Ghost in the Wire

What you see before you is my third attempt at a personal weblog.  The first, "This is not a Blog," began as an experiment with this new medium and derived its inspiration from what can only be called a fundamental need for catharsis.  The second Gulf War had just begun, and the media coverage of the buildup and prosecution of the war seemed so appalling, so dreadful, that I had to do something more than simply choose to consume or avoid it.  My biggest problem with the war, which seemed unjustified on the merits presented in the most obvious ways, was its failure to register as an event in the way that other wars appeared to have registered.  Here was a government starting a war against the backdrop of global protests and severe doubts about its necessity at home, here was a military so obsessed with the prospect of bombardment and invasion that they could only giddily describe the onslaught as "shock and awe," and here were tens of thousands of civilians being destroyed under the hygienic auspices of the term "collateral damage."  And yet the advent and conduct of the war seemed to resonate with no more authority that would a season finale of Friends.  I authored about a hundred posts before my interest began to wane, but I had a few of them that I particularly liked.  My readership was slight if consistent, but the small group of loyal patrons who stopped by were eventually overwhelmed and overrun by spambots, which flooded the site, Agent Smith style,  and overcame my capacity to fight them.  I abandoned the site and chose not to renew the domain license, and "This is not a Blog," as its title might have predicted, was no more.

I worked on my dissertation for a while, finished and defended it.  I had some time on my hands and the siren call of blogging began to ring distinctively in my new, Ph.D. ears.  My dissertation, Spectral Mediations, focused on media ecology and philosophy, and in keeping with my thinking at the time, which centered heavily on countering the more pessimistic appraisals of technological change, I dubbed my new blog "Broken Letters."  It was a lovely little place, with a fresh Movable Type install, and I posted on anything that struck my fancy, from politics to media studies to random thoughts on the world.  I attempted to cultivate a more academic air, to keep with my newly minted academic status.  The blog read reasonably well, and while it had its lulls, my reader base grew far beyond that of "This is not a Blog," and all was well with my little blogging world.  And then, in a flash of hacking magic, the hosts were cracked, the service pulled, the posts were (with only one or two exceptions) suddenly lost, and again as its title might have predicted, "Broken Letters" ruptured beyond repair.

The election of 2004 came and went, with anticipated if entirely lamentable results.  Contacting some of my colleagues and friends, people who I respected as intellects and writers, I started a group blog that could explore issues of rhetorical construction and progressive politics.  With some discussion as to its mission, we dubbed it Progressive Commons and sent it off into the world.  It is still there, doing exceptionally well, though still evolving into something greater than I envisioned when we began.  This summer, we will begin the transition from a group blog to a certified non-profit organization, and after that I expect Progressive Commons to take on a whole new trajectory. Still, as much as I enjoy my work there, something has been missing.  Progressive Commons allows me space to write of politics and rhetoric, but it leaves little room for personal ruminations or discussions of media ecology and theory.  The room it does leave is largely practical, and as fundamentally important as the practical questions of political economy and news cycles are, I found myself wanting to explore different ways of talking out theories of media in the abstract, but doing so in a way not bound by the stringent and often stifling conditions of the academy. 

And so, here we are, you and me, at "Ghost in the Wire," my latest and I suspect longest lasting experiment with personal blogging.  Here I will discuss a lot of things, from the specific attributes of different media to the tenets and limits of media ecology, from some exposition of different media theorists to some disquistion on the more interesting issues raised when we think about mediation - issues that go by names like time, mimesis, and of course, the ghost.

What follows is the text of a presentation I gave recently at Athica, the Institute for Contemporary Art here in Athens, GA.  The presentation fronted a small symposium convened to discuss the current exhibit "Embedded: Living With Technology," and I will discuss both the exhibit and the discussion in a future post.  My talk was entitled, as the title of the post indicates, "Had Prometheus Been an Algorithm."  Enjoy.

The term algorithm is an interesting one.  Invented by a mathematician who worked in the royal court of Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries, the algorithm is a set of well defined instructions designed for accomplishing a task that, given a stable initial state, will result in a corresponding and recognizable end-state.  In other words, plug in the variables, follow the formula, and presto-magicko, you'll get an answer.  Computers work on algorithms, as does the human brain (albeit much more complex ones that those of the computer).  But algorithms aren't just black box technologies.  We see algorithms everyday in the recipes we use in cooking, or the DIY manuals we buy from Lowe's.

Algorithms exist in response to a need.  By assembling variables and arranging them in a series of sequential steps, algorithms can provide answers to questions and promise the ability to process complex events by breaking them down into constituent steps.  Usually, we know how and why algorithms are employed, but not always.  Sometimes we discover the algorithms at work in the world around us very late in the game, and only after we realize the nature of the algorithm at work do we understand the reason for its existence.

Today, I want to propose thinking through a sort of literary algorithm, one that like those in nature, might tell us the reasons for its existence if only we can trace its function.  Today I want to explore the idea that Prometheus, the famous Titan of Greek legend, might in fact have been a mythological algorithm, and that he may in fact continue to serve in that function, two and a half millennia after the mythology that birthed him has lost its authoritative status in the Western world.  In the next few minutes, I want to explore four different incarnations of the Prometheus myth, and hopefully by looking at each, to identify the algorithm at work under the name of Prometheus, and what Prometheus as an algorithm can teach us about art and technology.  To set the stage, let me anticipate my conclusion: that humans are the result of the technological feedback loop, not its primogenitors.

[Also posted at Progressive Commons.]

Friday, June 3rd.  The end of business hours are fast approaching, and glorious bells will soon be ringing in the weekend.  For weeks, your company has been accused of behaviors that have inspired anger and retaliation from the publics with which you interact.  Claims have been made, damning claims, about certain methods used to get the job done, and the masses have responded with outcries, investigations, even violence.  There have been small pockets of support by those who, come hell or high water, support your products, love the brand, and plan on buying no matter your modes of production, but those have been far too muted for your preference. 

Now is the time for some strategy.  Through sheer coincidence, or perhaps particularly adept manipulation, some of the whistleblowers have been silenced, for they have refused to confirm some of the stories that once they disclosed with surprising openness.  You have mounted a moderately successful campaign against the sensationalist media that would capitalize on those claims in order to push up their own ratings through the celebration of scandal, driven as they are by profits and nay-saying and, dare you say it, an intense distrust and distaste for your particular product line.  But, and this is a big but, this campaign can only get you so far.  See, the problem is this: your company actually did do a bunch of the things that have been reported, and the investigations are continuing, and you know that the details will come out eventually.

Fortunately for you, you know a few things about how that sensationalist media works.  You know that news media are time sensitive, and that televisual news doesn't spend time investigating cold stories, which means that if you can get them distracted, you can get the news out there without much of a public airing.  You also know that, having already muddied the waters a bit, you can count on those self-important talking heads to content themselves with bigger news, bigger scandals, and by the grace of god or the whimsy of satan, a big one - involving perhaps the most famous whistleblower in history - has just exploded with the force of a televisual nuclear bomb.  You also know that media networks plan their weekend schedules during the week, and that they will not take the time nor tackle the challenges of rescheduling, especially if they think they already have solid news line-ups.  And so here we are, friday afternoon, what do you do?

Well, if you're the Pentagon, trying once again to cover up allegations of Koran abuse during interrogations, you do what you always do: release a flood of documents shortly before everyone heads home for the weekend.

I'm working on a book chapter right now involving trauma and media, and does so by looking at a shift in Derrida from the trace to the specter, as well as a reading of Art Spiegelman's Maus that celebrates its mimetic faculty as being oppositional to a more conventional representational schema.  The paper is still being thought through, but I will post some more on it when it gets closer to completion.  But for now, I've been retracing my own thinking process, and I realized that to some extent this problem of the unrepresentable has been plaguing me somewhat indirectly for quite a while.  My masters thesis, for example, argued that one can read the concepts of reality and death in Baudrillard as two sides of the same coin, as a sort of event horizon from which to think the distal realm around us.  And last year, I gave a short presentation at the National Communication Association's annual convention that touched on a similar theme, though this time regarding attempts to critically engage horror films.  What follows is a slightly modfied text of that talk, for what it's worth:

I want to begin by asking: how can rhetoric respond to horror, be it the horror of a particular event, or the advent of horror in general?  Asked another way: is it possible to render horror through what we think of as rhetoric?

Let us put aside any long-winded attempt to circle our wagons around a community-accepted definition of rhetoric.  Let us put in abeyance any long-standing debates over what rhetoric entails, from Aristotle through McGee, and just this once, provisionally agree that rhetoric can be characterized as the production (and possible seduction) of meaning.  This agreement requires of rhetoric a fairly massive awning, but it at least avoids having to worry about some of the more tiresome contests over intention and the contours of the subject.

Instead, let us focus our efforts on the equally wily and less-definite definition of the other half to today's equation: horror.  What does horror mean? 

I have recently discovered podcasting.  Yes, I know, I'm like a year or two behind the curve, but I've been fairly busy and haven't been paying attention like I should.  Oh well, that's all about to change - not so much because I'm any less busy, but because I am extremely intrigued by podcasting technology and by the phenomenon itself.  I plan on contributing some podcasts in the somewhat near future, but for now I'll be exploring different software options.  If you have suggestions for good feeds, software, or technique, feel free to let me know, either in comments or by mail.

This may seem an odd or marginal topic for a post, given that I have only seen two different examples of the practice, but I think it's worth thinking about what those two instances imply.  I am talking about efforts to hypothesize and simulate the nature of prison life for famous celebrities undergoing trials, most notably celebrities like Martha Stewart and Michael Jackson.

You remember the jokes tossed about as cameras surveyed Martha's likely new "home decor," as the paucity of craft opportunities and lack of high-class status symbols were pointed to as evidence of the true torment imprisonment held in store for her.  Cameras scanned the likely cell from left to right, slowly drinking in its small size, as voice-overs spoke of the trial proceedings and image montages showed Martha in various stages of composure, with looks ranging from classic Martha pristine to something more like disheveled criminality.  More recently, MSNBC's Abrams did a special on Michael Jackson's potential future quarters, and the special looked as if it had been scripted by the same production crews responsible for the earlier Martha stories.  They joked of the lack of decorative armbands on the prison uniform, about how no sheriff deputy would hold umbrellas for Michael Jackson, and about how cramped the gloved one's quarters would be, a far cry from the sprawling demesnes of Neverland.

So here's my question: why this obsession with simulating the prison life of these sorts of famous celebrities?  Why this production of what might be called a "simulacron P?"

I just completed a submission draft dealing with Derrida and materiality, one that I'm contributing as a chapter to a book being done on the "material turn" in rhetorical studies.  As it touches on much of the interests I discuss on here, I thought I'd include a small portion of the paper:

Writing boasts its share of ghosts as well.  The mystique attached to old texts, seen recently as the source of satanic power and mysticism in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, can also be seen in the name given to those piles of mail deemed undeliverable: the so-called “dead letters,” named because of their removal from the more lively process of circulation and the possibly deceased status of their senders and addressees.  Even the near-instantaneous exchange of e-mail is phantasmatic, with writing done here suddenly manifesting there, saved in the inbox until (or after) being read, waiting for one more click of the mouse before initiating a sort of electronic séance.  Derrida, we should remember, routinely argues that writing is dedicated to the proposition that the author no longer needs to be for the message to be received, and that the possibility of communicating beyond one's death is necessarily inscribed in every act of writing.  Writing, in other words, always entails the possibility of writing a dead letter.

And so it is no coincidence that Derrida's Specters of Marx, which revolves around a reading of the ghosts in and of Karl Marx (the great thinker of materiality), also contains a meditation on the spectrality of contemporary technics.  In it, the specter proves so pivotal that Derrida contends that no assessment or appreciation of media can be made “without taking into account so many spectral effects, the new speed of apparition (we understand this word in its ghostly sense) of the simulacrum, the synthetic or prosthetic image, and the virtual event, cyberspace and surveillance, the control appropriations, and speculations that today deploy unheard-of powers.”  In other words, the spectral component of media, their ability to make the dead live again, to proffer a virtual sense of presence, or to simulate or anticipate an event, are what give new media and their messages their distinctive character.  The specter, we could say, is what produces media as material phenomena, that shapes the possibilities of response and interpretation in today's evolving media ecology.

My first podcast, the inaugural "ProgCast" of Progressive Commons can be found on our new media page.  Enjoy.