Passing the problem to the practice

My previous post posited a number of possible pursuits within a practice, but really failed to bring together any logical focus or even starting point. My interests in this field feel very heterogeneous and underdeveloped - there is a clear difference between believing one has an interest in a particular area, and actually being interested.

I recall a conversation between a couple of friends over fiction writing - they were discussing overcoming problems of plot, where you need to get a character to a particular point or situation in order for the plot to move on. And a piece of advice that was found to be useful was 'give the problem to the character' - find a way to get the character to have to work out how to get themselves into a situation.

Is it possible, in a similar vein, to give the problem of what a practice is to be about, what its concerns are, back to the practice. To find a way within it for it to suggest (perhaps) what it wishes to be about.

This requires from the outset setting up a logic of practice without knowing what that practice is actually concerned with, other than its own self-discovery. This methodology is arguably philosophical in the modern sense, one can imagine it folding in on itself like Descartes meditations until it reaches its Cogito. Or it might never do so, it might continue collapsing, like Descartes practice might have if a certain kind of rigour had been applied to it (like Hume later does)

By what methodology could this be achieved? My first thought was of a database. I was interested that Lev Manovich seem to place databases with the internet as being flat interlink media, contrasting with the hierarchy of a traditional OS. But a database is as much its relationships as its data tables (just as the internet is surely as much its links as its contents). That relationships can be reconfigured does not mean there isn't some kind of implied hierarchy there. The types of possible relationships are defined by the pattern of primary keys after all - if a record has no unique identifier, or its identifier is not referenced, then the record cannot be connecting to others, and possible hierarchies are limited.

The question though is - what would a practice generating program look like to the end user, what would it say, what would it suggest? I can only at this point imagine the most strange and arbitrary configuration, of splicing interests at random with no understanding implied.

Establishing fields for exploration

I'm about to start an MA in Interactive Media next week, and I thought it might be helpful to use this public/private space to try and come up with some a short list of what I'm interested in, with the hope on being able to boil it down to some kind of off-the-cuff couple of sentences. Lets see what happens:

• the effect of the internet on social relations - I'm thinking particularly in terms of the re-ordering of face-to-face social interactions (ie. meeting people through the internet), on the generation of co-operative enterprises and the way the format of social networking sites shifts the way people talk and interact with each other - often through simple technologies (e.g. column width)
• the aesthetics of interface, especially in terms of making an interface feeling tangible - especially through synaesthesia.
• non-manipulative strategies for utilising marketing and surveillance technologies to turn 'control society' back on its head.
• simple interventions which show a certain field of relations in not just a new light, but one that makes the interactions clearer to see.
  
• the possibilities of speech recognition technology for exploring literary aesthetics and Wittgensteinian notions of 'coronas' of meaning.
• the generation of optimism and helplessness through certain interactive technologies, set against the conceptual problems of hope especially in terms of anthropological difference. (and we might ask here: can machines hope? what is it they can't do?)
• the ordering of concepts and knowledge - modes of categorisation and relation.
  

Unknowable hope? - some comments in lieu of a continuation

Having just returned to this blog in order to post on Kierkegaard, I've been re-reading the Can Dogs Hope mini-project to see if it can be moved forward.

The central issue seems to be this: if we are entirely unable to show that dogs display what we might term hope behaviour then we have no right to say that they can hope.

A further question arises: if we are unable to show that dogs display hope behaviour, do we have a right to say they can't hope?

Is this the right kind of question to ask? What would we be saying if we claimed an ant couldn't hope, or even that a rock couldn't hope? But we can imagine a situation where such terms have sense - for example where someone is pursuing an argument by analogy or metaphor, and we wish to disprove it or show its inappropriateness.

What would we make of someone who, when we remarked on watching a dog gazing up at a person with food that the dog was hopeful, remarked "dogs can't hope." Would it be different if we were in a pet shop and had said "my dog's hoping I bring him back a toy" or "I think my dog hopes I'll bring him back something tasty"? I think it would; and yet surely we can make sense of the dog believing either of these things.

I feel no closer to an answer, and I have to get to bed.

Kierkegaard and the dialectics of despair

I wanted to take a moment, not so much to reflect upon (for I've little time) but simply record a few notions of Kierkegaard's from The Sickness Unto Death. For Kierkegaard, despair comes in three formulations - in despair being unconscious of having a self, wanting in despair not to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself. Despair before god is sin, it constitutes a wilfulness before god; thus the opposite of despair is not hope but faith - a faith in which one humbles oneself before god. And likewise the opposite of sin is not virtue but the same said faith.

So what of hope in Kierkegaard's formulations? Hope for Kierkegaard is intimately bound with, even a form of despair. Hope is the despair of the possible without what is necessary or determined - the adolescent's despair is founded on hope: "he hopes for the extraordinary both from life and from himself" (2008, 69) The hopeful individual cannot acknowledge the limits of his or her existence; it seems quite natural that this could end in wanting in despair not to be oneself (if one feels one's weakness is the barrier to fulfilment) or wanting in despair to be oneself (if one feel's the barrier is external).

But I suspect this isn't exactly what Kierkegaard was getting at, for one these latter forms of despair depend on more spirituality than he credits the hopeful youth, whose main concern is over earthly things or the earthly in itself. Nor is the process outlined above enough to claim that hope is a form of despair, for it could be argued that what's been shown is a causal sequence; we could claim that love inevitably ends in hatred, but this is not sufficient to claim that love is hatred. And it does seem that Kierkegaard wants to argue for a stronger relation than causation: "Instead of taking possibility back to necessity he runs after possibility - and in the end cannot find his way back to himself" (2008, 41)

If hope leads us away from the self, perhaps hope is then a form a despair in ther first sense - that of being unconscious in despair of having a self. This seems the most coherent interpretation. But personally I am not convinced that this first form of despair is properly despair at all - even if it is a wilful unconsciousness of being in a state of despair, isn't it simply a cover for despair rather than despair itself? And doesn't it fall subject to all the pitfuls of positing something in unconsciousness - that it is far too easy to create an internally coherent system with its use, and near impossible to produce something demonstrable or disprovable? That's not to say Kierkegaard is necessarily wrong; rather that it's very much for Kierkegaard to show that he's right, and I don't think he manages this.