Armand and Dean

Notes taken on Monday, 24 September, expanded, extended, hopefully simplified: First Armand, then Dean.

Stephen defined “technicity” last Monday as a “prepresentation of meaning in iterable form” and this Monday he reformulated that as the functioning of a sign, as in, the sign operation itself that exists that cannot be thought of in temporal or semantic ways. Technicity doesn't mean anything that you can point out, like pie or love, so is therefore not mimetic (isn't trying to represent things). I understand this as the process of the significationability of the sign, as in, the sign's ability to mean before it actually means something (although it cannot be thought of in 'cause' terms because before the sign means something, it doesn't actually mean anything). Technicity is inherent in signs; without the significationability, signs would have no potential to function as anything, and language wouldn't work.

Language is a filter. We understand the world, reality, materiality, through language. For example, we use metaphors to indicate things that are apparently unlike each other are similar in some way. Love is a red rose; we can say that because there is something about the rose that is iterable (its beauty?) and we recognise this same thing in love and we see a pattern and therefore meaning. Everything that is not language is thought through language, though, and Armand wants to expand this thinking. He wants us to forget about this linguistic determinism, that is, the quality of the language to divide things and state what they are in terms of language, and rather accept the fact that signification takes place without reference to our agency. We don't need to come in to signify; we are not coming into the room and determining that the chair is a chair – the technicity, the potential of significationability is there, inherent to the sign. So signification is not something we do as 'users' of language, defining things ; things are inherently able to be signified, to be in operation – technicity is there when we come.

Human thinking, for some reason, tends to situate itself in binaries. For him, this pair consists of structure and materiality. Structure concerns things such as physics, linguistics, culture, symbolism, artifices – basically, the way the world out there is striated/divided into parts. Materiality rather consists of orality, matter itself, nature – the world mush. Matter. To illustrate this difference further, think of a chair. The word chair, the fact that it's a noun, the fact that it has a function that you can undergo (sitting), that is all how humans have said it is – this is the structure. The structure is like a box that humans have put upon it to 'get' it, to differentiate it from something else that is boxed. A chair, in terms of materiality, is matter. If you forget everything you know about chairs, and you can suspend your thinking about chairs, then what you have in front of you assembled in such a way is the materiality – the label chair is added only afterwards to classify this cluster of matter that looks like that. The chair's undetermined existence, its ontology, its chairness is the materiality. If you get at the chair via its attributes you situate yourself in the field of axiology (values attributed to things: especially aesthetic values, which are the most conventional of all) – so if you think of a chair because it's sittable-upon or it's a noun, those are two attributes it has and that means you've divided it and the thinking operation occuring is then on the level of structure rather than materiality.

In terms of materiality, Armand uses the term “ambiguity” and “ambivalence” to suggest that the materiality/matter/beingness of a chair can be constituted in infinite ways – i.e. there are innumberable amounts of interpretations for the chairness of a chair. This is the ambiguity. It could be anything. And when one signals and says this object is a chair, structurality enters because the human has entered and signification requires an agent – in our case, the human. So by saying the chair is a chair, we are suppressing the ambivalence that it could be thought of in innumberable other ways, it is just this particular way that we choose to think it because for signs to work, they must pass through the noise. The ambivalence, therefore, could be thought of as noise – eg the chair could have been thought of as always having to touch a surface so it could have been thought of as one with that surface. The reason why the indeterminateness is noise is because it's effectively all matter and it's not distinguishable or separatable unless we sign, unless we pull something out of it; unless we sign. The sign is a sign because it's different from the noise, Language is a system of differences, and when we say 'chair' we mean 'chair' because we don't mean 'table' or 'shark'. But chairness, or the fact of being a chair, doesn't exist as different from anything – there is no chairness, really, but our language allows us to slot things in our minds and pattern them, thereby leading us to believe clusters of mattered arranged so are chairs. Francisc says here that “Armand would argue that it’s precisely chairness that truly exists: the essence of a chair as a manifestation of the essence of matter in all its appearances. What you seem to be saying here is that categorization of matter is a human skill (a linguistic ability). Thinking in binaries (like you say) is essentially human: thinking of chairness in terms of what it is not (the linguistic model of Saussure, where words mean something only insofar as they fail to mean something else).” - I understand this as my denotation of chairness as a word making me think there is no true chairness – so this is the linguistic ability/human skill coming into play – because I'm thinking the material chairness isn't actually real and that chairness is only determinable through language. However, Francisc refutes that, bringing in the idea of manifestation of essence. I didn't realise I could use this argument. So then the chairness of a chair is a FIRSTNESS MANIFESTATION of the essence of matter which can be and is everything. It's one example.

We can think about this in terms of Charles Peirce's thoughts regarding firstness, secondness, thirdness. If you are an alien from faraway planet X and you arrive on Earth and see a chair, before knowing that it's called a chair, and that there's many iterations of it in the world, that is the experience of firstness – its ontology, its being. Once you move around some more, you find another chair and begin to pattern the first chair and the second together and think they must be linked somehow – this is secondness – these things must mean something. Once you see several more, you begin to realise there is a larger pattern here. This pattern fits together and from there, assuming the alien thinks similar to humans, a law of chairs seems to form. Chairs need legs, you can sit your ass down on the top... things from then on can be classified as chairs because they fit into the system. Thirdness is this formation of a system, a law.

Firstness is the materiality, secondness and thirdness refer to the domain of structurality. Language, signification, operates in secondness and thirdness because it symbolises, it uses a sign to point to a firstness in something because the firstness is internally experienced and cannot be known by anyone else. Secondness and thirdness can be externalised.

Language has built within it a reflexivity, a recursion. There is no cause/effect relationship when signification happens because there is nothing in the firstness that leads to secondness or thirdness. A chair is not a chair because its materiality/firstness suggests sitability and functioning as a chair. Humans have thought of the function of sitting on it in a moment of technology, and have signed it as a chair. Before anything can be thought through language, there is only the prepresentation of technicity, the signifying function, the potential, I suppose, for something to be thought of as a chair. Recursivity comes in as a condition of technicity – we see of the materialness of a chair because the word chair points to it, but once we think of “chair” we cannot but think of the materialness of the thing we call a “chair”. The materiality thus doesn't cause the structure, and vice versa. That's why there is a reflexivity. Take another example from last week – consciousness. We cannot think of consciousness (even though we are conscious) except by signifying through the word “consciousness”, yet the word actually points us back to our consciousness. So we can't say we can be conscious because of the word conscious exists and we know what it refers to inherently, nor can we say that the word conscious exists because we are conscious. They circle around without end. This is technicity, the sign operation at work.

Signs and materials can be thought of in terms of a diagram of Charles Peirce. The sign, object, interpretation triangle. The object is the materiality of the chair. The sign is the word 'chair'. The interpretation is the viewer's putting together of the two. The triangle can be tesselated, however, meaning that I can make another triangle from the interpretation with another object and sign. So if we use the chair example, the first triangle looks like:

then the larger triangle set would look like:

Meaning exists bound to these triangles. No one part can be missing. Technicity, I believe, would be like the lines joining the dots together to form a triangle – all there put together marking the possibility of signification.

Misha Kavka covered Dean's reading in mind-mappable terms but I'm going to attempt to build up her argument so as to understand it. Her thesis is “Our participation in communicative capitalism does not subvert it. It drives it.” One can understand capitalism in terms of an exchange for surplus value – so you buy something from me, and both of us expect to gain something MORE from that transaction. i.e. I give you money for a pie, I gain more than what I had before because the pie will bring me satisfaction that money couldn't, and you will gain more because the money will give you satisfaction that it did not give to me. So in capitalist exchanges, an excess is always implied, gained. Communicative capitalism is this exchange of surplus value through our communication – in our technocratic society, this takes the form of our Facebooking, emailing, blogging etc. As partakers of these systems of communication, we are nodes (recall the Galloway lecture), dividuals (Deleuze's term), data caches (Stephen's term). We input information about ourselves and converse online with that information, and the network which we find ourselves in, eg Facebook, takes up this knowledge from all of its users/data caches, averages it, and “puts out an upgrade” (Stephen) to please “most” of us. From here we may feel like we are being cared for, but Facebook doesn't cater to the individual, nor the mass, which is a group of individuals; it caters “for is its own code: its protocol, or algorithm, which is the only thing able to generate surplus that is profitable to Facebook itself.” - Francisc said.

Our interactions on the internet can be referred to as an affective labour. Sometimes we join causes and are asked to sign petitions online to stop vivisection or to force some political action beyond the Facebook sphere – we feel good about ourselves if we do that. We feel affective pleasure; maybe we may think it's fun to click click and be part of these movements. This is a form of control, driven not by our emotional gullibility or affective need, but by the.. drive to communicate.

When there is a message sent over the internet, it constitutes two things: its content, and its contribution (the fact that it was sent). In communicative capitalism, contribution matters more than content – the sending matters more than what was sent. What you want to say gets superseded by the proliferation of messages, to the point that it doesn't so much matter what you say but just that you are saying it, whatever “it” is.

Dean distinguishes critical reflexicity from reflexivity in communicative capitalism. Critical reflexivity is like self-reflexivity, when you sit down in tutorial and discuss and try to unravel things from an outside point of view. Reflexivity in communicative capitalism is achronological – time is not considered, and therefore no order of thought is cared for, but rather that the message is bouncing back and forth. Misha called it levels of “drawing attention from”. So my FB comment on a photo gains another response and then another and other friends join in and it goes to the top of the news feed and other friends see it and they all talk about it. Attention is being placed not so much on my initial message but on the fact that there are many messages, and others may get an urge to post as well. Then we have a reflexive comment chain. Francisc added: “Dean, however, has one more meaning in mind when she talks about reflexivity, and that is the ability of the signal to influence the very meaning it purports to be reflecting on. Communication doesn’t happen entirely outside of meaning. Dean says that mere numbers (the hits or ‘likes’ you get on YouTube or Facebook) also contribute to the ways in which the text is being perceived. The very fact that we tend to consider more important a post with numerous hits is a proof that the meaning of the post is influenced by what we tend to consider mere communication for communication’s sake. This is the subtlety of communicative capitalism: to fool us into thinking that communication only happens for its own sake, when in fact it happens for the sake of a capitalist logic, to do with the circulation of capital (social or cultural).”

My comment may have been an important thing to say, say I was an expert, but that expert knowledge becomes reduntant. Someone with a different opinion can easily oppose what I say and then people may join in to oppose me and suddenly, even though I may be correct, the opinions take precedence over my knoweldge. This is where we have seen the rise of amateur knowledge, with things such as Wikipedia; the wisdom of the crowd is trusted more than the wisdom of the expert, because if many people think something is right then we think that it's more likely right than what one 'qualified or not' person says. In other words, mathesis (quantity of messages) matters more than mimesis (reproduction of meaning in messages - quality)

What drives our will to participate in this communicative capitalism, in these exchanges? Think about procrastination – Dean says we respond to blogs with anxiety about stolen enjoyment. If you could be doing something else instead of responding to blogs, like gardening or reading, you respond feeling anxious about not doing that which you could have done, not fulfilling the what if. This what if is a fantasy, though. The fantasy of enjoyment that is in the what if, offsets the enjoyment we actually do feel when we are participating in online communities, offering up our thoughts.

Dean brings into this Lacan, who says the subject enjoys by repetition. Dean distinguishes between desire and drive. Desire operates in the symbolic and by substitution (as a metonymic process). For example, if you want a book off Amazon, you actually want a feeling thatyou think it will give. So you get the book and feel good once you have it but then you see that Amazon recommends you this other book that is similar and you think … I need that book too. So you buy it also and it makes you feel happy but then you see a collector's item from that second book that you don't have. In short, attaining an object of desire but creates another lack, which is substituted for by the next object. What we desire is a objet petit a (a stands for autre which means other). This objet petit a, according to Lacan is unattainale; it is the thing that will quell the desire, that will not create another gap/lack.

S1 ? s2 ? s3 ? s4 ? … ? o.p.a.

The above is a metonymic contiguous relationship, as in, objects are juxtaposed next to each other, each standing in for the p.o.a which is perpetually deferred. Desire, then, is a system of built in frustration. You never get what you actually want, you just get more want.

Drive, on the other hand, is a movement, like an instinct, appetite, hunger. You want something but you don't get it. Drive is not concerned with the object, really, but the process of going for the object (and not getting it). Enjoyment derived from this circular movement of repeatedly missing the object is termed jouissance. The subject is captured despite their own sense of personal agency.

Jouissance then is surplus enjoyment, because it is not an enjoyment from satisfying a want, but from NOT satisfying it, repeatedly. Think of a spiral in the middle of which is the subject, you. You are not going to be satisfied by attaining a thing, and instead are being satisfied by the movement of trying to attain that thing. As such, you are captured by the movement.

In terms of Facebook and online networks then, Dean says that is what we are doing when we are interacting online – experiencing the jouissance/surplus enjoyment of click clicking and posting funny memes and looking at random things online. We enjoy the process of this interaction rather than the 'meaningfulness' of it. Each time we click, Dean says we receive an “affective nugget” and this only lasts a smidge of time. It's like a shot of pleasure that we receive, and it wears off very quickly, so we look for the next one, as if we were addicted. We accrue affective nuggets in a way, even though they are ephemeral. This is characteristic to deisre which is linear and cumulative in nature. When you think of drive, movement is not linear so much as circular, circling around the same object without progressing, really. We know the object is unattainable but we pretend we haven't noticed the object. So we keep circling around our object which we turn a blind eye to, and the pleasure we derive, which we find “beyond the pleasure principle” (Freud), turns into the pain of not attaining the object. “So while desires are resolved in a hedonistic frame (the repetition of the illusions of pleasure), drives are essentially unpleasant, or more precisely, masochistically pleasant.” - Francisc.

Dean goes on to say that the accrual of these affective nuggets, these shots of pleasure, creates a feeling community, but for Dean, this does not mean that community (like a Twitter community) is a political one. Therefore, through our participation in communicative capitalism, we are not undermining communicative capitalism but driving it, making it grow. It may not be correct to say that the feeling communities she describes aren't political, because they can definitely be. However, perhaps what she is suggesting is that whatever they are being political about is not important, because the message gets drowned out in the proliferation of other messages. “They are non-political because they don’t refer to the semantics of the relationships they stand for, but rather to the structurality of these relationships (to their networkness).” - Francisc Being told what to care for by so many messages, perhaps we don't so much care about any of them enough to make a difference.

Combo possibility: “One point of connection between Armand and Dean's texts is to be found, I think, in Armand’s claim about materiality as undetermined ontology. Dean too hints at the same issue when she says that online interaction doesn’t care about the meaning of the message but rather about communication for communication’s sake. This places a sign of relativity upon meanings (which are man-made texts) and stresses the importance of something that transcends semantics and is independent of human agency: the code of the programme, which works in terms of mathesis.” - Francis