Cultural Stacks

I am exploring/developing a  concept of "cultural stacks" in the hope it may help me clarify my position...

(And maybe for comparing types of creativity: (1) access to emergence &  (2) construction

(I need a simple yet extendible concept that focusses attention on ideology and is inclusive, not bound to the dualism of language!)

The cultural stack is a continuum between a defined "commons"  Zizek (2010)* and a situated subject position (Davies and Harre, Henriques) ....

(c.f Finding a groundless solidarity? re the Flat Plane post structural and the "Individual"

What is a cultural stack?

The vertical poles/arrows represent the  extended 'identification' of a subject position in cultural space 

The discs represent cultural layers: each layer specifies :'objects', 'actions' and 'names'

The  top of the stack is where we always find a situated & located subject position 

(c.f   post-structural  theory)...

       (c.f Our exclusive I-ness?<> specific role?)

The  foundation of the stack is where we find the Commons  (our inclusive We-ness) (a meta narrative?

Subject, Subject Positions and Stacks

A specific subject (me, you) may have access to numerous subject positions, (c.f. roles)

Another aspect of this theory is that of transparency of layers

To the specific situated individual subject position, certain layers of the stack with their options of action, owned objects, and names are transparent, some are not, some can be changed, some cannot...

If a layer is not transparent then the actions/objects/names of that layer are taken as given, they are 'facts' not assumptions... here is how cultural stacks depict ideology....

Can the specific subject position change the transparency of layers and change the values within the layers:? here is where we find the importance of meta-language, to be able to discuss access to values...?

When access to these layers are available (i.e. they are transparent) the 'common layers meta-narrative' is able to be discussed in relation to the subject position as compared with just imposing an ideology...as 'fact'

The transparency of layers is directly related to designed perceived affordance  and affect

"for in design, we care much more about what the user perceives than what is actually true. What the designer cares about is whether the user perceives that some action is possible (or in the case of perceived non-affordances, not possible)."

Norman

c.f 

"I use the concept of affect as away of talking about a margin of manouverability, the 'where we might be able to go' and 'what we might be able to do' in every present situation. I guess 'affect' is a word I use for 'hope': 

Massumi

Massumi is concerned with human value , Norman is concerned with design value...

Levels of creative enquiry may only be concerned with an objective task, i.e. the transparency of deep cultural levels may not be addressed, though they may well influence the enquiry

They may concern wider human values...

Yet as most design tasks take place in the context of a user/subject position human values are always relevant...

To retain and extend the hope (and affect)  Massumi is concerned with in such a context  may require the following...

" the abandomment of conditioned influences, abandonment of reassurances about reality, and ultimately the sacrifice of ones Weltangschuung. as long as these influences remain intact, thepossibility of unending enquiry remains a myth" D'arcy

Looking at Theory via Cultural Stacks:

Bordieu and Cultural Stacks

Bordieu admits social formations are structured in hierarchical fields

The Dispositions/inclinations of habitus could be depicted as flowing along the arrows

The  (objects)events of the world trigger responses (actions) based on these  dispositions/inclinations

however

Another important feature of the concept of field is that
it is a dynamic concept; a change in the positions of the
agents acting in the field will change the structure of the
field itself. The field is therefore nothing more or less
than the total positions of the agents interacting in it

Cultural capital:

The agents in the field, low versus high, compete for the
scarce resource they can harvest in a particular field, for
instance academic qualifications in the academic field -
academic qualifications are equal to what money are in the
economic field, creating a universally acceptable resource

for obtaining high or low positions in the field. (p.187 Theory of Practice) Bourdieu argues that human view not only economic capital, but social and cultural capital as scarce resources, which as he writes,:"...may be 'fair words' or smiles, handshakes or shrugs, compliments or attention, challenges or insults, honour or honours, powers or pleasures..." (p.178 Theory of practice) These forms of capital can be harvested in different fields

(Think about these )

Example : engineer a may be a punk rockers so he has 

* an engineer layer with tools and skills

* "punk" layer with accessories and actions

* he has a "human" layer with human needs (Shelter, love, food etc)

Some of these layers and there attributes may be more accessible/transparent to him than others...

If they are not transparent then he is subject to ideology...

Discussing a particular attribute of the engineer within a particular layer is not the same as discussing the stack, they are a different type of discussion...

Discussing the layer within the layer would be a meta-discussion (different from a meta narrative) it would show self awareness- reflexivity.....

Bridging the specific technical (The limb) with the collective  commons (the social body)?

Social Research is concerned with norms of name, action and object in the layers of the stack...?

But only in relation to an individual do they become enacted....

The academic tradition has an aim of creating/enabling access to knowledge:  transparent cultural layers as experienced from specific subject positions...

Does the market has an interest in defining the top of the stack as real and obscuring the more communal levels

Does it drive an ontology of exclusion

Is this  done by fixing subject positions that lack knowledge of alternatives to products sold

These alternatives may be simple material replacements, or different relations/interpretations that sit at different cultural levels of the stack 

Information overload can also obscure access to alternatives...

We could perhaps explore Gaaltungs Transcend via this: see article  (re Habermas/Bourdieu/ Foucault/)

What about comparing types of creativity: (1) access to emergence &  (2) construction

*"today intellectual property is our commons, information is our commons. Something that Marx could not have predicted is taking place today: we are witnessing a strange regression to the same kind of enclosure of the commons, and people having to pay rent to people like Bill Gates for intellectual property."  Zizek 2010

‘The enclosure of the commons is a process of proletarianisation of those who are excluded from their own substance… The present conjecture compels us to radicalise it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject.’

Zizek - "First as Tragedy, then as Farce"

**     Transparency of information re reaching decisions due to technology c.f information overload c.f 

Heylighen

***   D'arcy

On Critique Massumi

http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n4_t_massumihtml.html

Affective Resonance & segmentation of the decentered-self?

Although feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects areprepersonal. In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to unpack the previous sentence and provide some examples that will illustrate why the distinction I’ve made between feelings, emotions, and affects is more than pedantry.


This has to do with the second term in Massumi’s definitions of affect/affection.L’affection is the process whereby affect is transmitted between bodies. “The transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (Brennan 6). Because affect is unformed and unstructured (unlike feelings and emotions) it can be transmitted between bodies. The importance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message.

Let me clarify that the transmission of affect does not mean that one person’s feelings become another’s. The transmission of affect is about the way that bodies affect one another. When your body infolds a context and another body (real or virtual) is expressing intensity in that context, one intensity is infolded into another. By resonating with the intensity of the contexts it infolds, the body attempts to ensure that it is prepared to respond appropriately to a given circumstance. Given the ubiquity of affect, it is important to take note that the power of many forms of media lies not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning.

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php






Are there are different types of resonance?, natural resonance of water based life forms  and the resonance of solid state technology (mobile phones etc)... are some healthier (more inclusive) than others...?


Is it a possibility some of  the designed systems are or soon will be designed / evolve incidentally to enhance (via simplistic symbolic framing (Headly and Clark),  segmentation and reduction (Ahlander & Lahache, Bernays)) distance  mistrust, fear and conflict between common humanity by the automated  manipulation of online profiles etc, as these systems are mostly built with nothing but profit in mind. And  mistrust, fear and conflict happen to be profitable for certain powerful interest groups: security, arms, lawyers etc....

Does hope lies in the shared celebration (Delanda) that is not dependent on exclusive forms of consumption (reification) or ritual, and ensuring space for this...?

Ahlander & Lahache Complexities of lifestyle brand segmentation(2006 Masters Thesis)
Bernays, E. Engineering of consent (1955, contributor) (1928, Propaganda)
Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 2004.

Headly and Clark Debating anti war protests 2005

Massumi, Brian. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987
Parables for the Virtual. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Art & the Instrumental : Massumi

Art foregrounds the dynamic, ongoingly relational pole. Everyday experience foregrounds the object-oriented, action-reaction, instrumental pole. That pole comes across as stable because it offers our action perches -- “affordances” in J.J. Gibson’s vocabulary. We attend to the perchiness, and let the other side of that same coin, the passing-relation side, slip behind the use we can exact from the perception. Art brings back out the fact that all form is necessarily dynamic form. There is really no such thing as fixed form – which is another way of saying that the object of vision is virtual. Art is the technique for making that necessary but normally unperceived fact perceptible, in a qualitative perception that is as much about life itself as it is about the things we live by. Art is the technique of living life in -- experiencing the virtuality of it more fully, living it more intensely.


This also suggests a way of dealing with the question of interaction in art, and why the question of whether it is art or not comes up so insistently. A distinction of Whitehead’s is useful here. He calls the experience of the flow of action “causal efficacy”, and the qualitative, vitality affect, aspect he calls “presentational immediacy.” You can’t have one without the other, but presentational immediacy tends to disappear into the flow of causal efficacy. OWe see with and through it to the affordances we take as the actual form of things. Only rarely do we do the opposite -- see with and through the actual form to the dynamism of life. Now, you have to take interactivity at its word. Its flow is a flow of action. It’s true that the flow is two-way. But the back and forth is of action and reaction. It always comes back to causal efficacy, instrumentality, affordance. This backgrounds the qualitative-relational aspect – even when it is supposed to be all about social relation. By putting relation so fully into action, interactivity backgrounds its own artistic dimension. That’s the dimension of relationality in its own right, as opposed to a particular relating-to, for this or that already determined purpose


http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_4/n1_massumihtml.html

Wall-Smith - Masumi

Stubborn Relationality

In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi argues for a human thought and subject that are fundamentally folded in with the pre-conscious and autonomic modulation of perception. Massumi's theory is extrapolated from a number of perceptual phenomena that undermine the dominant assumption that the mechanics of perception can be distinguished from the processes of thought out deduction. These phenomena suggest that there is no level of thought removed from the vagaries and determinations of the mechanics of perception. The theory presented in Parablesamounts to a refiguring of the mechanics of perception as cognition. At the least, Massumi's argument erodes the possibility of a hard distinction between perception and thought. In the process he threatens the perceived autonomy of the subject by providing an empirical basis for the suggestion that the subject emerges and finds their continuity in the relation between body and world. Indeed, even the autonomous body is threatened. If the thinking subject is conceived as emerging in the codetermination between body and world then our understanding of the mechanisms of thought cannot be reduced to the body alone. Our conception of thought and subject begins to leak out into the world and our struggle to understand the genesis and continuity of both becomes ecological rather that simply biological - it becomes stubbornly relational.

Toward An Ontology of Mutual Recursion: Models, Mind and Media

Mat Wall-Smith
English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales

Affect & Hope in the context of Designed Percieved Affordance :

I use the concept of affect as away of talking about a margin of manouverability, the 'where we might be able to go' and 'what we might be able to do' in every present situation. I guess 'affect' is a word I use for 'hope': Massumi

Humans and their  Activity Systems (eg education) can become individualised, isolated and enclosed (re enclosure/subject positions ( Davies and Harre, Henriques) by   Designed Systems (Physical and Abstract (Eg Search Engines (1), Mapping Tools ))

the discourse dominated by the objectification of  "designed perceived affordance"(£££) (Norman)

(one counter to this could be  Affective Resonance (Massumi))

The closure is derived not simply because of lack of will on behalf of the enquirer but because of  conditioning bought about by the following influences:

The bounded nature of acquired knowledge sets, accepted norms of social env (Hegemony?)

The cultural belief that the only way to extend ones knowledge is to follow an incremental extension of well-defined knowledge sets.. (D'arcy) (this is an epistemological/educational problem) (relates to acceptance of/enquiry into  Random Expressive Flow)

'Practical' constraints'  and priorities (Who decides?) (c.f Construction drive ideology)

Weltanschuungen (Checkland) etc

Another boundary could be added to depict the point at which the potential environment

To retain and extend hope (and affect) in such a context may require the following...

" the abandomment of conditioned influences, , abandonment of reassurances about reality, and ultimately the sacrifice of ones Weltangschuung. as long as these influences remain intact, thepossibility of unending enquiry remains a myth" D'arcy

Relates to Massumi/Manning, see Q's  Foucault

Affective Resonator (Massumi) - re individual/de-centred self

Could be related to Frankfurt School - Critical Theory - Habermas/Marcuse

(1) I discovered the "Filter Bubble"Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles" | Video on TED.com ]
 2 days after designing the above diagram, Is this a collective affective resonance(Massumi) or the filter bubble itself?

As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

"If "code is law", as Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig declared, it's important to understand what the new lawmakers are trying to do. We need to understand what the programmers at Google and Facebook believe in. We need to understand the economic and social forces that are driving personalisation, some of which are inevitable and some of which are not. And we need to understand what all this means for our politics, our culture and our future."

 Eli Pariser. The Filter Bubble

HENRIQUES, J. et al. (1984) Changing the subject. Psychology,

social regulation and subjectivity. London, Methuen.

Notes

Foucault > MAssumi

Beyond closed competing power based pessimism

of classification systems

to hope in the present ground of Environmental Field Effect

Massumi.

Emergence of energy/identification/ (info?) from environmental 

Sacred Discourse

Context

Reduce Suffering > Peace Health Happiness

Rationality?Enough?

Extend Rationality?

1. Concepts of Random Expressive Flow?

Random Walks

2. Space for Emergence of  Mutual Value/Quality (Vibration/Vision/Information)  from Noise

...environmentally emergent accounting for itself...

eg Natural Complex Projection Systems

Trees/Bushes/Clouds - Earths Creativity (Deleuze)

When we met outside there was a background of complex projection surfaces... distraction? aid?

Elevator music?

Eno thinking music...

Background chatter on Public Transport.

Discussion beneath Clouds - Vid Camera.

C.f. Drawing Machines

Mussami/Manning - Experiential Field, Phenomenological Field.

Earth as Present - Turtle Bed - Tibetan  - Freefall Freedom - Brian

Buddha, Running Woman, Theatre.

Field of Immediate Experience - 

The dance of attention, 

co composer, 

an indetermination of a coming to be determining

Massumi & Manning

"Brian Massumi and Erin Manning lecturing about Coming Alive in a World of Texture: For Neurodiversity at the Thinking - Resisting - Reading the Political conference in Giessen, Germany, November 12th 2010 
They talk about multiplicities of existences, emergent relations in the environment, re-conceptualizing what it means to be "human" and what it means to be "autistic". Specifically they focus on neuro typical experience of experiential fielding, inter-modal modes of existence, intricacies of perception, environmental awareness, entrainment, and actively relational thinking"


Keywords

Emergence, Experiential Field, Qualitative

This appears to me a dynamic balance of performativity & knowledge, a coda? the contrast  between the neurotypical & the autistic somehow acting as a vehicle for and extended insight feedback... into the eco(emergent) - conceptual(classification) awareness affordance? choice from moment to moment?
Automatic Reconstructon (Reproduction, Function) and Concious Reconstruction (Reflexive/Aesthetic?)...

I picked up that this  concerned with that (field effect)  which emerges beyond and before categorisation and social construction... (Delanda)  of the celebration inherent in and emergent from the ecological...? potential inherent in matter....(BwO), before the cut of the intellectual knife of conceptualisation...

before conceptualisation gets to work on the phenomenological experience...

Before themes are picked from the raw data...

Massumi on Predictability - Patterns- Classification-Marketing

In such a fluid economy, based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life - your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation - check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and around.

Massumi on Foucault and Capitalism

... you have to get rid of the idea as power or constraint as power over. It’s always a power to. The true power of the law is the power to form us. Power doesn’t just force us down certain paths, it puts the paths in us, so by the time we learn to follow its constraints we’re following ourselves. The effects of power on us is our identity. That’s what Michel Foucault taught us. If power just came at us from outside, if it was just an extrinsic relation, it would be simple. You’d just run away. In the 1960s and 1970s that’s how a lot of people looked at it - including myself. Drop out, stop following the predictable, straight-and-narrow path, and things like sexism will just disappear. Well, they didn’t. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Power comes up with us from the field of potential. It ‘informs’ us, it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it emerges with us - we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to a number of predictable paths. It’s the calculable part of affect, the most probable next steps and eventual outcomes. As Foucault says, power is productive, and it produces not so much repressions as regularities. Which brings us to the ‘society of control’ and to capitalism 


This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism’s dynamic. It’s not a simple liberation. It’s capitalism’s own form of power. It’s no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it’s capitalism’s power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are OK - as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It’s very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there’s been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.


When you buy a computerised product, you can do a lot of different things with it - you use it to extend your affective capacities. It becomes a motor force of your life - like a turbo charge to your vitality. It enables you to go farther and to do more, to fit more in. The way even older-style products are sold has something to do with this. You don’t just buy a car, the dealers tell us, you buy a lifestyle. When you consume, you’re not just getting something to use for a particular use, you’re getting yourself a life. All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding ...


It’s this enabling of experience that is taking over. Now, that enablement of experience has to be tended. Companies work very hard to produce brand loyalty. ‘Fidelity programs’ involving things like rewards points are everywhere. The product becomes a long-term part of your life, you’re brought into a relationship with the company through fidelity programs, service networks, promises of upgrades, etc. The way you use the product is also more and more oriented towards relationship - the most seductive products produce possibilities of connection. ‘Connectibility’ is another buzzword. When we buy a product, we’re buying potential connections with other things and especially other people - for example, when a family buys a computer to keep in touch by email, or when you get a computer for work and end up joining on-line communities. What’s being sold more and more is experience, social experience. The corporation, the capitalist company, is having to create social networks and cultural nodes that come together around the product, and the product gets used more and more to create social networks that radiate out from it. ‘Networking’ was the buzzword in the 1980s, when this new kind of capitalist power was just coming into its own.
Marketing itself is starting to operate along those lines. There is a new kind of marketing called viral marketing where specialised companies will surf the web to find communities of interest that have spontaneously formed. It started in the music industry, around fan networks for bands. They find a group of people who have a very strong affective attachment to a band or a performer that is very central to how they see themselves and to what they perceive as the quality of their life. They will network with them, offer them tickets or inside information, or special access, and in return the members of the group will agree to take on certain marketing tasks. So the difference between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost indistinguishable. On both the production side and the consumption side it is all about intangible, basically cultural products or products of experience that invariably have a collective dimension to them.


ndividual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes rather than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals. This is a step beyond niche marketing, it’s relational marketing. It works by contagion rather than by convincing, on affect rather than rational choice. It works at least as much on the level of our ‘indeterminate sociality’ as on the level of our identities. More and more, what it does is hitch a ride on movements afoot in the social field, on social stirrings, which it channels in profit-making directions. People like Negri talk about the ‘social factory’, a kind of socialisation of capitalism, where capitalism is more about scouting and capturing or producing and multiplying potentials for doing and being than it is about selling things. The kind of work that goes into this he calls ‘immaterial labour’. The product, ultimately, is us. We are in-formed by capitalist powers of production. Our whole life becomes a ‘capitalist tool’ - our vitality, our affective capacities. It’s to the point that our life potentials are indistinguishable from capitalist forces of production. In some of my essays I’ve called this the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism.
Jeremy Rifkin is a social critic who now teaches at one of the most prestigious business schools in the US (talk about the capture of resistance!). Rifkin has a description of capitalism that is actually surprisingly similar to Negri’s. And he’s teaching it to the next generation of capitalists. It centres on what he calls ‘gatekeeping’ functions. Here the figure of power is no longer the billy club of the policeman, it’s the barcode or the PIN number. These are control mechanisms, but not in the old sense of ‘power over’. It’s control in Gilles Deleuze’s sense, which is closer to ‘check mechanism’. It’s all about checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN number on your card checks you into your account. The checks don’t control you, they don’t tell you where to go or what to be doing at any particular time. They don’t lord it over you. They just lurk. They lie in wait for you at key points. You come to them, and they’re activated by your arrival. You’re free to move, but every few steps there’s a checkpoint. They’re everywhere, woven into the social landscape. To continue on your way you have to pass the checkpoint. What’s being controlled is right of passage - access. It’s about your enablement to go places and do things. When you pass the checkpoint you have to present something for detection, and when you do that something registers. Your bank account is debited, and you and your groceries pass. Or something fails to register, and that’s what lets you pass, like at airport security or places where there’s video surveillance. In either case what’s being controlled is passage across thresholds.
Society becomes an open field composed of thresholds or gateways, it becomes a continuous space of passage. It’s no longer rigidly structured by walled-in enclosures, there’s all kinds of latitude. It’s just that at key points along the way, at key thresholds, power is tripped into action. The exercise of the power bears on your movement - not so much you as a person. In the old disciplinary power formations, it was always about judging what sort of person you were, and the way power functioned was to make you fit a model, or else. If you weren’t the model citizen, you were judged guilty and locked up as a candidate for ‘reform’. That kind of power deals with big unities - the person as moral subject, right and wrong, social order. And everything was internalised - if you didn’t think right you were in trouble. Now you’re checked in passing, and instead of being judged innocent or guilty you’re registered as liquid. The process is largely automatic, and it doesn’t really matter what you think or who you are deep down. Machines do the detecting and ‘judging’. The check just bears on a little detail - do you have enough in your bank account, do you not have a gun? It’s a highly localised, partial exercise of power - a micro-power. That micro-power, though, feeds up to higher levels, bottom up.
http://www.international-festival.org/node/111