Algorithms: A timid elucidation via Google Earth

Simply put, algorithms are logico-mathematical automatons. They depend first and foremost on a function that remains unaltered (pre-set by the one who conceives the code, otherwise known as ‘the writer’). Apart from the function, an algorithm is endowed with a number of variables, which are selected from a pool of possibilities established in the writing phase and to which said function will be applied. These will provide the input, i.e. that which is going to be processed. And of course, to each input its own output – an entity that is anticipated and yet never completely known.

What is interesting about algorithms and functions in general is this ambiguity that characterizes them: the fact that the outcome is at the same time known and unknown. It is known insofar as the outcome is always already contained in the code: it is set by the code, limited by it, determined by it. Be the results as wild and as unexpected as they may be, they would not be possible if the code hadn’t provided the conditions of possibility for them. But at the same time they cannot be known in advance. At the end of the day, an algorithm is created precisely in order to deal with outcomes that cannot be foreseen. If they could be fully known in advance what sense would it make to come up with an algorithm in the first place?

A simple illustration

I’m thinking of a funnel now. A funnel is ‘coded’ (one might find the word ill-used here, but let’s think about it with a modicum of lenience) to let a liquid pass through it on its way to another location. The location doesn’t matter yet. What matters about it is that the liquid poured through the funnel will have to reach this destination, this location. Now, the width of the funnel’s neck will determine the amount of liquid that can pass through. No matter how hard one strives, one will never be able to pour more than the ‘code' of the funnel’s neck allows. One can pour less, of course, but that just proves the point: freedom, in a code, is limited to a lesser input. One can’t do more than the code allows.

Source: Superb Wallpapers 

Of course, not all algorithms are this simple. In fact, most of them are not. One can imagine possible complications even in the case of the funnel model. Twist the path of the funnel’s neck and you have more time required for the liquid to pass through. I don’t know why anybody would do this but it’s a possibility, a variation of the algorithm. Place a sieve somewhere along the way and the same liquid will reach its destination in an altered state (filtered, cleaned of impurities, thinned out etc.) Vary the thickness of the liquid and you’ll have varied times. And so on, and so forth.

Complications are endless. But it becomes clear from this example, I hope, that algorithmic realities are dependent on the code or function of the given situation. If such is the case, it would be easy to extrapolate the logic of algorithms to situations that are not mathematical in nature. Let’s say writing, since we’re always at it. The writing of a short story has its own algorithmic determinants. Length is one. Length provides the essential difference between a short story and, say – a novel, or a novella, or a trilogy; so that a short-story writer will never go beyond a certain word limit without the risk of moving into a different territory: the territory of lengthier genres. Content is another piece of code that matters in the case of a short story. Content differentiates a short story from a scientific treatise, from an almanac, from a shopping list. The crossing of species is possible, of course, but it does not prove the algorithm wrong; on the contrary, it confirms its strength. Then shape too matters: it separates a short story from a dramatic piece, from a film script, from a poem. We can go deeper and deeper, in search for other determinants, equally important: genre, audience, language, loyalty to a certain tradition, allegiance to a certain ideology.

Many other things aside, what is very important in an algorithm is its departure from the subject. Although they are written and employed by humans, their outcomes can’t be changed by the user in ways that are not always already existent in the code. The amount of liquid passing through a funnel (thickness, viscosity, velocity and other things considered) will never be changed by human volition. The genre limitations that determine the shape and length of a short story cannot be transgressed by an individual writer without his/her transgression degenerating into something else, something un-short-story-like.

What on earth...

In digital environments, algorithms are far more complex than a funnel or a short story. And yet, they serve similar functions.

See Google Earth.

To get there, let’s bring into the matter Clement Valla. Collector and curator of digital artefacts, Valla gathers, among other things, Google Earth images. He sometimes calls these things ‘postcards.’ What he is interested in are images that appear to contradict our understanding of what planet Earth looks like, or should look like. His ‘postcards’ depict shrivelled, bent, twisted-and-turned features of Earth surfaces. Contemplating his collection is like contemplating a bunch of Dali paintings, in which materiality is destabilized: clocks melt, figures take new shapes, constructions are deconstructed, structures are destructured. A glitch is immediately assumed as a likely cause for all these mutilations: a disorder of the code, an ailment of the scripted function. A human being could not have produced such fantastic distortions; so all must be in the algorithm.

Sourced: Jace D

Source: Clement Valla

The assumption is right. But only partially. Yes, these distorted images are the result of the algorithms playing behind Google interfaces. But, as Valla puts it, they’re not mistakes. They are not the result of a sick algorithm. On the contrary.

“[T]hese images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition – an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They are seams which reveal a new model of seeing and of representing our world – as dynamic, ever-changing data from a myriad of different sources – endlessly combined, constantly updated, creating a seamless situation.”

As explained by Valla, what Google’s texture-mapping algorithm has managed to do is fundamentally alter our ways of seeing and interpreting surfaces through photographic representations. Snapshots, i.e. distinct images separated from other similar images by means of the very frame that encloses them, are no longer the working principle here. While the Google algorithm does make use of previously created snapshots, it assembles them in ways that obliterate the seams (i.e. the frames). As a consequence, what we see on a Google Earth map is a continuous, fluent representation of a space that is in itself continuous and fluent, only misconstrued by the snapshot model. In fact, Google’s algorithm not only fixes a technical problem familiar to cartography (the conception of a map that is continuous, seamless) but also a representational problem: the mental effort required to understand that behind discrete segments of time and space taken with a photographic camera exists a world that is essentially continuous.

Back to the old chestnut of representation

Now, insofar as the apparent glitches are concerned, and which make the world look so different from ‘reality,’ one must keep in mind that Google operates in a relatively new territory, where the digital archive reigns supreme.

“The images produced by Google Earth are quite unlike a photograph that bears an indexical relationship to a given space at a given time. Rather, they are hybrid images, a patchwork of two-dimensional photographic data and three-dimensional topographic data extracted from a slew of sources, data-mined, pre-processed, blended and merged in real-time. Google Earth is essentially a database disguised as a photographic representation.”

Note that this doesn’t make Google Earth algorithms more accurate representations of the world. On the contrary. As Valla points out, there’s no night in the world conceived by Google Earth. And that should suffice to make the point clear. What’s more, selectivity (which implies obliteration and exclusion) is very much at work in Google Earth, just as it is in any man-handled representational systems. The algorithms choose their data according to the code that stands at their foundation. Of the numerous images uploaded to be processed through the code, only those are selected which comply with the criteria specified in the algorithm’s script. Just as a writer selects what he/she wants to write (and the success of their art depends precisely on this principle of selectivity), Google Earth too does away with what’s at odds with its algorithms. And just as in the case of the writer, here too the conclusion is disappointing; as disappointing as any conclusion drawn about any form of representation:

“In these anomalies we understand there are competing inputs, competing data sources and discrepancy in the data. The world is not so fluid after all.”

If this sounds familiar it’s because we’ve always devised the wrong mechanisms for the interpretation of the world; wrong not as in mistaken, but wrong as in impotent. What digital algorithms of the Google Earth type reveal is a process that starts off with a human badge on it only to lose advantage on the way towards the outcome. Since the algorithm does the work (even the anomalies collected by Valla are the product of a machine-run program), it looks as though we’ve won a battle in the war of objectivity. But that’s wrong to say. Wrong yet again. Algorithms, automated as they may be, are still the product of human minds. But what beautiful things they can create.

Source: Clement Valla

Of technical images, with Vilém Flusser

In essence, technical images represent the end of writing, in at least two senses. They are its polar opposites; and they put an end to the domination of writing as such. This is, in essence, Flusser's theory. To better understand it, one needs to see what’s specific to each of the two forms of expression/notation. And that’s where I’m going now.

Source: Miguel Frias

I've already discussed, last week and to a lesser extent the week before, that to Flusser writing is historical in the sense of its generating historical consciousness by means of linearity. With writing, the World (that terrible chaos that presents itself as our constant embarrassment) is returned to us ordered. But ordered in a special way. Ordered like the files and ranks of an army, like the wires between two telegraph poles, like the trajectory of an arrow about to hit its target. In other words, like the lines of a written text. Although I placed them first, the metaphors preceding this last sentence are the results of writing, not its models. Writing allows us to see the straightness of all these trajectories because, with writing, we have become accustomed to the paradigm of the line. Understanding, reasoning, logic, historical consciousness, etc. etc. – all these are manifestations of straightness.

The least we can say about this way of ordering is that it has transformed the World as well as our understanding of it.

But writing is not exempt from the tests of dialectics. Its rise to dominance implies some kind of fall as well. The fall may not be fully visible now, when we’re at the very beginning of a major transformation. It may never turn out to be a complete, deep, catastrophic fall. But we can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that writing is taking new forms, and that, more than anything else, it is losing ground. Of course, letting go of writing is not an easy task. Writing has been (and still is) one of our closest companions. We have built civilizations based on it. We have glorified and tortured, eradicated and constructed, invited and enforced – with writing on the topmast.

Apparatuses of transformation

But if letting go must happen, in the name of what can we be said to be letting go of writing? Flusser proposes technical images. Technical images, unlike writing, are not linear. The page of a book reads from top left corner to bottom right; or from top right to bottom left; horizontally or vertically. No matter which script is used, the principle is the same: we go about it in a straight line.

This, however, doesn’t apply to images. Images are meant to be taken as a whole. There is no linear reading of a photograph. One doesn’t start from the top left corner and proceeds to arrive at the bottom right corner.

Unlike writing, which is concerned with lines, images are concerned with surfaces. And this is a fundamental difference. But a difference that’s not so striking if we think that, in fact, representation has been making use of images for a long time. Since way before the emergence of writing, to be more precise. The caves of Lascaux are there to prove it.

So the question arises: what’s so special about technical images? What sets them apart from other visual artefacts?

Flusser focuses on one type of image: photography.

Source: Lilip Studio

Now, of course, the immediate thought crossing one’s mind in relation to photography must be something about its indexical value. Indexicality means that a photograph points at an actual object in a way similar to how the index finger does it; and it does so more prominently than, say, painting. A photographer takes a picture of something. Something that exists exactly the way it appears in the picture that’s been taken. Painting, which is also a representation of something, transforms the object. The work of the artist is apparent in every brushstroke, in every conscious use of perspective, of shadows, of composition in general. Of course, a photographer (and a filmmaker more so!) can do all this him/herself, and with relative ease. So this is not where the fundamental difference between painting and photography lies. To Flusser, the actual difference resides in the fact that the camera is a coded apparatus. Realistic as it may seem (a snippet of reality, as the cliché goes), a photograph is the result of the operations inherent in the camera. Images taken by a photographer will be dependent on the mechanical (and more recently, digital) processes made possible by the camera they’re using.

One may argue that something similar happens in the case of painting; that painting, like photography, requires certain material preconditions in order to exist. Yes, but painting preserves the human factor. Errors in painting are completely due to the artist’s application of the material preconditions. Too much colour here, mistaken application of shadows there, there’s a plethora of possibilities where a painter can go wrong. In photography (where the human remains relevant, no doubt), a large proportion of the possible errors are due to the range of operations built into the camera, and over which the user has no control. An experienced photographer will be able to apply the right apertures to the right photographic situations; but they will not be able to overcome the fact that the camera has only this many types of aperture.

So here’s the fundamental rupture. When we use a photographic camera it is not the apparatus becoming an extension of us (which is the classic understanding of technology at large) but us becoming an extension of it. When we press the button of a camera we enable the coded possibilities built into the apparatus to come to fruition. We serve the camera. We help it come to the realization of its potential, of the specific possibilities extant in its code. And that doesn’t quite happen in the case of painting.

With algorithms we jump into post-humanity

With this in mind it’s becoming easier, I think, to see how the latest optical technologies (analogue or digital) are forms of this general subjection to an apparatus. I don’t mean this in a dystopian sense, as the robot that takes over; but rather in the sense of a development whereby the human has vacated its own creation, like a Deus Otiosus that will only return, if ever, in order to punish the independence given to his creation. (Remember the biblical story of the fall?)

Algorithms are a crucial illustration of all of the above; an example Flusser did not have the chance to discuss (he died in 1991, so all of the 21^st-century technologies we’re using nowadays were unknown to him; although he had a fairly good understanding of how an algorithm works).

Digital algorithms take the coding of the camera to a whole new level. They don’t even need our hand to press their buttons. There’s no button for algorithms. The functions of a button are, once again, scripted into the code. And so, apart from the initial turning-on, an algorithm needs no further human input. An algorithm is built to work in its own terms, after its own script, automated to process information (data) by applying ad infinitum the functions written in its code.

Source: Dark Government

The difference between the code of a camera and the code of an algorithm is simple: while with the former we used the apparatus ignoring (not noticing) the code but hoping to be able to control the results, with the latter we are fully aware of the code but no longer in control of the results. What’s more, we are also fully aware that there’s nothing we can do in order to stop the algorithm. Nothing but the ultimate solutions: shutting it down.

So mechanical cameras and digital codes have this thing in common: the repositioning of the human element. The human is no longer at the center of production of artefacts but at the periphery. That’s why ‘post-humanism’ is such a catchphrase nowadays.

The post-human is – due to no simple coincidence – also a post-writing. Of course, writing hasn’t been completely eliminated from the picture (my pun!). We are still deeply immersed in the linearity that’s been guiding our consciousness for thousands of years. Binary code, which stands at the foundation of the digital world, is itself arranged according to the logic of the line. Not only is it written in lines that start in the top left corner and advance towards the bottom right corner; it is also constructed in accordance to a linear causality between code and operation: code is teleologically written, so as to lead to a result visible in a computer operation.

Flusser has pointed out the fact that no definite separation from linear writing is possible as long as we keep thinking and organizing ourselves according to the principles of linearity. I’m not even sure that we should be aiming towards a complete annihilation. That kind of radicalism would verge dangerously on suicide. But major changes are taking place. Of course they can’t be sudden and complete. But they are here, they are questioning the grounds of writing. Two examples of these changes, in which the algorithm reigns supreme, are Google Earth and soft cinema. I’ll discuss them next week. So we’ll see.

A brief history of writing

Last week I touched quickly, insufficiently, on the issue of algorithmic reality. And that brought to my mind Vilém Flusser’s concern with technical images. And so I thought I must say a few things about that now. But before algorithms can come to the foreground I need to say a few things about writing à la Flusser. In what follows I’ll be citing especially “Letters of the Alphabet,” an essay in the collection Does Writing Have a Future?

Source: Te Ipu Pakore: The Broken Vessel

Vilém Flusser’s theories of writing have a strong historical grounding. He proposed that writing makes history. That, on the one hand, it is a practice with a background, with a beginning (Sumerian tablets, Egyptian papyri, Roman wax tablets and stone inscriptions, and so on and so forth). On the other hand, thought, writing makes History. It was only after the invention of writing that historical consciousness was made possible.

The lines that put an end to a babble

The possibility to arrange events in a linear manner, to speak of them as ordered, is the by-product of writing itself. None of this was possible before writing, when, says Flusser, the world existed in a state of mythical consciousness; when language itself was not yet settled, not yet set in stone (or in whatever).

“It is possible to claim that people of that time babbled.”

Because of the absence of writing, pre-literate cultures could not have spoken the way we do, because they had not yet gone down writing’s path.

With writing things became different in the world and in language. With writing we start to see events through the lens of their inclination towards linear ordering. One after another, events partake in a curious pageant that leaves traces on surfaces, i.e. creates a history of the event’s presence and its advancement towards the next event. With writing, we can imagine what has caused an event and what is likely to be inferred from it. That’s because we can see the before and the after of the event in a linear arrangement. And once we can see that we can’t see otherwise: events must have causes and must produce effects. Writing has made it possible to speak of origins and of projections into the future.

Logic itself is the result of writing, says Flusser. Logic, as a form of syllogistic bargaining with data based on causes and effects, on premises and conclusions, on inferences and injunctions, with the intention of arriving at a truth with a chronology of its own, is a derivative, again, of writing, and of its ability to put things into straight lines.

A simple formula

The success of writing appears to have been due to the simplicity of its formula. Once the world is presented in straight lines, it becomes easier to re-present. The simplification that came with the creation of specialized signs (letters able to synthetize the world through simple combinations) turned the human mind away from pictographic representations, which, realistic as they may have been, were time-consuming and sedentary. The Lascaux paintings are still in Lascaux because the caves could not be transported anywhere else; and so, in order to have access to the signs represented there, one had to be there, in Lascaux.

Source: Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire

I can imagine elitism catching roots right there, in the darkness of those caves. Those who could not afford the privilege of seeing the murals were left outside of knowledge, outside of humanhood, forced to gang up with other prehistoric ignoramuses. Deep inside the caves, those paintings were guarded from the outside world by their very remoteness and, by being guarded, they were also preserved.

Writing did not eliminate preservation from the scheme. Hence its success. Since the ability to eternalize an event through pictographic signs was a privilege of representation per se, writing could not ignore it. So it too advanced the promise of eternity. But on top of that, communication by means of these specialized signs presented this huge advantage of being movable. The human animal turns now its attention to lighter surfaces, easier to transport: tree bark, shells, animal hides. Things found in nature (simple, sympathetic to inscription, at hand) are now turned into support for writing.

The personalization of representation

The story goes on, but there’s no time here to go into details. The point, as Flusser formulated it, is this: before writing, the connection with the world was not completely severed. Of course, the animal painted on a cave wall is not the animal itself but a representation of it: a reminder that such things exist out there, beyond the threshold of the cave. The representation, though, has full referential power: it does refer to an actual animal out there, it is an image of that animal.

Writing ruins this certainty. Writing intervenes between image and human being to unsettle their marriage. Letters are representations not of the world but of images of the world, images akin to the Lascaux paintings. This is apparent in the formal resemblance between Western letters and their referents:

“In the fifteen hundred years since their invention, their original form has changed repeatedly, and yet it remains recognizable: the two horns of the Semitic steer (Hebrew: aleph) in the A, the two domes of the Semitic house (Hebrew: beth) in the B, the hump of the Semitic camel (Hebrew: gimul) in the C. Letters are pictures of a cultural scene as it was perceived by those who invented the alphabet in the second millennium B.C. on the eastern Mediterranean.”

This original resemblance has been forgotten, but it must be taken into consideration when we think of how the letters of the alphabet (or of other writing systems) have been allowed to act as representations of representations; of how they were welcomed at the representational games.

Source: Women of Faith

And so, with the emergence of writing, the world took a step back in its relationship to the human element. Now, in order to make the cave painting accessible to others, a writer refers to that representation in an abstract way. He/she does not explain the world to their readers. What they explain is the representation they have of that world. So writing becomes not only a way of objectifying the world but also of personalizing representation, making it the product of the whim of a writer or other. Precisely because a written text can circulate, it can be present where the reality it refers to is not. A writer can describe in writing a bull or a wild horse, and the reader has to take his words for granted. In essence, there’s no way of ascertaining the truth of an utterance when the referent is absent. That’s how rhetoric became necessary: a way of persuading an audience devoid of direct access to the object. That’s how logic turned up: as a way of proving the truth of the world by means of permutations of thoughts and by establishing a diagrammatic proof-building methodology. Both rhetoric and logic deal with abstractions, with their problems as well as their solutions.

No turning back for language

And hence the essential perversion of the relationship between language and writing:

“Something in the spoken language itself calls out to be fixed in place – and in fact, not so much in the memories of speakers and hearers, or in records or tapes, but rather in the writing itself. Spoken language seems to rush toward writing almost on its own, to become a written language and so to achieve its full maturity. After the invention of writing, spoken language appears to be a preparation for a written language, to teach people how to speak properly in the first place.”

This progression mentioned by Flusser is due, of course, to the several stages of evolution that language has undertaken ever since the invention of writing. As writing turned to be language’s technical way of materialization (its own technology), the invention of inscription, once acknowledged, could never be dis-acknowledged. And so language started takin shapes dictated not by its internal forces but by the forces of its technological apparatus (writing).

“Today we have hardly any access to preliterate speech. Even in nurseries and among illiterates, writing has permeated the language.”

So the schism is total. The specialized signs of writing have taken over the realm of representation. But this victory lasted only this many centuries. Flusser finds photography to be the great rupture in the history of writing, the way towards a different form of formulating the world. With cameras and their encoded capabilities, the door was opened to what Flusser called technical images.

Of them (algorithms et al), next week, if the gods of writing are so inclined as to give us a chance.

Being caught reddit-handed, or the pleasures of policing for free

I got in trouble at the weekend when I set up a reddit account (my first one ever) and, having had a rather cursory reading through the rules of the group (or subreddit) I had joined, I was kicked out. I had, it seems, gravely violated the rule no-links-to-your-personal-blog-are-allowed-on-this-subreddit. Mind you, the link was inside a post that was the equivalent of half a Microsoft Word page, but what does that matter? Out I went. First infringement, red card. Harsh policy (zero tolerance); excellent policy-implementation.

Source: Fear and Loathing in Bioethics

The episode has left me thinking. Not about dis-affiliation from groups but about this idea of being spotted, of being handcuffed (metaphorically speaking), of being caught red-handed.

So I’d like to start by noticing this language of apprehension and its potential for rhyme. Reddit, red-handed. Just for fun. (Couldn’t help it.) Also couldn’t help thinking about the way reddit is organized, as a means of dissemination and dismissal at the same time. But I need to be well understood: by reddit I mean pretty much all of social media, and with it pretty much everything that takes place online.

Nobody has asked for it

Now allow me a few words about the avatar that ‘caught’ me. I checked his/her/their history – as one does in such circumstances, I’m sure. They haven’t posted anything original in one year. Ever since their last post they’ve been engaged in replies, more or else, but also in the territorial and emblazoning (to them) actions of policing the space in search for intruders. Now that’s an interesting aspect, because nobody has given them a sheriff’s badge for doing so. Nobody gives any such badge to any such vigilante on the internet. And I mean nobody, because the actual work, the real work of fending and defending, of blocking and dismissing, is done not by human beings but by algorithms. What human beings can do is alert those algorithms when they come across incriminating practices such as (I had to find out) my own. And that’s exactly where the issue finds its grounding. In the fact that individuals offer their time and resources to serve algorithms. Take it as a dystopian panic if you will, although I don’t mean it that way. And so the deeper question that imposes itself is this: isn’t this loyalty to the algorithm somehow a manifestation of the loyalty to another kind of abstractions? To the abstractions represented by ideologies?

Algorithm, the latest materialization of control

All ideologies need materializations. They cannot dwell in the abstract because they’re supposed to address concrete social items: human beings. Yes, this itemization that we’re subjected to comes hand in hand with the externalization of our concerns. Stuffed with the dictates we are exposed to like some docile teddy bears, we take pleasure in controlling others, in exercising this weird, dehumanizing (algorithmizing) power: the ability to find the right places where others do wrong by a given system.

The vigilante who caught me reddit-handed had a concern larger and seemingly more important than the actual reason he had presumably joined reddit for. He was there to discuss books. That’s what the group was for, that’s what the group was asking for. The rules were clear (I found out after reading them closely): you don’t post unless your posts are related to book discussions. It’s with this kind of adamantine restrictiveness that the issue of participation was imposed on the members. And yet, the individual who ‘caught’ me (I want to insist on this word because I want, in essence, to insist on the process of being criminalized – which is precisely what rule-breaking leads to) did not post a reply to my contribution. No, they chose to ‘report’ me (another word of the same resonance). Content was not important. What mattered was that a forbidden object was present in a forbidden place. I’m not trying to defend myself because I know that would sound pathetic; and it wouldn’t even be the purpose of this very post. But here’s the issue: twenty lines of text mattered less than one link half a line in length. All the rest was discussion of a book! What’s more, it was a reply to a question posted by somebody else.

But let’s move on

A few weeks ago I wrote about the phenomenon of synopticism: the inversion of the panoptic gaze to the point where we’re no longer dealing with a figure of authority watching over and super-vising the subjects but rather with the situation where subjects watch around themselves in order to police the space of their social interaction as if they were law enforcers. Policemen without a payroll. That’s precisely what Foucault pointed out throughout his career: the disciplining of the individuals to the point where they become guarantors of the discourse’s functioning. There are many other illustrations of the phenomenon. Think of all the white supremacist movements and their urge to protect a presumed universality by clearing it of a presumed non-white threat.

From Django Unchained. Source: giphy

Think of the neighbor who peers into your own bedroom. Think of the entitlement to install surveillance cameras on one’s own property.

This last example is a really interesting one, and possibly closer to the online vigilance I’m trying to bring up in this post. In essence, a camera set up on one’s property will not annul a theft. It is not the camera that deters a thief from breaking and entering but the fear of being caught on it. Not only that, but the camera is not a security object per se. It does not hinder access. Like even the loudest alarm ever, it is not a blocking device. If a thief did not know that a camera existed he or she would just move on undeterred; the theft would go as planned. At least an alarm system draws attention to its own presence when it goes off. Not a camera, though.

Then what’s the point? What does the person who installed the camera gain from having installed it? Peace of mind? I doubt it. We, the outsiders, are not the only ones who know that a camera is completely incompetent against a break-in. The owner knows it too. So the camera doesn’t demarcate for them a worry-free territory. What it does demarcate, though, is a space of policing. If the camera catches the intruder the owner can use the image to refer the intruder to the legal discourse. The owner, therefore, has little to gain for themselves but a lot to gain for the discourse.

Unpaid work makes the world go round

This is the externalization of concern I was talking about. The state of being-concerned does not serve the individual. He/she remains on duty but without being remunerated for it. They give away an important asset (their generosity) in order to fulfill the purposes of power.

I’m familiar with the term ‘leave without pay.’ It is very carefully pointed out whenever an individual transgresses certain rules concerning not-engagement in the workplace. But I haven’t heard any instance of ‘being on duty without pay’ (voluntary work excluded), although a lot of what happens in terms of this policing of the social sphere by unemployed individuals points precisely in that direction.

Source: Huffington Post

‘Pay’ needs to be regarded not necessarily as monetary remuneration. These days, when visibility has become a currency in itself, social capital needs to be understood in terms of the benefit drawn from having been involved. In what? In anything. Anything, that is, that has significance to the discourse of visibility.

And so back to my poliziotto. I mean not to him-him but to what he represents. To recapitulate, what have we here? Someone in the service of an algorithm. Someone acting for the benefit of a site that’s not his own, from which he gains very little, possibly nothing. Someone who’s settled into a regulated territory and has inhaled all the fumes of the site, in such a great quantity that now they’re high on the idea of duty. Which is not even an idea anymore, but rather an internalized practice. And that, without going into any other details, is characteristic of the disciplined society we’re inhabiting. Nothing new in itself. Nothing outrageously unknown. Just another instantiation of an age-old propensity towards self-subjection, something Foucault spent entire books talking about. And talking, and talking.

Some texts reject me, so I write them

The most inspiring texts to me are not the ones that keep me immersed in them but the ones that refuse me, the ones that send me away.

Source: Search Engine Land

It happens this way: I read and I read and there’s nothing out of ordinary about my reading. I peruse with the mind to the text, open to its charisma, expecting the pleasures, watching for clues. But the mind that reads this way is that of a stranger. What I mean to say is ridiculously simple, beyond obvious: that through this type of reading I remind myself that I am not the author but only a reader. A stranger, indeed: someone who comes from without and whose likelihood to settle within is minimal. But some texts are more than that. Some texts fill me with that curious sentiment that I am the one who’s written them; that my reading of them right now is the reading of some draft I am in the process of editing. In these situations, I can’t stop thinking beside the actual text, ignoring it as it were, heading towards a conclusion that’s not the text’s but mine.

Drafting

A draft, always a draft. Which means, in essence, that I perceive incompleteness, imperfection, room-for-improvement. I have this knack for visualizing alternatives. When I read these texts I feel the urge to imagine how I would write them otherwise. Not better, not worse. Just differently.

A draft requires careful reading, i.e. the placing of care into the text. It requires me to care enough about the text to attempt to imagine it different. And so what happens next is this: I can no longer read. That’s because the urge is now in me, the urge of inspiration (I might call it that, for once).

I can imagine a point where there’s no more room for perusal, where continuing to read is a dangerous business. Dangerous because it can cause confusion. If I am not careful enough at this point, if I don’t pay sufficient attention, I risk unconscious plagiarism – which is the worst form of all, because it takes away the pleasure that comes with the stealing of something truly valuable. I know this because I’m familiar with those moments when one can remember with embarrassing accuracy a paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, but not their origin. When that happens I feel utterly incapacitated. My mind wants to find that place where everything happened first, and that desire is so strong that I can no longer concentrate. And so a frantic search starts, one that often leads nowhere but to exhaustion.

It’s much easier to plagiarize, I think, when you know exactly what you’re plagiarizing. It’s much harder to do it when you just happen stupidly upon a fragment you didn’t even know was in your head.

Drifting

So in those moments I can no longer read. I need to put the text aside and start my own text. I need to write because something in the original text tells me with the urgency of catastrophes that if I miss this opportunity I miss everything. And ‘everything’ is an incredibly ample concept sometimes.

My own texts are very often caused by texts I’ve been reading, and whose reading must be interrupted. Those texts, in their splendor, send me away. Away to the computer, away to the piece of paper and the pen. But also away from their substance (the texts’ substance).

Source: Red State

When I have to stop reading because I need to write there is no way back. I can no longer see the original text. Its presence panics me. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. Not anymore. I turn my back to it. I obliterate it. The fact that it exists disappoints me. And this is the very same text that caused inspiration in the first place.

Incredible, the ways of writing.

Textual determinism

It’s in moments like these that I see the agency that resides in texts, their ability to stir me into action. Not the authors. They don’t awaken me to the same awareness. I very rarely feel the need to praise an author for an affect brought up by their text. Authors are not interesting. Not in themselves. An author must be an author of something. Of a text. So the text is more imperative, more interesting. It’s what exists, what needs to be dealt with. It’s what possesses the capacity to determine my actions. Textual determinism – I might call it that.

With other texts, which are more silent, less reproachful than the ones that make me write, I have a different kind of relationship. With them I don’t. I don’t start anything, I don’t change anything, I don’t make an effort. When I read these texts I make notes on the margins. Sometimes. At other times I make no notes at all. Not even mental notes. These texts don’t ask for anything. And because of their silence I remain silent too. What I want to say is that I forget these silent texts. I forget them even while I’m in the process of reading them.

But the texts that speak to me are incredibly empowering. The very nerve to get away from them is evidence to this empowerment.

A case study

Speaking of notes. I do the following when I take notes at lectures, conferences, public speeches. (I used to do it when I was a student and I’m still doing it. Every time). I start the way everybody starts. I write down the words I hear. I give the speaker my time and space and reincarnate their words onto the page, my page. At this point I am fully occupied by the speaker’s speech. To put it differently, I follow their text. I pay tribute to their gesture, and with it I confirm their authority over the text, over the clarity of that text. I would not dare thinking of altering anything. Like a good journalist who obeys the rules of his profession and protects his sources, I strive for exactitude. Everything for a faithful rendition. Everything for loyalty. But then, all of a sudden, something happens. Suddenly, the speech I am listening to ceases to be clear. It becomes blurred. It fades slowly, until it reaches inaudibility. And then, I cannot hear it at all. Why? Because at that point I am already being forced to generate my own text.

What I think happens at that point is simple, albeit brutal. I snatch the original idea. I literally steal it, the way thieves sneak into the houses of the unaware to dispossess them of valuables. And once that idea is in my possession I run away with it.

It’s the grab, the seizing of the opportunity to write, that estranges me from the speech that keeps going on in the room, unheard by me but still alive to others.

Source: Hearts and Minds

And then I write. First, things directly related to the speech. Then gradually relevance fades. It too goes away. And so the original text gives in, and in its place comes my own text, my own speech. I end up, of course, writing things completely unrelated to the original situation. But it’s now, after having encountered and then immediately divorced the original text, that I find the right energy to write. As if the echo of the original text were contaminating me.

What do you know, this too might be some kind of disease.

A carnival of gaffes

But let’s look at this hunt for errors from a more technical perspective. Or a more technological one, to put it otherwise. Or just from another perspective, pure and simple.

The example of the book reviews of last week doesn't make for an isolated phenomenon. Take a look at YouTube. It’s packed full of vigilant watchers who see mistakes in films and take great pleasure in sharing their findings. Best Fails. Greatest Mistakes. Funny Goofs. These are the titles that entertain the generation of faults: our generation.

Little they seem when regarded in isolation. But greatly they weigh when put together.One sees them and one criticizes. Or on the contrary, one sees them and one revels in the rise of all marginal genres, of which the fail is one of the most popular. The question remains at the centre of all this: What’s it with the hiccup, with the glitch, with the malfunction? What makes them so appealing, so exciting?

Possible answer: Maybe the lure of the power that’s crushing under its own weight. Or maybe something more technical, more, how should I put it, of our time.

The age of the non-expert

We need to see that things are changing around us, and in many regards. Formerly accepted methods, in knowledge as well as in technologies, have been falling short of their grandiose promises. They can no longer provide recipes to go by. They can no longer provide recipes, full stop. The world isn’t working the way it used to. Top to bottom is not the right trajectory anymore. Hierarchies (which are the very essence of traditional power, based on dissemination from above, on weighing down on the subaltern and on legalizing the utterance of the few against the argument of the many) are obsolete now.

Yes, this constant hunt for errors is the result of the new reality in which the non-specialist rules. It is the result of Web 2.0. The consumer turned into producer, the user turned into a manufacturer – these things have helped immensely the trend.
When the video cassette, and then the DVD player, were invented, they were praised primarily for one quality: the user's ability to go back and forth, a magical act permitted by the rewind and the fast-forward functions. That aspect has been immensely improved and further facilitated by Web 2.0, with its YouTube offspring and all the adaptations that ensued from it, which allows anyone with an internet connection to play with video or music files to their heart’s content. Add to that things like Netflix, or Igloo, and the picture becomes sharper. Access to mistakes is one of the many possibilities opened up by this unrestrained access to everything.

The more, the better

The issue is related, of course, to the general trend taking place in the online universe, where creativity has taken a sharp turn from creation to curation. Like all artists who take pride in their work, YouTubers find their own reserves of pride in the mashups they produce. Keeping things together is more important than pointing them out in isolation from each other. That's why the great hunt for mistakes is one that takes place in an ecosystem of its own, with cases upon cases making up the little universe of failures-on-record.

Source: Warren Fyfe

This seems, indeed, to be the case: the issue of recording, of having things on record, preserved (curated) in an effort to make a case for something. We seem to have learned rather well the techniques of argumentation taught to us as early as primary school: if you want to be credible you need to amass proof. The more, the better. Accumulation shows us the way, and this feels uncannily familiar. We must have seen it in another form, somewhere else. Maybe in the utilitarian logic based on the argument of quantity?

Errors can provide this reassurance of large numbers when they come about invasion-style. And by the looks of it they do seem to take up quite a lot of space; a lot of the generous space offered by the Empire of Data.

Going viral means growing fast

But there seems to be something else behind this abundance of failures, behind this carnival of gaffes.

Logic of nature: when abundance becomes apparent it generates movements of its own, interests that tip the ecosystem towards particular phenomena, to the detriment of others. Translated into human language, this theorem finds its materialization in the logic of profits. As long as the hunt for errors remains a local issue, it raises an eyebrow or two but nothing more. When the tendency becomes visible, though, when it goes viral, it calls for action. In that case, producing a piece of art riddled with errors makes perfect sense. Satisfying the pleasure of the hunters brings home the need to be in the limelight. In other words, there’s a lot to be gained from being talked about online. Good or bad, it matters not when the accountants start counting hits and data traffic. The most important thing now is to be seen, to be watched, to be shared, to be watched again, and to be shared and shared and shared ad infinitum. Value is nothing. Presence is all.

The fault in our stars (a narrative paraphrase)

There’s a pleasure we seem to take in looking for gaffes, for slip-ups. And that’s what I want to think about this week.

Source: Why to Read

When I started posting my book reviews on Zero to One I also started searching the net for others’ impressions on the same books. I simply want to know where I’m sitting compared to others. Something reviewers in general do, I’m told. It gives me/them a good feeling to know. Or so it should. What I’ve noticed, among other things, is that most book reviewers (and not just the anonymous bloggers that inhabit the vast expanses of the online desert, but also the ones who write for big papers and enjoy big audiences) take much pride in making known their dislikes. Especially their dislikes. And I don’t want to be trivial. I’m not accusing any of these reviewers of vanity. I’m only taking note of this trend.

Texts need space to breathe

There’s something essential that needs to be said, especially about prose writing: novels, essays, that kind of stuff. Not everything a writer says must be perfect! A lot could but not everything must, not everything can. I don’t know how many readers expect every given line to be the equivalent of a Mona Lisa to be put in a gilded frame and sent off to the nearest Louvre. But there seems to be quite a few of them out there who’re asking precisely for this.

Things, however, don’t work that way. They’ve never worked that way. Texts need breathing spaces. There are passages with a role as simple as their name suggests: they’re made to facilitate passage. That’s all they need to provide. Not explosive metaphors, not kerosene-like imagery to fire up one’s mind. If a book is good enough it will have plenty of those throughout its pages. But books, mind you, are not continuous displays of brilliance. Fueled on good ideas, which come always at intervals, books in general are made up of fits and starts. The reader has to be shaken out of their state of habituation with the text; they need to encounter surprise; they need to find gems strewn between parts made of base metal. There’s a good part here, another good part there, but most of what’s read is made to carry the plot, to fill the pipes that traverse a text.

Kernels and satellites, two elements of any narrative

Seymour Chatman has put together a whole theory of narrative structures, which is predicated precisely on this play with joints and juxtapositions. According to this theory, stories are made out of narrative blocks that follow upon each other. Within these blocks there are two crucial components, something that Chatman names, translating to a certain extent from Barthes, kernels and satellites. The terms should be pretty self-explanatory: kernels are cores, nubs, hearts, essences, while satellites are adjuncts, appendages, accessories. Think of kernels as the main actors in a film and of satellites as the supporting actors and the extras. The former make the limelight; they carry the message of the film’s narrative, they get the awards and the applause. The later are not so swell but they’re the mass that enable the protagonists to shine. In spite of their uncompromising differences, none of the two is possible without the other. In order to be the lead role one needs minor characters to wander around and fill the screen. At the same time, without the alpha character the minor ones have no reason to be.

When Chatman describes his theory in Story and Discourse, he makes it as clear as possible that the structure of a narrative requires a skeleton (a scaffolding, a framework, a pretext; something like the hardware of a computer) and the flesh that comes upon it (matter that makes the connections, a tissue, a context; a software, if you like).

“Kernels are narrative moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction taken by events. They are nodes or hinges in the structure, branching points which force a movement into one or two (or more) possible paths. Achilles can give up his girl or refuse; Huck Finn can remain at home or set off down the river; Lambert Strether can advise Chad to remain in Paris or to return; Miss Emily can pay the taxes or send the collector packing; and so on. Kernels cannot be deleted without destroying the narrative logic. In the classical narrative text, proper interpretation of events at any given point is a function of the ability to follow these ongoing selections, to see later kernels as consequences of earlier.”

To Chatman, kernels are some kind of signposts. They signal where the story could have become something else. They are also nubs where the story turns out to be hanging on mere threads. It’s with kernels that one becomes aware of structure as such. Satellites, however, are context-dependent; they are peripheral elements, the role of which is to cover the kernels, to make them invisible so as to create the illusion narratives are famous for.

“A minor plot event – a satellite – is not crucial in this sense. It can be deleted without disturbing the logic of the plot, though its omission will, of course, impoverish the narrative aesthetically. Satellites entail no choice, but are solely the workings-out of the choices made by the kernels. They necessarily imply the existence of kernels, but not vice versa. Their function is that of filling in, elaborating, completing the kernel; they form the flesh on the skeleton.”

To put it otherwise, in Twitter-like terms, strictly speaking a novel’s plot can be shorthanded into one sentence fairly easily. The essence doesn’t take much space. What happens beyond it is what comes as a surplus to the framework on which the novel is built. All that meat covering those bones is there to make the transition between the skeleton’s parts possible. Without the connecting tissue, the kernels would remain isolated, visible, ugly.

Navigating with satellites

I’m going to exaggerate here, but truth is we need to take these things (the fits and starts of stories) as what they are, so as not to demand a shining armor from something that’s meant to be rags.

With poetry yes, things are different. From poetry we have the right to expect perfection, because poetry is precisely the quest for faultlessness. In a poem, every line and every word must be taken seriously. The distinction between kernels and satellites is irrelevant in most of the poetic genres (with the unsurprising exception of the so-called narrative poetry, whose very title says it all). A poem is a kernel in itself. It can be read in isolation, even when the reader is aware of the poet’s oeuvre and where they can make the necessary connections between different poems, between different themes.

But the point of this post was to bring about the issue of the guilty pleasures we experience when we come across imperfections. The danger of exercising this pleasure is easy to identify: if one moans about the parts that aren’t that essential (which, unfortunately, happens very often – or at least in a lot of the cases I’ve seen so far) one risks missing the point. The point, i.e. the kernel. Outside the point one navigates with the satellites; one looks at the secondary; one looks at what could be taken out without affecting the structure.

Of classics, after all

In a short essay from 1981 (“Why Read the Classics?”), Italo Calvino says this about books: “If I read the Odyssey I read Homer’s text, but I cannot forget all that the adventures of Ulysses have come to mean in the course of the centuries, and I cannot help wondering if these meanings were implicit in the text, or whether they are incrustations or distortions or explanations.”

Source: University of Oxford

Calvino clarifies a couple of things. 1. That the classics are classics not because they’re fixed but because they’re mutable. 2. That a classic text is not only what it is but also (or mostly) what it has been made to be. The latter being due to the fact that a classic is read by many generations. But the fact of their readability across time is caused by being always young and restless. Which goes back under clarification no. 1, as above.

This is just to re-articulate the point in the quote.

Alterations

Since some of these classics require translations (having been written in a different language or in a time too distant to sustain comprehensibility), let’s briefly bring up translations. There are translations contemporary to the reader, as opposed to translations contemporary to the translator.

Consider the former (the latter will be made clear by contrast). Insofar as they don’t fall for the archaic fallacy according to which a text must sound the way it sounded to its original readers, these texts arrive at the meeting with us vested in the garb of novelty. They’re fresh and crispy, just off the production line, and aimed at a public that speaks the patois. These texts use the exact allusions that make a contemporary tick. Example: Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf isn’t impossible to read; it isn’t made difficult by impenetrable allusions. And that’s precisely because he made the poem sound intelligible to late-twentieth century readers.

“So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.”

Classics in the language of us – is what Heaney’s Beowulf is in the first place. Not that we don’t need explanations every now and then. Far from it. With the passing of time, the world itself has changed and understanding the basics of fifth-century chieftainship or the dynamics of a narrative that mixes fact and fiction rather liberally is not, as they say, as easy as pie. But those explanations aren’t directions; they are illuminations. And what’s more, they don’t try to make the translator sound intelligent. They simply ease the reader’s way into a text that’s bound to be difficult.

Or do I wrongly understand the role of a translator?

Substitutes

But the classics pose yet another aspect: that the readers change their gears too, with or without a translator’s help. The transference of resonances depends, to a certain extent, on the idiosyncrasies of biological ages. Let’s call them generations, for lack of a better word. One of the most apparent distinctions is that between a text read in one’s youth and the same text read at maturity. The constant: the reader; he/she is the same. The variables: a) reading the text once in one’s tender years and once in the years of mature undertakings; b) reading the text once only, when one is young and presumably un-formed, wet behind the ears; c) reading the text once only, but at the age when wines are better sipped than drunk in quaffs. As we move through these categories we get to understand texts in different ways. The battle between generations may very well be just this: a disagreement over readings, an impossibility to sign a pact over the meanings of a text.

Source: Deviant Art

Let me quote some more from Calvino:

“In fact, reading in youth can be rather unfruitful, due to impatience, distraction, inexperience with the product’s ‘instructions for use,’ and inexperience in life itself. Books read then can be (possibly at one and the same time) formative, in the sense that they give a form to future experiences, providing models, terms of comparison, schemes for classification, scales of value, exemplars of beauty – all things that continue to operate even if a book read in one’s youth is almost or totally forgotten. If we reread the book at a mature age, we are likely to rediscover these constants, which by this time are part of our inner mechanisms, but whose origins we have long forgotten. A literary work can succeed in making us forget it as such, but it leaves its seed in us.”

It’s the wetness-behind-ears thing. How to get over it, how not to consider it inexperience that needs to be corrected, stupidity that requires to be schooled.

Educating the young in how a text must be read is like a joke that needs to be explained. If you didn’t get the point in the first place, you should be left to figure it out for yourself, and through this figuring out discover the pleasure that was there to be had in the first instance. Explain to someone how to read the joke and you’ve destroyed everything. The classics are, I think, in a similar situation. Let them be encountered at first hand, approached with the uncertainty and the scorn that come with the inevitable, irrefutable distance in time, in mores, in consciousnesses.

Don’t provide introductions, don’t go on with footnotes, don’t turn yourself into an academic reader unless you’re forced by the circumstances of your profession! These things kill a text. And to whose benefit? We peek into the indexes and appendices of books not because we’re stupid; it’s because the one who rendered them anew has made it necessary for us to do so. The mere presence of such apparatuses of understanding draws the readers towards them because the readers believe too much in the power of the printed text. Simple logic: why would an appendix be there if it didn’t mean to be considered?

Translators/editors of this kind try to educate us by placing inside the text clues of their own capabilities. They depart catastrophically from the text, by making us dependent on their skills rather than curious about the text’s qualifications. We read the translator’s curriculum vitae instead of perusing the actual text. We’re given crutches when nothing’s wrong with us, when we can navigate easily the seas that we have never sailed before.

Forgetting well

What one should get from Calvino’s words, therefore, is this realization that a classic text isn’t, as many are tempted to think, a guaranteed memory but precisely the opposite. A classic text is one that forces us to forget. To forget its letters, its words, its semantic juxtapositions. To remember it, however, by means that resemble the intricacies of DNA: a memory that stays in the depths of remembering.

Source: Synonym

A classic text is, therefore, anti-educational.

I grew up at a time and in a place where rote-learning was the only acceptable way. What I did learn from that was how to hate the texts I was supposed to love. Yes, I’ve learned those things. Yes, I still recite them when I find it relevant, because they’ve been fixed between my synapses and refuse, by some chemical miracles that take place in my brain, to let go of me. But that doesn’t mean I have enjoyed them the way they (my teachers) thought I was going to enjoy the incident of the encounter. This, in fact, was the central problem: that the meeting with those texts was not at all an encounter. It had been prepared, premeditated, pre-designed, or as they say about old DVDs they sell in DVD stores, pre-loved.

Calvino again:

“The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.”

It’s the influence that matters: an influence that matters. Not just any dictation will make one a good writer, a good reader. Calligraphy classes make you a good calligrapher, but not a good novelist. Rote-learning of a text makes you a good reciter but not a good reader. I’m on Calvino’s side even when he speaks of books that “refuse to be eradicated from the mind.” Provided we’re talking about something that’s been acquired, not given by force (as it were), like a gift pushed into our pockets while we’re screaming that no, we don’t want it.