all dynamic, interactive (through at least “storage” and “recall”) archive based
mnemotechnics ... ✤ they are somewhat in competition .. that is, one of these will
...
Individual, Social and Global Memory (as well as attention and “protention”)/ Media, Thinking and Acting Admin ✤ share blog links with each other ... but only if you want. Learn to work together, to produce better individual work (this doesn’t mean copying from each other! :) ✤ share links, tags with each other ... eg twitter #arts3091 ... I’m putting links up on Twitter and on the course site ✤ today’s lecture and weeks 5 and 6’s lectures are all related. I may give the end of this week’s next time .. we’ll see. The Course So Far ✤ Key question: how do we (you and I) deal with the complexity of media, cultural and social change? The Course ✤ Week Two (and three) dealt with as many of the fairly traditional ways of thinking about media and comms and change as I could put together (briefly!) into one hour or so. ✤ Week Three focussed on media ecologies as a major way of understanding the shifting sets of relationships or “ecologies” involved. The Course ✤ This week we’re thinking about the way in which our experience might be constituted/interfered with by media, and media and other “ecologies”. Today—what is “experience”? ✤ a very wide ranging, and sketchy lecture ... just try to relax and listen up ... ✤ the main question: how do memory, action, thinking, feeling, habit, sensation, etc change with media change? ✤ a second set of questions: what are all these? and what does this tell us about media (while media perhaps tell us quite a bit about “us”)? How do memory, habits, action, perception, attention, protention, sensations, thinking processes (whatever these are), come together with (now often global
and/or hyperlocal) media? What happens when any of these change? What is social change in this context? Of course we can think of the relations between memory, habits, action, perception, attention, protention, sensations, thinking processes, and global and/or hyperlocal) media as a huge, complex and shifting ecology of ecologies ... (more on this soon) How do we come to have “experience”? ✤ (soon) the conclusion of the media ecologies lecture.. as a way into this .. ✤ How do you come to have experience, a sense of self, world, relations between these? ✤ How do media/social change interact with our memories, habits, perceptions and sensations (including vision, but also hearing, touch, proprioception), thinking and activity, attention and protention? How do all these come together, along with the shifting world? Up Front ✤ Media (and communications) intervene fundamentally in all of these, and all of them are crucial to what media and communications are, how and whether media work .. ✤ And what kind of self, society etc we live in, from moment to moment .. now ... (“whatever now is”), and in the ongoing creation (and destruction) of history, big history, small history, your history, our history ... Exam Stress Story ✤ Recently I found myself working on an article for my research. There was (for once) no hurry. Yet I was very tense, scratching notes into the margins of articles as quickly as I could ... feeling under immense pressure. Trying to rush my thoughts ... ✤ I asked myself where this pressure was coming from .. and to cut a long story short I realised I had embodied the habit of such pressure from years of exams when I was younger. When I placed my attention on to the stress, I clearly remembered similar feelings, even the exact ways of writing/thinking, positioning my body and moving, from the distant past, during test and exams. Exam Stress Story ✤ This is partly a warning story of course ... it’s not a bad idea to question the
✤
✤
✤ ✤
✤
way you work, where it might come from, whether it’s appropriate to the present. However it also raised some questions. This was experience, moving from the habitual to the conscious, with shifting forms of attention, memory, sensations etc ... in relation to media forms (writing, pens, reading) in embodied contexts (desks etc) that assembled what we might call the Andrew/exam ongoing media event ... What do such events tell us about sensation, thinking, attention, memory and habit? About our engagement with media forms and events and what they require from us? About the past, present and future? Umwelts Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok “umwelt (plural: umwelten; the German word Umwelt means "environment" or "surrounding world") .... the "biological foundations that lie at the very epicenter of the study of both communication and signification in the human [and non-human] animal." Template:Von Uexkull, 1920, 1934/1957; cf. Lorenz, 1971 (Studies in animal behaviour, Vol 2. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press) (Wikipedia) An umwelt is the world as your organism is able to perceive and act within it (so each person’s world is different, but a dog in the same room would have an even more different world ... literally different because it would extract certain perceptual relations and affordances for action from it ... think of this room for a tick, or bacteria) Umwelts
✤
The crucial thing is that we can share the same world in general but have very different “umwelts”.
✤
Much of media theory assumes a more uniform set of experiences than this ... but
There are No Simple Experiences ✤ Our own experience is very complex, and different to that of others .. so how do we negotiate, think about it, talk about it? Neither are there Completely Correct/Permanent Models ✤ All models are useful; none of them are right. Indeed, modeling is so useful that especially in the everyday, we are always modeling/theorising (theory of mind) ... Chris Frith: we are constantly modeling those events (the behaviour of others, what the world will do next, the weather, etc) beyond
✤ ✤
our feeling of our body .. indeed, we model our own body as well ... our models are never entirely accurate, but still useful. To complicate this, much of our experience involves modeling (eg fitting what we sense into patterns we recognise, modeling what might happen next from what’s happening now) ... So there is no simple, clear perception, memory, habit, thinking processes, media, communication, interaction, attention ... things are complex ....
So how do we cope this complexity ✤ not just simple knowledge but frameworks that are constantly corrected according to (and in fact as) experience ✤ not just this but transversals/metamodels .. that is, we are constantly having to combine models/ideas/assumptions in odd combinations so we can move with the world (or we are trying to resist this by making the world comply with increasingly inaccurate models we can’t give up) ✤ this will come up time again when we come to many of the major more “topic based” issues that will be discussed later in the course (from next week) eg old versus new journalism ✤ Guattari for how this all comes together, and some finishing off of the media ecologies topic from last week. what is coming together, if anything in mediated experience? Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies technoscience (incl. media) and social as solution/problem within these ecologies • “Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new techno scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and restate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and, on the other hand the inability of organised social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work.”’ (‘Media Ecologies and Digital Activism’) • are we now seeing new forms of organization better able to make things work? Theory + practice (models and experience) are inseparable here. e.g. Guattari loved Radio Alice and the Free Radio as theory+practice examples
of using media differently to reform social life, the production of subjectivity Radio Alice Here’s a more complex, recent example ✤ obviously there’s the Middle East (or Wisconsin, the Occupy movement etc) over the last couple of years... but now we’ll look at ... ✤ new media as a way of visualizing the structure of choreography --> Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing Reproduced (William Forsythe) http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/ ok .. now I’m going to break all the elements involved experience in down.. perhaps something like “memory” is the key to it all .. if we question memory that is .. Memory ✤ When I lived and worked my exam stress, even when writing and reading at home with lots of time, was I remembering the past, or was it a habit, was it just “in my body”, or in my brain? Or perhaps triggered by the paper and pen, or a habit of sitting? Or perhaps all through all of these? ✤ And when I suddenly, for the first time in perhaps 40 years, asked, why is this? Was this my mind, or my stress, “speaking”, or some different kind of perception? When I retrained my attention on my body/mind differently, what was going on here? And when I shifting this attention back into the past, what was going on? Was I remembering habits? And why did it “go” when I remembered the past? Memory ✤ Is somehow “virtual” ... it’s real, but it’s not quite actual ... ✤ This virtuality is a vague set of possibly infinite relations from the past, in the present, and from which we draw to propel us into the future in our actual engagements with the world ✤ As in my writing and research at home, past to future .... ✤ But when I wanted to shift this, I cast myself into the pool of memory .. this virtuality .. at first vaguely, then into a less vague region of the past .. then more and more specifically (Bergson).. the memory emerged in accordance with my attention to perceptions and habits ... ✤ So memory is a dynamic relationship between actualisation of specific events as they shift and the broad, almost infinite set of potentials for action from the past ..
Memory ✤ another way of putting this, the experience of memory is a dynamic relationship between remembering and forgetting, habit and conscious thought, as one pays attention to one’s movement through the world in relation to that which seems to move through this movement and world, from the past into the future (so not only retention of the past and forgetting, but also projecting into the future, or protention) Memory ✤ as per my Course Ouline notes, we can also think of memory as short or long term; “natural” or “technical” [Ancient Greeks: a neat division that media as memory technologies problematise]; working, performative, etc; conscious, unconscious and subconscious [Freud] (in fact, many of our theories of thinking processes are in fact theories of the active working of memory); voluntary and involuntary [Proust] .. In short ✤ our brains, bodies, world, technologies (and friends, families, genes, mobiles, iPods, books, iPads, plans, concepts, feelings, beliefs, morals) are all dynamic, interactive (through at least “storage” and “recall”) archive based mnemotechnics ... ✤ they are somewhat in competition .. that is, one of these will often destroy another as it comes “online” for us .. constantly ✤ a lot of our experience consists of this conflict of archives and memory etc... a dynamic ecology .. Memory (Ancient Greeks/recent French) .. Nmeme, Anamnesis, Hypomnesis ✤ Nmeme and Anamnesis imply a kind of living, ‘natural’ memory or, in the case of anamnesis, recall (though eg Derrida soon problematises the ‘natural’) ✤ Hypomnesis is a kind of extended memory, more technical - recalling things through signs or technical devices (this includes writing). Of course it implies deficiencies in Nmeme and problematises it... Memory (Ancient Greeks/recent French) .. Nmeme, Anamnesis, Hypomnesis ✤ communication is often about using media technologies and archives to help out the deficiencies in “simple” human memory ✤ we “remix” our current experience via media ...
✤
See Galaxy Quest, scene 15 for a good example of this ...
Memory—Anamnesis/hypomnesis (Plato/Stiegler) ✤ anamnesis—recall ... “natural” (Ancient Greeks) versus hypomnesis .... all technologies are hypomnetic eg cooking utensils tell us how to cook ... but media technologies are even more so, self-consciously ... Stiegler calls media mnemotechnologies ... ✤ but as our memory gets greater through mnemotechnics .. and as these globalise (networks, internet), we also lose our “natural” memory to the machines ... ✤ Stiegler says that in fact, humans never had pure or natural memory, unsupplemented by technics (it follows that there is no pure inner being, thinking etc for anyone, in a sense no real simple individuality separate from the world—we are social and technical animals ... not only in language but in our “techniques of the body” [Mauss]). But he still worries about our survival in this hyper-globalised constitution of our experience/memory in contemporary media .... how media technologies contaminate us ... ✤ “our bodies and brains are inflected and contaminated by the material supplements and cognitive prostheses which we incessantly internalize” (Sutton:131) ✤ tensions between different aspects of media, between memory as STATIC “fixed in archives” (133) and DYNAMIC “porous and active” (later we’ll see that archives might be mobile, porous and active) ✤ controlling memory as “moral quest” (135) .. continues to media ✤ but “totally voluntary memory” is a fantasy .... (135) Husserl/Stielger .. Three Kinds of “Retention”/Memory ✤ Husserl (phenomenologies founder, who Stiegler follows and critiques) suggested that in human memory there were primary and secondary retentions ... plus a third kind of retention, “image-consciousness” ✤ Primary is lived experience in the ongoing moment (duration) ... retaining something in time (remembering from moment to moment what is going on) .. the continuity of experience ✤ Secondary is what we might normally call “memory” ... that is, things we have “stored” that we can “recall” Stiegler, technics and memory
✤ ✤ ✤
Tertiary retention is what Husserl calls “image-consciousness”, that is, exterior interference with experience/memory ... Stiegler says what media mostly do is act as tertiary retention .. (mobile address books, news, etc) In particular, the new technics of networked mediation make for a tertiary series of retentions that increasingly intervene, indeed constitute, human short and long-term memory.
that is, media, as tertiary retentions, increasingly interfere with primary and secondary retentions and the way they work even with language, this was the case, but now it is much more the case, in a much more unstable and destablising way that is the real importance of “new media”/networks, etc understanding this, enables to understand the relation between media and experience Bernard Stiegler thinks there is a crisis in the contemporary “ecology of mind”, as mnemotechnics—that is, media— proliferate, diversify and interfere with more and more of what we used to easily (whether true or not) consider “natural”, our “selves, “culture” Synthesis (Kant/Stiegler) ✤ Memory as one of the main bases for the subsequent “syntheses” of perception, consciousness, thoughts, feelings, sensations, recognitions, a sense of space and time, of our own reason (thinking processes) in relation to the world ... ✤ “Synthesis” means a bringing together into something like time .. duration .. or we might say simply, experience. So a great deal of much smaller (or larger) events come together into the ongoing “synthesis” of our experience ✤ Yet Stiegler says that the network of media technologies now has it’s own synthesis, in competition with ours Synthesis (Kant/Stiegler) ✤ “The techno-logical synthesis of tertiary retention supersedes the syntheses of consciousness.” (‘Our Ailing Educational Institutions’) ✤ Rightly or wrongly, we took much of our experience to be “interior”, whether to ourselves or groups, or even sometimes to more or less “unified” cultures. ✤ Now this is much more obviously and powerfully exteriorised in media
technologies, global networked and “global mnemotechnics” ... in which there are powerfully different umwelts, perceptions, logics, judgements etc coming together .... Education as tension within all this ✤ For Stiegler, our educational system plays a crucial role in all this ✤ It has long formed “unwelts” if we can put it that way .. in particular ways .. that is, embodied habits of perception, thinking, remembering, forgetting, acting, possibilities for future habits etc ... ✤ But as media go global and transform the world, the old means of education are no longer as relevant ... this might be good in many ways, but it has consequences ... ✤ In challenging education, it challenges our senses of self (“I”), of community (“we”), culture, etc ... but more than that Education as tension within all this ✤ “Today, when automated understanding and a certain schematisation of the cultural industries are beginning to converge, this educational system with its nineteenth-century roots -- a system inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-Century ideas and used as a device for internalising the prostheses that form the history of knowledge and of the 'we' (understood as universal consciousness distinct from national histories) -- is challenged by the transformation of the technical system into a planetary industrialised mnemotechnical system of retention.. And with it 'consciousness' (as such) is challenged. The international programming industries are gradually replacing national educational systems and their national institutional programmes which, as a result, no longer seem compatible with the transmission imperatives defined by the planetary industrial and mnemotechnical system. This evolution is a veritable war of minds, which is today led by the US, but who (as will be seen), are only continuing the pursuit of a campaign begun by Western Europe. This possibility was, from the beginning, inscribed into the process of adoption that characterises any form of socialisation.” (Stiegler, ‘Our Ailing Educational Institutions’) Although ✤ for some, this just tells us to relax .. ✤ mind has always been embodied (we think with our bodies, not just our brains .. so we perceive via moving through the world [Alva Noe] ✤ and it has always been extended mind (course readings) .. the syntheses we
perform in partnership with media technics just means we think/act better in a complex world ... they tell us, though, that the world/social life/language/technologies are as real a part of our actual thinking/remembering etc, as whatever goes on in our brains and bodies ... this only makes media more important .. changing them changes everything! This is reflected in a lot of the issues we have been discussing in the course (and in fact in many popular films, such as Inception, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, etc), e.g.: What “effects”do media have? Are they good or bad for us? How are new media changing “news’ and therefore democracy, cultural values, what difference does a network make? ... not just about content, or right information ... it’s about the very bringing together, production of collective (social ) and indivdiual experience, we might say of the social and/or the individual Minority Report (5)example Archives (brief trip back to 2090) ✤ you might remember this as the question of the archive, the (technical, media) foundation for the way in memory might be constituted), from ARTS2090 ... ✤ although now in addition to this, consider how we, with our media technologies, access, store to, and transform archives, constantly (in what we discussed in ARTS2090 as “archive fever” [Derrida]) .. along with a transformation of perception, “umwelts”, relationships, sensations, habits, senses of one’s body in the world, in the present, but also the sense that arises of a relationship to past and future .. etc ✤ you will note that these are very different questions to those of the message or information communicated, and perhaps more powerful .. more important perhaps ... archives are ✤ the basis for individual or collective memory ✤ the basis for authority, social formations, culture ✤ the basis for what becomes individual or collective experience memory
experience archives
Each New Media Assemblage (Change) --> An Archival Earthquake ✤ “this archival earthquake ... the archiving, printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past ... No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media.” (quoted in Stokes) Memory, Media, Politics ✤ “the question of hypomnesis is a political question, and the stakes of a combat: a combat for a politics of memory, and more precisely, for the constitution of sustainable hypomnesic milieux.” (readings for this week)—that is, a context that supports the survival of human consciousness etc .. (although not necessarily in the same form as the past) ✤ note that this is not just about the content of memories, but about the way that we can experience memory of any kind ... [political forces use media to constitute the very way that our memory forms, it’s possibilities etc, quite separate from its content] all these rework what counts as experience all involve complex interactions between different “archives” of memories, of data and code, of images, of possible actions and note here the importance of “possible actions” ... don’t have much time for this .. but this emergent and ecological ‘possible action” is a long way from simple or full decision making or agency all these involve interacting with archives, as do all media this changes our concept of the world, of us, of what we can do in the world, with ourselves, with others now these questions are not simple to separate, but ... let’s move, much more briefly to (March 19) Sensation ✤ Vision, taste, hearing, touch, smell ... (modes of perception) ✤ but also ✤ proprioception ... (and others such as pain, or pleasure)
✤ ✤ ✤
literate culture tends to subordinate many of these to vision ... eg you sit still and read ... recording opens many of them (especially sound) up again ... interaction opens up touch/proprioception etc ... they actually are much more mixed up than you would think .. an extreme version of which is synaesthesia ... McLuhan: the crucial thing that a new medium does is shift the ratios of relations between the senses (which dominates or in what combinations?)
Sensation ✤ we have different forms of “memory” etc in and across all of these sensations ... ✤ sensations are probably made up of “microsensations” we don’t feel ... ✤ yet they give rise to our thoughts ... in short, our thoughts arise from the way we are affected by and affect the world (Spinoza’s power to affect and be affected from last week) ✤ interactive media are more “multi-modal”, demanding more complex forms of media analysis, but also production .. challenging the previous media forms and practices based on different arrangements of the senses ✤ then there is amodality .... sensations that can exists in many senses without belonging to any (eg a pattern through time ... Daniel Stern/Brian Massumi, Susanne Langer) Sensation ✤ finally, sensation is not quite “us” .. we don’t always identify with it ... What is perception? ✤ Perception (more often) feels more like us .... or does it? ✤ It is never simply “direct” .. we don’t see “the world” as it is ... (not that what we see isn’t real, it’s just partial) ✤ What we perceive is based very much on a kind of quick “blurry” sketch of what’s changing in the world, but heavily contextualised by our previous perceptions (memory), contexts, models, frameworks, movement into the future (aims), pains, pleasures etc .. Perception ✤ Alfred Whitehead says that there are two aspects to perception ... “causal efficacy” and “presentational immediacy” ✤ This is like the “virtual”, huge but vague past as this comes into the present ... and the “actual” clearer world ... ✤ ‘Whitehead calls this [first] aspect of perception “causal efficacy” in order to
remind us that what we perceive first is not an object but its pastness or its capacity to exist in relation. This causal aspect of perception is the directly perceived relation between objectness and world.’ (Erin Manning, http://nine.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-055-prosthetics-making-sensedancing-the-technogenetic-body/) Perception ✤ to put this simply, a chair is not immediately a specific chair so much as an aspect of experience that mobilises a whole past in which one can sit on certain objects in the world ... ✤ in “presentational immediacy” ‘perception is enhanced by the quality of experience. Now the redness of the chair emerges, a quality that is, strictly speaking, completely unnecessary to the experience of sit-ability.’ (Manning) Perception ✤ There is less of “us” that we think .. our ongoing production of subjectivity happens to us as much as by us, and is hard work, never finished ... ✤ Brian Massumi (among others) suggests that in fact, much of what we take for (our very own) thought processes, and talk about as reason, judgement, agency etc are in fact affects, perceptions, sensations, etc that emerge with the world ✤ And if “with the world” we also mean with media ... thus again the important of media’s engagement with all these crucial aspects of our experience ... Habit ✤ much more important that we often think ✤ we are in the habit of ignoring habit .. that’s what it’s for .. to work without our thinking about it .. although our thinking might also just be habitual .. a habit of putting experience together in a certain way ✤ not much time .. but habit is not simple repetition .. it is in fact another synthesis .. of related but actually slightly (or not slightly) different responses to the changing world in certain contexts over time .. so you don’t want to play exactly the same tennis shot but variations of a “backhand” for example ... so habit is complex .. yet it is also the context for much else that happens (cf. perception etc) Cognition (Thinking Processes)
✤
✤
‘Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels and wants and decides. Each of us is that thing. This is the traditional view of mind, the view that has dominated establishment research into cognition and consciousness for the last 500 years.’ (Alva Noe, ‘Does thinking happen in the brain?’) This is a major assumption in the history of both traditional media theory and cognitive science. That we are, or should be, effective rational agents in a reasonably logical world, with inputs from the world (not us) through our bodies and nervous systems or sensations (not quite us), converted into symbols somehow in our brain (like a computer)(us, finally), with actions produced (“our” actions on the world).
Cognition (Thinking Processes) ✤ There are lots of versions of this—from Descartes in the 17th Century through Kant in the 18th to cognitive science and computing to cognitive psychology today and much education/management etc theory eg learning objectives that supposedly align all this very neatly .. testing etc ✤ This is now what we might call cognitivism .. in it’s present version it sees the mind in fact like a computer (and computing, these models of the mind, and much media theory, all arose from the same group of people—see Hayles How we became posthuman) Cognition (Thinking Processes) ✤ Now in fact, even Descartes, Kant and, eg the cyberneticists from which cognitivism arose, (and many cognitivists today) had/have more complex views on the topic ✤ By in more popular culture, we do in fact end up with much of education etc based on this notion .. and much media theory ... Cognition (Thinking Processes) ..in fact .. ✤ “cognition” may not be an individual agent, either “spirit” or “abstract mind” or even efficient brain, processing input and output via the processing of symbols ✤ much of what we think of our experience as “thinking” might in fact be perception, sensation, affect, habit, the complexity of memory .. all increasingly challenges/transformed by mnemotechnics (media technologies .. now global mnemotechnics) ... Cognition (Thinking Processes) ..in fact ..
✤ ✤
✤
there are alternative theories of mind some emphasise that mind is always social, either because thinking seems mostly language (is it?), or just because thinking arises in relation to others/the world—there is not consistent or even rational agent, but a social, “ecological” world which produces subjective experience as one ongoing aspect of “participation” (at most) in this world. thinking is perhaps just a tool among others that helps our movement adjust to the movement/change of the world
Cognition (Thinking Processes) ..in fact .. ✤ there is embodied mind (Alva Noe, Varela, but also see the Alan Kay video about learning to play tennis this week) ✤ there is extended mind (Clark, Chalmers, Sutton, etc) ✤ there are those who emphasise the emergent and relational aspects of “mind” even more ... (Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Alfred Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon [individuation - the ongoing, dynamic “ecological” coming together of somewhat transient events and individuals in process ... from whom Stiegler draws the term “trans-individuation”] now none of this matters too much except as a way for you to think through the complexity of what media do to “us” and to “our” experience and how media changes perform dramatic changes at the heart of our very constitution of sense of world and ”self”: memories, perceptions, sensation, thoughts but, on the other hand, how powerful media might be when it comes to helping “us” adjust to social and cultural changes .. sometimes themselves brought about by or with media change Derrida and Ghosts ✤ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI References not in slides or course outline ✤ Derrida, Jacques (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression Chicago:University of Chicago Press ✤ Mauss, Marcel (1992) ‘Techniques of the Body’ in Crary and Kwinter Incorporations NY: Zone ✤ Steigler, Bernard (1998) Technics and Time, 1 Stanford:Stanford University
✤ ✤
Press Stiegler, Bernard (2003) ‘Our Ailing Educational Institutions’, Culture Machine Sutton, John (2002) ‘Porous Memories and the Cognitive Life of Things’ in Tofts, D. et al (eds.A) Prefiguring Cyberculture Cambridge, MA:MIT Press
