This is really just a montage of images related to Power, Systems, Control & Being (I need to return tonight and add sources and links for all of you)….so these are more ‘video-clips’ of ideas floating around that haven’t been mixed down yet. It’s almost there, so I can wash the coffee stink off me before firing up Omnigraffle and cranking on some wireframes that must needs be done by Monday. Last night I had a personality crash, with all my little stressors compiling into one big cluster-f00-b@r that I convinced myself could just be sorted out by trying to make sense of one eensy-weensy bit, which is not only a bad idea in and of itself, but lead me to being a douche, but you all knew that about me.
Mostly working and reading yesterday, which was alright. Too damn busy for me to spend much time kvetching, and between that and the existential hangover, things went considerably smoother than expected. I’ve got to get a lot of things under control before we get too far into fall, and I have none of them. Well some of them, but mostly blinded by lust.
The Terra Cognita of Cybersex
The effectiveness of art is generally hard to judge. Pornography as one of the arts creates ecstatic perception, triggering arousal only through symbolic codes (a semiotics of tumescence, if you will). Cybersex is by no means new, erotica is its oldest device of simulacra. Computation and programming have likewise been known in pornography for centuries. In the 120 Days of Sodom, Sade imagines a ceaseless execution of coded game rules. There is no single point of originality, but only combinations computed out of a set of sex partners and their organs. Erotica as software programming has been long neglected. We demand meme-space computers built from erotic imagination and shamanic sex acts, an accretion of design within the cyber-pornopticon. This becomes important later when we discuss Foucault, Heideggar, Being and Power, so this is a good place to start. Sex is always a good place to start.
the borders of this territory are _shift
1. That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single energy.
2. That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
3. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
[William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil, 1903]
Unfiltered sensor of my first thoughts of preSimulationist blogging implies architecture of participation and remixing for ambient world, technological primate/endomorph/numerology/physics divide and on the signifying reflection, direct connection to digital shadows of physical world, unmediated by expert groups, scientists, governments, pundits, critics..
it’s [M]y reflection of the cheapness and coming ubiquity of sensors and networked sensors is often shaped in terms of the interplay between Power & Being, especially through the lens of media, mediated spaces, simulated realms, and the ideation of the self. Lust holds me in place, and the touch across time from the a friend you make your own is still a welcome sign reigning in the distance between being and nothingness.
we have come to give you metaphors for poetry
She’s a media montage, Neilson ratings Gathering my attention span and force-feedback into a content generation algorithm – a Being-generation algorithm. The deeper reaches from where she comes is a mystery continuing its pleasures without disdain, a presence from nearer distances that you’d only thought. The pore and spin of rhyme itself makes the outer in your skin a silly pudding forming on the night. Touches under cover are what remind you of light, and the guiding hand is slid apart and then you are to time and distance the same measure of meaning, how you enter and repeat; finding subjectiveness in the smoothness of a moody light. We are these frames aside from what was there before, and contain within us these reminders of our own schedule fleeting in the mists. Love’s would be it. But another word sufficed and made it close, made the dialog begin where before the was none. And friends established in the course of battle in the course of things are made close and personal, made like no other, but heading on into the gloom; you describe and forage, kneeling space and distance amoungst their own flames of desire.
“The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form.”
[WB Yeats]
This is the revolving door. I’d heard them, too, in the burnt amber offerings of your dusks, in the afterburner of another’s lust. This is the heart’s business, after all, to forage and claim, to rotate and spin, as it were. But you’d skipped me now and then from what was a polish or a fur-dealer, touring touch, flooding picnic, the after hours spread and hold. The nightly scores are folded out; her eyes bore into you, entering space where no one has gone before. But the peach. And I’d told them to wait; and told them no further marks are waited here; and told her to still my heart and hold me down, for I am this limb and stair. The very spin itself, forming on the peaks of chance, call no distance too great to transmit, transmute, whatever. This is the curling iron, made informed but not too simple, claiming only what it is itself and making no claims for whatever might follow from the light or its own appositive in the realm of choice. You’d call another name the doubt of things in their own perspective. This is the door as metaphor. But what flows through the heart cannot be denied or described, it is too simple for words, only a flood or a tremolo, or a fathom on the floor of the spreading rift. And what resembles, for instance, comes from love and spreads outward and does not resemble so much as it hopes.
“What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. ‘No,’ was the answer, ‘we have come to give you metaphors for poetry.‘”
[WB Yeats]
You’ve been there, of course, you just don’t remember why or how it all happened. The sorrier loops err on the side of justice, and make these, specific junctures what they are, too. In case of not noticing, the easier gasps are said over and over, healing where before there was only a mute sense of forgiveness running along your spine and then collapsed. The jungle itself has no metaphor for forgiveness, only the heart does. And in the silences of what follows, love has her face floating before you, a penetration and a firmer hand than you’ve felt before, whispering to your lips. Dancing across these lips. My baser claim, then, is at no distance of abstraction from discharge made certain in or [w]ithin the easier crossings. What had no name in the time you thought was a motive held before you like a clam or a finer spin; moot to other discharges, the soul stays in its own parlor, waving feathery rains from their own excellence. Some differentiations are required…. What is the degree of openness.closeness? Degree of mediation? Degree of Power & Control?
more thoughts on foucault & heidegger:
And how can we discuss Being, Power, Control? So I was thinking that it’s important to realize at the outset that for Heidegger, [B]eing is neither a substance nor a process. Being, in early Heidegger at least, is “that on the basis of which beings are already understood.” One might say that the understanding of being is the style of life manifest in the way everyday practices are coordinated. A culture’s understanding of being allows people and things to show up as something — people show up as heroes in Greece and as Saints in the Middle Ages, for example, and things for the Homeric Greeks were flashing up to be admired, while for Christians they were creatures to be mastered and interpreted.
Put generally, the shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background understanding of what counts as things, what counts as human beings and what it makes sense to do, on the basis of which we can direct our actions towards particular things and people. Thus the understanding of being creates what Heidegger calls a clearing (Lichtung). Heidegger calls the unnoticed way that the clearing both limits and opens up what can show up and what can be done, its “unobtrusive governance.” (Waltens)
For Heidegger the history of being in the West has been the history of misunderstandings of the clearing. From Plato on, philosophers have sensed that something beyond ordinary beings was responsible for their existence as anything, but since the clearing always stays in the background — or, as Heidegger puts it, withdraws into shadows — philosophers have replaced it with a highest being that is the ground of [beings] and the source of their intelligibility. For Plato the highest being was the good, for Aristotle the Unmoveble Mover, for the Christians the creator God, and after the Enlightenment it was ||MAN|| himself. Heidegger calls all these attempts to replace the clearing with a “beingest being”, onto-theology or metaphysics.
According to Foucault, power has suffered a parallel misunderstanding. In general, many of Foucault’s difficult remarks concerning power make sense if we take him to be getting at a social clearing with an emphasis on the way the everyday practices of individuals and groups are coordinated so as to produce, perpetuate, and delimit what people can think, do and be. For Foucault, power, like Heidegger’s being, is no fixed entity or institution, but is incarnated in historical social practices. “One needs to be nominalistic,” he tells us, “power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.” This strategical situation arises from specific individuals and groups opposing one another. These actions, taken together, open a social space in which people, things, and the real are defined. Like the clearing, power is productive. Foucault tells us: “[P]ower produces; it produces reality,” that is, it determines what it makes sense to believe and to do.
For Foucault, [Power], as opposed to violence, controls actions while nonetheless leaving them free:
Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.
For like Heidegger, Foucault writes of this non-violence way of piloting (cybernetica) action as governance:
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. … To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.
I could say, paraphrasing Heidegger, that [Power] is that on the basis of which human beings already understand each other. As Foucault puts it:
In the idea of governmentality, I am aiming at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other.
Since Foucault is not interested in how things show up but exclusively in people, “Power”, which is normally used to describe the way governments govern people’s actions, seems an appropriate, if perhaps misleading, name for what controls the way people understand themselves and others. It should be clear that some type of power in this ontological sense, like some particular understanding of being, is essential to any society. Thus, according to Foucault, “A society without power relations can only be an abstraction.” Abstrations of Power.
Abstractions of Power: It’s [M]y reflection of the cheapness and coming ubiquity of sensors and networked sensors is often shaped in terms of the interplay between Power & Being, especially thru the lens of media, mediated spaces, simulated realms, and the ideation of the self. Lust holds me in place, and the touch across time from the a friend you make your own is still a welcome sign reigning in the distance between being and nothingness. So that’s what I meant.
Monrai Cypher – Natural Language to RDF/SeRQL for the Semantic Webhttp://www.alicebot.org/
Monrai Technologies has announced the alpha release of Cypher, one of the first software program available which generates the metadata representation of natural language input. Cypher produces RDF graph and SeRQL query representations of sentences, clauses, phrases and questions. The Cypher framework provides a set of robust definition languages, which can be used to extend and create grammars and lexicons. The software encourages users to develop and share linguistic information such as phrase structure and dictionary definitions for various languages and domains. Cypher programming is fun to learn and easy to use, and the framework is designed to allow a novice to quickly and easily build natural language processors to handle highly complex sentences and phrases. Cypher is language and vocabulary agnostic.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Beats Human Intelligence on Yahoo Answers Social Networking SiteThe two year old Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as the Buddhabot began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers site this month. Yahoo Answers is a Web 2.0 site with a social content rating system reminiscent of Digg. The Buddhabot has so far answered 102 questions and eleven have been selected as the best answer. The Buddhabot is the first and only AI to compete with human beings to provide the best answers on Yahoo Answers new social networking site.
Over the last two years Buddhabot inventor and futurist Ron Ingram has personally invested an average of more than 20 hours per week in programming time and about $30,000 into Buddhabot development. Ingram has high hopes for the Buddhabot. He says, “For the price of a home in Malibu I could develop the Buddhabot’s conversational capacity to a level surpassing that of a human being. I lack only time and financial resources to attain this goal which could be remedied by a single large donation or more frequent small donations.”
Cyborglogs (“glogs“)
Clynes defined Cybernetic organisms (also known as “cyborgs”, “borgs”, and somewhat as “posthumans”) by way of a synergy between human and machine such that operation of the machine does not require conscious thought or effort on the part of the human. The theory of Humanistic Intelligence (HI) makes this concept more precise, and focuses on machines of an informatic nature. HI is defined as intelligence that arises from the human being (being) in the feedback loop of a computational process in which the human and computer are inextricably intertwined. This inextricability usually requires the existence of some form of body-borne computer. When a body borne computer functions in a successful embodiment of HI, the computer uses the human’s mind and body as one of its peripherals, just as the human uses the computer as a peripheral. This reciprocal relationship, where each uses the other in its feedback loop, is necessary for a successful implementation of HI. This theory is in sharp contrast to many goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI) where the computer replaces or emulates human intelligence.