technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
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This paper explores the architectural design of Web 2.0. In Web 2.0, there is a social dichotomy at work based upon and reflecting (if not directly determined by) the underlying Von Neumann architecture of computer processors and memory. In the hegemonic Web 2.0 business model, users are encouraged to process digital ephemera by sharing content, making connections, ranking cultural artifacts, and producing digital content, a mode of computing I call “affective processing.” The Web 2.0 business model imagines users to be a potential superprocessor. In contrast, the memory possibilities of computers are typically commanded and accumulated by Web 2.0 site owners. They seek to surveil every user action, store the resulting data, protect it via artificial barriers such as intellectual property, and mine it for profit. This mode of new media capitalism prompts site designers to build Web sites that are capable of inscribing user activity into increasingly precise databases. Users are less likely to wield control over these archives. These archives are comprised of the products of affective processing; they are archives of affect, sites of decontextualized data which can be rearranged by the site owners to construct knowledge about Web 2.0 users.
— Robert Gehl, ”The archive and the processor: the internal logic of Web 2.0.″ New Media & Society, Forthcoming -
Freud, of course, began the project of psychoanalysis with the study of hypnosis, a kind of interaction between subjects that has been dismissed by many as a parlour game of manipulation. Freud would later distance himself from hypnosis as the origin of psychoanalysis; he argued that hypnosis was tyrannical and did not lend itself to scientific explanation. Freud moved from suggestion to free association, attempting to “free” the patient from the tyranny of suggestion. Freud examined hypnosis as a form of communication that operates prior to the formation of meaning.
Hypnosis has been discussed as a kind of magic, an art of illusion. Some ancient Greeks felt language in general functioned this way, that even the everyday use of language was a kind of magical incantation that produced results by acting directly on the world, leading the soul,* inducing trance and movement, shaping reality. Verbal inspiration was seen by the Greeks as a kind of divine possession rather than as the conscious product of self-aware human genius. It’s useful to recall that the Greeks did not hold “magic” in contempt, or denigrate “belief” as superstition. And why should they? Schutzman points out that “This economy of ‘faith’ which we are so quick to devalue is really very much the same as the economy of evidence, which we are so quick to valorize.”
Chris Chesher has coined the phrase “invocational media” to describe computer technology. The computer functions as a kind of magical device; the human user does not “talk to the computer” but rather issues commands which change the nature of reality. While all technology is to a certain extent invocatory, computers invoke “programmed sequences of instructions, where the results of one invocation become inputs for others. They are open not only to inputs from outside through peripherals, but to distant events through networks and to records from the past on databases. This combination of components exponentially expands the range of invocations that become articulable.” The “associative indexing” available through the technology of hypertext allows us to navigate vast amounts of data with such strings of invocation. “There is no fundamental difference,” Chesher continues, “between a poet invoking the Muses for inspiration, and me invoking a search engine for material to use in this talk.”
The challenge to scholarship offered by works such as the exhibits before us is the challenge of the magic of language in the ancient world. These works don’t just operate at the level of meaning and signification (although of course they do that); they also operate at a level that is prior. All communication, of course, operates on this level, but not all communication attempts to interrupt the level of signification with this appeal to the multiple and interconnected nature of subjectivity. “[H]umanity is not constituted of isolated beings, but made up of communications among them; we are never given, even to ourselves, except in a network of communications with others: we bathe in communication, we can be reduced to this incessant communication, whose absence we feel in the very depths of our solitude” (Bataille, 250-2). There are no subjects; there is only the network, and it is us.
— Bernardo Attias(Source: acjournal.org)
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Networked narrative affect moves this body in a kind of darkness - since the physical world as such is placed out of temporal sync, out of focus, out of sight. With this vampiric flight of the body, the interactor moves by puppeting, sending avatars to do her bidding, causing material structures elsewhere to realign. The premodern remant of the vampire and the postmodern legend of the cyborg thus invoke not only a cyberspatiality but a cybertemporality - an endless night. As regards the networked self, we might say that as the vampire cuts, the cyborg pastes. The embrace of the vampire and the cyborg, then, appears not only in the enunciative networke of www.darksites.com; we see the productivities of their affective labors throughout a series of critical, poetic, and cinematic texts dating from the middle 1990s which take networked enunciation as a given of global technoculture. The cyborg-vampire embrace reveals in negative the dark transit of the affective labor working to articulate the self within the circuits of virtual materialism.
— Peter Day, Vampires: myths and metaphors of enduring evil.
