Shouting and Pointing
Leuschke is not here for a while. But I love the away screen. It says some interesting stuff about pointing. “Pointing at information has become a standin for its possession.” Some views on blogging see the entirety of the phenomenon in its embrace of shouting (punditry) and pointing (linking). I don’t see it that way at all. Like Weinberger, I think it's far more complex than that. What interests me is the ability to see, albeit through a limited window, into a diverse group of consciousnesses as they grapple and form ideas around information.
There are, in Foucault’s terms, new discursive formations being constructed. These contain elements of the old formations (narrative and cataloguing taxonomies) and entirely new social formations, where power lies in different sorts of capital. I don’t see it as a “new consciousness” so much as an ever-accelerating group of tools that force a confrontation with basic issues of social consciousness, i.e., public vs. private, individual vs. collective, etc..
It seems to me that the core is conversational, as many of the blog writers I read have proposed. The ideas I take away reading these texts, like normal conversation, often have little to do with the intention of the writer that has composed the text. I suspect the same is true of my texts, for the handful of people who seem to read them regularly. I’m a textual wanderer. I started reading I.A. Richards The Philosophy of Rhetoric, but stopped after the second lecture. There’s some dense stuff, connected with my other wanderings. I like dense stuff:
A perception is never of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest, whatever else it may be — is sorting.Score one for the digital folks. It is or it isn’t, within an arbitrary category. But Richards doesn’t stop there, the next step is trying to figure out how meaning works in this process of sorting:
If we sum up thus far by saying that meaning is delegated efficacy, that description applies above all to the meaning of words, whose virtue is to be substitutes exerting the power of what is not there.So in essence, pointing is what all words do. From Richards’ perspective, words are stand-ins, and as such, find their meaning in the things that aren’t there. Meaning is found in the missing context. Contexts are almost always multiple and blurry, in the most analog sense of the word. So, what is routed through our sorting is always imprecise; that's the power and beauty of it.
In these contexts one item — typically a word — takes over the duties of the parts that can then be omitted from the recurrence.The "fit" of a word in different contexts is always ambiguous in one way or another, though they form a necessary shorthand needed to accomplish work. Though the sorting may be determined by structures such as “cellular automata” the deep questions of how these things are put to use is the real mystery. That’s why I can’t get that excited by Wolfram, or Chomsky either for that matter. I like the way that Richards put it (in 1936):
We can be fairly ingenious with these metaphors, invent neural archives storing up impressions, or neural telephone exchanges with fantastic properties. But how the archives get consulted or how in the telephone system A gets on to the B it needs, instead of the whole alphabet at once in a jumble, remains utterly mysterious matters.
Shouting and pointing is also an advertising strategy, a persuasive perception of rhetoric. It's a simplistic view of rhetoric on the web; though the structure of the network is rhizomatic, the connections of the people within it are not. And not everyone is selling something. Where Richards really shines is at suggesting that all rhetoric is not persuasion, as was thought in the embattled realm of classical rhetoric. There is also the matter of exposition, which is ultimately where Walker Evans set up camp in the visual realm, as a radical reaction to persuasion.
Richards points at Coleridge’s essays “On Method,” so I had to stop and read them. I'm easily distracted. There, I found the best perspective on Wolfram’s discoveries:
It is with sciences as with trees. If it be your purpose to make some particular use of a tree, you need not concern yourself with the roots. But if you wish to transfer it into another soil, it is then safer to employ roots rather than scions.Coleridge would have loved Wolfram’s automata. He saw education as a process of extracting those roots intact into new soil. However, against his perspective, I see myself (as a teacher) concerned with the practical matters of building things, not growing people. This research will no doubt be of great impact to those in AI, even with Kurtzweil’s reservations, however, I don’t think knowing how the neural telephone exchange might work explains how we get what we need.
Something stuck in my head from a post from net.narrative.environments. I was reminded that, as an adolecent I was deeply influenced by two things: Playboy Magazine and The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. While I won’t explain Hefner’s influence right now, I will say that the subtitle of the catalogue, “access to tools” was a libratory influence. There is an optimism in thinking that access to informational tools can shape the world, an optimism that interests me more than the functioning of machine intelligence. I’m far more interested in the trunks of discursive formations than the roots; they make better planks with which to construct a world worth living in.
And I am far more interested in expository prose than persuasion.
