Philosophy

Twitter Time

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

“Twitter relies on people’s desire to be the same.” At least that’s what A. C. Goodall claims in a recent New Statesman article, “Is Twitter the Enemy of Self-Expression?”  This is, it would seem, a rather vague and unsubstantiated claim.  In his brief comments, Alan Jacobs writes that Goodall’s piece amounts to “assertions without evidence.”  Jacobs goes on to argue that it is unhelpful to make sweeping claims about something like Twitter which is “a platform and a medium,” rather than an organized, coherent unit with an integral “character.”  A medium or platform is subject to countless implementations by users, and, as the history of technology has shown, these uses are often surprising and unexpected.

On the whole I’m sympathetic to Jacobs comments.  His main point echoes Michel de Certeau’s insistence that we pay close attention to the use that consumers make of products.  In his time, the critical focus had fallen on the products and producers; consumers were tacitly assumed to be passive and docile recipients/victims of the powers of production.  De Certeau made it a point, especially in The Practice of Everyday Life, to throw light on the multifarious, and often impertinent, uses to which consumers put products.  Likewise, Jacobs is reminding us that generalizations about a medium can be misleading and unhelpful because users put any medium to widely disparate ends.

This is a fair point.  However (and if there weren’t a “however” I wouldn’t be writing this), I’m a bit of a recalcitrant McLuhanist and tend to think that the medium may have its influence regardless of the uses to which it is put.  And perhaps, I might better label myself an Aristotelian McLuhanist, which is to say that I’m tending toward localizing the impact of a medium in the realm of habit and inclination.  The use of a medium over time creates certain habits of mind and body.  These habits of mind and body together yield, in my own way of using this language, a habituated sensibility.  The difficulty this influence poses to critique is that, precisely because it is habituated, it tends to operate below the level of conscious awareness.

I don’t think the focus on use and the attention to the effects of a medium are necessarily mutually exclusive.  Habits after all are only formed through significant and repeated use.   Perhaps they are two axes of a grid on which the impact of technology may be plotted. In any case, it would help to provide an example.

Consider our experience of time.  It seems that the human experience of time, how we sense and process the passage of time, is not a fixed variable of human nature.  My sense is that we habituate ourselves to a certain experience of time and it is difficult to immediately adjust to another mode.  Consider those rare moments when we find ourselves having nothing to do.  How often do we then report that we were unable to just relax; we had the urge to do something, anything.  We were restless precisely at the moment when we could have taken a rest.   Or, at a wider scale, consider the various ways cultures approach time.  We tend to naturalize the Western habits of precise time keeping and partitioning until we enter another culture which operates by a very different set of attitudes toward time.  It would take something much longer than a blog post to explore this fully, but it would seem plausible that certain technologies — some, like the mechanical clock, very old — mold our experience of time.

Bernard Stiegler has commented along similar lines on the media environment and consequent experience of time fostered by television.  To begin with he notes, going back to the establishment of the first press agency in Paris in 1835 near a new telegraph, that the “value of information as commodity drops precipitously with time …”  He goes on to describe industrial time in the following context:

“…. an event becomes an event — it literally takes place — only in being ‘covered.’  Industrial time is always at least coproduced by the media.  ‘Coverage’ — what is to be covered — is determined by criteria oriented toward producing surplus value.  Mass broadcasting is a machine to produce ready-made ideas, ‘cliches.’  Information must be ‘fresh’ and this explains why the ideal for all news organs is the elimination of delay in transmission time.”

To be sure, more than the logic of the medium is at play here, but it may be difficult and beside the point to parse out the logic of the medium from other factors.

The ability to eliminate  of the delay between event and transmission that characterized industrial time has been radically democratized by digital media.  We are all operating under these conditions now.  You may vaguely remember, by contrast, the time that elapsed between snapping a picture, getting it developed, and finally showing it to others.  That time has been collapse, not only for large news organizations, but for anyone with an internet enabled smart phone.  In the interest of creating catchy labels, perhaps we may call this, not industrial time, but Twitter time.  “Twitter” here is just a synecdoche for the ability to immediately capture and broadcast information, an ability that is now widely available.  My guess is that this capacity, admittedly used in various ways, will affect the sensibility that we label our “experience of time.”

Stiegler continues (with my apologies for subjecting you to the rather dense prose):

“With an effect of the real (of presence) resulting from the coincidence of the event and its seizure and with the real-time or ‘live’ transmission resulting from the coincidence of the event and its reception, a new experience of time, collective as well as individual, emerges.  This new time betokens an exit from the properly historical epoch, insofar as the latter is defined by an essentially deferred time — that is, by a constitutive opposition, posited in principle, between the narrative and that which is narrated.  This is why Pierre Nora can claim that the speed of transmission of analog and digital transmissions promotes ‘the immediate to historical status’:

‘Landing on the moon was the model of the modern event.  Its condition remained live retransmission by Telstar . . . . What is proper to the modern event is that it implies an immediately public scene, always accompanied by the reporter-spectator, who sees events taking place.  This ‘voyeurism’ gives to current events both their specificity with regard to history and their already historical feel as immediately out of the past.’

There is a lot to unpack in all of that.  We are all reporter-spectators now.  Deferred time, time between event and narration, is eclipsed. Everything is immediately “out of the past,” or, at least as I understand it, the whole of the past is collapsed into a moment that is not now.  The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, just two months past, might as well have taken place five years ago.  The killing of bin Laden, likewise, will very soon appear to be buried in the indiscriminate past.

Twitter as a medium, used to the point of fostering a habituated sensibility (but regardless of particularized uses), would seem to accelerate this economy of time and expand its province into private life.  It doesn’t create this economy of time, but it does heighten and reinforce its trajectory.  In fact, the relentless flow of the Twitter “timeline” (not an insignificant designation), or better, our effort to keep up with it and make sense of it, may be an apt metaphor for our overall experience of time.

All of this to say that while a medium or platform can be used variously and flexibly, it is not infinitely malleable; a certain underlying logic is more or less fixed and this logic has its own consequences.  Of course, none of this necessarily amounts to saying Twitter is “bad”, only to note that its use can have consequences.

Speaking of habit, I’m curious if anyone felt the urge to click the “1 New Tweet” image?

 

“Life without memory is no life at all”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

Not too long ago I found myself unable to recall an element of a story from my past.  It was a story I have narrated many times since it occurred nearly 15 years ago.  The event was not insignificant, and what I could no longer remember were my own words.  I could picture the scene.  I could feel what I said.  The words, however, seemed slurred, as if they were on a tape that was being played too slowly.

What a curious thing memory is.  There is so much of each day that we do not remember.  But then there are these episodes that we can revisit repeatedly; many of them, in my case anyhow, so very random, of so little significance.  Yet they stick, they linger, they creep into consciousness for no obvious reason.  And then there are those memories that are like so many beads we string together on the narrative thread of our emplotted lives.  Even these, it seems, are not as durable as we might hope.

Anthony Doerr opens Memory Wall with this reflection from Luis Bunuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh:

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.  Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence.  Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.  Without it, we are nothing.

“Is Memory in the Brain?”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Most of us think of memory as something that goes on exclusively in our brains, but alongside of efforts to view cognition in general as an embodied and extended activity, some researchers have been arguing that memory also has a socially extended dimension.  David Manier is among those pushing our understanding of memory so as to encompass acts of social communication as remembering.

Manier’s 2004 article, “Is Memory in the Brain?  Remembering as Social Behavior,” published in Mind, Culture, and Activity seeks to establish social remembering as a legitimate and significant area of study for cognitive psychologists.  In order to this, Manier begins by challenging the dominant understanding of memory which construes memory as something located in the brain or as a faculty housed exclusively in the brain.

“Historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, often influenced by Halbwachs (1950/1980), have taken up the topic of collective memory, looking at ways that organizations preserve important aspects of the past, and ways that events of weighty historical importance (such as the Holocaust) become integrated into the collective identity of a group of people …. But among some psychologists, especially those whose emphasis is on neuroscientific approaches to memory, it is possible to detect a certain ambivalence toward this topic.” (251)

Manier intends to argue instead, “for the usefulness of conceptualizing remembering as social behavior, and for expanding the science of memory to include communicative acts.” (252)  Manier and his colleagues have conducted a number of studies into what he terms conversational remembering.  These studies take place in “naturalistic contexts,” that is everyday environments as opposed to the contrived laboratory environment in which most cognitive scientific research takes place.  Thus far, Manier’s studies suggest that the dynamics of social remembering shape the subsequent remembering of individual group members.

Manier briefly traces the history of the belief, most recently articulated by Tulving, that memory “has a home, even if still a hidden one, in the brain” back past recent neuroscientific discoveries to ancient Greece.  Plato operated with what Cropsey has termed an “obstetrical metaphor” according to which “the purpose of philosophy is to serve as a ‘midwife’ to the birth of ideas having germinal existence within the soul; in this sense, Plato saw knowing as involving an act of remembering.”  Thus memory was not conceived as mere storage of information, nor simply as a brain function, but “rather more like a journey, a quest in which conversations with a philosopher … can play a crucial role.”  (253)

According to Manier, this more conversational, dialogical, social conception of memory was displaced by Aristotle’s “emphasis on taxonomy” and his division of the soul into four faculties: the nutritive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the rational.  Memory, associated with imagination, was understood as a function of the sensory faculty through which one perceived images of things past.  While Aristotle did not maintain that what he had distinguished in theory was in fact distinguishable in reality, others who came after him where not so precise.  In Manier’s brief sketch, the notion of memory as a faculty located in the brain evolves through the Medieval heirs of Aristotle, to Locke, Thomas Reid, and then on to Gall and Spurzheim (founders of phrenology), Fechner, and Ebbinghaus.  (253-254)

Certain metaphors have also reinforced this “modular or topographical” view of memory:

“Often, the metaphors have been influenced by discussions of anatomy and physiology (… ‘the mental organ’ of language production – discussed by Chomsky …).  Moreover, the industrial revolution, with its production of heavy machinery, lent weight to an emphasis on metaphors about psychological ‘mechanisms.’  The development of computers spawned a host of new metaphors for cognitive psychology, including information processing, hardware and software, systems and subsystems, control processes, input and output, the computational architecture of mind, parallel distributed processing, …. (254)

Against the “mental topography” approach, Neisser has called for “ecological validity” which “asserts the imperative of understanding ‘everyday thinking’ rather than the study (preferred by many experimental psychologists) of how isolated individuals perform on contrived experiments conducted in carefully controlled laboratory settings.” (255)  Following Bruner, Manier goes on to characterize remembering as an “act of meaning” adding, “memory is something that we as humans do, that is, it is a meaningful action we perform in the sociocultural contexts that we take part in creating, and within which we live.”  Furthermore, “If it is correct to say that memory is something we do rather than something we have, it may be more appropriate to think of remembering as a kind of cognitive behavior ….” (256)

Now Manier articulates his chief claim, “remembering can be viewed as an act of communication.”  (257)  He aligns his claim with Gilbert Ryles’ earlier argument against the “tendency to view silent thoughts as somehow real thoughts, as opposed to the thoughts that we speak aloud.  By analogy, Manier suggests that not all remembering is silent remembering, and he offers the following definition:  “Remembering is a present communication of something past.”  He goes on to give various examples, all of which constitute acts of remembering:  solitary, private remembering; remembering in conversation with someone; and remembering through writing.  Each example was a remembrance of the same event, but each situation shifted what was remembered.  (258)

While some may argue that behind acts of remembrance there lays one’s “real memory” physically located in the brain, Manier suggests that the “neurophysiological configuration” is “only the material basis for real acts of remembering.”  Furthermore,

“This view of acts of remembering accords with the concept of distributed cognition, according to which we humans use the cultural tools that are available to us.  As Dennet, announced … we no more think with our brains than we hammer with our bare hands. And one of the important cultural tools we use in our thinking – and especially in our remembering – is group conversation.” (260)

Manier then provides a transcription of a family group conversation to illustrate how memories shift through the give and take of conversation, memories that presumably would not have been altered otherwise.  He concludes,

“Remembering is not only shaped by internal, cognitive processes.  When we reconstruct past events in the context of conversation, the conversational roles that are adopted by group members will affect what is remembered.  Moreover, conversational remembering can be shaped by other influences.  These influences on remembering – as well as a host of other sociocultural facts – tend to be missed by an approach that limits itself to what goes on in the brain.”

Manier, David.  “Is Memory in the Brain? Remembering as Social Behavior” in Mind, Culture, and Activity, 11(4), 251-266.  2004.

‘Haunted Places Are the Only Ones People Can Live In’

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Places have a way of absorbing and bearing memories that they then relinquish, bidden or unbidden. In three artful paragraphs Michel de Certeau enchants us with a series of poignant reflections on place and memory built upon a string of evocative metaphors. The whole discussion appears near the conclusion of a chapter titled “Walking the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life.

The context of walking and moving about spaces leads de Certeau to describe memory as “a sort of anti-museum:  it is not localizable.”  Where museums gather pieces and artifacts in one location, our memories have dispersed themselves across the landscape, they colonize.  Here a memory by that tree, there a  memory in that house.  De Certeau is principally developing this notion of a veiled remembered reality that lies beneath the visible experience of space.

And not only spaces, for as he puts it, “objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps,” suggesting then this metaphor:  “A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.”  But it is principally with places that de Certeau is concerned, places made up of “moving layers.”  We point here and there and say things like, “Here, there used to be a bakery” or “That’s where old lady Dupuis used to live.”  We point to a present place only to evoke an absent reality:  “the places people live in are like the presences of diverse absences.”  Only part of what we point to is there physically; but we’re pointing as well to the invisible, to what can’t be seen by anyone else, which begins to hint at a certain loneliness that attends to memory.  Reality is already augmented.  It is freighted with our memories, it comes alive with distant echoes and fleeting images.

The loneliness of memory is also captured in a comment incorporated by de Certeau:  “‘Memories tie us to that place …. It is personal, not interesting to anyone else …'”  It is like sharing a dream with another person: its vividness and pain or joy can never be recaptured and represented so as to affect another in the same way you were affected.  It is not interesting to anyone else, and so it is with our memories.  Others will listen, they will look were you point, but they cannot see what you see.

And perhaps it is this invisibility of memory stored away in places that inevitably suggests to de Certeau the haunting metaphor:  “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not.”  But, he goes on to say, “Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.”

At this juncture de Certeau notes that this unseen, absent reality laid over our perception of present places “inverts the schema of the Panopticon.  This is a curious aside given that de Certeau is in conversation with Foucault, for whom the Panopticon becomes a metaphor for disciplinary society in Western cultures.  Rather than being seen by an unseen presence, we see an unseen absence.  Is this also then a form of resistance, a way to disperse the power of disciplinary society?  Do we invoke our memories inhabiting our spaces in order to inoculate ourselves against the pressures of conformity?  Our memories, especially perhaps childhood memories, are so particular that they reinforce the uniqueness of our experience.

Finally, de Certeau points to the embodied status of these memories:  “Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read … symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. ‘I feel good here’:  the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.”  We not only see our memories, we feel them.  Of course, the proper vocalization of this feeling is not always, “I feel good here.”

Jacques Lacan, Jansenist?

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

If I imagine a Venn diagram consisting of one circle representing those interested in Jacques Lacan (a modest circle), and another representing those who read this blog (a rather tiny circle), then the overlapping area probably includes one person … if I count myself.  Nonetheless, I’ll post this anyway.

In conversation with a friend I was made aware of an article that contains this intriguing anecdote (if you’re in that overlapping area in the Venn diagram):

Jan Miel was, he says, the first to propose translating a text of Lacan’s into English and as a result had been invited to lunch in his country house in Guirrancourt, not far from Paris.  After the meal during a stroll in the garden Lacan turned to him and said:  ‘You are neither an analyst nor an analysand, so why are you interested in my teaching?’.  Miel found it difficult to answer because, he admits, he really did not know what he found so fascinating in Lacan’s work, so he eventually stammered:  ‘Well, my main interest is in Pascal.’  To which Lacan replied, ‘Ah, I understand’ and led him back to his library where he showed him a quite substantial collection of Jansenist books.  So if reading Lacan leads to Pascal, it appears that reading Pascal may also lead to Lacan.

“Ah, I understand” — loved that, and wondered how many times those same words were uttered in a Lacan seminar!

The article goes on to explore the use Lacan makes of Pascal’s Wager and presents some helpful background material on the Wager.  Be warned though, some math is involved.