.



This is the experience of being exposed to information rather than persuing it (and in the process controlling it), and it seems to posit (as per Plant's obsession with the hysterical and DID) that only in a fundamental break with pathways of information can true interconnectedness be realized. Or, to answer my own question, the structure that can best show the interconnectedness of information is the only which erases difference and strives to connect the random, the arbitrary.

This is stumble. The digital flaneurship plugin that allows you to take quantum leaps around the internet. While you can control pathways (more like genres) of pages to be directed to, the random 'stumbling' of pages makes these connections thin to almost the point of breaking through to Plant and Ada's idealization of the everything related. In this moment, the perusing of the internet becomes like Plant's "neural nets" which "have less to do with the rigors of orthodox logic than the intuitive leaps and criss-crossing once pathologized as the hysteria of a thinking marked by associations between ideas which are dangerously 'cut off from associative connection the other ideas but can be associated among themselves'" (173-174).

the medium is the message

In Plant's discussion on weaving, she foregrounds the process of production rather than the result because the patterns in cloths are "implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge" (67). She makes a parallel argument about binary code. The zeros and ones that compose the Net are the Net themselves.

Plant makes an analogy on page 127: "If computers are the power looms of the modern industrial revolution, software is more like knitting." Thus, the process of programming code to correspond to the on/off switches (the ones and zeros) of silicon chips is akin to the process of weaving thread to create cloth, which is identical to its process.

I found that this analogy helps elucidate Katherine Hayles' concept of the flickering signifier and her argument that we must consider the embodiment of information. Plant mentions that "the keystrokes of users on the Net connect them to a vast distributed plane composed not merely of computers, users, and telephone lines, but all the zeros and ones of machine code" (143). That is, the signifiers of the keyboard correspond to a layer of coded signifieds that in turn signify layer upon layer of code, leading back to the zeros and ones that determine the passage of electrical impulses which are themselves signifiers.

I second Patrick's desire to see this text digitized, in order to enact the kind of weaving that Plant describes that is immanent in hypertext. The fact that this text is out of print enacts the relegation to footnotes of women mathematicians and programmers that Plant subverts throughout the book. To paraphrase Ada Lovelace, it would be preferable to see this text digitized in order that we wouldn't have to be acquainted with this text through the medium of pen, ink, and paper merely (20).

Mimicry, Originality

Stitched between Sadie Plant’s first mention of Alan Turing and her later assessment of the Turing test, the section titled “eve 1” is strategically positioned to complement what follows it in such a way that much of Plant’s decentralized text can be accessed from this node. In discussing the clockwork automata which fascinated a young Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace’s later collaborator, Plant presents a certain logic: “Given that women are ‘not only illusive, but illusions,’ why not ‘supply illusion for illusion’ and ‘spare the woman the trouble of being artificial’?” (86).

It’s a funny coincidence that the name of the author of the novel quoted above contained the name “Adam” and that he wrote of a future “Eve,” the original Judeo-Christian models for a male-female gender binary. Throughout Zeros and Ones, Plant endeavors to expose notions of the original and the unique as nonexistent, as well as to secure an originary position for women in history that proposes that they always already existed in a way that is only becoming easy to understand through the metaphor of the internet. On 122, Plant relates female telephone operators to their "Strowger sisters" (automated switchboard operators), having made the point throughout the text that women have throughout history performed repetitive, clerical (as Licklider might say) tasks. The multiplicity of identity and position that is possible through the internet is one women have enacted throughout time, through multi-tasking, weaving.

Plant’s work resonates with Judith Butler’s suggestion that gender is not essential and does not exist a priori, but is rather constituted through the repetition of stylized gestures. At times Plant’s defense and project to recuperate for women subjectivity as the binary 0 seems to simply group “women” together and then avoid assigning an essence to that category by arguing that the members of that category necessarily explode the idea of the original – which still feels a little too easy.

Plant uses narrative to recover for women the credit for certain technological advancements that are conventionally attributed to men: for example, she suggests that the sight of Anna Freud weaving before her writing father, caused him to write that women wove as a means of obscuring a lack, a failure to be creative (as though weaving itself were not a creative act). A technological advancement like the internet might be easily fit into a narrative of (male) progress; Plant wants us to know that women invented the internet by being, weaving, generating their lives and selves as networks before the Net existed as such.

Back to the Turing test: “The man has to simulate the woman, and the woman has to play herself. Whichever passes as female wins” (90). This simple summary changed the way I’ve been thinking about the Turing test. If the woman wants to pass the test, she might consider exaggerating ideals of femininity to be sure of defeating her male competitor, who participates in the male construction of femininity alluded to by Plant. Again, I thought of Judith Butler, in the sense that performed gestures are imitative and naturalized, and that language performs gender in the Turing test. Later programs (Eliza, Parry, Julia) raised the question: if it talks like a human, is it human? I am also interested in discussing the fear that a facsimile might physically surpass a model (as Edison said, and Turing worried). It is not perhaps a fear of being subsumed by what one has created so much as simply a fear of being shown by one’s creation that notions of reality, humanity, and gender have all been rigorously constructed. Irigaray writes, sardonically, that inferior species always are pure mimicry (83). The fear, apparently, is of realizing that there is nothing but mimicry, that the unity of 1 doesn’t exist.

"The more it schizophrenizes, the better it works"

I love the way Plant's book is structured and modeled after Lovelace's professed thought patterns, "hysteria," and even her own work in translating Menabrea's work. Just as Ada's work was meant to be supplementary to Menabrea's, Plant's seems to "do what it wants" in bifurcating (in the interest of elucidation) at many points with Ada's biography. In a way, Plant's work is hypertextual, providing "footnotes without central points," commenting on and highlighting the then-overlooked importance of Lovelace's thoughts (10). The interspersal of Ada's words in Plant's text make this appear to function backwards, or mutually. Thus, Plant's writing is, more than other, less explicitly outwardly-referential works, an act of weaving. Her constant reference back to Lovelace's early work and its related texts and authors is a form of backing--she continually plays the Lovelace card, so to speak.

Plant's backing, like the construction of a narrative and teleological history, "begin[s] at the end of [the] operation" and "work[s] backwards from that point to the beginning" (26), reinscribing a feminist stance on the history of computing. Plant removes the man from the equation here, allowing Ada's work to stand alone as a text open to female commentary, and producing her own small "genderquake" (38).

post-structuralism and the modern age

I found Plant's text extremely engaging, in that dangerous way in which I'm more likely to be carried along its currents than to remember to stop and think critically. Her most interesting proposition, I think, comes on pages 42-43, in which she suggests that women in temperament and skill set might be better prepared for the world in which we now find ourselves, "as though [women] always had been working in a future which their male counterparts had only just begun to glimpse." Plant's examples come from the working world, but many conventional ideas about femininity seem reflected in a number of post-structuralist notions: lack, decenteredness, flow.

Just last night I was discussing with my flatmate differences in the scholastic system and in employment (and the cultural values there reflected) between America, where he went for school from undergrad through (currently) post-doc, and Germany, where he grew up. In Germany, he said, a person studies a very specific field and seeks employment in a very limited margin of difference within this discipline, expecting to work that one job his entire life (and hoping that the job is not far from the town in which he is living). In America, by contrast, he feels people expect to move, certainly expect to change jobs if not careers entire over the course of their lives.

So maybe, talking about contemporary culture as post-structuralist, involves a bit of an American bias; even though the writing to which I'm alluding largely comes out of Europe, I can't speak personally for European culture. But I just remembered this conversation because I just noticed that on the page before the one I quoted, Plant suggests, "women were less willing to define themselves through employment or a single career" (41).

I can't remember the text, but I've seen made before the comparison between femininity and the networks, flow, and disruptions of the digital age, and I think it's a very interesting notion to pursue. If we subscribe to it at all, can we trace this shift? Plant's argument on the chicken or the egg (both female) aside, was the entry of women into the working world and/or academia, even if subjugated to some extent, a propeller of this shift? Or is there a more organic or unexpected course of progress that we might study?

The structure of Plant's text is also fascinating, with its broken, citing, little narratives. Little titles and keywords, promising to be explored, compounds of signifiers to fill. And of course, in addition to the breadth of material referenced and cited in the text, there are the bolded quotations themselves, both a part and inbetween the text. It's a style well suited to her subject matter. In MC15, reading "This Sex Which Is Not One," to which Plant frequently alludes, we discussed the fact that Irigay's writing process is to cite and quote othe texts, augmenting them with her own readings, and thus playing out the multiple nature of femininity that the text itself expounds. Deleuze and Guattari and Agamben follow suit in some of their texts, focused on multiplicity. Admittedly it's also right now a popular style in various kinds of fiction and nonfiction alike (another place in which our culture is implicated in these ideas), but it's interesting to see it at work in Plant's text (which, published in 1997, might predate much of the current vogue). The usual questions of what it does for us as readers in shaping her argument, how we take the nature and genres of what she does cite, &c., continue to apply.

the text which is not one

I found that Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones does not merely pay lip service the richness of non-linear narrative and the connectivity of the internet, but rather enacts these concepts in the form of the text itself. Replete with allusions to & quotations of other texts (including its own chapters), Plant's book seems to have a hypertextual quality reminiscent of Net texts. First, the length of the individual sections ruptures extended, linear argument; instead, concepts are woven together across several texts: Lovelace's letters, Irigaray, Wittig, Gibson, etc. Also, the large, bold quotations, which are somewhat freestanding, create network among themselves, further challenging linearity.

It would be interesting, given that Plant's text is out of print, to digitalize it, adding both internal and external links, searchability, multiple viewing options. In printed text, weaving is the background (paper) & links must be forged in the mind of the reader; it would be fruitful to make these connections, these touches, manifest. To rework the text into an explicitly multiplicitous network would engender different modes of reading, with the result that no two readings would be likely to trace the same path through all of the links. The primary locus of organization would be the reader's interest in lieu of the convention to read print from beginning to end.

Furthermore, to highlight conceptual webs surrounding terms such as "woman," and "the feminine" would highlight that these are not transparent, purely denotative signifiers, but a network of (sometimes contradictory) significations--a process, a weaving that enables the imbrication of multiple valences: historical, biological, subject-positional, cyborgian, philosophical. These registers are mobilized not to affirm the unity of a category, but to suggest that "this sex which is not one" is multiplicitous, anti-essential, & nonidentitiarian in ways that a hypertextual reading experience would foreground.