2: knowledge is of course crucial, but so too is an aptitude for panic.

3: bits of language…rhetorical softwares, unpredictable algorithms of textual hazard whose results were subject to change

4: seduction involves a summoning of alterity, the cultivation of a familiar.  “Relax,” this algorithm of the familiar reads, “it’s just a machine.”

5: tools vs weapons

7: forgetting

8: familiars

9: Alife: lycanthropy for networks. Artificial life disturbs, continually rendering the border between life and nonlife, flesh and machine, seductively uncertain.

9: panic

10: the bumper sticker for such an inhuman politics reads: Provoke swarms, forget coalitions.

11: subtractions and repetitions

12: holes sprout in what had been experiences as wholes.

13: inside/outside; viewer/viewed; animal/human

14: flattening of the self into a line.

15: The event of observation is less a passive reception than an incessant exposure to a swarm, a hospitality to the multiple “parts” of an object.

17: chaosmosis: a welcoming neither foreseen nor preconceived

I’ll admit that this chapter made pretty much made no sense to me.  I get that this is the introduction, presenting important terms, but I don’t really get the presentation.

19: “artificial life,” simulacra that are not simply models of life but are in fact instances of it.

20: living systems as distributed events.  living systems are in this view understood as unfolding processes whose most compressed descriptions are to be found in the events themselves.

21: life is just an interesting configuration of information.

21: It’s a creepy doubling of something no longer appears: “Life.” “Life,” as a scientific object, has been stealthed, rendered indiscernible by our installed systems of representation.

Not much yet; it’s coming.  I promise.

Starting then with Ch. 2: “The Photograph Unclassifiable”

5: “a photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically,” 
” The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’” it points a finger at certain vis-a-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language.”
deictic: showing or pointing out directly

6: “dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I didn’t yet knowthat this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for.”
“as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of language”

Ch. 3: “Emotion as Departure”

8: “I was bearing witness tot he only sure thing  that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system”

Ch. 4: “Operator, Spectrum, and Spectator”

9: eidolon: an unsubstantial image

10: “camera obscura”

Ch. 5: “He Who Is Photographed”

11: “dependence”

12: ” ‘myself’ never coincides with my image”
“disturbance”

13: “to whom does the photograph belong?”

14: “others – the Other – do not disposses me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest deceptions”

15: “private life” and “political right”
“Death is the eidos of that Photograph”

Ch. 6: “The Spectator: Chaos of Tastes”

18: “the impulses of an overready subjectivity”

Ch. 7: “Photography as Adventure”

18: “Fascination”

19 “Interest? Of brief duration.” 
“This picture advenes, that one doesn’t”
hebetude: lethargy, dullness

20: “it animates me, and I animate it”

Ch. 8: “A Casual Phenomenology”

20: “paradox”

21: “affective intentionality”

Ch. 9: “Duality”

23: “the co-presence of two discontinuous elements”

Ch. 10: “Studium and Punctum”

26: “What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training”
“It is by studium that i am interested in so many photographs”

27: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”

Ch. 11: “Studium”

27: “The studium is the order of liking, not of loving“

Ch. 12: “To Inform”

28: photograph as “contrary to the text”

30: “it supplies me with a collection of partial objects”

Ch. 13: “To Paint”

30: “Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting”

31: “Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater”

Ch. 14: “To Surprise”

33: “All these surprises obey a principle of defiance”

34: “Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs”

Ch. 15: “To Signify”

34: “the mask is the meaning”

36: “Yet the mask is the difficutl region of Photography.  Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning”

38: “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks”

Ch. 16: “To Waken Desire”

38: “For me, photographs of landscape (urban or country) must be habitable, not visitable”

Ch. 17: “The Unary Photograph”
unary: having, consisting of, or acting on a single element, item, or component

41: “The Photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion) : no duality, no indirection, no disturbance”

Ch. 18: “Copresence of the Studium and the Punctum”

42: ” the scene is in no way ‘composed’ according to a creative logic; the photograph is doubtless dual, but this duality is the motor of no ‘development,’ as happens in classical discourse”

Ch. 19: “Punctum: Partial Feature”

43: “Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred”

45: “However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion.  This power is often metonymic”

Ch. 20: “Involuntary Feature”

47: “Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so”
“The Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there”

Ch. 21: “Satori”
satori:  sudden enlightenment and a state of consciousness attained by intuitive illumination representing the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism

49: “intense immobility”

51: “I am a primitive, a child–or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anythign from another eye other than my own”

Ch. 22: “After-the-Fact and Silence”

51: “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance”

53: “I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at”
“Ultimately-or at the limit- in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes”

Ch. 23: “Blind Field Palinode”
palinode:  an ode or song recanting or retracting something in an earlier poem; a formal retraction.

55: on punctum: “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nevertheless already there“

59: “The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond — as if the image launched desire ebyond what it permits us to see”
“the fantasy of a praxis“

Ch. 24: “Palinode”

60: “I had perhaps learned how my desire worked, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography”

He then sets up part 2 as his Palinode.

Jenkins starts us off with the wonderful image of Bert and Bin Laden (I have to admit that I am sad that the website’s been dismantled, he always creeped me out) to set up the concept of convergence.

“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainement experiences they want” (2)

“Convergence occurs within the brains of individual consumers and through their social interactions with others” (3).  Hmm seems important for the distinction he makes between two levels of the meaning of the word media.

“on the first, a medium is a technology that enable communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated ‘protocols’ or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology” (13-14).  Both are at play, but the second level is more important when considering his other major concepts: participatory culture and collective intelligence.

participatory culture: “Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (3).  The not understanding part is key to the tensions he sets up in the case-study chapters.  People are having to make shit up as they go along.

collective intelligence: “None of us can know everything; each of us knows something and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills” (4).  This is how he describes the power the audience for media has come about.  Audiences pool their knowledge and it becomes a kind of leverage in conflict.  It also, outside of conflict, allows the audience many times to simply make sense of what is being presented.

Jenkins wants to shift focus in many ways away from an analysis of the technology that has allowed this convergence to occur and focus on the protocols it creates: “As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices” (23). 

He acknowledges that this shift, this process that is taking place, “convergence refers to a process, not an endpoint” (16), is unequal throughout society, and as one segment moves towards it, others will get left behind. “As information spreads from the film into other media, it creates inequality of participation within the franchise.  The Matrix may be a global cult phenomenon but it is experienced differently in each country round the world” (116-117, sidebar).

Jenkins works through his major concepts through six case-studies (5 of which are pop culture).

1: Survivor and the spoiler phenomenon that popped up around it.

“Survivor is television for the Internet age–designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued” (25).

“It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them” (26).

“New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communitites are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” (27).

“Only certain things are known by all — the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals.  Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises” (28).  Collective intelligence

Sidebar on Twin Peaks: “In the end, they felt betrayed because Lynch could not stay one step ahead of them.  This should have been our first sign that there was going to be tensions head between media producers and consumers” (34).  Participatory culture, the beginnings of convergence.

“Spoiling is also adversarial in the same sense that a court of law is adversarial, committed to the belief that through a contest over information, some ultimate truth will emerge.  The system works best when people are contesting every claim that gets made, taking nothing at face value” (43).

Sidebar on Big Brother: “Fan regard the broadcast version as a family-friendly digest of the much racier and more provocative Web feed, and they are drawn toward talking about things they know were hidden from people who watch only the televised content” (51).  All three key ideas are at play here.  Convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.

“What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory,continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties” (54).  Thus discussing the tension between the group forum where everyone is encouraged to participate and share what they learned and where they learned it in tension/conflict with the Brain Trust who only allowed the elite membership and felt above having to reveal how they knew what they knew.

Another tension:  to know or not to know: “The question was whether, within a knowledge community, one has the right not to know — or more precisely, whether each communitymember should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it” (55).  This not being an issue brings what Jenkins calls a “deeply totalitarian dimension” to the discussion of these collective groups (55).

“What we need to keep in mind here and througout the book is that the interests of producers and consumers are not the same” (58).  This of course fuels the tension at the heart of his discussion in Ch. 2.

2: American Idol and consumerism vs. audience control

“American Idol was from the start not simply a television program but a transmedia franchise” (61).

affective economics: “a new configuration of marketing theory…which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions” (62).

62-63: commodified audiences and their value/risk

“networks should be focused more on the quality of audience engagment witht he series and less on the quantity of viewers.  Increasingly, advertisers and networks are coming ot more or less the same conclusion” (63).

63: “touch points,” “impressions,” “expressions”

“American Idol offers up a fantasy of empowerment” (64).  Something the audience takes seriously and eventually will make some statements to that effect.

66-68: changes in research concerning audience participation.  move from impressions to expressions.  What they see to what they do.

brand extension: “the idea that successful brands are built by exploiting multiple contacts between the brand and consumer” (69).

“Brand loyalty is the holy grail of affective economics” (72).

Zappers, Loyals, and Casuals: 74-79

“Such distracted viewing is fairly common for women; even though fairly committed to the program must respond to competing demands on their attention in the early evening hours” (81).

“Social viewing, then, would ap-pear to be an important driver behind brand and content extension” (82).  Does anyone know why exactly words are constantly hyphenated in the middle of lines, and in really weird/annoying places?

85: affirmation of conservative social values through discussion of ethical trangressions.

86: process through which collective intelligence becomes shared knowledge

90: product placement as a double-edged sword

“the debates about Idol voting are debates about hte terms of audience participation in American media” (92).  Coming back to the point made before that people don’t know all the rules yet.  They do know that audiences demand a different kind of entertainment.

3: The Matrix as a transmedia world, successful failure.

“The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium” (97).

“The Matrix is also entertainment for the era of collective intelligence” (97).

“Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole.  Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption” (98).

“I would argue, however, that we do not yet have very good aesthetic criteria for evaluating works that play themselves out across multiple media” (99).

“So let’s agree for a moment that The Matrix was a flawed experiment, an interesting failure, but that its flaws did not detract from the significance of what it tried to accomplish” (99).  Ok I can do that; especially since my personal qualms with the franchise have to do with the actual production of the second movie.  It kept me from watching the third.  Maybe I should sometime.

99-100: criteria for cult artifact status

101: necessity for collective intelligence

“The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts” (104).  Cliche perhaps but perhaps apt in this conversation.

“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling” (106).

107: breakdown of licensing structure

“In reality, audiences want the new work to offer new insights and new experiences” (107).

Sidebar on the Mangaverse: “The flow of Asian goods into the Western market has been shaped by two competing forces: the corporate convergence promoted by media industries, and the grassroots convergence promoted by fan communities and immigrant populations” (111-112).

Same: ” ‘transcreation,’ one step beyond translation” (113).

media mix strategy: “these franchises depend on hypersociability, that is, they encourage various formso f participation and social interactions between consumers” (112).

117: logic of world-making

Note: weirdness with a block quote that doesn’t finish on 119.  Do I have a misprinted copy or do others have the same?

On that same page, side bar: the importance of plot arcs that are season based.  Forerunners: Babylon 5 and  The X-Files (oh yeah family favorites).

“we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by expanding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end” (121).

123-125: Getting to know characters in transmedia

127: additive comprehension

127-132: sidebar, “the Beast.”  yeah, I wish I had known about that.

“the emergence of knowledge cultures made it possible for the community as a whole to dig deeper into this bottomless text” (131).

“our schools are not teaching what it means to live and work in such knowledge communities, but popular culture may be doing so” (133).  Such a direct lead in to his discussion of Harry Potter that doesn’t happen for another chapter after this one.  Though Star Wars applies in many ways as well.

“This transmedia impulse is at the heart of what I am calling convergence culture” (133).

Art of the Motor: Title, hence important term.  First appears in “The Data Coup D’Etat”:
“The communications industry would never have got where it is today had it not started out as an art of the motor capable of orchestrating the perpetual shif of appearances” (23).  In thinking about this conept, Virilio sets up how motorized communications alter reality even as they claim to present reality.  Key to understanding this concept is two terms, Mediatization and similarly, “The Shrinking Effect”

These two terms are very closely related.  Very early on in the book, Virilio defines mediatization as it applied to the world before the 20th century: “Up until the twentieth century, to be mediatized mean literally being stripped of one’s immediate rights” (6).  He claims Napoleon I as the great “mediatizer” who took over areas but left the former leaders in a puppet role.  Each “ruler” seemed separate, individual, but they were all really just another part of Napoleon.  The many are really the one.

The same happens with mass communication, and the projector motor of the cinema becomes the symbol.  Virilio sets up the difference between the audience of a theatre production with that of a film.  While the theatre goers all see a different play due to positioning in th theatre – perspective, distance – the viewers of a film all see the film from the same perspective and distance.  The cinema “plunges inert cinemagoers into an unprecedented form of solitude, multiple solitude, since, as Marcel Pagnol so aptly puts it, a thousand spectators are reduced to one in the cinema auditorium!” (9).  The motor becomes the symbol of mediatization.  The audience in the twentieth century sees the world from one perspective, and this is problematic for Virilio because of the issues concerning who controls that perspective.

Mediatization occurs because of the “Shrinking Effect” of modern telecommunication technologies.  To get at this Virilio provides the history of the creation of the Republic of France.  The multitude of presses in Paris started the wave that shifted the focus of history in Virilio’s view:  “history was already completely turned toward the future, whisked along by the liberating power of the new media” (38).  Presses were publishing events about the future, what was to come (the arrest of Robespierre for instance).  But this is only a part of the equation: the multitude had to be controlled or there would simply be more uprising.  As Virilio points out “It is easier to fool a crowd than a single person” (38).  It is not insignificant that Virilio states this twice.  The “mulitple solitude” is incredibly important.   Virilio claims the optical telegraph as the first real new medium to effectively shrink the world in the various ways he means. 

It’s inventor, Chappe claims “The telegraph shrinks distances and in a way joins an entire huge population into a single point” (40).  Here we have both meanings of the term shrinking.  Shrinking the large population into the small, mediatization, and also shrinking large distances to ever smaller ones as communication speeds up.  People have contact with each other from great distances that were before measured by how long it took a person to travel from one place to another (in person or via letters that transported along with people).  With the telegraph, messages relayed without the people, effectively closing the gap as the messages received had much less distance to travel over land (think for a moment of the setup of the telegraph system.  One person sends a message on one end transmitted in various ways depending on the system to another station.  At that station, the message gets decoded and sent along to the interested parties.  The time of transmission is nearly instantaneous depending on the system, but it still has to travel from the station to the individual(s) concerned.  Thus distance is still there, but much shorter).

Newer media close the gap further and now instant (or nearly so) communication means there’s no distance effectively between people.  Because of this, Information becomes commodity in of itself and gains power.  At the same time  those who control (or in in reality create) the information becomes the leaders of this fourth estate.  The question then becomes, what constitutes information?

—-Pause: To be continued…

At some point while reading Maffesoli (since I didn’t mark it I can’t find it again-so frustrating) he mentions music.  Now, as background, my undergraduate degree is a dual major in English and Music.  I really like music, so the metaphors we’ve been reading, especially in Ulmer, really make sense when expressed in terms of music.

Anyway, while reading I remembered this piece that I composed in undergrad that is for 4-part mixed voices (male and female) called “Benedictus.”  I think the religious stuff in Maffesoli coupled at some point with that music reference to lead me to this particular piece.  While I don’t plan to work with this particular piece, it reminded me that I have another one that is composed for 3-part female voices.

Here’s where I think I am going.  Ulmer demonstrates the mystory and all the different pieces that come together in no particular fashion to create one’s identity, by proximity.  The piece I wrote in many ways brings all this together for me (the text is a section of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself).

I don’t have a choir on hand to sing this song, but I myself can sing each part.  I have sound editing software that will allow me to layer each part on top of one another, allowing me, essentially to perform this piece as a trio with myself.

The point?  Well, frankly it is an expression of my everyday.  It is in many ways my “social divine.”  This is just a seed of the project however.  I plan to try to make it a little more complex (though just doing this will prove to be a challenge).  I might work with some of the other pieces I’ve written.  I may compose some more music, including perhaps an accompaniment to “Permeable Shell” (the 3-part piece).  Rather than just thinking of one’s identity as a polyphony, I will actually perform my identity (or at least part of it) as a polyphony (drawing on Ulmer here).  The text also seems appropriate.

Here’s hoping it works out.  If so I will be very excited.

Rather than going from here and reiterating many of the same points touched on in most of the other posts (a difficulty one has when one posts late), I would rather focus on the curious analogy Maffesoli makes throughout to the “restorative myth” in the realm of religious practices.  Okay so it’s not that “curious,” but I found it an interesting way to enter this discussion of tribes, though I suppose it is rather fitting.

“It is certainly possible, if only as a working hypothesis to apply the double process of social reliance and of negotiation with the holy characteristic of the early Christian communities to the various tribes that are made and unmade in praesenti” (22).

Relation of words to the transmission of food and drink: comparison with the unifying affect of the Christian eucharist: “This leads back to the confirmation, expressed countless times, of the link between the divine, the social whole and proximity” (25).

“the divine issues forth from daily realities and develops gradually through the sharing of simple and routine gestures” (25).

Experience of “life”: “We might call the spiritual attitude ‘dionysian’ and the more sensual perspective ‘dionyisac’” however, they are both founded on the primacy of experience, on a deep vitalism and a more or less explicity vision of the organicity of hte various elements of the cosmos” (32).

The “social divine”: “We could also use the word ‘religion’, if it is used to describe that which unites us as a community; it is less a content, which is the realm of faith, than a container, that is, a common matrix, a foundation of the ‘being-together’” (38).  Why all the religion stuff.

“a relativization of the unifying structures and institutions is underway.  There is no reason to get upset about it; on the contrary, since the effervescence flowing from this polytheism is on the whole the surest sign of a renewed dynamism in all aspects of social life, whether the economy, spiritual or intellectual life or, of course, the new forms of sociality” (48)

“It is the demonic figure found in all myths and religions, the biblical Satan who refuses to be subjugated.  Although it is occasionally destructive, the satanic figure continues to exert a basic function” (48).

Oh wait, can’t forget the entire section in “Tribalism,” “3. The ‘religious model’” (82 ff).   “it is important to use religious images in order to sieze in nuce the forms of social aggregation.  This transversal or comparative view recognizes that it is from a collectively experienced imagination that human history is inaugurated.  Despite the caution we must exercise when dealing with etymology, religion (religare) – reliance – is a useful way of understanding social ties” (82).

In this it’s all about “affinity groups” (85). 

I would probably quote more than half the book if I kept going, but I feel this covers most of the basis for this use of religion as an analogy or “model” for Maffesoli’s discussion of the creation and interaction and networking of these things he (or rather the translator) calls Tribes.

Deconstruction itself doesn’t bother me (I find it very amusing at times), but Ulmer’s working from deconstruction and his move to his new method of chorography is difficult.  Originally I thought about trying to map the associations between the different things that he discusses in trying to create his project, but I got too confused to even know where to begin.

So, instead, I did something I know that he really wouldn’t want me to do.  I keyed into the moments where he gave me something more general to work from. 

Here’s what I think I get: Traditional (and by traditional I mean print) media critique works from a certain framework that has prevailed since ancient Greece.  It has been modified, especially around the time of Ramus, but it hasn’t changed completely.  One of the big changes that happened with Ramus is the separation of delivery and memory from the rhetoric, focusing instead mainly on invention and arrangement.  Ulmer contends that this model does not hold up in the face of the new media possibilities of what he calls “hypermedia” that integrates words and images and sounds all together in one.

Heuretics, then is Ulmer’s performance of what he views as a new method for viewing texts as well as creating new methods.  He calls this new method chorography.  He relates this method to two important principles:

1) “Do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meaning (write the paradigm)” (48).  He also discusses these different meanings for important key terms to his project:

Chora: the concept of “place” as seen in Plato’s Timaeus. and from F.E. Peters: “an area where genesis takes place” (in Ulmer 48).  He also has a whole chapter devoted to explaining the many meanings of this term (too long to sum up here).

Premises: “‘Premises’ in logic are propositions that support a conclusion, explicit or implicit assumptions, or a setting forth beforehand by way of introduction or explanation” (48).  Also, “a tract of land–a building together with its grounds and appurtenances” (48).  appurtenance: (from dictionary.com) 1. something subordinate to another, more important thing; adjunct; accessory; 2. law a right, privilege, or improvement belonging to and passing with a principle property; 3. appurtenances, apparatus; instruments.

Folies: “seventeenth-century ‘extravagant house of entertainment’” and “‘contemporary psychoanalytic discoveries’ (folie = ‘madness’) (50). Also, a place where secret lovers would spend evenings (50) and “a place for dancing, drinking, and watching entertainments” (50 – 51).

Vanguard: military “the foremost division or front part of an army–shock troops, the probes” (88). political like Abd-el-Krims leadership of the Moors in the Rif War with France (88).  artistic like the surrealist opposition to the Rif War (88-89).

Gest: old english ” ‘ bearing, carriage, mien, a mixture of gesture and gist, attitude and point’ (Bullock and Stallybrass, 365)” (102). also “a tale, a deed or exploit, deportment or conduct, gesture, and even ‘the stages of a journey’  (102).

There are more, but these are a start.  Ulmer gives another principle of Chorography for him to follow:

2) “to collect what I find into a set, unified by a pattern of repetitions, rather than by a concept.  Electronic learning is more like discovery than proof” (56).  A while later he gives a very clear example of what he means here, though throughout he organizes things into repetitious sets.  The most obvious example that he points to himself:

“To write with the paradigm, chorography might take as a point of departure the series beginning with the term Rif ( a mountainous coastal region in norther Morocco); Riff ( a member of a group of Berber-speaking tribes living in northern Morocco); riff (in jazz, a melodic phrase, often constantly repeated, forming an accompaniment for a soloist).  The project is to learn to write with patterns that function more like music than like concepts” (91).

The last sentence leads me to the general statements I mentioned before.  Throughout he makes statements about what the method should do, should look like, etc.

“choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer’s specific position in the time and space of a culture” (33).

“The chorographer, then, writes with paradigms (sets), not arguments” (38).

“How to practice choral writing then?  It must be in the order neither of the sensible nor the intelligible but in the order of making, of generating.  And it must be transferable, exchangable, without generalization, conducted from one particular to another” (67).  Ok isn’t this statement in of itself making this exercise not choral since he feels this generalized statement is necessary?

“being neither intelligible nor sensible, it has to be approached indirectly, by extended analogies” (67).

“Indeed chorography suggests the possiblity of a method that is never practiced the same way twice” (75).

“Chorography is a response to this appeal for invention, however impossible, based on the assumption that invention may not be undertaken ‘in general,’ solely by means of abstractions that leave out the foundation of thought int he practices constituting the cultural identity  and ideology of the inventor” (84).

“The transformation of this temporality from the mode of mystery (interpretation, truth) into the feeling of eureka (invention) is an important goal of chorography” (100).

“the chorographer introduces empathy, projection, and identification effects into critical theory” (102).

“Chorography is designed to introduce into the narrativesand arguments of the print apparatus a Heuretic code, to supplement and replace the Hermeneutic code and its drive to reduce enigmas to truth” (106).

I end with this one, though there are more, because I feel like this is exactly what I am trying to do here; unfortunately, I am not practiced well enough in any other way.  What I am trying to do, even though I have all of this, is to not come up with some sentence (my own axiom if you will) that can boil all this down into something digestible.  It simply isn’t right now for me.  I’m working on it though.

Andreas Stroehl divided (sort of) Flusser’s essays into vague groupings, and I really keyed into the theory of communication part.  Stroehl calls it “Communications Philosophy and Communicology” (xxxiii).

Flusser divides perspectives on communication into two camps: Information Science and Communications Theory.  I won’t spend too much time talking about the differences (though it’s probably important to know that they represent, roughly, the following of the second law of thermodynamics and the exception to that law, respectively) because that is basically the entire point of the first essay.  What I am more focused on is a concept he starts with in “Line and Surface” that actually then traces back to “On the Theory of Communication” and forward to the other essays.

In “Line and Surface,” Flusser sets up the problem of concepts and images.  Concepts are coded by the written word, and images are coded in a variety of other mediums.  In discussing this, Flusser points out an interesting and important issue: in order to even engage in the various questions/concerns surrounding this split, it “can only be stated by writing it out in lines” (22).

So I tend to have a problem with just this.  In reading Flusser, he explains several different systems very clearly, but I still have problems understanding.  For example, going back to “On the Theory of Communication,” Flusser explains the difference between “discourse” and “dialogue” (18).  For my own benefit, I created a little diagram:

Reading on, I encountered another moment in this essay where I felt a diagram would be important.  Flusser describes what he means when he states “what characterizes the present: a discursive culture without dialogical feedback” (18).  His explanation is fairly lengthy, so I made a diagram to help me remember without having to reread the entire section:

As I continued reading, I obviously encountered Flusser’s concern about writing about a problem that deals with the relationship between the written and the visual.  My notes throughout this section are inclusions of diagrams to help my make images of the concepts he writes about. Flusser explains perfectly why I feel the need to do this: “it takes many more minutes to describe what one has seen in a picture than it does to see it” (23).  It would take me much longer to write out a summary of the concepts visualized above.

Granted, my visualizations are not entirely without text.  Perhaps my diagrams could almost be considered more text than image, but I feel this is still more concise and perhaps more along the lines of where Flusser sees the model of communication leading to: “Imaginal thought will be a translation from concept into image, and conceptual thought a translation from image to concept” (30).  This rather circular model will be able to clearly delineate the difference between fact and fiction because all the fiction will be self-referential, making the fact easier to see.  Or maybe my drawings are just scribbles on paper, linear, that keep me grounded in the linear world of type.

Actually, looking forward to “The Codified World,” Flusser gives another explanation as to why I spent time drawing out these little pictures (there are more, I just shared the first two).  He explains that for a person to understand something linearly (like his explanation of the mass communication system in the modern world) that person has to read the whole thing and then bring it together, “Linear codes demand a synchronization of their diachronicity” (39).  That is exactly what my images do.  In fact, in a way, that is what these blogs are really supposed to do, are they not?

We are in fact on these blogs supposed to be bringing together all these different little threads we’ve picked up in the books we’re reading and bring them together as the notes we have, to help ourselves understand the concepts.  We don’t necessarily have a thesis or anything like that, but we are putting stuff together.

The papers we are about to start writing (since Flusser is the third book) are supposed to do this as well.  We are linking concepts into a synthesis from three sources.  We read these sources diachronically, and will now try and understand the three together synchronically.

Flusser’s point in all of this is really about the changes that are occurring in the way we communicate.  With new technology, we are more and more living in a world dominated by “surface thought” as opposed to “line thought,” “image thinking” instead of “concept thinking.”  He is quick to remind us that we are not necessarily becoming illiterate, that “concept thinking” should never actually go away, but inform our new method and, ideally, lead to a whole new model of communication.  If it doesn’t, the model of communication set up in my little drawing above will go on a rampage and consumer culture will reign and the select elite will manipulate the masses and hold all power.

From his view, it’s either utopia or distopia.  I have to wonder if there is no middle ground for him.

Ok, so early on Lyotard discusses what he means when he talks about language games.  Actually he provides us with a few examples of language games and then gives us the source from which he draws this concept, Habermas: “he calls the various types of utterances he identifies along the way (a few of which I have listed) language games” (10).  Language games are the statements we make in our language that perform certain functions. 

The easiest example in which to see what this means is in the “performative” statement.  Whatever the sender says is true because the sender said it.  The sender has the authority to make whatever is said true.  To use an example that Lyotard does not, if I, as the instructor for my sections of EN 1000, state that class is cancelled on a given day, then class is cancelled on that day because I have the authority to make that decision.  One of my students could not have done the same thing.

This becomes interesting to me (language games in general) as Lyotard then discusses the concept and legitimation of narrative and scientific knowledge.  These two concepts for Lyotard are separate entities.  One cannot gain scientific knowledge from the rules of narrative knowledge (though many try) and you cannot gain narrative knowledge from the rules of scientific knowledge.

Narrative knowledge in particular interests me in the way it works.  While variations exist between different cultures, some specific qualities set it apart (especially in terms of legitimation).  The sender in this case has the power to not only transmit a message imbued with statements that define cultural boundaries, but also as the sender actually perpetuates and creates these boundaries even as he/she passes on the ability to do so to the receiver.  This knowledge is legitimate because it is being passed on in the manner it is.

This leads me to wonder how much of a role-playing situation works in the same manner, in terms of the creation of a group and the rules/customs/boundaries that are set up for each individual group.  They do in a way create a culture unique to that group by virtue of the stories they tell and the epic history created.  At least this is what it seems to me.  Perhaps this is a little beyond the scope of my thesis, but then again, perhaps this may be an interesting way to refocus my thesis.  It’s still early.

McLuhan references all different types of new media throughout the book, but in spite of this, there seems to be a category of media advances that he places above all the others.  Throughout especially the first part, McLuhan stresses the importance of the advancement of electricity.  Electricity for him is key to modern media advances.  He sets this advance in opposition to advances in mechanization and print.

This is a concept I have spent quite a bit of time trying to understand.  What is it that makes electricity such an important form for McLuhan?  As he puts it, “Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement” (26).  He posits that it is the first time we could see truly that the content of a medium is clearly another medium.  The electric light in of itself contains no message, but rather is used to contain another medium (say text) (8).

At various points he mentions the instantaneous nature of the electric age.  Having the entire “picture” in an instant makes media that have grown out of the electric age fundamentally different from those that came out of the mechanical age.  The mechanical age was about the process.  Moveable type as a new medium changed the way text was presented from the tribal (perhaps cold?) methods of illuminated, or hand copied manuscripts to a more factory-like, specialized (hot?) method of the mechanized press.  Electricity brought both the telephone (cold) and the radio (hot) as new media, but more importantly it allowed instant access.  By allowing information and media to pass instantaneously, electricity has reorganized our society.

Perhaps this is McLuhan’s point about what is considered “New Media” today.  It is new in relation to the mechanized age that came prior to electricity.  Is radio still a new medium?  Perhaps not, but his classifications can and should be extended to include media that had not yet been invented, media like the internet.  I am still trying to figure out if it is hot or cold.  Perhaps certain aspects are one and others are the other.