If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown. — Albert Einstein

and this work will (already) require an a-cyclic slippage into and out of mechanistic language which makes so much of the territory un-mappable (before a new language can be framed). a skimmering skittering across hot metal plates causing dissipation and evaporation. (where transformed language is a compressed gas, waiting for temperature and pressure changes to expand to fill a dialectic space — wherein the words and word-constructs are tested for vacuity or fullness). Conscious use will govern whether or not there is a sense of movement or an underlying stasis in the text. Thankfully it is a DCA and not a PhD so there is plenty of room for experimentation.

[and a pox on all you slackers who underline in pen or pencil or highLight texts in library books. I don't give a damn what you think is important, so keep yer grubby hands away from public domain books!]

The language is based on joining and dis-joining, you see. That is, it’s a perfectly good language if we could use it properly. It has to be used as an artistic form and not as a rigid tool which is supposed to reflect reality exactly — reflect what is exactly. It’s like the notes in music. They look quite separate, but when they’re played, they’re not separate. — David Bohm, dialogue with E.Nada

A necessary feature of the thesis project is inconsistency. For it to be a rich learning experience, it should be variable or stochastic. How to achieve a creative inconsistency, then? Where changing perspectives and voices and models and worn pathways exists in profusion that is at the same time, not overwhelming. A sequence of statements (each a consistent sound-bite), with threads of difference demarcating their extent, applicability, and style.

remember:

Flow in reading
Flow in writing
There is no beginning
There is no ending

All else is abstracted, and becomes manifest from the unstable, unknowable, vague, vast, rich, unending flux.

Any abstraction is a sub-system of a whole and can be considered in its own right.

Fundament(al)
assumption
:implicat(ions)

Life does not end and is implicate in the whole.

Underlying assumptions (assumed and unarticulated) are always there (in academic studies) and this is an explicit revealing of one that predicates or prescripts this work.

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics, that approach to social inquiry being an expression of how the dominant world-view is itself dominated by abstracted elements rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, and largely govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-form of one. This energy arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body which allows for that expression, the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ between the two, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time) of the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation, when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

(a title: On The False Invariance of Text)

Writing is oscillation, it is frequency, it is tone and overtone. It is directed at a hundred thousand invisible targets some not yet alive, most dying, some dead. It is all-encompassed by the infinite flux of be-ing at the same time as being uncircumscribable. Resonance drives the text. Without resonance, the text is more than dead, it is simply not. Null, less-than-zero. Silent. While speaking in tongues, interfacing with one another, we tack meanings to the words, sounds, making them become for a moment, a surfacing out of a wider flow of dis-connection. Or merely happenstance accretion, coagulation, a resulting (sepsis-in-mind) of something (quelque chose), making: turbid agglomeration becomes acculturation.

The whole engagement with the idea of doing the doctorate arises from a combination of pragmatics and desire. The pragmatic considerations are real to the degree that the author understands the social value of ideas that are formally exposed, independent of format, and that the Other takes up, paying life-time and attention to. This is a basic premise. Desire enters the process where there is the need to be recognized, this, not on a social scale, but on a simple and uncorrupted personal scale. There is the deep risk that both these motivations are hollow and base-less. To defeat that potential, the process will be open and open-ended, unending. It will not begin and end with bound covers and stitched bindings. It will mimic life that came from who-knows-where and is going elsewhen.

One point of this blog is to de-stabilize the general process of writing to the degree of opening up expressive possibility. It is not here to be a blog, with endless sifting through and cross-referencing of network sludge. It is an armature on which to hang the infinity of idiosyncratic individual inputs and some limited external inputs into the process flow.

The armature of the final work is a combination of practice-based activities and a display of input-output (re)sources. Thematic threads (flux, energy, continuum, flow, movement, change, sound), and must needs vocal, aural, oral output/interface. The allowance to rest in writing, here, is a giving-up, a surrender, to the order. And critique cannot dominate the work. it must be proactively positive after shifting the basis of the argument from a traditional worldview to one based in energy, flow, and distributed presence. And transform the argument from argument to metaphor, to incantation, to invocation, to song, to a lived/living dialogue replete with rejoinder, complaint, excuse, bombast, and obscure platitudes.

Produced by writing, philosophical statements are no more authentic or truth-bearing than are literary expressions, and literary expression are no more pseudo than are philosophical dicta; they both fall victim to (or rather take advantage of) the figurality of language, its uncontrollable semantic slippage and syntactic leaps and bounds. In fact, the more one believes one can stay clear of or break free from the sign’s dictate, the deeper one is likely to sink into the ever widening semiotic quicksand. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p. 202)

Looking at Foucault’s conception of discourse as a conflation of semiotics and postmodernism (gag on that stone-like term). Of course, the State (or, in my terms, the Techno-social system), when exercising power has to project power along more or less defined pathways. That is a fundamental characteristic of the TSS — its cumulative ability to (and process of) refining and ultimately reifying the pathways through which power (energy!) moves through the system. This power/energy ultimately and necessarily moves between human participants in the system and the pathways are, ultimately, sourced and targeted through the space of flows (between individual beings) to the individuals themselves, the Continuum of Relation. (see my comments on code in the previous posting, where code is a reified or institutionalized discourse pathway that carries energy between humans.) The expression of power, though, comes not from some externalized and monumental State. The concept of State is simply the active collectivization of individuals life-time/life-energy which dynamically coalesces into a relation or constellation which is a source of projected power. The force of projected power being the ability of a collective to gather excess energies, and organize them (negentropically) in such a way that they may be projected along a chosen pathway. This is where various levels of both subtle and overt control and coercion find their exercise — within individual lives as those lives are mapped into a collective space of more singular flow (vs flows).

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social infrastructure.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world. — Wilhelm von Humboldt

Then the question of how to deal with all these books at once? Where to read them, how to take notes, how much to read in any one at a time, and such. Reading in the evening before sleeping isn’t very good, although restful. Mid-afternoon is optimal, but carving out several hours from the daily to-do grind makes that difficult. Having a space in the CMAI office is very helpful now, as there are more comfortable chairs. The collective grad offices are too noisy and busy. Dislocating to Bronte or a cafe elsewhere is possible, but not time-effective if only for reading. Ach!, the questions of methodology …

structural organization. weaving this space of inquiry, exposé, or a web of deceit. a fabric of cloaking, or a dust cover for an old arm chair.

Van Leeuwen’s overview (in Multimodal Discourse) of an expressive situation that he labels semiotic production frames first a (situated) discourse which is then subject to design (to shape the delivery mechanism) which is materially formed in the production process followed by distribution (one-to-many propagation). these conceptual and actual stages are closely bound to a semiotics-based view which is rooted in the abstracted space of language and representation. this, despite the fact that the expressive action is indeed a real, tangible movement of energies from the producer to the receiver/consumer — it is not abstract. it is in this space between the models built in the abstracted semiotic space and the real executions that Dialogue, in the extended definition that I propose, occurs. it does not preclude any (most) semiotic models, but is sets the limits of their applicability that arise from the abstraction process that is inherent in language. the Dialogue model looks at these processes, steps in semiotic production as a continua of socially applied protocols which guide (provide a pathway for) energized expression from the Self to the Other — so that semiotic production is clearly not the thing itself, but an abstraction of it. (Van Leeuwen notes this when reflecting on the separation from embodiment that written language imposed on this abstraction process).

he suggests that two mechanisms for the establishment of ‘new’ forms of discourse — that of provenance and experiential meaning potential. the first providing memetic (not mimetic, btw) evolutionary input from other cultural sources, the second an internally generative source arising from lived experience.

multimodality clearly has an affect on the flow of energies (of expression) from the Self to the Other. the existence of socio-cultural value-systems as framed with and by abstracted linguistic (and semiotic) systems and protocols is a key formative element in the energy flow process. but again, it is not the thing itself, it merely forms a pathway for the expressive flow.

His use of terms articulation and interpretation would roughly correspond to transmission/expression and reception/impression.

In a materialistic model, the material is merely the means of semiotically-framed expression. In my model, the energy of expression is carried, in perhaps a poor metaphoric sense, through the pipe of linguistic/semiotic (and therefore social) protocol, but is another essence altogether from the pipe (which, again, is only a abstracted framework). As a social system builds up more and more complex pathways (which, in the end are blockages of open flows), it becomes more and more difficult for individuals operating within that system to find expressive pathways. This is especially apparent in social systems with sufficient or excessive energy resources. energy-poor social systems, those which are consequently, less stable, have more possibilities for less-defined actions, expressions.

It is in the consideration of the energy flow itself that many of the characteristics of formative social systems (ideologies, etc) become obvious, along with equally obvious solutions to the strictures that they apply to individual and collective human existence and consequent expression.

Understanding that my own task, to express an ideology, a weltanschauung, arises in the socio-cultural milieu that encourages certain expressions and discourages others. All social systems do this to one degree or another. And, as one key processural factor, I need for this expression to be idiosyncratic. As much so as is possible within this system. And if not within this system, then simply accept that it has to be done outside this system. eh?

But it is precisely at the edge of what a social system defines as acceptable or not is where transcendental change occurs both individually, and as a direct consequence, socio-culturally. Neither social or cultural systems are static entities which can be held or can hold to a particular standard protocol for expression indefinitely. Change is universal. And change occurs within liminal and undefined situations.

No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human network from which his actions arise and into which they are directed. — Norbert Elias