The Electrate Professor

The Electrate Professor has moved

2009-05-24T20:38:00.002-05:00

I have decided to port this blog over to Wordpress. I have two other blogs there and so it will be more manageable to have them all at the same site. Also, I didn't like the fact that I couldn't create tags and categories the way that you can with Wordpress blogs. I will leave this one here to steer any visitors over to that site. I will also delete some of the early entries that didn't really apply to the topic, but I will keep them here so that they are somewhere.

So the new blog is at http://electrateprofessor.wordpress.com. Thank you for visiting!

Infinition: Thinking-Fractal

2009-05-01T22:20:00.005-05:00

I wrote a poem a while back called "Axiom: A Mathematics of Poetry" in which I parody the opening chapters of G. Spencer-Brown's The Laws of Form. The first line introduces a new concept that I created called "infinition":

It shall be taken as given the idea of infinition. The idea of infinition stands in direct opposition to the idea of definition.

Then, as in chapter one of the Spencer-Brown book, I provide a definition:

Infinition is the act of making indefinite or unclear. That is to say, while some uses of language attempt to clarify, others attempt to obfuscate.

The poem then continues with instructions to make a poem, introducing "canons," "conventions," and "principles" much like The Laws of Form does in its opening chapters; these kind of "mathematical" moments attempt to define poetry from its moment of creation. Interspersed within these various defining moments are "infinitions," poetic moments that obfuscate, that use metaphor and imagery to open up or make blurry what the definitions try to distinguish or clarify.

I later realized that this concept of infinition, which I playfully created for the purposes of this poem, could be introduced in the context of electracy as a simple analogue of electrate thinking. If electracy is a kind of thinking that emerges from or opposes (to some extent) literacy, and literate thinking has as its modus operandi the goal of defining, distinguishing, and clarifying, then "infinition" can be seen perhaps as a kind of electrate definition.

Or, to phrase it as Greg Ulmer might, infinition is to electracy as definition is to literacy.

As a kind of image-thinking, or thinking through or via images, electracy invites the kind of ambiguity that literacy loathes. Ulmer's work (in Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy for example) steers us toward this kind of thinking that is already happening, that is at the core of inventive thinking, as in Einstein's "wide image" of the compass:

Part of the value of Einstein as a paradigm is that his theories are imaged by a compass. The story of his compass becomes a parable for our own search , in that we must find our equivalent of the compass--the scene that we recognize as having this guiding role in our orientation to the world and to life. (27)

For Ulmer, "invention is an ecological process" and therefore we must attend to the various institutions of our lives (family, career, entertainment, community) in order to tune in to potential new ideas that can emerge from cross-over (in the way that metaphor suggests "crossing over" or "carrying across"). His books provide "heuretics" for invention, and they work: using his CATT(t) method back in his graduate theory course in 1987, I independently discovered the image of the rhizome (for me imaged as a watermelon) as a model of thinking differently, before knowing anything about Deleuze and Guattari.

If we are to think of infinition imagistically, then, I would offer the Koch snowflake as a model of a kind of "fuzzy definition" or "fuzzy logic" or "thinking-fractal." The idea is to start with an equilateral triangle and then to let each of the sides open out into an increasingly elongated boundary. It'll be quicker for you to get the idea if you see the animations at the Wikipedia entry for the Koch snowflake. Here is a boundary of infinite length, which seems to be a contradiction: if something is bounded, it is typically finitely bounded, enclosed by a measurable boundary.

So the question, then, is how can this fractal curve help us to think differently? Can the model of the Koch snowflake open up thought, make it an act of infinition?

Don't get me wrong: there is a place for definition. But there is also a place for infinition.

Liquid Theory

2009-04-01T00:04:00.001-05:00

Just after posting my extended comments on "how concepts function," which mentions a desire to explore fluid-flow principles and de Bono's concept of "water logic," among other things, I came across this post on liquid theory, inviting us to contribute to a liquid book, a call-for-collaboration in a wiki-book of philosophy: Liquid Books. Here we go!

How Concepts Function

2009-03-31T20:40:00.001-05:00

I started reading the IEP (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) entry on "Concepts," which starts by laying out "tasks for an overall theory of concepts," one of which is to determine what the metaphysical status of a concept is. As I thought about Deleuze and Guattari's theories, it occurred to me that they are not so much concerned about what a concept is so much as what a concept does: how it functions in a particular context or assemblage, what it accomplishes in solving a particular problem.

In fact, the way that this line of thinking started was by thinking, "If you stop to think about it..." But stopping is artificial: there is no stopping: the mind is going going going, a model of Bergsonian duration, and it's when we "stop" to think about thinking that we develop a metaphysics of thinking, a model of the "being" vs. "becoming" of thinking. Deleuze is about thinking on the go, thinking as going, and going implies a direction, possibly even a destination (unless you're a nomad, that is) and/or an agenda: are you stratifying or destratifying? Are you becoming more complex as an organization or is there a kind of chaos-ification occurring?

Thought, that is (to repeat myself), requires a context (what are you thinking about? what problem are you trying to solve?). I see this in their concept of the machinic assemblage: things themselves have fluid ontological categories depending on the role they play in a temporary assemblage of parts/wholes that come together to fulfill a particular purpose or desire. A bicycle tire on a bike, for example, serves as a mode of transportation; in a work of art, however, it serves as a mode of self-expression. In a different context, faced with a different problem to solve, it could be/come something else (in the way that car tires are used as the soles of shoes in third-world countries).

For D&G, it seems that the problem they want to solve is the question of how to think differently, how (ultimately) to think creatively. Beyond this (and with them there always seems to be a beyond), they want to capture the boiling roiling moment of a phase transition, whether the moment when water freezes or when water boils... In the words of Jeffrey Bell, in his Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference,

A dynamic system. . . presupposes both the stable, structured strata that are in some sense *complete*, and it entails the unstable, unstructured, deterritorializing flows. As Deleuze and Guattari proceed to develop the implications of this thinking, or as they develop a philosophy 'at the edge of chaos,' they neither create concepts which solve, once and for all, philosophical problems, nor do they slip into a state of anarchical relativism. Rather, philosophy, as with a living organism 'at the edge of chaos,' must maintain both its stable strata and its unstable deterritorializing flows. Without the former, a living organism dies (or a philosophy slips into disordered nonsense and says nothing), and without the latter, an organism is unable to adapt and will also die (or a philosophy falls into a mindless repetition of cliches and platitudes). (4)

So there should be a give and take to thinking, one that allows for this kind of freezing (stratification, striation) then flowing (destratification, smoothening). Philosophical concepts, according to Deleuze and Guattari, function to facilitate such vacillations.

With all of this in mind, I declare once again my intention to investigate fluid/flow principles. An initial peek at the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology points to Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids, "rigid body dynamics," viscosity vs. "viscoelasticity," and the like.

And before closing this entry, I need to mention Edward de Bono's Water Logic, in which he opposes the "rock logic" of the "Greek gang of three" (i.e. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, "who hijacked Western thinking") with his concept of "water logic": "Traditional rock logic is based on 'is' [identity: What is this?]. The logic of perception is water logic and this is based on 'to' [flow]. . . "What does this lead to?" De Bono concludes in a passage that might have been penned by Deleuze: "I write about the huge importance of concepts for water logic. It is concepts that give movement and flexibility in thinking. Such concepts do not always need to be precise because we are using water logic rather than rock logic, which depends on precision" (189).

Thinking About Thinking: Post-Continental Philosophy

2009-01-28T18:14:00.004-05:00

I recently received from inter-library loan a book by John Mullarkey titled Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline. This looks at four contemporary philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and Francois Laruelle, all of whom, according to the author, deal with the topic of immanence in different ways in order to renew thought. The common denominator that Mullarkey identifies is that they all "show" rather than tell via diagrams, and he proposes a "diagrammatology" (W.J.T. Mitchell's term) as a mode of philosophical discourse to "think immanence":

And such images are never mere ornament -- they are often frames around which whole arguments are set. . . . Diagrams have long been useful in teaching and learning logic . . . but now their foundation to all understanding has been highlighted through research in cognitive science and visual studies. Diagrams are 'problem solvers' because they 'automatically support a large number of perceptual inferences, which are extremely easy for humans. (162)

Mullarkey's conclusion points to the changes that a "post-continental philosophy" might induce in how we think:

What we are saying -- and what a Post-Continental thought indicates -- is that philosophy must take up the challenge of renewal and acknowledge the possibility that art, technology, and even matter itself, at the level of its own subject-matter, in its own actuality, might be capable of forcing new philosophical thoughts onto us. With that, however, there might also come a transformation of what we mean by philosophy and even thought itself. (193)

The transformation of thought itself: this is the theme of this blog and of electracy as a description of what becomes possible when fundamental changes occur to the communicative apparatus of a society. Mullarkey's book, I am suggesting, offers thinking with and through diagrams as one way of of manifesting an electrate form of thinking.

Google Earth and Autocartography

2008-12-30T22:56:00.002-05:00

I had lunch with John Craig Freeman, one of the organizers of the Invent-L Imaging Place conference I attended back in February 2007, my work for which has become the focus of this blog. He showed me his recent experiments with Google Earth, and I was intrigued by the possibilities for autocartography. The ability to embed youtube videos and other files in layers points to the map becoming an organizational interface for a kind of rhizographic, multi-genre autography. Here's the slideshare file for my presentation on Autocartography:

Autocartography: Mapping the Self

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: electracy education)

Further Dialogue and New Directions

2008-11-25T19:35:00.001-05:00

My response to the essay rejection prompted a dialogue about possible directions the essay could take in the future and possible venues. I am indebted to Craig Saper for his encouragement, his tending to expression of my "genius." After giving it thought, I concluded that I could develop the autocartography as a genre and use a map interface for my presentation. I've also ordered the book Lacan: Topologically Speaking, edited by my former professor Ellie Ragland. I had a course with her while at UF called "Madness and Literature," in which I applied Lacan's theory of psychosis to a breakdown I had while an undergraduate. Getting back in to Lacanian theory will be a challenge of course! But this could tie into my references to topology as a spatial metaphor for "imaging place": in this case, the place of the mind. Lacan's use of topology to "map" the mind might yield clues to how it could be used to image place as I presented it at the conference (now almost two years past!). In my presentation (you can find the slideshow at slideshare.net: http://www.slideshare.net/rsmyth/second-life-imaging-virtual-place-part2), I mention the conceptual metaphor "thinking is moving through space" and consider what would happen to thinking if the space through which thinking moved was a topological space, or a multi-dimensional space.

There is much to think about here!

Essay Rejection and Response

2008-10-27T19:00:00.003-05:00

I received word that my essay didn't fit the pattern of other work delivered at the Invent-L Imaging Place conference and that it needed major revisions. Here's the email I received in full:

We’ve consulted with our readers and the general consensus is that your contribution is not yet ready for publication in this particular journal issue. The readers enjoyed your essay as did I, but they want a better sense of how it fits with the rest of the collection. The journal volume focuses on specific imaging place projects. The readers felt that you talked in general terms about fascinating aspects of imaging, and offered a wonderful experiment. They also thought it was two or three essays smashed together: one on Ulmer and Deleuze; one on The Quick Brown Fox; and, one on SL. Finally, they want you to make the essay more of a journal article and less a paper presentation by removing the references to the conference in the body of the text, and citing it, if you'd like, and putting those citations in notes and in a bibliography. It reads like a paper rather than an article at this time.

They saw your essay as a wonderful experiment about topology that would certainly fit in another issue, or something that might fit here if you were to provide a more elaborate answer of how your work led to new insights in imaging place specifically.

The specific changes requested would be to revise the essay with a discussion of how it fits with the imaging place focus. Then, the article would need to explain how the experiment with the Quick Brown Fox or the Ulmering of Deleuze led to new theoretical insights about imaging place.

All that said, I personally liked the essay, loved your performance, and think the work it considers worth publishing.

As you can appreciate, our timelines are very short: we’d need to have the revised contribution in hand no later than the end of the month (August 31) to facilitate one final editorial review. Please let me know if you think this is feasible and whether you’d like to proceed with such a revision. The editorial group would like to include your work, but only if the revision successfully addresses the issues raised above.

I responded as follows:

Sorry for not responding sooner. I have to admit to being very frustrated about receiving this one week before major revisions were due, at the end of a summer vacation during which I could have worked on such revisions. It was especially frustrating after having submitted the draft a whole year earlier--one of the few submitted on time, I think.

I was also surprised that there wasn't any room for something a bit on the edge in terms of form and content. While it certainly didn't fit the pattern of other projects, I thought that it addressed questions that the conference topic raised and suggested future avenues for research and consideration. The references to the conference within the text were meant to ground it in the event of the conference, a grounding I thought necessary given the great abstraction of some of the content.

Perhaps some of you may know of a journal or venue that would consider it as is, given its strengths and faults as you have determined them. Or perhaps you plan a future issue of an IMAGING PLACE journal in which this would be a better fit.

Thank you for the time you took in considering the essay. And thank you for the great honor of including me in the conference--for squeezing me in as you did. I enjoyed the chance to move among the grammatologists once again and to lend my vision to the goals of the Larger Project--after climbing atop the shoulders of giants

I have to admit to wondering why they delayed so long in responding: was it to discourage me from working on a revision, since it was so different from the rest of the projects? But I have to assume that they were all just too busy to turn their attention to this work, and when the time came for them to do so, they left it to the last minute, as we all do--though I think that they had some idea of what they wanted to include based on the conference presentations.

The Speed of Thought

2008-05-18T19:57:00.003-05:00

I am reading a novel titled The Speed of Dark, told from the point of view of an autistic man trying to decide if he should take an experimental cure for his autism. In the process of making his decision, he researches how the brain works, and at one point he reflects on what he's been reading:

The book answers questions other people have thought of. I have thought of questions they have not answered. I always thought my questions were wrong questions because no one else asked them. Maybe no one thought of them. Maybe darkness got there first. Maybe I am the first light touching a gulf of ignorance. Maybe my questions matter. (40)

The reference to light and dark ties in to the primary metaphor that the title invokes: "the speed of dark" vs. the speed of light. The character thinks that darkness must be faster than light, since it is always out in front of light, the frontier which light is penetrating.

I found this quite powerful. So much of academia is about distinguishing between those who have a right to answer the questions they ask, and those who do not--between those who even have a right to ask questions in the first place. The thought that my questions might matter, despite my lack of expertise, is heartening. I am reminded of Greg Ulmer's pep talk on the meaning of acquiring a Ph.D. He called it "a license to teach yourself," an indication that you have gone as far as the institution will let you go and that you are now in charge of your own education.

Later in the novel, the character speaks of thinking in terms of speed:

I do not know what the speed of thought is. I do not know if the speed of thought is the same for everyone. Is it thinking faster or thinking further that makes different thinking different? (240)

I have considered the question of thought-speed in the context of Deleuzian philosophy in my other blog:

I actually woke up this morning and, while in that half-haze of sleep and waking, starting thinking with Deleuzian concepts. I thought of how schizophrenic thought happens at high speed and wondered if the speed of thought could be measured. It’s probably not so much “fast” thinking (as neuronal firing is an electrical phenomenon that probably happens at speeds defined by the laws of physics) as truly rhizomatic thinking, as thinking that branches out into new areas, creating new connections in the mind of the schizophrenic that are “abnormal.” It would be a kind of “cinematic” thinking along the lines of Deleuze’s “movement-image” (as described by Clare Colebrook in her excellent introduction to Deleuze, which I am reading now). But there is a kind of “speed” to it insofar as it creates an “intensity,” both in the more common sense of “being intense” (like wow, he’s intense, man) as well as the sense that DeLanda develops in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, in which something approaches a phase transition–starts to boil, for example. The schizophrenic as boiling-brain.

The real question, then, is how to boil our brains to schizophrenic intensity without "losing our minds"--a very real danger, as I have discovered for myself.

Learning and Mnemonomics

2008-05-06T19:51:00.002-05:00

While at work, I am slowly reading Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment, the report published by the National Academy Press. The chapter on "Advances in the Sciences of Thinking and Learning" speaks of the fundamental components of cognition as being working memory and long-term memory. The following quote caught my attention:

Unlike working memory, long-term memory is, for all practical purposes, an effectively limitless store of information. It therefore makes sense to try to move the burden of problem solving from working to long-term memory. What matters most in learning situations is not the capacity of working memory--although that is a factor in speed of processing--but how well one can evoke the knowledge stored in long-term memory and use it to reason efficiently about information and problems in the present.

Thinking in terms of how our memory is extended by technologies of communication--books, libraries, the internet, social networking--this quote suggests that learning is not just a matter of how we access our personal long-term memory but also a matter of how we access our culture's memory, as stored in these various media. How can we tap the long-term memory of this vast, mnemonic prosthetic and use it to solve problems in the present?

This also invokes Ulmer's concept of "emeragency" which puts problem-solving and policy issues at the center of a "humanities of pragmatics." The technologically enhanced human brain is truly a "limitless store of information." As such, our primary problem as individuals in the 21st century--and as educators of students who need the information literacy skills to navigate this limitless store of information--is to develop methods for managing this huge palace of memory: the birth of mnemonomics.

Mnemonomics: Social Networking as Collaborative Memory

2008-04-12T08:08:00.005-05:00

Just posted a slideshow on a new concept of "memory management" I'm calling "mnemonomics." This was for a presentation to a group of school librarians taking a course on Web2.0 and its potential applications in the classroom. I wanted to communicate my sense of profound amazement at the phenomenon of social bookmarking. It's simple enough to use del.icio.us, for example, but in the context of the history of memory and the current major transition we are undergoing in communications technologies, it is literally "mind-blowing" (insofar as other people's minds become part of our own: "collaborative memory"). I expand on an entry from my other blog on "Memory in the Age of Electracy", and as I worked on the PowerPoint the subtitle changed from being "Social Bookmarking as Public Memory" to "Social Networking as Collaborative Memory." I added references to Twitter (which I've just started to do: twitter.com/rsmyth) and slideshare as well as a plug for Pierre Levy's book Collective Intelligence, which I think all of these technologies point to in a nascent form.

One quote I return to in my presentations of late, by Barbara Maria Stafford, invokes the sense of radical transition that occurred as a result of the printing press: "Pixels are the movable type of the future."

The Slikipedia Project

2008-01-12T13:12:00.000-05:00

We have posted the PowerPoint presentation that we delivered in the "Libraries as Immersive Learning Environments" class at Slideshare.net: The Slikipedia Project. Our hope is to realize this project in the coming months.

Libraries as Immersive Learning Environments

2007-11-21T18:23:00.000-05:00

I have enrolled in a non-credit course from the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign called "Libraries and Immersive Learning in 3D Virtual Worlds." The course meets once a week in Second Life and carries on conversation throughout the week on an open-source course-management system called Moodle. For our final project, we are supposed to propose a project that incorporates some of the principles of "immersive learning" that we've been exploring in the course.

My partner and I plan to do a kind of "songline" or "memory palace" about the history and political science of just war theory. My hope is that this will be a model for an electrate form of information storage and retrieval. More to come as the project unfolds.

Imaging Thought as Imaging Place in Heidegger

2007-09-23T20:09:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading Heidegger's What Is Called Thinking? and found it very interesting and, for the most part, accessible (they are transcriptions of lectures he delivered). Of interest to my "thinking about thinking" and the work done for the Imaging Place conference are Heidegger's references to thinking as being on a journey or a path:

Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway. . . . In order to get underway, we do have to set out. This is meant in a double sense: for one thing, we have to open ourselves to the emerging prospect and direction of the way itself; and then, we must get on the way, that is, must take the steps by which alone the way becomes the way. . . . Only when we walk it, and in no other fashion, only, that is, by thoughtful questioning, are we on the move on the way.

He continues in this vein, invoking the quest-motif:

To answer the question 'What is called thinking?' is itself always to keep asking, so as to remain underway. This would seem easier than the intention to take a firm position; for adventurer-like, we roam away into the unknown. Nevertheless, if we are to remain underway we must first of all and constantly give attention to the way. The movement, step by step, is what is essential here. (168-170)

Later he writes of the "thinker's quest":

The wish to understand a thinker in his own terms is something else entirely than the attempt to take up a thinker's quest and to pursue it to the core of his thought's problematic. The first is and remains impossible. The second is rare, and of all things the most difficult. . . To speak of an 'attempt at thinking' is not an empty phrase meant to simulate humility. The term makes the claim that we are here taking a way of questioning, on which the problematic alone is accepted as the unique habitat and locus of thinking. (185)

In a different book, Heidegger invokes even more radically the notion of a region in which thinking occurs. In his Discourse on Thinking, according to its introduction, Heidegger speaks of two kinds of thinking--"calculating thinking" and "meditative thinking"--and in focusing on the latter he speaks of the horizon of consciousness, our field of awareness, calling this "the region" and "that-which-regions":

In the opening of the region, its regioning, we have what supports and manifests itself in part as the opening of man, his meditative thinking ... the nature of thinking [has] an origin prior to thought. And what is this origin? It is the nature of that-which-regions. (Introduction p. 30, 35)

This looks like challenging stuff, but I was immediately drawn to the conceptual metaphor of the Mind as a Body Moving Through Space that is in play in both books. Again and again this recurs, and I am once again curious about what it might mean, what might be the ultimate significance of such reliance upon bodily metaphors of navigating a three-dimensional space as the way that we are able to think abstractly (for is not thinking about thinking the most abstract that we can get?!).

The Stuff of Thought

2007-08-24T09:33:00.000-05:00

I just read an interview with Stephen Pinker in the recent Discover magazine (September 2007), which introduces his forthcoming book titled The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. From what I read, this sounds like one I might have to read (among all of the other ones!). One nice new perspective that supports one in George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant is his definition of framing as different perspectives of the same actual event. The example he uses comes from linguistics, the study of verbs (which he has been fascinated with): "Fill the glass with water" vs. "Pour water into the glass" vs. "Load the wagon with hay/Load the hay into the wagon". He asks about how kids are able to learn these distinctions and suggests that framing an event in multiple ways is "one of the key talents of the mind." He then talks about the "superhero" of metaphor and how it allows us to "leach the content from [one domain] and use them as abstract structures to reason about other domains." This sounds very familiar to the work of Lakoff and Johnson, which I have mentioned in previous posts (e.g. see post from June 13th, 2007). Then he writes,

When we put together the power of metaphor with the combinatorial nature of language and thought, we become able to create a virtually infinite number of ideas, even though we are equipped with a finite inventory of concepts and relations. I believe it is the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible abstract concepts. It may be how the mind evolved the ability to reason about abstract concepts such as chess or politics, which are not really concrete or physical and have no obvious relevance to reproduction or physical survival (my emphasis).

When I read this, I wondered what exactly is an "abstract concept." If metaphor (i.e. some concrete thing or experience) in the world is the only access we have to an abstract concept--or is that which an abstract concept is based upon, then what is an abstract concept? What is "abstract" about it? These questions take a different spin when considered in the context of Deleuze's definition of a concept, which is something that makes something happen in the world.

I also noticed that Pinker himself uses a metaphorical concept (how can he avoid it?!) when he describes gaining access to "otherwise inaccessible abstract concepts". This resonates very much with one of the key moments in Greg Ulmer's keynote speech for the 2007 Invent-L Conference on Imaging Place, when he invokes an early childhood memoryof being unable to open a door but was left there to do it on his own ("tough love" he quipped), when his mother refused to do it for him. He suggests that this childhood memory can become an "image of wide scope" (i.e. an image that invoked all four "quadrants" of the "popcycle" and thereby ties together these disparate realms of human experience) that we store into the "ka-ching database," a kind of compturized I-Ching that will enable us to get answers to burning questions. The goal of such a database and this strategy is to have "memory guiding intuitive judgments" and to generalize this (use of images/memory) into a feature of thinking. As the keynote continues he invokes Socrates's daemon: Socrates stops at the door and consults his daemon (e.g. the voice of his body, a.k.a. Lorca's duende), which electracy will augment and support in the new apparatus. He mentions a couple of other examples of the door as pivotal image (Kafka's "man from the country" and Nietzsche's "dwarf at the gateway"), but it's his own original experience that calls forth and organizes this "new image of thought," this new constellation of gateways and doorways that suggest how thinking can or will be in the age of electracy.

And that makes me think of my own doorknob experience, the one occasion I was on the inside of a mental hospital and was put into a room with no doorknob at all. What does that suggest about thinking?

Imaging Thought

2007-08-21T17:12:00.000-05:00

I have finished and posted the essay that all of these posts have worked toward completing. The title ended up being "Imaging Place As Imaging Thought: Deleuze, Electracy, and Second Life." One insight I reached in the process of writing it is that there is a connection between Deleuze's call for a new image of thought and the new kind of thinking that Ulmer calls forth with his concept of "electracy." Another insight I discovered is that the "imaging place" that cognitive metaphors of the Mind as a Body moving through space is a form of imaging thought. That is, we automatically image thought using these metaphorical concepts that Lakoff and Johnson have discuss.

The second part of the essay was an experiment in "thinking with Second Life." I call it "Disorientation" as it is meant to throw into doubt some of our cherished beliefs about rationality. A startling coincidence occurred. I chose randomly, among the multitude of pink stars (indicating events in the Second Life cartographic interface), the one for the place called "The Think Differently Lounge." And the funny thing about the place was that it was like most of the other dance halls you might encounter in SL, but this one had a grid-like structure for a ceiling and walls. And there were no obvious exits. I couldn't find one, at any rate. So after teleporting directly into the "Think Differently Lounge," I was trapped and surrounded by a highlyl striated (grid-like) barrier. Striation is a codeword in Deleuze and Guattari for a process that has congealed, crystallized, stabilized: all flows have slowed to a rigidity--the state (vs. the nomad), the tree (vs. the rhizome), stratification (vs. destratification), the striated space (vs. the smooth space), the territorialized (vs. the deterritorialized). I use the term in the paper to invoke this concept of theirs, in order to suggest that any form of thinking differently eventually settles in and becomes the norm. It's a common enough, almost cliched conclusion to reach, but it was interesting to have it happen on one of the only occasions that I consciously went into SL with the intention to perform an act of electrate reasoning. Out of the experience emerged the kind of allegory (down to the woman who accompanied me, called "Nar Duell," which sounds suspiciously like "Ne'er Do Well," like a character one would encounter in a bona fide allegory straight out of the Middle Ages) one might expect to see more of in the emerging age of electracy.

A Revolution in the Mind

2007-07-29T22:09:00.000-05:00

At a second, recent visit to the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, I recently bought Reidar Due's book on Deleuze, part of polity press's "Key Contemporary Thinkers" series. Here again is an explication of Deleuze which puts thinking in the center of his work: "Deleuze's philosophy . . . aims to produce a revolution in the mind, a fundamental change in how we think" (1). Due sees Deleuze's early philosophy as being concerned with "how mental activity is situated within reality," and in the process of engaging with the philosophical tradition in order to answer this question enlists the "cosmological metaphysicians" (the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Bergson) who "consider the mind to be an activity that unfolds within a larger set of forces or energies that constitute the cosmos or the world as a whole. The crucial feature of this picture of the mind is that mental activity is seen to be parto f the world and not separate from it: the mind is not a screen" (5).

Due continues in his introduction and writes about how Deleuze extends the meaning of "immanence": "This concept becomes for Deleuze a principle of thought rather than a property of reality. The principle of immanence means, positively, to think genetically, i.e. to reproduce in thought the genetic process that engendered an object" (8). And in turning to explain Deleuze's alternative concept of the subject (i.e. "the notion of the individual human mind as constituting a self-conscious centre of knowledge and action" [9]).

In Deleuze's thought, the starting-point for formulating this alternative concept of the subject is the concept of 'affect.' According to Deleuze, affects are the basic components of mental activity. . . . To understand an affect is to see it as a force, a particular type of energy and this energy does not presuppose self-consciousness. . . . In this philosophical perspective, the mind is a site of thoughts rather than a centre of consciousness. These thoughts are not defined by the fact that someone can say: they are my thoughts. Thoughts, in other words, are not defined as belonging to a subject.

The Philosophy of Creation

2007-07-29T10:52:00.000-05:00

One thing I promise myself whenever I take an occasional trip to Harvard Square is a book purchase at the Harvard Book Store. This is how I have built a small collection of books on Deleuze over the years. After all, these are not the kind of books you get from the local public library, so one must build one's own library. On a recent visit, I purchased Peter Hallword's Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. The introduction addresses the centrality of thinking to Deleuze's philosophy of creation:

Deleuze . . . assumes that the most creative medium of our being is a form of abstract, immediate or dematerialized thought. 'Thought is creation' and 'to think is to create -- there is no other creation' (What is Philosophy, 55; Difference and Repetition, 147). . . . Almost every aspect of Deleuze's philosophy is caught up with the consequences of this initial correlation of being, creativity, and thought. . . . In other words, the main task facing a creature capable of thought is to learn how to think. (1-2).

This has been my project throughout this process of participating in the Imaging Place conference: to learn how to think, to think about what thought is, or does.

Making a Few Connections

2007-06-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

I've been reading Minksy's latest book, The Emotion Machine, and he provides some interesting insights into how the mind works. One idea he has involves a "Critic-Selector" model, in which he suggests that we have a kind of "negative expertise" (i.e. a way of learning from our mistakes). The Critics are those who learn to recognize a kind of potential mistake before it happens. His thesis in the book is that "much of our human resourcefulness comes from our ability to switch among different Ways to Think" (83), and he suggests that the many and various emotional states of the brain are some of the very "Ways to Think" that we switch among in order to solve the problems of life. When he speaks of problem-solving as a way of briefly switching most of your Critics off (a.k.a. "brainstorming") and then turning them on again to examine the options, I thought of Edward de Bono's "Six Hats" method of creative thinking.

After my reading this morning, it occurred to me that my idea regarding new modes of thinking beyond the conceptual, modes which would capture the changes in thinking that the electronic apparatus are bringing about (the receptual, the exceptual, the deceptual, the inceptual) can connect to this work of de Bono and Minsky. Much of what Ulmer's work focuses on is how to think creatively: his CATT(t) method, for example, and his book on Heuretics: The Logic of Invention.

Following Flow: Intuition in Action

2007-06-16T13:29:00.000-05:00

I discovered another clue to the Deleuzoguattarian conception of thought. After reading about Simondon in Deleuze's Desert Islands, I looked him up in the index to A Thousand Plateaus and went to the "Treatise on Nomadology" where I read the following:

We always get back to this definition: the machinic phylum is materiality, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation . . . . We will therefore define the artisan as one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, a machinic phylum. The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulate. It is intuition in action. (409)

This makes so much more sense after reading Manuel DeLanda's books (Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History) and Todd May's Deleuze: An Introduction. Here's a passage from A Thousand Years:

In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated "stuff" simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all different manifestations of this dynamic material reality, or, in other words, they all represent the different ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. (21)

This illuminates a passage in A Thousand Plateaus that follows the one quoted above, which discusses metal and metallurgy:

In short, what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable. . . Metallurgy is the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness. (411)

I haven't given much thought to this last sentence, but I tried to "follow the flow" as I wrote the "diapath" below, earlier today. I guess, in a sense, I tried to make my thought (especially the point of view of the Fox, which represents this ethos) metallic....

I did see a potential connection to my philosophy of mixtures: the melting and flowing of metal is similar to a lava flow. . .

What is Thought? A Post-Socratic Diapath

2007-06-16T13:25:00.001-05:00

[Dialogos --> Diapathos; Dialogue --> Diapath]

The Lazy Dog: I must get organized. My thoughts keep swirling around one central question: “What is Thought?” It’s like a funnel, sucking my mental energy into a vortex. I have no control. Yet I never make any progress. I am stuck at that one location, that one point, as if a young child waiting to go forth into the world (first day of school, perhaps) and is afraid to do so. How can I think these thoughts about thought? I am not qualified. I have no credentials. I haven’t read the entire oeuvre of Western philosophy and all commentary on each major thinker. Who will listen to what I have to say? I will waste my time. I am wasting my time, for I can’t think of anything else.

The Quick Brown Fox: You spin and spin but you haven’t gone through. Dive in. You are swept up in the swept, the spinning. You are not traveling with it. Come with me through the vortex, to a new dimension of thought, to whatever is beyond the here of now.

The Lazy Dog: No, no. I must get organized. There is no time for wandering in multidimensional phase spaces. (Not to mention there’s a deadline.) This requires a particular kind of thinking, to think about thought in a systematic way. It requires analysis, a breaking down into this and that, and then a spreading out, an anatomizing of thought, an atomizing of thought. Ah yes, that will be my most erudite title: “An Atomy of Thought.” A resurrection of an ancient genre, a return to a classical age. Fox, I have no time for your non-sense. I have real work to do. My intention is to develop this genre within a contemporary context, accounting for all current thought in psychology, cognitive science, conceptual integration theory, the electrate apparatus.

[the QBF branches off of the Lazy Dog’s dialogue: he has multiple responses as it unfolds… below is a link from “non-sense.”]

The Quick Brown Fox: Oh but Dog, there is a logic to nonsense. A higher logic some would say :the logic of chaos, a theory of complexity, a recognition that all is in flux, nothing is stable, there are only flows, flows of matter (which are flows of energy, for the Einstein showed that each is a manifestation of the other, wed by speeds and slownesses), bloodflows to the parts of the mindbrain bridged by a concept, the flow of our conversation from me to you, from smooth to striated, from rhizome to tree :fractal half-dimensional web of unfolding potential :spider dropping from the leaf and falling free, web trailing from behind :banyan branch dropping down, seeking for an earth :

The Quick Brown Fox: [the following branches off from deadline]. How can there be a deadline? There are only lifelines. There is only life. Even the rocks are alive :have you ever seen a lava flow? have you ever seen a mud slide? Dog, you’re too lazy to even open your eyes and pay attention to what is happening around you! You only attend to that which you can control, that which will fit your little simplistic equations. You’re scared of nonlinear equations, or, rather, you have no way of conceiving of them :this is the limitation of your view of the concept, residue of literate thought. You must go beyond the concept to capture these new modes of thinking. Here’s a (partial?) list:

--the recept
--the decept
--the incept
--the except

So the questions you should be trying to answer are these: How to be, not conceptual, but receptual? How to be deceptual? Inceptual? Exceptual? How to create recepts, decepts, incepts, excepts? If you want to think with Deleuze, you have to think beyond Deleuze. He spoke of philosophy as the creation of concepts. You must speak of philosophy as the creation of recepts/decepts/incepts/ excepts.

The Lazy Dog: Your talk is all jumbled. How is anybody supposed to follow you? It’s all really a bit much. You’re interrupting me once again. Now, to get down to it. Let’s see. Okay. First of all an explication of terms: I will use “mindbrain” to indicate the origin or source of thoughts in order to acknowledge the current recognition of the problems that a Cartesian split (of mind from brain) poses for a current philosophy of mind. This term will be a way of acknowledging the embodied nature of thought, how it emerges from our “wetware,” from a brain and its experience of being in a body immersed in a three-space (three spatial dimensions). This recognition is in line with all of the current thinking about : David Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Josephy LeDoux. These thinkers point to the central role that emotion plays in reason, and therefore to misconceptions regarding the ….

The Quick Brown Fox: Umm, Dog?

The Lazy Dog: Yes, Fox? Yes?

The Quick Brown Fox: Preeeee-cisely.

On the Careful Creation of Concepts

2007-06-14T15:55:00.000-05:00

Read a short essay by Deleuze in his Deserted Islands called "Faces and Surfaces" today. It's an interview/conversation with artist Stefan Czerkinsky, who asks Deleuze, "What precautions should be taken when producing a concept?" Deleuze replies,

You put your blinker on, and check in your rearview mirror to make sure another
concept isn't coming up behind you; once you've taken these precautions, you
produce the concept. (282)

This sentence is footnoted, and the note says,

Concepts are not in your head; they are things, peoples, zones, regions,
thresholds, gradients, temperatures, speeds, etc. (312)

This note reminds me of their essentially anti-metaphorical stance.

Competing Theories of Cognitive Science

2007-06-13T18:45:00.000-05:00

I was digging on my desk last night and found a couple of folders with essays waiting to be discovered. The first included the 2003 Afterward to Lakoff and Johnson's reprint of Metaphors We Live By, which puts this early groundbreaking work into the context of research done since its first publication. The second was an essay by Martin E. Rosenberg called "Constructing Autopoiesis: The Architectural Body in Light of Contemporary Cognitive Science," which is a pretty severe critique of the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner paradigm in cognitive science, what he calls "the top-down model" (vs. the "bottom-up" model of Maturana and Varela as well as Deleuze and Guattari):

"I sensed that the notion of embodiment from Lakoff and Johnson was in fact incompatible with that of Varela and Deleuze" (174). . . "What makes Turner's polemic so astonishing is its seeming ignorance of a trend in cognitive science, represented by the work of Maturana and Varela, called the emergent or enactive paradigm" (176).

For Rosenberg, L&J aren't doing what they say they are doing: "Lakoff believes that he has created an emergent-properties account for metaphor-making" (173) but what he/they have done is to impose a top-down paradigm by positing "space as a structuring principle for the representation of concepts" (177). Rosenberg questions the extent to which the systems of meaning that they identify actually emerge from bodily experience. In other words, L&J aren't radically embodied enough...

Now the funny thing is that Rosenberg himself ends up using a key conceptual metaphor of spatiality as he sets up his critique:

"However, it is the grounds that we are most interested in, and we can approach those grounds from another direction by examining their claims for an 'experientialism' that explodes the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism as fundamental epistemological stances" (177, my emphasis).

This is what happens to me when I read L&J on the conceptual metaphors (like "More is Up" or "Change is Motion"): we're trapped in language as a reflection of our bodily experience, and it's hard not to recognize the truth of what they say. Still, I think Rosenberg has a powerful point to make, and this points to my Imaging Places presentation when I ask how different topological conceptions of space can in-form a change in the way we think with conceptual metaphors of space.

Beyond the Concept

2007-06-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

Ulmer's post to Invent-L today [subject line "the idea of chora at Key West (thinking)"] was a kind of choral meditation on a visit he made with some family members to Key West. He writes at one point,

The plane of immanence. Life, Deleuze says simply. Conatus (striving prior to any subject or identity). Outside. That is, without concept (not thinkable, or only duly noted, within literacy).

At this point I thought that what electracy needs is the equivalent of the concept for literacy. Then a handful of words came to mind: recept, decept, incept, and except. And these are all possibilities.

--The decept, for example, could refer to "deceptive" uses of language which wouldn't be considered deceptive because there is no literate, Platonic notion of Capital-T Truth to achieve and avoid: simulation, play/acting, prosopopeia, the dissoi-logoi of the sophists, "how to lie with maps/statistics" and Ulmer's assignment to write with fallacies rather than avoiding them... One who is deceived in the passive is one who is in error (to err = to wander).

--the recept or "to receive" (vs. conceive): "to take in, to admit to a receptacle or containing space; to allow to enter or penetrate" (from OED); other meanings involve "to take in by the mouth swallow" (think Applied Grammatology and Derrida's deconstruction of "seeing is understanding" conceptual metaphor to allow for the chemical senses: not "I see" but "I smell"!) and "to take into the mind." One of the examples was from Romanes 1888 book on Mental Evolution, which I promptly ordered from Amazon. He also wrote Mental Evolution in Animals with the Darwin himself....]

--the incept: again from OED--to begin/commence, to take in, as an organism or cell. To inceive (vs. conceive)

--the except: would probably be the opposite of incept: to let loose, express, eject...

These would be dubbed "the ceptions." No percept b/c D&G address this in What is Philosophy?

These, then, would be variant methods or, rather, manifestations of electrate reasoning in the same way that a concept is a manifestation of literate reasoning. Note to self: consider Lakoff and Johnson's "conceptual metaphors" in light of grammatological apparatus.

Deleuze on Thinking

2007-06-11T20:24:00.000-05:00

I pulled Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts off of my shelf and read through Tom Conley's essay on "Folds and Folding," since I read through Deleuze's book on The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque a number of years ago and also met Tom while teaching at Hamline in Minnesota. This is some of the clearest writing I've read by him (his The Self-Made Map I found tough-going). In it, he speaks of thinking (how is it that, once I turn my attention to this topic, suddenly it shows up everywhere?!). He starts with early conceptions of the fold in Deleuze's book on Foucault and writes, in the section titled "Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)," about the larger issues of sexuality in the emergence of subjectivity:

Every human being thinks as a result of an ongoing process of living in the world and by gaining consciousness and agency through a constant give and take of perception, affect and cognition. (Key Concepts 171).

According to Conley, "There is opened a dramatic reflection on the character of thinking, which belongs as much to Deleuze as to Foucault. . . . In terms of subjectivation, thinking means 'folding, doubling the outside with its co-extensive inside'. A topology is created by which inner and outer spaces are in contact with each other" (174).

Perhaps my invocation of moebius strips and klein bottles during the Imaging Place conference wasn't so far off the mark!

Conley continues:

When we "think" we cross all kinds of thresholds and strata and follow a fissure in order to reach what, he says, Melville calls a "central room" wherein, we fear, no one will be and where "the soul of men might reveal an immense and terrifying void." Thinking is figured as a moving line; it is indeed "Melville's line" with its two free ends... a line moving at a growing molecular speed, a "whiplash of a crazed charioteer," which leads... ultimately to a central room where there is no longer any need to fear its emptiness because the self (a fold) is found inside. "Here we become masters of our speeds, more or less commanding our molecules and singularities, in this zone of subjectivation in the embarkation of the inside and the outside" (174).

Conley continues to tie Deleuze's work to thinking when he introduces The Fold:

When he [Deleuze] remarks that it is incumbent upon the self to "draw singularities from a space of the inside", and that thinking--what makes possible the agency of the self--is tantamount to doubling the outside with a coextensive inside, Deleuze suggests that the upper room [of the "Baroque House"] and its folded furnishings become the imaginary space where subjectivation can be realized. The Baroque room, a space in which thinking takes place, is the site where new folds and folding (the forces and products of thinking) can be felt and harmonized" (176, my emphases).

So perhaps my question about "what is thought?" wasn't so whacky after all. After reading how much Deleuze seems to consider the question, it makes me feel very philospher-like to have asked it in the first place....

Ulmer's response

2007-06-10T21:37:00.000-05:00

Here's Ulmer's response to my reading of his allegory, from the Invent-L list:

> So did this ice cream story come from the ka-ching database of early childhood experience?!

This anecdote did not make it onto my shortlist of childhood markers. Those are

1. Learning how to open a door (my Invent lecture)
2. Two schmoos in backyard
3. Hearing someone yelling "help" in winter (wrote about this in Internet Invention, p 198). anyway, you are the perfect respondent for this thread, having cut your teeth on Spenser. Faerie Queene orders strawberry in a cup! Great reading. You got it. Next installment on the way (oblio). (invent-l list, 10 June 2007)

He refers to my dissertation work with him, which studied Spenser as one negotiating the transition to print culture after the advent of the printing press as analogous to our moment of transition from literacy to electracy.

The Quick Brown Fox and the Lazy Dog

2007-06-09T18:40:00.000-05:00

These will be the allegorical figures that will populate my philosophy. I'm not sure that they will reach the status of "conceptual persona" that Deleuze and Guattari call for in the creation of philosophical concepts, but they will allow me to do something different with the form and style of the writing, so that it's not a straightforward and conventional writing.

The Quick Brown Fox, as you may remember from learning how to type, jumped over the Lazy Dog's back. But then what happens? That's the question I want to ask, and attempt to answer.

The sentence incorporates every letter of the roman alphabet. It invokes alphabetic literacy at the same time that it suggests a going forward, a becoming-electrate: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog's back. The dog is slow. The fox achieves speed, races forward, is going on. The dog wants to slow things down, the way scientists and mathematicians minimize dimensional complexity in order to comprehend, to grasp, the nature of reality. The fox turns the point into a line by dashing forth: what you see is a blur, the fourth dimension manifest.

Brainstorming about Dust

2007-06-09T00:15:00.000-05:00

I did a little bit of brainstorming about dust (earth + air). I wish I had Inspiration (the program) to experiment with. I used the common composition technique of "clustering." First thing I thought of was the phrase "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" and associated with death and materiality and the biblical. I then remembered reading about dust as being composed in part of dead flakes of skin. Skin yields many interesting possibilities: boundaries, distinctions. Also flaking... Dust as a residue of a broken boundary. I could do a database search on "dust" and compose with what comes up: writing with the internet.

The goal is to explore each association as if it were a new world... I'll have to get that book titled Dust.

How to think like dust: becoming-dust--light, floaty, yet when it accumulates/gathers/clings, it can destroy computers: it generates heat on the inside of the computers, destroys cooling fans. Does dust behave like Deleuze's concept of the molecular? Investigate.

Thinking About Thinking

2007-06-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

The ultimate purpose of my conference presentation at the Invent-L conference was to think about thinking--how can new technologies change the way we think? And the more I think about *that* the more I return to the question of thought itself. And ever since I asked the question, I continue to bump into this question in the books of philosophy that I dip into. So I'm not far off the track....

For example, I grabbed Gilles Deleuze's Deserted Islands and Other Essays 1953-1974 from the shelf tonight and read the one titled, "On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought." He writes that he's interested in Hume, Bergson and Proust b/c in their work are

elements for a new image of thought. There's something extraordinary in the way they tell us: thinking means something else than what you believe. We live with a particular image of thought, that is to say, before we begin to think, we have a vague idea of what it means to think, its means and ends....Proust, for example, has the idea that every thought is an aggression...and that we think only when we are forced and constrained to think. (139)

As I read this, I thought of the images of mixture I've developed after thinking about the elemental pre-socratic philosophers: mud bubble dust lava: mud (earth + water), bubble (air + water), dust (earth + air) and lava (earth + fire). What I need to do is to figure out how to think like these mixtures: think like mud, like bubble, like dust, like lava. For as Deleuze writes, "What we're looking for these days is a new image of the act of thought, its functioning, its genesis in thought itself" (140).

This will require "formal renewal" as well. Deleuze points to this problem:

in philosophy, we're all experiencing this problem of formal renewal. It's certainly possible. It begins with little things. For example, using the history of philosophy as a 'collage'... Also, the medium in philosophy is the concept (like sound for the musician or color for the painter), the philosopher creates concepts. He executes his creation in a conceptual 'continuum' just like the musician does in a sonorous medium. What's important here is this: where do concepts come from? What is the creation of concepts? A concept exists no less than characters do. In my opinion, what we need is a massive expenditure of concepts, an excess of concepts. (141)

So how can the mixture-concepts I have created guide the formal execution of my philosophies? That is the question I am wrestling with (in the mud? mud-wrestling the question?).

An Allegory of Thinking

2007-06-03T23:03:00.000-05:00

In response to Ulmer's allegory of thinking, I posted the following to the Invent-L list:

So did this ice cream story come from the ka-ching database of early childhood experience?!

Some questions that Greg's allegory raised for me:

1. Why is it the ice-cream store of "Reason"? Is thinking only about reason, or is there more to it than that?
2. Since this allegory invokes a landscape metaphor (what else is there?), I wonder what other stores and places there are to go and what they represent other aspects of thinking.
3. Why is thought represented as something solid that melts (e.g. ice cream)?
4. What is the mother of thought? What is the father of thought? Why is thinking represented as a child?
5. Why does the mother tell the child not to pick up the fallen ice cream? Why does the father say "nicely done" after clarifying the lesson learned? What does this suggest about the nature of thought and thinking?
6. Am I thinking too much about all of this?

Some implications for thought and thinking:

1. Thought is slippery. Thought doesn't last long: it's transient, it melts away.
2. Thinking is something to be enjoyed, while it lasts. The joy is ephemeral, though.
3. Thought is something we try to contain. The "waffle-grid sentence/cone" suggests the striated space of Deleuze and Guattari. Thought inevitably escapes, however; it cannot be contained.
4. There is plain thought (vanilla and chocolate) and there is specialty thought (bubblegum-clam flavor with sprinkles).
5. Curiosity about something else (here, about the ants) leads to losing your thoughts. You must stay focused in order to engage in sustained thought.
6. The visual nature of allegory/analogy provides *the* way to think within the electrate apparatus. A "proof" will be a scene unfolding in the space of allegory/parable.

If this is the way we are to think in the electrate apparatus, which Greg's response suggests, then what will happen to the practice of philosophy?

I am also thinking about how Second Life could/would become a staging area for collective thought/allegorical "happenings" (e.g. Craig's and Will's VirtaFlaneurazine-SL experiments in SL).

Eagerly awaiting part 2.....

Response #2 to the Question of What is Thought?

2007-06-01T22:59:00.000-05:00

Ulmer offered the following response to my question on invent-l, changing the subject line to "allegory (was whacky question)":

What is thinking. Part One: an allegory.

The ice-cream store of Reason.
The most popular flavors are vanilla and chocolate but some ask for bubblegum-clam with sprinkles. Thinking is the child exiting with a double-dip thought already melting down his hand (a self-portrait, 1950 perhaps) nestled insecurely in a waffle-grid sentence.

A proof (reconstructed scene with parable feature turned on):
1. ......mmm.......m......n...nn.......------zzz---,,,,
2. (Sees trail of ants crossing a deep crack in sidewalk). ?????
3. (Leans over 90 degrees at the waist. Double-dip top-heavy conedischarges plops reverse order onto sidewalk altering ant train movement with several casualties). !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
4. (says Waaaaaahhhhhhh!) Oops oops oops.
5. It still looks ok mostly (reaches for upper portion).
Mother: Don't touch that!
Father: A lesson: vertical and horizontal. Nicely done.
6. (Looking at sister's cone). It would be funny if hers plopped.

Now at first I thought this was the kind of whacky, flip response that Ulmer sometimes will give out, or the kind of creative play that gets spun out on invent-l sometimes that doesn't seem to lead anywhere. But then I printed it out and carried it around with me at work, and in the spare moments I had (like when computers were re-booting or carrying out some function), I'd pull it out and think on it. And the more I thought about it, the more questions it generated. But when it occurred to me exactly what he was doing, I realized that it fit right in to his whole project, which has to do with changing the way we think. It's about having us think with images, through images rather than words. I'll save my thoughts about this post for another day.

Response #1 to the Question of What is Thought?

2007-05-30T21:48:00.000-05:00

Barry Mauer replied immediately to my whacky question with the following response:

Excellent start. I think you are already hinting at an answer here, which is to move away from defining thought as something that can be understood as an "object" (in terms of exclusive features) and towards an understanding of thought as it is understood "in language" (and other sign systems). Also, you suggest (at least to me) that perhaps thought is understood in terms of what it does rather than what it is.

And another "thought": what if we de-center human beings from thought about thought? If thought does something, can a machine or animal do it? Can space itself think?

And what are the limits of thought? What is outside it? How does it overlap with other concepts (like "sense" and "reason")?

Just some thoughts. (invent-l list, 28 May 2007)

Just a (gossipy, blog-like?) aside--I love Barry. He's absolutely great. We were in Ulmer's dissertation seminar together (with Michelle Glaros and Richard Howard, among others), and I always enjoyed hanging out with him. It was *so* great being with him again during the conference. We plunged into some serious discussion about the conference topics. . . I scratched one note down during our conversation (Bill Stephenson was there--another brilliant guy who I had a lot of classes with back in graduate school): "What do we want to remember?" and "moving through loss is equivalent to moving through information." At one point Barry suggested that in the age of literacy, logos was the gold standard, but in the age of electracy, pathos and ethos will be the gold standard. Now that's putting it in terms I can understand!

Barry also mentioned psycho-pharmacological interventions that suppress the amygdala so that there is no affect, no emotional involvement, and how that can affect one's ability to remember: we attach mood to information.

Anyway, to comment on Barry's response: he attributes too much to me when he suggests that I "hint at an answer." I did want to imply that thought is more about what it does than what it is, but this is probably more a result of reading Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze (A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History; Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy). Deleuze is always pushing us to create new concepts (thereby making something happen in the world--me having thoughts, making concepts/philosophy), and I am impressed by the idea of the "materiality of the concept". I'm not articulating this very well, so I'll just stop now.

I do want to mention that I was reading Douglas Hofstadter's book on Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies recently, so Barry's suggestion of thought de-coupled from human wet-ware definitely resonates with the work that he and the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" was doing when they tried (and succeeded to some extent) to get computers to perform higher-order thinking skills (a.k.a. thinking via analogies).

Abstract Revision/Whacky Thought

2007-05-29T21:38:00.000-05:00

I didn't post anything of substance on invent-l until yesterday--Memorial Day. Had the day off, and wife/kids are still in FL visiting grand-parents, so I was on my own. I sat in my pajamas until 4pm while I read the first chapters/pages of the Alliez book on Deleuze I mention below (among other things) and got swept up in the witch's ride once again. The subject line was "whacky question #1" and was a reference to Craig Saper's response to a question of mine at the conference (can't remember what it was now). He told an anecdote of a French professor who would always characterize his questions (he was the only one with enough courage to pipe up in this particular class) as "whack-eee." Here's the message I posted:

(I think this might qualify as the revision of my conference abstract that Craig
requested a while back)

I’ve been quiet since returning from the Imaging Place conference in part because it was so intense (the preparation leading to it followed by the “being there”) and in part because I experienced a bit of burn-out and have been catching up with the rest of my life: phoenix rising from the ashes. I promised Craig S. at the conference to ask some whacky questions, so this is the first: What is thought? or (conversely?) what is thinking? or “what does it mean to think?”

One thing I hoped for from the conference but wasn’t very good at producing (perhaps my fault, perhaps the fault of the conference format) was a conversation about how a 3-D electronic space like Second Life will change the way we think spatially. To save (my) time in posing the question, I will quote Christy Dena quoting me in her article “Art and Aporia: Imaging Place” (http://www.slatenight.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=96&Itemid=40
):

For the Greeks, the act of moving through a space was LITERALLY an act of reasoning for them, if you consider their use of the “memory palace” as a method of organizing their speeches, their argumentative acts of reason. As the fourth step in a rhetorical act, “memoria” was their way of remembering the “topics” (literally “places” in Greek) in their speech: they would put images which would trigger their memory of the speech topic into the places of their memory palace (the imagines loci). Craig also points out that the movement through a space is/was an act of reasoning in oral cultures as well. In aboriginal walkabouts, details of a journey are encoded in a song. And I remember reading in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines that the aborigines would embed stories in the landscape so that, as they walked about, stories were stored in a kind of pre-literate version of the Greek’s memory palace. So what we are doing in SL/VR when we speak of moving through space as an act of reasoning is nothing new. The question is this: how does the electronic medium change the way that we think spatially? If oral culture’s primary mode was narrative (i.e. using space to tell stories), and literate culture’s primary mode was argumentation (i.e. using space to make arguments), then what is the primary mode of “electracy”? We might say “using space to make patterns” (a.k.a. artwork, aesthetically pleasing constellations of meaning: “The wide image is an emergent pattern…. a constellation that appears within a field of relationships” Internet Invention 276). I think what Ulmer is trying to work out is the codification of creativity, the actual in-corp-oration of discovery into the act
of reasoning (this is actually the first step of rhetoric: invention, which means “to come upon, find, discover”)...."

One thing I tried to do in my powerpoint presentation (now available in two parts at http://www.slideshare.net/rsmyth) was to introduce Lakoff and Johnson’s cluster of conceptual metaphors based on the Mind as Body metaphor (Thinking is Moving, Thinking is Perceiving, Thinking is Object Manipulation) and consider these in light of using virtual reality as a prosthesis for thinking (Ideas are Locations, A Line of Thought is a Path, Understanding is Following, etc.). I wanted to ask three questions: If thinking is moving through space, then

--What happens to thought when our understanding of space changes?
--What happens to thought when we consider the space of non-Euclidean geometries?
--What happens to thought when we begin to navigate virtual spaces like Second Life?

This especially became resonant when Greg told his anecdote about his inability to use a doorknob when very young.

But the more I thought about thought, the more I wondered what thought actually is…. and thought that this would have to be answered before going much further.

Ultimately, I’m intrigued by what it means for abstract thought to be based on bodily experience of 3-D space and early infant/childhood experiences with manipulating objects and learning to navigate our world.

So what do you think? What is thought?

Richard

(I was encouraged to post this b/c I just returned from Gainesville [twin sons graduated from P.K. Yonge on Friday] and started reading a book I bought from Goering’s: Eric Alliez’s THE SIGNATURE OF THE WORLD: WHAT IS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S PHILOSOPHY? in which the translator writes in the preface, “But what is perhaps most significant about Alliez’s operation… is the absolute centrality he accords to the question of *thought*, which he places at the very heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s recasting of materialism for the twenty-first century as a materialism of the concept. For *What is Philosophy?* clearly shows that it is impossible to answer the question without also expanding it to “What is Thought?”. . . (xxiii) ) (invent-l list, 28 May 2007)

I was surprised when Craig Freeman posted this in its entirety on the conference website, but I was also happy that my posting it seems to have gotten the ball rolling on the post-conference 'formalized' activity (like thinking about what product should emerge from the conference).

The Witch's Ride

2007-03-12T21:18:00.000-05:00

It's been a couple of weeks since returning from the conference. I wanted to express some of the joy I felt to be part of this important learning community that takes up so many interesting and significant questions of how we are negotiating the transition in apparatus from literacy to electracy. So I posted the following to the invent-l list. Here's the message:

I'm just now getting on *my* feet a bit after the conference. Guess it takes me a little longer. . .

During the keynote speech at the conference, Greg defined Spinoza’s concept of “conatus.” I looked this up in Deleuze’s book on Spinoza, in which Deleuze uses a passage from Malamud’s THE FIXER as an epitaph, which says, “I didn’t understand every word but when you’re dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch’s ride.” (invent-l list, 5 March 2007)

A witch’s ride: I think that captures something of my experience the last five or six months. . . .

When I looked up “Conatus” in Deleuze's index of the main concepts in Spinoza’s Ethics, I was redirected to “Power” and read the following:

“In joy … our power expands, compounds with the power of the other, and unites with the loved object… It can be said that joy augments our *power of acting* and sadness diminishes it. And the *conatus* is the effort to experience joy, to
increase the power of acting, to imagine and find that which is the cause of
joy, which maintains and furthers this cause. . .” (101).

I have experience this joy, this power, in community. A neuron needs a network to
get all fired up. . . .

Thank you all for providing a community of scholarship in which to experience such joy.

Ulmer followed this up with a joke about how as a scholar he works on his own, in a flip kind of way:

this conflicts with my ascetic nature, but oh well... (invent-l list, 11 March 2007)

Which I have to admit kind of hurt my feelings. (Is this what you're supposed to do in a blog? Spill your guts? gossip?) Because he seemed so genuinely grateful that we had all come to the conference, had gathered around him. As a result, I didn't post for quite a while. It kinda exhausted me. My "capacity to act" was diminished to some extent. And now to continue in this vein of being the hurt little child, he did the same thing during the conference, when we were sharing our presentations the night before the conference. I had spent a lot of time making a nice looking, tri-fold posterboard with bold-faced headers and images from SL. Stayed up way too late the night before finishing it up. And Ulmer joked that it looked like a (7th grade) science project.

Now don't get me wrong--I love his sense of humor. But these two instances seem to be at my expense. Maybe I'm being too sensitive, but I'm just telling it like it is.

Catching Up

2007-02-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

I want to start with an impression I had while watching Ulmer's keynote. He seemed genuinely humbled by the fact that many of his former students--me, Craig Saper, Michael Jarrett, Barry Mauer, Michele Glaros, and Stephanie Tripp--as well as colleagues--John Craig Freeman, Will Pappenheimer, members of the "Florida Research Ensemble"--had gathered together, had come to Gainesville so that he could be part of the conference. Once they post the video of each presentation, I think you'll see it (if you go looking, whoever "you" are).

Conference Blog

2007-02-27T22:37:00.000-05:00

I've decided to make this my invent-l conference blog. I'll try to make it more blog-like to, with more frequent bursts of where I'm at (rather than waiting a month and then delivering some kind of polished short academic essay). Can't get away from the old training--"the old style" as Beckett said (quoted in Deleuze's essay--but can't find where and, guess what? I'm not going to bother finding the bloody page reference....)

Machinima: The Electrate Professor

2007-02-26T22:46:00.000-05:00

Here is the machinima video that Stephanie Tripp and I unveiled at the Invent-L conference. It features the avatar of Greg Ulmer that she created. I posted it up at livevideo.com and will embed the video below.

The Electrate Professor

Autocartography: New Installments

2007-02-20T14:56:00.000-05:00

I've finished two more "chora" in the autocartography: one in Haverhill and one in Smyth County, Virginia. Again, both grew out of existing places in Second Life, the first being one of the places in the "Imaging Places" work of John Craig Freeman, and the second being the work of a psychology student at UC Davis which attempts to provide a simulation of the experience of being schizophrenic.

Like the first one set at the Mayan Ruin, the editing of these were driven by the chosen music. I stayed with the work of Philip Glass as it fit so well with the theme of each. In Haverhill, I chose his two original works from The Truman Show soundtrack. This movie invokes the issues of identity as it is shaped by the digital medium. Freeman's work in Haverhill features my "real life" self talking about the metaphor of metaphor and how the "broken bridge" by my house in Haverhill was about to undergo repair. Freeman has been putting his work, originally intended for art gallery showings and publication on CD-ROM, into Second Life (SL), the online 3-D participatory virtual reality. So the youtube video shows my SL avatar watching my "real" (digitized) self. The music is from the scene in the movie when "Christos" (the God-like creator of the Truman Show and owner of Truman) is watching Truman sleep; he approaches the screen and strokes his hair. At this point in the machinima, "I" (the SL avatar Abaris Brautigan) am watching "me" in Freeman's introductory movie being aired in SL. The second segment shows Abaris walking from the interface globe up the invisible stairway to a platform-map of Haverhill, where the spheres (i.e. the nodes or loci of the original work) are situated. The music is from the scene in the movie when Truman is attempting to sail beyond the bounds of the small town he has been persuaded all his life never to venture beyond. At movie's end, he discovers his self and breaks out of the digital realm; in my piece, "I" go from having trouble accepting my digital appearance and the sound of my digital voice to accepting this. I'm not sure what I'm trying to say exactly, but I wanted to point to the strangeness of identity formation at this time of transition from literacy to electracy.

The second location reminded me of the breakdown I mentioned in the previous post. The breakdown occurred in Smyth County, Virginia (how's THAT for a signature effect?!), and I was admitted to the Smyth County Mental Hospital, where I was labeled as a schizophrenic after being mistakenly treated for being on LSD. I did not have the experiences that are depicted at the UC Davis SL installation, but being in the hospital was a very scary experience, one that I remember vividly. I took this experience into a seminar on "Psychosis and Literature" with Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, whom I quote at the end of the video. During that seminar, I learned of Lacan's theory of psychosis, which seemed to fit my situation so well and to explain what happened to me. The music, from Glass's opera Einstein on the Beach, includes repeated counting and nonsense voices--it sounds crazy.

In all three of these, the music has been essential in terms of creating the desired mood that I wanted the video to portray. Greg Ulmer, the theorist whom I worked with at the "Florida School of Grammatology," writes about the significance of cultivating mood in electronic writing, especially in his book Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. He views electronic media as prostheses for a fuller expression of our humanity, an expression which recognizes the recent breakthroughs in brain studies which show the centrality of the emotions in our reasoning.

Autocartography: First Attempt

2007-02-08T20:42:00.000-05:00

I've been working on a conference presentation for the Invent-L Conference, which will be taking place two weeks from tonight. My presentation will be about a new genre of electronic writing that I've invented called Autocartography. And part of my goal is to create some "machinima" movies in Second Life that experiment with video as a dense communication medium. An initial stab at this, rushed to make the NMConnect Media Arts Symposium which starts this weekend, can be found here: Autocartography: A Mystory. The subtitle, "Chora: Mayan Ruin", invokes the work of my dissertation director Greg Ulmer, whose book Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy invents "choragraphy" as a genre of electronic writing. You see, by inventing new genres, I only follow in his footsteps. I hope to have two or three more of these finished before I leave for the conference on the 19th.

"Mayan Ruin" tries to capture the chaos of madness, which I experience shortly after a honeymoon to the Mayan peninsula where I toured ruins like the one in Second Life featured in the movie. The choice of music, "The Funeral of Amenhotep III" by Philip Glass, from his opera Akhnaten, is meant to create a striking and frightening mood. I found myself editing the movie to synchronize with shifts in the music. I also found that, while in the process of making the movie, I discovered a narrative thread emerging from the short, 30 second scenes that I was patching together. That is, it started to make sense, and the more I look at it, the more sense it makes (if *that* makes any sense!). I won't say any more about that now lest I pre-empt all of the scholarly commentary that is sure to follow!

During the honeymoon, I was reading a book called The King and the Corpse by Heinrich Zimmer, a book along the lines of Joseph Campbell's explanations of mythology. When I encountered the serpent statuary and its related symbolism at Chichenitza and considered this in relation to Old Testament myths of the Garden of Eden, I became a bit overexcited. I remember reading William Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY on the way home to relax.

When I came across the Mayan Ruin in Second Life, all of these memories were resurrected, which makes it for me a "chora" or "sacred place." I didn't realize until after I began the filming that the name of this particular ruin, Xibalba, is the name for the Mayan Underworld.

The Return

2007-01-31T21:50:00.000-05:00

I discovered a blog today by an old friend from graduate school, Harvey Molloy, and so I thought that perhaps I should use this blogspot (which I used to test the process way back when in 2005) to just shoot out idle ramblings and whatnot, in order to crowd the blogosphere even more. I will use my other blog to continue to comment on the books that I read; this one I will save for all of those special insights that all of you are just dying to read (I am sure)...

Arcology

2005-08-17T22:46:00.000-05:00

Just stumbled upon an architectural theorist I was interested in about five years ago. Cant' remember how or why I was interested. . . . I just remember the concept of a self-contained city/enhanced community. The guy's name is Paolo Soleri, and I've discovered that he has a whole community in Arizona which he is building. Check it out here: Arcosanti. You can apply to live there after attending a five-week workshop. Very interesting!

The Quixotics

2005-05-01T20:50:00.000-05:00

I rediscovered a Gordon Lightfoot tape from 20+ years ago (those old TDK's had a life-long guarantee and they weren't fooling around!) and have been listening to it over and over again. One of the songs is "Don Quixote," and it occurred to me that there should be a wandering band of ascetics called the "Quixotics." What we need are more people willing to tilt at windmills, to take on the behemoths of MNCs (Multinational Corporations), to do the impossible, to carry the torch of idealism forward. Perhaps a group of "engaged" monkish types who take on the world, trying to make it a better place.

Today, at a "peace celebration" at Gar Park in Haverhill, Dave Dunn of the Peace Alliance told of legislation to create a National Department of Peace. See the Department of Peace Campaign or The Peace Alliance for more information about that--and to join the newly engaged wandering band of Quixotics who will proudly stand up against the impossible forces aligned against a better world.

His Excellency in metaphor

2005-04-29T00:03:00.000-05:00

Listening to Joseph J. Ellis's His Excellency George Washington on CD-ROM. I noticed in the first few pages that he uses two geographic metaphors to describe Washington. First, in the preface, Washington is compared to the landscape of the moon (distance, alien, mysterious) and then in the first chapter, titled "Interior Regions," his "interior regions" are directly compared to the interior regions of the country in which he served during the French & Indian War. These are striking and startling metaphors which I'm sure hold some meaning for the "making" of history.