[-empyre-] Reply to Anna's questions...

[Lichty, Patrick]

In this chapter you seek to map a journey for networked art from structure to flow where 'the flow' now moves away from  authorship to the reader/audience. But of course the claim of 'e-texts' especially now in the age of the 'social network' and interactivity, is that the audience is not simply a consumer but rather a 'prosumer' both producing and consuming texts at the same time.

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Absolutely, and I hope that I have not confused this text with the content of one of my theory classes in saying that I try to underscore the barthes/Foucault dialectic, although in S/Z, Barthes lays the foundation for Foucault's shift to the reader.  The caution that I want to put out is that I feel that there is an assumed position of agency, so aptly described by Murray, and perhaps Laurel and Turkle.  perhaps we are in a period of different protocological levels of agency (different levels of control of the discourse in terms of institutions, levels of access,a nd technical control).  I don't feel the playing field is level or the degree of agency betwen production and consumption as being equal at all - it varies by level of access and permission.


I'd like to return to some of the theoretical beginnings of such thinking (which have already been mentioned in the posts so far) but NOT so as to set up a clear genealogy between these earlier thinkers and some natural antecedents they provide. We often find the idea (too easily wrought I would say) that contemporary writing and publishing in the network have their genesis in some of the postmodern texts by authors such as Barthes.

The idea of "being too easily wrought" is well taken, and opens up a Pandora's Box of theoretical tool use, dominant memes and personal circumstances. Why woudl I want to use Barthes or Foucault, or even Banjamin, when they are so well trod paths?  That's a horrible Pandora's Box - I teach media theory to Freshmen, I find Barthes (Death of the Author)  & Foucault (What is an Author?) in the case of this subject easy concepts to grasp, and accessibility was part of the parameters of the essay, although I feel that my core metaphor being borrowed from degrees of integration in calculus as possibly being the most accessible, either.  Sometimes you just have to go with your assertions and work them out as well as possible.

In regards to choice of theorist, and I want to note that although Barthes is too "accepted" as an a priori authority for my taste, one wonders who is germane out of multiple sources to the subject.  For example, in the 90's everyone was quoting Baudrillard/Krokers, then Virilio, then (can't remember) then Benjamin (whose "Mechanical Reproduction" was expressed better through Warhol rather then New Media).

In thsi case, the choice of Barthes was chosen not out of position, but in terms of near ubiquity, what i felt was appropriateness, and resonance with my personal situation to the subject, as I was "raised" in thsi school of thought.  I'm sure that other names might be used just as well, and this might be a great point of discusiion.

Thsi brings me to the idea of (Heidegger?), utility, and framing.  If I have a hammer, I'm going to look for nails.  That's framing by virtue of the tool, whether functional or discursive.  The use of the references I have frames my argument in certain ways, and in a way, recurses beack to my end argument in that in this period of info-glut, there are many tools, many techniques, and we sometimes use familiar frames,
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In regards to looking at precedents, I feel that the most interesting one, although Modern in his formalism, is Frank.  I spend a lot of time on him. I probably coudl have worked with McLuhan in terms of formalism here as well, but Frank theorized the fundamental shift in late 19th/early 20th Century literature of "random access", problematizing linear narrative almost as badly as Duchamp problematized objectification.

In short, as "we" sit in the midst of an exploding media milieu that is fracturing and recombining in a highly dynamic fashion, how can we discuss these processes with the most clarity across the broadest audiences, or are we being romantic?  At the end of my essay, I'm almost ready to rewrite the whole thing as a spatial tag cloud of weighted occurrences of metadata, and let these define ther relative importance of topic, thinker, subject, etc.

I rememember when I was once being interviewed for a position, the dean in question told me that it was very nice that i was telling him all this, but he is hearing "this, and this, and this word".  It felt like a reiteration of the focus groups and community consensus building events I had been at, and had further convinced me that contemporary though is developing a dominant indexical nature to it.
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Instead I would like to ask you, Patrick, how different you think say Barthes' idea of the reader found in this quote:
'the goal of literary work (of literature as a work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text' S/Z, 1994p.4)
is from the so-called collapse of authors and audiences is in networked writing? In particular I am wondering how your terminology of vector, flow etc might assist us with navigating through some of these issues? Or perhaps you don't see a difference?

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As above, I feel this lays the groundwork for Foucault, and I teach that my theory of "media" is that the author/producer/reader/consumer/editor/intervener/etc. has become such a set of flickering signifiers that really changes in relation to site, community, and if you want to go into Kate Hayles' & Alex Galloway's traveling through the layers of translation and protocological levels, I believ that the relations of agency between the cloud of users, the machines, networks, and software are dizzying.  We are all audiences, authors, translators, who are shaped by our tools, but in what ways, and to what exent, and where?

That's a book, not a chapter.

The closest that this particular missive gets to my essay is the issue of vector, or the direction/mode/interplay of communication and agency in regards to placing a narrative in different forms (lists, blogs, WIKIS).  These all have different configurations of audience, author, interaction, permissions regarding agency in conversation or discourse, all of which are important.  I try to discuss generally how I feel that lists, blogs, and wikis work differently (agora, soapbox, collective) and what that does to the the author/producer/reader/consumer/editor/intervener.

but on the other hand, I assertion is that looking at specific parts of a communal conversation (the profusion of lists, blogs, etc) has gotten to the point in which there  is a development of indexical thought that has turned into a narrative metastructure by artists like Levin, Wattenberg, and others.  I find it a little disturbing that when we look at large discursive fields (not in terms of genre or discipline but in sheer production of data), it ceases to be what you write, but how much and what words you are using that defines your relevance to a given discussion _under that framework_.

This practice of indexical wieghting to determine trends/flows might not be taken seriously, perhaps as a scholarly structure for research and discourse for the production of documents, but I do feel that it is having an effect upon the way that communities (even thsi one) are generating information, disseminating it, and assessing its relevance.  And, perhaps that might take us over into Shannon and his ideas of Noise in information theory and trying to "make sense of the stream of data" that is being read and wrtittern to the machines and between people, but in a way, isn;t that getting back to barthes and Foucault, but in terms of informatics?  Could we look at it in terms of cybernetics?

With so many modes of production, consumption and intervention, how does one determine the framing mechanism for conversation without applying filters, and what filters are appropriate?  That brings us back to authorship, reading, permissions, and framing/representation.