• Latour

   

   

As I read through this week’s part of Latour's Assembling the Social, I can't help but cross back to Deleuze, especially his ideas of the rhizome. Deleuze in using the idea of a rhizome as a mode of knowledge dealing with non-linear aspects. In reading Latour and his tracing associations and deploying controversies with the five sources of uncertainty, it feels as if it is much like the rhizome model where you begin at a specific point and attempt to make connections to the immediate "world" around you in an attempt to increase your knowledge and impact, eventually evolving beyond that immediate "world". It struck me from the very beginning of the introduction when Latour writes of the "science of the social" and "sociology", defining it "as the tracing of associations. In this meaning of the adjective, social does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social"(5).

In A Thousand Plateaus ... Deleuze and Guattari write of aspects of the rhizome encompassing principles of connection, heterogeneity and multiplicity. Running back to A Thousand Plateaus, D & G share examples of measurable, quantifiable examples or “assembleges” in a path that attempts to “quantify writing” in hopes of defining meaning. They even define books as “abstract machine(s)”, including the statement that “Literature is an assemblage”. In attempting to bring English pedogogy into the twenty-first century it struck me as an attempt to incorporate technology very much like Latour’s ANT, both seemingly not about signifying or ideological concerns but as Deleuze and Guattari state, “It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come” (379). Its all about relationships…

rhiz.doc                                                                                                                                    

• Hayles 

 In chapter eight, The Materiality of Informatics, Hayles uses William S. Burroughs to explore a facet of her term of disembodiment. In her example she takes his work, Ticket, stating that,“Burroughs turns the tables on those who advocate disembodiment. Instead of discourse dematerializing the body, in Ticket the body materializes discourse. Situating this text in the high technology (for its time) of magnetic tape-recording, I demonstrate how the theoretical framework can be used to foreground embodiment while still being attentive to the complexities or representational codes” (194). A little of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, anyone?

 I find these few pages in this chapter a pivotal point in discussing the considerations of the body in how they are interpreted in dialectical terms of embodiment and disembodiment. Hayles chooses Foucault’s Discipline and Punish with part of its ideas from Jeremy Benthem’s Panopticon prison design to help show how the body as a representation is followed into discourse from a power system. She attempts to show how to trace the body from a physical form into a fully recognized discourse in her chapter. She states later on, “Embodiment is akin to articulation in that it is inherently performative, subject to individual enactments, and therefore always to some extent improvisational. Whereas the body can disappear into information with scarcely a murmur of protest, embodiment cannot, for it is tied to the circumstances of the occasion and the person” (197-8). These lines seems to follow much of what we have read so far in the fact of the overlapping terms of drama, acting, performative, improvisational and other performing terms that help to materialize her theory. Why is the “performative” so much of what we seem to be following in a pedagalogical sense, specifically when the “performative” or drama seems to be within English discourse as Susan Harris Smith calls it “the red-headed step child of American literary studies”? (Smith:8).

• Ulmer

 When I first started this piece I really had to concentrate on his word play. Many Times I would miss the meaning in his word play. But again we seem to be following a performing theme. Ulmer’s ideas of method acting, rehearsal space and his word play with chorography all encompass the medium of expression to explore new media ideas. Ulmer’s break down of techniques of method acting like the magic as-if,  the psychological gesture, emotional memory recall, affective memory define Ulmer’s ideas of the use of play or imagination that is so important in acting and essentially to his incorporating of his technique in developing reading of new media texts. “The part of the Method appropriated in chorography as the analogy for the purpose of electronic rhetoric is not the public performance but the rehearsal, not the realistic effects of the finished performance but the “work around the margins” of the play, the improvisational exercises conducted in response to the play, parallel to the play and different from it, in which an autobiography and a work of art are brought into a fragmented correspondence. A chorographer reads disciplinary texts the way a Method actor reads a (screen) play” (118).Viola Spolin, from her book, Theater Games for the Classroom states,

“The heart of improvisation is transformation. Creativity is not rearranging: it is transformation. Intuition bypasses the intellect, the mind, the memory, the known. Using intuition cannot be taught. One must be tripped into it”(Spolin:4). I think this “plays” into Ulmer’s technique.

• Manovich  

Vertov states of his idea of Film Truth (Kino-Pravda)...

"...I am the eye of cinema. I am a mechanical eye. I am a machine, and show the world as only I see it.

...I am the continual motion. I come up close to objects, and I move away. I crawl under them, and I leap atop of them.

I trot beside the muzzle of a running horse, and I cut full speed into a crowd. I run ahead of attacking soldiers. I fall over

onto my back, and I rise up into the air with the airplanes. Up and down I go, up and down. My road leads to a fresh

perception of the world. I code an unknown world and do it in a way that is absolutely new."

                                                                                                              -Neya Zorkaya's The Illustrated History of Soviet Cinema

Manovich, from the Language of New Media says of the Database and Narrative...

"As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture,

each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world" (225).

Looking at the the database as a mix of items in no random order contrasted against the the narrative and its need to connect a path of events to make meaning made me think of the metaphor Manovich uses with the work of director Dziga Vertov's from his film, Man with the Movie Camera. In Vertov's film he uses film techniques, edits, shots and even stunts about essentially a man filming, to actually express a narrative. In paraphrasing the above quote from Manovich he uses items to order events, even though seperately apart they are contrasting ideas and functions. Incorporating order and technique he then arranges the aspects to forward the trajectory of the story. It is strange that seperately they are seemingly random and worked, arranged and together they progress to a final point.

• Massumi

This was a tough read over the last few weeks. I admire the fact that Massumi was/is the principle translater of many of Deleuze's works. Massumi in his beginning pages speaks of considering the body and its capacity for movement and sensation in works of cultural theory.  It echos some of the earlier works like Hayles and her embodiment work. Massumi states:

"There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information and image-based

late capitolist culture...there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect" (27). Affect as an undefinable encompasing key to unlocking the current trends of  new media study. This to me seems to encapsulate almost all of what we are attempting to achieve in our search for digital pedogogy this semester. This attempt to try and unify these aspects and the body into the real to me is a reoccuring trope. He says later on of the body, "The body figures not as an object, one substantial element among others, but as a part-object, a conversion channel, a transducer-of the substantial elements of mixture, along with the shards of already abstracted elements they carry, into sensed potential". Using the body as the partial carrier helps to (I feel) add meaning and direction to many of his chapters in a non linear way. I just seem to be swimming in some of his thought lines...

Here is my Pecha Kucha Link...Seems everyone was dissapointed that I did not have a spoken word part of it. I just thought it was not need (nor is it required, as far as I know), feel free to tell me what you think.

• Wysocki

Anne Frances Wysocki from the chapter, Openings & Justifications in the book titled, Writing New Media, describes writing as an object, “when we see our writing as objects-objects to be seen, to be physically manipulated-and not, for example, as attempts to get abstract thought present in the most immaterial means possible (as is how I think we have often taught writing), then we can consider the kinds of embodied, temporal positions that we need to be able to see”(22). Even though I am not a teacher, I can relate to her desire to underscore the importance shift from the obtuse to a more concrete and measurable way to see and respond to writing. In her attempt to make writing as more of an object or tool to be used it helps to unlock ideas and new media styles that are constantly changing. By bringing the writing to a neutral area it allows us to view the writing from different perspectives and through different styles (twitter, youtube, etc). This embodied position brings me back to the reoccurring theme of body in new media that started with Hayles.

• Miller

In Rhythm Science, Paul D Miller draws connections of music sampling into the world of new media and technology. As an artist, he combines theory, sound, images and recombines them to create something new. I find it odd that in this last reading of the semester I find this book to be one of the more enlightening to bring together sound, music and video to attempt to trace a path of a new technological pedagogy, maybe because he is a child of the eighties like me, who feed off music videos and MTV when that was what it was known for. Lev Manovich from an earlier reading of his Language of New Media states it like this, “The history of the human-computer interface is that of borrowing and reformulating, or, to use new media lingo, reformatting other media, both past and present-the printed page, film, television”. The real into the book(and even most of the course) and Miller’s narrative was for me was when Miller referenced a quote by the classical pianist Glenn Gould, “The most hopeful thing about this process-about the inevitable disregard for the identity factor in the creative solution-is that it will permit a climate in which biological data and chronological assumption can no longer be the cornerstone for judgments about art as it relates to environment. In fact, this whole situation of individuality in the creative solution-the process through which the creative act results from, absorbs, and re-forms individual opinion-will be subjected to a radical reconsideration” (72). I think that is where we are now looking at new media as pedagogy.  To have it come from a genius musician who many thought was a crack pot because of his eccentricities is all the more powerful. Not to mention the fact that he composed for the Stratford Festival theatre company (there is that performance reference showing up again) and his hypochondriac like demands about his performance rituals (there is that body/embodiment thing showing up again), his chair, and levels, I’m not sure how to completely articulate it all but it seems to encompass it all. Just watch and listen...