I find Alan Liu’s ‘Transcendental Data’ from Critical Inquiry 31 a very interesting article because he tries to outline how the discourse network 2000 works — in reference to Kittler’s concept of the discourse network 1800 & 1900. Liu rightly identifyies XML and the ideology of division of content and presentation as the fundaments of discourse network 2000.

That is very close to what I sometimes call the php/mySQL or database-turn in online publishing. (And one can add the so-called Web 2.0-stuff). We’re all writing these tiny text-objects, (or uploading images or sounds), that are furnished with meta-data by the softwares we use, and are then possibly ‘endlessly’ redistributed over the networks, and aggregated according to various ‘preferences’, in various contexts (again, in possibly endless combinations).

A discourse network is a discursive circuit. Or — Liu quoting Kittler — “The term discourse network. ..can also designate the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data. Technologies like that of book printing and the institutions coupled to it, such as literature and the university, thus constituted a historically very powerful formation….Archeologies of the present must also take into account data storage, transmission, and calculation in technological media. (Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens, Stanford, Ca., 1990, p. 369)

Liu asks these question: “What is the social logic that underlies the technologic of discourse network 2000? (…) How is an author now a postindustrial producer? (…) What are the aesthetics of encoded or structured discourse or, as I will term it, of postindustrial dematerialization? (…) How is it possible for writers or artists to create in such a medium?

Well, with regard to the last question, I’m tempted to say: “Easy, we type and hit the publish button.” Writing is still ‘putting words in the right order’. But what Liu wants to get at is, of course: “How does discourse network 2000, enable a certain form of writing, of sharing knowledge, of discussing (in writing)”.

Liu then proceeds with giving a basic overview of XML, with a short reference to TEI. (I wonderded, did Critical Inquiry ever before or since print such a basic introduction to any subject?)

“These cardinal needs of transformability, autonomous mobility, and automation resolve at a more general level into what may be identified as the governing ideology of discourse network 2000:the separation of content from material instantiation or formal presentation.” (p. 58)

“Data islands, or more generally what I will call data pours, are places on a page — whether a web page or a word processing page connected live to an institutional database or XML repository — where an author in effect surrenders the act of writing to that of parameterization.” (p. 59)

“Now web pages increasingly surrender their soul to data pours that throw transcendental information onto the page from database or XML sources reposed far in the background.” (p. 61)

“What is at stake is indeed what I called an ideology of strict division between content and presentation — the very religion, as it were, of text encoding and databases.” (p. 62)

“Discourse network 2000 is a belief. According to its dogma, true content abides in a transcendental logic, reason, or noumen so completely structured and described that it is in and of itself inutterable in any mere material or instantiated form. Content may be revealed only through an intermediary presentation that is purely interfacial rather than, as it were, sacramental — that is, not consubstantial with the noumenal.” (p. 62)

He then concludes that: “Authors and readers become operators of black box machinery who select criteria for prescripted actions.” (p. 63). I’d say that’s a bit stretching the argument. It is certainly true for people who do not know how to change the defaults; it is true for those working in a fixed (institutional) context and keep to the rules, and do not want to change any of the rules. Etc. Also one has to remember that blackboxing also enables people to work with technology…, and doesn’t imply that nothing can be changed.

In the following section Liu outlines eloquently the importance of standardization, and the continuity between industrialism and post-industrialism. XML asks for standardization, yet really is no standard, but a meta-standard. In a few quotes:

“My thesis is that the postindustrial technologic of encoded or structured discourse dates back — with a signal difference I will indicate later — to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialism.” (p. 64)

“New in Taylorism was the additional principle that decisions had to be extracted from the embodied work of the laborer and described on instruction cards as procedures that could be optimized, reprogrammed, distributed, and otherwise mediated.” (p. 67)

“Databases and XML are now our ultimate functional managers. They are the automatic mediators of the work of contemporary knowledge.” (p. 69)

” The upshot of such a social history of databases and XML is that the common presumption of business writers, technologists, and others that there was a sharp break between industrialism and postindustrialism is historically too shallow.” (p. 71)

“Only by understanding the deep connection between industrialism and postindustrialism are we now prepared to discern the great difference of the latter. Both epochs, as we have seen, share the projects of standardization and management. But only postindustrialism saw these projects through to their radical conclusion, which might be called metastandardization and metamanagement.” (p. 72)

“XML, for example, is technically not a standard but a metastandard, a family form of standards that governs the extensible creation of specific standards of XML tags or schemas.” (p. 72)

The last section of the article deals with the data sublime. And that jump — to Turner, Gibson and Novak, so to the computational sublime — comes too easy.

(I also do not agree with Liu’s argument that new media arts & new media are a too new field “to commit to any one analysis”: which field commits to that anyway?)

This section is about the idea (or ideology) that a massive amount of data (dataclouds) will, who knows through self-organization, or through other ‘formations’, come to show meaningful patterns. That’s what Gibson was onto in Idoru and his other later novels. But instead of jumping to this aesthetic, one should — I think — rather look at how datamining, marketing and the search engines deal with this in a real-world way; that affects our lived reality, can be seen as one of the (f)actors that construct our reality.

Nevertheless, there are good bits here too, good treatments of Novak, Jevbratt etc. The last two pages of my photocopy of the article are again full ofpencil markings.

“But the avant-garde conviction that there was a necessary relation between form and content was nevertheless a reflection of industrial standardization and management.” (p. 79) [Yet, as Liu states, there was a third term in the modernist equation of form & content: materiality].

“When the material substrate was removed to allow for internet transmission, that is, variable methods of standardization — for example, XML documents governed by a common standard but adaptable to undetermined kinds of hardware, software, and usages — could suddenly be imagined.” (p. 80)

Liu asks: “Is the writer or artist any longer an author in such circumstances, let alone a creative one?” (p. 80). My margin says in pencil: “sure”.

“In the romantic era circa 1800, Kittler observes, the hermeneutic discourse network began when a source of meaning located in Nature or the Mother called to poets to transmit its transcendental essence through language conceived as a mere channel of translatability.” (p. 80)

“In the modernist era circa 1900, by contrast, mother nature was a faint echo. The true source of the signal, Kittler argues, (…) was an apparently random, senseless, automatic, untranslatable, and thus nonhermeneutic noise inherent in the channel of transmission itself — like tuning your radio to a Pychonesque channel of revelation indistinguishable from utter static.” (p. 81)

“The distinctive signal of 2000, by contrast, synthesizes 1800 and 1900. In 2000, the channel is just as seemingly senseless, random, and automatic as in 1900. But the source point of the transmission is phase-shifted so that phenomenally senseless automatism follows from a precursor act of sense making in the databases and XML repositories outside the direct control of the author.” (p. 81)

Wait: “databases and XML repositories outside the direct control of the author”. Not for those authors who set up their own databases, who know XML, who will manipulate Technorati, or stay out of that… So this statement, I think, is too general. The technology is partly imposed on us, partly we are able to construct it ourselves.

Liu takes away too much of the acting power (there another word…) from the writer. (Maybe he hates working with the TEI-people ;-) ). It does shows how important it is to have open standards that can be developed further and changed.

“[N]ow the author is in a mediating position as just one among all those other managers looking upstream to previous originating transmitters — database or XML schema designers, software designers, and even clerical information workers (who input data into the database or XML source document).”

Yes, but that doesn’t mean an author is not creative. It is true that our current writing and publishing technologies make it far more easy to cut-&-paste-&-change; it is true we do more ‘circulating’. it’s true, authors can be, and are often their own publishers. But isn’t that much more an ‘enabling’ feature, than a ‘loss of creativity’? Even if we work inside preformatted contexts? Not that Liu is nostalgic, he is not. He just states that we do not regard an author anymore so much as “the originator transmitter of a discourse” (p. 81).

“[C]ontent held in databases and XML now sets the very standard for an ultra-structured and ultra-described rationality purer than any limiting instantiation of the Ding an Sich. And so what Kittler calls the mother tongue — now the discourse of the motherboard, of the matrix itself — seems to return.” (p. 81)

Again, this stretches the argument (into the abstract). I do not find that very productive. Motherboard, matrix… It is also not true — although texts are circulating in the network, distributed over many harddisks, aggregated in different combinations at different end points, and are ultra-structered for that purpose. But all the bits of texts are still written (typed in, copied), and still they are read, and acted upon. (True, some more by search engines than by human beings). One can let oneself be blinded by the sublimity of it all, but I don’t see why one should.

Liu concludes: “The core problem is what I have in my Laws of Cool called the ethos of the unknown — of the unencoded, unstructured, unmanaged — in human experience. In our current age of knowledge work and total information, what experience of the structurally unknowable can still be conveyed in structured media of knowledge (databases, XML, and so on)? Perhaps the arts — if they can just crack the code of ordinary cool and make it flower — know.” (p. 81).

I have two remarks to make to this (not having read his Laws of Cool):
1. Is there such a thing as a perfect divide between the ‘unencoded, unstructured, unmanaged’ on the one hand and the encoded, structured, managed? Environments that are structured on one level, can allow for total unstructeredness on another level.
2. XML can be very messy too.

I have the feeling this is somewhat a pseudo-issue. If our texts are put into XML-schemes, that doesn’t mean that our written sentences are structured better. (XML doesn’t mind if your sentence is grammatical). And it sure doesn’t mean expierence becomes more structured.

But maybe I don’t get what Liu is at.

Liu btw is a Pynchonite & a Wakian (his most recent article in Critical Inquiry deals with FW). And of course he quotes this great passage from The Crying of Lot 49:

“She [Oedipa Maas] could, at this stage of things, recognize signals like that, as the epileptic is said to — an odor, color, pure piercing grace note announcing his seizure. Afterward it is only this signal, really dross, this secular announcement, and never what is revealed during the attack, that he remembers. Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.” Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, New York, 1999, p. 76

All quotes from: Alan Liu, ‘ Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse’, in Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004).

Also available here: http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.liu.htm.

“Note taking can take many forms — oral, written or electronic. At its deepest level, whatever the medium, note taking involves variations on and combinations of a few basic maneuvers, which I propose to identify as the four Ss: storing, sorting, summarizing and selecting.” (p.85)

“Each method of storage carries with it constraints of reliability, preservability, and accessibility.” (p. 86)

“Each method of sorting, too, entails constraints and easements in the retrieval of the stored material.” (p. 86)

“Francis Bacon outlined the two principal methods of note taking in a letter of advice to Fulke Greville (…): “He that shall oout of his own Reading gather [notes] for the use of another, must (as I think) do it by Epitome, or Abridgement, or under Heads and Common Places. Epitomes may also be of 2 sorts: of any one Art, or part of Knowledge out of many Books; or of one Book by itself.”” (p. 86)

“Michel Foucault reportedly expressed a desire to study copybooks of quotations because they seemed to him to be the work[s] on the self … not imposed on the individual.” (p. 88)

“Yet even today note taking generally remains an area of tacit knowledge, aquired by imitation rather than formal instruction and about which there is little explicit discussion.” (p. 89)

“But there is little so far that addresses how note taking is changing as new tools have become and continue to become available, from the Post-it and the highlighter to software programs and the Palm Pilot.” (p. 89)

“There are many possible criteria on which to draw up a typology of note taking broadly conceived: by field (commercial, legal, medical, literary, philosophical), by type of source (from listening, from reading, from travel and direct experience, from thinking), by intended audience (for short- or longterm use, for sharing with others or for private use), by general purpose (rhetorical, factual, playful).” (p. 90)

“Robert Grosseteste, for example, drew up a topical index to his readings using 217 symbols that linked collections of citations kept in a seperate manuscript to the corresponding passages in the books he owned in his library” (p. 95)

(About Robert Grosseteste: http://www.grosseteste.com/.)

(Other persons that Blair discusses are Francesco Sacchini (who wrote On How to Read Books with Profit, that is De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus, first published in 1614) and Jeremias Drexel, author of Aurifodina, or The Mine of All Arts and Sciences, or the Habit of Excerpting (1638).)

“Early Modern scholars praised for their memories did not rely on the techniques attributed to Simonides but rather on abundant note taking; indeed pedagogues in the humanist tradition are routinely hostile to the arts of memory from Erasmus to Drexel.” (p. 97)

“Instead he [Drexel] concludes that “human memory is slow, narrow, volatile and unfaithful unless it is strengthened with memory aids” ( A, p. 3) (p. 99)

“The association of note taking with moral worth has proved persistent. Many a self-improvement program in the eighteenth century and beyond involved the promise to keep one’s diary or reading notes more religiously.”

(Drexel call for 3 kinds of notes: lemmata (bibliographical references), adversaria (copied quotations), and historica or exempla.)

“On Drexel’s account the note is an aid to memory because it triggers recall of the reading or experience recorded, and one should study one’s notes in order to remember them. “One seeks from excerpts aids, not to exercise one’s memory less, but in order to help memory more happily in its activity” ( A, p. 67). (p. 103)

“The memory function was explicitly delegated to paper because, according to Chavigny, “too much memorizing can be harmful to the higher intellectual qualities.”.” (p. 106) [This is in the 1920’s, Chavigny was a medical professor].

“Today we delegate to sources that we consider authoritative the extraction of information on all but a few carefully specialized areas in which we cultivate direct experience and original research. New technologies increasingly enable us to delegate more tasks of remembering to the computer, in that shifting division of labor between human and thing. We have thus mechanized many research tasks.” (p. 107)

“[I]f every text one wanted were constantly available for searching anew, perhaps the note itself, the selection made for later reuse, might play a less prominent role.” (p. 107)

“Notes must be rememorated or absorbed in the short-term memory at least enough to be intelligently integrated into an argument; judgment can only be applied to experiences that are present to the mind.” (p. 107)

All quotes from Ann Blair: ‘ Note Taking as an Art of Transmission’, in Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004).

I know: too many quotes….

Complete text available here: http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.blair.htm.

(Damn, just lost a long post because Safari crashed… Here I go again).

I read John Locke’s A New Method of a Common-Place-Book a few days ago. (E-text here: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=0326). I was quite excited to find out it only deals with his method of indexing and retrieving previously ‘stored’ notes; his ways to deal with paper-techniques to extends one’s own memory.

Actually Locke’s method shows that his commonplace books were no commonplace books anymore, but notebooks. Commonplace books belong to the Rennaissance, and to a world in which rhetorics are predominant. Notebooks belong to the new world of modern science. One deals with constructing arguments the other with arriving at scientific truth. One still puts (human) memory in the centre; the other values reporting and writing down. (To put it bluntly). What I find exciting is to see the co-development of storage & publishing techniques (paper not really being scarce anymore in Locke’s time) and techniques of writing, noticing and researching.

Interesting in this respect are the theories of Richard Lanham about economies of attention and the return of rhetorics in the world of the electronic word (as his book, froom 1993 (!) is called): http://www.rhetoricainc.com/.

A long an thorough paper on Locke’s methods of commonplacing is Richard Yeo’s John Locke’s New Metod of Commonplacing, (2004): http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/jsutton/Yeo.doc. Here’s my digest in quotes.

(All this I find interesting because of the (for me) implied reference to blogging: making notes, research, indexing, use of keywords, referencing, working/writing/publishing methods — and the relation to rhetorics & the use of commonplaces — read: samples).

“I argue that on his own account, Locke extends and complicates the previous functions of these notebooks, making them part of a system for managing information that could be adapted to suit individual purposes.”

“In his influential De Copia (1512), Erasmus offered a manual of examples, advising that themes, quotations and maxims from classical texts be entered under various loci (places) to assist free-flowing oratory.”

“By 1704, the year of Locke’s death, Jonathan Swift (who kept his own commonplace book) regarded the worst applications of the method as part of a syndrome of techniques—including abridging, epitomizing, and indexing—all offering easy ways to skim a book. He dubbed this syndrome “Index learning.” Such abuse of commonplacing was disastrous: “By these Methods, in a few Weeks, there starts up many a Writer, capable of managing the profoundest and most universal Subjects. For, what tho’ his Head be empty, provided his Common-place-Book be full.” The reputation of this humanist legacy had further to fall: by the nineteenth century the term “commonplace” degenerated to refer to ordinary, unremarkable facts or observations—the very opposite of its early modern meaning.”

“yet Cicero stressed that the good orator needed knowledge, not just rhetorical skill: “A knowledge of a vast number of things is necessary, without which volubility of words is empty and ridiculous … the whole of antiquity and a multitude of examples is to be kept in the memory.” This is why the natural powers of memory needed to be augmented, a demand inflated by the humanist passion for “copious” embellishment of material.”

“Bacon affirmed the role of a “good and learned Digest of Common Places”: “The great help to the memory is writing; and it must be taken as a rule that memory without this aid is unequal to matters of much length and accuracy.””

“Between 1500 and 1700 there was a subtle shift in the function of such notebooks: from being repositories of the material that individuals sought to memorize, they came to be seen as ways of retaining information that could never be memorized”

“Thus although material is placed under an appropriate category, or subject, its position in the notebook is determined by alphabetical combinations. Such compression and scattering of related material is tolerable because the index operates as a finding device⎯provided that the maker of the commonplace book remembers the Head under which particular material has been placed.” (Concerning Locke’s notebooks).

“This “topical man,” as Locke pointedly calls him, has a memory full of “borrowed and collected arguments” but usually mixes incompatible elements because he has not thought these ideas through. This stance anticipates several passages in Some Thoughts where Locke ridicules the collection and memorizing of quotations, “which when a Man’s Head is stuffed “with, he has got the Furniture of a Pedant.””

“Locke rarely made marginal notes in his books. Instead, on the inside back cover he noted the pages containing something that he entered in one of his commonplace books. When picking up this book on a subsequent occasion, he then knew that there was already a commonplace book entry.”

“In these ways, Locke’s adversaria and his library catalogue were linked, and so the commonplace method was now part of a sophisticated system for research and information management.”

” For Locke, however, commonplace books are not catalysts for related, yet memorized, material; instead, they are a means of reducing dependence on memory, retrieving references, and avoiding unnecessary duplication in note taking. His method allowed one to forget, thus relieving the memory, and yet also providing a means of finding required material at a later time.”

“Locke used commonplace books in new ways, expanding their scope and transforming them from a rhetorical storehouse into a research tool and a crucial component of his system for managing information.”

” Traditionally, commonplace books contained personal collections of publicly accepted knowledge. The material they stored, usually drawn from the classical corpus, comprised generally accepted tropes, maxims, and quotations that could be applied in oratory and written compositions. Such commonplace material was effective because its status was unchallenged and its authority could, with appropriate skill, be transferred to the particular case being argued.”

“Thus although such commonplaces were collected by individuals in unpublished notebooks, they were intended for public use and relied on widely endorsed values. Indeed, it was assumed that these notebooks could be shared and read with benefit by other educated individuals.” (This is an interesting relation with blogs I’d say…)

“Nevertheless, his [Locke’s] method of indexing does suit a world (described in Le Clerc’s introduction of 1706) in which the ambit of reading and study is expansive, and future topics not easily anticipated. Confessing his own habits, Locke acknowledged a tendency to “change often the subject I have been studying, read books by patches and as they have accidentally come in my way, and observe no obvious method or order in my studies.” Given such a pattern, we can see why he confronted the problem of allocating pages in a notebook.”

“I think that Locke’s account of memory shows why commonplace books are necessary for the proper ordering and retention of ideas; his concerns about disorderly and confused ideas entail the need for methodical collection; and his views on personal identity suggest a role for commonplace books in reinforcing a biographical sense of self.”

“Locke did not see the practice of making entries in commonplace books as a way of improving memory. ”

“In 1704 Locke’s French translator, Pierre Coste, reported that the great philosopher advised that “whenever we have meditated any thing new, we should throw it as soon as possible upon paper, in order to be the better able to judge of it by seeing it altogether; because the mind of man is not capable of retaining clearly a long chain of consequences, and of seeing, without confusion, the relation of a great number of different ideas.””

“The commonplace books gave Locke dedicated pathways to his library and saved time in finding passages previously read and noted. The emphasis was on retrieving, rather than recalling, information, but the indexing still required the user to remember the Heads that were chosen when particular entries were made.”

“The stress was not on quotations under generally shared Heads, but rather on referencing entries back to books, ideally those in a personal library.”

All quotes from Richard Yeo, ‘Locke’s New Method of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information’, in Eightteenth Century Thought, 2, (2004) 1-38.

“So, yes, writing is my first love and there’s nothing better than really good literature – but art has one advantage in that it provides an active space, a space of becoming-active. You can actually do the thing rather than just represent it. Not if you’re a painter, of course – but in process-based art you can, and that’s a really powerful thing.”

Tom McCarthy, interviewed at http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=tommccarthy

“The blog provides a means of processing and selecting from an overwhelming abundance of written matter, and of publishing that record, with commentary, for anyone who cares to read it. In some cases, these “readings” become influential in themselves, and multiple readers engage in conversations across blogs. But treating blogging first as a reading practice, and second as its own genre of writing, political or otherwise, is useful in forming a more complete picture of this new/old phenomenon.”

“Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s [a 19th century diary-writer] words, it is the need “to see more of what is going on around me.” And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.”

Caleb McDaniel at:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html

(I refered that article in the earlier post on commonplace books. Now I finally read it).

Lately I’ve been doing a tiny bit of research in the use of commonplace books. There is a close resemblance between the function of commonplace books (in for instance the Seventeenth century) and how some people use blogs. Some bloggers see, or call their blogs commonplace books. It’s a pretty well-known comparision, but I never really explored it until now.

Here’s some quick info, with links, and links to some pictures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/compb.htm
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/46800

Here’s a danish blog that uses ‘commonplace book’ as a category — seems to have nice quotations… http://www.bookish.dk/index.php?cat=23. And a blog that calls itself a commonpace book: http://www.constantreader.org/v2/commonplace.html.

Some more relevant stuff:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/2005/08/the_blog_as_a_record_of_readin.html
http://cut-and-paste.de/
http://www.diyplanner.com/

There’s much more, but my dear reader, you can google as well as me.

In Making Things Public Anke te Heesen has a very nice short article about notebooks. I copied quite a few paragraphs from it; waht follows here is a digest of her article. I love the way she sees the notebook as a paper machine, as a technology that is an actor in how we write, store and process thoughts.

“The notebook as a paper-machine consists of the function noting and storing notes. ‘To note’ means first and foremost ‘to write down’, from the Latin notare, with the connotations sign, mark and writing, or from noscere, which means ‘to get to know’. ‘Note’, from notitia refers to this, namely, ‘to be known’. (…) Therefore apart from the actual act of wrigin, noting also describes a particular kind of perception: taking notice of something. Etymologically, here writing and taking notice are contained in one procedure, which at the same time implies habitual forming of a person and results in a praxis with paper that requires certain gestures, performed acts, rituals and tools.” p. 584

“From the sixteenth century on, bits of knowledge have been noted down in books with blank pages, stored in special boxes or placed in pigeonholes or compartments on bookshelves. In that era, the notes and small pieces of paper were the smallest material text-units of intellectual work. Organized note-taking was understood as a writing technique that could be learned, and it was one of the essential skills in the learned world.” p. 585

“Already in 1605, Francis Bacon recommends in Advancement of Learning the use of ‘commonplace books for entering the fruits of reading, quotations and references: ‘I hold that the diligence, and pains in collecting common Places, is of great use in certainty and studying.'” p. 586

“The philosopher John Locke, who influenced entire generations of English gentlemen with his instructions of how to make commonplace books, rendered the procedure methodical. In one of his texts, published in 1706, he described how to keep such a notebook. The ‘Memory is the treaurey or Storehouse,’ he said, but one must provide memory with an orderly basis. ‘It would be just for all the World as serviceable as a great deal of Household Stuff, when if we wanted any particular Thing we could not tell were to find it.’ This organization begins with reading. One should first read a book but not write anything in the notebook. ‘The places we design to extract from are to be marked on a piece of Paper, that we may do it after we have read the Book out.’ So after putting in all the bookmarks, one should read the book a second time and decide what is relevant enough to be written down in the notebook. ‘I take a White Paper Book and what Size I think fit. I divide the two first pages, which face another, by parallel lines,’ and make an index. In so doing, one froms one’s own keywords. A commonplace book thus refers a quotation noted down to its original context (its origin, the book) and, a the same time, is a stock to draw on for the memory, the speech to be given or the text to be written.” p. 586

“Entire generations of intellectuals and young gentlemen were educated to practice this technique. The notebook was a technique in service of discipline.” p. 587

“Notebooks were a place for collecting things, a technique for discipline, chronological recording and evidence. Such a book with its blank or gradually filling pages was a paper-machine which took in what one fed it but at the same time directed the entries.” p. 588

“From the beginning, this paper technology adhered to certain rules: The entries had to be written in a straight line , and no blots or spots should mar the paper. A margin, which in the earliest years was often signalized by a fold in the paper, provided space for notes and commentaries and played a significant role in administrative forms of writing (files).” p. 588

Anke te Heesen, ‘The Notebook, A Paper Technology’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 582-589

So now on my desk:
John Locke, A New Method of a Common-Place Book: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0326.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/adv1.htm.

Ok, I’ll not try to summarize how Latour outlines his idea of Dingpolitik — (that we do not have hard facts, but matters of concern & that it’s about how publics gather around an issue, how an issue is a ‘thing’, not a fact but a gathering together). He uses of course etymology and refers to the Icelandic Thing — the parliament — to describe what a thing is; I’ll not go into the important role of mediation, of deliberation and yes, rhetoric; I’ll just say that I find this redefinition of politics very exciting and very clear. It also makes me pick up the texts that he refers to, specifically Dewey’s The Public and its Problems — Dewey being a favorite of mine ever since I read Art as Experience.

I’ve spent lots of hours in the shady garden in Kanne, going through every page of what N. calls ‘the brick’ (the catalogue). No I did not read every word, but at least I’ve seen every page and I’ve read a good deal of the articles. Sometimes I put a post-it on a page, sometimes with a few words scribbled on it. I’ll go through those ‘bookmarks’, harvesting the quotes…

‘Gathering’ (coming together, collecting): how — I thought — is that connected to the current technology around blogs…. rss (our own, personalized collection), gathering of different bits of content through keywords, using folksonomy; how Technorati (etc.) aggregates content; how even search engines do this. A blog collects bits of writing (and images, and links, and keywords) and people (readers) and other blogs. But the content is also collected, harvested, gathered.

I’m not stating anything new here — I’m trying out the words, and try to think (or visualize even) the different layers of mediation.

When I do this, I’m actually also going back full circle to what is probalby one of Latours many starting points for Making Things Public: the issue network-research of Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, that lead, in any case for N., also to the rediscovery of Dewey’s ideas about the public, and how publics gather (form) around an issue.

I somehow like to tie that in to current webtechnologies and current practices of online writing too. (Speaking as a blogger, blogs as partial conversations, blogging for oneself, publishing without a public, yet one’s texts are gathered, and most importantly maybe — bringing in rhetorics — the ‘ethos’ of the blogger).

Well, maybe it’s also sort of tying it (‘my thoughts on blogging’) into the politico-philosophical discourse.

Just thinking aloud. // Some quotes then…

“The cognitive deficiency of participants has been hidden for a long time because of the mental architecture of the dome in which the Body Politik was supposed to assemble. We were told that all of us — on entering this dome, this public sphere — had to leave aside in the cloakroom our own attachments, passions and weaknesses. Taking our seat under the transparant crystal of the common good, through action of some mysterious machinery, we woudl then collectively endowed with more acute vision and higher virtue.

(…)

Unfortunately, much like the Tower of Babel, those ‘palaces of reason’ (…) are no longer able to house the isssues they were supposed to gather.”

Remember how ‘messy’ is the world of blogs…

Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, in Latour & Weibel (eds.) Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM / MIT, Cambridge Ma, 2005, p. 30

“The foundation of all understanding of sociological theory — that is to say, of all understanding of human life — is that is no static maintenance of perfection is possible. This axiom is rooted in the nature of things. Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe. (…) The doctrine is founded upon three metaphysical principles. One principle is that the very essence of real actuality — that is of the complete real — is process.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, The Free Press, NY, 1967 (1931). p. 274.

“For the purpose of this report, interaction (that is face-to-face interaction) may be roughly defined as the reciprocal influence on individuals upon one another’s actions when in one another’s immediate physical presence. (…) A ‘performance’ may be defined as all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants. Taking a particular participant and his performance as a basic point of reference, we may refer to those who contribute the other performances as the audience, observers, or co-participants. The pre-established pattern of action which is unfolding during a performance and which may be presented or played through on other occasions may be called a ‘part’ or ‘routine’.” p. 26/27

(At which point Goffman refers to Von Neumann & Morgenstern’s The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour in a footnote).

“A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropiate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be realized.” p. 81

(Reminder to myself: on p. 232/233 Goffman describes five perspectives for analyzing ‘social establishments’: technical, political, structural, cultural and dramaturgical).

“In this report the performed self was seen as some kind of image, usually creditable, which the individual on stage and in character effectively attempts to induce others to hold in regard to him. While this image is entertained concerning the individual, so that a self is imputed to him, this self itself does not derive from its possessor, but from the whole scene of his action, being generated by that attribute of local events which renders them interpretable by witnesses. A correctly staged and performed scene leads to audience to impute a self to a performed character, but this imputation — this self — is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited, or discredited”. p. 244/245

The next paragraph is even better maybe; Goffman regards the person as a “peg on which something of collaborative manufacture will be hung for a time”, while the means for producing selves are “often bolted down in social establishments”. The theater metaphor provides him with the idea of a ‘back region” with “tools for shaping the body”, a “front region with its fixed props”; co-participants on stage and an audience. He then states: “The self is a product of all of these arrangements, and in all of its parts bears the marks on this genesis.” p. 245.

(It’s this framework that allows for applying ‘Goffman’ to the scene of personal publishing.)

“A character staged in a theatre in not in some ways real, not does it have the same kind of real consequences as does the thoroughly contrived character performed by a confidence man; but the succesful staging of either of these types of false figures involves use of real techniques — the same techniques by which everyday persons sustain their real social situations.” p. 246/247

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, London, 1990 (1959).

Goffmann applied to blogging by Danah Boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/alterity/archives/2005/03/goffman_and_pos.html.

A beautiful book, for various reasons. First of all a wonderfull overview and introduction into Latours view on technology. Secondly a very precise account of how a revolutionary type of metro never gets ‘off the ground’ — because of the love for technology (and other reasons), or rather the lack of it: Aramis is a project that does not go through translations… that is not negotiated enough. (Who loves has to negotiate and change). Thirdly it shows that one can write a true sociological novel, or do novelistic sociology. (A bit what Powers does from the side of the novel — Latour and Powers love each others work).

“By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.” p. 23

“Give me the state of things, and I’ll tell you what people can do — this is how technology talks. Give me the state of human beings, and I’ll tell you how they will form things — this is the watchword of sociology. But both of these maxims are inapplicable! For the thing we are looking for is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman thing. It offers rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between waht humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans. It translates the one into the other.” p. 213

“The work of folding technological mechanisms can go from complication to complexity. This is because technological detours go from zero to infinity according to whether the translation goes through intermediaries or through mediators.” p. 219

Bruno Latour, Aramis or the Love of Technology, Harvard UP, Cambridge &c., 1996 (1993)