Why "Eco" now?

In the following post I hope to examine whether or not media ecology and "ecomedia" (which we seemed to understand last class as media about ecology) belong  together theoretically. As Aaron pointed out to me the other day, media about ecology (and the 'environment') is not the same as media ecology. He argued that just because both terms contain "eco" in them does not mean that the course (or maybe even media ecology as a discipline) should necessarily concern itself with nonhuman animals or "environmental" concerns. His main point is not that we should abandon this work, but that to analyze media about ecology differs from the analysis of "media ecology." Thus, my analysis of the 'mediated' nature of environmental shows such as Whale Wars on South Park was a relatively standard move that many scholars have made using different texts, rather than using the methodology we might call "media ecology." (Is it a methodology? This will be discussed later).  BlackFish, Sea World, and other media that deal with 'ecological' issues can be thought through the methodology of media ecology, but media ecology is not restricted to issues of the nonhuman animal or ecological politics.

Caroline Stone's work on e-waste, for example, is a media-ecological study because, although she discusses the film Wall-E as a representation of e-waste, the interest is not on the film per se, but the problem of e-waste and the ways in which it is circulated and eventually gathers.

But is it a coincidence that the metaphor of 'ecology' for objects of inquiry such as media or writing has become so dominant? Does it provide an original methodology for studying the ecology of writing or media that focuses on the medium regardless of its content (and indeed, would this not be to agree with Mcluhan: the medium is the message) or is it because the problem of the nonhuman animal, nonhuman AI/bots/search optimization, matter/materiality presses upon us as we confront global issues such as climate change, overpopulation, globalization, food production,  that deal with the very real fact that the earth is a finite resource? And that these problems has allowed such a methodology to emerge?

Ecocomposition and Ecomedia

In his book Postcomposition, Sid Dobrin recognizes the 'failures' of what he calls "Ecomposition."  I recognize that Dobrin's book is situated in a particular disciplinary conversation in composition studies. I further recognize that Dobrin is not saying that ecompositional work that engages with political and ecological issues should not be done. He does write, however, that at least within composition, ecocomposition has functioned as "a misnamed approach for giving students something to write about, a political content addressed as the thing that fills writing with meaning" (124). Dobrin identifies four ways in which Ecocomposition has already failed:

1.) Falls prey to the 'pedagogical imperative' of composition studies.

2.) Ecological composition has failed because of its embrace of "floating signifiers like 'nature' and 'environment'  as its primary objects of study rather than writing"

3.) Ecocomposition has always been anthropocentric, "focusing on the human agent's relationship with the environment"

4.) Ecocomposition as an idea hasn't spread and influenced further scholarly work.

(125-26)

Dobrin explicitly reminds us that questions about the construction of nature or the nonhuman animal should not be abandoned: they are important.  Yet, this is something he explores elsewhere.

Why do I bring this up when we aren't talking about "the phenomena of writing" or even the field of composition? Because writing  seems to occupy the place of the word we have chosen for this course: media. That is, Dobrin's  description of the phenomenon of writing-as-system as isolated from other political and theoretical issues in ecology mirrors a possible position that "media ecology" does not have a necessary relationship to larger ecological concerns. In contrast, "ecomedia" does. "Ecomedia" to implies that we think about ecology as the content of media. Another way to put it -- Media ecology designates a methodology (in the same way that one might categorize 'deconstruction' or 'actor-network-theory') and 'ecomedia' designates something media ecology might choose to study, but does not have any privileged relationship to Media ecology's methodology.

But in the academic scene, media ecology as a methodology has also emerged from the recognition of global ecological problems. Is media ecology simply a new name for an old methodology or does it offer a different different mode of inquiry? Or am I simply wrong that media ecology is a "methodology" and that we should position media ecology as a 'field' of inquiry? (And what are the differences?)

I prefer the idea that media ecology is a methodology, but a methodology that is not an empty formal method, but one which is not only influenced by the concerns of those theorists that have helped media ecology emerge, but were the conditions for the possibility of its emergence. These concerns are not the same as "content," but it does seem that media ecology contains methodological assumptions that in some ways connect it to the larger scholarly endeavor of the "nonhuman turn." I turn now to those theories.

The Nonhuman Turn of Theoretical Inquiry

In the previous post, I mentioned the Wikipedia entry on "Media Ecology." The main distinction the author(s) of the entry make between the North American Media ecology and the European is that, citing Matthew Fuller,

"The European version of media ecology rejects the North American notion that ecology means environment. Ecology in this context is used 'because it is one of the most expressive language currently has to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter' (Fuller 2005:2).

Despite this claim, it seems that the more recent media ecology, especially Parrika (although he calls his method 'media archaeology'), look to the nonhuman animal, plant, and mineral world for models and metaphors for media, distinguishing them from the Mcluhanesque definitions offered by the Media Ecology Association (Parrika's book is called Insect Media for a reason, right?).  Indeed, as I pointed out in my last post, the MEA's definitions all seem to use environment to describe human made media and its impact on humans. The metaphors are of "information" "code" "system"  or all at once "complex communication systems as environments" (Nystrom). 

The title of Parrika's book would have one believe that instead of using the metaphor of "environment" to describe communication systems among humans, we appropriate elements from what we might call the 'environment' or nonhuman animals systems as metaphors or models for these communication systems. That is, 'media' is not restricted to its impact on humans, but rather becomes a problem/issue/interest between humans and nonhumans as well as among nonhumans themselves. Nonhumans do not only mean here the digital world, containing many algorithms that make decisions without direct human intervention, but also nonhuman animals and their environment. If we think "ecology" simply means the digital circulation of texts, images, videos on networks, we may be bracketing an entire realm which does not appear to concern the human (but really does). 

In other words, we get the sense that the North American Media Ecology Association is primarily interested in human endeavors and the complexity of our digital and textual lives rather than "ecology" as a biological discipline that has to bear on ecological crises.  

In contrast, many theorists have tried to theorize about what Quentin Meillasoux calls "the great outdoors," those parts of the world that are not directly correlated to our perceptions. An influx of nonhuman, nonanthropocentric philosophy has arrived in the forms of Speculative Realism, New Materialism and critical animal studies. The former is a general term for philosophers that attempt to revive the tradition of realism in the face of what Quentin Meillasoux calls "correlationism." 'Correlationism' is any philosophy that makes the real conform to what is given to the human being. In After Finitude, Meillasoux writes, 

"By correlationism, we mean the idea according  to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other." (AF 5). 

The main culprit briefly discussed in M.'s book is Heidegger. I'll leave the details to the reader's leisure, as it does not directly bear on the question at hand.

The critique of correlationism has been taken up by Object Oriented Philosophy (Graham Harman) and Onticology (Levi Bryant. These philosophers also reject 'correlationism' and propose a realist theory of objects (although Levi Bryant seems to have toned his OOO influence down a bit lately). As I mentioned in class, this philosophy has had a huge web presence and one could even argue that the entire intellectual movement would have been impossible or at the very least had much less of an impact on theoretical discourse today had their not been blogs (Bryant's blog, for instance). Bryant in particular, especially in the earlier days of the blog where he was developing what would become The Democracy of Objects worked tirelessly to respond to questions and criticisms, shoring up evidence and speculations for his argument that would result in a book and continued engagement with his own work. 

Object oriented ontology argues for a "flat ontology" in which even the human subject is considered 'an object' among other objects. One of the tenets of OOO is that, because of the influence of correlationism, we have mistaken ontological questions for epistemological questions. That is, instead of asking what something "is," we turn that question into "what can we know about it?"  OOO tries to construct a different ontology in which we understand objects as "withdrawn substances" (Harman). OOO, at least ontologically, does seem to make much of a distinction between nonhuman animals and plants and other material objects like tables and hammers. Both Harman and Bryant have their own specific way of getting at their ontologies, with Harman relying on Heidegger and a weird philosophy of 'substance' and Bryant on his reading of Deleuze, Lacan, and Niklas Luhmann (among others). Both, however, are trying to construct a nonanthropecentric philosophy. 

In contrast to OOO, Cary Wolfe has recently used complex systems theory of Niklas Luhmann in conjunction with Derrida's philosophy, particularly those texts explicitly thematizing the nonhuman animal (Animal that Therefore I am (following)), to show how we are dependent on nonhumans for our current ways of life under global capitalism. Unlike OOO, Wolfe is very interested in the distinction between nonhuman animals (and other things we might characterize as 'living') and other objects. For Wolfe, there is a biopolitical imperative to interrogate the difference between the who and the what -- even if the 'what' is always the condition for the possibility of the who. Wolfe is not so much in "ecology" as a metaphor because of his adherence to Luhmann's systems theory. We will return to this point when we discuss Wolfe's critique of Latour. 

'New materialism' is, in some ways, a theoretical position that mirrors OOO except that new materialist do not think that we have to build first an ontology that can only then can lead to discussions of ethics and politics. Rather, new materialism is already intimately concerned with politic.  Rather than reviving old school philosophical terms like "substance" as Harman does, Bennett and other new materialists focus on materiality and matter (Karen Barad can also be considered a new materialist). New materialism is interested in exploring the agency and the capacity/potential/energy/affect of nonhuman beings within networks. Bennet's book title? Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 

Bennett draws on an array of sources including Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson, and especially: Bruno Latour. 
While I hesitate to put Latour in a completely separate category than these other recent theorists, I feel I must. Latour springboarded "science studies." Furthermore, Latour is an anthropologist/sociologist. He is interested in a new methodology that could allow for a "symmetrical anthropology," an ongoing project that was outlined in We have Never Been Modern ( Latour believes that we must shift from the verb "to modernize" to "ecologize." But why ecology?

First, we should understand that none of these thinkers that I mentioned has much interest in the well worn opposition of Nature/Culture. Indeed, the 'realist' philosophical project is also deeply invested in getting rid of the distinction because 'culture' leads to the postmodern impasse of cultural relativism.  Indeed, "ecology" for some of these thinkers seems to be the only way out of this dichotomy. Because of this caveat, we cannot understand "ecology" as a synonym for a vulgar environmental politics in the name of the Natural World or the Environment (as if it was separate from human intervention). 

However, doesn't  'ecology' must have something to do with what we used to call nature?

Latour defines 'ecology' as such: "Ecology is not taken in this inquiry as a focus on Nature but  as the end of the notion of nature which is presumed to be a common world of all collectives. If nature is no longer the arbiter of judgments, we now have to compose rather than modernize" (Latour, Inquiry, online text)

Ecology, then, is meant to signify not only the movement and circulation of media, but rather the imperative for a common world. A 'common world' in some sense that can be opposed to simply accepting the values of globalized capitalism.

In other words, ecology resonates with the imperative to allow 'things' and 'animals' to have a 'say' in our common future as collective beings in the world. We already know that nonhumans act upon human beings, sometimes as essential components to human ways of life.  I believe that for Latour and many other thinkers the larger context that we must take into account is the fate of our common collective under the threat of what used to be taken as 'environmental' concerns: climate change, sustainability, overpopulation. 

These are our current problems that must be addressed not only by actions but the creation of new concepts. I am referring here to Deleuze and Guattari's claim in What is Philosophy that "all concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges [. . .] concepts are only created as a function of problems which are thought to be badly understood or badly posed" (16). 

The question we should ask, then, is whether what I've called the methodology of media ecology is necessarily connected to the concept of ecology that has emerged because of the ecological problems we face today. 

On "Writing Studies" and recent projects

"Writing studies," is a somewhat hypothetical discipline (insofar as we still don't see research positions in "writing studies," but rather "new media," "communications," "composition,"  "rhetoric") mentioned in Sid Dobrin's book Postcomposition, as a way to mark a form of disciplinary research apart from "composition," traditionally associated with First Year Writing and 'research' on pedagogical methods. In Dobrin's own words,

Thus, the primary agenda of Postcomposition is to argue for a move
beyond the academic work of composition studies in favor of the revolu-
tionary potential of the intellectual work of writing studies, specifically the
work of writing theory, an endeavor likely best removed from the academic
work of pedagogy and administration." (Postcomposition 24). 

Too often in composition, 'writing' is tied to a subject, usually a student subject. Writing as an expression of that subjectivity or writing as constituting that subjectivity. For Dobrin, 'writing' should be the focus of a 'writing studies' such that the subject cannot be torn from the inscriptional practices themselves. I like to think of this as thinking each inscriptional practice as a performance of a subjectivity, one that can only be described through that particular assemblage of inscriptional practices. That is, "subject," is no longer an expression of a human being or a consciousness, but the particular moment of inscription. The human and nonhuman actants work together to inscribe a 'subject' (if we still even want to preserve that term, so as to preserve a sense of agency). Byron Hawk gets at this through Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of the 'molecular' and the 'molar' in A Counter History of Composition:

"Meaning, purpose, and intention all are molar and separate subject and object, but the desire and the force behind them are molecular and collapse subject and object [. . .] The subject is a molar residual, off to the side, a side effect of desiring-machines, not a single center from which desire is born" (165).

 Raul Sanchez argues in his 2012 article, "Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity," that the subject is neither an 'effect' nor an origin or something that precedes a moment of inscription:

"Identity names this singularity, which is neither a precursor to the act of writing nor merely its effect. If we no longer say that identity is expressed through writing, but rather that identity names the moment of inscription-the intrusion or emergence into Judith Butler's "grammatical time of the subject" (117)-yet is only available in and after writing as writing's condition of possibility, then we can also say that identity manifests, at once metaphorically and materially, in both the figure and the body of the writing-subject. These claims make it possible to recognize that there is neither an origin story for the "moment" of inscription nor an aporetic limit at which one must hover perpetually. They make it possible to name the act of writing, the moment of inscription, as that which marks a convergence of time, space, and linguistic code at the production of a text. More important, they make it possible-necessary, actually-to use this very convergence to embody, figuratively and empirically, the convergence itself. They make possible the writing-subject as both thing and word, object and concept."

The writing-subject in this sense is an event -- an event that draws together all of the actants, human and nonhuman. As Latour puts it in We have Never Been Modern, "History does something. Each entity is an event" (81). 

Ok, so the writing subject is linked to an act of inscription. Is writing simply any act of inscription? In broad terms, yes, it is. Every event leaves traces -- I would be tempted to say irreversible 'traces'. "Writing" ever since writing scholars' took notice of Jacques Derrida, has been refigured as 'the trace' in general. "Writing" is not necessarily about conscious invention and arrangement of an essay, but writing could be as simple as a mark on a wall or an animal's tracks. 

If this is truly the case, then scholars of "writing studies" are able to study practically anything as writing, as acts of inscription, of traces. My question, however, is what do we get by understanding in terms of 'writing' rather than 'rhetoric'? Are there not rhetorical limitations to the word 'writing'? Although his tone bothers me, I can't shake Ian Bogost's point in Alien Phenomenology that, "writing is only one form of being" (90). Of course, the problem with his statement is how he slips from 'writing' to "language" and then proceeds to deny the medium of writing and even language of a certain materiality, so brilliantly traced by Derrida. Bogost writes that in contrast to philosophical works (with the exceptions of Derrida, Nietzsche, or Wittgenstein) "philosophical works generally do not perpetrate their philosophical positions through their form as books. The carpenter, by contrast, must contend with the material resistance of his or her chosen form, making the object itself become the philosophy" (93). Here Bogost makes two mistakes: 1) seeing Derrida's form as a "book," when Derrida explicitly attempted to subvert that very medium, and 2) denying the inseparable bond between medium/form and content. 

In other words, Bogost makes no meaningful distinction between writing/carpentry outside of the fact that carpentry seems to lead us to 'doing philosophy' with objects other than the pen and paper. But if we understand writing as any trace, then these 'carpentry' projects of philosophy are just as much 'writing' as they are carpentry. Furthermore, the 'designation' writing, given its rigorous deconstruction by Derrida, avoids some of the baggage that 'carpentry' contains -- an emphasis on the 'hand made', for instance. 

Thus, carpentry just becomes a better metaphor for describing the practice of 'philosophy'. But what exactly is 'philosophical' about Bogost's projects? Of course this depends on our definition of philosophy, but if philosophy is the "invention of concepts" as Deleuze and Guattari contend, then Bogost's projects are not philosophy, even if they contain an 'affect' or a 'percept', which is the domain, according to D&G of ART. 

Within Derrida's understanding of writing, however, such art works would be considered "writing." But what do we get from describing artworks within a general system of writing? Does it erase the specificity of it being art or does it put into question the boundaries of what constitutes the art "work" (does it include all of the 'writing' and 'responses' that take place because of it? . . .and any possible future response?). 

Currently, I'm trying to adapt a significant piece of my writing on BioArt to a writing posthumanism. In my original piece, I framed the project in terms that would preserve these works as art, even if, at the same time, the artwork is always within a complex system of writing events, which will affect the function and efficacy of the artwork (critics reviews, theoretical statements from the artists, etc.). 

The question I have for myself is: what is it about BIOART that makes visible art as entwined within a writing system of human and nonhuman actants? My hunch is that by using 'life' materials as their medium, there is an increased probability of the artwork to not simply be the subject of writing surrounding it, but 'writes us' in some unique way. There is an unpredictableness, a propensity for failure that can be made visible through Bioart that reveals the general conditions of artworks: the possibility of their 'failure'. However, it is precisely the failure of BioArt that gives it's significance for biotechnological practices because the force of this failure is to recognize our inability to simply program and control life through genetic coding or otherwise. We can substitute "writing" for genetic coding, since there is no real way to control, in this age, the effects of our writing practices. What is the fate of this blogpost? What videos go viral? BioArt also is potent example of how our best laid plans can be foiled by nonhuman agency. 

But then, does BioArt simply become a stand in for any "writing?" Indeed, could not the same point be made with other artworks or even other inscriptions? Is there something that BioArt adds to our understanding of 'general writing' (that is, 'writing studies') or is the point of writing studies to show the very specificity of this writing practice? But then would we not succumb to the temptation of 'rhetorical analysis'? What words, what concepts does BioArt suggest that would be an essential supplement to our understanding of writing-as-system? 

These are the issues I am struggling with as I attempt to integrate some very specific research on an important group of artists and artworks in the biotechnological age. 

Barry's Visual Intelligence Meets Complexity Theory and other forms of Music

A couple weeks ago, John suggested that the strength of How Images Think is that it introduces a lot of issues to be explored more in depth, but leaves us this task. In a way, I think Barry's Visual Intelligence does the same thing and, for me, more than the Burnett. Its still not a masterpiece of writing and the book contains some inconsistencies and essentialist rhetoric, but, as we discussed in class, it engages some of the work done in psychology, neurology, and other sciences.

Our conversation this week seemed to center around the interaction between the sciences and the humanities, with John offering an important insight that each has its distinct methodology, but that the objects of study are not how the disciplines are defined. Barry's methodology is kind of a mix of methodology, but her framing discipline is probably gestalt psychology. A gestalt "implies a configuration that is so inherently unified that its properties cannot be derived from the individual properties of its parts" (42). This holism that Barry derives from the gestalt school provides support for Sid's observation that "visual rhetoric" may be a misnomer. If rhetoric breaks things into parts, then the gestalt considers their total effect as well as their production and formation of wholes.

Perhaps Barry's biggest strength is the physiological and neurological evidence that supports the gestalt hypothesis. Rather than looking at the eye as functioning like a camera, she considers how the eye actually interacts with the environment. The eyes is unlike a camera because the image on our retina is in constant motion and our 'mental image' (which, I take, must a be a metaphor) is created through what stays constant within that motion. Thus, movement is essential to vision because our eyes function by noticing and recording 
change (Barry 29-32). Furthermore, while the images in a camera are "bounded" what we see is "unbounded" (33). Barry convincingly argues that the retinal image is only part of the mechanism of seeing and not its product (Barry 33).

And yet, although she has shown that even the images on our eye our involved in a complex process of production and interpretation of our world, she still seems to hold onto an idea of some sort of "reality" or "direct experience" that we can see with our eyes, but that becomes mediated when some sort of technology is introduced. As Sid suggested last week, we may need to think about the eye itself as an incredibly complex technology. Indeed, Barry claims that "human vision is still the most powerful means of sifting out irrelevent information and detecting significant patterns" (34). Why is this? Perhaps because significance can only come through emotions as well as personal and cultural memory. Neurological research suggests that we frequently are affected by the visual before we can evaluate it critically. The amygdala in our brain is what detects emotional significance (see Barry 17-18). As V.S. Ramachandran has shown, however, some of the information we receive may correspond to our physical/topographical map, but does not reach the amygdala, such as the case where a man looking at his mother said "this looks like my mother but it is not her." However, once his mother began to talk he recognized her as his mother.

Why is this? Because the verbal and visual parts of our brains, although intimately connected, are also independent systems. Neurologist VanDerkolk has shown that traumatic experiences are stored in different parts of the brain. Routine thoughts tend to stimulate the 'Broca' area, which controls verbal language, but traumatic experiences do not. This is why people have difficulty putting traumatic experiences into words (Barry 40). This neurological explanation suggests to me the usefulness of certain psychoanalytic techniques to get the patient to verbalize their experience. As Slavoj Zizek has said, the first time something happens it is an intrusion of the Real but the second time is when it enters the symbolic order (the order of language).

Barry's research is drawn frequently from holistic theories such as J.J. Gibson's "ecological optics theory." For Gibson, it is the change that signals visual and the relationship that carries meaning (Barry 41). We would do well to critique Barry's language here of "carrying" meaning, but the ecological model is useful in understanding how she moves from the visual process itself, to gestalt psychology, to her musical metaphors and investigations into the creative mind.

On that note--Music is a prominent metaphorical resource for Barry--particularly when related to gestalt theory. Using Christin Von Ehrenfels argument that 'melody is relationship since it is still recognized in another key, Barry plays out this idea of melody" (see Barry 43). She continues this metaphor: "It is as if we begin by learning to put together different notes into meaningful melodies, gradually building a musical repertoire on which we come eventually to rely for all performances" (Barry 65). I find this a useful metaphor, but I also question Barry's harmonious holistic approach. While Barry, cognitive science, neurology, and optics theorists may be correct that our process of vision tends to look for patterns and creating a whole (see for instance the discussion of the 'blind spot' and filling in on pg 26), I think that we need to consider the inharmonious aspects of vision--those things that we can't quite put into a pattern--what Michel Serres has called "noise," which is as essential to communication as information (according to Mark C. Taylor).

On one hand, Barry's science seems to support many of theoretical humanities' assumptions. We create meaning by our ability to see patterns in essentially disparate elements, but not so much by what we sense, but by what we believe (Barry 27). And again, Barry denies that scientific analysis can ever get to the heart of things alone. She argues that the 'phi phenomenon' shows that scientific dissection could never yield adequate answers because the principles of perception lie in spaces between the elements rather than within them (Barry 44). However, this holism turns slowly into a sort of  idealism where resistance to these processes can only be combated by "deliberate thought and active higher reasoning" (Barry 68). This sounds suspiciously to me like a reasoned criticism rather than using the "perceptual logic" found in most visuals and images itself to complicate its own assumptions and (ab)uses. Perhaps rather than hardening our experience into significant patterns we need to pay attention to what we exclude (the visual and audible noise) just as much as what we include.

This leads me to Barry's discussions of the creative temperament. I was reading this section through the recent lecture I heard by V.S. Ramachandran at UF a couple days ago. Ramachandran talks about how a neurological explanation of synethesia can help explain the metaphorical process. Barry recognizes this connection and argues that the creative mind works in metaphors (Barry 72). Indeed, I would argue (and this in no way is a unique claim) that the humanities' "methodology" to return to John's distinction between the humanities and science. Our methodology is metaphorical, creative, and inventive. However, I am not sure I can support this distinction since it is clear that such models of the atom as the "plum pudding" model or even our current model are in reality "images"/metaphors of what *really* is there. Perhaps the humanities are just a bit more honest about the metaphorical and contingent relationship between the Real and our description of it and the necessity for metaphor (see Derrida's "White Mythology" for a brilliant analysis of philosophical metaphor and catechresis).

To return to Barry's work proper: Why does she want to make such a clear distinction between the "abstract" system of language and the "visual" or the "image". In the section "Mental Images," Barry argues that we have this ability to abstract from the world to form--a concept, by the way, that has been around since Aristotle, and indeed someone who Barry relies on extensively. Strangely, its when she gets into the territory of literary works, theories, and authors that her argument becomes a bit messy and problematic for students of English. While it appeals to our literary sensibility, I sense a very conservative program here--as we have discussed in class today.

In the section metaphors of the mind, she turns to neurological researcher Zeki and agrees with him that the task of the brain is one of extracting invariant features from the continually changing information from the environment to provide a unified image, but that each area is synchronous and that there is no master area of the brain controlling the other ones (Barry 93). Drawing on the theories of Crick, we see that from a neurological perspective "the conscious mind receives information from the brain rather than directs it" and thus our sense of "unity and mental control" is an imperfect illusion (Barry 94). What I like about this insight is that we get away from this notion of the "subject" as some sort of transcendental I or some sort of "soul" that resides within us. Consciousness, a subject speculated on by many philosophers (and, I may add, which still needs to be considered philosophically) is materialized, but not in a deterministic way but through material interactions. Zeki argues that "it is no longer possible. . .to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding nor is it possible to separate the acquisition of visual knowledge from consciousness" (Barry 44).

However, I want to repeat--this does not mean that there is no consciousness or "mind" separate from the brain. For Barry and many of the works she draws on, our "mind" is less a director of the brain than an Interpreter. This reminds me of the theory of the "Focalizer," which is not a narrator nor a character but basically a 'voice' that filters and offers a certain perspective on the narrative. A friend of mind used this concept to look at the "Cyclops" chapter in Joyce's Ulysses.

But perhaps a better metaphor would be a "screen" or "filter" because the mind can only pay attention to so much of what the brain is currently doing. Barry argues that if we were to become aware (conscious) of the inner workings of our brain, we would be paralyzed by the overwhelming activity and noise or driven to madness--we may become autistic (Barry 98).

Barry briefly touches on chaos theory in her work, drawing from it the idea of "spontaneous emergence of self-organization" (Barry 96). I think that we should look at Barry and the visual intelligence through Mark C. Taylor's discussion of complexity theory and see where we end up. I will try and also pit Mark Taylor's metaphor of the musical fugue as an alternative to Barry's focus on the symphony, which I think may open up her insights into greater complexity rather than assuming our writing must be as holistic and "experiential" as our being-in-the-world or, to echo phenomenology once again, the lebenswelt (Life-World). Its this sort of generalized universalism that existential phenomenology is frequently accused of that we must get rid of in order to deploy some of Barry's insights. I think Taylor's discussion of complexity theory, particularly the concept of "between order and chaos," needs to be put into conversation with Barry.

Despite Barry's use of chaos theory, she does not take chaos theory seriously throughout her entire work. She makes reference to it, but when distinguishing between the visual and the verbal, she argues that "verbal language is essentially a linear system imposed on a non-linear experience" and that language is a static system. This is patently false and seems to only serve her interest in maintaining a distinction between the visual and the verbal based on human "experience" (which she never really defines in any systematic way). As we have said in class, this essentialist rhetoric without any sort of theoretical justification seems to continue through the work. For instance, in the section "Image Affordance," she argues that "essential characteristics that define the essence of things become meaningful through what they off use as useful within our everyday experience" (Barry 79). This is almost pragmatist in the Deweyian sense, but there is no mention of this theorization, preferring to claim an essence without qualification. Strangely, though we could read Barry as entrenched in a kind of Husserlian life-world approach, she does tend to separate appearance and "reality" without realizing the implications of doing so. For instance, "In Western art we pay attention to appearance rather than the meaning images take on through experience" (Barry 81). This metaphysical opposition is more apparent in her reference to the medieval philosopher, Maimonides: idolatry is "missing the whole concept of the image" and to mistake "surface appearance for essence" (Barry 126). And so we arrive at a different kind of interpretation of gestalt  psychology than say, Merleau-Ponty: Barry still seems to maintain this distinction between appearance and reality that doesn't take the phenomenological critique of this metaphysics seriously. She is speaking of the life-world, but ignoring an entire tradition and making the mistake of creating these useless oppositions.

Everything has an agenda and I in no way meant to critique Barry merely for having an agenda (although I think the arguments she makes are conservative in the worst possible way), but its interesting to me that Barry discusses repetition only from a neurological and psychological side. While this may seem an obvious insight, it is nonetheless important for her engagement with the humanities: more repetitive thinking patterns, the more these patterns become entrenched neurologically (Barry 63). While she is insistent that patterns are how we make meaning, she is aware that these patterns can become habits and create stereotypes. Thus, she argues that the more "open and flexible a person's abstract thinking remains, the more open the person is to new learning and change" (Barry 64). Repetition seems to be at once confirmed by the making of "patterns" but also vilified as something that creates stasis. Repetition of something, however, is always repeating within a different context or moment in time and so it is never truly repetition (i'm sure I could cite some theorist on this insight). Barry doesn't seem to outright reject repetition because patterns are in some ways based upon it, but there does seem to be a focus on this concept of "creative thinking" that, while I am not against it in principle, is once again not explored in depth.

But the meat of my question comes down to how her musical metaphor, with its emphasis on melody contains a certain commitment to consistent and holistic narrative without taking into account other disruptions of our productive and interpretive moment outside of critical reflection and interpretation. For Taylor, following Heidegger, distinguishes scholarship from thinking: "Writing is thinking, but scholarship is not writing" (Taylor 807--JAC 24.4). Although he at first denies that he can make the distinction, he seems to say that not-writing is writing that is accepted in scholarly journals while "writing" is creative: "Writing, by contrast, is transgressive. It violates accepted codes and crosses boundaries guarded. Creativity and invention occur, if at all, in the gaps between disciplines" (Taylor 808). Taylor actually agrees with Barry in her focus on the importance of visual, but the visual in Taylor is meant to be disruptive and transgressive, not a holistic integration: "We can no longer write merely with words but now must learn how to think and write with images and sound. Design--visual as well as graphic--becomes integral to writing" (808). But is this really an accurate distinction? Barry does seem to worry about the ways that images are used to stabilize meaning and stereotypes, but she is so reliant on gestalt theory and holism that she doesn't think about how her musical metaphor may not recognize the potential of writing (in Taylor's broad sense) to disrupt this stabilization without a sort of "active higher reasoning" that she attributes to Spinoza (once again, without a detailed consideration of Spinoza's philosophy).

In Sid Dobrin's soon to be released book Postcomposition, he argues that writing is violence and not just disruption:

Postcomposition works to create tremors in composition studies’ ground,
with the intent of violence. It works within what Victor J. Vitanza would call
the “terrorism of theory” specifically against the “will of the field” (143). It
is a work of disruption and discomfort; it is a work against the discipline’s
pedagogical imperative toward the contingency of writing. (Dobrin 2)

I don’t mean violence as
a negative, destructive act; rather, violence operates to change the object
upon which it is enacted. That is, violence does not work toward destruction
in the negative but instead creates possibilities through disruption or,
at minimum, through Foucault’s notion of thinking “differently.” (Dobrin 113)



In a way this is a bit of a digression, but I do want to consider the sort of "violence" done to music by the likes of John Cage, Webern, and Schoenberg. Indeed, I think that this kind of hyper-order (in particular of Schoenberg) that approaches mathematical theorems is an important metaphor for complexity theory. I'd like to explore this further in another post or in a paper. But for now, I want to look at Taylor's choice of musical metaphor in comparison with Barry's: Fugue as opposed to Symphony.

For Barry, symphony and melody is the primary metaphor. True, she does argue that symphony is actually created by silences which in turn creates rhythm (Barry 125). And indeed, Oliver Sacks has argued in a podcast lecture on one of his books that rhythm is something humans are predisposed to, but the experiments by Schoenberg, et. al. show that music does not necessarily have to contain a consistent rhythm (We might also look at what Muckelbauer has said in his recent book about "singular rhythms" and see if this offers a way out of 'rhythm' in the sense Barry is getting at). As Dobrin argues in Postcomposition, we might want to look at writing in terms of its viscosity, which I think complicates our traditional notions of rhythm. I'm not sure how yet, but I think that we might be able to look at Dobrin's concept of saturation and viscosity of writing in terms of the irregular "rhythms" and "rules" (that are somewhere between order and chaos) of these composers I'm suggesting.

As I mentioned above, Barry seems to think that repetition implies a solidity of thinking patterns, which is indeed supported by neurological research. However, repetition (with a difference) is a key aspect of Fugue, particularly a Bach Fugue. The Fugue, like the rigor (and apparent chaos that is actually regulative) in Schoenberg, was considered at the time "too austerely intellectual for the common ear" (Taylor 158). I quote Taylor at length on what Bach's fugue "Musical Offering":

In a canon, the same melody is repeated by one or more voices overlapping in time, "in order for a theme to work as a canon theme, each of it snotes must be able to serve in a dual (or triple, or quadruple) role: it must first be part of a melody, and secondly, it must be part of harmonization of the same melody. When there are three canonical voices, for instance, each note of the theme must act in two distinct harmonic ways, as well as melodically. Thus, each note in a canon has more than one musical meaning; the listener's ear and brain automatically figure out the appropriate meaning, by referring to context." the complexity of the canon increases as the pitch of different voices or 'copies' is staggered, their speed varied, or the theme inverted by making the melody jump down wherever the original jumps up. The most complex canonical structure results from the inclusion of "retrograde copies" in which "the theme is played backward." Named after the creature that moves backward in space, this type of composition is known as a 'crab canon." What Hofstadter finds so fascinating about Bach's Musical Offering is the way in which the different parts fo the score work together as a whole. He alerts listeners: "Notice that every type of 'copy' preserves all information in the original theme, in the sense that the theme is fully recoverable from any of the copies. Such an information-preserving transformation is often called as isomorphism (Taylor 157-158, all italics mine except the final one)

Thus, the "melody" is indeterminate--no "original" melody can really be discerned unless one appeals to the first "melody" played. Everything cannot be integrated in the same way, but the music only provides a set or a potential combination of ways to formulate the piece rather than foregrounding one particular pattern and creating a figure/ground, gestalt relationship.  Or perhaps this is misleading. The gestalt is created by the subject (like the 'melody' created by the listener). This is another issue I'd like to explore further.

To complicate the music metaphor even further, we have to introduce Jean-Luc Nancy's work Listening into the mix, a work that I have already created a long, involved post on. However, I feel I am now prepared to engage Nancy's relationship to Taylor's reading of complexity. If timbre in psychoacoustics is "In music, timbre (pronounced /ˈtæmbər/, like the "tambour" of "tambourine", and spelling pronunciation /ˈtɪmbər/; French: [tɛ̃bʁ]) is the quality of a musical note or sound or tone that distinguishes different types of sound production, such as voices and musical instruments. The physical characteristics of sound that mediate the perception of timbre include spectrum and envelope. In psychoacoustics, timbre is also called tone quality and tone color" (wikipedia)

First, this reference to color makes an interesting connection to synaesthesia, but also the attention to timbre adds a new layer of complexity to the strands of instruments. Now, when we consider the material instrument being played, we realize that the same melody with different instruments--though a repetition of the silences and the notes--are actually repetition with a difference. While I don't wish to appropriate Nancy's particular interpretation of this 'resonance' in terms of the subject and the self (even though he strives to separate this talk of the subject from the subject as a stable entity--see pgs 8-9 of Listening--Dobrin's Postcomposition suggests that we need to move away from this notion of the 'subject' and 'self' completely to focus on writing as such--I believe Raul Sanchez also moves in this direction) I do want to call attention to the relationship between noise and timbre, with an aim to extending this connection with Serres' (and Taylor's reading of him) conception of noise. Nancy writes,

Sound in general is first of all communication in this sense. At first it communicates nothing--except itself. At its weakest and least articulated degree, one would call it noise. (there is noise in the attack and extinction of sound, and there is always noise in sound itself.) But all noise also contains timbre. In a body that opens up and closes at the same time, that arranges itself and exposes itself with others, the noise of its sharing (with itself, with others) resounds (41).

Thus, by looking at these smaller *almost* silences at the beginning and at the end of a sound we come to realize that these "silences" between the notes are echoes of the past--perhaps in the same way that Mark Taylor engages with the ghosts of his own writing:

"Rewriting does not merely repeat but also transforms in a way that complicates the parasite/host relationship. As the work takes shape, it becomes the host for ghosts now appearing as parasites [. . .] My words remain ghostly because they are haunted by others who have gone before and will haunt other yet to come. Writing always involves the screening of this spectral interplay of parasites and hosts" (Taylor 196).


And so we arrive at Taylor's idea of the "screen." Like Barry's use of the "interpreter" to describe the mind and like the concept of "focalizer," the "screen" both "hides while showing and shows while hiding," a concept that can be traced back probably to ancient wisdom, but which recalls to me some of the late Heidegger when he discusses truth and error among other things. Taylor writes, "In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening" (Taylor 200). While this may seem like Taylor is saying "then, this was this, and NOW this is this" (a la Burnett) Taylor is aware of historical precedents, citing Augustine's Confessions and going all the way back to Plato's concept of ananamisis: "Augustine finally concludes that cogito (to think, reflect) is, in effect, cogo (to bring together, collect)" and a Heideggerian might add to gather (Taylor 201).

Barry supports this kind of thinking with cognitive psychological research--as cited above--with the idea that we cannot be aware of all the activity of our brain. For Taylor, this extends to the information society: "Though there are multiple sources of turbulence, one of the most important factors creating unrest in today's world is the unprecedented noise generated by proliferating networks whose reach extends from the local to the global" (Taylor 202). Dealing with noise in a way that recalls Nancy's analysis of timbre, and drawing on the work of Norretranders, Taylor distinguishes between information and "exformation."

Exformation is perpendicular to information. exformation is what is rejected en route, before expression. Exformation is about the mental work we do in order to make what we want to say sayable. exformation is the discarded information, everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when or before we say anything all all. Information is the measurable, demonstrable utterances as we actually come out with it" (Norretranders qtd. in Taylor 203)

Taylor reads this in a way that suggests Nancy's "communication" as such, which also recalls D. Diane Davis' attempts to get at the sayable rather than the said, which she gets from the thought of Levinas and, as she says in a recent interview, Nancy. Taylor writes,

"Exformation, in other words, is what is left out as information is formed from noise. As such, exformation is not simply absent but is something like a penumbral field from which information is formed. Since information is constituted by what it excludes, it inevitably harbors traces of noise" (203).

Are the traces of noise that Taylor discusses the inevitable echoes, reverberations, and resonances that result from any material embodiment of musical notes? In this sense, performed music never (or rarely) contains utter silence--there is always some sort of noise in between the notes that itches for acknowledgment. Of course, the question is--does writing echo? Does it reverberate? Or is it something particular to sound? Does writing contain a timbre--an attack and a fade such that the spaces between letters or words are really (here we have the I heart huckabees moment) echoes of the words and letters past and future?
Writing does seem to have this self-reflexive, echoing quality, with each echo simultaneously a repetition of the initial sound as well as a completely new element. Does writing contain reverb or delay?

Perhaps this noise within the notes is what John Cage tried to get at with his 4:33:

The point is not the silence of the written piece of music, but the experience and the minute noises that accompany the piece of music--the idea that the audience is not a passive consumer of the music and that the context (a concert) matters as much as the written piece of music itself. This mirrors writing because some pieces of writing are only validated in a certain context within a certain performance/material situation.

Returning to my example of Schoenberg:

Is this chaos or complexity? I leave this question for another post or another night.