Semantic Foundry

Syntax, dear friend, writhes as you do;
for to write is to choose at cross-roads — both true

And so I, @semanticwill, begin the “Post(ing) Self-Similarity,” series of poetic tapestry. This all started when I was thinking about pervasive control systems through mediated experience and pharmacology; the panopticon has been torn down and replaced with far more pervasive mechanisms of control through surveillance, mediation, medication; talking points replacing discourse, which started as this piece and a reaction to Adrian Chan’s post “Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self,” and was carried out as far as my brain could free-associate, (if nothing else, perhaps we rip off the skin and peer into Will’s thought-processing (as it reacts,relates to/for), of various discussions on Twitter, and think that) modes of social interaction within the comments on the web 2.0 blog which become art, itself – relational aesthetics – symbolic tokens of signification gifted back and forth. There is an idea (if I break out, I am slip-streaming this evening — don’t expect epiphany here, or redemption, I offer nothing), You know it – I’ve been, perhaps through shear force of will, trying to unlock, accelerate the quality of the author-author inter-subjective collaboration through the intra-comments dialogue because that is where the real juice can be, hopefully, eventually – where a real stress testing of ideas can happen, perhaps, or at least something more substantive that mutual masturbation circle-jerking or mimetic emulating, emulation -  setting each other on fire for some cause,

Dispersive simulation catalyzed
By melding techne with consciousness
Necessitates a new metaphysics.
Simply – technology is not the ideology itself,
as the futurists claim.

Techne becomes invisible, but not in the transition from discipline (panopticon) ala Derrida, to “C”ontrol per se, Techne shorting the distancing further than MCluhan ever thought possible. But more than shortening the distance (some think technology as a distancing tool), but it can provide a mechanism for a tighter integration of ideas, a glass arcade of inter-subjective interaction between authors, objects, pro-sumers in a strange loop. Maybe. Brain stem hasn’t received enough caffeine this morning.

But, [T]echnology is absolutely, 100 percent, The rapid flowering of ‘Californian ideology’?, in positivist concept of human evolution, drew on a long tradition which Leo Marx aptly termed the ‘technological sublime’. Sublime my ass, one function may be served by the short-circuit of the ‘new economy’ in the dot.com bust of 2001 is that it at least cleared some space for a more nuanced assessment of digital culture away and we see things as they are instead of some manifest utopia. I am that man of the crux; I photograph (see Benjamin) an image, Marx had almost nothing to say about the impact of technology on culture – a lacuna that Walter Benjamin generously attributes to the fact that capitalism was in its ‘infancy’ when Marx undertook his analysis. Benjamin’s ‘Artwork’ essay (2003), written during his exile in Paris between 1935 and 1939 (if you don’t own Benjamin Illuminations – buy it now, just for that article famously takes up the impact of ‘technological reproduction in the cultural realm).

In effect, Benjamin theorizes what Vertov’s ‘Man with the Movie Camera’ had sought to enact, positing a privileged relation between film and the demand to comprehend the illusionary nature of film (illusory nature of comments on an article as projection device) a technologically transformed world (the flowering of a simulated world between authors). For second degree; it is the result of editing (but not interaction), (how many times do you edit your live work? Re-post comments?). For Benjamin, the ‘second degree’ illusion of film shooting by the specially adjusted montage corresponds to profound changes in social photographic device and the assembly of experience as the industrial city displaced ‘nature’ as the primary lived environment. What first appears in that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here his 1927 essay on Russian film as the ‘dynamite of become the height of artifice, and the the fraction of a second’ becomes the ‘optical uncovision of immediate reality the Blue Flower subconscious’ of the 1930s, a technological lever capable of in the land of technology. (Benjamin, liberating the masses from the prison-house of the industrial city). However, I was thinking that it is a mistake to assume, as Mark Poster (1995) does with his ‘second media age’, that Benjamin was unswervingly positive towards ‘new media’ because he saw the shifting capability in the new medium. Film’s ‘shock’ capacity is intensely ambivalent: as much as it can blow everyday reality apart to reveal its hidden springs, it can also render the fragments indifferent to history. Cinema thus occupies a crucial place in the dialectical movement of history: it is both a symptom of the hold of modern technology over consciousness and a lever for unlocking that hold, and of course at the end we know the pervasive control systems that current media instantiate (shared hallucination of fear created by 24-hour news channels, as the most glaring example).

This ambivalence is apparent in the more sanguine formulation of cinema Benjamin offered in ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, written in 1939 alongside the final version of the ‘Artwork’ essay:

There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception of film. (2003: 328), and of course what is needed is a new formulation that deals with the emergence of ‘reality tv’ as a form of simulated-relative shock chair whose induced fabricated discomfort and anxiety achieves it’s intended e/a-ffect which is to render the viewing catatonic and drooling.

Here film, and its most recent incarnation as broadcast tv is aligned, not with the dynamiting of the social world by revealing its ‘optical unconscious’, but with the system of industrial training systems (but with industrial removed and replaced with ‘service industry’). Benjamin draws on Marx’s comparison between ‘training’ and ‘practice’: where practice depends on skills acquired over time from experience, training depends upon the strict division of labour and the fragmentation of work tasks. For Marx (cited by Benjamin, 2003: 329) the unskilled worker on the assembly line ‘does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker.’

Post(ing) Self-Similarity

Syntax, dear friend,

writhes as you do;

for to write is to choose at the cross-roads

both true,

and untrue; and I doubt my love,

just as I, mimetic desire

that your love bleed over my face,

set me aflame,

scorch my body with searing, woe and turbulence

so my mind might

being confined in penitence prison

I come to read the signs,

across your printed skin

and know itself to be a lexicon,

of outspoken sin.

The political ambiguity of media thus turns on whether its radical impact – its capacity to break the world into fragments, dismantling old patterns and enabling new relationships to be imagined – will be reduced to another mode for industrial training of the senses. For Benjamin, this is finally not so much a question of the formal process of fragmentation, as Adorno feared, but a question of meaning. Can ‘distracted’ perception generate collective meaning capable of entering individual experience, and thus become the conscious basis for recognition of the conditions of one’s existence and self-creation process?

This ambiguity, described in 1927 by Benjamin’s contemporary Siegfried Kracauer as ‘the go-for-broke game of history’, is helpful in situating the ambivalence of the ‘global information society’ orchestrated by contemporary digital networks. On the one hand, technologically mediated ‘flows’ radically undermine the traditional social consequences of space and place; on the other hand, as Sassen observes, new information technologies are integral to the emergence of ‘global cities’, which concentrate command and control functions in the  global economy. This produces radically uneven spatial textures in which intimacy at a distance (think about the perceived level of intimacy on Twitter between people who have never met) is juxtaposed to the disjunction of physically proximate areas and the virtual exile of communities lacking appropriate technology and resources (the digital divide has widened into the grand canyon), which brings us back to Chan:

“in the gap between the act of posting and the post itself, there seems to me to be a gap of presence. A juxtaposition of here and now, and there and elsewhere, that coincides with the act of youtubing a concert live. Why do we do it (use social media), and for whom, if and when the medium is built on a radical uncertainty of presence: a gap composed of parts discontinuity, distraction, and disconnection?” ~gravity7, Post Writing: Social Self, Private Self, Post(ing) Self

In the same ambivalent vein, decentralized person-to-person communication offers significant structural challenges to the media and communication forms that dominated the 20th century, yet ‘the technologies of freedom’ celebrated by de Sola because he was doing anything unusual or Pool (1983) are produced by corporate oligopolies deviant. . . . Data-gathering is routine, whose scale and global reach is unprecedented, and generalized, and distributed across almost every sphere of daily life. (Lyon, 2003: is matched at every step by the extension of personal 97) surveillance even with the “radical uncertainty of presence.” New media networks enabled the rapid coordination of rolling global political campaigns against war in Iraq, yet the health of workers making computer chips, like the disposal of old First World computer equipment in the developing world, remains largely invisible. And, despite the pervasive rhetoric of freedom, the potential of peer-to-peer networks is being reshaped in the wake of Napster via a combination of technological and legal patches designed to protect existing content owners, who are fast shifting consumers to lucrative time-based licensing models of consumption. Again, technology tooled for subversion is appropriated into the system as a new instantiation of control systems by the media oligopolies – which we see right now with the proliferation of social media “experts,” attempting to teach those media conglomerates how to co-opt the subversive nature of talk on twitter to carpet bomb the memespace of constructed identities within the social networks.

In Gilles Deleuze’s terms the digital era represents a shift from ‘disciplinary’ to ‘control’ societies (and now we come full circle back to the idea of mediated | medicated). Where disciplinary societies depended on moulds, physical structures such as Bentham’s panoptic architecture, control societies operate by modulation, a flexible form of active molding defined by the ubiquity of digital information. Yet the flood of information that characterizes digital culture is both the extension of control and the possibility of its disruption. The crucial issue is still the threshold Benjamin identified as a consequence of the techno- the old sovereign societies worked with logical destruction of aura: how to develop a ‘politics’ simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; commensurate to technological modernity, so that but recent disciplinary societies were information can be made meaningful, not just as the equipped with thermodynamic machines stance of isolated individuals but as a collective presenting the passive danger of entropy understanding capable of entering individual experience the active danger of sabotage; control presence of the technologically transformed world. The societies function with a third generation widespread and unfulfilled demand for a new social-of machines, with information technology extending beyond the confined technological and computers, where the passive danger boundaries of the market is registered in the is noise and the active, piracy and viral advertising strategies of mobile phone companies, as contamination. Much as in contemporary art, which can be characterized in terms of ‘relational aesthetics’ manifested in the emergence of artworks which are no longer objects or images but modes of social connection and interaction on Twitter.  (oh shit, here it comes), so I’ll leave it with this stream of consciousness, since I seem to be losing traction here:

“caught in the cuts of life, The end of man
often lies at hand, his tribal voice cut out
but whereof can one
not speak?  It is on the table;
it is in my grasp;
it has soaked into the carpet.  As a man,
my               permission opens me aimlessly:
I move my mouth and walk therein,
stride with confidence into a the empty room
of my                                            detachment,

I            swallowed hard the whole bottle of your silence
and slipped into the cup of a nightingale’s tear—

Will    memories of your touch, will

you become my fragrant flash of searing pain,
my dusted desire to be right up against it

Feeding       —     on tears of sight,
pull the blinds, hidden beying veils of disguise
beneath the covers, one leg stretches
beside a leg outstretched, These dance and meld, and
should point recursively back to relatively simple declarative sentences,

“Emersive simulation catalyzed by melding techne with conciousness”

state their assertions  and are done with it,

but as lines of verse they are just begging for

some leg room, or for some breathing space.

It’s tempting to conjecture,

that “feeding on tears of sight” are here reflected in the caesurae,

but if that is indeed the case, the effect is entirely (in-betweening), no

rhythmic division is enhanced, more conflation, no, more on that later,

thinking that I want my enjambements to be like tourniquets, cutting off the blood,

or, rather,

the breath of this streaming, no?”