Jodi Dean has posted recently about a phenomenon she calls "wikification," (a term I love). She writes:
I'm thinking about the way we are perhaps in the middle of a perfect storm of doubt and disbelief, one which we might think of in terms of the collapse of the conditions of possibility for credibility, or with Zizek, in terms of the decline of symbolic efficiency. Nothing—or nearly nothing—is accepted on face value. The most important aspects of our lives cannot be established with certainty—new information appears daily, new questions are asked, new answers provided; we must continue to check to see if our information, our cites, our sources, are still there, updated, or outdated.And, it seems to me that wikification might be a valuable metaphor for thinking about the decline of symbolic efficiency; not only is there no one single authority, nor one standard of reason that holds our facts together, but also anything that is entered can be changed, altered, revised.
In a followup comment, clarifying the nature of symbolic efficiency, she notes:
I understand the decline of symbolic efficiency in a very simple, perhaps too simple way: symbols don't mean the same thing in multiple places, their meaning is more likely called into question, the variability of the symbol is more immediately apparent. So, symbolic identities like 'worker,' 'man,' 'woman,' 'Black,' 'mother,' 'gay' don't carry enough weight/meaning to anchor/establish anything at all. They are immediately contested, rendered something else, something other.
I have been thinking about these two concepts, wikification on the one hand and the decline in symbolic efficiency on the other, and have two somewhat contradictory responses.
First, I think that if the loss of symbolic efficiency is as Jodi describes it, then the symbol is always in a state of loss, and one can travel to the historical records of most periods in history and see the same sentiment (to pick one randomly, the rise of ethics standards in Hollywood corresponded with serious sense of political and social upheaval, or another, Seneca talks about how modern Rome has lost the real meaning that was once given by living in a world more primally connected with nature and the need to rethink practices of living, to rehearse death, to be free of this decline in value (i.e. the imposition of value on things rather than authentic ideals/existence), and so on). It seems that the very notion of efficiency is, then, somewhat of a self-fulfilling crisis or disaster. To frame the symbolic in terms of efficiency is always to frame it as the search for a better meaning, one more valuable, more efficacious, more substantial. So the idea of a symbolic efficiency is already the announcement of its crisis - that it is never efficient enough. Speaking of a decline, then, may be redundant.
Second, I think it is also possible that symbolic efficiency, as Jodi describes it, is inextricably linked to constructionist thinking, and that what she is describing as wikification is a realization of the historical conditions that limit the term's theoretical applicability to today. In other words, symbolic efficiency is on the decline as a heuristic device, not as a reflection of some change in the Real organization/horizon the symbolic. In which case, the decline is the decline of a theoretical frame, and a good opportunity to think anew a sense of th symbolic away from the constructionist and towards a more connectivist perspective. This isn't merely a process that's good for understanding epistemology; it's a process that would radically rethink the formation and relation between the Lacanian registers. The alternative is to stick round probes in square holes and call it a perfect fit, and explicate accordingly.
Otherwise, I think any expose or thinking about wikification will be impoverished, and to some extent I think Jodi's initial linkage of wikification to questions of symbolic efficiency is evidence of that. The truly exceptional thing about Wikipedia is not that it is often wrong, but that it is ever right, not that it is malleable, but that if you look at the history of entries, that it congeals towards consistency, even hegemony. What is exceptional is that an aggregate collection of information can, through the integration of various individual threads, contributions, questions, and corrections, produce something remarkable, something that looks like and quickly becomes more popular than those other texts we like to call "knowledge." I think in this instance, at least, the connections that matter than the veracity of the construction, and it may well be a mistake to judge the malleability of the connections by recourse to the veracity or facticity of its constructions.
Comments (4)
There is no doubt that at any point in time symbology shifts and for any individual (especially those of us over 40, way over 40), symbolic efficiency declines.
However, the idea of a general decline in symbolic efficiency is different - it points to a potential crisis and I believe we are clearly living in that time. The increase in visual (primarily input) and decline in verbal (primarily output) communications have to be one source of a whole range of new social neuroses/psychoses we witness.
I do believe there is a declining "placebo" effect to these heuristics. Once a certain term or method is in general use, it's effectiveness declines - the biological analogue being antibiotics - resistance increases. In the case of mental/psychic structures, I conceive of it moving from the symbolic to the imaginary registers, where consciousness can play with it and the unconscious can continue to resist exposure.
But back to wikification. The progressive part of wikis is that it is a collective endeavour that creates value and exposes more of the knowledge creation process.
The fact that wikis are "right" sometimes is not amazing - no more than why the encyclopedia britannica in 1972 was sometimes right. Lets not underestimate the power of speed and the cost reduction of revision as powerful motivators to participation and value generation.
And of course, wikis force language thinking, and that is tremendously progressive.
Posted by pebird | November 23, 2006 1:58 PM
Posted on November 23, 2006 13:58
Interesting idea that the decline in symbolic efficiency is also a function of age/maturation. That is something I'll need to think a bit more about.
I certainly agree that we are living in a sort of crisis, though as I noted above, I think the crisis may be one of heuristics rather than of language, though certainly the former does not exclude the possibility of the latter. But I'm not sure that the term simply loses its value with use, as if the mere circulation of the term mitigates its value as a critical device or theoretical concept. Certainly some terms with much longer histories - mimesis, Ereignis, the subject - have not lost their worth simply through use, though their value has likely declined or their utility radically reconfigured as time and thinkers pass by.
The point I would like to make is that these various rethinkings and reconfigurations are usually related to changes in the technics that enable thought. To a certain extent, it may be possible to think of philosophy as nothing but an attempt to master technics, to explain the possibility of thought, or a thinking subject, or of being, as something that can be purged of its technics (or at least its bad technics), or that can transcend technics, or that can negate any originary force to technics by sublimating them to some other theoretical conceit more amenable to thought and contemplation. Not every philosopher does this, obviously, but the frequency of these efforts remains undoubtedly impressive.
As for wikis, I agree for the most part. As for the most powerful argument for wikis as a form for thought, I'll post a few comments on that in a day or two.
Posted by kenrufo | November 24, 2006 7:54 PM
Posted on November 24, 2006 19:54
Hi, Ken,
This is Jaime Wright. I hope you're well--I know this is a weird way to contact you, but I don't know what your email address is.
I have two questions (unrelated to wikification) and then a comment.
I have to write a chapter on simulational culture, and I have two questions for you.
1) Who can I read for evidence that we live in a simulational culture? Or don't live in one--whatever...
2) Should I talk about terms like visual culture and aesthetic culture as well?
Also, I think the idea of symbolic efficiency is inherently creepy. Whose efficiency? And to what end? The OED itself was a kind of wikipedia, at first. Is that the kind of single authority that makes a symbol more efficient?
Posted by jaimelane | November 26, 2006 5:27 PM
Posted on November 26, 2006 17:27
Hey Jaime, how goes it? I have a tendency to think that symbolic efficiency is a bit creepy to, though as with most things the creep factor is located within the conceptual and pragmatic web surrounding the concept rather than the concept itself. The term has a history in Lacan and Levi-Strauss, at least, and it's not a bad attempt to name the capacity for people to believe in the representational validity of language, though of course, the problem is that it names more than this...
Still, the contrast to the OED is illuminating. The Enlightenment did establish certain teleological norms for epistemology, and the various dictionaries were in accordance with this, and were quickly awarded an ethos to match. Of course, at the time, few means of investigating and disseminating the process of their production existed, and so the public at large saw a repository of information without seeing the randomness that generated it, or the controversies surrounding entries. In some ways, the situation has some interesting parallels, but the really significant difference may be in the capacity to witness the act of construction, to take it out of the black box of epistemology and throw it open for discussion. One might explain the alleged decline in symbolic efficiency, then, in a way that one explains the power of hermeneutic reading or ideological critique: that exposing the means of an ideological formation (what Hyde liked to call "how language means") disrupts its conclusion, or at least reduces the coherence and authority of the final construction. I'm tempted by this, but at the same point, I'm also rather skeptical of these sorts of claims of liberation through critique. Sloterdijk makes the argument that people know that the bad stuff is arbitrary and capricious, but that they just don't care to do much about it, for example, and I'm tempted to think that people who don't know the specific details of the OED's development would, when hearing those details, announce that "Sure, of course they're all arbitrary, and experts disagree, but whatever." So I'm assuming there's something different to explain this notion of wikification as a further or more explicitly recognized decline in symbolic efficiency. If I had to lay odds, without thinking about it too much further at present, I think it has more to do with the archiving technology and less to do with the controversies, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, re: simulation. Readings really depend on how theoretical and philosophical you want to get. I mean the obvious choice is Baudrillard, who I still find captivating, but his thought evolves a lot, and he shifts positions and refines explanations, and there are arguments for and against different stages in his thought. If you want to provide more detail about the chapter, I might be able to be more specific, but the standby is the infamous Simulacra and Simulations (the book that Neo pulls off the shelf in the original Matrix movie), and I might also recommend The Illusion of the End.
If you want to invest less time (though why on Earth would you want to do that?!? *grin*), I'd stick to some of the media literature: Levy's Becoming Virtual is nice if you're doing Internet related stuff, Gitlin's Media Unlimited works more generically, Michael Heim has a series of books dealing with virtual reality, and Doug Kellner has a book Media Culture, which goes through different theories of media and simulation, Baudrillard included. I like that last book for what it is, but understand that Kellner has some biases that lead to a somewhat truncated appreciation for folks like Baudrillard (he is a good example of someone who, because he is a bit more of a structural Marxist, likes second stage Baudrillard a lot more than third stage - the third stage, not coincidentally, includes a lot of critiques of Marxism as the mirror of capitalism because of its naturalization of labor), so you'll be getting a version of things that departs radically from other assessments of JB. If you want non-techie stuff, I like Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle or any of James Der Derian's work, which takes a lot of so-called post theory and applies it to political relations theory. Anyway, I might be more specific if you want to email me some details (ken.rufo@gmail.com should work fine).
As far as visual culture and aesthetic culture, I just don't know if I can be of much suggestion help without knowing the project details. I find visual culture hugely overhyped, which in no way discounts the study of it. It just reflects my own theoretical/aesthetic interests. I tend to think that aesthetic culture is a more interesting and more encompassing term, but for this reason it also suffers a bit from Burke's casuistic stretching, and there ends up being as many meanings for aesthetic culture as there are commentators.
Posted by kenrufo | November 26, 2006 9:46 PM
Posted on November 26, 2006 21:46