Immanent Domain

Turing Machines All Over the Place

 I have often heard Turing machine this and Turing machine that. It’s only lately that I’ve actually read about the concept and come to understand that one aspect of Turning machine is that it aspires to be universal, capable of simulating other, more specialized machines.

So now I’m seeing them everywhere. My iphone is a Turing machine, the laptop I’m writing this on, the ipad I’m looking forward to buying.  All of these devices are wireless receivers, can record text, etc. Devices today have different strengths: a high end digital SLR can take video and has built-in GPS, but it’s best at taking digital photographs. I can read the New York Times on my iphone, but like it better on my laptop, and will probably like it best of all on an ipad.

Still, it was a breakthrough for me to realize the emerging trend isn’t toward one master device that does everything, but toward many devices that do all sorts of things.

Philosophically, what’s so damn interesting about this is that the machine, the poster child for determinacy in an earlier, clockwork age, now has poster children all over the place for indeterminacy. A Turing machine is, by definition, indeterminate.

If Gilbert Simondon is correct, most machines are similarly indeterminate. Only we restrict their functions (fruitfully) to limited tasks. This is one reason why, predictably enough, Deleuze and Guattari are so enthused about Simondon.  Even non-Turing machines have an underlying diversity or flow that can be rechanneled in unexpected ways. Think, for example of how bicycles have mutated and diversified over the last forty years: road bikes, fixed gear, mountain, BMX, stunt, commuter, cruiser, exercise, rickshaw taxi, power generator. I could go on, but you get the point. The underlying technology is less determinate than I’ve been accustomed to think of it.

Got much more thinking to do about this, but it’s a start.

House Pessimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. “ Not Gramsci’s use, so much as how it functions in some circles as a kind of slogan or shorthand. Specifically, I’ve been asking when does this maxim cease to be a consolation and become an excuse, something which claims to preserve possibilities, to keep hope alive, but in practice forecloses both?

 I think Nietzsche is correct in identifying nihilism as, in part, the despair we can fall into when our hopes, and the worldview which supported them, turn out not to be true. If so, some left academic circles promote a nihilism that is no less bitter for its staid eloquences. 

The failure (and yes I will call it that) is neither one of intellect or of will, but of desire. Pessimism of the Intellect as the House Style of Leftism has always struck me as a strategy to keep desire at arm’s length. If desires are imbricated in larger structures of oppression, so the reasoning might go, best to renounce them entirely, or at least deny they have any hold upon you or your motives, or spend an enormous amount of time reflecting on their imbrications. Delay your gratifications, Bodhisattva -like, until the last injustice is righted and the last soul enlightened. 

Is this the best way to change the world, or simply something that epitomizes the very privilege that it seeks to renounce? The alternative for me, predictably enough, is in a different genealogy: one that runs from Spinoza through Deleuze and Guattari, right on to Hardt and Negri, who begin their book Labor of Dionysius: A Critique of the State Form thus: “This book is aimed toward the proposition of a practice of joy—joy in the sense of the increasing power of an expansive social subject.” 

Hardt and Negri have their debts to Gramsci, but they are light years away from how his quote is most often deployed. If culture is indeed a structure of feeling, shouldn’t we have more to offer than depression and obligation, however heroic we imagine that nasty combination to be?

Writing for the Hell of It

I've been reading Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. In my (limited) experience, it's the best thing I've ever read about popular music. Clover is capable of summoning the grand sweep of political contradictions and historical change, but with a poet's ear for an apt phrase, and a poet's eye for the telling detail. 

I mean this literally; he's a published poet. I don't think this is coincidental to my enjoyment of the book. One of the sadder aspects of an advanced degree is the way it tends to kill off the pleasure of writing just as writing. Not in the service of some grand political purpose or martyrish personal struggle within the coils of vaguely sinister profession. Nope, just writing for the hell of it.

I have no idea of what Clover's composition process is like. But for me as a reader, I imagine traces of writing for its own sake. I could make all kinds of arguments about how that's a theoretical impossibility; but I don't think it's a psychological impossibility. To say that a distinction can be deconstructed is not to say the distinction is not important. (To the contrary, it's contingency, uncertainty, and instability is what makes it important.)

In any case, Clover's book has inspired me to get back to writing just for the hell of it.

If you like music, I'd encourage you to give it a gander, especially the central chapters on hip hop, rave culture, and grunge.

Boyz in the Bricolage

3 Players I notice in much Hip Hop:

1> The radically deterritorialized sounds: the fragments and samples, the loops and reengineered beats. (Though these are arguably pulled into the flow of the overall rhythmic progression.)

2> The unifying subjectivity of the MC and (usually his) narrative. This is also usually quite specific in terms of history, geography, and social positioning. Not just territorialized, but literally about seizing and defending territory. In masculinist songs (whether parodic in the toast & boast tradition or not), women are one of these territories.

3> The danceability of the music (which varies). Its designs on the bodies of listeners; its ability to propel those bodies into new compositions.

Not sure where I'm going with this, but my eye is on how well-adapted hip hop is to global, sampled, music. But also feeling skittish about its traditional investment in an oh-so-unified male MC. Is it the combination of a radically experimental form and a comforting image of male power (Big Poppa) that is part of its appeal? Yet a really good rap is all about "flow" nonetheless.

Think I need to go reread some Irigaray. Who'd have thunk it?

To Be Hoisted on One's Own Picard

To pay a discouraging price for abiding by one's convictions (demonstrating an integrity akin to Captain Picard).

The Ad Bombinem Argument

An old grad school trick. Instead of bothering to read an unfamiliar thinker's work, find out a single, supposedly damning objection to it. Then if the person comes up in conversation, say "yes, but" and jump straight to dropping the objection/bomb. 

This fosters the illusion that you are not only familiar with the thinker in question, but in fact more informed than someone who has read their work and finds it useful.

Schadenmoide /scha-den-moi-de/

Self-congratulatory bitterness, usually accompanied by a belief that one's misfortune and/or alienation must surely be evidence of moral integrity. Arguably an indulgent form of ressentimentality.

Cinema as a Sub-Genre of Painting

It's part of a careful argument, but here's the paragraph where Lev Manovich swings for the bleachers:

"the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth-century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting." 

"What is Digital Cinema?" (175) in the collection The Digital Dialectic edited by Peter Lunenfeld

I'm enjoying the details and qualifications in Manovich's argument, but the paragraph above already gives me a lot to work with. Because even if the statement isn't completely defensible (though it may well be), it can still illuminate a lot about contemporary film. 

One of my favorite moves I learned from Eve Sedgwick is to play "what if": What if we read the Scarlet Letter as an exploration of Chillingworth's hard-on for Dimmesdale? What if we think about Oscar Wilde primarily as a (racialized) Irishman? What if we think about a fag hag as a complex of desire and identification like any other identity, and not in terms of pathology or deviance from a norm? 

Make a move like this and you get right down to exploring interesting issues without getting gummed up defending whether or not its the only or the most plausible reading. Instead you conduct a kind of thought experiment. So what if we consider film as a sub-genre of painting? What properties of filmmaking today does that bring to light?

Hands, Humanist & Otherwise

  Before moveable type, scribes employed a variety of "hands" for different situations and clients. A legal hand, for instance, was strikingly different than one used for ecclesiastical work

Since I've been teaching digital media, I've found myself thinking a lot about letterforms, and changing my own. This began with the hand I use most: lettering in the margins of books with a mechanical pencil.

The "hand" I've developed would not make a great general typeface, precisely because of the features I need for my margin notes:

• It needs to be "scrunch-able" when I don't have much space. Since blackletter forms originally grew out of a need to conserve space on expensive media like parchment, I've incorporated blackletter elements.
• Unlike a pen, a mechanical pencil has little variation in stroke width, especially the .5 H lead that I use for notes.
• A rationalist (straight up and down) axis works better with the pencil, and to conserve space than the more familiar humanist (sloping to the lower right) axis of many typefaces.
• It needs to be robust enough for me to execute it when arthritis inhibits my fine motor control.

Besides making my notes more legible, this hand has taught me a good deal about letter forms. I find myself thinking about things like negative space in the counters, or how one form is similar to others (as in the "m n r h" example above). When I'm ready to try designing a typeface (presumably with variable strokes, wide open counters, a humanist axis, and other pleasing features), I will have a much better idea of what I'm up to.

Comfort Lewd

noun. Much-loved, much-used porn.