nettime's_indexical_utterance on Fri, 14 Mar 2003 01:02:32 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> vector, all to vector digest [snelson, wark, flagan] |
Subject: Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors Kermit Snelson <ksnelson@subjectivity.com> "McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com> Are Flagan <areflagan@artpanorama.com> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:18:42 -0500 Subject: Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors [2x] From: Are Flagan <areflagan@artpanorama.com> Re: 3/12/03 22:12, "nettime's digest" <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>: > David writes that "surely power has always had a vector." yes, but its > historical-technical form changes. The most significant change, in my > view, beginning with the telegraph, which bifurcates time, splitting the > time of the movement of information from that of objects and subjects. One can equally argue that the most significant change, and split, came with Genesis, when God used words to create things. The time and space warp has always been the technological forte, from the steam engine puff-puff train to the TGV, and has figured in just about every accounts of the why, what, when and how of another progressive time. This is why this "splitting" of the time of the movement of information from that of objects and subjects becomes problematic to accept as a condition. The speed of this transportation vector is of course changing, as always, but the proposed split is arguably not a result of the telegraph, as information, and only when thus thought, has by some ontological measure been separated from its material strata. Instead of separating information from materiality to create another time, which is a suppressed side-effect what you are doing to form a premise, one could say much more clearly that it is actually the substance of materiality and this materiality's ability to move that has changed. In the case of the telegraph; the encoding of signals in electricity made a quantum leap in speed possible. But did it create another time zone? Did it split information from subjects and objects? Of course not, information was embodied in electricity, which moved at a faster speed over longer distances than a truckload of letters. Morse's own desire is quite instrumental here. He literally expressed a wish to make electricity _visible_, and it is precisely in this coming into sight through another matter, with the ability to encode and embed, that the gain in speed lies. (We are now hot on the heels of light.) The fact that information is hard to see and hear when passing through the wire does not in itself justify a twilight zone of vectors. > I don't really find this in Virilio, who does speak about differentials of > speed, or the gearbox of speeds. But in the main i think my approach is > quite different. Virilio does not really address what I am calling third > nature, where the landscape of the communication vector becomes a space > and time over and above the space and time of things, both directing it > and managing it, but also producing new kinds of 'accident', or what i > call the weird global media event. > The accidental effect is very much agreed upon. But we don't need the vectors of third nature to call 911. The collapse of the WTC was arguably precisely such a made-for-TV event of speeds and technologies violently crashing. Does is matter if this collision course is then called a vector? I think the fact that we are now discussing nomenclature instead of positions and effects tells me that it matters in a way that is quite unproductive. > Thanks to Miguel for mentioning the epidemological use of the term vector, > which is also a good way of understanding the term. A vector for HIV is > human blood; a vector for cholera is water. It defines a space of > possibility and also of impossibility. You can't get AIDS from drinking > water; cholera cannot really use the air as a vector, etc. Even within the > space of possibility, it doesn't determin why *this* blood, *this* water > is actualized as the vector. Or in other words, this is a 'technological > possibilist' line of thought, not a technological determinism. > This is the same mindset repeated; the vector terminology becomes a superfluous, yet potentially instrumental, modeling kit. Personally I truly enjoy James "double helix" Watson these days. After his landmark lecture on melanin and savage black sexuality (featuring slides of bikini-clad girls), he has proposed to eradicate stupidity and make all girls pretty. Honestly. We rather need to vector that in when talking about the possibility and determinism of modeling. > I would point out to Are that I was *not* one of those people wetting > their pants over headsets and data gloves. In fact these are the concepts > by which i managed to *avoid* some of the fetishisms of technoculture > writing. > Of course you are all free to just worship at the feet of famous names, > and attribute all that is good in thought to your favorite idols. Or we > can think for ourselves, here and now, by finding what is productive in > each other's thought. That way might lie an ethics of the vector... My contention was rather that you are creating another techno-fetish for the information age with all the distinctly mathematical-logical vector talk. Although I can grasp a tangential handle on what you are talking about, to inevitably redraw the Bezier to fit my own way of thinking, it returns precisely to what you want others to distill as useful. The Derrida postcard mentioned contains, in my view, a useful note on any telegram from nowhere. I'll try sending it again. Anyone who has read your stuff here and elsewhere knows that you're not by any means a one-trick writer, so the question is if this theoretical framework and trademark of the vector, which seems strangely akin to some kind of universal flowchart in application, is worth riding like the famous thought experiment that carried Einstein to celebrated relativity. Look how that simulation brand effectively killed off Baudrillard when it was no longer the hippest thing around. While there may indeed be vectors everywhere, I think and hope that we are past another round of completely confusing the map with the territory. (Although it is remarkable how nettime jumped on this vector business, just as the world, as we pretend to know it, appears ready to be redrawn in blood red. Ah, the luxurious comfort of bubble baths...) -af - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: "McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com> Subject: Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:15:25 -0500 There's lots of great ideas threading together on this vector thing. This is how i always imagined 'distributed theory' could work. "What if vector was a publicly sourced idea that had many meanings", as Brian C sys. Yes exactly! Eugene quite properly draws attention to the history of information studies, in which information is defined quantitatively, and where content is taken to be radically separate from form. While this view of information is the dominant one, it doesn't really fit the biological world, "In biological networks, there is no channel separate from message." I argue that we live in an era that subordinates the materiality of communication to the abstraction of information. I would include in that the subordination in *information theory* of alternatives to the dominant view. It is not just that the dominant view is dominant ideologically, however. The vector is abstraction *made concrete*, in the world. The world is being made over in the image of an abstraction. The whole point of critical thinking, in my view, is to identify abstraction at work in the world and unmask the powers that it serves. The 'pathology' Doug speaks of is exaclty the one my writing explicitly identifies. To me this is just updating Marx's procedure. He started with bourgeois concepts of political economy, and showed both how they mapped an abstraction made concrete, in the world, while masking its class basis. When Marx explains exchange value and the general equivalant, he uses examples such as 10 coats equals 3 bushells of wheat, and so on. Only he never discusses the materiality of the emergent space where such comparisons are actually possible. He notes the significance of communication for the world market in the margins of the Grundrisse, but he lacks a materialist approach to the vector. "Is information a mobile?" Eugene asks. In my approach, information is displacement. Difference is displacement. The acceleration of the possibilities for displacement, the wiring of the world, opens a new historical domain for the virtual. No wonder the vectoral class is striving so vigorously to stuff those possibilities back within the purely quantitative envelopes of strategy and commodity. That there might be other ways that communicating might work is one reason i'm reluctant to join Brian C in speculating on vector graphics, etc. I don't see vector as a metaphysic. It's a local theory. However it is interesting to me that the 'universal machine' is the ultimate example of the separation of vectoral form and information as content. Brian C rightly points out that there's no differentiation of scale in this discussion of the vector. I thik one of its qualities is to short-circuit hiearchies of scale -- which is one of the causes of what i call weird global media events. (One of which we may be entering right now...) Poor old Doug -- did you really not learn how to read during that fancy-pants education you had? Nobody is suggesting that "you can run your virtual reality machine without oil" The question is: how are resources identified, calculated, ordered and controled? As everyone else seems to have figured out, I am not arguing some species of the 'weightless economy' or any such nonsense. When Brian H asks about geopolitics, my question would be: along the lines of what abstract force does geopolitics align? There's an analysis of the particular forces in contention, but beyond that there is the analysis of what powers of projection across space and time do those forces use? What is the virtual space (with real hsitorical, geographic and technical coordinates) of empire. This i don't se really addressed in the Hardt-Negri tool set, useful tho it is in many other ways. Brian H stresses one particularly important feature of the Negrist position. The extent to which popular forces are not resistant or reactive, but the driving engine. The creative, popular appropriation of the vector seems to me to be the thing to look at. The materiality of new subjectivities. They didn't just arise out of a reading of Spinoza. They arose out of the historical development of the vector. If I keep translating Brian's otherwise very interesting ideas back into this language, it is because the H+N language he favors is not strong on the materiality of communication. It relies on less than help concepts: general intellect, immaterial labor that are clearly not of a materialist cast. But -- why not? -- let's call it a subpolitics, as Beck suggests. A good term. "'We' do this to the extent that wqe engage in collective thinking, which actually happens, as you can see by the forms of networked coordination across the world that are producing the peace movement. Vectors everywhere!" Well said. Or -- why not? -- call it jurisprudence, as Tiziana suggests, taking a cue from Deleuze. The beginnings of a new coneption and practice of democracy. Or rather, that the west is finally catching up with the east and the south in using the tools to practice this. Let's not forget Tiananmen square, People Power, Reformasi, the democratic movements of Taiwan and S Korea. In the popular appropriation of the vector, the west does not lead. While my sympathies are more with the Bifo Holmes perspective, one might say at the same time, with ._., two cheers for the European Union. Not three cheers. That would be too much. But there is something to be said for a countervailing power, operating at the 'molar' level. Even if it is mostly self interested. But, in the long run, the struggle is to think and live outside of the representations of authority in all its forms: state, market, academy, media. Bowing down before Bush or Chirac or Virilio -- its all the same to me. A refusal of the challenge of autonomous life, without appeal to origin, order or foundation. There is nothing outside the vector. but what is 'inside' it could be very different, indeed. ___________________________________________________ http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html ... we no longer have roots, we have aerials ... ___________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 13:14:30 -0800 From: Kermit Snelson <ksnelson@subjectivity.com> Subject: Re: <nettime> There are only Vectors Ken Wark: > 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. For me, that summarizes Ken's message fairly clearly. If his readers were to pay less attention to the word "vectors" and more attention to the words "power" and "organising what happens," they'd understand more readily what he's getting at. At the very least, this would spare them further detours through the not-so-relevant fields of electro- magnetism, Shannon-Weaver communication theory and epidemiology. > 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. Note that the message here isn't, in fact, "vector, vector, vector." It's "possibilities, possibility, possible, possible." Negri and Hardt prefer the more obscure (of course) word "posse" [1]. This is the "civil society" gospel. George Soros spends a lot of good money around here to promote it. His friend and fellow Karl Popper disciple Ralf Dahrendorf, speaking in 2001 (three months before 9-11) to an audience rather less naive than Negri and Hardt's, called this idea "democrats without democracy" [2]. These are words you use with people who won't be fooled. There aren't many of them. Basically, the idea is that we give up the vote and other obsolete fetishes of "democracy" in exchange for lots of cool telematic tackle and other media technology through which we find and express our "identity". In the new post-national world, rights no longer come from WHERE you are. That's the old, tired, territorial, border-ridden cartography. Rights now come from WHO you are! And WHO we are consists of our interests, our passions, and our specific cultures. Our differences make us democrats! So who needs democracy? That's the Empire idea. And it's finally here. In a delicious irony, the Ides of March have arrived again, except that Julius Caesar isn't dying this time. He's coming back to life. And this time, the Senate has already surrendered. No Battle of Pharsalus will be necessary. "We Plebeians," on the other hand, are already mostly settled behind big- screen TVs, getting ready to watch CNN present the Mother of All Gladiator Shows, live from Baghdad. No more hanging chads; the only votes that matter now will be counted by Nielsen. And the upscale few who prefer the more edifying media productions of the Harvard University Press are also gleefully cheering the whole thing on, just as Negri has told them to do, imagining themselves in the role of the persecuted early Christians who will someday take the whole thing over from their spiritual inferiors. Ken is right. We are in the middle of an epochal change, and it does have to do with abstraction and the shifting balance between matter and information. What's more, the whole distinction between matter and information stems from the very two issues closest to our hearts here at nettime: art and technology, or how we make things. Michelangelo once said that the process of creating something like his "David" is easy; you simply take a big chunk of marble, and knock away the bits that don't belong. But where did "David" live before Michelangelo knocked away the bits of marble that didn't belong to him? Questions like this one have puzzled every philosopher since the beginning of philosophy. Plato invented his famous theory of forms to answer it. That's why Socrates in the Dialogues talks more about the arts than anything else; endless discussions of whether the art of flute-making serves that of flute-playing, and so on. Platonism is a theory invented to explain, and to control, art and technology. His answer to the "David" question is that information, or the "forms", are what is real. Matter isn't. David exists, the marble he's made out of doesn't. In Ken Wark's terms, Michelangelo's David is a "vector". David exists as a specter of abstraction from his "material substrate," and spooky things like him, now becoming increasingly distinct in the thickening haze of intellectual property law, are increasingly running today's asylum. What all of this has to do with Empire is pretty clear from historical events, both ancient and current. Plato invented his theories largely in order to save Greece, which was then dying from the self-inflicted wounds of the Peloponnesian War. He found a tyrant, Dion of Syracuse, through whom to try out his political theories on the dying culture, but it was already too late for Greece. But Plato had a student named Aristotle. And Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great. Centuries later, the theories of Plato and the metaphysical ideas of Greece in general had come to dominate the thought of Greece's conquerors, the Romans, and became Stoicism. The Stoics believed in living life according to that greatest of the Greek inventions, Nature. The greatest of the Stoic disciples were the Antonine Caesars, lords of the Pax Romana at its height, and the greatest of these was the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Many centuries later, another devotee of Plato's Nature, Leo Strauss, fled his native country, which was then also a republic decaying into an Empire, and left behind one of the leading legal architects of that Empire, his colleague and mentor Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss ended up in the USA and found a disciple there named Allan Bloom. Allan Bloom had a disciple named Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Wolfowitz's current boss is Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld's current boss is George W. Bush. Yes, a new Tyrant of Syracuse has been found. Is a Kingdom of (Third) Nature at hand? Ken Wark, in one of his recent posts, talks a lot about Harold Innis and a little about a man who was greatly influenced by Innis, Marshall McLuhan. As most of us here know, McLuhan was a literary critic, a personal friend and champion of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. By the end of his career, McLuhan believed he had taken achieved the highest goal possible in his chosen field of poetics; namely, a general theory of the human artifact. Plato again. McLuhan's book appeared posthumously and was called the "Laws of Media: The New Science." The reference is to Giambattista Vico, a 18th-century Italian "anti-Modern" who was steeped in ancient Roman law and its informing Stoic natural law doctrine that those who live according to Nature are fit to rule those who do not. Contemporary "anti-Modern" Leo Strauss, as he reports in the 1971 preface to his book "Natural Right and History," studied Vico thoroughly, as do Strauss's disciples today. But perhaps more obviously relevant to our current situation is a much earlier work of McLuhan's, found in "The Interior Landscape," a 1969 anthology of McLuhan's literary criticism. The editor of this volume placed this essay at the end of the book because he considered it to be an epitome of the great man's entire career. This essay, which first appeared in 1946, is called "An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America." It's mostly about the Great Books program at the University of Chicago that Leo Strauss eventually took over from Robert Maynard Hutchins in 1948. But it's also about the old struggle in the USA between the North and the South, between a North that long ago opted for abstraction and technology and a South that opted instead for the competing "Nature" tradition of Cicero and Stoicism, in which "all knowledge is sub- ordinated to the development of political prudence" [3]. Reading this essay leaves no doubt that McLuhan, self-appointed standard-bearer of the Vichian "new science" of natural law, sided with the South in this quarrel. As did Hutchins, of course, that "eminent Kentuckian." Most of us are familiar with the "peculiar institution" of the American South that followed rather naturally from the idea, familiar also in the South's beloved legal tradition of Greece and Rome, that some are destined by Nature to rule over others. Most of us are about to become more familiar with it than we have ever been before. As we willingly give up our democracy to become "radical democrats"; as we willingly embrace, at the advice of our tenured and foundation-funded gurus, a world in which our rights, like those of the Southern slaves, depend on WHO we are, not WHERE we are; as we embrace a "Global South" that isn't perhaps what we expected; as we willingly and joyfully jettison the dying world of science and technology in favor of a Ciceronian world in which all knowledge is subordinated to "the political"; as we enter a world in which we may once again be punished, this time via the DCMA, for reading things we're not entitled to read, we're about to learn again exactly what that "peculiar institution" feels like on our own skin. Didn't McLuhan also say that a key effect of the electric environment of telesthesia would be to retrieve pre- modern, pre-industrial, tribal forms of organization? Well, starting this month, we'll finally discover what he really meant. Enjoy. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] Hardt and Negri, _Empire_, p.407-11 [2] Dahrendorf, Ralf, "Can Democracy Survive Globalization?", _The National Interest_, Number 65 (Fall 2001), p.22 [3] McLuhan, Marshall, "The Invisible Landscape", 1969, p.227 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - # 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