extensions

Last week, I attended a lecture by Prof. John Thompson (Cambridge) on “Books in the Digital Age.” And, in a discussion re: the academy and books and how they operate, Prof Ken Wark (from NS Sociology) made the point that, for students today, books are somewhat irrelevant. Instead, he presented the metaphor of the Professor-As-DJ, pulling PDF texts from here and there, remixing theory into a mashup we call “class.” And, for the most part, that’s true — most of my classes don’t have “books,” but readers, collections of texts.

I mention this, because, I’ve read D&G’s “Rhizome” chapter probably five or six times now, and I still don’t get *a lot* of it. And it makes me wonder, as I so often do when reading some of these authors for our classes, French philosophers in particular, what is it? Is it the translation? Are these guys just being purposefully obscure, a sort of hiding the fact that they don’t really have anything to say? Or, is it me — am I either not bright enough to grasp all this? Or, my point to all this, is it because I’m reading the chapter, instead of the book? Is there context that I need to really get this?

That said, I do get it enough to know that D&G’s work is important, because we just have to look at the world around us to see that their notion of rhizome explains much of what’s happening. Social networking, viruses like SARS, terrorist networks, new military models in response to terrorism threats, genetic research, new science understanding swarming behavior — all of this has become predominant in our culture in the last 10-20 years, and, if we look at previous cultural models, none seem adequate in describing just what’s happening today. None of them get to this idea of “connectedness,” which today is so predominant. And connectedness can be both positive (Wikipedia) and negative (SARS).

Multiplicities…always n-1. The network is always defined in terms of “taking-away-ness” — that speaks to the unstable nature of the rhizome, the idea that it’s never “one thing.” And, more importantly, it can never be broken, only changed. Ruptured, but continuing to flow…

One thing I did find intriguing was D&G’s description of the book as a machine, something seen in Aarseth:

As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a machine–not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place. The boundaries between these three elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two.

D&G say this triad (or, at least, a similar one…) no longer holds:

There is no longer a tripartite between the field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders…In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity.

In Aarseth, he’s suggesting something that’s not obvious, that the book is nothing without the “third party,” the human “operator.” D&G — I think(!) — are saying something similar. We cannot separate our or divide from us what we create. There are no clean and clear lines between “subject” and “representations” of our world, because there is no “One,” there is no singular subject, only connections, only multiplicities.

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object.”

This seems a rather radical statement, tossing aside the notion of subject/object, self/other, that’s been an essential element of thought since we started thinking. But, in light the idea of virtuality, and the messy kind of reality our networked lives in cyberspace have made, it makes sense. We need new terminology to describe this new sense of being, how we all exist now with on foot in the physical, and one in the virtual.

One question that I’ve been thinking about as I’m working on my final paper for my Digital Media Theory class is: “What if the server crashed?” That is, what would we lose if our virtual existences one day simply vanished?

It’s easy at first to think, “not much.” But, I can only speak for myself, it’s much more than that. There’s a good amount of thinking, of identity creation, of writing that I’ve invested online. And the more I put myself out in cyberspace, the more difficult it becomes to leave it.

I’ve (we’ve…?) grown dependent on our virtual lives, it’s more than an objective “other,” and, yet, it’s still difficult to think of it in the subjective sense.

Is it me, or is it my avatar?

So, I think what D&G have opened up is a new way to consider all this, new paradigms and descriptions and categories. And we need it…we’re tired of trees…

Microsoft invests in Facebook. And there is glee:

“Once a social operating system takes over a country it’s like it becomes the native language of that country,” said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook and notes that Google’s Orkut dominates Brazil, Friendster dominates the Philippines and Facebook is becoming the dominant forum in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Facebook boosters say that social networking represents the future of online activity. Advertisers are attracted to these properties because they offer an opportunity to aim ads to particular users interested in their product or service.

Is Facebook, and social networking in general, the “social operating system” of the future? Maybe, and that’s why Microsoft is interested. Operating systems abstracted us from the inner workers of the computer. Web browsers abstracted us from the operating system. Why not a “social networking” layer?

But it seems like there are two big strikes against the Microsoft-Facebook deal becoming the Greatest Thing Ever. One, the fact that sites like Facebook are “attractive” to advertisers, likely just means “more ads” for the site’s users. Companies quickly forget about the users, and turn to making the next buck as the prime motivator for business.

The other problem is that Friendster, if you remember, at one point was the coolest site around. MySpace seems to have gone down in status, as people built up Facebook. Social networking sites seem to have a fickleness factor. More ads, and something else better comes around, and it’s a few billion dollars down the drain.

It very well may be that social networking sites are the new OS, but it’s not that clear that Facebook will remain at the center.

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

While networks may have always been with us, they are, as Geert Lovink points out in “The State Of Networking,” the “emerging form of organization of our time.” The implications are vast, and hopefully others will add their thoughts here on that. I, though, wanted to focus on a slightly different aspect: the fragility of a network.

Networks are fluid, built to be impervious to an outside threat. The Internet was designed, in fact, on the premise of surviving a large-scale attack. A network, then, is resilient: “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze, 9).

In the arborescent, top-down world, this would be dangerous — a break in the hierarchy, and the system fails. See: Katrina, U.S. Hurricanes in the 21st Century.

But this fragility is not only inherent to a rhizomatic structure, but also an important reason why it exists — fragility, in this sense, is a postitive attribute. As Lovink notes, networks are “inherently unstable and its temporality is key…[they] are dense, social structures on the brink of collapse.” Networks can swarm around the breaks — that’s how the packet-switched communication technology on which the Internet works, and that paradigm can be applied to any rhizomatic structure, whether it’s at the technical bits and bytes level of the net, or the socially viral world of Obama girl (3.7 million views, and still going).

It’s easy, then, to think of the rhizome as subversive, a way to provide a means for a kind of digital “civil disobedience,” as Lovink suggests. But, in terms of power, the network is no longer (if it ever was) a space for rebellion and counter-culture. As Deuluze and Guattari note, the smooth and the striated are constantly at play, and the smooth, flat, networked world of the digital counter-culture doesn’t stay that way for long.

An example — today, I attended the IBM/Lotus Collaboration Summit, an event that saw a number of new products and announcements from the company. IBM, just like Microsoft and most in the tech business, see “Web 2.0,” that is, the social networking world, as their next and best chance for future money-making. IBM today told a tale of collaboration, and knowledge, and connections, and the Millennials, and how, of course, they would provide the foundation for all this innovation.

MySpace, also today, has announced a new advertising strategy, providing custom ads, based on whatever you have in your space. Not to be left out:

MySpace’s rival, Facebook, also says it is experimenting with ad customization with the help of Microsoft, which signed with the up-and-coming social network last year to provide display ads on the service. To the consternation of privacy advocates, who say Internet users are unaware of such activity, the social networks regard these detail-stocked profile pages as a kind of “digital gold,” as one Fox executive put it last year.

Digital gold, indeed.

So, the smooth, networked world of Web 2.0 won’t stay that way for long, as the value of our thoughts, our relationships, or connections, our creative energies will soon be scooped up by the digital panhandlers of the capitalistic system.

Meet the new boss…?

Maybe not. As always, networks are susceptible to virus writers and hackers, who test for points of vulnerability and exploit holes in the system (and no system is without holes, no code is perfect…). If distributed networks have become hegemonic, as NYU Professor Alex Galloway suggests in his essay, “Protocol” (pdf), if they have become “the new citadel, the new army, the new power,” it may be that virus writers, hackers, and crackers become the best way to subvert the control, both overt and covert, the network has placed over us.

I’m not suggesting, though, you get rid of your anti-virus software just yet.