LP+Week+9


 * Grosz, Chapter 6**

In 1847, George Boole published ‘The Mathematical Analysis of Logic’ describing an algebraic system of logic based on binary (yes/no, on/off). In 1937, MIT graduate student Claude Shannon used Boolean theory to describe the workings of the electrical circuit, shaping the concept that supports all digital computers. That same year, Alan Turing’s Turing Machine used binary bits to “determine if and how any given algorithm can be computed.” Binary is the basis of assembly language – the computer’s base language that interprets all code into electrical circuit actions. And programming/algorithm-writing itself is based off of discrete mathematics, which derives from Boolean logic. The computer could not do what it does without that difference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computer_science#Binary_logic

//Difference is determination, specificity, particularity. (93)//

Fast forward almost a century. The algorithms have gotten vastly more complex – computers are dealing with data to insane orders of magnitude, but the assembler still only distinguishes between two things – yes and no, on and off.

I’m on a social media kick, so naturally all I could think about when reading this piece was how identities and difference were constituted on social networking platforms. For convenience, I’m going to focus on Facebook.

On every platform, a user is an individual object – an object that has characteristics attached to it.

On my profile: Name: Lindsay Poirier Sex: Female Birth year: 1991 Networks: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Blackstone-Millville Regional Religious Views: ... Political Views: ...

This becomes part of my identity in the virtual space.

This identity is dynamic. More information is attached to the user as an object as the user does more stuff, interacts with more people, changes its views, etc.

//Becoming means that nothing is the same as itself over time, and dispersion means that notion is contained in the same space in this becoming. (97)//

In this sense, the architecture of the social networking space allows me to become.

What I think is really important to think about in social networking is that difference is what makes people discoverable – it’s what allows for search. If we all had the same characteristics, search could not distinguish what it is we are looking for.

//Difference is always reduced to, as well as mediated, constrained, and translated by, the identical, the similar, the analogous, or the opposite [...] This pure difference in itself, this process of self-differentiation that has no self before it begins its becoming, is the undermining of all identities, unities, cohesions, under the differing movement that both distances and decenters all identity. (93)//

The search functionality on Facebook – Graph Search – works as follows:

Imagine I’m trying to find an old friend from my hometown, but I can’t remember her name. I would need to enter categories that describe that individual that I know that Facebook discerns. So I might type: Female from Blackstone, MA

//Difference is the name we can give to any identity – minoritarian, majoritarian, pure, or hybrid – for it is the force that underlies all temporary cohesions as well as the possibility of their dispersion. (94)//

//The concept of difference, ironically, does link together various categories of subject, various types of identity, humanity itself, not through the elaboration of a shared identity, but through the common variation or difference that the human, in all its modalities, asserts from the inhuman, both the subhuman (material, organic, and living forces) and the superhuman (the cultural, the collective, the cosmic, and the supernatural). (96)//

In this sense, difference – the very thing that makes people discoverable on Facebook – also represents a sort of cohesion. There’s a tension between collecting and filtering.

//If we understand that this multiplicity configures in unique ways for each individual yet enables shared patterns to be discerned for those who share certain social positions, then we will not confuse these acts for a latent order or, worse, for a coercive system. Instead, we will be able to see, not just how socially marginalized subjects develop or invent through the movements they utilize and the techniques that marginalization enables them to develop. (98)//

Overall, my online identity – the data structure that represents me and all of the data that its filled with – is constituted both by categories that I fall within (based on profile information) and the content I produce, the people I converse with, the things that I like. The contents of the data structure constantly update as I move from the space, so I’m always in a process of becoming.

//In this case, identity cannot be understood as what we are, the multiple, overlapping categories that make us into subjects; rather, we are what we do and what we make, we are what we generate, which may give us an identity, but always an identity that is directed to our next act, our next activity, rather than to the accretion of the categories that may serve to describe us. (98)//

Now, what does it mean that my whole structure itself, along with every other structure on the web, can be reduced back down to a bunch of ones and zeroes?


 * Grosz, Chapter 4**

On Regret

Sometimes, a friend will say something like, “I really regret taking that job.” I believe that regret assumes a sense of free will (on the part of the regretter) – I am down in the dumps because I could have made a different decision at the time.

My answer back is usually, “There is no such thing as regret.” (But I don’t really get what I’m saying when I say that.) I usually reason something like this: “Well you made a decision, and it became part of your history. You can’t regret it because you wouldn’t be you unless it happened.”

Bergson’s idea of possibility – the real vs. the virtual – is interesting here. Prior to making the decision that you now say to regret, the option never existed as an “abstract possibility.” It was only after the decision was made that the unchosen option manifested as a possibility that dissolved.

//If we follow Bergson’s famous distinction between the possible and the virtual, the possible is at best the retrospective projection of a real that wishes to conceive itself as eternally possible but which becomes actual only through an unpredictable labor and effort of differentiation, an epigenesis that exceeds its preconditions. It is only after a work of art, concept, formula, or act exists, is real, has had an actuality, that we can say that it must have been possible, that it was one of the available options. (66)//

//So although we can posit that x and y are equally possible (or not equally possible), it is only after one of them has been actually chosen, that we can see the path of reasons, causes, or explanations which made it desirable. **Only after one of the options has been chosen can we see that the unchosen option is not preserved in its possibility but entirely dissolves, becoming simply a reminiscence or projection.** (66-67)//

According to Bergson, I am wrong – regret is possible:

//Once the act is performed, we can divide, analyze, assess, and treat as necessary what in the process of its performance remains undivided, unanalyzable, surprising, and utterly contingent. (67)//

//But there’s the idea that each prior and subsequent act constitutes the individual – s/he is a new person each time s/he acts.// //Acts, having been undertaken, transform their agent so that the paths that the agent took to the act are no longer available to it except abstractly or in reconstruction. (67)//

And that the materiality of the present is constituted by the past:

//Living bodies can act, not simply or mainly through deliberation of conscious decision, but through indetermination, through the capacity they bring to the material world, to objects, to make them useful for life in ways that cannot be specified in advance. (69)//

//The universe has this expansive possibility, the possibility of being otherwise not because life recognizes it as such but because life could only exist because of the simultaneity of the past with the present that matter affords it. (71)//

So maybe, in this sense, we could look at regret, not as impossible, but as a contradiction? Because the decision that you are thinking upon + every subsequent decision (including the thinking act itself) has reconstituted you as a subject that made that decision and the material world that you are currently thinking within?

//Freedom is not linked to choice (a selection from pre-given options or commodities) but rather to autonomy, and autonomy in turn is linked to the ability to make (or refuse to make) activity (including language, that is, systems of representation and value) one’s own, to integrate the activities one undertakes into one’s history, one’ becoming. (71)//

//**Life is the protraction of the past into the present, the suffusing of matter with memory, which is the capacity to contract matter into what is useful for future action, to make matter function differently in the future than in the past. The spark of indetermination that made life possible spreads through matter in the activities that life performs on matter, and the world itself comes to vibrate with its possibilities for being otherwise. (72)**//