[-empyre-] An "other" view of writing, performance

[Lichty, Patrick]

I have been quiet in the conversation (and on many of the lists in the last year or two) in order to listen more and talk less.

It's very strange; some of the points that have been offered in the last week seem to be larger and smaller ones.

In regards to the idea of "other" histories, I am a classical Libra personality on this.  The Networked book does create a salient metaphor by framing discourse within a medium and setting its processes upon it.  In so doing, the project acts as a multi-tiered probe into technoculture, and sets up an alternate methodoilogy that suits the authors quite well.  In regards to other voices; I might say that most of us are "regulars" to the New Media scene, and therein lies the conundrum, but unless someone wants to run with that, I will probably say that the 'otherness' of our discourse in the book is with approach and methodology.

I also agree with Johannes that there are differing expectations amongst the creators of the project.  Johannes rightly states that in the age where information is rising at an exponential rate, how does one validate the necessity for reflection on any text or another, or to digest the Networked Book and reply to it in the space of a month?  This is parallel to what I am getting at in my essay, that in an age of information overload, artists and writers are forced to read index tags and use trending algorithms or that texts must be legible at the seventh-grade level, given the average literacy in the US (but I am being polemic).

What I am also interested in regarding some of the ideas regarding performance and media.  We can go back to the death of the author (barthes) and the text as performance, and the performance of completion in reading (Foucault), but I might be more interested in a performance of situation of discourse or habitus.  The Networked Book responds to a culture, and tries to reflect upon it in a McLuhanesque marriage of medium and message.  Perhaps the performative elements are the call to response, as well as the presentation of the propositional form of the book.

Lastly, regarding history, I had a great talk witht he people at the Long Now Foundation regarding the Rosetta project, which is an archive of 15,000 texts of different languages etched into a metal disc.  We live in a time where languages are being lost by the month, and as more media is being archived digitally (an inherently media ecologically unsustainable practice), I agree with the Long Now that we will enter a "Digital Dark Age", in which digital archives will either degrade, crash, or simply not migrate over decades. Therefore, i am very grateful, and appreciative that the book will be published after a year, as atoms trump bits every time.

In regards to this, another family member (a tenured historian) was talking to me this weekend about her difficulty in writing a history of artists that were not dead yet, and that their context keeps changing over time.  The traditional baseline for historians versus theorists is that one writes about those who are dead/long inactive, and the other not. While I replied that one merely has to localize their discourse (set a very tight context), her problem compared to the discussion here seems as if we are trying to write histories concurrent with the events, which is problematic to say the least.  It is the greates exercise in control - desiring to control one's own historical context before the other historians get to you. But them one can look to computational culture and Engelbart's idea of the "bootstrap", or pulling together a project from the grass roots... I see what we are doing here as an important experiment to which any proclamations, or declamations about its relative worth will only be borne out in time.

To refer to Johannes, who has time?  Well, while I think there were expectations for the book to be a viral sensation, I am much more concerned with it being an importane experiment and good solid book on the subject, a tome that will sit on the shelf with proper gravitas, in a period early enough in the history of new media that it will demand attention.

In my opinion, all one can do is to present a proposition that others will see, and hopefully that will resonate with others.  Throw a log on the fire, and hope it burns.