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Shades of Grey: The Semiotics of Brand Identity & Business Cards

Dec 4, ’11 1:05 AM

Premise: I have noticed over the past few years that fewer and fewer people are carrying business cards around. I also noticed that as a mechanism to control costs, many companies are no longer printing business cards for employees – most recently when I wondered what it would take to get cards to represent myself and my employer at an industry conference (in short – not fucking likely). But in most professional social situtations, there is still some expectation of the exchange, and people do feel sheepish when they don’t have them. So I started to wonder: what is the value of business cards in social interaction design? This  post is not an academic discourse – just some thoughts I had while designing my own cards. I want to understand the nature, value and meaning of a branded business card in our hyperreality where most have multiplicities of identity manifest on social networks.

Branding, Semiotics, Objects

One problem for a  designer is the nature of design itself. To design is to “show thy own true self” – to explore and then make manifest myself in some way that which an audience can then view and judge to solve a particular problem. First, many designers are too busy solving problems for their customers. Another is to design their own brand is to be left open to judgement. Is this not the reason most designers have such a poor website? Piece of shit business card? Does the cobbler’s children really have no shoes, or is the cobbler a charlatan.

I am reminded of an old friend Todd Zaki Warfel, having this discussion some years ago. Some choose not to engage in this discussion, but others, when forced, simply say – here we are – here is our work, here is how we did it, and this is it – please judge me. This is how Todd and I have always felt. We prefer to do things from scratch. It may be tough, it may suck – but we’ll do this from scratch and we’ll share it all –  It’s an honest approach harking back to the Scottish Empiricists of the 17th century.

I want to discuss this, as well as the meaning of business cards, but first, to lay bare what I am talking about, I took as a case study my own recent experience designing my personal business cards. Here they are so that I don’t build them up too much before we discuss the philosophy or semiotics of them too soon,

 

Business card technical details:

Size: 3 x 2.25
Paper: 260# Pegasus Duplex Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black + Foil Stamp white
Side B: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Duplex + Cut

The cards are custom mounted stock which means that it technically doesn’t exist. It’s 2 pieces of paper which is letterpress printed on the outer 2 layers and then glued together. They are then die cut to the right dimension and inserted into the custom folder that was designed for them.

Sleeve technical details:

Size: 3.625 x 5.5 folding to 3.125″ x 2.375″
Paper: 80# Pegasus Cover, Midnight Black Vellum
Side A: Foil Stamp Black
Finishing: Make Die + Diecut + Fold + Glue

 

Semantic Foundry Business Card - Sleave

 

I think that “Brand” is a complex media object, its very definition is a contested metapragmatic domain between interested popular discourses and varied professional discourses of designers, lawyers, marketers, consumers and activists.  Furthermore, as a privileged semiotic object, the semiotic categories of brand are frequently extended not only to a whole new range of services, quasi-commodities and objects that are not in themselves economic objects (including experiences, places, countries, even recent discussions of ‘anthropology’ itself as a brand), so that the semiotic language of brand has undergone a curious form of genericide in which brand is often coextensive with semiosis as such.  As a result of these tendencies, brands are typically represented as being in their very essence a kind of deterritorialized, immaterial form of mediation, a kind of globalized intertextuality, a semiotic image of the global capitalist economy itself , very far from the materiality of messages on bottles in which they are often encountered on a token level.

Discussions of a category of ‘brand’ or ‘branding’ in anthropology inherit many of the tendencies of popular and professional discourses on the subject.  In anthropology, for example, following much popular discourse, discussion of brand is almost always made identical with the discussion of the culture of circulation that brands indirectly index, hence, brand is almost synonymous with globalization, and therefore, most attention is given to specific highly salient brands engaged in cultural hegemony – killing off indigenous objects, media, and signifiers of consumption in favor of those imposed through free-trade deals and western military power. I care less about brand as global imperialist imperative and more of brand as inter-subjective co-created cultural fetish-object.

Do these cards themselves stack up, so to speak, according to that? How are they a media-fetish object? An interesting note on object fetishism comes from a friend, Thomas Wendt, writing in an article “Inspiration Fetishism,”

“Fetishism” is a Portuguese, Latin, and Spanish hybrid related to art, the act of making something, sorcery, and artificiality. It has only recently become related to sexual objects and things that are thought to hold a power for which there is no basis. That power, for example, can be religious (a crucifix), sexual (leather), or otherwise. For Karl Marx, commodities are the universal fetish; for Sigmund Freud, they represent adisplacement of libido. Either way, it relates to a perceived necessity without which one cannot perform a certain function.

Semantic Foundry Business Card - Front

In some cases, particularly recent discussions of virtual environments, it can much more directly be argued that the line between producer and consumer is truly blurred (Coombe et al.) such that brand as fetish-object is co-created between designer and consumer and that which is signified by the card itself – even if it person, becomes commodified, at least if what Marx says holds true. To borrow from Jerry McGuire – you no longer complete me – you commodify me.

Importantly however, the intertexts of brand that occur as it is appropriated and redeployed by consumers, sometimes helping define the brand or lending it their own labor of consumption, is not legally recognized in property law and is subject to unilateral restriction.   This area of brand has become a dominant theme in recent literature, linked to often uncritical appropriation of the professional discourses, definitions and claims of marketing professionals into anthropological discussions, a reflexive move aided by the frequently porous professional boundaries between the two discourses (Callon et al. 2000).  Here, again, just as producer or designer is treated as a Goffmanian ‘figure’, so too the consumer.  Here, as well, we can see shifts from the interpellation of the consumer qua consumer to interpellation of the consumer as citizen, among other modalities, thus conflating different social imaginaries (for example Berdahl 1999, Bach 2002, Jain 2007,Özkan and Foster 2005), or as having certain specific desirable social properties that are associated with the prototypical consumer, for example ‘cool’, ‘cute’ (Allison 2000, 2004, Iwabuchi 2002, 2004), or even secular ‘culturedness’ (Gronow 2003, Kelly and Volkov 1998) or religious piety (Jain 2007). So what then, is the meaning of brand as it relates to business cards? Or of these particular business cards?

Semantic Foundry Business Card - Back

As brand objects attract more properties of subjects, whether of producers or of consumers, we come squarely into the vexed category of the brand as a fetish (especially when we talk about these business cards), or at least, certain aspects of that notoriously polysemous entity, specifically those having to do with the conflation of categories of subject and object. Do these cards represent nothing more then themselves? Have the been elevated to the level of fetish-object that they no longer signify me, but only themselves?

It is at this point, too, that analysts turn from Marx to Mauss, often finding in brand a kind of curious image of the Maussian ‘total social fact’.  So the question remains – what is the meaning of this brand-image? What things have been conveyed with the sign-image of these cards? Are these cards nothing more than festish-images? I don’t know.

I do know is that, as a designer, I have finally designed cards that I feel comfortable with.

Much thanks to the great people at Publicide who say my designs, didn’t faint, and worked diligently to make them to specification while allowing me to stop in regularly to check on the progress. If you need high-end letterpress printers, let me know and I will connect you with them

Special thanks to Todd Hoza who did photography for this cards.

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On the Semiotics of Fashion Branding & Advertising

Nov 23, ’11 9:27 AM

Soundtrack: Shahrooz: Raoofi Watching Stars

“Fashion is never anything but an amnesiac substitution of the present for the past” – Roland Barthes

Perhaps nowhere except in the semiotics of fashion advertising is the use of transportation, narrative, dreamworld, and experience design more sophisticated in its hegemonic beauty.





Further, fashion advertising is an excellent example of identity-image producing media where signifier and signified collapse. The nature of the fashion object is tied directly to our manufacture of identity – those objects which we encase and adorn our bodies for public consumption – and fashion is acknowledged as a co-created cultural language of “style”. In the realm of Haute Couture fashion advertising, those products and identity-image advertisements at the top of the social-economic spectrum: brands such as Dolce Gabbana, Gucci, Alexander McQueen, Prada, etc, media such as runway shows, Vogue, Allure – the goal of producing an attractive identity product is pursued with an affluence of money and artistic talents drawn internationally to create the most emotive and entrancing hyperreal simulacra within those media channels.

I found these articles to be exceptionally well researched in articulating a stance on the cultural implications of fashions’ highly developed grammar of sign systems within advertising and how that relates to identity manufacture. I hope you find them equally fascinating.

“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” – Oscar Wilde

PRADA

Speaking of Fashion: Consumers’ Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings

This article explores the ways that consumers use fashion discourse to inscribe their consumption behaviors in a complex ideological system of folk theories about the nature of self as it relates to and exists within the context of society. Verbatim texts of 20  interviews concerning consumers’ perceptions and experiences of fashion are interpreted through a hermeneutic (interpretive) process with specific consideration given to gender and identity issues. Whereas critics of consumer culture frequently argue that fashion discourses enshroud consumer perceptions in a common hegemonic outlook, the authors analysis suggests that this ideological system offers a myriad of countervailing interpretive standpoints that consumers combine, adapt, and juxtapose to fit the conditions of their everyday lives. Read Article.

Narrative and Persuasion in Fashion Advertising

Narrative transportation—to be carried away by a story—has been proposed as a distinct route to persuasion. But as originally conceived, narrative transportation is unlikely to occur in response to advertisements, where persuasive intent is obvious and consumer resistance is expected. The authors of this article analyze fashion ads to show how narrative transportation can nonetheless be a possible response to ads, if specific aesthetic properties are present, most notably when grotesque imagery is used. The authors then situate narrative transportation as one of five modes of engaging fashion advertising, each of which serves as a distinct route to persuasion. They explain how aesthetic properties of ads call forth different modes of engagement and explore how grotesque imagery can lead to either narrative transportation or immersion. As routes to persuasion, transportation and immersion work by intensifying brand experience rather than boosting brand evaluation. Read Article.

Fashion Photography as Semiotics: Barthes and the Limites of Classification

Semiotics, the system of signs asserting meaning by way of language and image, proves to be enormously relevant and valuable when looking at fashion photography as a means of communication. The author argues that fashion photography speaks both to the reality and illusion of garments and of bodies, and in deconstructing how these elements are organized and presented, a new language and system emerges from the photographic work. The author explores how Roland Barthes places fashion photography within a semiological framework, applying semiotic structure and rationale to the genre as a system of communication for symbols and signs present within any given image. Read Article.

The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity, and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s

Fashion, as it is actualized and spoken through the medium of photography, represents some of the most beautiful and hideous elements of culture and society. Invariably, fashion photography pictures and proffers standards of beauty, self and display that, by sheer style and omnipresence, overwhelm common sense and rational thought. The innate contradictions within fashion photography and the larger industry it represents burden the form with criticism. This precarious position fashion photography exists in endangers the possibility of looking at the form outside a purely non-decorative or aesthetic framework, and further, problematizes the reconciliation of a place for its valid study in the academic schema. Read Article.

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Self-Similarity of Identity in Networked Publics

Apr 8, ’11 5:21 AM

“SemanticWills‘ theoretical musings propel us deep into a Borgesian labyrinth of the networked contemplations of his interiority, a virtual schizopoliae populated by hustlers, pimps & the purveyors of an emergent artificial intelligentsia. Like a DJ theorist spinning new ideas, he plays the citational remix game and reminds us that being hyper-linked to the Virtual Motherboard on Social Networks is part of the addictive lifestyle choice that has become our shared zeitgeist”

- DJ Versimilage

{——– Start Transmission ———}

Bach: Prelude & Fugue in C Minor.

Morning thoughts from SemanticWill at the Zero-Moment point, caffeine crashes against the blood-brain barrier like a wrecking ball and clarity returns (which means you’re fucked and  I am going Meta). You can either blame the L-Tyrosine or the caffeine, but thoughts begin to crystallize, so I may step away from the more lyrical poetica of design thinking and return to pure symbolics (these are not easy, I apologize), also remind me to explain the idea about how networks exhibit and emergent behavior very much like fractals. ** see bottom for explanation

I (we) exist in social networks in the theoretical tradition of participating in crowds as the self-fulfilling prophecy of a neural meta-consciousness, as autonomous entities existing independent from my intentions of the individual it is made of, consciously acting in the world, and we can exhibit an emergence of identity.

When looking for factual proof of the existence of such a proactive, instead of fractal-like adaptive intelligence, one can only start by assuming that this entity I call (I) must produce some observable patterns. Patterns we can isolate and possibly decode.

I seek to decode, and then recompile this pattern.

We Vibrate in Ex(is)tacy

  • the evolutionary mist / raw simulated self is emergent
  • raw crystal of self below
    Fourier’s shade
    splendid drop
  • life underfoot – water years
    turning bare marvels
    mirrors deconstruct of grave intent
  • crystal lattices :: between authors,
  • us, is called some new transformation
    and ordered MAGnitude. . .the “I” as “we” in networked
  • publics

(which is what I was thinking this morning, so I wondered {quite a few comments}- I hope the combination of both radiation, and Thai last night didn’t leave me in too much disarrangement.)

Algorithmic Meta-Consciousness

My mind can emulate this screen can emulate the laws of nature and feed them back to me. Re,cur,sive,ly. That interactive self decomposes a function into a continuous spectrum of my frequency components, and the inverse transform synthesizes a function from its spectrum of frequency components.

Invented monadic memories can be replaced by genuine shared ones,

s,e,p,a,r,a,t,e,l,y

[realms of reality] can be folded-in and brought to uniform size and blended into one constructed lattice presupposed by its facets.

This is NOT monism. But it points into it. A Sassuerian signifier dependent upon that which is signified.

These are just the beginnings. This is what we say. We operate as synaptic agents of self-organized control, remixing pure simulations of worlds we have not yet invented; if you can see them, they are successful. Like viruses. Like genes seeking to replicate themselves.[Blackmore, Dawkins]

I may be the inter-connection to dreaming of new worlds, after all, dreaming is the moment the mind generates quasi-perception (it may also soon become the only private space left, once the agents of complete surveillance and control attain pervasiveness in Bentham like Panopticonic architectures), like a crystal growing, control systems accreting out of the social graph. Rereading the literature about interactive writing, an emerging practice amidst poetic praxis at large, the parallel becomes obvious to this idea of self-organizing, organic memetic growth. Preconscious (as in my morning pre-consciousness) writing is a conscious and paradoxical effort to tap into the screensaver-mode of my mind; interfacing it directly while self-assembling language, crystallizing on this screen, real-time, on Twitter, poetic syntax drip from my fingers like a Rorschach test, traditional descriptions of identity evaporating like ink soaked-up in blotting paper. Later, this writing seeks to “map” the ideas to other writings by connected authors in the virtual space. But how this plays out is still in nascent form. How will these feedback loops effect the writer’s interiority of their creative effort?

The credibility (read Authenticity) of its practitioners notwithstanding, it is interesting to me that, during interactive writing sessions, the writer by no means writes in a language he speaks, indeed the language does not have to exist at all. It has been pointed out that all interactive writing tends to converge and resemble each other and you might say that this is caused by all minds obeying to the same internal logical instruction set, just as salt-crystals all look roughly the same and for now we assert as conceptual instantiation that growing crystals of thoughts equals the organic growth of ideas in a hyper-real virtual space, fed by the the constant feedback loop of other authors contributing comments, encouragement, or re-mixed variations of the author’s original dialectic ideas which map ideas from the interiority to the exteriority of the Other, and then back again:

Protest: Still, the neuro-anatomy mapping leads to inevitable artistic questions about how we “create” or map in the world, if our consciousness is expressed sequentially proto-self > to core consciousness > to emotion > to feeling > to extended consciousness and back in different feedback loops, always refining the mapping procedures…

Contratemp: Can you consciously map these connections, or does the mapping happen organically: I suppose, by feeding certain pathways, and starving off others?

Retort: Both, Will, but remember that most of the processes are unconscious and only for maintenance of the organism until perceived by the organism by reaching a threshold of activation, usually with coordination between various of the proto self structures…

{–Pause Transmission: Refraction and Reflection –}

I am thinking this morning that the evolution of consciousness through human history is marked by growth in articulate attention to the interior of the individual person as distanced — though not necessarily separated — from the communal structures in which each person is necessarily enveloped. . . .thinking  The Inward Turn of Narrative (1973) Kahler had asserted in detail the way in which text-as-narrative in the occident had become preoccupied with and articulate about inner, personal crisis (shattered mirror effect) of self. The stages of consciousness described in a Jungian framework by Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) move toward a self-conscious, articulate, highly personal, interiority. The highly interiorized stages of consciousness, in which the individual is not so immersed unconsciously in communal, social media  structures, are stages which, it appears, consciousness would never reach without writing. Obviously this is a recent.

“The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. Ontogenetically and phylogenetically, it is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.”

~ Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

-Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word)

{——– Restart Transmission ——-}

Networks, Fractals, and Viruses

At the beginning of this post, I made the bold assertion that social networks were like fractals. Let me explain that I think it is shaped like a fractal. That is to say, it is self-similar across all scales, at all resolutions, no matter how far down the rabbit hole you go, Alice. Any portion of the network has the same structure as the network as a whole. Neurons connect with each other across synapses in much the same way that various words on this page are linked to other sites across the internet. McLuhan claimed that, “electronic circuitry is [an] extension of the human nervous system” (Medium Is The Message, 1967, 40). But the opposite formulation may be more useful for our interactions here in this Simulated world: every individual brain is a miniaturized replica of the global communications network, and are both self-organizing and dependent upon a constant feed-back loop.

The network is the great [Outside] that always surrounds and envelopes me, even as I connect to it. But it is also the Inside: its alien circuitry is what I find when I look deeply within myself. The network is impersonal, universal, without a center, but it is also pertubingly intimate, uncannily close as hand. This is why Deleuze defines subjectivity as a folding (in): it is “an interiorization of the outside…a redoubling of the Other…a repetition of the Different…It resembles exactly the invagination of a tissue in embryology” (Foucault, 1988,98).

Burroughs makes a similar point when he suggests that “the whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism”(Cities of the Red Night, 1981,25). In both cases, identity is implanted in me from without, not generated from within. My selfhood is an information pattern, rather than a material substance. I may describe this process that subtends my consciousness in several ways: as embryonic in-folding, as fractal self-similarity, or as viral, metastasizing proliferation. But the difference between these alternatives is just a matter of degree. The crucial point is that the network induces mass replication on a miniaturized scale and that my consciousness may exhibit a fractal pattern which is strikingly similar, especially as my consciousness and writing connects to other nodes, is fed by, and interacts with other writers in this virtuality.

Good morning. Welcome to Spring.

{——— End Transmission ——–}

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Esse Is Percipi: Self & Social Networks

Feb 19, ’09 7:09 PM

Soundtrack: Koyaanisquatsi, “Prophesies”

This is another article exploring Identity, Self & Social Networks within the context of various western philosophers. A previous article entitled “Heidegger 2 Twitter, Technology, Self and Social Networks,” was written previously and exists antecedent to this article. The goal of these blog postings is to find placement of our current circumstances within the traditions of modern philosophical thought, as it were.

“Nothing is more bourgeois than to be afraid to look bourgeois.”

—Tom Wolfe (The Painted Word. Stated in regard to Andy Warhol.)

Esse Is Percipi

George Berkeley is probably the philosopher in the Western tradition who most fully anticipates our current ideas about our experience of reality on social networks. He notoriously argues that esse is percipi: to be is to be perceived. In his own time, Berkeley was merely taking the doctrine of empiricism to its logical extreme. If our minds contain nothing but atomistic perceptions – which is to say, ideas or representations-then it is superfluous to posit, in addition, a material world out there that would be independent of these ideas, although supposedly giving rise to them. Mental representations themselves are enough, says Berkeley, especially since — according to our initial assumptions — we can never get beyond them in any case. Berkeley’s argument reads like an unintended reductio ad absurdum of what Richard Rorty calls “the ‘idea’ idea”: the Cartesian notion that the mind is like a theater in which consciousness is a detached spectator that contemplates and manipulates special objects of inner sense (ideas or representations). The major philosophical question then becomes that of how our mental representations relate to their corresponding objects in the material world.

The genius of Berkeley is to simply short-circuit this whole dilemma, by negating the material world altogether. His radical conclusions follow logically and powerfully from his dubious initial premises. Now, nearly all of the important twentieth-century philosophers reject “the ‘idea’ idea” in the first place. But the representationalist approach remains alive and well in other fields, most notably in AI (artificial intelligence) research and in cognitive science. Cognitive scientists start from the assumption — not that computers should be understood by comparison to human minds, but rather that human minds themselves can already be understood in terms of computers. This is more than just “some rough analogy,” says Andy Clark; “it is not that the brain is somehow like a computer,” but that it “actually is some such device”. This means that cognitive scientists conceive minds, on the model of digital computers, as information processors that work by performing logical operations upon internal representations of external phenomena. This is why Berkeley is still relevant today. In twenty-first century terms, his argument may be rephrased as the claim that our experience of existence is already virtual. And that is indeed what the cognitive scientists say. They claim that the “real world” of our perceptions is in fact largely a construction of our own inner cognitive processes. “You and I, we humans, we mammals, we animals, inhabit a virtual world…the brain works as a sophisticated virtual reality computer” wrote Dawkins in “Unweaving the Rainbow.” Our sense of reality is the product of simulation. It only remains for the cognitive scientists to follow Berkeley all the way down that road and jettison the “outer world” altogether as an extravagant, unnecessary hypothesis. I have become my Twitter personality @semanticwill and there is no need for Will Evans in meat-space.There will then be no escaping the control of the social network.

Eyes Wide Fucking Shut.

Berkeley is surprisingly unperturbed by the obvious objection that, if his theory were correct, then objects would cease to exist whenever we stopped looking at them. He dismisses this worry on a number of grounds, all of which apply just as well to our current conceptions of reality in social networks. First of all, Berkeley says, if things exist only as perceptions or representations in the mind, then that tree yonder just as surely exists when i am thinking of it with my eyes closed as it does when I am looking at it directly. In either case, the tree is being perceived as an idea by my inner sense. Berkeley brackets the whole question of the cause of perception; what matters is only its effect within my mind. But this is the very principle of virtual reality; as Deleuze puts it, “simulation designates the power of producing an effect” even in the absence of anything that is supposed to be  a cause. In the second place, Berkeley says, the fact that I may only perceive a given object intermittently doesn’t impugn the consistency of the object. There is no reason why the object shouldn’t have the same features and appear in the same place whenever I do happen to perceive it or think of it. There is no more reason for me to worry that the tree will be uprooted because I took away from it than there is for me to worry that the objects of a virtual world, or the icons on my desktop, will dissipate because I turn off my computer. In either case– when I look back at the tree, or when I turn the computer on again–I will find that everything is exactly the way I left it. In the third place, and most importantly for Berkeley, just because a given idea is no longer present in my mind does not mean that it is likewise absent from all other minds just as when I turn off Tweetdeck, most of my virtual connections still exist — and many continue to converse even in my absence.

The proper logical conclusion from the intermittency of my ideas is “not that [sensible objects] have no real existence,” but rather that “there must be some other mind wherein they exist”. Ultimately, for Berkeley, this other mind is God. Today, we are more likely to say that it is the computer, or better, the network, on which the virtual reality simulation is being run , or even, in the case of the ‘other’ instantiated through their Profile on a social network – I am because my profile exists on the social network. Perhaps this is the reason for the proliferation of home pages, blogs, and profiles on social networking sites. To be online is already to be perceived. Even if no one ever visits your website, you are still visible to the network itself. Your Profile is still on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or MySpace. [You] still exist. For the network is the modern instantiation and understanding of G-d, the unsleeping omni-voyeur. The cogito of simulated reality therefore reads: I am connected, therefore I exist.

Long before the internet, Warhol already understood this logic. His film Empire (1964) shows the Empire State Building in a single continuous stationary shot that lasts for over eight hours. Warhol’s stated purpose in making this film was to turn the building into “a star!”. And we must say that he succeeded, just by virtue of having made the film. Nobody actually has to watch Empire in order for the movie to have its effect. As long as the film is rolling through the projector, the virtual, simulacra image is perceived, as it were, by the cinematic apparatus itself; and so the Empire State Building actually is a star.

Appearances, Profiles & Self

Perhaps the oddest thing about Berkeley’s argument is his claim that, in fact, the argument has no pragmatic consequences. “After having wandered through the wild mazes of philosophy,” he writes, we “return to the simple dictates of nature,” and “come to think like other men”. Berkeley indulges in metaphysical speculation, the better to put an end to such speculation. He denies the existence of matter, he says, only in order to refute skepticism and vindicate the assumptions of common sense. This may seem like a crazy, and outrageously backward, way to proceed, but Berkeley’s point is that the best way of “saving the appearances” is to show that there is nothing besides appearances, no real world behind this apparent one. In an immaterial world — or what is the same, a virtual world–nothing is hidden, and everything is precisely what it seems.

In a certain way, then, Berkeley anticipates Nietzsche‘s polemic against those metaphysicians who distrust the senses. Berkeley could easily say, along with Nietzsche, that the senses “do not lie at all…The ‘apparent’ world is the only one; the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added…”. Berkeley’s critique of skepticism is oddly congruent with Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. For Berkeley, skepticism arises when we posit the existence of an external, material world, only to discover that we can know nothing about such a world and that we can have no access to it. For Nietzsche, similarly, nihilism arises when we posit the existence of a transcendent “real world,” only to discover that such a world is empty and that we can have no access to it. Of course, it is crucial that Berkeley denies the existence of the transcendent materiality, while Nietzsche denies the existence of transcendent ideality. The radical conclusion Nietzsche draws form his arguments could not be further from the pious conclusions Berkeley draws from his. For Nietzsche, everything changes when we learn to accept appearances – that My Profile == Me; traditional conceptions of self crumble, and everything must be created anew. For Berkeley, in contrast, nothing changes; the order of the world is confirmed, once we realize that everything is just an appearance – My Profile != Me – it is just a projection of self. We can read Nietzsche and Berkeley, therefore, as rival science fiction writers, offering alternative visions of what Michael Heim calls “the metaphysics of simulated instantiations of self,” on social networks.

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A Virtual Life in a Sim World, Part Deux

Jan 17, ’08 4:42 PM

This seems to be the only place where someone is thinking about the meta-abstraction of self in virtual worlds – I continue my discussion of identity and self – might as well since everyone seems asleep at the wheel .

—————-

Fantasies of downloading the mind into a computer seem to depend on a  top down and overly simplisitc extrapolation from the idea that the same sequence of code can run on many different machines. In fact, this scenario of mind transfer is about as plausible as the claim, made in a television commercial by IBM in 2001, that you can “download an entire warehouse” over the Internet. Such operation siwll only be possible when nanotechnology allows for the “nanofaxing,” or precise replication over distance, of complex physical objects, as in William Gibson’s All Tomorrows Parties (268-269).

All Tomorrow's Parties

All Tomorrow's Parties

To duplicate my consciousness, or to transfer it to another location, I will need to know how to reproduce the biological hardware of my brain and spinal cord, as well as the mental software containing my memores, sensations, experiences, emotions and thoughts as well as the virtual cartographies of connections my mind has modeled of the real world. In the meantime, it might be best to forget about running the same software on many pieces of hardware and focus instead upon the converse idea of running multiple software program at once on a single piece of hardware. Why worry about transporting myself into another body when I still haven’t realized how many different selves are porsent in this body that I already have.

I explored a bit of this in a much earlier piece on fractal spirals of selves evolving and replicating in multidimentions of space-time. People with multiple personality syndrome are said to display different physiological patterns – different voices, different pulse rates, even t different levels of cholesterol – depending on which personality is in the forefront at a given moment. Thus the same actual body can support many different virtual selves. I would argue that elsewhere that the phenomenon of multiple personalities, along with Pierre Klossowski’s notion of demonic position, gives us a better paradigma for a concept of pre-Sim subjectivity than anything we can get from psychoanalysis. You cannot be one without being at least two. We are all at least potentially multiple, even if most of us do not suffer from the oppressive consciousness of being so. In recent years, increasing numbers of multiple “households” themselves have come to reject the idea that their multiplicity should be regarded as a medical “disorder.”

In particular, they resist the received psychiatric dogma that the experience of multiple personality syndrome either can or should be “cured” by integrating all the personalities into a single construct of self. More is lost than gained from such a normalizing reduction. The point is not to eliminate these multiple identities, but rather to get them to talk to one another and to find ways for them to continue cohabitating with each other, in their one shared body, without too much distress or conflict.

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A Virtual Life

Jan 12, ’08 4:47 PM

I never considered myself an intellectual. I never saw myself as being capable of “deep thoughts,” so on this Saturday, as I sit here with camomille tea, the Decemberists playing, and a rampant disdain for all that is neither real nor virtual, some thoughts I offer up. This should really be considered a continuation of my writing on Crystallization Of Idenity.

The actual and the virtual are mutually dependant. Neither being meaningful without the other. Every empirical object has its aura of virtuality; every virtual state is grounded in some sort of materiality. The virtual cannot be opposed to the actual in a way that the soul is traditionally opposed to the body. It is better to say, paraphrasing Kant (as we all do), that the virtual without the actual is an empty proposition, while the actual without the virtual is doomed to be blind.

Mom can’t put this back together.

I would say that the virtual illuminates the actual, but it is nothing without the actual’s support. The relation, then, between the actual and virtual is something like the one between hardware and software. A computer is able to calculate, and thereby to ‘Seem’ulate, an indefinite number of possible worlds. But this can only happen if each of these worlds is strictly correlated with a particular physical state of the machine. Now, these machine states are themselves entirely actual, while the possible worlds that they support are virtual. There two dimensions are coextensive, yet entirely different in nature. Small changes in the actual physical state of the system may correspond to widely different virtual events and even to entirely different worlds which must needs then be mapped.

This is why a software program can run, with almost identical results (huge caveats here relative to floating point integers and the way you C# compiler vis a vis you typical java compiler – sorry, rabbit hole, and not even Alice wants to go down that one), the point being those software programs could run on many different kinds of hardware, and why, conversely, a single piece of hardware can run many different sorts of software. Arguing from this theoretical disjunction, futurists like Ray Kurzweil foresee the possibilty of “downloading your mind (not soul), to your personal computer” (Age Of Spiritual Machines, 2000). It’s a question of learning how to copy the contents of your mind in sufficient detail and then installing that copy on a machine other than the brain: “we don’t need to understand all of it; we need only to literally copy it, connection by connection, synapse by synapse, neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter. Kurzweil seems to believe that we can do this without worrying about the underlying hardware of the brain; we can just ignore “much of a neuron’s elaborate structure,” he suggests, since it only “exists to support it’s own structural integrity and life processes and does not directly contribute to it’s handling of information” (Kurzweil, 125).

But contra Kurzweil, this distinction is entirely bullshit, for the brains “handling of information,” is itself a “life processes” that depends upon, and in turn effects, the structural integrity of the neurons (see Penrose). Indeed, one could not literally copy it in the first place unless one paid attention to the elaborate structures underlying it all that Kurzweil is so keen to toss out. Kurzweil does entertain the idea that a downloaded mind will need some sort of new body, if only because “a disembodied mind will quickly get depressed” (134). But he fails to grasp the full extent of the reciprocal correlation between the mind and body, or software and hardware, or virtual and the actual.

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