McKenzie Wark on Wed, 12 Mar 2003 04:22:36 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors |
>From: human being <human@electronetwork.org> >Would you please further define these 'vectorial' statements, >as each is a very big statement, and I must have missed the >post where all of this was reasoned as a common empiricism. >If you would begin with a solid (physical) definition of vector, >that would be helpful, as in, how does it relate to vectors as >they are used in mathematics and the sciences? And, if this >is based in Paul Virilio's work, would you post the definition >that you've stated before that you use but have yet to share. happy to oblige... From: The Virtual Republic, Allen & Unwin, 1997: A word on this word vector. I've borrowed it from the writings of French urbanist and speculative writer Paul Virilio. It is a term from geometry meaning a line of fixed length and direction but having no fixed position. Virilio employs it to mean any trajectory along which bodies, information or warheads can potentially pass. For example, a flight from New York to Sydney, via Los Angeles, is a vector both me and my baggage might happen to be on. There are certain fixed qualities about this vector. The plane travels at a certain range of speeds, has a certain maximum distance, and so on. But in theory it could fly to any direction from its starting point, and land at any point within a circle, the radius of which is determined by the amount of fuel it can carry. In other words, its flight is of fixed maximum length, but potentially in any direction. The virtual dimension to any vector is the range of possible movements of which it is capable. While flying from New York to Los Angeles, I pick up the telephone and make a call to Sydney, to ask a friend to pick me up at the airport. That call has different properties -- it moves faster than the aircraft, obviously, and it moves only information, not bodies and baggage. Virilio's interest is in the way vectors tend to get faster and more flexible, connecting anywhere to anywhere, revealing every last fold of the earth to the observer, and what this might mean for the way power is organised. I'm interested in the way the vectors along which information moves separated out from those that move things. Information can now almost always get there before you can ship your goods there, or dispatch a division. Third nature is fast; second nature is slow. Third nature seems increasingly to be in control of second nature. We no longer have roots we have aerials. Or as the Aboriginal writer Mudrooroo says, apropos people like me: 'They love grids, all straight lines, all leading to somewhere.' This is the other source of anxiety in the 1990s besides the market. The vectors of third nature, from multichannel and satellite TV to the internet, seem always to speed up, proliferate, merge, divide, mutate, and beam in on us from afar. The market seems to be everywhere; the media seem to be everywhere. Market and media merge as endless data-bit-streams, transmitted all the way around the world. They could be stock quotes or soap opera, all rendered purely virtual, instantaneous, ubiquitous, senseless. A perpetual challenge to the imagination, and hence to the very idea of culture, and the very possibility of the virtual republic. We are not entirely without resources for thinking about such things. The Canadian media studies scholar Harold Innis had the idea that the types of vector people use will not only shape certain kinds of culture, but will offer different possibilities for the shape and durability of society, economy and nation. His famous example, to put it in a very crude way, was to think about the way ancient Egypt built itself out of media with very different properties -- stone and papyrus. Papyrus is what he called a 'space-binding' kind of media. It made possible the transmission of written orders across space, and the return of written reports. Its a useful tool for making empires, and enables the waging of distant military campaigns and colonial administration. On the other hand, stone is 'time-binding'. Through the construction of temples and the pyramids, a priestly caste can sustain their authority from generation to generation. This simplifies Innis' famous essays on these questions a great deal, but the point is that he offers a way of thinking about the potentials that different kinds of media offer. Innis also argued that it might be important for a society that its culture be based on some kind of 'balance' between space-binding and time- binding media. He was very worried about what he saw as a bias towards space-binding media in his own time, which was why he was very active in the formulation of media policy in the 1950s in his native Canada. I'm less sure about whether one can determine what constitutes bias or balance between different kinds of media, but I think Innis was on to something, nevertheless. In a remarkable essay on the development of the telegraph, American media studies scholar James Carey picks up where Innis left off. What is distinctive about the telegraph is that it is the first really successful technology for moving information about from one place to another faster than one could move a person or an object. Think about it. Before the telegraph, information had to be moved around by road or rail, but it could not really get there any faster than, say, an army or a wagonload of wheat. But from the telegraph onwards, one vector after another added to this basic ability to move information faster than things. Its not necessarily that there is 'more' information than there ever was before. I'm not even sure how one would measure that. What has changed, since the invention of the telegraph, is the relation between information and other things that society moves around in space -- people, goods, and weapons. Thesedays cultures may have access to television, radio, mass print media, video, computer networks, and so on. The vectors along which information passes are now many and varied, and not equally available to all cultures. Thinking about culture, questions of power are never far away. From the telegraph onwards, these vectors progressively create a new space of possibilities for organising what happens. After the telegraph came the telephone, the television, telecommunications. A whole series of developments of a certain kind of experience -- telesthesia, or perception at a distance. They are what made possible the development of Australia, as a progressively integrated economy, society and culture. They are the conditions of possibility for the 'abstract community' of nation which can imagine itself, at one and the same time, as diverse and coherent. They are what make possible a virtual republic, where specific cultures bring their interests and passions into an ongoing conversation about what kinds of thing might be possible. Like everything else that sticks around for a while and gets woven into the fabric of everyday life, the experience of telesthesia becomes a habit. I can remember when making an international phone call was a really big deal. Something rare and expensive and requiring special assistance from an operator. Now I just don't think that much about it. Punch in the numbers and there you are, talking to someone on the other side of the world. 'No one's far from anyone, any more', as Telstra ads used to say -- as if it were the most natural thing in the world. 'Reach out and touch someone', as another ad puts it. Only you don't touch them. You experience the other person at a distance -- telesthesia. How quickly it comes to seem so -- natural. While it may feel natural for some to inhabit this media made world, I suspect there's a fundamental change here that has a lot of people just a bit spooked. Its no longer a case of making second nature out of nature, of building things and getting used to living in the world people build. I think it might be interesting to consider telesthesia to be something fundamentally different. What gets woven out of telegraph, telephone, television, telecommunications, is not a second nature, but what I call third nature. >>the vectoral class see A Hacker Manifesto: http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html >> the commodity game of the vector >>the strategy-game of the vector see http://www.criticalsecret.com/n10/McKENZIE%20WARK/ _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? 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