Seyrix’s Weblog

camera lucida 8060

I adore that he involves himself in his theory. It gives it a context that actually, for me, allows me to push it past its authorial context into new spaces, instead of having the job of trying to squeeze theory without referent into the study of a subject. Or, maybe I’m just grasping theory a bit better nowadays.

Note: the author has to be very careful of the words he uses to describe his relation to pictures: interest, intrigue, pleasing, and others are off limits. He uses instead forms of adventure and attraction.

Note: spectator, subject, object, operator are important.

3 1 does photography exist on its own?
4 2 photography is defined without relation to its essence – apply to older forms; but the photograph reproduces
5 a photo shows – is a clear envelop of the message – it is the thing it looks at; never distinguished from its referent
6 photograph contains a duality: the yin/yang: the self and the referent
7 author felt urged to talk about specific photographs, not to speak sociologically
8 3 author torn between expressive and critical languages; might there be a new science for each object?
((I find this idea interesting as it applies to pedagogy around both WaC and WC – discussing issues sociologically can feel reductive))
9 4 photograph can be done to do, to undergo, to look; the referent is the spectrum of the photograph
10 chemical order: outside camera; physical order: technology; the spectator considers the chemical and the operator the physical
11 5 posing – derive existence from photographer;
12 image doesn’t really represent himself as the object?
13 photograph as a disturbance to history – it allows us to look on ourselves in history
14 in the moment of having pic taken: he feels like a subject turning into an object: this is a micro death
15 he seeks death in the photograph (after it’s taken, or while?) the click of a camera button pressed is a signifier of time passing
16 6 they are only images;
18 photography is an uncertain art; remonstrating with moods
19 7 photos stand out to him by internal agitation; adventure (advenience, advenes) is the word to describe stand-out photos
20 a photo animates obs, is animated by obs – that is, it creates adventure
20 8 Lyotard: something or other
21 affect is irreducible; sentimentality is important for the spectator
22 9 (image) presence of nuns and soldiers together create adventure
23 author attracted to duality
25 cultural homogeneity is not … attractive to author?
26 10 studium (Latin) means an enthusiastic commitment without special acuity. This word describes the field, (the rebellion,) the thing that one feels from training – interest
the second element breaks the studium – this element is not sought after, but it seeks the spectator
27 The second element (above) is called punctum – a pricking
27 11 most photos lack punctum – they don’t prick
28 culture is a contract between creators and consumers; studium allows us to discover the Operator.
28 12 photograph is pure contingency
30 biographemes: biographical features
30 13 photography tormented by ghost of painting
31 photography touches art by theatre, not through painting: uses perspective, photography, diorama – arts of the stage
(back to the death fixation that seems to run through so much theory)
32 14 the essential gesture of operator is to surprise something – the surprise is for the spectator
first surprise: the rarity of the referent; second surprise: takes a decisive instant of time (Bonaparte touching a plague victim
33 third surprise: prowess; fourth surprise: exploitation of framing, blurring, etc. fifth surprise: lucky find
33/34 all surprises obey principle of defiance: defy probability – we don’t know the motive, reason, cause of the photograph
34 anything/whatever (from Lyotard kinda?) becomes what is important to photography: whatever is in the picture becomes important, rather than the reverse
34 15 photography cannot signify except by assuming a mask (because photograph is pure contingency)
36 society mistrusts pure meaning – society needs noise to surround it “as said in cybernetics” which will “make it less acute”; masks are too discreet to constitute an effective social critique (really?) – too much aesthetics?
38 no meaning at all is safest: life rejected photos because they “spoke too much”; photography is subversive when it is pensive, when it thinks

I just realized this little guy didn’t make it online earlier. So, here she he is. I blame hotel internet. (Edited for gender continuity.)

First, I love how accessible this book is. Great mix of theory and the all so neglected application.

SPOILING SURVIVOR
25 survivor and spoiling
26 communal: ethics of problem solving
27 spoiling as a collective intelligence: knowledge communities have more power – new forms
28 knowledge not shared but collective* thus, communal spoiling
29 out of play* political power will emerge
we are in a period of apprenticeship in which we innovate and explore structures of support for the future – Levy
spoiling is democratic?
30 spoiling as a “bringing close” or “collapse” from previous authors
31 survivor sucks: finding the place of meeting/interest (joining a tribe when needed, then to leave?)
32 tele-tourist;
33 technology as information
36 logical spoiler progression
38 gated knowledge communities; brain trusts
discusses the scalability of Levy’s utopian knowledge communities
Levy: distrust for hierarchy; democracy best
39 the problem of data without origin: keeping power by keeping the source
41 ChillOne also keeps sources, but opens results to all
42 CO wrong on some counts; knowledge community delegated to fully use the resources of the community
43 Contested Information; spoiling is adversarial – a contest
44 potential knowledge isn’t thrown out unless it is holy (so to speak)
absolutists vs relativists: you’re right vs you’re not -or- memory is imprecise and data corruptible
45 The evil pecker and his minions; “evil pecker mark”;
46/7 deciever
47 biblical/torah deduction. Odd.
48 experimenting with the knowledge community looks like survivor
48/9 proliferation of theory*
50 big wide open amusement park
Collective Intelligence and the Expert Paradigm
51 is spoiling a goal or a process? Do we really want to “Win?”
not everyone can play (many parts of) the game – still need privileged information (a problem for knowledge comm.?) – but all can play to some extent
52 expertise not vetted the same
53 expert paradigm: exterior/interior -but- collective intelligence: everyone can contribute -Walsh
expert paradigm uses rules, but a collective intelligence is disorderly, unruly
54 ex.para. credentialed while no hierarchy in col. Int. and works with experience, not formal ed.
C1 seems to have somewhat broken the system by purporting to be an expert
Social process of acquiring knowledge keeps collective together
55 does one have the right ‘not’ to know in a knowledge community?
“you never really get to watch the show for the first time”
56 spoiling becoming public; corporations use community building to ensure engagement (uh oh?)
57 life of community shortened by C1 – the members needed a new game

WHY HEATHER CAN WRITE

175 emotional capital or love marks; participation
176 what rights to read/write – struggle over literacy
177 the discernment movement
178 Hogwarts and all; cool: the daily prophet;
180 mimickery; diversity in imagination?
185 role playing game and fanfiction in one
skills needed: ability to pool knowledge, compare value systeems, make connections, express interpretations/feelings, ability to circulate what you create
186 rewriting school; affinity spaces – good teaching idea…
den- mothering in an online space (hidden but not too hidden age markers?)
187 discussing “scaffolding” – a raising up by the community – a more exciting place to write?
189 beta readers as a model for mentor/learner
190 the myth of copying to apprenticeship
194 defense against dark arts;
195 copyright enforcement; squelching creativity; interconnectedness = power
197 children’s campaign
198 fair use, the problem of copyright online?
200 Muggles for harry Potter;
205 kids are forced to recant their fantasies in order to defend their right to have them
207 Dumbledore’s army
209 WWJD w/HP
advocacy of media literacy skills, building a wall doesn’t work
213 HP as an opening to talk about values
216 finding alliances, mapping, globalization, conglomeration – lots of key words

I feel like I’m starting to find a note-taking groove for myself. Noting the introductory chapters usually makes the rest of the book more pleasant to get through.

Ethological – study of human ethos and its formation
deontological – ethical theory concerned with duties/rights
mediatization – stripping of power, leaving a husk of appearance
eschatology – theology dealing with the end times
kinedramatic -
ostrakon – ballot on which one is to be ostracized
cathodic – kata ‘odos – down path

The Media Complex

1 industrial media operates outside democracy, because there’s no independent criticism
3 problem therein is what mass media can obliterate/hide- counterpower
4 without visual limits, no mental imagery
5 Smith deontological: outlines ethics for media
6 mediatization ↔ communication
7 communication is central to man
8 alter-ego – other standpoint: 2D screen offers one standpoint, stage 3D = many ways of seeing
9 Mcluhan: sequential sense of the world
10 private terrorism and the media of transparency
11 media perpetuates lack of upward mobility, injustice
14 economic battlefield: project of American Communication becomes mediatization of populous
16 dividing line between program and information fading
17 advertising borrows terrorism’s aesthetic
18 adv. To destroy taboos, attack institutions; morality of the end times for adv.
21 freedom of media melding with reduction, proliferation, acceleration, use of comm. Weapons

The Data Coup

23 the real is kinedramatic; art of the motor: ??
24 technology as high explosives; new tech is disorganizing
25 through media’s “brining close,” new barbarism (barbar – foreigner speak) can be created, thus creating the enemy (I don’t get how enemy and foreigner are assumed the same here)
26 defining media as in the image – holy (which is now under a cloud)
28 (I get annoyed with how everyone uses Herodotus as a straw man just because he was developing history rather than used a developed form)
change in scale of war leads to mediatization through essential division of info
30 (in greece) democracy calls itself a moral force through mediatization
31 eloquence as a battle – a communication weapon; mass communication became a system of general incrimination
32 down a path democracy

I ran across an interesting little rant today about the elements of the RPG.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/6588-Extra-Punctuation-On-RPG-Elements

While it isn’t terribly useful in that the subject isn’t the RPG game, but the RPG game’s attributes seeping into first person shooters, it got me thinking about the media of the video game genre and the message that it pushes.

The article essentially gets pissy over the inclusion of RPG elements into non rpg genres. The example is the FPS, which is traditionally a genre that rewards the player for skill in hand/eye coordination and in ability to use a common tool/weapon/strategy better than an opponent.

But, with the inclusion of RPG elements, some of the newer FPS games involve leveling up stats and improving on the ability of the character you play to hold the gun more steady, to survive longer, and to upgrade and purchase weaponry. This introduces a reverse learning curve, as the article states, making the game, specifically the multiplayer experience that is tethered to RPG elements, easier as the game is played longer.

This seeping of RPG elements, I think the author would attest, tends to not fit the media and the audience which is capable of succeeding in the opening stages of play.

And all this begs the question I’m currently too tired to really answer: what kinds of elements serve to undermine the RPG genre as a medium?

MY THOUGHTS

In reading this, it feels like one should feel implicated, as actually belonging to a group-think, group-ethic-ed tribal dynamic. If you don’t (I dare say) you might be reading it without any attempt at applying it as the author would say, wholistically. I felt that I was a member of a tribe (or half a dozen) and could see how they competed for me as a member, and how I played for the betterment of those tribes I’m in.

I also thought more about his claim that dichotomies are of little importance to discussing the tribe (which is something I would claim holds little importance in many many spheres) and came up with an interesting (and somewhat applicable) example of why dichotomies are problematic.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/101181/bones-the-beautiful-day-in-the-neighborhood?c=999:1088 This is a clip from Bones that’s amazingly attune to what is discussed by Maffesoli.

Also, here is tribalism as discussed in a political blogger’s post : http://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/09/centrism-as-tribalism/
Note: it might be most efficient to word seach down to the first reference of tribe to get the jist of it.

KEY WORDS

crystallized
pissuance
political
ethics
aura
antinomy – opposition
social divine – specific, imminent, transcendance (21)
palaver – idle discussion or flattery
sect

INTRODUCTION

2 “Thus, the ambition of this book is to address itself mysteriously, with neither false simplicity nor useless complexity”
Hell yes.
2-3 magic informed science – don’t overdo the disparity
3 reliance/religiosity are ssential ingredients in tribalism
4 DEF pissuance: energy of the people, opposite of politico-economic power — pissuance understood through the social divine
underground centrality assures perdurability of life in society
5 we must be lax, but not lazy; we must be like newborns; we can only know indirectly
6 microgroups = tribes; the masses are not subjects of historical movement-have roles, not individuality; theory does not discriminate – wholistic
7 proposing a theoretical method to guide through the confusion around tribalism
knowledge /= politics in that we cannot expect to go to action through knowledge

THE EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY: RESEARCH ARGUMENTS

10 DEF paroxysmal: extreme or acute; persona is important to the idea of the tribe member – finds fulfillment in relation to others; collective feeling is derived from communal figures: christian saint, greek hero, etc.
11 mythical type is around to express a collective spirit;
12 “the aesthetic of the we is a mixture of indifference and periodic bursts of energy”
13 DEF hommerie: blend of greatness, trupitude, ideas, venal thoughts, idealism
collective sensibilities creates an aura around time
15 moral = political; in groupism, the member tries to please the group, unlike the herd instinct which is simply seeking refuge
16 communal is born from proximity and and sharing of territory;
17 groups form ethics around their members: the buguosie fail to denounce the petty theif
19 arua functions ‘as if’ it existed; social life generally turns around flow of words, goods, and sex (anthropologically speaking)
20 DEF ethic: a vessel for the collectivity’s emotions and feelings
21 customs coax out the divine in spiritual divine
22 neighborhood important as it represents overlapping of symbolic and function
25 habit concretes the ethical dimention of sociality; growth in urban tribes encouraged computerized palaver that assumes rhe rituals of the ancient agora (marketplace?)
26 again, common emotion is expressed as the thing that causes us to come into communion with others
27 theme of custom: person counts for more than individual in a tribe; DEF allonomy: the idea that the law is an external force
28 tribes are somewhat barbaric

TRIBALISM

72 from the political order to the realm of identification
73 experiencing the other is the basis of community; can function witout one’s full presence; communion of saints (as a model) forebears sociality
74 DEF aesthetics as: the common faculty of feeling/experiencing
75 neotribalism refuses political projects/finality, and is concerned with only the collective present
76 neo-tribes are fluid, dispersable; the social – individual has a function; the sociality – the person plays roles in order to play the games
77 the spectacle stands in for a communion
78 death = deindividuation?
81 life = work of art; sociality = unqualified reality
82 only small sects can found something
84 sect is small, communion oriented, leaders not based in rational competance or sacerdotal tradition – leading them to not be long-lived
85 sect is alternative to the purely rational
90 protective mechanism of secrecy
91 refocusing on that which is close signifies solidarity: signifies a “founding act”
93 secrecy can take the form of an adopted(?) rhetoric from the “young tough”s to the academic cryptospeak
95 a clan forges its own private moral from the immoral; tribalism and massification go hand in hand; symbolism, duplicity further the tribe
(symbolism is a private thing… to be understood by those who can decode.)
the tribe is a micro group, compared to the mass
96 developing new lifestyles is an act of pure creation
97 the tribe guaruntees solidarity, but also has the potential for such things as racism (author doesn’t commit to good or bad)
100 the bond holding an entity together might be that of something that divides

When we were first tasked to begin thinking about a project in new media, my mind immediately went to the (computer/console) gaming culture.

In trying to be more specific about the game as a new media, I guess there are two ways in which I’m thinking about the game:

First, games are being made more and more as advertisements (not even as a part of advertisements).  One of the older and more thorough iterations of this would be Chex Quest.

This game was packaged with the cereal (I don’t think it was even a send-away) and was a bit of a cult classic among some gamers. This kind of game changes the role of the genre, and would make a very interesting plaything as far as successfully navigating the message and the media.

Second, I also find interesting the increasing extent to which games are becoming cool, and to what extent games are communal (tribal). The best example would probably be WoW, which is the current most popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). The game values teamwork, having a guild, and being in concert with members of the guild. The game is all about being with or against others.

In this sense, I am curious about looking at games as emerging forums – places where tribes gather and work together. This doesn’t necessarily only work with MMORPGs, either. Games like Civilization, Starcraft, Call of Duty, and even Nascar games are all scattered along a line from aloneness toward the greatest sense of community.

All games, too, have an aspect of exile (or would it be a painless imitation of exile?) and are concerned with learning to succeed in a new world. Therein lies one of the messages of the game: the information to survive and necessity to strive onward.
A primary message of any game is that you will be rewarded for continuing onward, something most profound in RPGs of any type.

Realistically, I can’t create an MMO. I can’t code (without a hefty refresher course, and even then, visual basic makes a pretty shitty game,) so I can’t create something specifically to my liking.

I can, however, use a program that will help me make a game. This means the game will have to be single-player (though I could ‘try’ and imitate otherwise) and would not be a cutting edge modern style game. But, it would get the job done, and it would force me to think about the tailoring of the message to the game.

I really enjoyed this essay, probably because of its unspoken ties to the workings of the trickster character, which I’ve seen theorized over in writing center theory.

His going argument is that the expelled has been torn out of his customary surroundings into a place of exile, a place of overabundant information where meaning is difficult to process.  To fail to interpret data and not be creative results in some kind of nebulous failure/death/whoopsy.

Flusser seems to be saying that in a way, the exilers do the expelled a service by putting them in a new place where creation happens, where there’s new knowledge.  I think that’s very kind hearted of him, but I also because of this, want to create the distinction between an exiler and a trickster.  An exiler, like Flusser states, throws you out to make his own world seem more tidy and rounded, but a trickster leads you into the strange place, tricking you, but not for the rounding of the tricksters world, but for the joy/entertainment that she gets from coercing you to pass through a strange door she’s opened.  Maybe you can go back through that kind of door, but is it worth going back (maybe to be a trickster yourself).

The trickster is something that I added to this  chapter to amend the problem of the exiler being such a singularly despicable character from which knowledge is somehow gotten.

The expulsion in terms of pulling back the sheets also reminds me of Improv, a book in which thewriter/instructor has his students wander about, calling obects by the wrong names, identifying htem by the wrong colors, until the reality around them becomes foreign and they see size of objects anew and colors as novel.  A domestic escape, one maybe of the sort that Flusser says cannot last long.

It seems to me that Flusser’s version of expelling is a very violent act, and a very selfish one on behalf of the exiler.  Maybe this is good for the wanderer, the exiled, the writer of history, but it also seems deadly, something that can cause breaking and damning.

In the writing center, we sometimes strive for this exiling, but we cannot be the exiler;  we can not push them through the door and slam it behind them, and count our gains as the writer is left in the muddled overabundance of new (new college, new type of thinking, writing, learning) but we must coax them, sometimes with a carrot, and trick them through that door, and create futher doors by which they move in and out and throughout newness, and learn not in spite of the exiler but in regognition of a good trick.

This also prompted me to think of a direction a larger project could take, combining a few unlikely candidates: contemporary research on the trickster in the writing center, and of the exiler, and of the exilinng so proliferating in certain victorian novels that I am for some strange reason reading (I think I’ve been tricked).

Flusser says that human communication is an artificial process.

I guess I agreee, but, seeing birds who collect the songs of other birds to impress mates, I wonder how pervasive “natural” really is if it were put to the test.  Are “tool” or “instrument” words that are expandable to (too) many situations?

I also was interested in his Greek formulation of Idiot (idios, transliterated) as a private person.  To me, having a bit of Greek under my belt, this doesn’t mean, really, a lack of art, as Flusser puts it, but a lack of participation – maybe a lack of want to ‘do’ art.  A Greek considered idios a term to represent someone who did not engage with the public aspects of Greek culture and government.

It is interesting that Flusser sees human communication and as staving of nature which is solitary which is death.  It speaks in interesting ways to his notion of exile, maybe in a way that conflicts, but most importantly in a way that complicates the goodness he sees in the act of being exiled.

But, in any case, I find it interesting that there’s not so much of a distinction made between whether the tools/the artificial staves of death or if it is simply our attempt at such.

How is man a solitary animal that cannot live in solitude?  Can’t we be communal like wolves or even honey bees?  I don’t really get his statement here.

I appreciate his distinction between explanation and interpretation, even though with the complexities added in following essays, overlapping definitions seem to pile up and confuse.  But, as far as this essay, I really found nature and spirit interesting.

I am not sure, though, that I understand Flusser’s leap from human communication being improbably to probable.

We use language to resist the end of our experience,the wiping of our databases, and attempt to deny nature.  I wonder, though, how he conceptualizes this in terms of passive and active and in terms of individual and societal movement.  Are “we” individuals or is “we” actually more singular?

(While I am holding myself to appreciate this piece, I feel like I need to question his interpretation of biology which tends toward more complex forms.  This doesn’t exactly run counter to what I’m thinking of as evolution, but evolution specifically makes the claim that complexity does not equal ‘better’ and also that evolution can move toward succes – whether that is complexity or simplicity.  Just a pondering that might affect his ideas minutely.)

As I was first getting into Lyotard, I found myself at first cursing him (I know, Jeff, you told us to try our darndest to like an author for the first few reads). He started off very much ambiguous about his intent, so much so that at one point I circled all the “it”s and “this”s and “that”s, which all stood in place of an actual restating or simplifying of his “hypothesis.” (By the way, that was the first full paragraph on page seven).

But, as I started figuring Lyotard out, I became more comfortable with his unravelling way of speaking, and was particularly helped by his resituating his ideas into several different examples for the benefit of his reader.

Overarching opinion of his writing aside:

Seeing the time frame in which Lyotard writes, I found it really interesting that he talked about who will control information, especially near the beginning of the book, he talks about communication satellites or “satellites housing data banks” while asking who’ll have access and who won’t.

Looking to the internet as the realization of his data banks in space, where space becomes more a thing between people than a nebulous void around us all, it seems his question has already been played out, or more accurately is now being played out. The internet, contrary to a database in which access must be in a sense given to an individual, the internet as a general rule is porous so that anyone can access the knowledge within unless access is intercepted and cut off.

So, while America (one may claim) is one of the primary publishers of knowledge on the internet, it is the receiving nation-state that, for its own reasons, restricts knowledgee to its people. (On a side note, it seems I have heard something about legislators possibly having a vote on whether to give the President some mysterious “emergency power” over the internet in the US.)

I was also thinking about open sourcing as a kind of speaking back to the question of access when Lyotard speaks of who will have control over the underlying prejudices in the coding and creation of machines. The open-source community seems to have recognized the problem of access to the underlying and spoken back to too restrictive access.

I guess it shouldn’t be a secret that I’m a closet gamer.  So, in thinking about McLuhan’s commentary on games, I found myself trying to apply his thoughts to all manner of electronic forms of game, specifically gaming and its genres.

McLuhan says that games  are  a booster shot for groups/tribes.  I wonder, if, reflecting on  certain genres of gaming, games haven’t attempted to either replace or reform the idea of tribe.  Specifically with MMORPGs, (massively multiplayer online role playing games – games that bring millions of people onto the same fictional world, and allow dozens of players to form groups for the purposes of survival, teamwork, socialization, and generally a better gaming expreience,) it seems that  a tribe is formed that attempts to give its players  a very “cool” visual experience in which players intimately affect their surroundings and placement, as well as a “cool” audio experience, as many of these players communicate with their community (in this case usually called a guild) over microphones to organize.

 While this game maybe is something beyond what McLuhan was thinking when he described games that mimicked real life, but provided release from work and automation, Starcraft, an older game (about to be reborn again in Starcraft II -crossing my fingers in hopes of having a computer to play it,) is instance based, with a strict beginning, end, and process, which  more similarly resembles the social process of the author’s game of cards.

I’m curious about using McLuhan’s  idea that the “social practices of one generation tend to get codified into the ‘game’ of the next.”  Are the current waves of video games, the “violent” types as they’re depicted, somehow ripples from the waves of recent wars?  It seems unlikely.  But, maybe it’s more complicated.

Starcraft is an RTS game and focuses on ability to move groups of units efficiently, sometimes “dancing” them toward and away from an enemy.  It requires finesse en masse.  Ideas of “Micro” and “Macro” play come out of Starcraft more vividly than in most any other game.  Each unit, in this game, has a type of damage, a type of defense, a speed, strenghts and weaknesses.  Each unit type can prove pivotal if micromanaged correctly in the game.  Like Baseball’s precise timing echoed for McLuhan the precise movements of industrial society, maybe this game, put to market in 1997, echoes the balancing of a football like interchangeability and ingenuity for the neccessary, but unwieldy need to preserve the precise movements of specialized units.