I’m going to indulge in some concrete abstraction. If it hurts just turn away…I need to post to test the blog and I thought I may as well post something worthwhile…you were given fair warning!
The more I think about and engage with the technologies that enable or move toward the concept of ‘eduglu’ I realise that there is a strong and practical link to my research on Stiegler’s Instrumental Maieutics (Stiegler: 1998). Its the ‘in-between’ that matters most. This is a hard concept for people that normally deal with specific utilities to grasp - and perhaps its pretty alien to our mode of being-in-the-world, or what Brian Massumi calls our ‘ways of carrying variation’ (Massumi 2002). We tend to concentrate on isolating and making-instrumental a perceived difference. What this means, in practical terms, is that when we perceive a shift in the ecological order (in this case of knowledge production, demand and distribution) we try to isolate that difference by latching on to a particular set of technologies, softwares, or solutions. In most institutional settings (and perhaps more generally in a consumer culture) the easiest way to assume a kind of capture or ownership of contingency is to be able to purchase it. People want a turnkey solution that they can ‘own’. Of course ownership here is not really ‘ownership’ in the proper ‘instrumental’ (having access to its facility) sense -just the abstract monetary sense.
What we need to understand is that the shift presaged and sensed by/in a network culture is not reducible to a particular system. It is, rather, a change in the relational dynamic - a change in the way things change/emerge/disperse - and consequently a change in the way continuities form and persist. In order to capture and contain (make instrumental) this networked difference we will need to come to terms not with a ‘given’ (system, software,technology) itself but ‘the difference by which the given is given’. (Deleuze: 2004) In short this means, that we need to work out strategies for instrumentalising the differential….
This may seem pretty ‘airy fairy’ and theoretical but it is actually intensely and politically engaged with the everyday task of building information systems and architectures. Your ability to connect and to incorporate connections in the service of forging a dynamic and productive (live-ly) continuity is determined by the adoption of systems capable of harnessing (and agitating) the differential rather than containing a difference. In order for a dynamic community of learning, research, and application to persist beyond beyond the life span of one system or architecture, we need to establish protocols and adopt standards that ensure the flow and redundancy of knowledge - which has in the process become pure connection. This is why I keep repeating the mantra; ‘flat and decentralised’ -because that is what will preserve the potential to realise new, unthought, pre-individual, connections via novel aggregations of a molecular datascape…
If your still confused- its all about syndication and aggregation……but couldn’t we just as well call these the networks mode of perception and expression?
Maintaining a flat and distributed ontology effectively just multiplying our ways of seeing and becoming in a networked world..
on Feb 2nd, 2009 at 11:59 am
Firstly, Nice kittens.
Secondly, great post Mat. Such an insightful synthesis of the way in which the inherent emergence of networks requires a differential thinking that can span across systems and platforms. “flat and decentralised’ is a mantra worthy of repetition. In Foucaultian terms we might say networks reveals shifts in governmentality: a reorganisation of the the point of contact between technologies of domination (University architectures and ‘new university’ discourses of pedagogy, quality and verification), and a re-organistion of technologies of self (student, teacher, academic, avatar). And yet when I think of the classroom experience, it seem to me that teaching has never felt so centralised and hierachical. Partly, this is an issue of design for us as teacher researchers.
I’m hoping this year to focus more on the dynamic ( the learning) rather than synoptic product pushed out by the anxious student at the end of the whole process. Trying to harness the anxiety as a force for productivity rather than meltdown. And meltdowns seem on the rise, which lead me to wonder about the relation of affect and the emergence of a new type of therapeutic student subjectivity that the new Universities invoke. How to think differentially about the relations between teaching and learning? That’s a question.
on Feb 2nd, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Hey G…
I’ve thought quite alot about the relationship between Authorship and Authority evident across two otherwise pretty divergent Foucault’s. The link between them is made fundamentally clear and forced front and center when we consider the clearly stated governmental rationales for a private ‘for profit’ DNS and the way those formative assumptions shaped the development of the network. I think in most cases we still tend to think through that topology when designing network architectures and so we are still concerned with building ’sites’ - of course the intent of design is in most case far removed from the cultures and socialities that develop on that site once it becomes ‘torsional’ and ‘transductive’ . In web2.0 we’ve seen a shift in companies understanding the generative force of this ‘torsion’ is key to any sort of survival and capitalisation in the networked space. Like a few other commentators I’ve kind of moved on from that realisation and am trying to work out how we can move beyond this corporate capitalization of user interaction, how we can redistribute the excess generated within these corporate silo’s - once again the ’simple’ answer is that mantra; ‘flat and decentralised’. How can we ascribe metadata that is never ‘meta’ that exists on the same plane (vortex) as the data which it aggregates and which is never centralised in an attempt to capture and contain that ‘meta layer’ and its capacity for enabling a fluid ‘transduction’ - a continuity of value greater then the sum of its parts.
Of course all this works at the level learning and teaching. In part because the same modelisation that saw the network formed and governed as ‘defined territories’ - that is registered sites with ‘populations moving about in a calculated way’ also informs the development of institutional learning and teaching (amongst pretty much everything else of course-Foucault D&P -From memory sorry Michel). In part I think the answer for L&T is changing the perception of what an outcome is - both for teachers and students. This comes back to a sense of the power/responsibilty of authorship. In all our auditing and careful stipulation of determined outcomes we move away from affording the student responsibilities and/or value from what they produce in a course. Somewhat ironically this is all tied to the an old mentality about giving students a safe place to learn without fear of repercussions should they fail. The heirarchical and centralised architecture of the traditional university learning space delimits and centralizes the arbitration of value. Too often this arbitration is also made completely abstract and overdetermined. The result is that the fear of failure is actually magnified well beyond the real value or risk of the prescribed activity. People lose perspective via this abstraction - at the same time the ‘value’ of the exercise is reduced to an abstract ‘value’ that only has currency in the university. The results are many and not easy to summarise within a post but the generalised effect is a lack of any continuity of development because we fail to fold that ‘anxiety’, or ‘intensity’ more generally, into the continuity afforded by an ongoing cumulation of value (and value here is sense of value TO a community - the realisation of the self as supplement)…
on Feb 17th, 2009 at 8:24 am
[...] keeping with the notion of what Mat Wall-Smith calls a “flat ontology,” blogcamps would provide a forum where anyone and everyone are encouraged to participate and [...]
on Jul 12th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
If it’s true that our species is alone in the world, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little