Form, content, and process ended up matching throughout the project.  Insofar as I was looking for control, it seems the actual work I designed and carried out implemented some of the bodily and intellectual reconfigurations I set out to trace.  The interface with the digital, the fragmentary nature of the project’s components, and my ultimate role as “manager,” rather than creator, say, of the information artifacts I gathered and constructed functioned to match my experience as worker with the modes of being that characterize the control society.  The content was explicitly gathered to expose control in daily life, and the process of assembling it evidenced those content-derived conclusions.  For instance, the temporality of assembling and linking, the alternate modes of synthesis through the space and duration between clicks, the habits of mind and body at the computer and in the world, the logic of hypertext, all contributed to a very different way of engaging thinking and academic problems.  In some ways, the novelty of the project in these terms–the way these form/content/process issues were explicitly foregrounded–served to denaturalize the usual intellectual work we undertake in the academy.  Thinking back to Kittler’s technodeterminism, I suppose the neatness of this three-way relation should come as no surprise.  That writing, research, and product together enter into the construction of hegemonic, techno-derived practices is no revelation, but actually coming to understand this process experientially in a way that my familiarity with the usual only allows me to conceive in the abstract has certainly been different.  New.  

And it seems appropriate then that it is process over product I find myself privileging here at the end.  As per previous posts, I am not pleased with the aesthetics or with some of the unresolved formal shortcomings of the thing (what are the rules of a good hypertext?) as thing in itself.  But I do feel the exercise was worth doing.  More than that, even.  It enabled me to realize, through my body (walking, taking pictures, reading, typing, connecting, clicking, fingertips, sight), what I would otherwise have only articulated through the old systems of discipline that still dominate scholarship.  These reflections, for me, deepen the urgency of certain questions and begin to point a way toward future work.  Interestingly, the process-oriented “results” of my final thoughts lead back to the larger questions of our seminar in relation to pedagogy, although these never seemed central to the project.  Working through distinctly different constraints and methodological problems highlights the significance of a structural approach to thinking composition:

1. How will our modes of knowledge production change in the context of new media? What is there to gain, lose?

2.  How are these new modes actualized across sites of subject production in the economy, the job market, etc.?  

3.  If the university’s rate of change is slow by comparison to the fields students enter, how can the aims of our pedagogy adapt? How will the university respond to the new formal imperatives of control? 

4.  What is composition?  How is the crisis of representation and the humanities redone in the context of the digital? What are we making? how? why?

5.  How are mind/body relations altered in the post-discipline context of intellectual work? How can we think through this in our classrooms?

6.  What about the practical changes and considerations we’ll have to make for new composition models? Not just reading and writing anymore, but the time it takes to assemble something digitally? The duration of uploading, coding, managing information? What new metrics for assessment will be required?

If discipline gave us the sustained process of reading and synthesizing into teleological arguments (even the poststructuralists do it, really)–the form/content/process trifecta of an Enlightenment orientation predicated upon the Cartesian subject–control gives us a digital space in which we must understand that these categories will not hold.  Or hold, differently.  More than any other area in the age of reason, the humanities obsessively struggle to define a function at once distinct from and indissolubly tethered to the use-value-bottom-line capital demands of practice.  Attention to composition process in the era of control seems a thread of inquiry worth engaging in this context as we work through the newest crisis of who we are and what we’re doing here.  It is not enough to return to the utopian formalism of the New Critics, denying use-value while serving it in the culture industry; nor is it enough to politicize and historicize form without material recourse to making.  Instead, the digital points up a compromise that might enable us to simultaneously consider the ontological and epistemological repercussions of pedagogy in the humanities without ignoring the actual, ontic manifestations of the politico-economic states-of-affairs in which we operate. The old dialect, then: we make the world as we are made by it.

My mother flunked out of art school.  

Working on my incarnation of Arcades, I wish I had allowed myself time to think of the aesthetic.  The wiki site is utilitarian, and attention to form could have, I think now, made the product of these weeks something more satisfying to me.  This exposes a bias I now see as with me to the end of this: focus on content over form.  Even if I thought I was engaged in formal considerations, they were still largely subsumed to an anxiety about and preoccupation with content.  It was only after I had devised a meaning-derived structure that I was able to start working, and when I assumed immediately I would not have the time to learn the code etc. necessary to make something aesthetically sophisticated, I set a very definite course for what I would produce.  It seems unfortunate in hindsight.  As I prepare to arbitrarily conclude the thing in the next few days, an unanticipated set of reflections emerges: 

1.  I feel I might now be better equipped to differentiate form and content than ever before.  Although those two terms constitute a relatively superficial distinction (as with so many binaries blablabla), working in a form that I have not spent the majority of my academic life mastering emphasized the ways the two interweave to create “meaning.” Actually working through this has enabled me to experience through making, rather than merely thinking and articulating in words, the difference between working through content and working through form.  Perhaps this is what I would have already learned had I not decided some time ago that the impossibility of making a living through art was an unconscious reason not to make any more of it.

2.  What would have been different if I had thought more specifically about form as a basis for constraint from the outset? For instance, process.  The wiki quickly became too unwieldy to interface with in any systematic way, and adding to the assemblage became a kind of disorganized proliferation.  I found myself constantly distracted by what I wanted to add where, going in the add and link something and immediately taking some other course of action.  I might set out to work solely on a specific convolute, but by nature this became impossible.  In this way, the process very much matched what I imagine the navigation of the arcades wiki will become: an only vaguely orderly procession down a series of generally interrelated paths.  This is alright.  But what if I had learned some other way of creating hypertext (ie–not a canned program) that required me to make more specific aesthetic choices? The logic of hypertext, too, still eludes me.  I’ve come to think of it like city planning: you plan the movement bodies will trace through the space of your design.  I am a novice planner, and the wiki shows it.  As I end, I am only starting to barely just now almost be able to conceive of the rules that govern this online space.  What do I have to link to what so that people will move in a certain way through my threads?  A very circumscribed space, like Stephanie Strickland’s “Ballad,” deals with these problems through a simultaneously simple and elegant organization of choice, randomness, and author-imposed direction.  What I have made is much bigger and rudimentarily conceived.  I still need to go through and check for dead-ends, but this seems almost impossible now.  A literal lesson then: do this as you go, because you may never return to where you had been.

The work proliferates, thanks to structure.  Now that I’ve set it up, I can spend hours adding and assembling.  This project is very much one of “this AND this.”  No “or.”  

Things have also become quite enjoyable.  I don’t feel as if I am “working.”  Is this a new affect for thinking?  A new rigor.  I left my debit card at the bar for five days.  I mailed my taxes on the fifteenth.  I’ve been eating the same food (red potatoes, green beans) and/or wearing the same clothes (pants, shirt). 

I wish I knew about computers and stuff.  Like how to make things look cool.  

There can be absolutely no end to this.  I suppose that’s why Benjamin left Arcades unfinished and died.  The idea of an arbitrary cessation on Monday is difficult to conceive.  It will not be done.  Will I feel as if it should be done?   Will I feel it is nothing because it is by nature unfinished?

I know now who to call in Pittsburgh if I want to advertise my small business or find/become a surrogate mother.  I know that the Post-Gazette covers a lot of sports.

To do: add convolutes (food, university). upload pictures. check each fragment for links. link dead ends.  add more external links.  add poetry. add synthesis for each convolute.  update bibliography. 

http://pittsburgharcades.pbwiki.com/

There is a mundanity to the process that seems simultaneously disheartening and exciting.  This, because of ubiquity.  See, I’m putting up the most omnipresent words and images–they’re everywhere. They’re contemporary materiality.  And this makes them seem at once very boring in their original contexts (in a newspaper, on the bus, the sidewalk, the grocery store) and potentially interesting in the context I’m trying to reconfigure for them through links.  The paradoxical affect, then, of looking directly at an everyday that is always there, constructing us.  Probably not what Heidegger would call thinking, but perhaps not its binary, either.  Also, maybe dangerous in that the capacity for failure seems higher when you’re trying to make critical sense of what’s right in front of you–we saw that with Manovich and his attempted snapshot of the current moment.  Or perhaps it’s just that the past is easier to pretend to have gotten right.  It is past, after all.

I make tea and go back to bed with a pile of books. Things are happening. This week, I have worked on the wiki and begun to string things together.  Change you can believe in:

1. I have come to enjoy this. Not least the fact that a fragmented mind can do fragmented work at any time. There’s a new temporal arrangement to the whole thing.  I do not have to allocate an entire day to this work, although I still will spend those days. Instead, I can link anything I find any time I’m online (I’ve never liked the term “surf,” the sound of it, anyway).  This is dangerous and wonderful in that it weds my internet idleness to work; it makes me always a worker. That, of course, was one of the dangers for Deleuze–we are always now working in the control society where physical location is no longer a constraint on our productive capacities.  But the liberatory side–always, two sides–is that this might not be work, although its telos begins and ends with academic mandates.  Is it work, or is it making? I feel it to be both–and, in that, particularly appropriate to the questions I’m asking through form and content.

2. My processes here, the choices I make about what to include, have come to emphasize the elision between the global and the local that control effects.  While I’ve stated a commitment to locating the hypertext in my immediate place, the enterprise proves that Pittsburgh is a networked site tied up along a continuum from local to global.  It proves this through my body and the things I read: not just the Post-Gazette, but the New York Times, always. Not just paper, but digital media, images, words that actualize on my screen in my apartment.  These are no less Pittsburgh.  This place is not only sandwiches with french fries inside or electric flowers on the quad.  It is as much the linked up wires and waves that bring the rest of the world to work on us.  I will not, then, hesitate to include everything that touches me here, at this point.  In an interesting way, these considerations deepen my understanding of the abstractions we tick off when we describe our hyperlinked first world.  

Reading Flusser and Manovich with Deleuze last week helped me to conceptualize what I’ve been trying to get at in structuring this project.  That is to say, I want to ask the questions Negri, Hardt, and others have been asking since Deleuze appropriated Foucault’s term “society of control.”   What exactly is going on these days? If the institutions of discipline are in crisis, but are still quite obviously in place, what is changing?  With Negri and Hardt, I want to look at it (it being the present world of our concern) along a modernity/postmodernity, control/discipline spectrum.  

With this larger framework in mind, Benjamin’s Arcades becomes methodological (hyperlinked web of collected debris and observations) and morphological (I’ll take something like the shape he’s making), though the temporal location of the object of inquiry changes.  Benjamin found the history of the 19th century in the 20th as much as in itself.  I want to take the immediate historical moment (is it history yet?) as my focus.  I want to find the moment where it operates.  But I also want to compare and contrast.  If Arcades shows us discipline, what do those same tropes (convolutes, Benjamin calls them) look like these days and here, in the streets of Pittsburgh? Or more specifically Oakland, which is where I usually am and therefore would like to think.  What happens to the collector, the photograph, the flaneur, fashion, architecture in the society of control?  Many of the structures are the same–this city was built years back–but the things that happen in and through them have changed.  How?  How do people, animals, plants, objects distributed in public and private space compare with the distributions of the disciplinary society? How is Pittsburgh not at all Paris, and what does this say about our location along Negri and Hardt’s global smooth space?

Processual concerns this week:

1.  I know how to make images smaller now.  

2.  After taking notes and working on this idea for several days, I realized I still had nothing visible, so I posted my notes in progress–a long collection of quotes and poorly punctuated summary/thoughts/plans/hopes/dreams–and an unfinished introduction on the wiki site.  A twofold set of concerns arise hence: a) I am posting these things to prove I have been working.  I confess to a degree of anxiety about the shift from process to product.  As I write, say, a seminar paper, I know that the time it takes me to research and synthesize will be invisible, read only in the conventional passability of the final draft.  Working on this different metric of vague equivalence to that effort, what do I show? How do I prove?  How do I let go of the impulse to prove a certain degree of quality?  b) As we’ve said in class, it feels uncomfortable to bare the unpolished junk of thinking and writing.  It’s like intellectual exhibitionism–whipping off the coat to reveal the socially unsanctioned, slightly dirty forms beneath.  In that sense, I guess it’s kind of hot.

3.  As we quoted Flusser this week, “A shoemaker not only makes leather shoes; he also makes a shoemaker out of himself” (45).  I notice as I go on with things that this project requires I make something else out of myself.  Here’s the thing: I walk around campus, around Friendship, Shadyside, Lawrenceville, and I look at things more closely.  In my daily habits, I am compiling, which requires a kind of attention I rarely engage in when my object of inquiry lies only between the covers of books.  It is a wholly different subjective exercise.  Too, I will make time this week to walk in space and find more objects, images, movements.  I must essentially schedule a time to wander.  How different from the usual academic enterprises.  And then there’s method.  Lacing things up as hypertext, the speed of connections I can make without the synthetic constraints of linear exposition, feels new.  Letting the click and the space/duration between pages serve as the connecting thread–rather than words, that is–has started to feel exciting in the sense that I no longer have to pare down and leave out for the sake of a thesis.  And all in the spirit of Benjamin.

Cheers.  

1.  Media: How do you use the internet? It seems difficult.  For example, I need to figure out how to make my photo files smaller.  This is one inane example of the time consuming problems that result from general technological ignorance.  I will learn.

2.  Method:  When will I do what, and how? Toward this, I have started posting found items for later analysis (see above for technical challenges) at this site: http://pittsburgharcades.pbwiki.com/.  Two categories are up (though only perfunctorily named)–the space has at least been created.  I’m afraid of limiting myself to a certain focus each week; I’m also afraid of the converse.  I’ve also yet to decide the function of this blog, though I am already posting this.  In any event, this much is certain: the wiki will contain found items throughout the term, though a majority of writing and linking might take place in the final weeks.  

3.  Content: How long can I go on without an overarching framework? Some are coming to the fore.  I want to take a number of Benjamin’s threads and weave them for the current moment as manifest in Pittsburgh, specifically in Oakland, specifically (perhaps) around the Cathedral of Learning.  My interest in the building stems from the fact that I spend much of my time there, praying to the god of learning.  I recently learned a number of floors are reserved for what is loosely termed “mechanical equipment.”  This seems notable.  Still, I’m not sure.  I want to talk about architecture, yes; and the things publicly displayed, as well as what grows–the inside and the outside.  I might talk about movement and night, and the way technology reconfigures Benjamin’s key 19th century figures–that’s the flaneur, collector, gambler.  But I still feel engaged in a process of narrowing.  These limits are not enough.  This project seems just that–a process of defining the limits that emerge from an overabundance of material.  An explicit simulacrum, then, of our usual being-in-the-world.

Coming Soon: Bibliography; Sense; Thinking.