McKenzie Wark on Wed, 12 Mar 2003 11:24:34 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors |
Dear Human Being, thankyou for taking the trouble to read and think. I will only respond briefly, for I think many of your speculations are not really addressed to me, but to yourself, to your own future thinking. This point I think is crucial, and I have only formulated it this way recently: Information has an *abstract* relation to matter. Information is always material. It does not exist independently of its material substrate. But it can have any substrate. It has no necessary relation to the substrate in which we happen to find it. For example, these ascii characters could be on my screen, your screen, a piece of paper. This has lots of amazing consequences, and more than a few problems. If you are familiar with meta-mathematics, this solution may remind you of the differences between Platonism, Constructivism and Intuitionism in meta-mathematics. The position I would defend falls in one of the latter two camps. (Don't know which). Vector is quite an old word, going back to the renaissance. It has meanings in many fields, which can be useful to hyperlink into, or confusing. I prefer not to get into it too much. I am interested in the relationship between a geometry and a geography of information. A vector has a fixed property and an indeterminant property. One could say length is fixed, axis is not. Strictly speaking, that's a vector. But by extension, one could think more abstractly of a vector as a relation between a determinate and an indeterminate property. Maybe the other way around: Length may be indeterminate, but axis is given. I find this very useful for thinking about how information moves through time and space. Any given media has certain fixed properties (my concession to the McLuhan/Innis/Ong school) and some that are not (and here I want to return to the historical materialist school from which i come...). You are right to point out that vector is not a term that Innis or Carey use. But it is my interpretation of how they were thinking. I think my reading solves certain problems in Innis, but that need not detain us here. I don't think Virilio really uses it as a concept. The telegraph is not striictly the first vector that separates the (geometric) plane of information (third nature) from the geographic plane of collective human labour (second nature). yes, one can beat drums, make smoke signals. But honestly, are these precursors of all that much *historical* significance? Thinking ought to be oriented to the historical horizon, in my view. "There is nothing outside the vector" ie, we can reread Derrida through the history of communication and the communication of history. ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html "Theories are made to die in the war of time." -- Debord ___________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net