Gillette

4/8/81 Re: Toward a Circulus Methodicus of Interconnection

From the player's vantage, the teleconference process derives from the engagement of metaphor and metonymy. The present juncture should be firmly grasped as a shift from a wealth of sources (often referred to as resources) to a redeployment of such sources in such manner as to recirculate their initial dissonance, or freshness in discontinuous context. The activity itself is a sufficient metaphor for summing up all the recorded dialogues and "texts" within the multiple purviews of the cultures within the particular reach of teleconferencing itself. From here the system of keyboard, phone link, phantom satellite, shared time network, et al, is a proto-medium for cerebral savagery.

Teleconferencing as Neologic

"Neological theory holds that there is an interrelatedness about the world which means that almost anything may turn out to be relevant to something else, if looked at in a different light." - Paul Cheney

Neologic contemplates the preverbal milieux of thought in which any particular experience was stored as a memory of what it sounded like, how old it was, in what season it happened, how hairy, how soft, how hard, etc.

When confronted with a conventional or traditional logical impasse, operational neologic advocates judgement-suspension, silence and soliloquy, distraction, and irrelevance. One uses peripheral reading, environmental scanning, metaphorical play and accidents.

". . .the essence of aesthetic transposition, let us say of aesthetic promotion, is to introduce onto the plane of the significant something which does not exist under this mode or under this aspect in its uncultured state. . ."--Levi-Strauss

4/14/81 Re: Teleconferencing and Operational Identity

". . .the individual observation assumes the character of a fact only when it can be related to other, analogous observations in such a way that the whole series 'makes sense'. This sense is, therefore, fully capable of being applied, as a control, to the interpretation of a new individual observation within the same range of phenomena. . . if, however, this new individual observation definitely refuses to be interpreted according to the 'sense' of the series. . .the 'sense' of the series will have to be reformulated to include the new individual observation."--Panofsky

Kuhn speaks of a normal science as any discourse which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria. This teleconference is a manifestation of abnormal discourse. The "problematics" of each teleconference "message" tends to deflect the attention from the actual information in the entries themselves. The accumulated effects of the total entries of all the players would yield more than a circular wandering simply in search of explanations of the experience of experience.

There is the crude proto-beginnings of the motif index. There is the actual cash value of the "content" of each of the entries taken individually or within particular patterns of context. There is primary data on the micro-sociology of this "abnormal discourse." There is the whole hairy issue (apparently an upsetting one) of defining an operational identity "on the line" so to speak.

Bergson's "emergent evolution" says essentially: When two or more simple (basic) entities come (fall) together they may add up in unexpected ways. This simple notion is an operating assumption of bricoleurity.

More operating assumptions: This medium (including its network aspect) is the vehicle for linkages between coincidence, chance, seriality and synchronicity (and potentially the syncopation of models, concepts, methods and epistemes). The first stage, linkages, is still in progress and is characterized by fragmentary tactics of bricolage. The next stage, syncopation, will probably be characterized less by bricolage and will be neological in its formal arrangements and refinements (including results from the kind of contingencies that now seem useless).

All this rests on the deeper assumption that art is the chief agency of discontinuity in human affairs, and that discontinuity has a vital function in the very existence of the species and is central to its survival. Art, from this perch, is the carrier of periodic, or cyclic, interventions in the equilibrium of things.

Re: Conventions in the Techno-Public Domain

How do we navigate the flow of definitions and divisions, the sort-crossings emerging from the ground of textual exchange? What kinds of "filters" are possible for elevating the "chance" couplings of context/meaning into formal expressions in their own right, independent of the chance nature of their genesis?

A central feature of teleconferencing formalism is that, in part, it is a species of "inner space" and, in part, "techno-public domain." (A natural meeting ground for solipsistic imperialism of every stripe.) How does this feature, the singular synthesis of public and private, determine the "shape" of its information?

When each player in the network defines a distinct operational bias and embodies a set of individual working methods, how will a successful consensus emerge and evolve? How do we design a way to achieve consensus?

Re: The Double Axis

". . .a throw of dice will never abolish chance. . ." said our precursor Mallarmé. I am pulled to linguistics again in search of metaphors of the "sensed" structure emerging in the content of this exchange. Jakobson's distinction between "aesthetic" and "referential" language seems apt and naturally fits in the following way: "Poetic" language projects relationships or equivalence on the paradigmatic axis (the axis of selection and substitution) and the syntagmatic axis (the axis of combination) simultaneously.

Teleconferencing, as a "command" activity, is double-axial in the same way. Players can operate within the distinct axial domains separately and linearly in Jakobson's referential sense. Or they can operate within and between the axis in random or stochastic ways, Jakobson's aesthetic sense.

"If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text or a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur."--Derrida

"The blurring of boundaries is not good in itself. . . promiscuous or hybrid... forms can easily degenerate, yet such forms are the crucible from which new and discriminating achievements have traditionally come."--Geoffrey Hartman

It would appear as if Wittgenstein's "language is a way of picturing" were subject to inversion: How is the picture a way of making language or "languaging?"

4/15/81 Re: Epistemorphs and Dramatistic Tension

In the phrase of another idiom, the total discourse so far is a search for a systems architecture--a method, once stable and efficient for scanning, selecting, and integrating the combinatorial elements entered into the teleconference "space" by other players, and preoccupied with different methods, other bias, separately defined needs, et al.

Epistemorph is defined as any entry into the teleconference discourse that although altered or qualified by other methods, enters the motif index of innumerable such entries (points) in a set of unequal, shifting interrelations. Thus the epistemorph is understood as the minimal meaningful unit of information (formalized or raw). At this juncture in the teleconference the epistemorph is restricted to the textual statement, but an epistemorph is potentially a diagram, an image, a text, a combination of the three.

An epistemorph is a conceptual tableau directed toward synesthesia.

Entries are described as epistemorphic when they are assertions about knowing as it bears on the conceptual-intersecting taking place at any point in the discourse. Thus the "natural selection" of epistemorphs by some inclusive (and/or transcending) contingencies measuring survival (or "cash-value").

Re: The Engineer vs. Homo Ludens

View "A"

The actual and potential structure of teleconferencing is an opportune extension and enhancement of the pre-existing ways and means (methods) employed by various special cases: weather forecasting, psycholinguistics, mathematics, cybernetics, semiotic "practice"-whatever. This makes better specialists by organizing data, bringing their respective clans new senses of unity or infrastructure, thereby making their progress more swift and sure. That is, from this vantage point, teleconferencing is a technological advancement which accelerates processes already in place. It will help mathematicians calculate, cyberneticians cybernate, managers manage.

View "B"

This view concedes the compelling necessity of view "A." Yet it prefers to understand teleconferencing and related technologies in terms suggested by the inherent and open nature of the experience: to view the process heuristically; to see it as a tabula rasa; to develop procedures of wandering and play; to see it in its own right, for its own sake, but to see it askance as well.

Re: The Redundancy of Potential Command

Levi-Strauss defines a code as a means of "fixing signification by transposing them into terms of other significations."

After this much hands-on experience, I can imagine each player as a code-maker, or codifier, developing multiple lines of conceptual and paradigmatic counterpoint evolving simultaneously with no single line predominating. "Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy,"(Kenneth Burke) the players (each with a distinct operational style) would fulfill to the analogous "letter" Warren McCulloch's redundancy of potential command.

Structurally, a player's theater-of-operation (the relation between differences) states and demonstrates complex and unpredictable analogies of experience. There is no a priori "command" structure. Command becomes a function of selection. All players in the teleconference have an equal dose of potential command. At any given point in the actual discourse itself command will reside with one or a grouping of players, depending on ground rules, pragmatics, and the random unknown.

From this interplay of sensory barbs an index of epistemorphs results, as if by "secretion."

Re: Metaphor and Metonymy

A return to analogies of binary opposition, contrastive exchange, and dialectical (or dramatistic) tension in order to approximate actual and potential processes experienced in teleconferencing: The computer network generates associations by sensed likenesses (metaphors) and associations of juxtaposed unlikenesses (metonymies). This division underlies any substitution set in language, but it also is the logical prerequisite for the formation of any system out of any elements. With metaphor the justification for a connection is the similarity (or resemblance) that is sensed to exist between things, while metonymy is a means of connecting things by the notion of their temporal and spatial dissonance, by their juxtaposition. Metaphor is equated with "sensed identity." Metonymy is equated with a conceived (or perceived) difference plus "necessary interrelationship." Combinations and permutations generated by "entry" choices exercised by the players constitute another, separate level of metaphor and metonymy which is independent of the players' intentions. Another bifurcation: the metaphors and metonymies designed, articulated and entered by the players, and the metaphors and metonymies resulting from (derived from) the separate entries as they rub up against or interlock with each other without prior intention.

The second tier of metaphor and metonymy within the discourse will multiply asymptotically as the structure of the "entries" expands to include the diagram and the image with its text.