Tag: The Semaphore Line

• What are the differences between the savage geography and the civilized one?

  La Pérouse travels through the Pacific for Louis XVI with the explicit mission of bringing back a better map. One day, landing on what he calls Sakhalin he meets with [the] Chinese and tries to learn from them whether Sakhalin is an island or a peninsula. To his great surprise the Chinese understand geography quite well. An older man stands up and draws a map of his island on the sand with the scale and the details needed by La Pérouse. Another, who is younger, sees that the rising tide will soon erase the map and picks up one of La Pérouse’s notebooks to draw the map again with a pencil . . .Latour (1986: 5)

  From ‘Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’. Available here.

  2012.10.26

• Techno-fundamentalism?

  Another episode of the Digital Human aired on Monday. ‘Do we know what all our technology is for or more intriguingly what it wants?’ asks Aleks Krotoski this week. In the opening few seconds you hear Douglas Rushkoff, who I saw defend his PhD in the summer. He talks of technology’s ‘bias’, and provides the example of the gun as having a ‘tendency’ towards killing people. I immediately thought of Latour’s (1994) Common Knowledge article ‘On Technical Mediation’ (available here) where he provides the same example of the gun and the operator. He outlines two symmetrical positions:

  The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human can master…

  Or in other words, that gun is responsible for the killing (‘Autonomous Destiny’) OR the human operator is (‘Neutral Tool’). Latour, of course, proposes a third way. A new path that corresponds to neither of the above:

  …[A] third possibility… more commonly realized: the creation of a new goal that corresponds to neither agent’s program of action. (You had wanted only to hurt but, with a gun now in hand, you want to kill.)
  I call this uncertainty about goals translation.

  Who then is responsible? ‘Someone else (a citizen-gun, a gun-citizen)’ (1994: 32). I’ll quote this next passage in full, because it really is a fundamental constituent of Latour’s argument, and I really think it’s a classic:

  If l define you by what you have (the gun), and by the series of associations that you enter into when you use what you have (when you fire the gun), then you are modified by the gun-more so or less so, depending on the weight of the other associations that you carry. This translation is wholly symmetrical. You are different with a gun in hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in- your-hand, aimed at someone who is screaming. What is true of the subject, of the gunman, is as true of the object, of the gun that is held. A good citizen becomes a criminal, a bad guy becomes a worse guy; a silent gun becomes a fired gun, a new gun becomes a used gun, a sporting gun becomes a weapon. The twin mistake of the materialists and the sociologists is to start with essences, those of subjects or those of
  objects. That starting point renders impossible our measurement of the mediating role of techniques. Neither subject or object (nor their goals) is fixed. (1994: 33)

  2012.10.25

• The Mechanical Turk

  

  Saturday saw the TUC ‘A Future That Works‘ march in London, and estimates suggest 150,000 people took to the streets (see here). Ed Miliband and others spoke at the Hyde Park rally which was hosted by James Smith (or, Glenn Cullen from The Thick of It!)

  Protest marches are invariably tiring affairs. My calves are still aching from walking round London all day, and my head hurts from trying to extract data from Twitter, which I can assure you is not an easy process. The ‘anti-kettling’ mobile web app, Sukey (version 3.0) was running during the day, providing a reliable and informative account of proceedings. I’m trying my best to collate hashtagged tweets (‘#sukey’ ‘#oct20’ etc.) and updates from key accounts (@sukeyio, @OccupyLondon etc.) to help with tracking the action. I’ve also saved all the re-tweeted and verified images of incidents during the demonstrations across London and hope to make use of them somehow. Sukey should be launching a corresponding desktop web app in the next few days. The overall aim is to connect those inside demonstrations with those outside, by crowdsourcing ‘micro-tasks’ (like Amazon Mechanical Turk, they say) and enrolling others in small but crucial jobs (tagging photos, linking tweets etc.).

  2012.10.22

• Telegraph and Modern War

  Derek Gregory has a fantastic post on the role of the telegraph in modern war over at his Geographical Imaginations blog. In a post called ‘Bodies on the wire’, he points to a bunch of new ideas he wants to follow up on. They revolve around the historical role of war media and, specifically the place of the telegraph in the communication of the Crimean War. He also notes Jan Mieszkowski‘s argument that…

   one of the crucial dilemmas of modern war is the disconnect between the participant’s sensory disorientation (‘To be under fire is to experience the loss of control of one’s own signifying practices’) and the abstraction (or ‘perspective’) of distant observers.

  When I relate this to the use of digital (mapping) technologies during protest, I’m interested to see whether we can apply the same sort of thinking. It seems to me that this dis/orientation is a notable continuum; and that often, an intimacy with modern technology (in the way of touch-gestures on a mobile device) leads to a difficulty in maintaining a kind of abstraction or perspective of the distant observer. A tactile primacy, I guess. But of course, the kinds of moves made on a mobile device are in some way creating these abstractions too – straight from the heart of the action.

   

  2012.10.18

• New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (2012)

  New title in Harman and Latour’s New Metaphysics series. It’s available to download from the Open Humanities website, here. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin are the authors, both in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. The first half comprises of interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux, whilst the second half is devoted to the ‘cartographies’ of a new materialism. There seems to be an obsession at the moment with using cartography as a metaphor for new ways of thinking in philosophy. I’m kind of interested in folding all that work back into the study of digital mapping technology itself.

  On another note, here’s a section from the interview with DeLanda where he talks about his rejection of Marx, and yet retains a commitment to leftist, and thoroughly-materialist work (40-41):

  Q3:…In several of your writings and interviews… you mentioned various problems with Marx’s thinking. You consider yourself to be left-wing, but you do not share many of the dogmas, institutional preferences and economic solutions offered by the Left, premised on Marxism. In terms of economics your interest seems to be much more in institutional or evolutionary economics (think of the writings of Donald now Deirdre McCloskey and Phil Mirowski) and the way in which they now reread Adam Smith (especially his Theory of Moral Sentiments from 1759). Nevertheless, what you do take from Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotelianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it. Combining your rejection of Marx and your appraisal of materialism, could we then label your new materialist thinking as a non-humanist and even nonanthropocentric materialism?

  MD: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori. Although he was sincerely interested in historical data (and hence, in creating an a posteriori theory) the actual amount of information available to him was extremely limited. Today we have the opposite situation thanks to the work of Fernand Braudel and his school. In addition, the old institutional school of economics (perhaps best represented by the work of John Kenneth Galbraith) as well as the neo-institutionalist school, offer new models that go beyond classical economics. (The two authors you mention, though, are mostly useless, being meta-economists and non-materialist.) It is our duty as Leftists to cut the umbilical cord chaining us to Marx and reinvent political economy. Deleuze and Guattari failed miserably in this regard. Marx’s theory of value was indeed anthropocentric: only human labor was a source of value, not steam engines, coal, industrial organization, et cetera. So in that sense the answer is yes, we need to move beyond that and reconceptualize industrial production. In addition, Marx did not see trade or credit as sources of wealth, but Braudel presents indisputable historical evidence that they are.

  Delanda goes on to talk of how ecologists are ‘well placed’ (41) to help re-formulate a left-leaning materialism; one that does away with some of Marx’s humanistic assumptions, and re-distributes some of the energy to other things. DeLanda is perhaps equally well-placed to theorize these kinds of moves too.

  P.S. Check out Tammy Lu’s work. Her artwork adorns the cover of Dolphijn and van der Tuin’s book, as it did for Bryant’s Democracy of Objects too.

  2012.10.16