Burn Completely

The semester is over. I’m burnt out, but not completely. I’ve tried to present to my students this semester a pragmatics of media assemblages (in an undergrad and grad course called Introduction to Media Assemblage Theory). Not what it means, but what one can do in and through media. What we are becoming through media, what we could become. This is both scary and full of potential. This is also not a dialectic, nor a metaphor for something else.

Such a pedagogy necessitates that both student and teacher enter into a process of ontologizing media flows. This focus on processes--pedagogical, methodological, intensive, affective, diagrammatic--has been the aim of the course. To think the movement and duration specific to sets of singularities. Resonant non-coinciding unicities, oscillating around basins of attraction on a plane of consistency. Coded and overcoded, regimes of passage are institutional capture machines for these processes, they feedback into them and also potentialize connectivities. Value is generating through these feedbacks, and itself becomes a material vector, self-organizing and over-coded. A moving bedrock of valuation. 

 

The aim was to get at these processes through the production of sensation. I argued—in my reading of Sterne and Crary—that the senses are organized hierarchically and each sense is habituated through specific sensory grids. Cartesian perspectivalism vs. haptic, synaesthetic vision; tactility as visual vs. tactility as amodal, multimodal sensation.

 

We looked closely at the definition of neoliberalism in Foucault, and its connection to Deleuzian control societies. We brought the theory of entropy into relations of deterritorialization by historicizing and refunctioning its concept and diagram. But we have not been obsessed about words. They are important, but they should find their assemblage, their media assemblage.

 

I have created a set of media, that discursively does not share the same plane, and yet they can also be grasped by a discourse that traverses them. Nonlinear dynamics and affective capital.

 

We have attempted to think pure duration. Yes duration before the grid of intelligibility that accompanies the spatialization of representation. I’m sitting in a dentist’s office. CNN is on. There is no internet. There is no internet.

 

So we have tried to deploy a method of morphogenesis in media. How do perceptual forms emerge in media assemblages? Through ecologies of sensation. What are ecologies of sensation? Noncoinciding resonant unicities. We should pause for a moment and consider what the nature of this unity is. Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus,

To begin with, a stratum does indeed have a unity of composition, which is what allows it to be called a stratum: molecular materials, substantial elements, and formal relations or traits. Materials are not the same as the unformed matter of the plane of consistency; they are already stratified, and come from "substrata." But of course substrata should not be thought of only as substrata: in particular, their organization is no less complex than, nor is it inferior to, that of the strata; we should be on our guard against any kind of ridiculous cosmic evolutionism. The materials furnished by a substratum are no doubt simpler than the compounds of a stratum, but their level of organization in the substratum is no lower than that of the stratum itself. The difference between materials and substantial elements is one of organization; there is a change in organization, not an augmentation. The materials furnished by the substratum constitute an exterior milieu for the elements and compounds of the stratum under consideration, but they are not exterior to the stratum. The elements and compounds constitute an interior of the stratum, just as the materials constitute an exterior of the stratum; both belong to the stratum, the latter because they are materials that have been furnished to the stratum and selected for it, the former because they are formed from the materials. Once again, this exterior and interior are relative; they exist only through their exchanges and therefore only by virtue of the stratum responsible for the relation between them. For example, on a crystalline stratum, the amorphous milieu, or medium, is exterior to the seed before the crystal has formed; the crystal forms by interiorizing and incorporating masses of amorphous material. Conversely, the interiority of the seed of the crystal must move out to the system's exterior, where the amorphous medium can crystallize (the aptitude to switch over to the other form of organization). To the point that the seed itself comes from the outside. In short, both exterior and interior are interior to the stratum.

 

What then is a unity? A machine for folding inside and outside topologically. Outside forces of futurity are active potentially, nascent, producing patterns of morphogenetic mutation. 

Then there was the system of the strata. On the intensive continuum, the strata fashion forms and form matters into substances. In combined emissions, they make the distinction between expressions and contents, units of expression and units of content, for example, signs and particles. In conjunctions they separate flows, assigning them relative movements and diverse territorialities, relative deterritorializations and complementary reterritorializations. Thus the strata set up everywhere double articulations animated by movements: forms and substances of content and forms and substances of expression constituting segmentary multiplicities with relations that are determinable in every case. Such are thestrata. Each stratum is a double articulation of content and expression, both of which are really distinct and in a state of reciprocal presupposition. Content and expression intermingle, and it is two-headed machinic assemblages that place their segments in relation. What varies from stratum to stratum is the nature ofthe real distinction between content and expression, the nature of the substances as formed matters, and the nature of the relative movements. We may make a summary distinction between three major types of real distinction: the real-formal distinction between orders of magnitude, with the establishment of a resonance of expression (induction); the realreal distinction between different subjects, with the establishment of a linearity of expression (transduction); and the real-essential distinction between different attributes or categories, with the establishment of a superlinearity of expression (translation)..Each stratum serves as the substratum for another stratum. Each stratum has a unity of composition defined by its milieu, substantial elements, and formal traits (Ecumenon). (A Thousand Plateaus, 72)

Consider this passage from Whitehead's Process and Reality:

That whatever is a datum for a feeling has a unity as felt. Thus the many components of a complex datum have a unity: this unity is a 'contrast' of entities. In a sense this means that there are an endless number of categories of existence, since the synthesis of entities into a contrast in general produces a new existential type. For example, a proposition is, in a sense, a 'contrast.' For the practical purposes of 'human understanding,' it is sufficient to consider a few basic types of existence, and to lump the more derivative types together under the heading of 'contrasts.' The most important of such 'contrasts' is the 'affirmation-negation' contrast in which a proposition and a nexus obtain synthesis in one datum, the members of the nexus being the 'logical subjects' of the proposition. (24)

         

As David Hall put it in "Process and Anarchy," 

The process of self-creativity involves the coming together of all available things into a felt synthesis constituting the aesthetic unity of a drop of ex- perience: The many become one. The act of creativity is an act of concrescence, an act of becoming one...Being is characterized in terms of its potentiality for novel synthesis. The "many things" of the world, in accordance with which the growing together of experience (the aesthetic event) becomes, constitute beings. The aesthetic event itself is becoming. This view of existence, therefore, requires two kinds of process: the process of self-creativity, which is concrescence, and the transi- tion of being into data for acts of concrescence. Creativity explains both con- crescence and transition. "Creativity" and "process" as general concepts are the primary terms which interpret the reality of things as creative passage. The reality of things is comprised by aesthetic events. These events are free, novel, and transitory. Creativity, as the spontaneous realization of novelty, requires that there be freedom to produce the novel. 
 (272-73)

Hall goes onto argue that  "For the locus of freedom is the self. But, as nature is basically incomplete and as acts of creativity require some form of organic wholeness or completion to qualify as aesthetic, self-actualization, which is the paradigm of creation, must entail the consequence that the self is momentary, transitory, and in process. Aesthetic events are momentary acts of creativity which come into being and at the point of full actualization cease to be in the fullest sense. Process, therefore, is atomic in character. Otherwise there could be no full realization of novelty through aesthetic action. Creativity is the self-creative activity of finite events in process of becoming. Each such event, at full realization, loses its uniqueness. Reality, as an interweaving of freedom and novelty, therefore, must be seen as process. (273) Hall notes that Tao is said to be an "Uncarved Block," meaning that it is capable of infinite characterization. It is the source from which all things come, though it is in no way separate from that of which it is the source. One cannot avoid a kind of deism here, but one that is not transcendent but immanent to matter. (274). 
         

What is the relation between sense perception and intuition? For an event-particle to have a unity as felt there is an irreducible element of intuition involved. We are considering here affect as a felt or effective unity. There is a suspension of time-space concepts that is necessary in order to occupy your very own body without organs, it is not only space that must be thought topologically, but time durationally in a pragmatics of relationality, action, change, and function: "anarchy and unity are one and the same thing, not the unity of the One, but a much stranger unity that applies only to the multiple" (TP 158). The duration of things create a variety of flows, which sometimes finds strange resonances. Examples of hybridity are not what I mean here. Rather, these flows are material and representational at once, as long as we understand by the word "representation" a disposition constituted by a subtractive perception oscillating between action and dream (Bergson, Massumi, Deleuze). So let us return to a diagram of this morphogensis as a unity. We should take D/G's mention of yoga very seriously. Beyond merely the representational verisimilitude, or death sentence of Orientalism. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I aim to provide a reading of B. K. S. Iyengar's Light on Yoga in the time ahead. I want to consider yoga as a way of creating your own BwO as an experience of love and change immanent to each body, below the family but feedbacked into it, an ecology of sensation that is preindividual in the sense Simondon, Masumi, and Hansen describe it. 

So heterochronic evolution--we will define this again using Deleuze and Delanda--will give us patterns of morphogenesis. How? Consider an argument made some time ago in the Journal of Anthropological Research:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That is, morphogenetic rules…are inherited properties of lineages that determine limits on how ontogenies can respond to gene mutations in a given environment. While the mutations, and the repeated morphogenetic tendencies expressed as parallel phenotypic novelties in a given clade, are random in the sense that they are independent of what natural selection might prefer, they can nevertheless impart a coherent pattern to what can and does evolve in that clade. I argue below that particular kinds of heterochrony that appear repeatedly in parallel in particular clades reflect shared, inherited morphogenetic responses to common environmental causes. Third, there are limits on the ways in which speciation can occur in general and even narrower limits in the case of any particular monophyletic group of species that share aspects of population structure and ecology and that evolved under the same basic conditions of physical change. Finally, natural selection can act in similar ways across species faced by similar climatic changes, especially when those species share commonly inherited aspects of genomes, morphogenetic rules, and population structure.

Climate, Heterochrony, and Human Evolution Author(s): Elisabeth S. Vrba Source: Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1-28; Accessed: 21/02/2009 17:21.

 

Life moves in clades, as Bruce Sterling has it in Schixmatrix. Vrba defines “Heterochrony” as including “all evolutionary changes in the timing of appearance of characters during ontogeny and in the rates of shape and size development. From one to most descendant characters may be affected.”

 

We know that heterochrony is important to Deleuze for reasons that help us to grasp what kinds of modalities we need to give materiality to a definition of ecologies of sensation. Heterochrony is a theory of “vacuoles of noncommunication.”

 

“You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals." Maybe, I don't know. But it would be nothing to do with minorities speaking out. Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money--and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”

            --G. Deleuze to A. Negri, “Control and Becoming”

(Jonathan at Cultural Studies took exception to my quoting this, because of what he felt to be a kind of silly opposition between money and noncommunication. I don't really see these things in opposition as much as in mutual determination given a field of intensitiies, with their own durations and force. But the key here is that there is something "before" and "after" money: and that substance is pure relation or pure immanence. The purity here is like the unity in the above definition. We are back at the same problem because the aim in this is to break with concepts of timespace, to break with conceptualization as such and enter bodily into the flow of durations. Becoming as continuous variation. To take a song as a field of potentiality. Consider this song:

It's gonna rain. It's by Steven Riech, and you can listen to it and hear Reich's brilliant commentary on it here:

I've remixed some of the audio on Garage Band a number of times:

It\'s gonna rain again and again

  

The method of diagramming duration ontologically is to follow the relations it enters into.

Deleuze suggested that there are definite properties of duration. “Pulsed time and non-pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non-pulsed time. This kind of floating time that more or less corresponds to what Proust called “a bit of pure time.” The most obvious, the most immediate feature of…non-pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure. Non-pulsed time puts us first and foremost in the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, non-coincident, non-communicating durations. The problem therefore is clear: how will these heterochronous, heterogeneous, multiple, non-coincident durations join together…”

             --G. Deleuze, “Making Inaudible Forces Audible”  

 

Thinking about the temporality involved in individuation processes as embodying the parallel operation of many different sequential processes throws new light on the question of the emergence of novelty. If embryological processes followed a strictly sequential order, that is, if a unique linear sequence of events defined the production of an organism, then any novel structures would be constrained to be added at the end of the sequence….On the contrary, if embryonic development occurs in parallel, if bundles of relatively independent processes occur simultaneously, then new designs may arise from disengaging bundles, or more precisely, from altering the duration of one process relative to another, or the relative timing of the start or end of a process. This evolutionary design strategy is known as heterochrony…

             --M. Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

 

And I submit this to write a paper on duration and becoming: For some time the association of the animal with the savage defined the ideology of colonialism. A system of finance and affective labor were deployed and potentialized by the flows that gave movement and becoming to eugenic racism and territorial expansion. The change in the ratios of perception brought on by new media (the hand and the lithograph) and communication technologies (the ear and the phone) helped to monumentalize and quotidianize the ideology. This paper is interested in diagramming this latter process as a continuous multiplicity of flows, each having gradients of intensities, each having a pattern of interactions (functional capacities, capacious functions), each with strata and becoming. Correlated processes with specific “speeds, rates, coefficients, and differential relations.” How have contagions of race, perception, matter, and sensation contributed to a new understanding of the human as human? At what point does such an analysis become a conduit for proliferating ecologies of sensation? Durations organize themselves along functional connectivities, noncommunicating differential relations, where all becoming is in the middle of things. We will consider an array of morphogenetic processes—new habituations, new contagions, new becomings—across the remains and mutations of empire.

 Songs:

songs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Delanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

 

Can resonance be something other than new age?

What is Manuel Delanda trying to do in this reconstruction of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology? He is trying to provide an account of the interdisciplinary basis of Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy that ranges from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Henri Poincare’s topological geometry and beyond. Many things get lost along the way, like the problem of paradox and humor which is very important to Deleuze, but something else is gained—a kind of analytical clarity, which is contrary in some sense to Deleuze’s own rhetorical style. Regardless, what Delanda has done in this “already classic” book (back cover blurb) is to develop a notion of individuation, the virtual, and the actual that attempts a thoroughgoing displacement of Platonic and Aristotelian essentialism. Delanda tries to devalue the very idea of truth; importance and relevance are the key criteria for a Deleuzian epistemology; a problem is well-posed if it captures an objective distribution of the important and the unimportant, or more mathematically, of the singular and the ordinary (7).

 

Deleuze has a realist (not an actualist [33]) ontology: philosophers who grant reality full autonomy from the human mind, disregarding the difference between the observable and the unobservable, and the anthropocentrism this distinction implies (4). So one of the first implications of this is that Deleuze’s philosophy is not a story “about us”; it is about the world as assemblages, as nested spaces and times, as mutational transformations across timespace. Through a process ontology, Deleuze replaces the essences of entities with dynamical processes, some of which are material and energetic, but all of which remain immanent to the world of matter and energy (5).

 

Whence ontology?

 

            There is an objective illusion fostered by the concealment of process under product (68-9). Any area of the world which is in thermodynamic equilibrium is an area where intensive differences have cancelled themselves out, and hence an area which conceals the virtual without the need for human intervention. These areas of the world would constitute an objective illusion (74).

            In a Deleuzian ontology one must emphasize that the regularities displayed by the different possible trajectories in a given multiplicity are a consequence of the singularities that shape the vector field. Deleuze makes a sharp distinction between trajectories as they appear in the phase portrait of a system and the vector field (28-9). The vector field is the real source of the regularities or propensities in the population of possible histories (33). Unlike trajectories, a vector field is not composed of individuated states, but of instantaneous values for rates of change. Individually, these instantaneous rates have in fact no reality but collectively they do exhibit topological invariants (singularities). Ontologically, these invariants of a vector field are topological accidents, points in the field which happen to be stationary; Deleuze argues that these topological accidents should be given the ontological status of an event (a perfect storm? a scientific concept for this would be stochastic resonance). A key concept in the definition of a multiplicity is that of invariant, but invariances are always relative to some transformation. In other words, whenever we speak of the invariant properties of an entity we also need to describe an operator or group of operators capable of performing rotations, translations, projections, foldings, and a variety of other transformations on that entity. So the ontological content of the virtual must also be enriched with at least one operator. The quasi-cause is this operator and is defined not by its giving rise to multiplicities but by its capacity to affect them (84). The quasi-causal operator creates among the infinite series springing from each singularity “resonances or echoes”—the least corporeal of relations. A quasi-cause, or a relation of quasi-causality could be thought of in terms of the establishment of a communication channel between divergent trajectories that change the distribution of the singular and ordinary within a trajectory.

 

One of the chief targets of a Deleuzian ontology is essentialism. Essentialism can be understood as a theory of the genesis of form, a theory of morphogenesis, in which physical entities are viewed as more or less faithful realizations of ideal forms; essences act as originary, fully present models, eternally maintaining their identity, while particular entities are conceived as mere copies of these models; the essence of a thing is that which explains its identity, that is, those fundamental traits without which an object would not be what it is. “If such an essence is shared by many objects, then possession of a common essence would also explain the fact that these objects resemble each other and, indeed, that they form a distinct natural kind of things” (6-9).

            In Platonic essentialism or Aristotelian typological thinking, species were examples of “natural kinds”; animal/plant species provided the ideal model of what an abstract general entity was supposed to be. Contemporary evolutionary biologists such as Michael Ghiselin argue in contrast that species are not a higher ontological category. Essentialist and typological thought are rooted in the hierarchy of categories (each level of organism, species, genera representing a different ontological category). By contrast, contemporary science argues that the process of speciation is intensive in the sense that its description involves ideas of population and heterogeneity (in population thinking, using statistical analysis, the average is an abstraction and only the variation is real). For population thinkers genetic variation is the fuel of evolution: without adaptive differences between organisms natural selection would be incapable of yielding any improvements in the population (57-9). More, heterogeneity is the state we should expect to exist spontaneously under most circumstances; while in essentialist or typological thinking uniformity is the natural state and difference is what needs special explanation, for population thinkers it is difference that is unproblematic (71). The norm of reaction replaces the idea of degrees of perfection with relations between rates of change. The forms are thus statistical results of the population individuating itself through differential rates of change: “…the substitution of populations for types, and the substitution of rates or differential relations for degrees” (Deleuze, qtd. in Delanda 59-60). Thus, multiplicities replace essences; a species is defined by the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it; form-generating resources which are immanent to the material world (9). Unlike the a priori grasp of essences in human thought postulated by those who believe in such entities, there would be an empiricism of the virtual (85-6).

 

Emergent Intensity

 

Deleuze replaces an essentialist morphogenesis with one based on the notion of intensive difference, which he differentiates from both qualitative difference and extensive difference. He conceives intensive difference not negatively, as lack of resemblance, but positively or productively, as that which drives a dynamical process. The best examples of intensive differences are the differences in temperature, pressure, speed, chemical concentration, color… (6).

            Intensive properties cannot be divided without involving a change in kind, a qualitative change (25). If a quantity of matter in a given state is divided into two equal parts, each part will have the same value of intensive properties as the original and half the value of the extensive properties (69). Intensive properties do not add up but rather average. This averaging operation is an objective operation, in the sense that placing into contact two bodies with different temperatures will trigger a spontaneous diffusion process equalizing the two intermediate values. Thus differences in thermodynamic intensities such as temperature are capable of driving an averaging process of equilibrium in a population of molecules. Unlike qualitative differences, differences in intensity can drive fluxes of matter or energy (69-70). Intensive differences such as temperature or pressure gradients within one body are productive, forming the basis of simple processes of individuation. Soap bubbles and salt crystals emerge from the spontaneous tendency of the molecular components to minimize a potential or intensive difference (70).

 

There are a large number of physical structures that form spontaneously as their components try to meet energetic requirements. These components may be constrained to seek a point of minimal free energy, like a soap bubble that acquires its spherical shape by minimizing surface tension, or a common salt crystal adopting the cube form by minimizing bonding energy. The point of minimal energy functions as a single point attractor (a singularity). Thus a topological form (a singular point [eg minimal energy] in a manifold) guides a process which results in many different physical forms. This is in contrast to a form of thought that posits the essence of sphericity (circle-ness) which then is realized in the world by soap bubbles. The topological form of singularities is mechanism independent, independent of their physical mechanisms (15).

            Mechanism independence (19-20) is a concrete universality, a concrete set of attractors-singularities (realized as tendencies in physical processes) linked together by bifurcations (realized as abrupt transitions in the tendencies of physical processes). Following Deleuze, Delanda also defines concrete universals as preindividual (before the individuated product) singularities and affects (74). The tetrapod limb would be a concrete universal: asymptotic singularity (a basin of attraction that is never fully actualized because of so many divergent final forms of it) and unactualized capacity (blocked or divergent series of bifurcations; an open set of potential combinations constantly mutating [79]) (77). The universality of a multiplicity is typically divergent: the different realizations of a multiplicity bear no resemblance whatsoever to it and there is in principle no end to the set of potential divergent forms it may adopt. Multiplicities give form to processes, not to products. This distinguishes the obscure yet distinct nature of multiplicities from the clear and distinct identity of essences. Finally, concrete universals are meshed together into a continuum often through feedback loop relations that resonate (the communication channel of a quasi-cause). (21). A continuous space progressively differentiates itself giving rise to discontinuous spaces.  The continuity of a multiplicity is not defined primarily by metric spaces, but by non-metric spaces (e.g. asymptotic closeness; asymptotic stability: small shocks may dislodge a trajectory from its attractor but as long as the shock is not too large to push it out of the basin of attraction the trajectory will return to the stable state defined by the attractor [29]) (22). The example of geometry (23-4): the metric space which we inhabit and that physicists study and measure was born from a nonmetric, topological continuum as the latter differentiated and acquired structure following a series of symmetry-breaking transitions (24).  

            Given a cell with a specific history, and a certain inductive signal which can change its fate, the outcome of their interaction will depend on how many other attractors exist nearby in the state space of the network of genes within the cell. Far from directly determining the qualities of a differentiated cell, inductive signals trigger cells to switch from one attractor to another nearby one, guiding a process of qualitative differentiation which follows attractors as so many stepping-stones. This process of stimulus-independence is what defines the signature of the virtual: the traces which the virtual leaves in the intensive. 65

            The three ontological dimensions constituting Deleuzian thought—the virtual, the intensive, and the actual—can be understood in terms of individuals at different spatial scales populating the actual world embodied in discontinuous spatial or metric structures condensing out of a nonmetric, virtual continuum (61). As migration and folding (invagination) begin to yield finished anatomical structures nonmetric relations become progressively replaced by a less flexible set of metric ones (64). Thus, a relatively undifferentiated intensive space (defined by continuous intensive properties) progressively differentiates eventually giving rise to extensive structures (with definite metric properties) (25).

 

Tetrapod Limbs

 

Multiplicities are obscure and distinct; the singularities that define a multiplicity come in sets, and they are structured through progressive differentiation (16). Singularities lead to an entirely different way of viewing the genesis of form (15). Singularities function as never-actualized (35) attractors for trajectories: a large number of different trajectories starting their evolution at very different places in the manifold may end up in the same final state (the attractor), as long as they all begin somewhere within the sphere of influence of the attractor (basin of attraction); singularities represent long-term tendencies of the system (14).

            A multiplicity is a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations (phase transitions), together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels. Phase transitions are events which take place at critical values of some parameter switching a physical system from one state to another, like critical points of temp. at which water changes from ice to liquid, or from liquid to steam…the progressive differentiation of the spherical egg is achieved through a complex cascade of symmetry breaking phase transitions. Control parameters in a state space determine the strength of external perturbations to which the system may be subject. These control parameters display critical values, thresholds of intensity at which a bifurcation takes place, breaking the prior symmetry of the system (18-19).

 

Phase Transition

 

This separates out the part of the model which carries info about the actual world (trajectories as series of possible states) from that part which is never actualized. What ontological status do such partially never actualized multiplicities have? Multiplicities have a real virtuality which forms a vital component of the objective world, virtuality is their mode of becoming. The virtual must be defined as strictly part of the real object (30). A space with multiple attractors breaks the links between necessity and determinism, giving a system a “choice” between different destinies and making the particular end state a system occupies a combination of determination and chance (35). The four elements of essentialist classificatory practices—resemblance, identity, analogy, and opposition—are displaced by real virtuality. 38 A nonlinear system with multiple attractors continues to display its virtuality even once the system has settled into one of its alternative stable states, because the other alternatives are there all the time, coexisting with the one that happens to be actualized. All one has to do to reveal their virtual presence is to give a large enough shock to the system to push it out of one basin of attraction and into another (75).  

            In populations, the coupled rates of births, death, migration and resource availability correspond without resemblance to the differential relations that characterize a multiplicity. A given intensive process of individuation embodies a multiplicity, and the lack of similarity between the virtual and the intensive is explained in terms of the divergent character of this embodiment, that is, by the fact that several different processes may embody the same multiplicity (61).

            The assembly of multiplicities must yield individuals with the capacity to evolve; this process is characterized by intensive properties articulating heterogeneous elements, relating difference to difference (73). Contrast an assembly-line factory with the process taking place within and among living cells which results in the assembly of tissues and organs. The parts of an object put together in an assembly line are fully Euclidean, with rigid metric properties such as sizes, shapes and positions. This limits the kind of procedures possible for their assembly: rigidly channeled transport system, rigid motions to correctly position parts relative to one another. This rigidity also limits their capacity to affect and be affected and thus to mutate. Component parts used in biological assembly are defined less by rigid metric properties than by topological connectivity: the specific shape of a cell’s membrane is less important than its continuity and closure, and the specific lengths of a muscle less important that its attachment points. (Delanda uses topological resources to analyze certain recurrent or typical features of state spaces [14].) This allows component parts to be adaptive (to fold, stretch, or bend: topological connectivity). Components may float around and randomly collide, using a lock-and-key mechanism to find matching patterns without the need for exact positioning. All of this has consequences for the capacity to evolve through mutation and selection, the capacity to differentiate differences (73). In biological assembly mutations do not have to occur simultaneously in matching parts, channels, and procedures in order to yield a viable entity for natural selection. Thanks to diffusive transport, lock-and-key matching assembly, topological and adaptive parts, as well as stimulus independence, evolution has an open space in which to carry out its blind search for new forms (67). The finished product has some geometric properties and some intensive such as entropy or amount of energy; metric properties which expand the concept from structure to function; is characterized by qualities which are metrically indivisible like intensities (68).

 

Media Assemblages

 

             A multiplicity may be characterized by a fixed number of definite properties (extensive and qualitative) and yet possess an indefinite number of capacities (affordances) to affect and be affected by other multiplicities (71). Deleuze gives a two-fold definition of the virtual in terms of unactualized tendencies or singularities and unactualized capacities or affects (72). A multiplicity will exhibit a variety of capabilities to form assemblages with other individuals, organic and inorganic. The example that Delanda uses is the assemblage which a walking animal forms with a piece of solid ground (surface to walk on) and a gravitational field (endowing it with a given weight). The capacity to form an assemblage depends in part on the emergent properties of the interacting individuals (animal, ground, gravitational field), but is not reducible to them (72). Affects (capacities, affordances) are relational; what an individual affords another may depend on factors such as relative spatial scales; affordances are also symmetric involving both capacities to affect and be affected. (Keep in mind that classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry is a sharp departure from the traditional classification of geometrical figures by their essences. Groups are not classified by static properties but in terms of how they are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, by their response to events that occur to them. Degree of symmetry is not an intrinsic property of the entity being classified but always relative to a specific (group of) transformation(s) [17].) The interactions which organisms have with the organic and inorganic components of an ecosystem are typically of the intensive kind, an ecosystem being a complex assemblage of a large number of heterogeneous components: diverse reproductive communities of animals, plants and micro-organisms, a geographical site characterized by diverse topographical and geological features, and the ever diverse and changing weather patterns (73).

            One task of virtual  philosophy is to locate those areas of the world where the virtual is still expressed, and use the unactualized tendencies and capacities one discovers there as sources of insight into the nature of virtual multiplicities (returning to the interior of the tetrapod limb) (76-7). 

We leave to another post the connection between this intensive ontology and a nonlinear history of institutions. Delanda takes this later question up in the conclusion to A Thousand Year of Nonlinear History. There he writes brilliantly of the BwO (body without organs, plane of consistency, qualitative multiplicity) through which intensive processes actualize various forms.

“Moreover, not only were there several particle accelerators mobilizing trigger flows of different kinds, there were coexisting motion of destratification of intermediate intensity which connected these flows, generating meshworks of different kinds: peasant and small-town markets; symbiotic nets of small producers engaged in volatile trade and import substitution; large cities and industrial hinterlands operating via economies of agglomeration; alpine regions elaborating industrial paradigms different from those of the coal conurbations, in which skills and crafts were meshed together instead of being replaced by routines and centralized machinery. What use is there in moving our level of description to the BwO if we are not going to take advantage of the heterogeneous mixtures of energy and genes, germs and words, which it allows us to conceive, a world in which geology, biology, and linguistics are not seen as three separate spheres, each more advanced or progressive than the previous one, but as three perfectly coexisting and interacting flows of energetic, replicative, and catalytic materials?” (267)

The Production of Habit: On Two Conceptions of Difference in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish

Getting a hold of Foucault

What happens to the body in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (hereafter DP)? Let us specify what body we are speaking of here, because after all it is still such a vague term. The body of docility, but also the productive nexus between capitalism and discipline. The body of the norm, but also the body incited to a microphysics of activity and expression. So already we are speaking of at least two bodies in Foucault: that palimpsest in perpetual dissolution invoked in “Nietzsche Genealogy History,” and the more mundane body of habit, of exercise, of experimentation, and regulation. (I should mention in passing how surprised I was to find that Deleuze had organized a conference on Nietzsche–the only one he ever organized in his career–in the early 60s, and that Foucault had taken an active part in the proceedings; and that together they had been involved in the French publication of Nietzsche’s works–all this in Desert Islands. I suppose my surprise was that Foucault had such an early and long lasting engagement with Nietzsche–it always seemed to me that he became more Nietzschean after The Archaeology of Knowledge, but that is clearly mistaken. So then it is through the laughter of the Nietzschean aphorism–its specific intensities, as Deleuze reminds us–that I re-read these crucial sections of DP). 

The first body, the body of discourse, the body that is produced by a power that “writes” it, has been the dominant figure of the body in cultural(ist) criticism for the past twenty years. It is the body of performativity, of the mark, piercing, and the tatoo, it is the queered body of drag and camp. It is the body of a curious productive repression, whose productivity takes only the form of a narrow linguistico-psychic expressivity. What does that mean exactly? The body is thought as something that means, that displaces meaning, that figures linguistic traces, and that dynamizes the psyche with its little traumas-turned-to-discouse (psychotherapy). But what of that other transformation, meaningless on a certain level, but nonetheless forceful and historically decisive, because irreversible: the transformation of the body of the soldier into a docile body through constant practice and the inculcation of the automatism of habit. 

The classic representation of such automatism in industrial production is Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The first few minutes of this classic is worth watching carefully.

The meanies of correct training

The problem here is that Foucault straddles both conceptions of the body. In other words, there are two notions of difference tied to embodiment that pervade Foucault’s text: difference as opposition, contradiction, binary structure, dialectic, and sign; and difference as intensive, affective, immanent, indexical, and qualitative. According to Deleuze, much of contemporary thought is in thrall to Hegel’s commitment to contradiction as the highest form of difference. “Only when difference is ‘carried up’ to contradiction is the absolute reached. Being must not only differ from itself; it must contradict tself. Internal difference must be realized as internal contradiction. Deleuze’s anti-Hegelian project is then succinctly announced in one compact question: ‘can we not construct an ontology of difference which would not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction would be less than difference and not more?’” (Linck, Matthew S.(2008) “Deleuze’s Difference.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16:4, 509-532, 513)

The first conception of difference has ordered the thought of the “socially constructed body.” Indeed, wasn’t it the fateful confrontation between Judith Butler and Foucault that largely gave us this body of linguistico-psychic expressivity? But if the classical age discovered the body as object and target of power (DP 136), have we not discovered an ontogenetic body through biocybernetic reproduction, a body whose affectivity opens it to assemblages of matter, information, flesh, sensation through patterns of self-organization and across critical ridges of mutation? That’s my contention. 

Worker Robot

Through this obsessive and meticulous observation of detail (141) was born the being of modern humanism. What is crucial here? The exact relation between obedience and utility: this is the realm–broad, stratified, mutational, repetitive, synaesthetic, and mundane–of habit. How is a more useful body habituated? Through exercise, examination, machinic assembling Foucault tells us. Excerise was the technique by which one imposed on the body tasks both repetitive and different, always graduated, bending behaviour toward a terminal state: “a subjection that has never reached its limit” (161). More, through the regulated distribution of individuals in space: enclosures; partitionings of space (anti-desertion, anti-vagabondage, anti-concentration); and the rule of functional sites (141-43). Equally important, and this needs more elaboration, disciplinary habituations emerge from the confluence of experimentations on the body: out of discipline, a medically useful space was born (144).

Distributing individuals in the medically useful spaces of discipline was correlated to strategies of normalization. Rank—the place one occupies in a classification, the interval in a series of intervals; and so cells, places, ranks: disciplines create complex spaces that are architectural, functional, hierarchical (148). Control of activity: time-table (monastic orders): establish rhythms, impose occupations, regulate repetition (149). 

 

Probably Normal

For centuries, the religious orders were the masters of discipline (150), which the 18th cent. refines by monitoring smaller durations toward a more detailed partitioning of time; by assuring the quality of the time used; by breaking down and correlating gestures and movements, by adjusting the body to temporal imperatives. Thus, an obligatory rhythm is imposed from the outside (and let us keep in mind that the “outside” is one of Foucault’s great concepts, according to Deleuze. We will return to this). The body assembles continuously (not prosthetocally) with technology through the instrumental coding of the body: a breakdown of the total gesture into two series, parts of the body used and parts of the object manipulated (153). 

Power is articulated directly onto time (160) through ordering the time of individual existences. There is a capitalist and disciplinary accumulation of duration that turns to ever-increased profit or use the movement of passing time: How can one organize profitable durations? The disciplines are a meticulous machinery for adding up and capitalizing time (these strategies first emerge in the military). The aim is to divide duration into successive or parallel segments, ending at a specific time; break time down into separate and adjusted threads; organize the threads of time; finalize threads through specific durations, punctuating them with exams; draw up series of series, and at the end of each series, others begin, branch off, and subdivide in turn (159). Like the ontology of contemporary digital media, disciplinary temporal threads are organized through a “branching-type interactivity” (Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media 38; I return to this connection below).

 

The body as object and instrument

But then Foucault concludes from this that the disciplinary methods reveal a linear time whose moments are integrated, one upon another, and which is orientated towards a terminal, stable point; in short, an “evolutive” time (160). Now this is a quantitative time, and it is molar; but the durations of exercise, their lived intensity in each repetition are always also qualitative, irreducible, continuous, preindividual, proprioceptive. So that evolution in terms of progress might have been the discursive self-representation of the disciplines (Foucault shows as much in his many quotes of self-congratulatory petty bureaucrats), but the exercise-repetition of discipline was based in the time of microdurations in terms of genesis: the narrative of the progress of societies and the habituated geneses of individuals. As a side note we see that this is also why the signal-index displaces the sign-representation. Exercise works through the trigger-command: a given command must focus the attention and trigger off the required behavior and that is enough; it is a power based in signalization: perceiving the index-signal and reacting to it immediately, autonomically, proprioceptively (cf. Charles Sanders Pierce, “What is a Sign?” 7-8).

But back to the issue at hand: According to Foucault, the disciplines create four characteristics of individuality: 1. Cellular (play of spatical distribution); 2. organic (coding of activities); 3. Genetic (accumulation of time); 4. Combinatory (composition of forces). The modalities are tables, prescribed movements, exercises, tactics. The chief function of disciplinary power is to train individuals, to link forces together in order to multiply and use them (170-71); individuals are both objects and instruments of disciplinary power. Through the disciplines, and in the panoptic network of gazes, supervision becomes a special function that is also integral to the production process; a specialized personnel for management is born; surveillance becomes a decisive economic operator making the disciplines an integrated system (175-76). 

And so gradually a new object is born: The Natural Body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration, the body susceptible to specified operations; the body offered up to new forms of knowledge. Body of exercise, manipulated by authority, a machine of useful training; through its use the body brings out its correlations and spontaneously rejects the incompatible. Thus disciplinary power has as its correlative an individuality that is not only analytical and ‘cellular’, but also natural and ‘organic’ (156). But we must amend Foucault here. What is “natural” about this body? It would be better to speak rigorously of affect. This is Patricia Clough elaborating Brian Massumi on affect: 

Critical theorists, especially those drawing on the thought of Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze, have defined affect as a body’s capacity to affect and its susceptibility to be affected. Affect is a prelinguistic, preconscious and preindividual capacity, an irreducible and an inexhaustible potential for activation. Drawing on the works of Gilbert Simondon and David Bohm, Brain Massumi addresses the inexhaustible potentiality of affect in terms of the ongoing becoming or individuating of bodily matter, its ongoing ability to inform or to self form: that is, its aliveness (2002).  But it is in his treatment of affect in terms of proprioception, interoception and exteroception that Massumi’s employmnent of the works of Simondon and Bohm proposes ways to think the relation of trauma and bodily affect. Defining proprioception as “the sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments,”  Massumi proposes that proprioception “folds  tactility into the body, enveloping the skins contact with the external world in a dimension of medium depth: between epidermis and viscera” (58). At this medium depth, proprioception is asubjective and nonobjective. It is a “dimension of the flesh,” that might be “diagrammed as a superposition of vectorial fields composed of multiple points in varying relations of movement and rest, pressure and resistance, each field corresponding to an action” (59).  (Clough, “Reflections on Sessions Early in an Analysis: Trauma, Affect and ‘Enactive Witnessing’” 10). 

 

Digital Automatism

 

So it is this superimposed dimension of affectivity that refunctions the natural body in the disciplines; it is a body mutating through new habituations, shifting its capacities, its very sensorium. This is why the thought of affect and the procedures of discipline must be situated together.  

So let us pause here. If the two conceptions of the body we are extracting from Foucault correlate with two figures of difference, we might draw specific conclusions. 

What does Foucault show through this analysis?

1. That despite the relegation of the body to a supplement of the mind in Western metaphysics (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, etc.), the body historically has been an obsession of various forms of power (monastic-pastoral, disciplinary-productive, military-capitalist). The body has been the central modality or instrument for the elaboration of tactics of normalization, control, and distribution. Foucault is actually doing an ontology of becoming, he is diagramming a system of transformation of the human body.  

2. That this becoming happens through language, discourse, visibility, and habit. That the body is both the target of discourses of normalization, and an instrument of habituation (but for that very reason also of mutation). 

Let us trace these two insights further into Panopticism. Panopticism is an abstract machine, the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form: it is a figure of a political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use (205). For instance, Foucault notes that the military camp is constituted through a network of gazes; it forms a diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility. The aim is to increase the possible utility of individuals; to produce cohesion in a human multiplicity by making useful individuals (210-11). At first, this human multiplicity presents the disciplines with an architectural problem: how to maximize visibility of the observed, while minimizing the observer’s visibility: the perfect eye (172-73). The disciplines as techniques for ordering human multiplicities gradually transform society with a new rationality through the low “cost” of the exercise of power; by bringing the effects of this social power to maximum intensity and extension; by correlating power with the output of a given apparatus (educational, military, industrial, medical). Thus discipline fixes, it arrests or regulates movement; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes distributions to neutralize resistances (219): oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continuous individualizing pyramid (220).

(The “perfect” cinematic representation of this in recent times is Barad-dur and the Eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings–well almost: Tolkein makes it clear throughout the trilogy that Sauron at times wants to be seen and worshipped–he is then an image of the pre-disciplinary sovereign–and at other times wants to remain anonymous not unlike the disciplines).

Barad-Dur and the Eye of Sauron

The circular architecture of panopticism expresses a political utopia (174) that never dispenses with the pyramid-structure of the norm. Indeed, the disciplinary mechanism secretes a penalty of the norm (183-84). For at the heart of all disciplinary systems functions a small penal mechanism (177). Tied directly to the process of normalization is a whole micro-penalty of time, activity, behavior, speech, body, sexuality (178). Disciplinary punishment must be corrective, and so punishment is accomplished through repetitive, habituated exercise (179). The rule will function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected or as an optimum towards which one must move (183); homogeneity and individuality go hand in hand in the society of the norm (184): it individualizes by measuring gaps, determining levels, fix specialties, correlating differences. The norm is a value-giving measure (183): It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, and the nature of the individuals. This value traces out the external frontier of the abnormal. In short it normalizes.

Foucault argues that Panopticism, as visible and unverifiable (201), is a power that is less corporal (in terms of violence on the body) and more subtly physical (in operating through the object-instrument of the body, in its organization of space and vision) (177). But is this what Foucault means? If visibility is the great trap of panopticism, if panopticism made it possible to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement (200), and replaced them with a multiplicity that could be numbered and supervised (201), how is it that the major effect of the Panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power? (201) My question is aimed at drawing attention to how habit, habituation, affect, bodily capacity, sensation falls out of the picture–literally–as vision becomes thaumaturgical in the perverse shadow play of the inmates cell. Suddenly, exercise, repetition, duration and its catalysis of/in the body are reduced to the conscious state of exhibitionism. The inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers (201). “A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (202). He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection (202-03). 

But this is not only a matter of being conscious of a fictitious relation because the principle of one’s own subjection is in fact the body. Hence, the body comes back: “The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behavior, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy” (210). (We should note that in Foucault’s summary of his own analysis of the disciplines in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, it is precisely the body that is foregrounded: “One of these poles [of the power over life]…centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” [139]). It is this ongoing, meticulous, concrete training of useful forces through bodily durations that enables panopticism to achieve the status of abstract machine, which “may and must be detached from any specific use.” In short, it is the analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces that constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred to other realms of disciplining (219). 

In short, the body is normed through habit. But habituation is also the site of preindividual (where the subject and population meet–Simondon) mutation. In our next post we will engage with Deleuze’s treatment of Foucault, in which he stresses precisely this mutational interstice in his friend’s thought. It is to mutation we must turn next. 

 

the effects of mutations that will change the identity of amino acids

 

In this sense, Foucault can say, or at least he does so once in a crucial passage of Discipline and Punish, that a “diagram” expresses a relation of force or power: “a functioning abstracted from any obstacle, resistance, or friction…and which should be detached from any specific use.” For example, a disciplinary diagram that defines modern societies. But other diagrams act on societies with other stratifications…One of the more original aspects of the diagram is its being a  place of mutations. The diagram is not exactly outside the strata, but it is the outside of the strata. It is between two strata as the place of mutations which enables the passage from one stratum to the other. (G. Deleuze, “Foucault’s Main Concepts” 251).  

We will comment on Deleuze’s Foucault in subsequent posts, but for now let us make another kind of connection. We have seen how the disciplines ramify capitalist production in the nineteenth century through the cellular (play of spatical distribution), organic (coding of activities), genetic (accumulation of time), and combinatory (composition of forces) strategies of normalization (homogeneous and individualizing), and whose modalities are tables, prescribed movements, exercises, tactics, whose chief function is to train individuals, to link forces together in order to multiply and use them. How does this relate to the birth of modern mass media? Lev Manovich in The Language of the New Media correlates the material organization of media, not merely its division of labor (the studio system, for example), to the standardization of factory production and to its demand for simple repetitive and sequential activities, a new modular activity (what we have been calling disciplinary habituation). Thus the habituations of discipline is also the place for a discontinuous sampling of reality in emergent media. “The invention of typesetting machines in the 1880s industrialized publishing while leading to a standardization of both type design and fonts (number and types). In the 1890s cinema combined automatically produced images (via photography) with a mechanical projector. This required standardization of both image dimensions (size, frame ratio, contrast) and temporal sampling rate. Even earlier, in the 1880s, the first television systems already involved standardization of sampling both in time and space” (30). What does this suggest for our understanding of panopticism? That the procedures of surveillance developed through the material organization of a technologized perception (machinic perception) that was a discontinuous, quanticized sampling of both time and space. That the interstice of mutation (diagram) of capital and discipline destratifies not only through the serial visibility of the panopticon, but through a newly technologized sensorium discontinuously sampling spacetime. Isn’t it here in this mutational realm, that is in history but not of history, that is untimely, where discipline becomes control? (This is to contest the historicism that structures Manovich’s analysis of new media–cf. bottom of 41.)

Coming back to Foucault, we can see from his lectures on Biopolitics that a method takes shape incorporating these two conceptions of difference in a logic of strategy. “For what is dialectical logic? Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call a strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. So let’s reject the logic of the dialectic and try to see-this is what I will try to show in these lectures-the connections which succeeded in holding together and conjoining the fundamental axiomatic of the rights of man and the utilitarian calculus of the independence of the governed” (Birth of Biopolitics 42-43).

On the Work of Art Today: Benjamin and the Machinic Phylum

We will begin here with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (Second Version of 1936). (I’m not going to justify using this version except to say that there are aspects to it that exceed Adorno’s policing of Walter!)

W.J.T. Mitchell has clarified the genealogy that ties Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay to an effective diagramming of our present. “I will state it as a bald proposition, then, that biocybernetic reproduction has replaced Walter Benjamin’s mechanical reproduction as the fundamental technical determinant of our age. If mechanical reproducibility (photography, cinema, and associated industrial processes like the assembly line) dominated the era of modernism, biocybernetic reproduction (high-speed computing, video, digital imaging, virtual reality, the internet, and the industrialization of genetic engineering) dominates the age that we have called ‘postmodern.’ This term, which played its role as a place-holder in the 1970s and 80s, now seems to have outlived its usefulness, and is ready to be replaced by more descriptive notions such as biocybernetics” (W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” 486-87).  

One of the first things that strikes me in Benjamin’s oft-cited essay is the notion that concepts must be created that can track, or account for the tendencies of capitalist cultural production–or rather cultural production under capitalism, and that these concepts aspire to the status of being completely useless for fascism. So Benjamin poses to us a question that, while having lost none of its pertinence, seems nonetheless so distant today, to us doubly ironic, postcolonial postmoderns. And that is can concepts–in their form and function–exceed Potestas-Power-Domination-Capital-Fascism? These are by no means all the same thing, but certainly there is a sense that Benjamin wanted to develop a kind of critique that would reject and dismantle the foundations of thought under fascism-capitalism. 

It reminds me of Michel Foucault’s celebration of Anti-Oedipus as a handbook for an anti-fascist life (cf. the Foreword); it reminds me as well of Negri’s repeated assertion that today there is nothing outside of Power, and all nodes of resistance (through potentia) are produced as part of its very functioning. 

But let us return to Benjamin. What again strikes me reading further is that Benjamin insists on the phase transitions inaugurated by new technologies. What for instance does the lithograph do in modern society? First, the technique of tracing on a stone (rather than incisions on wood or copper plate) made it possible for graphic art to extend its market (already a tendency of previous techniques) but “in daily changing variations” (102). So then note the method: consider the scale of consumption and the durations of production. These shifts in technique and technology are tied fundamentally to the body for Benjamin. He notes immediately after his discussion of lithography that it was photography that freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks in the process of pictorial reproduction–”tasks that devolved upon the eye alone” (102). 

But then Benjamin has recourse to what might be characterized as a linear-tendency argument which seems suspect to me for several reasons. The argument goes something like: just “as the illustrated newspaper virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film was latent in photography.” Now this notion of latency in technology reduced machinic evolution to a linearity which could be empirically and conceptually contested. I sense that a non-linear approach to technological change would be far more effective in understanding virtuality not in the terms that Benjamin means it here (as latent, genetic, originary), but in the sense of Deleuze: as that which exceeds its actualization, as a purely morphogenetic multiplicity that actualizes fields of force (which are then captured and gridded by Power-Language-Culture).

And yet Benjamin is right to trace these emergences at the interfaces between bodily habituation and technological innovation. It is the linearity that we are taking exception to!

Let’s read on!

In the Third Movement, we get the argument around the Lack: the reproduction lacks the here and now–”its unique existence in a particular place.” This here and now underlies the concept of the artwork’s authenticity. But it is precisely the authenticity of an artwork that becomes non-pertinent in the regime of its technological reproducibility (we will call this TRA–technologically reproducible art). Why? The TRA is more independent of the original that its manual copy: the capacities of the specific technology re-works the original as part of its very functioning (the photograph brings out aspects of the original through the capacities of the lens or through techniques of developing). Also, the TRA can place the copy where the original cannot go: through scale of re-sizing (cathedral goes to studio), and the movement of recordings (live performance goes to the private room).

What do we make of Benjamin’s argument on authenticity? “The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to it” (103). Now, Derrida’s critique of presence has bequeathed us a permanent allergy of the concept of authenticity. But is Benjamin merely opposing the authentic to the inauthentic? Is the binary a simple, or clear hierarchy in the sense that writing is for speech in Plato’s Phaedrus? This is the question, and one which demands an answer that perhaps cannot simply be given in the form of an answer, paradoxical (or stupid) as that might sound. 

Let’s continue: “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura” (104). Benjamin does not seem to be lamenting this withering by any means. His language is charged with the utopian humanism of a certain Marxist tradition, but beyond that a kind of mystical eschatology seems to take over the text: present crisis, renewal of humanity, mass movements of our day, destructive catharsis, liquidation of the value of tradition, etc.

To say that Benjamin was premature in his prophecies is to miss the point. The problem of the aura could be correlated to a number of specific effects of capitalist exchange of commodities: the fetishism that results from capitalist circulation and valorization could be seen to be the historical heir of the aura of the artwork (many others have made this argument); the dissolution of the original in the kinesis (movements) of TRA is about the emergent dominance of exhibition value, the refunctioning of representation and media itself in the advent of popular art practices. What Benjamin calls us to attend to is precisely what happens to perception in the era of popular culture.

“Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized–the medium in which it occurs–is conditioned not only by nature but by history. The era of the migration of peoples, an era which saw the rise of the late-Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a different perception” (103). We must attain to a form of media diagrammatics commensurate with this revolutionary insight! In other words, Benjamin here marks the fundamental method of a materialist analysis of machinic evolution. 

The unique apparition of a distance? What are we to make of this mystical description? How can we make sense of the aura through the figure of an eye following a mountain range or the shadow of a branch? How does one breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch? (105) I don’t claim to know here, I am trying to feel myself along Benjamin’s text…To possess a thing, to desolve its uniqueness in reproduction: this is the “desire” of the masses. The photographic/filmic reproduction enables this possessive dissolution.

Benjamin shows us that contemporary culture is founded on the shock value of exhibition (Baudrillard’s simulacrum); but that what is at stake in looking at contemporary cultural production from film to literature is the way in which perception is mobilized, restructured, habituated sometimes in the service of the status quo, sometimes in the service of political critique and resistance (thus film is a way simultaneously of thinking the new [forms of perception], thinking anew [new relationship to reality and time], and a new habituation [attention span]). But always what we assume is human nature is neither natural nor strictly human: at the interface of technologies, human perception has been formed in particular ways throughout history, and it is still evolving. The shock is neurological and machinic as once (cf my discussion of Buck-Morss below). 

Benjamin rejects with panache the l’art pour l’art legacy of Kant-Mallarme (a critique which Bourdieu would take up so ably in Distinctions). The end of the cult of beauty for Benjamin meant that the basis of art would henceforth be politics itself. He was without question wrong about that. But the intuition was right: the dissolution of the high art/ low art distinction in the 20th century meant that the basis of aesthetic judgement could not refer to the inviolable aura of the origins, but that some other criteria had to be found. As far as I can tell people are still trying to find that new foundational criteria–that it has taken so long suggests to me that it does not exist.

This is an excellent, thoughtful and thought provoking lecture. Thank you Prof. Gelley.

In the Seventh Movement of the essay, Benjamin lays out a really expansive notion of exhibition value and we see the potential of such a method take shape. First, Benjamin does something here that Deleuze and Guattari claim is specific to the sciences: correlate functions (philosophy creates concepts, art affects). But Benjamin is theorizing from the correlated functions of the photographic image a new perceptual and signifying apparatus which is epochal to the TRA. The move is brilliant: he asks what are the new functionalities of photography and how are they distributed and operationalized across a variety of contexts and modes of perception?

One of these new modes of perception is the renunciation of eternal value for improvability. This is a function of modern TRA that remains of central importance due to the rise of evolutionary learning algorithms (self-organizing and self-sensing, feedbacked, distributed, networked) in digital computers. Just think Photoshop for a starter.

Benjamin has an assemblage theory of TRA. But it is the assemblage of a piecemeal mode of production (capitalism, d’uh), the modular commodification of cultural production, by which I mean that every aspect of production (say of film, Benjamin’s privileged example) is assembled from specialized labor and technical objects. And so while painting can claim the status as a whole piece of art, film-art is “piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law” (116). I wonder what a productive slashing of Benjamin’s assemblage and Deleuze’s assemblage would yield? This is a methodological inquiry yet to come.

One of the most influential concepts that came out of this essay is “shock” (Buck-Morss notes the Freudian resonances here for Benjamin; cf. W. Benjamin, “Charles Baudelaire”; for the psychoanalytic treatment of war-neurosis and “shell shock” cf. S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Benjamin’s notion here is that phase transitions in media assemblages (technological-perceptual circuits) are actualized in “physical shock effects” (119), and these are to be differentiated from “moral shock effects” (Dada). There is nothing less than a thoroughgoing and radically politicized “synaestheticism” that marks Benjamin’s thought here: 

From an alluring visual composition of an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile [taktisch] quality. It thereby fostered the demand for film, since the distracting element iin film is also primarily tactile, being based on successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator. Film has freed the physical shock effect–which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside the moral shock effect–from this wrapping. (119)

This tactility forms the basis of Benjamin’s celebration of mass distraction: “the distracted masses absorb the work of art into themselves” (119). This brings to mind a recent argument Jordan Crandall made at the UC Berkeley “Militarism and Everyday Life” Workshop. In a wide-ranging presentation on a fascinating project on the affective disposition of “readiness,” Crandall noted that the form of the scopic regime has become immersive in digital technologies (recalling Deleuze’s elaboration of haptic vision in The Logic of Sensation; recalling as well Mark Hansen’s notion of affectivity in New Philosophy for New Media). What Benjamin pushes us to, and which resonates well with Crandall’s notion of digital immersion, is precisely the synaesthetic history of such shifts in perception, and their political implications across class, race, gender, sexuality. If from Kant onward the notion of taste itself was centered on an idealized vision of concentration and part of a broader biopolitics of population which separated out forms of intellectual labor from manual labor, distraction through percussive effects is part of the revaluation of affectivity under capitalism. Bringing this analysis of cinema’s scopophilia into the era of TV (where sound and the glance, rather than the image and the gaze, dominate), John Ellis in Visible Fictions notes that “TV’s low emphasis on the construction of the voyeuristic position” displaces attention away from the female body and of female sexuality characteristic of classical Hollywood. 

Broadcast TV’s lack of an intense voyeristic appeal produces a lack of the strong investigatory drive that is needed alike for tightly organised narration and for intense concern with the ‘problem’ of the female. Similarly, the regime of broadcast TV does not demonstrate a particular drift towards a fetishistic manner of obsessive replaying of events. The series and the segmental form construct a different pattern of repetition that has much more to do with constructing a pattern of familiarity. 

Writing in early 1980s, Ellis notes that the one exception to this is the fetishistic presentation of the female face on broadcast TV. Now much of this has been utterly transformed with the advent of the home theatre system, large screen TVs, and other technologies. Mark Pesce’s presentation on BitTorrent and piracy is a good example of the new business model of hyperdistribution and the phase transition in habits of consumption catalyzed by broadband technologies. 

Benjamin’s analysis has far reaching implications for both methodology and media history, but his arguments beg many questions as well. For instance, Benjamin differentiates use from perception through the respective senses of tactility and vision. “Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit” (120). One could contest this, of course, but what seems relevant here is the relation between habituation, attention, and tactility. The gradual competence in new forms of perception happens on the terrain of habit suggests Benjamin, and this leads to important insights in thinking of the nested timescales (both evolutionary and cognitive) of forms of perception, proprioception, and apperception (awareness, consciousness) in an overall sensorium. 

We would be remiss, especially today, not to highlight one key aspect of Benjamin’s essay: war and property. Benjamin notes that the culmination of the aestheticization of politics (”let art flourish and the world pass away”) is war. War sets goals for mass movements “on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations” (121). What better commentary on our times, on Iraq and Afghanistan, on Counter-Terrorism, and Departments of Homeland Security-Abu Ghraib, could there be than this: to affirm the embodiment of capitalist media is to affirm the set of temporal relations that habituate a distributed and differentiated sensorium for, precisely, war and the commodity. We respond by jamming, tweaking, displacing, breaking, and generally fucking with this sensory motor assemblage.

This is precisely what is at stake in critical video games studies. In “Have You Played the War on Terror?” (Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 23, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 112 130), Roger Stahl marks the phase transition in contemporary control societies from commoditized spectacle to virtual Netwar:

Instead the game represents what has come to be known as ‘‘lifestyle marketing,’’ the creation of an immersive cultural universe that surrounds a brand name. The use of interactive technologies to craft and market this universe*the video game as advertisement or ‘‘adver-game’’*can be counted among the military’s many firsts. In fact, the success of America’s Army has been noticed by corporations such as Coca Cola and Daimler-Chrysler, who hope to promote their brands in a similar way (Oser, 2005). America’s Army has transformed the rhetoric of ‘‘recruitment’’ as well, initiating a new language that has been adopted in the realm of commercial war games. A television ad for Conflict: Desert Storm tells us, ‘‘All Americans Pledge Allegiance. A Select Few Show It.’’ A print advertisement for the WWII game Medal of Honor: Rising Sun features an enlistment card and the slogan, ‘‘You don’t play. You volunteer.’’ In this new war gaming environment, recruitment has taken on a logic that is entirely harmonious with the brand, a kind of brand loyalty. America’s Army, far from being a cultural anomaly, has become one brand among many. Col. Wardynski brags that the game has “achieved the objective of putting the Army in pop culture.” (125)

For her part, Susan Buck-Morss begins her brilliant consideration of the “Artwork” essay with precisely this point: “Benjamin is saying that sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics, which fascism does not create, but merely ‘manages.’ We are to assume that both aliencation and aestheticized politics as the sensual conditions of modernity outlive fascism–and thus so does the enjoyment taken in viewing our own destruction” (Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, Vol 62 (Autumn, 1992), 3-41, 4). For Buck-Morss, Benjamin’s demand to politicize art amounts to a heterogeneous practice of undoing the “alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them” (5). There is a lot here: undoing alienation (which does not seem to me to be Benjamin’s aim at all) implies an outside, or a pre- to power and capital that seems utopic at best (Negri, Hardt, Marazzi and Autonomia make this clear); but does the body pass through technology or is it always already technological, already part of machinic assemblages that form a continuous multiplicity of sense, sensation, and capacities? Nonetheless, Buck-Morss’s thesis–that Benjamin’s critical understanding of mass society disrupts the tradition of modernism by exploding the constellation of art, politics, and aesthetics, and that our focus needs to be the development of the human sensorium itself–is essential for how we understand embodied perception in media assemblages.

She writes at a time when Western academic discourse in the humanities was just on the cusp of this great empirical discovery: we do not yet know what a body can do (Spinoza, Ethics, Deleuze, Logic of Sense, and Massumi, Parables for the Virtual). So her language is marked by that moment; hence her assertion that the “senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication” (6). Here we see the long shadow of “resistance thinking” (the dialecticism of cultural studies) that inflects all thought of the body in postmodern discourse. For Buck-Morss the senses serve instinctual needs–for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability–and are part of the biological apparatus. But in fact it seems to me that what remains provocative in Benjamin is to refuse this notion of the senses as outside of power (cultural domestication), and to show the senses in phase transitions of habituation. (Granted this might be to Spinozify Walter, but his own anomalous relationship to dialectics opens that approach.)

Buck-Morss acknowledges this when she notes that the nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits.

The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit. (Sensory decripvation causes the system’s internal components to degenerate.) (12) 

Does Buck-Morss circumvent that fatal move in post-marxist cultural criticism, that move which brings back all the dialecticism of representational thought, and that mires sense perception in the Platonism of mediation? “The field of the sensory circuit thus corresponds to that of ‘experience,’ in the classical philosophical sense of a mediation of subject and object, and yet its very composition makes the so-called split between subject and object (which was the constant plague of classical philosophy) simply irrelevant. In order to differentiate our description from the more limited, traditional conception of the human nervous system which artificially isolates human biology from its environment, we will call this aesthetic system of sense-consciousness…the ’synaesthetic system’” (12-13). Clearly Buck-Morss wants a thoroughgoing revision of the subject-object split that informs theories of mimesis-mediation, but, in this essay at least, she is never able to make break from it. Why? The ghost of Hegel continues to haunt this thought!

The properties, or better, emergent capacities of this system are what call into question all theories of the primacy of mediation-culture in the phenomenology of experience: it is open in the extreme; open to the world both through sensory organs, and nerve cells that form the sensory networks, reaching out toward other nerve cells at synaptic points where electrical charges pass through the space between them. In the networks between nerve bundles everything “leaks” (13).

Repeatedly, Buck-Morss returns this synesthetic dynamism to a “mimetic language,” only to insist that what this language speaks is anything but the concept! (14) But “sensory mimesis” is precisely a concept, in the sense of a capture or gridding of the non-mimetic dynamism of an open system far-from-equilibrium: the synesthetic perceptual apparatus is immediately a non-coinciding dynamic unity. Pure resonance. (Cf Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual.)

Instead of taking recourse to the protective shield of the Freudian psyche, we should return to the machinic phylum in understanding the confrontation of the body to shock. Isn’t it in fact swarming technologies that provide protection against the unmediated stimuli of the world? Not because they are the new mediation, but because they install a patterned set of probabilistic interactions that both catalyze and grid these very stimuli. 

Recently, a great deal has been written about smart mobs, political (h)activism, evolutionary and nature-based algorithms, video game interfaces, musical improvisation, warfare, and robotics all developed through the engineering diagram of swarming. My sense is that swarming is the abstract diagram of postmodern control societies in that it literally incorporates forms of stochastic creativity (what Bergson called the creative indetermination of the body) with populations of events, forces, and processes. In the joint State Department and RAND publication Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, 2000), John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt depict six basic characteristics of swarming warfare: 1. Autonomous or semi-autonomous units engaging in convergent (or resonant) assault on a common target; 2. Amorphous but coordinated way to strike from all directions, exercising a “sustainable pulsing” of force or fire; 3. Many small, dispersed, internetted maneuver units; 4. Integrated surveillance, sensors, C4I (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence); 5. Stand-off and close-in capabilities; 6. Attacks designed to disrupt cohesion or adversary. For the authors, the key active process of the military swarm is “sustainable pulsing” of either force or fire. Crucially, this “should not be thought of as a strictly military phenomenon. Sustainable pulsing can be undertaken in social action as well. As seen from time to time in Serbia, those protesting the Milosevic regime’s nullification of local elections a few years ago, for example, were able to assemble in very large numbers on many occasions” (21-22). For swarming to work two fundamental requirements must be met. First, in order to strike at a target from multiple directions, there must be large numbers of small units of maneuver that are tightly intenetted—i.e. that can communicate and coordinate with each other at will and are expected to do so. The second requirement is that the “swarm force” must form part of a “sensory organization,” providing the surveillance and synoptic-level observations necessary to the creation and maintenance of “topsight” (22). The aim here is not to necessarily destroy the object, although the authors note that significant destruction can be wrought. Rather, the aim is to disrupt the organizational cohesion of the target. Drawing on both Benjamin and Buck-Morss, then, I would suggest an ontogenetic diagram of contemporary cyborg society: swarms have emergent properties (so-called intelligence) that have both an ethics (specific capacities to affect and be affected) and a “hauntology” (the network of relations, patterns of information, and sets of events that have constituted its very emergence).

 

Another example of such an ethical hauntology of swarming technologies is the work being done on the interface between commercial video games and the military. Again, Roger Stahl’s argument is exemplary here: 

New technologies of interactivity also challenge the primacy of the spectacle as the mode by which critical citizenship is defused. The spectacle is the offspring of broadcast technologies, of television and film, and tends toward the deactivation of the citizen. In contrast, the new paradigm of the video game is interactive and engaging, channeling one’s desires through its architectures. The new generation of war-themed games thus provides a particular way of habitating the political world dissolved in the aesthetic of ‘‘gametime.’’ Gametime moves quickly, subordinating critical and ethical questions to movement and action. Historically, the spectacle of war emerged to shift emphasis from the rational question of ‘‘why we fight’’ to the dazzling display of ‘‘that we fight.’’ Gametime integrates the citizen, however virtually, into the mechanics and pleasures of ‘‘how we fight.’’ (126)

Swarming works through the clinamen. See: http://mediaecologiesresonate.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/on-the-clinamen-in-deleuze 

But can the clinamen in swarming technologies be translated into resistance as Negri would have it? After having just linked the clinamen to difference and creativity through an ontology of resistance (I quote the passage at length in the above mentioned blog entry “On the Clinamen in Deleuze”), Negri goes on to say: “When we speak of difference, we are therefore speaking of resistance. Difference cannot be recognized within the homologization that biopower imposes on society. When we speak of difference, we mean the way resistance emerges against the compact mass of biopower in order to affirm the common consistency of the biopolitical fabric. It is only through the continuous renewal of this fabric, through creativity, life styles, and the destruction of all forms of essence or identity that difference can be affirmed, and the common constructed. The common is nothing but all these movements conjoined” (Negri, The Porcelain Workshop 98). 

If we can say that such resistance is necessary to think concretely, should we not also take heed of what Neitzsche referred to as the very problem of language in relation to sense perception? 

In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person “honest,” and then we ask “why has he behaved so honestly today?” Our usual answer is, “on account of his honesty.” Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called “honesty”; but we do know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as “honest” actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualities occulta which has the name “honesty.” We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite. (see http://www.davemckay.co.uk/philosophy/nietzsche/nietzsche.php?name=nietzsche.1873.ontruthandliesinanonmoralsense)

So we should be careful of all these words, and try to approach the relation between politics and ontology as clearly as language will let us–and we should never forget that part of what is at stake is developing a new relationship between language, diagramming, becoming, and politics. An untimely relationship, as Deleuze reminds us. 

…”new” values are precisely those superior forms of everything that is. Some values, then, are born current and only appear soliciting an order of recognition, even if they must await favorable historical conditions to be, in effect, recognized. On the other hand, some values are eternally new forever untimely, always contemporary with their creation, and these, even when they seem established, apparently assimilated by society, in fact address themselves to other forces, soliciting from within that society anarchic forces of another nature. Such values are transhistorical, suprahistorical, and bear witness to a congenial chaos, a creative disorder that is irreducible to any order whatsoever. It is this chaos of which Nietzsche spoke when he said it was not the contrary of the eternal return, but the eternal return in person. The great creations depart from this supra-historical stratum, this “untimely” chaos, at the extreme limit of what is livable. (G. Deleuze, “On The Will to Power and the Eternal Return,” in Desert Islands 126). 

And: 

The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority…Nietzsche posits that there exists ends “just a little higher” than those of the State, than those of society. He inserts his entire corpus in dimension which is neither historical, even understood dialectically, nor eternal. What he calls this new dimension which operates both in time and against time is the untimely. It is in this that life as interpretation finds its source. (G. Deleuze, “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” in Desert Islands 129). 

The fantasy swarms of RFID:

See also Wax Web: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/english/1movie/1all/F/1/1a1a2a1.html. 

Another kind of example of clinamediated swarms: (from: John Shiga, “Copy-and-Persist: The Logic of

Mash-Up Culture,” Critical Studies in Media Communication Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 93-114)

While a few mash-ups have been officially released by record companies, the vast majority are posted online in order to acquire feedback, recognition, and prestige within the mash-up community. Mash-ups that are posted on message boards are also opportunities for other members to reassemble the mash-up from its components or display their listening skills through commentary about a particular mash-up. A member of another mash-up message board, acapellas4u.co.uk, posted a mash-up which he claimed received radio airplay and asked for feedback (Johnnybaby, 2006). The feedback suggests that the validation of remixes/remixers does not necessarily lead to a sense of the ‘‘work’’ as the remixer’s private acoustic space or property. RobertP wrote, ‘‘This is a really tight, fun mix*excellent work* it is the only version of eminem that I think I have wanted to play again. In fact I think I’ll burn it to CD to play in the car*thank you!!!’’ The producer of the mashup, johnnybaby, replied: ‘‘Cheers Robert! . . . Have fun when you’re driving around with it blastin’ out of your motor!’’ Another member asked for permission to air the mash-up on their homemade radio station, which johnnybaby gave without hesitation. This thread suggests that listening in mash-up culture is guided by a ‘‘filesharing’’ sensibility, a disposition towards sound as infinitely replicable. The conventions of validation and techniques of listening do not translate directly into commodifiable works, but they open the possibility of developing a ‘‘trademark’’ style of listening, remixing, and commenting, or a ‘‘brand name’’ that links different artifacts. As Lury (2006) observes, the emergence of the artist as a brand name is part of broader shift in the author-function of the art-culture system: ‘‘Increasingly the brand name is not the mark of an originary relationship between producer and products but is rather the mark of the organization of a set of relations between products in time’’ (p. 95). However, the attempt to promote oneself as a stylized link between multiple works produced by other people exists in tension with the broader corporate and legal scrutiny of unauthorized copying on the web. Pseudonymous identities have thus become the norm in mash-up culture, which makes it difficult to pinpoint legal persons responsible for copyright infringement while at the same time enabling subcultural capital to be accumulated through a name that persists over time in the filenames of mash-ups and in the comments posted on message boards. (101)

NOTES            

 

---

 From a recent call for papers on the Artificial Life listserv (alife-announce@lists.idyll.org, October 16, 2008): “The World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NABIC’09) brings together international researchers, developers, practitioners, and users. The aim is to build a 3 day platform where the concerned researchers /academicians /engineers from diverse regions of the world would converge to share their excitement and paradoxically, frustration towards the pursuit of building up of machines that would not be strictly algorithmic in nature and are capable of handling ambiguity, uncertainty etc. by applying common sense. The theme for this symposium is ‘Nurturing Intelligent Computing Towards Advancement of Machine Intelligence.’” On experimental music and swarming diagrams see David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Continuum, 2006); Borgo’s analysis of complexity theory and its relation to popular, improvisational musical forms seems particularly open to what I am calling clinamedia.

 “If you have ever been to a picnic, you have undoubtedly encountered ants.  It is not the individual ant that draws your attention, but the collective behavior of the line of ants, as they walk off with your food that is impressive.  Ants are considered a social insect, a group that contains other insects such as bees, and some caterpillars.  It is their social structure and how ants make use of it that peaks the scientists’ interests.  An individual ant is relatively unintelligent, but when they are part of a colony, “complex group behavior emerges from the interactions of individuals who exhibit simple behaviors by themselves.” This phenomenon is indicative of all swarm intelligences such as bees, birds, fish, and the economy, which is another example of swarm intelligence, where something is created that is greater than the sum of its parts.  One of the complex behaviors that naturally emerges from individual ant behavior is the ability to determine the shortest path between two points.” Glen Upton, “Swarm Intelligence,” http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~uptongl/project/Swarm_Intelligence.html, accessed October 13, 2008. 

Arco Madrid

It was my first, and I hope not last, visit to ARCO, an international arts market. It was interesting, if only because of the anxiety of being a part of an institutional machinery for assigning an exchange value to what should have no fixed exchange or use value.

The discursive context fed into my project of trying to engage Negri, Deleuze, Bergson, and Massumi on value and affect.

This is what I said:

What is the relation of Value to Affect?
“Pagar mas o menos es una cuestion que cada uno debe sopesar. El valor del arte no esta vinculado al dinero, sino al amor que uno siente por una obra ya que su objectivo, lejos de ser especifico, es realzar la experiencia personal de quien la admira y cuyo futuro es imposible de prever.”

“To pay more or to pay less [for a work of art] is a question that…is up to the individual to decide. The value of art has nothing to do with money, but with the emotive connection with an artwork. Its goal is to enhance the personal experience of the person admiring it, and therefore its future is impossible to predict.” (Marie Elena Angulo, qtd. in “Assigning Value to Art,” ABCDARCO, 2, Feb. 12, 2009)

The creation of market value today is immense and immeasurable but susceptible to control, discipline, modulation, and change. (Paraphrase of Antonio Negri in “Value and Affect” [1999])

IT IS FUNNY THAT AT AN ART FAIR EVERYTHING I HAVE READ AND HEARD IS ABOUT QUESTIONING IF ART CAN HAVE A VALUE AT ALL.

THERE SEEMS TO BE SOME PARTICULAR ANXIETY AMONG ARTISTS, CRITICS, AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC THAT ART BE BOTH A COMMODITY TO BE BOUGHT AND SOLD, AND BECAUSE IT CALLS FORTH A SUBJECTIVE RESPONSE IT BE BEYOND THE COMMODITY FORM.

AN OLD ANXIETY AT ARCO? MAYBE SOMEONE FROM THE AUDIENCE CAN FILL US IN DURING THE QUESTION/ANSWER?

IN ANY CASE, I WANT TO BEGIN WITH TWO TERMS THAT ARE NOT ONLY IMPORTANT FOR HOW WE THINK OF THE ETHICS OF ARCO, BUT CRUCIAL TO HOW WE UNDERSTAND THE LIFE OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN India TODAY.

THOSE TWO TERMS ARE VALUE AND AFFECT!

SLIDE 1:

WHAT IS VALUE?
BECAUSE VALUE TODAY IS DEFINED BY THE QUALITATIVE CHANGE IT BRINGS TO A PRODUCT LINE (as in value added services); or an identity (as in cultural value)—VALUE IS BASICALLY DEFINED AS OUTSIDE OF ANY MEASURE.
BUT DOES THAT MEAN THAT IT IS OUTSIDE OF CONTROL?
PEOPLE WORKING IN THE FIELD OF MARXIST CULTURAL ANALYSIS OR FOUCAULDIAN BIOPOLITICS SUCH AS ANTONIO NEGRI ANSWER CLEARLY NO, VALUE IS NOT BEYOND CONTROL.
IN FACT THE PRODUCTION OF VALUE IS A FORM A CONTROL.

How to define Affect?
In recent work by feminist political economists, postcolonial critics, and Marxist philosophers, affect is defined as the substance of interaction and communication: distinct from “emotion,” affect is defined by its relational character, not limited by an internalized feeling. In that regard, affect is considered pre-individual, operating in those strata of being where the subject and populations meet. Recalling Baruch Spinoza’s “ethics,” the production of affect is not conceivable otherwise than in terms of the production of a relational capacity: the capacity to affect and be affected.

“It is not right to say that the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image ‘represents’, but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only flows. “ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema Two: The Time Image

AFFECT IS A BODILY CAPACITY TO AFFECT AND BE AFFECTED. IT IS SUBJECTIVE (ABOUT YOUR HABITS), AND POPULATIONAL (HABITS DEVELOPED SOCIALLY AND BIOLOGICALLY).
PEOPLE INVOLVED IN AFFECT STUDIES HAVE FOREGROUNDED THE IMPORTANCE OF BREAK AWAY FROM THE MIND/BODY DUALISMS THAT HAVE CHARACTERIZED WESTERN THOUGHT FROM ITS INCEPTION.
AFFECT IS NOT ABOUT EMOTIVE RESPONSE; IT IS ABOUT CAPACITIES THAT EMERGE FROM THE INTERACTION OF MANY, MANY BUNDLED PROCESSES IN THE BODY, IN PERCEPTION, IN ATTENTION, IN MEMORY.
IN SHORT, AFFECT IS ABOUT RELATIONS OF TIME EMBODIED IN SENSORIMOTOR CIRCUITS. (THE PHILOSOPHICAL PREDECESSORS HERE ARE SPINOZA, NIETZSCHE, BERGSON, WHITEHEAD, MEARLEU-PONTY, DELEUZE, LUCRETIUS AND BHARATMUNI)
THIS IS HOW BERGSON DEFINES THE IMAGE: BETWEEN REPRESENTATION AND MATTER, IMAGES ARE SENSORIMOTOR CIRCUITS.

“… define attention as an adaptation of the body rather than of the mind and to see in this attitude of consciousness mainly the consciousness of an attitude.”
-Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Memory, Sensation, Duration in Contemporary Media Assemblages in India

I am attempting to think through the implications for media assmeblage analysis of the connection that Bergson makes between the body and duration. This is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote. It may appear in South Asian Culture and History.

The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office Tiger presents itself as a corporation that provides measurable value-added services to Western firms, but these quantities are abstractions from the streams of immeasurable and immense values of immaterial and affective labor. This is the labor that inhabits, enables and exceeds the boundaries between home and office, between merit and privilege, between men and women, and between work time and leisure time. It is this space of creativity in between times that Office Tiger attempts to control as its own domain. Indeed, it is the value of temporality itself (starting work on-time, the duration of the work day, the intensification of labor-time through multi-tasking: Aneesh’s “time zone warp,” Deleuze’s Untimely plane of immanence from which the variable present only flows) that is most under attack and occupation by the pedagogies of Office Tiger.

It will be no surprise that this transvaluation of value is central to the actual connectivity between work and information technology, established through an algorithm-based governance structure that Aneesh terms “algocratic.” As Upadhya remarks in her review of Aneesh’s study, the algocratic mode of hegemony depends on technology, especially information technology, which structures work routines and workplace behaviour: in the post-industrial economy many work tasks are now performed through computers and the symbolic manipulation of code, giving rise to new systems of control, based on the coding process. “The algocratic mode has enabled new global flows of information labour as well as control over geographically dispersed workers through constant online access and monitoring, as seen in the model of geographically and temporally ‘distributed development’ followed by Indian software outsourcing companies.” Indeed, the digitization of information and its circulation in real time across the globe is the single most important catalyst for this transvaluation of value. For his part, Hardt notes that one “novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use. Even the most rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence allow the computer to expand and perfect operation based on interaction with its user and environment.”

            It is the value-added to specific cinematic clichés by information technology that brings me to a consideration of contemporary Bollywood cinema. I have argued in Untimely Bollywood that contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema is undergoing a definite phase transition, and that by diagramming the set of durations (or vibratory fields) assembled through the various processes constituting cinema—time embodied in form—we could begin to write a nonlinear history of South Asian media. Giorgos Artopoulos and Eduardo Condorcet note that in Bernard Cache’s analysis of the assemblage entered into by a kite, a method for diagramming “inflections on surfaces of varied curvature” becomes available to thought and practice. “In doing so, he describes the evolution of a form, and its shaping force in time. With the use of advanced geometries, time can be embodied in form—form—for example the kite—is the ‘site’ for the calculation of multiple forces. Digitally-generated environments to be inhabited by a ‘player’ raise the issue of human presence in the space-less environment of the computer” (214). Cinema as inflections moving, embodied in time, in form, and always doubled by the Untimely: this would alas, be too metaphorical, and hence useless, for an effective diagram. But let us progressively differentiate this metaphor, and show the set of intensive entities constituting it.

One way to consider duration ontologically is to follow the relations it enters into. Deleuze suggested that there are definite properties of duration. “Pulsed time and non-pulsed time are completely musical, but they are something else as well. The question would be to know what makes up this non-pulsed time. This kind of floating time that more or less corresponds to what Proust called “a bit of pure time.” The most obvious, the most immediate feature of…non-pulsed time is duration, time freed from measure, be it a regular or irregular, simple or complex measure. Non-pulsed time puts us first and foremost in the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronous, qualitative, non-coincident, non-communicating durations. The problem therefore is clear: how will these heterochronous, heterogeneous, multiple, non-coincident durations join together…” Durations do not (necessarily) communicate, but they do join together. What I have been calling a non-coinciding resonant unity is this “joining together” of duration yielding a media assemblage with emergent properties. Through embedded or transversal time-scales, a non-pulsed time mobilizes self-organization, morphogenesis and a virtual plane. Following Deleuze’s suggestion for a biological understanding of temporal cycles, Delanda puts the problem thus:

Thinking about the temporality involved in individuation processes as embodying the parallel operation of many different sequential processes throws new light on the question of the emergence of novelty. If embryological processes followed a strictly sequential order, that is, if a unique linear sequence of events defined the production of an organism, then any novel structures would be constrained to be added at the end of the sequence….On the contrary, if embryonic development occurs in parallel, if bundles of relatively independent processes occur simultaneously, then new designs may arise from disengaging bundles, or more precisely, from altering the duration of one process relative to another, or the relative timing of the start or end of a process. This evolutionary design strategy is known as heterochrony…”

If heterochrony is the necessary condition of affective capacities, then sexuality (praxis) finds its non-coinciding incipience here as an ecology of sensation, in folded bundles of parallel processes, that disengage, feedback, and mutate. It is this heterochronous duration that marks both the immensity of affective labor, and its susceptibility to control. It also limns an edge of chaos in the phase transition of contemporary Bollywood.

Eddies within eddies, without a trace. The great challenge of Deleuze’s notion of hearing the inaudible is to open the body’s perception to resonating durations in a continuous multiplicity. This is not easy, but there is an intuition necessary to it. 

 

NOTES:

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In a review of Virtual Migrations: The Programming of Globalization, Carol Upadhya highlights A. Aneesh’s description of two contrasting systems of Indian software labour deployment—bodyshopping and virtual migration. “Although there is some ethnographic description of the transnational experiences of Indian software workers that place them in an unsettled, interstitial space, the experiences of offshore software workers remain unaddressed. Instead, he focuses on the systems of control that have emerged to govern dispersed IT labour. He argues that virtual software labour migration is characterised by spatial integration (in which work is delinked from the work site) and temporal integration (in which workers in different time zones are linked together), and that this has led to the emergence of a new ‘governance scheme’ and organisational structures. The former are labelled as ‘algocratic’ or in accordance with the rule of algorithm, as distinct from the earlier governance schemes of bureaucratic and panoptical dominance” (Carol Upadhya, Review of Virtual Migrations, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, 42:2, 2008, 344-347, 345).  Upadhya expresses some skepticism of the extension of code to various forms of globalization in India, noting, “I am suspicious of the extension of the metaphors of ‘code’ and ‘programming’ to such a wide range of phenomena and processes: while he is attempting to provide a fresh formulation to describe these forms, the excessive use of these terms may appear more clever than insightful” (346). In what sense is code not a metaphor? Here we would insist that code is the very ontology of social relatedness, the form of value itself, in such IT labor. Negri defines immaterial labor and explicates its implications thus: “Today we face a tendency towards the hegemony of immaterial work (intellectual, scientific, cognitive, relational, communicative, affective, etc.) increasingly characterizing both the mode of production and processes of valorization. It goes without saying that this form of work is entirely subordinate to new modes of accumulation and exploitation. We can no longer interpret these according to the time employed in production. Cognitive work is not measurable in those terms; it is even characterized by its immensurability, its excess. A productive relation links cognitive work to the time of life. It is nourished by life as much as it modifies it in return, and its products are those of freedom and imagination. This creativity is precisely the excess that characterizes it” (Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, Noura Wedell, trans., [Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008] 20).

Aneesh, Virtual Migration 2.

Upadhya 345.

“Rather than the politicization of real abstraction that Virno gleans from the supposed collapse of labor qua measure, Cillario sees the current figure of real abstraction as centering on the proliferation and production of new procedures, of codes of production, of transmissible ‘hows’ rather than measurable ‘whats’. The organizational codifications of the processes in which incommensurate use values are produced becomes central, but the locus of abstraction becomes not labor per se, or commodity-exchange, but the role of cognition within the laboring process. Even if procedures themselves are then subjected to the standards of exchange (i.e., they in turn become products), their centrality to a capitalism that more and more takes the figure of ‘flexible accumulation’ marks a mutation in the character of real abstraction. As Cillario writes, ‘‘The incessant impetus aimed at the change in the methods and procedures of laboring activities is the generative nucleus of the abstractive process of knowledge’’ (1990, 168 /9). The centrality of procedures also means that, in a way that is not necessarily pregnant with emancipatory possibilities, reflexivity is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. That is, it is not just the abstraction of capital’s forms, but its colonization of cognition, that is crucial to an understanding of the present. ‘‘The concept of abstraction which is adequate to the phase in which knowledge becomes capital stems from the reflexive character of the process of social labor’’ (Cillario 1990, 168; 1996, 52)” (Toscano, Alberto, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 (2008), 273—287).

Hardt 94.

Stuart Kauffman’s elegant definition of a phase transition is useful to recall here. In At Home in the Universe, he writes that “when a large enough number of reactions are catalyzed in a chemical reaction system, a vast web of catalyzed reactions will suddenly crystallize. Such a web, it turns out, is almost certainly autocatalytic—almost certainly self-sustaining, alive” (58); “The ratio of possible reactions to polymers is so vast that eventually a giant catalyzed component and autocatalytic sets emerge. Given almost any way in which nature might determine which chemicals catalyze which reactions, a critical molecular diversity is reached at which the number or red catalyzed reactions passes a phase transition and a vast web of chemicals crystallizes in the system. This vast web is, it turns out, almost always collectively autocatalytic” (65).

Gilles Deleuze, “Making Inaudible Forces Audible,” in Two Regimes of Madness, Amy Hodges and Mike Taormina, trans. (New York: Semiotexte, 2006) 156-160, 157.

Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Ch. 2, 110?

On Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code

 

Rigid Waves is an example of...?

Hansen writes: “Forging such a cultural image of the body is crucial if we are to forestall the instrumentalization of the body and all that follows from it, above all the foreclosure of being-with or the finitude of our form of life. Far from being a mere ‘instrument’ or the first ‘medium’ (as some versions of posthumanism allege), the body is a primordial and active source of resistance; indeed, it is as resistance–as the ‘living expression of something simultaneously organization and obstacle to its organization’–that the body forms the source of excess supporting all levels of constitution (or individuation), from the cellular to the cosmic. As source of excess, the body possesses a flexibility that belies any effort, such as that of cybercultural criticism (and behind it, of cultural constructivism), to reduce it to a passive surface for social significance. The body is, affirms Millon ‘an entity that becomes a person, a creative subject, a being or an individual according to the circumstances.’” (Bodies in Code 15)

You kinda just wanna cheer at this passage. I do in some part of me: I want to say Yes, yes, the body is resistance, resistance, resistance. 

It’s precisely what I argue against in Untimely Bollywood (Duke UP, 2009). That the excess of the body should not be confused with the anthropocentric notion of resistance in cultural(ist) criticism (the excess of the body is a non-coinciding virtuality that potentializes the body, and thus is not a story about us). More, that the form of power necessary to turn the body into the privileged site of primordial resistance reminds one of Marcuse, and so of course also of Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in History of Sexuality and many other texts. What do we make then of this resistance?

There is a correlated problem: that of the example. What is the status of the example in Hansen’s work. One thinks of Derrida’s analysis of the example in the law of genre, to wit that the example always comes to fulfill the theory, that the example is always already gridded by the theory. This is of course precisely what happens in Hansen’s work: the example comes to confirm the theory that has set the stage for its arrival–the theory frames the example…

Notes on G. Deleuze’s “Michel Foucault’s Main Concepts”

 

The Twin of History: Thought

 

 

These are notes that I hope to turn into a fully developed post. 

But to think is to reach a non-stratified material, somewhere between the layers, in the interstices. Thinking has an essential relation to history, but it is no more historical than it is eternal. It is closer to what Nietzsche calls the Untimely: to think the past against the present–which would be nothing more than a common place, pure nostalgia, some kind of return, if he did not immediately add: “in favor, I hope, of a time to come.” There is a becoming of thought which passes through historical formations, like their twin, but which does not resemble them. Thinking must come from the outside of thought, and yet at the same time be engendered from within–beneath the strata and beyond them. (241)

There is so much here, as always. To think is to join with processes of de-formation, of the pure tendency of a variable curvature. A function of correlated movements, structures, strata. And in the interstice, where formations communication with formations, where a patterning of force is just taking shape, there in the becoming of this between-the-layers we find the diagram. This diagrammatic thought is historical but not of history. It is time out of joint, something monstrous, still to come, something whose force lies in the dynamism of its mutations. 

 

Foucault’s untimely thinking discovers three axes: 1. strata as historical formations (archeology); 2. the outside as beyond (strategy), and 3. the inside as a substratum (genealogy). This is difficult for me, as I think Deleuze is relating Foucault’s method to A Thousand Plateaus as much as to anything Foucault ever wrote. So I want to pick apart slowly what Deleuze means by these three axes.

The Value-Added Image: Media Assemblages as Ecologies of Sensation

It is not right to say that the cinematographic image is in the present. What is in the present is what the image ‘represents’, but not the image itself, which, in cinema as in painting, is never to be confused with what it represents. The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is, a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only flows.

–Deleuze, Cinema Two: The Time Image

 

I. The Argument

I have three correlated arguments that I will advance through two main cinematic examples.

Arguments:

1.     The analysis of capitalist media flows should first of all foreground the production of values that are immense and immeasurable and yet susceptible to biopolitical control. The globalization of value-added services, processes, and products, and the immaterial labor that is its substrate, is a useful point of departure in such an analysis. This would be to elaborate the obscure connectivity, or better, evolving functionality between the nature of labor exploitation in Business Services Outsourcing and the variable algorithms of Computer Generated Imaging. Let us call this functionality the Value Added Image, and note that the stylization of contemporary Indian urban life in dominant cinema has offered up a new cliché: The “lonely bubble” of the distracted cell phone user, in which the value-added of the interactive cellular screen divides the cinematic scene, interrupting narrative and enabling a forking away from profilmic timespace.

2.     My first argument suggests that the analysis of rasa in film and new media would primarily make perceptible the sensorimotor circuit from bhava-to-rasa, or stimulus to emotion, as a representational capture or habituation of the potentiality of biopolitical value. This is what I am calling an ecology of sensation, that is, the functional connectivities pertinent to the mobilization and capture of bodily affect within a given technological assemblage. Further, I would locate the pre-individual sexualization of media in this domain of affectivity.

3.     Finally, acknowledging the inheritance of Deleuze’s “ontology of sense” rather than the closure of metaphysics, the aim of a media assemblage analysis would be to diagram pragmatically ways of jamming such circuits of habituation by refunctioning the material connectivities themselves. To break the motor of sensation itself is continuous with the multiplicity of insurrections against the capitalist control of value.

In sum, the biopolitical analysis of valorization in new media, as it follows the phase transitions of the body’s affectivity, diagrams sensory-motor circuits of sensation or rasa becoming habit, and the circulation and refunctioning of cliché images. The aim here is to open both thought and sensation to mutations or transvaluations of value itself.

Throughout this paper I draw on a set of analyses that has developed the notion of affective labor as a decisive break in the organization of value under capital. In this work by feminist political economists, postcolonial critics, and Marxist phenomenologists, affect becomes the substance of interaction and communication: distinct from “emotion,” affect is defined by its relational character, and cannot be reduced to an internalized feeling. In that regard, affect is considered pre-individual, operating in that strata of being where the subject and populations meet. The production of affect, in a way which recalls Spinoza’s philosophy, is not conceivable otherwise than in terms of the production of a relation. Defined in these terms, affects seem to be at stake everywhere within a labor world which has been analyzed by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello (Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris, Gallimard, 1999) as dominated by connections, and by the imperative of building connections, of defining one’s own personality as the knot of a network (or better still: of multiple networks). In order to be successful in a world where labor is becoming increasingly flexible, casual, and “precarious”, one has to show that he or she is capable of building relations, of producing affects. In a situation in which the boundary between friendship and business is being itself blurred (are you building a connection with a certain person because you like him or her, or because he or she can be useful for you?), specific problems arise, which can nurture specific disturbances. As Michael Hardt has usefully noted, “The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization. Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production, and more significantly, numerous feminist investigations analysis the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor [or “labor in the bodily mode”]. Each of these analyses reveals the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself. He goes on to note, that the term service covers a large range of activities from health care, education, and finance, to transportation, entertainment, and advertising. The jobs, for the most part, are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, communication, and affect. In this sense, we can call the postindustrial economy an informational economy. So the question becomes how, in the context of the informatization of the Indian economy, am I correlating the function of affective labor in both business outsourcing and digital media? One modality of this evolving functionality is the nonlinear, open system of computer technology; another key modality is the modulation of subjectivity in the capacities of attention and sensation of value creation.

 

 

II. Cinematic Examples

            My two cinematic examples are the recent Bollywood flop No Smoking (Kashyap 2008) and the 2006 documentary by Liz Mermin Office Tigers. Office Tigers revolves around Joe Siegelman, a 34-year-old American ex-Goldman Sachs executive, who prances around the Chennai offices of Office Tiger, the outsourcing company that he and a partner founded, and “brags about how fabulously successful it is.” The movie presents itself less as industry expose and more like corporate propaganda for Office Tiger itself. As Anita Gates writes in her New York Times review of the film, “Executives suggest that Office Tiger’s secret is working its staff remarkably long hours, eliminating coffee and tea breaks, and instilling pride in the employees’ work by periodically telling them that they’re the best and the brightest and that this job is the gateway to a glorious financial future for them… [Office Tiger] lies somewhere between a white-collar sweatshop and a religious cult. But that may be true of a lot of corporations.” Gates goes on to note that the company relies heavily on instilling what are seen as American corporate values in their Indian employees. “The better to have them accepted and respected by American clients, the officers believe. For starters that means a 10 a.m. meeting starts at 10 a.m., not 11 a.m. or noon.” My interest in this film comes from the lacunae very much at the surface of the corporate sheen. Moments such as when a white, Jewish American management trainer lecturing the “Talent Transformation Team” tells his Indian employees that “A piece of history is taking place right now here at Office Tiger. It’s not a call center that’s content to do the simplest kind of work imaginable, make a profit and go on. No. Office Tiger is really thinking of innovative, much more efficient ways where the best and bright of India can work with the best and brightest people all over the globe. You guys are truly a part of history. Such a rapid economic development in such a short period of time, such a dramatic change of values. But I have news for you: this is actually the first hint of what’s going to happen, because this process of globalization is jut beginning, and the opportunity for people like you—ambitious, young, talented people—is just starting.” Intercutting random shots of Chennai street life with interviews, the movie also follows the English-speaking Indian employees through long hours of meeting deadlines, learning English grammar, dodging marriage proposals, and singing the praises of Office Tiger. Early on in the film, Deepak, an Operations Account Manager, declares, “I think its great to spend twenty hours a day in the office because that tells you of a great work ethic. I know I have done it in the past. I’m proud of it because that keeps me ahead in this competitive game. Because if I can spend twenty hours, you know, just being the best I can for those twenty hours, I know I’ve gained a lot of ground over all those hungry wolves around me.” The movie makes clear that these hungry wolves are not primarily other outsourcing companies but in fact Deepak’s fellow employees, all of whom are organized into client-specific teams that compete for cash bonuses by constantly upping their own productivity. The bonus is for what is called sustained operations excellence, and the African American head of human resources at Office Tiger calls this meritocracy. (A telling moment in the film is when one of the Indian managers declares that to him one of the greatest business leaders was Adolf Hitler, only to be reprimanded by his Jewish American supervisor for cultural insensitivity.)

            So what is this form of labor? Aneesh argues in Virtual Migrations that a “fundamental transformation in the nature and organization of labor is upon us. With fast data-communication links, programmers and other associated workers based in one part of the world are increasingly able to work on other locations around the globe.” Keeping this transformation in mind, let us draw out some of the key elements of this representation of Indian services outsourcing. First, we note the structured semantic slide between cultural values and capitalist value, which could be shorthanded as: the valorization of labor is part of the revaluation of culture itself. We should specify though that culture here is not merely a set of performative scripts of identity, or discursive constructs of subjectivity, but rather an assemblage of bodily, identitarian, and affective circuits: an entire ecology of sensation and sense.

Office Tiger, the movie and the business model, is careful to stage this dimension of cultural-ecological revaluation: the dichotomies of tradition vs. globalization, Indian vs. Western, familial home vs. world-office are presented again and again as continuous nodes of struggle, negotiation, and mutation. This itself would complicate the too facile argument of the dissolution of boundaries and borders in the new transnational economy; what Office Tiger makes perceptible is the bodily implication, or affective regularities that distinguish value from value, population from population. Thus, the revaluation of culture is seen as necessary to the strategies of capital accumulation. This simultaneous valorization through revaluation bleeds into all the other dimensions of outsourcing labor. For instance, the friction between the expectations of managers trained in neo-liberal meritocracy—what we might call the new abstract labor—and the affective ties of its actual employees stages this disjunction of valuation. These affective ties surface in moments of guarded sociality within the office, in subtle looks of disgust or discomfort exchanged between managers and workers, and workers and camera, in the opposition between marriage and office, in American pop music sung by male workers at office parties and in private get-togethers (“Stand by Me,” “Country Rose”). Moreover, the stark differences of status, wealth, language, and self-representation between the global services employees and the fleetingly visible populations that service them—maintenance, security, and administration staff—bubbles beneath this disjunction. The main point here for the purposes of this paper, is that Office Tiger presents itself as a corporation that provides measurable value-added services to Western firms, but these quantities are abstractions from the streams of immeasurable and immense values of immaterial and affective labor. This is the labor that inhabits, enables and exceeds the boundaries between home and office, between merit and privilege, between men and women, and between work time and leisure time. Indeed, it is the value of temporality itself (starting work on-time, the duration of the work day, the intensification of labor-time through multi-tasking: Aneesh’s “time zone warp”) that is most under attack and occupation by the pedagogies of Office Tiger, as we see in this short clip.

It will be no surprise that at the center of this transvaluation of value is the actual connectivity between work and information technology, established through an algorithm-based governance structure that Aneesh terms “algocratic.” As Upadhya remarks in her review of Aneesh’s study, the algocratic mode of governance depends on technology, especially information technology, which structures work routines and workplace behaviour: in the post-industrial economy many work tasks are now performed through computers and the symbolic manipulation of code, giving rise to new systems of control, based on the coding process. “The algocratic mode has enabled new global flows of information labour as well as control over geographically dispersed workers through constant online access and monitoring, as seen in the model of ‘distributed development’ followed by Indian software outsourcing companies.” Indeed, the digitization of information and its circulation in real time across the globe is the single most important catalyst for this transvaluation of value. For his part, Hardt notes that one “novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use. Even the most rudimentary forms of articifical intelligence allow the computer to expand and perfect operation based on interaction with its user and environment.”

            It is the value-added to valorization by information technology that brings me to a consideration of contemporary Bollywood cinema. Based on Stephen King’s “Cat’s Eye,” No Smoking has been universally panned by the critics as “pseudo-intellectual,” and almost totally rejected by national and diasporic audiences (although it will no doubt find an afterlife on Hindi satellite TV channels such as Sony and B4U). A niche movie without a niche. The plot and camera revolves obsessively around K (John Abraham), a smug, rich, egocentric chain smoker. His wife Anjali (Ayesha Takia) threatens to leave him if he does not quit smoking. K’s mysterious friend Abbas Tyrewala (Ranvir Sheorey) recommends him to a smoking cessation program at an improbably located prayogshala or “rehabilitation center” (translated as “laboratory” in the English subtitles) somewhere in a remote gulley of Dharavi. When K finally arrives after having descended level after level into what will turn out to be his own private inferno, he finds that the program has some rather extreme methods of making you quit smoking. The spiritual head of the center is one Baba Bengali (Paresh Rawal), a proud friend and admirer of the late Adolf Hitler (a Photoshopped image of the Fuhrer and the Baba hangs on his wall). The Baba forces K to sign an absolute agreement: “I hereby agree to do whatever l am asked to do in order to successfully quit smoking. I am getting into this program knowing exactly the risk my smoking will pose to me and my family. Thanks.” If K fails to follow any of the Baba’s rules his entire family will be tortured and killed one by one.

            My interest in this film has to do with its visual and aural style, and its narrative technique. Because its presentation strikes the senses as a kind of hallucination, No Smoking is a kind of movie that makes perceptible the norms of reception that form the set of habituations of contemporary cinema itself. The film concatenates various visual clichés to at times stunning and dizzying effect. For example, animated internal dialogue bubbles borrowed from comic books flash at various moments signaling what a character “really” thinks of another character or the situation; the subtle digital effects that intimate a shadow world of lost souls inhabiting reality; the overall bleach bypass cinematography giving a kind of relentless grayness to the mise-en-scene (a kind of post-industrial imagistic cliché), contrasting with the clichéd spectacle of John Abraham’s star body (specifically his sculpted chest); the blurring of reality, dream, present, past, film, TV and comic book, through various digital effects and a curiously forking narrative produces effects of disorientation and estrangement, even as the camera stabilizes these effects through the focus on Abraham’s body and character; there is also the graphic representation of dismembered limbs, sliced bodies, and asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation, stylized violence very much in the vein of Ram Gopal Varma; the various aural motifs or sound clichés that link Baba Bengali’s violence to shifts in plot and scenario .

            Both these movies pose the question of value and difference. What is the value of the new international division of services, and how does one measure that value given the radically flexible nature of profit accumulation, skilled labor, and labor management strategies in high-tech outsourcing firms?  How are cultural and familial values defined through this shift in the measure of work and profits? What forms of digital technologies add value to the sensory-motor circuits already habituated, pushing perception toward a non-representational becoming?

 

Indian guy: working 20 hours a day; Human resource manager Black; the slavery bit…office tigers never shuts down….where’s your tie? We need help crossing the street…frogger the video game…a few Saturdays will be gone…We never sleep. Be selfish…You can sell yourself like hotcakes outside. Try to understand the mentality…at the end of the day its all about money…Playing Quiet Riot…We wear ties to work because we are professionals…Indian educational system…not creative…India is in a time of transition…value of time…people will look at your shoes first…Creative problem solving…Gradually, get it English speaking…When would there be time for home…Black human resources guy was in the military…Marriage without sex…The marriage issue…Obviously woman…! Leave your personal worries…Hindu/Catholic…Customer is king…Detachment…Ganesh image…

The malevolence of this kind of capitalism…I’m alone, I’m a confirmed bachelor. Metrosexual…mud pack…the Party scenario…Singing John Denver…Action precedes Essence. Pirandello, Sartre…Existentialism…The play has become the reality…The charisma that are to become a manager…Insured…in Indian culture we have hierarchy…Be proud of our Culture…5000 years of culture…two hundred years of colonial history that has taught us to be subservient…Unified field theory…weak forces…gravity is a weak force…not apparent…triggers something deep inside you…The why technique…Why? Winning is everything…On time delivery…The story is about globalization…Wherever we can find the best talent…I want it to be sexy…Stand by me…

 

 

 

Cinema now offers architects ways of connecting remote spaces and relating them through movement, in time. This interaction can be enhanced using the Stanislavskian operative categories of ‘given action’, ‘objectives’ and ‘dramatic units’ as a frame for building narrative blocks into game to bring narrative and dramatic—and hence emotional— added value to the process of immersion. 213

The use of various affective techniques to intensify emotional resonance has become a major source of “value added” in contemporary digital media.

 

Cache uses computer-assisted conception and fabrication-systems (Cache 1995, p.88) in order to inscribe inflections on surfaces of varied curvature. In doing so, he describes the evolution of a form, and its shaping force in time. With the use of advanced geometries, time can be embodied in form—form—for example the kite—is the ‘site’ for the calculation of multiple forces. Digitally-generated environments to be inhabited by a ‘player’ raise the issue of human presence in the space-less environment of the computer. Such environments can be designated as hosts for narration, by rendering time and space through the sustainability of gameplay…. the fusion of the digital and the physical, from which emerges the embodiment of a personal space, developed by the synergy of digital worlds in physical spaces.

 214

My thoughts here focus on trying to make a connection between the synergy of digital worlds in physical space as a key component of value added business services and the visual style and narrative technique of No Smoking. The question remains what are the kinds of affects mobilized in value added outsourcing, value added digital compositing, and the addictions of globalization. … inscribe inflections on surfaces of varied curvature…this seems to me the very description of algocratic control technologies …

 

This supports the development of the relationship between movie time; the duration of the movie; visiting time, the duration of the visit; and the time-image of the narrative. It is important to emphasise that the interactive presentation of audiovisual narrative presupposes a subjective (and in that sense Bergsonian) perception of narrative cues, making the time of exploration of the installation a personal time-image, thus necessarily a personal time-narrative. 215

This is very important: based in the interactivity of new media, the durations embedded within each other become a form of subjectivation. But the question here is does the digitally composited image in contemporary dominant cinema participate in this interactivity—in what way?—and does the perception of narrative cues then qualitatively shift?

 

The generation of an adaptable structural system is the third step. The components of the generated shape will be analysed according to a parametrically- described structural system (more information on the parametric design concept can be found on http://www.smartgeometry.org). The power of such a tactic lies in its ability to allow for the reconfiguration of the design at any point, so that the computer can

re-calculate all the parameters on-the-fly, and update the design automatically, every time the architect changes any of the input values. These values will be changed in response to the way visitors use the exhibition space. The designer can experiment with different spatial configurations, without the need for re-producing the blueprints for the construction. 218

 

The unified workflow enabled by computational design provides the designer with a production-process for the rapid manufacturing of component-based structures. In House of Affects, a process has to be set up which offers a high level of flexibility, so that the design adapts procedurally to multiple criteria, connected parametrically to the structural performance of the system—such as direction of vision, and angles of projection. The product of the design-process will be a cardboard construction, accommodating several compartments that provoke feelings of enclosedeness in the visitor. 218

 

The establishment of this new method for the digital design and manipulation of a spatial construction—instantiated in the prototype installation House of Affects—which allows for flexibility in the production of a series of mutations in the configuration of narrational space, will test and explore the multiple variables of generating a systemic situation. Such a system is designed to allow for an affective conveying of drama, and a sense of narrative immersion, which actively facilitate not only the identification of player (visitor) with character (invisible Stephen), but also cues enactments, permitting the player to use physical

exploration to fully engage with an emotionally-charged audiovisual environment. 218

 

The objective of the House of Affects project, as far as the generation of space is concerned, is to develop a unified workflow for digital design and fabrication, which allows for flexibility in the production of a series of mutants, for a proposed configuration of the space, in accordance with the requirements of a project—the generation of a system of re-configurable structures that adapt to different exhibition spaces, as epiphytes do in nature. (An epiphyte is any plant which grows upon another living organism. Epiphytes are

not parasitic upon their hosts, but derive only physical support from them.) 218-19

 

 

 

Giorgos Artopoulos and Eduardo Condorcet, House of Affects—time, immersion and play in digital design for spatially experienced interactive narrative Digital Creativity 2006, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 213–220

 

 

 

Well Business Process Outsourcing includes all sorts of operations, from telemarketing & client servicing (call centres) to IT and all sorts of back-office operations, medical transcription, image & text editing, internet-based market research, statistical & financial data processing, and so on. Basically almost any process that does not involve decision-making or does not require face-to-face interaction with the client can be outsourced.

 

I also work in this outsourcing market, but as a freelancer, over the Internet. There are several websites mediating between buyers and service providers, and there are thousands of Indians who work this way for western clients, on various projects. The buyers can be individuals, but often smaller companies. This is the underground BPO market, and many freelancers here do it apart from their regular jobs.

 

Whatyiam, from my experience in the freelancing market I can very well understand how terribly frustrating it can get for western freelancers when the Indian comes and bids to do the project at for 2-3$/hour and wins it. People from developing countries (India, Pakistan, Russia, Eastern Europe) flock to bid at ridiculously low rates and sort of “spoil” the market for western freelancers, who find it difficult to win projects at decent rates.

 

Outsourcing:

 

IT Outsourcing:

IT Support

Software development

 

Knowledge Process Outsourcing:

Financial Analytics

Equity Research

Market Analytics

Statistical Data Analytics

Creative Services (Designing, Artwork, graphics, animationetc)

Offshore Engineering and Design

Writing and Content Development

 

 

 

BPO:

Documentation and desk-top publishing(or Pre-media)

Insurance process

Financial Accounting Process

Legal Process

Taxation process

Loan and credit processing

Sales processing

Banking process

 

 

 

Call Center:

Voice Outbound

Voice Inbound

Helpdesk

 

But then that’s the part of occupational diseases one get in any outsourced job. The Indian “speech neutralization specialists” has a put pet name for it – MTI (mother tongue influence!)

 

Back and forth sparked by “Office Tigers” on an Indian travel forum, IndiaMike.com, Dec. 2006. Accessed 10-1-08.

 

 

 

The analysis of sensation in Indian media criticism remains by and large Kantian in that the processual nature of sense perception is necessarily subordinated to the spatialization of representation. In what way does Immanuel Kant’s analysis of sensation and judgment continue to dominate the understanding of the communicability of intuition, or sense perception? He writes in the Critique of Judgment that the “way of presenting [which occurs] in a judgment of taste is to have subjective universal communicability without presupposing a determinate concept; hence this subjective universal communicability can be nothing but [that of] the mental state in which we are when imagination and understanding are in free play (insofar as they harmonize with each other as required in cognition in general)” (Book I; 9; pp 512-13). For Kant, on the one hand, the ideal of beauty does not rest in concepts (which would make it the good) or desire (which would be mere agreeableness), but on a given exhibition, “and the power of exhibition is the imagination” (Book I; 17; 517). It is the indeterminate communicability of beauty that forms the very basis not only for taste, but for moral life itself.  On the other hand, by “sensation” Kant declares that he will mean “an objective representation of sense” (45:12); and he will reserve the term “feeling” (“Gefuhl”) for the “subjective” hedonic tone (what it feels like to have the pleasure). He will speak only of the “feeling,” not of the “sensation” of pleasure. Sensation is thus a matter of perceptual representation; sensations have representational or intentional content. As an example of what he has in mind, Kant gives “the green color of a meadow” (45:16).[i]

 

I will argue in this paper that the communicability of beauty in the representation of sensation is in fact predicated on the ambivalent abjection of sensation itself, or the non-signifying perceptual capacities of the body, and that this abjection is the modality for the elaboration of a biopower of media assemblages. To recall the Natyasastra, such an analysis would follow the bhava of media: the quality, mood, manner, and price of the circulation of energy and matter through media circuits. This biopower of contemporary global media is felt through the exhibition values (Benjamin, S. Hughes) that accrue with the pirated or copyrighted circulation of information through ecologies of digital media and habituated populations. This value is, as Antonio Negri puts it, both immeasurable and immense, infinite but susceptible to control.

 

I. Ittafaq and Memory

I will present this argument by elaborating on two sound/image streams or sensorimotor circuits that have come to dominance in the past ten years in popular Hindi cinema. The first is what I have called the Ittafaq-image. In Untimely Bollywood, I argue that the term Ittafaq, a word whose semantic range includes Accordance, Accident, Agreement, Concord, Chance, Event, Opportunity, has been and continues to be the order word governing the intimate passage from narrative anticipation to song/dance movement and back. Think of the field of emergence for the Ittafaq-image: what does such an image do to articulated sets of relations, singularities, events? The Ittafaq-image relates specific vectors or basins of attraction that energize the suspenseful transition of the body from chance dialogue to anticipated song. From at least the 1950s on, this passage has been seen as the advent and necessary mastery of chance. Indeed, as Peter Brooks pointed out long ago, part of what melodrama does as a technology of subjection is tame chance through the narrativization of coincidence.[ii] Both Vasudevan and Niyogi De note that this is one of the legacies of the translation of the cultural form into popular cinema in India.[iii] 

            I believe that a decisive aspect of what we are witnessing today is the rapid dissolution of the empire of signs, gestures, habituations, spatiotemporalities, and generic codes that governed this passage into and mastery of chance: the Ittafaq-image’s new dispensation. The Ittafaq-image names a passage from a romantic dialectic of Accident-Concord to the proliferation and capture of chance as non-actualized event, as a value-producing pure potentiality to affect and be affected. In short, a new quotidian practice of the Ittafaq-image is coming into being in the contagious becomings of a body which, on the one hand, orients practice toward a non-calculable, always emerging, even non-insurable future, and, on the other, a body overcoded through the probabilistic apparatus of population statistics. I argue that a number of correlated developments have led to a qualitatively new Ittafaq-image in contemporary Hindi-Urdu cinema, and the social practices assembled with media multiplicity. Of signal importance has been the explosion of DJ culture and the specific rhythms and intensities of the audio-visual database as a cultural form in India. The very practice of sampling and harmonizing chance resonances across audio tracks in DJ practice gives Ittafaq a new contagious capacity by linking chance to an ontology of media intervals: patterned but unpredictable. More, the displacement of the bazaar-Talkie by the malltiplex is also correlated with this emergence of new population-segmentations, risk-experiences and chance-subjects, given that the malltiplex is the new arcades where the chance encounter harmonizes with populations of encounters unfolding their own regularity and their own singular creativity (loitering media, clinamedia). Finally, the emergence of the jump cut[iv]–understood as a cut in time and space[v]—in the visual style of certain commercial film genres (see below for examples) has refunctioned narrative in terms of what Gary Saul Morson has called the open time of narrativeness. These vectors of change assemble in the medium of the digital, their interactions synchronized but swerving toward a new experience of Ittafaq. It is here in this emergent timespace, where the regime of human security transforms and orders disparate practices of work, pleasure, and life, that the potentializing of kismat and Ittafaq becomes a matter of sexuality understood as an ecology of sensation. All this suggests that at the level of sensorimotor schema (the diagram of connectivity to historically specific ecologies of sensation) a dissociated body accelerating with the dynamic functionality of a globalizing media assemblage has transformed the mode of address of frontal iconicity so long characteristic of commercial Indian cinema.

 

But this transformation of harmony/chance has catalyzed and feedback looped with another shift, that of the memory-image, or perhaps better the nostalgia-image. Together these two image streams constitute what is a bodily shift in an entire ecology of sensation as temporality is reappropriated in the value-generating flows of the contemporary media assemblage.

 

II. Rasa and Contemporary Cinema

In one sense, the Natyasastra is a taxonomy for dramatic postures. As Phillip Lutgendorf notes, a treatise in thirty-six chapters, the Natyasastra purports to describe the origin and development of drama as well as to treat comprehensively of virtually every aspect of the composition and staging of plays. It details very carefully the various poses and postures linked to this or that emotion. (234) But Bharatmuni also points out that there is no limit to the bhava, and thus no end to the arts involved. (Keep in mind the broad semantic range of bhava: being, existence, quality, way, manner, intention, purpose, meaning, mind, heart, soul, emotion, feeling, inclination, notion, idea, expression, mood, price, rate of exchange. [OHED]) Rasa is a process of producing sensation and pleasure through specific techniques that activate a circuit of information at the “mucosal surfaces of the body”:[vi] the mouth, or better said, the snout-to-belly-to-bowel—the route through the body managed by the enteric nervous system, as Richard Schechner has it (“Rasaesthetics” 27). “The snout-to-belly-to-bowel is the ‘where’ of taste, digestion, and excretion. The performance of the snout-to-belly-to-bowel is an ongoing interlinked muscular, cellular, and neurological process of testing-tasting, separating nourishment from waste, distributing nourishment throughout the body, and eliminating waste. The snout-to-belly-to-bowel is the where of intimacy, sharing of bodily substances, mixing the inside and the outside, emotional experiences, and gut feelings. A good meal with good company is a pleasure; so is foreplay and lovemaking; so is a good shit” (27).[vii]

 

For Schechner, rasa is “the sensation one gets when food is perceived, brought within reach, touched, taken into the mouth, chewed, mixed, savored, and swallowed. The eyes and ears perceive the food on its way—the presentation of the dishes, the sizzling. At the same time, or very shortly after, the nose gets involved. The mouth waters in anticipation. Smell and taste dissolve into each other” (29). Schechner’s rasaesthetics connects up well with the current research on synaesthesia. In a recent article in the journal Nature, Julia Simner and Jamie Ward conclude from their research on lexical-gustatory synaesthetes that the circuit of linguistic thought and sensory perception may well form a continuous, qualitiative multiplicity in all of us to a great or lesser degree.[viii]

 

Comparing rasa—which literally means juice, but perhaps better translates in aesthetic terms to mood—with cooking, Bharatmuni declares that rasa is the final feeling of the spectators who have experienced the various emotions (55). Linking this experience of rasa to the connoisseurs of taste, Bharatmuni, like Plato and Aristotle, ties sensation and pleasure to a pedagogy of the self: “the intelligent, healthy persons enjoy various Sthayi related to the acting of emotions” (55). But there are many aspects of rasa that differentiate it from Platonic or Aristotelian aesthetics. The circuit of stimulus (vibhava), involuntary reaction (anubhava), and voluntary reaction (Vyabhicari bhava) culminates in Sthayi-bhava.[ix]

 

Adapting this perspective for a media assemblage approach, we could say that rasa is an emergent property of the assemblage of body and a given media. I do not think that the theory of rasa requires a taxonomy of gesture. Because the synaesthetic diagrams of gesture-color-sound and the circuits of sensation produced through each map or diagram would be historically specific (arbitrary) given the particular media ecology it is embedded in (which would mean that a rigorous taxonomy would certainly have a crucial role in pragmatically deploying such a diagram). The combination of gesture (movement), design, and voice-music in theatre has a different set of capacities then that produced in narrative cinema. So the connection between gorgeous costumes and the Sthayi bhava of rati (love) is arbitrary—culturally specific, to an extent (although one could I imagine make a case for the transcultural effect of the color red). Compare Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) or Kashyap’s No Smoking (2007) to In Bruges (2008). In Bruges is a visually breathtaking film in moments, but in a way that is aesthetically but not perceptually different from Devdas; that is by and large the codes of narrative are the same. They both have rasas which differ (hope-death vs. love-addiction), but the difference is involved in the intensive processes of stimulus-response while drawing on a shared set of habituations of sensation and pleasure.

 

Stephen Prince’s response to “cinema language” analyses takes issue with the reduction of filmic perception to “a series of relational differences among arbitrary signs” (“The Discourse of Pictures” 102). Using a cognitive and indeed positivistic approach, Prince argues that pictorial signs bear “clear structural similarities” to their referents. For Prince what is displaced in the arbitrary-relational signifier models are “issues of how cinema is able to communicate crossculturally (i.e. attain global popularity) and the even more basic questions of what makes the cinema intelligible to its viewers” (103). According to Prince, all cultures studies today demonstrate “clear pictorial and cinematic perception abilities” (103). Specifically, in regard to rasa and my argument above, Prince notes that researches have argued that some gestural expressions—those on the face, for example—may function as biologically based pancultural signals for emotion. Thus, the power and appeal of the movies lies in film’s ability to capture the subtleties and nuances of socially resonant streams of kinesic expressions, and not just to passively capture them but, via close-ups and other expressive devices, to intensify and emphasize the most salient cues for the viewer’s understanding in cognitive and affective terms of the meaning of the scenes depicted on screen (101). According to Prince, “The empirical evidence clearly [emphasis mine] suggests that pictorial identification skills do not develop from an extended period of exposure to signification and consequent learning, as do language skills, and that this is probably due to the fact that most realistic pictures are isomorphic with corresponding real world visual displays, unlike symbolic signs, which have a more arbitrary relationship to what they represent” (102). This power of cinema is based on the “clear source” of iconic meaning in motion pictures. 

 

Whence such clarity? Of course, it is ironically the relational differences among arbitrary signs that complicates any obvious clarity, if only in the presentation, in the cognizing of a given image-stream, in its associational and syntagmatic flows. If difference is at the heart of the sign—and this is the implication of both Saussure’s binary sign (he by and large excludes the referent from analysis, and certainly subsequent Saussurean-derived methods are troublingly binaristic, even when Derrida’s notion of force/context displacement is taken seriously) and Pierce’s triadic sign, then its analysis must be a method of a difference that “makes a difference.” As for the later, in “What is a Sign?” Pierce makes clear that a photograph can be both an icon and an indication, and we may add that under a variety of contexts can also be a symbol. (Likenesses or icons serve to convey ideas of the things they represent simply by imitating them; indices show something about things, being physically connected with them—“Such is a guidepost, which points down the road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed just after the name of the thing intended to be denoted, or a vocative exclamation, as “Hi! There,” which acts upon the nerves of the person addressed and forces his attention” (5); and lastly there are symbols which have become associated with their meanings through usage, or in other words, through convention.) The point here is that before meaning is understood either through its symbolic (arbitrary and conventional) sense, or what Bharatmuni calls vyabhicari bhava, or through its analogical iconic/indexical connectivity, it is pure connectivity first and most crucially. A specific stimulus of energy-in-mater, an interval of connectivity, and it is that durational connectivity where both measurable value and its outside are located.

 

What is important in the intensive processes of perception, in their durations that form resonant unities, is that they return the body at each moment to the non-place of potentiality (the virtual) from which it is actualized. This non-place of potentiality is outside of all measure and yet susceptible to control. This is why the clarity of the iconic meaning is rather less important then the mechanisms of capture and pre-emption involved in the production of specific sets of habituations.

 

This difference has to do with the embedded timescales of their production, from micro-durations in specific regimes of passage (spacetimes of sensation) to population-specific becomings that form over centuries or millennia. So what remains transcultural is the connection between sets of stimuli and particular habituations. Finally, the critical legacy of most importance in rasa theory is the intimation that the body, the embodied mind is itself embedded in and mutates through circuits of sensation and pleasure. In the spirit of both Benjamin and Derrida, we may say that the aim of a non-fascist aesthetics, an aesthetics of monstrosity, would be to open representation to this non-representational becoming.

 

Recently, Phillip Lutgendorf has elaborated a rasa-based interpretation of Hindi films, noting that “discussions of the conventions of Indian popular cinema in terms of those of premodern performance genres often invoke ancient Sanskrit drama and its authoritative treatise, the Natyasastra, yet they seldom offer detailed information about this text.” Lutgendorf notes that the NS is a key moment in the Indian tradition of thinking about performance, and its relevance for film theory potentially goes beyond the stylistic similarities that link the theater it describes with the latest Hindi or Tamil melodrama.[x]

 

 

This format of alternately spoken and sung performance, which gave great emphasis to poetic and musical expression of emotion, survived the demise of Sanskrit drama toward the end of the first millennium CE and became characteristic of a range of regional folk dramatic forms using vernacular languages; it was transferred to the urban proscenium stage by the (mainly Hindi/Urdu language) “Parsi theatre” troupes of the nineteenth century. It also became, after the introduction of film sound to India in 1931, the standard format for commercial cinema. Just as, in Sanskrit and most regional languages, there was no word for “play” that did not imply “music-and-dance drama,” so Indian-English “film” normally means one incorporating songs and dances, and there has never been a separate genre category of “musical” in the Hollywood sense. The specialized skills of lyricists and composers are highly valued within the industry and among its fans, and their names are likely to appear on posters and billboards as a way of promoting a film (stars’ names seldom appear, since their faces instantly identify them). Since the 1970s, dialog writers have sometimes received equally high billing, and the scripts of many popular films have been published in booklet or audiocassette form. (235)

 

Like the Greek philosophers, ancient Indian thinkers were interested in why people enjoy theater and in what they “get” from it; specifically, in why they derive pleasure from seeing things on stage that would not be pleasurable in everyday life. Whereas Aristotle posited katharsis, a purgation or cleansing, the authors of the Nå†yaçåstra and their successors favored a more complex explanation. In their view, primary and individualized human emotions (bhåva) generated by the multifarious experiences of life are transmuted, through their representation by actors in a dramatic spectacle, into universalized emotional “flavors” (rasa) that may be savored by audience members at the safe remove that theater provides (Masson and Patwardhan 1970, 1: 24). The complexity of the theory arises in part from the elucidation of the primary emotions, which comprise love, mirth, anger, pity, heroic vigor, wonder, disgust, and terror—these eight become sixteen, since each bhåva induces a corresponding rasa, which then proliferate geometrically into further subcategories (for example, Nå†yaçåstra 7.6–8; Rangacharya 1996: 65). What is most notable for my purpose is the assumption that, although a given performance will have a predominant rasa (thus a farce will be dominated by håsya rasa, or the comic flavor, and a martial saga by v􀀝rya rasa, or the heroic), it is expected to offer a range of others as well. The imagery used is somatic and in fact gustatory, locating aesthetic pleasure in the body as much as in the mind; thus the text asserts that a drama’s rasa may be likened to the taste produced “when various condiments and sauces and herbs and other materials are mixed” (Nå†yaçåstra 6.31–33; Rangacharya 1996: 55). Further, it is understood that rasas are fleeting and may be enjoyed serially; a successful performance is thus akin to a well-designed banquet or smorgasbord, serving up rasa after rasa for spectators to savor. 237

 

The pace and style as well as the self-assertive ethos of these “action-adventure” tales, which are characterized by abrupt plot turns and mood shifts, dramatic reunions and recognitions, and lyrical interludes set in demidivine or magical realms, are indeed suggestive of masålå films 244

 

 

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[i] See Nick Zangwill, “Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 53, No. 2. (Spring, 1995), pp. 167-176, 168.

[ii] See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

[iii] See Niyogi De, Esha, “Modern Shakespeare in popular Bombay cinema: translation, subjectivity and community.” Screen, 43(1), 2002, 19-40; Ravi S. Vasudevan, “Addressing the spectator of the ‘third world’ national cinema: the Bombay ‘social’ film of the 1940s and 1950s,” Screen, 36(4), 1995, 305-324.

[iv] jump cut: “In film, radical transition between two camera shots. Jump cuts will cause viewer disorientation and are sometimes used deliberately to create that effect. Howe ver, they are usually accidents that happen as a result of such factors as an extreme change in subject, size, camera angle, screen direction or position, or a camera shift from moving action to a stationary shot. If a jump cut happens too often, the viewer may become irritated and lose interest in the action on the screen” (Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/topic/jump-cut?cat=biz-fin, accessed Oct. 1, 2008).

[v] It is in fact the more subtle cuts in space that give duration to the Ittafaq-image; that is, the sense of an event still expanding, not exhausted is communicated in a certain continuity of spatial markers from one shot to the next, a compressed interval. This is best brought out in the scene of confrontation in Veer Zara: Mariam Hayaat Khan (Kirron Kher) confronts Veer Pratap Singh (Khan) and we shift to the balcony after the play of fearful gazes.

[vi] “The mucosal surfaces of the body are the regions where individuals and the environment meet. For example, the gut mucosa is in continuous contact with food antigens, the enteric commensal bacteria that constitute the gut flora, and potential pathogens that enter the host through the intestine. The gut epithelium and its mucous layer form a major barrier, trapping invading pathogens, which are then eliminated when the gut epithelium is shed. Maintaining the integrity of gut epithelium as well as ensuring its continuous turnover are essential for local defense.” Florence Lambolez and Benedita Rocha, “A molecular gut reaction,” Science 294.5548, Nov 30, 2001, 1848.

[vii] Schechner continues: “Rasa also means ‘juice,’ the stuff that conveys the flavor, the medium of tasting. The juices of eating originate both in the food and from the body. Saliva not only moistens food, it distributes flavors. Rasa is sensuous, proximate, experiential. Rasa is aromatic. Rasa fills space, joining the outside to the inside. Food is actively taken into the body, becomes part of the body, works from the inside. What was outside is transformed into what is inside. An aesthetic founded on rasa is fundamentally different than one founded on the ‘theatron,’ the rationally ordered, analytically distanced panoptic” (29).

[viii] Synaesthesia is a rare familial condition involving a ‘crossing’ of the senses — for example, ordinary activities such as reading or listening to music may be perceived with different colours or tastes1. Here we show that individuals who experience synaesthetic tastes that are elicited by words (who are known as lexical−gustatory synaesthetes) begin to taste an upcoming word before they can actually say it (that is, while it is still ‘on the tip of the tongue’). Taste sensations in these synaesthetes are therefore triggered by thinking of the word’s meaning, rather than by its sound or spelling. It is possible that conceptual thought may even be linked to perceptual experience in all of us….These pathways may operate in everyone, but be exceptionally active in synaesthetes: other variants of synaesthesia (tone−colour, for example) are known to rely on universal cognitive mechanisms, and functional magnetic resonance imaging indicates that merely imagining a taste can activate the area of the normal brain associated with taste. Lexical−gustatory synaesthesia may therefore represent an exaggeration of normal mechanisms that link linguistic thought and sensory perception.” Simner, Julia and Jamie Ward, “Synaesthesia: The taste of words on the tip of the tongue,” Nature, 11/23/2006, 444: 7118, 438.

[ix] Never the other way around according to Bharatmuni—although one could think about the way a rasa in turn, in a feedbacked connection, becomes its own stimulus, and under what conditions would that stimulus lead to a new rasa, or would become an arrest of sensation, a capture of it, a habit. As Schechner glosses it: “The Sanskrit word translated as “connoisseur” is bhakta, which can also mean a person ecstatically devoted to a god, particularly Krishna who is celebrated by means of singing, dancing, and feasting. The sthayi bhavas are the “permanent” or “abiding” or indwelling emotions that are accessed and evoked by good acting, called abhinaya. Rasa is experiencing the sthayi bhavas. To put it another way, the sweetness “in” a ripe plum is its sthayi bhava, the experience of “tasting the sweet” is rasa. The means of getting the taste across—preparing it, presenting it—is abhinaya. Every emotion is a sthayi bhava. Acting is the art of presenting the sthayi bhavas so that both the performer and the partaker can “taste” the emotion, the rasa” (31).

[x] Phillip Lutgendorf, “Is there an Indian way of Filmmaking?” International Journal of Hindu Studies 10, 3 (2006): 227–56, 234. 

 

DO READING OF: http://passionforcinema.com/against-‘no’-to-smoking/

 

III. The Value of Affect

What is this non-representational becoming other than a pragmatic affirmation of what Antonio Negri defines as affect? “Affect can be considered…as a power to act that is singular and universal. It is singular because it poses action beyond every measure that power does not contain in itself, in its own structure, and in the continuous restructurings that it constructs. It is universal because the affects construct a commonality among subjects” (“Value and Affect” 85). Affect as the capacity to act is the name of a desire. Second, affect is the power to transform the universal into the singular and the singular into the universal. This circuit has an expansive dynamic that has no limits (it is thus free, ontologically open, and omnilaterally diffuse [86]), only obstacles (that is susceptible to control mechanisms and algorithms). But that each obstacle overcome adds to its ontological power; the “conditions of action and transformation are from time to time appropriated and go toward enriching the power of action and transformation” (85-6). Negri concludes thus: “Since value is outside of every measure (outside of both the ‘natural’ measure of use-value and monetary measure), the political economy of postmodernity looks for it in other terrains: the terrain of the conventions of mercantile exchange and the terrain of communicative relations. Conventions of the market and communicative exchanges would thus be the place where the productive nexuses (and thus the affective flows) are established—outside of measure, certainly, but susceptible to biopolitical control” (86). Our diagrams have to aspire to the non-dialectical nature of this control in order to short circuit the connection between the diagram and control itself, and loop it into affective flows of a revolutionary nature. “…the standpoint of the oppressed that constructs insurrection and imagines a revolutionary reconstruction, a standpoint from below that richly constructs a non-place of revolutionary reality” (88).

 

As Erik Empson in “The social form of value and measure,” notes, “Arguably one of the things that changes in Negri’s conception is that “private” labour is no longer an adequate first term of the problem. The sociality of activity, the priority of the social, is more clearly the premise of our activity, i.e. our activity presupposes the whole activity of social networks of reproduction, and the new immaterial form of labour. The problem is no longer the alienation of the direct producer of value. We could, to play with the Hegelian mutual transformations of quantity and quality, say that the socialization of labour, has created a new qualitative dimension, posited a change in the essence of accumulation. Their question is really; how does the full interiorisation of labour under capital, total subsumption, redefine the operative dimensions of the law of value? For them “The first and fundamental consequence is that there is no possibility of anchoring a theory of measure on something extraneous to the universality of exchange” (2^nd thesis on Marx). Well quite so, but that is – as we have shown – exactly Marx’s point in the definition of the ‘immanent standard’” (http://www.generation-online.org).

 

The new mode of production considered by Negri, with communication and mobility as its essence, deconstructs and articulates subjectivity in the same breath. The domination of the law of value, is in the same breath, its deconstruction, because value is only ever an effect of the enactment of creative productive energy (the immanent basis of communism). There is no political moment in this venture, because the process is political from start to finish:

“In the orthodox Marxism of the 19th century, and in any case before 1968, the functions of destruction and reconstruction were separated from the act of insurrection. The immediate strategy of struggle had to articulate destabilization and destructuration, moments of a war of movement and a war of position.” (Thesis 7)

 

IV. Conclusion:

NOTES

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I am drawing on Michael Hardt’s definition of immaterial labor as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication” (Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2, 26:2, 1999, 89-100, 94). Later he notes that this “labor is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion—even a sense of connectedness or community…Such affective production, exchange, and communication is generally associated with human contact, with the actual presence of another, but that contact can be either actual or virtual” (96).

Jonathan Rowe, “Reach Out And Annoy Someone,” Washingtonmonthly.com, Nov. 2000, accessed 10-1-08.

See Linck, Matthew S. (2008) ‘Deleuze’s Difference’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies,16:4,509 — 532, 509-10. “…for Deleuze ontology need not be done in accordance with the dominant strains of the tradition and that, therefore, it need not be constrained by the limitations of that tradition (as Heidegger and Derrida would have it). Rather, given the creation and deployment of new concepts, some to be built upon concepts from the history of philosophy, ontology can still be pursued unhesitatingly. For Deleuze the problem is not that we have come to the end of the epoch of ontology; rather, true ontology is only now beginning to be done. Ontology is yet to come.” (530)

Sandro Mezzadra, “Taking Care: Migration and the

Political Economy of Affective Labor,” http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/mezzadra_taking_care.pdf, accessed October 13, 2008.

Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” boundary 2, 26:2, 1999, 89-100, 89-90.

Hardt, “Affective Labor” 91.

Anita Gates, “Helping U.S. Companies Export White-Collar Jobs,” NYTimes.com, Dec. 26, 2006, accessed 10-1-08.

Anita Gates, “Helping U.S. Companies Export White-Collar Jobs,” NYTimes.com, Dec. 26, 2006, accessed 10-1-08.

Anita Gates, “Helping U.S. Companies Export White-Collar Jobs,” NYTimes.com, Dec. 26, 2006, accessed Oct. 1, 2008.

This view is shared by many other analysts of the Indian service economy. For instance, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a global financial consultancy firm “which seeks to promote responsible global citizenship by advancing universal values in business operations around the world,” published a report in 2005 that made India’s rise to global prominence firmly a question of the new service economy: “By contrast, a large proportion of India’s growth comes from high technology processes requiring skilled labor, in which exports of services have played a key role. This growth pattern has resulted in services becoming the largest compo­nent of the Indian economy—contribut­ing 51 percent of GDP—making India’s situation unique in the developing world.

How did India achieve such atypical, yet dramatic success with a service-driven economy? In simple terms, it had enough of the right ingredients to make it the right environment at the right time to do so. Those ingredients—changes that eased its regulatory environment, an available supply of skilled workers who, very importantly, spoke fluent English, and the minimum physical infrastruc­ture—have helped India become an out­sourcing destination of choice for many global technology services companies since the mid-1990s” (“India: Linking into the global services economy,” deloitte.com, accessed October 13, 2008).

Aneesh Aneesh, Virtual Migration: Indian Programmers in the U.S. Based Information Industry, Dissertation, (Rutgers University, 2001) 1.

This would be the beginnings of a critique of Aneesh’s framing in my view (although he does acknowledge the importance of borders and the physical violence that constitutes securing it—see Virtual Migrations 8).

In a review of Virtual Migrations: The Programming of Globalization, Carol Upadhya highlights A. Aneesh’s description of two contrasting systems of Indian software labour deployment—bodyshopping and virtual migration. “Although there is some ethnographic description of the transnational experiences of Indian software workers that place them in an unsettled, interstitial space, the experiences of offshore software workers remain unaddressed. Instead, he focuses on the systems of control that have emerged to govern dispersed IT labour. He argues that virtual software labour migration is characterised by spatial integration (in which work is delinked from the work site) and temporal integration (in which workers in different time zones are linked together), and that this has led to the emergence of a new ‘governance scheme’ and organisational structures. The former are labelled as ‘algocratic’ or in accordance with the rule of algorithm, as distinct from the earlier governance schemes of bureaucratic and panoptical dominance” (Carol Upadhya, Review of Virtual Migrations, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, 42:2, 2008, 344-347, 345).  Upadhya expresses some skepticism of the extension of code to various forms of globalization in India, noting, “I am suspicious of the extension of the metaphors of ‘code’ and ‘programming’ to such a wide range of phenomena and processes: while he is attempting to provide a fresh formulation to describe these forms, the excessive use of these terms may appear more clever than insightful” (346). In what sense is code not a metaphor? Here we would insist that code is the very ontology of social relatedness, the form of value itself, in such IT labor. Negri defines immaterial labor and explicates its implications thus: “Today we face a tendency towards the hegemony of immaterial work (intellectual, scientific, cognitive, relational, communicative, affective, etc.) increasingly characterizing both the mode of production and processes of valorization. It goes without saying that this form of work is entirely subordinate to new modes of accumulation and exploitation. We can no longer interpret these according to the time employed in production. Cognitive work is not measurable in those terms; it is even characterized by its immensurability, its excess. A productive relation links cognitive work to the time of life. It is nourished by life as much as it modifies it in return, and its products are those of freedom and imagination. This creativity is precisely the excess that characterizes it” (Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, Noura Wedell, trans., [Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008] 20).

Aneesh, Virtual Migration 2.

Upadhya 345.

“Rather than the politicization of real abstraction that Virno gleans from the supposed collapse of labor qua measure, Cillario sees the current figure of real abstraction as centering on the proliferation and production of new procedures, of codes of production, of transmissible ‘hows’ rather than measurable ‘whats’. The organizational codifications of the processes in which incommensurate use values are produced becomes central, but the locus of abstraction becomes not labor per se, or commodity-exchange, but the role of cognition within the laboring process. Even if procedures themselves are then subjected to the standards of exchange (i.e., they in turn become products), their centrality to a capitalism that more and more takes the figure of ‘flexible accumulation’ marks a mutation in the character of real abstraction. As Cillario writes, ‘‘The incessant impetus aimed at the change in the methods and procedures of laboring activities is the generative nucleus of the abstractive process of knowledge’’ (1990, 168 /9). The centrality of procedures also means that, in a way that is not necessarily pregnant with emancipatory possibilities, reflexivity is at the heart of contemporary capitalism. That is, it is not just the abstraction of capital’s forms, but its colonization of cognition, that is crucial to an understanding of the present. ‘‘The concept of abstraction which is adequate to the phase in which knowledge becomes capital stems from the reflexive character of the process of social labor’’ (Cillario 1990, 168; 1996, 52)” (Toscano, Alberto, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism, 20:2 (2008), 273—287).

Hardt 94.

Praveen Lance Fernandes, “No Smoking,” Oct. 26, 2007, movies.indiatimes.com. Accessed Oct. 1, 2008. “No Smoking was one of the biggest disasters of the year & has made only 1.93 crore in its puny 3-week run that began with 1.73 crore,” “A ‘Wonderful’ Exclusive: 2007 Year-End Box-Office Analysis Report – India ~ Actresses,” bwtorrents.com, 12-14-2007. Accessed Oct. 1, 2008.  

“John Abraham resumes smoking for a role in the film ‘No Smoking,’” Bollywoodmantra.com, Nov. 21, 2006. Accessed Oct. 1, 2008.

As is well known, bleach bypass, also known as skip bleach, involves either the partial or complete skipping of the bleaching function during the processing of film negative. Bypassing the bleaching step allows silver as well as the color dyes to be retained in the image. The result is a black and white image over a color image. The images usually would have reduced saturation and latitude, along with increased contrast and graininess. It usually is used to maximal effect in conjunction with a one-stop underexposure. “For the skip bleach look, Cameron used a combination of between 50 and 100 percent bleach bypass, along with pulling the exposure one to two stops, depending on the scene. ‘If something was extremely contrasty, I might only skip bleach it 50 percent and pull it 1.5 stops to reduce the contrast a little bit,’ he explains. Company 3’s Stefan Sonnenfeld and Shane Harris then returned equal amounts of red, green and blue to the image during post. ‘It’s almost like a three-strip Technicolor look, similar to what Robert Richardson used in [portions of] The Aviator,’ says Cameron. ‘Because, effectively, when you skip bleach, you’re adding a black and white image on top of the color image. Then, when you put light through it, you’re effectively getting a desaturated image. I wanted to add back in the red, green and blue to give it almost a combination of skip bleach and Technicolor look.’ Sonnenfeld delivered digital dailies to Scott and Cameron on the set with that look roughed in so the pair got a sense of how the look would appear for any given scene. Bleach bypass can be done at any step in the photochemical development process-to the original camera negative, interpositive, internegative or release print-though the result is slightly different at each stage. The process is generally applied at the internegative stage. For Deja Vu, the bleach bypass was applied to the camera negative, not in printing, something studios usually wish to avoid. ‘Thankfully, I was able to get Tony and [producer] Jerry [Bruckheimer] to go for it. It really gives the film an interesting look’” (Matt Hurwitz, “Tony Scott’s Production: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again,” Digital Cinematography, 110, October 2006, 13).

The kind of digital experience that is said to “add value” to cinema can be discerned in this comment: “’Because of the unique geometry of our theaters, that means Beowulf in IMAX 3D will be experienced right at the bridge of your nose,’ explains Greg Foster, chairman and president of IMAX Filmed Entertainment. ‘Since the IMAX 3D DMR process lets us change the perceived camera angles, in certain sequences we have enhanced the 3D view to better take advantage of the IMAX 3D presentation. People looking at an IMAX 3D film are constantly grabbing, ducking and having an “I am in the middle of it” experience’” (Jay Ankeney, “An ancient legend spans film formats: Beowulf to be released simultaneously to IMAX, 3D, 2D and 35mm screens,” Digital Cinematography, 3.5 (Nov 2007) 16.

On Bergson’s Pure Duration and Suzuki’s Sunyata-Tathata

Bergson writes in Time and Free Will: “To say that the same inner causes will reproduce the same effects is to assume that the same cause can appear a second time on the stage of consciousness. Now, if duration is what we say, deep seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them should be quite alike, since they are two different moments of a life-story. While the external object does not bear the mark of the time that has elapsed and thus, in spite of the difference of time, the physicist can again encounter identical elementary conditions, duration is something real for the consciousness which preserves the trace of it, and we cannot here speak of identical conditions, because the same moment does not occur twice. It is no use arguing that, even if there are no two deep-seated psychic states which are altogether alike, yet analysis would resolve these different states into more general and homogeneous elements which might be compared with each other. This would be to forget that even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and a life of their own, however superficial they may be; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling. Indeed, we have no reason for calling it by its former name save that it corresponds to the same external cause or projects itself outwardly into similar attitudes: hence it would simply be begging the question to deduce from the so-called likeness of two conscious states that the same cause produces the same effect. In short, if the causal relation still holds good in the realm of inner states, it cannot resemble in any way what we call causality in nature” (199-201). 

Now this brings us to some of the fundamental shifts that Bergson hopes to achieve in the history of philosophy. First, causality in nature is not the same causality of lived duration. Causality, the principle of logical necessity between cause and effect, is an abiding concern in Bergsonian theory, from Bergson himself through to Prigogine, Deleuze, Massumi, Hansen, Grosz, Delanda, Shaviro, and onward. One might pose usefully it seems to me the relation between Deleuze’s quasi-cause (as elaborated in the Logic of Sense) and Bergson’s non-linear causality of becoming. What is most important in this relation? First, time is an irreducible component of all physical and psychic being, its being in belonging to mixtures of co-evolution. Assemblages only happen in time, although time is not “of” an assemblage (by which we mean that temporal relations cannot give us “types” of assemblages, only statistical probabilities and their indefinable unfolding, patterned but stochastic). In that sense, non-linear causality helps us to pose becoming as an unfolding of resonant processes, which while statistically regular on large scales (robust to shocks), are nonetheless open to chance and mutation at other scales of interactions. This breaks with the notion that causes are fixed, unified, and predictable–they are none of those things in the short (human consciousness) and long (embedded timescales of evolution) run. 

But this brings us to a lingering problem in Bergson–at least in this text (we might usefully compare this to the much later Creative Evolution). Why does Bergson reduce pure succession to lived durations in consciousness? Many times, he insists that pure duration is only so for a consciousness which endures. But does this have to be so? Many today would argue that everything–from a sugar cube on fire or dissolving in a glass of water to the swirling hurricane-like vortex at Saturn’s south pole (see http://ciclops.org/view/2313/Looking_Saturn_in_the_Eye)–endures. Stuart Kauffman asks rightly by what criteria do we say such phenomena (he is mostly talking about dissipative structures like the vortex Great Red Spot on Jupiter, not sugar cubes! See At Home in the Universe 20-21) is or is not alive. There is a lively debate here on the nature of life, and it centers precisely on duration and non-linear causality. 

There are other relations to also keep in mind with the above quote. The insistence that no psychic state can have a predictable causal relation to subsequent psychic states is part of the larger project of grappling with the pure succession “by imperceptible steps” of intensive processes. That time cannot be figured (or pre-figured, as Bergson shows in his analysis of the future in present causality) as space–indeed, once it is figured at all, as symbolical representation, time becomes space–is the central thesis of this thesis (yes, this was his doctoral thesis, sheesh!). Time is a continuous, non-quantifiable multiplicity, and the aim of Bergson’s thought is to aspire to a form of intuitive rationality commensurate with time’s becoming. 

 

Some definitions: endos·mo·sis (en′däs mō′sis): noun, in osmosis, the more rapid, inward diffusion of the less dense fluid through the semipermeable membrane to mingle with the more dense

Hylozoism is the philosophical conjecture that all or some material things possess life, or that all life is inseparable from matter.” 

Thus, Bergson glosses a fluid, imperceptible transference as a habit of thought: “We have seen that, though our deepest conscious states exclude numerical multiplicity, yet we break them up into parts external to one another; that though the elements of concrete duration permeate one another, duration expressing itself in extensity exhibits moments as distinct as the bodies scattered in space. Is it surprising, then, that between the moments of our life, when it has been, so to speak, objectified, we set up a relation analogous to the objective relation of causality, and that an exchange, which again may be compared to the phenomenon of endosmosis, takes place between the dynamic idea of free effort and the mathematical concept of necessary determination? But the sundering of these two ideas is an accomplished fact in the natural sciences” (218). Bergson has just suggested that “Here again the mistake made by consciousness arises from the fact that it looks at the self, not directly, but by a kind of refraction through the forms which it has lent to external perception, and which the latter does not give back without having left its mark on them” (217). The aim here as elsewhere is to restore to consciousness pure duration, and to stop treating time “as a homogeneous medium” (220); the obstacle is consciousness itself in its habits of reducing pure succession to simultaneity, difference to the homogeneous, and thus spatializing what ought to be understood as enduring. 

“We have seen that, though our deepest conscious states exclude numerical multiplicity, yet we break them up into parts external to one another; that though the elements of concrete duration permeate one another, duration expressing itself in extensity exhibits moments as distinct as the bodies scattered in space. Is it surprising, then, that between the moments of our life, when it has been, so to speak, objectified, we set up a relation analogous to the objective relation of causality, and that an exchange which again may be compared to the phenomenon of endosmosis, takes place between the dynamic idea of free effort and the mathematical concept of necessary determination?” (218). One could easily object that what after all is “our deepest conscious states”–is it some kind of essentialism of consciousness, and even more troubling doesn’t Bergson assume that he has gotten (we readers) there? Like many of the problematic terms that Bergson uses–purity, for me, most of all–it seems that the deepest conscious state actually turns out to be a confused mixture of imperceptible succession. But, then, could free will be located in something so confused and heterogeneous?

“We can now formulate our conception of freedom. Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable, just because we are free. For we can analyse a thing, but not a process ; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analysing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing and duration into extensity. By the very fact of breaking up concrete time we set out its moments in homogeneous space ; in place of the doing we put the already done ; and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism” (219-20). 

What is after all concrete? Does it have a difference resonance in French? We would need to check the French which I have not done…But strikingly freedom is a relation of a body (a perceiving, cognizing, multiplicity) to specific kinds of actions; but this relation is graspable not as a definition but a definite process with a definite, but non-spatial, non-repeatable, singular, and irreversible duration. 

“To sum up ; every demand for explanation in regard to freedom comes back, without our suspecting it, to the following question : ” Can time be adequately represented by space ? ”To which we answer : Yes, if you are dealing with time flown ; No, if you speak of time flowing. Now, the free act takes place in time which is flowing and not in time which has already flown. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts which we observe there is none clearer. All the difficulties of the problem, and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable” (221). 

So what then do we do with this undefinable relation, this fact called freedom? It is to insist the the absolutely undetermined event must be the constituted outside of all relations, all actions of the brain or body, the embodied mind, are constituted by this outside folded into the repetitions of its intensities. But note then that the folding of freedom into a process without end, or foreseeable product, is to insist that the aim of life is to actualize this experience of freedom by giving oneself to a given practice. The outside becomes the most intimate, and even the very stability of subject and object breaks down in duration. The outside simply turns out to be the virtual proceeding of the actual. 

There remains the problem of adequation. Is the language used by Bergson–intensity, sensation, sympathy, duration, succession, freedom, relation, action, perception–is this the language which best expresses the idea of freedom? And if it does, has this language escaped the spatializing tendency of symbolical representation? How?

The obvious, if not quite fully satisfying answer, is that Bergson defines this language as without definition, without visual perspective, the done product grasped in vision as opposed to the imperceptible unfolding of the lived duration of an event: a kind of synaesthesia of time. So in that sense the formulation (as translated) of Bergson’s triumphant sentence last quoted has this double sense, of a thought that has not left the desire for adequation, and thus for space, and a dim realization of a method that has found a kind of transcendental empiricism as its practice. To grow old and young in the event at once, to discover the untimely in all things, at every moment as an affirmation of freedom. But perhaps the post-Nietzschean/ Deleuzian experiment with Bergson is our new spatialization (for an attempt to practice something like that for media assemblage theory see: Deleuze, Cinema, and Zen: Break the Motor)? Is it not possible that concepts once monstrous but now part of the machinery of capture and domestication, as they enter the world of philosophy, of sociology, or literary and media criticism inevitably ossify the durational into the spatial, become the product (with their own cultural capital accruing or waning) of that which has already escaped it?  

How to think durational movement without product, space, simultaneity–without telos (goal, aim)? How could such a thought make a claim to 1. thought, 2. politics, 3. the future?

A practical way to go forward here is to compare some of Bergson’s theses on duration to Suzuki on Zen. In his 1951 paper “The Philosophy of Zen” (Philosophy East and West, 1:2, 3-16), Daisetz Suzuki writes that “When I say that Zen is life, I mean that Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization, that Zen is what makes conceptualization possible, and therefore that Zen is not to be identified with any particular brand of ‘ism’” (3). I take conceptualization here to mean symbolical representation, that it comes out of life itself, or what Bergson calls lived duration. Suzuki goes on to say that the experience of Zen is best expressed–again we are to contemplate what forms of expression, language, indeed (non)conceptualization best describes the non-conceptualizable–by the doctrine of sunyata which “means emptiness” but has no direct equivalence in English. It is not a negative term, it “is a positive concept with a definite connotation, but it ought not to be considered an outcome of abstraction or generalization, for it is not a postulated idea. It is what makes the existence of anything possible, but it is not to be conceived immanently, as if it lay hidden in or under every existence as an independent entity. A world of relativities is set on and in sunyata; sunyata envelops, as it were, the whole world, and yet is in every object existing in the world” (4). Sunyata is the experience that reconciles the contradiction between immanentism and transcendentalism. 

When we are out of sunyata we experience the duality of object/subject, but in it we are “in Zen.” “To experience means to become aware of, but not in the way in which we become aware of the world of sense-and-intellect. In the latter case, we always have a subject that is aware of something and an object of which the subject is aware, for the world of sense-and-intellect is a dichotomous world of subject and object. This unique way consists in sunyata’s remaining in itself and yet making itself an object of experience to itself. This means dividing itself and yet holding itself together” (5). Clearly, sunyata would be an experience that would fundamentally call into question causality and non-contradiction, and in that sense Bergson’s notion of the qualitative multiplicity of lived duration before symbolical representation would help us to affirm this experience. But, on the one hand, Suzuki is too categorical in his dismissal of logic. Aren’t there different logics which proceed through the pragmatism of functional mixtures and dynamic thresholds? Topological reasoning would be one example, tactical media (see Race, Perception, and the Institutionalization of Networks) would be another. More, isn’t intuitional reason a kind of logic of sense? On the other, sunyata helps us to critically engage the desire for adequation that marks Bergson’s final passage quoted above. 

Sunyata can help us to focus, to stay focused on the interminable process of a method, that is like one continuous mistake. A practice of the false. “Reasoning defeats itself, finds itself altogether futile, in its attempt to reach sunyata, because reasoning, instead of trying to see sunyata itself in the process of reasoning, strives to reach sunyata as the goal of reasoning, that is, when all the reasoning comes to an end” (6). Suzuki’s Zen and Bergson’s duration converge here on the insistence that one cannot substitute analysis for process-practice without turning time into space. 

But we should not lose site of the fact that for Suzuki, in Zen there is the experience of “sudden enlightenment.” We should not take this too seriously, or too lightly. “When sunyata is awakened to itself or becomes aware of itself, which is ‘knowing and seeing’ itself, we have another name for it: sunyata is tathata. Tathata is everyday thought, it is “an affirmation through and through” (6). But tathata is sunyata, and sunyata is tathata. “A Buddhist philosopher declares: A mountain is a mountain and water is water before a sunyata-experience takes place; but after it a mountain is not a mountain and water is not water; but again when the experience deepens, a mountain is a mountain and water is water” (7).

Nothing special, like a frog just sitting. We are reminded here of another Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki who in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970) wrote: “Zen stories, or koans, are very difficult to understand before you know what we are doing moment after moment. But if you know exactly what we are doing in each moment, you will not find koans so difficult. There are so many koans. I have often talked to you about a frog, and each time everybody laughs. But a frog is very interesting. He sits like us, too, you know. But he does not think that he is doing anything so special. When you go to a zendo and sit, you may think you are doing some special thing. While your husband or wife is sleeping, you are practicing zazen! You are doing some special thing, and your spouse is lazy! That may be your understanding of zazen. But look at the frog. A frog also sits like us, but he has no idea of zazen. Watch him. If something annoys him, he will make a face. If something comes along to eat, he will snap it up and eat, and he eats sitting. Actually that is our zazen—not any special thing. Here is a kind of frog koan for you. Baso was a famous Zen master called the Horse-master. He was the disciple of Nangaku, one of the Sixth Patriarch’s disciples. One day while he was studying under Nangaku, Baso was sitting, practicing zazen. He was a man of large physical build; when he talked, his tongue reached to his nose; his voice was loud; and his zazen must have been very good. Nangaku saw him sitting like a great mountain or like a frog. Nangaku asked, “What are you doing?” ‘Tampracticingzazen,” Baso replied. “Why are you practicing zazen?” “I want to attain enlightenment; I want to be a Buddha,” the disciple said. Do you know what the teacher did? He picked up a tile, and he started to polish i t . In Japan, after taking a tile from the kiln, we polish it to give it a beautiful finish. So Nangaku picked up a tile and started to polish it. Baso, his disciple, asked, “What are you doing?” “I want to make this tile into a  jewel,” Nangaku said. “How is it possible to make a tile a jewel?” Baso asked. “How is it possible to become a Buddha by practicing zazen?” Nangaku replied. “Do you want to attain Buddhahood ? There is no Buddhahood besides your ordinary mind. When a cart does not go, which do you whip, the cart or the horse?” the master asked. Nangaku’s meaning here is that whatever you do, that is zazen. True zazen is beyond being in bed or sitting in the zendo. If your husband or wife is in bed, that is zazen. If you think, “I am sitting here, and my spouse is in bed,” then even though you are sitting here in the cross-legged position, that is not true zazen. You should be like a frog always. That is true zazen.”

This is too beautiful not to quote in full, and in any case, as Patricia Clough and I affirmed to each other just before we saw Wall-E with As’sia, my daughter, we only aspire to bring together in a new diagram the force of innumerable quotes!

In any case, Daisetz Suzuki differentiates sunyata-tathata from pragmatism by radically de-linking practice from teleology, and Zen from time. “Time and teleology are interwoven, and Zen transcends time, and therefore, teleology also” (8). But what Bergson has shown throughout his life’s work is that time is teleology only after the done is separated from the doing, the product from the process, that is when time is spaced. But lived duration, and the intuitional reason that gives it its singular dynamism, its pure potentiality, is radically free, and also and for precisely that reason, non-teleological. 

But that is not all Susuki has to say here on time; indeed, he goes on to suggest that momentalistic Zen is not, because each moment has eternity in it. “To Zen, time and eternity are one. This is open to misinterpretation, as most people interpret Zen as annihilating time and putting in its place eternity, which to them means a state of absolute quietness or doing-nothingness. They forget that if time is eternity, eternity is time, according to Zen. Zen has never espoused the cause of doing-nothing-ness; eternity is our everyday experience in this world of sense-and-intellect, for there is no eternity outside this time-conditionedness. Eternity is possible only in the midst of birth and death, in the midst of time process” (8-9). So eternity is the difference immanent to process (of course in Zen Buddhism, eternity is inseparable from divinity). The (non)aim would be a kind of motionless duration, echoing with a future that will only ever remain potential. I would think this potentiality is divinity, if I needed divinity to make this thought, how shall we say, living. But the thought needs nothing, because it is isomorphic with the life it models, enters into mixtures with it, and emerges as multiform expression. Only certain of the expressive forms–narrative, sign, icon, figuration, discourse, metaphor, montage, syntagmatic unit, character–are recognized and legitimated through pedagogical institutions of gridding and exploitative value, even when they are part of movements of counter-actualization (anarcho-Marxism, ecofeminism, womanist anti-imperialism, Maoist postcolonialism, poly-sexualization). Couldn’t we think of a political practice of counter-actualization in various media–from literature to the screen to the cellphone–that begins with a new lexicon: attach and attack the grid in the grid, denaturalize it, and then radically naturalize it. Expressive forms are thus refunctioned, and the political becomes the untimely in the potentialities of co-evolution. By calling into question the stability of the category “political” itself, new gradients will emerge as a froglike practice reassembles media and their intensities. Strictly, nothing special. 

 

I don’t mean to fetishize Suzuki’s Zen, because we know of the use Japanese Zen buddhists made of their practice during World War II. Zizek speaks about this in his talk at Google, and his words are important to think about.