CCAP Research Community

Hi Anna,

Insomnia again last night so hope this makes some sense occasionally … ignore at will!

Love the idea of moving ‘distributed aesthetics’ to the ‘aesthesia of networks’. For me this is a bold if still surprisingly difficult question. No wonder everyone reaches for the simplest - or prettiest - static diagram … and no wonder you intrepidly go in precisely the opposite direction!

The concept of network aesthesia directs things towards the old familiar problem of both the network and aesthetics, but in a very new way which has enormous consequences (not just for art, but for culture, politics etc). This is the problem of the in-between, the intensive (and its relation to representations, a question in which we are both interested). I was wondering whether this obvious intensive in-between wasn’t still the major characteristic of the aesthesia of networks, the one that still isn’t quite accounted for.

Of course, if so, it is important to ask about the breakdown (mashup) between logical and affective forms that you point to with regard to Venn diagrams etc. Or if you like, we need to pose, as you are beginning to do here, a kind of equivalence to synaesthesia within/between logical modes or categories (such as “customisation, homogenisation and atomisation … collective enunciation, production and distribution”). Or to qualify this, we need to pose something within a confusion of logical modes that is similar to synaesthesia because it is a derivative of it (in the light of our shared assumption that all reason and logical forms are derived from affect) .

Where does this lead us? The difficult, as you begin to point out here, is not so much in aesthetic experience qua experience, but in the way that descriptives (or models) both fail to fully account for that experience, and at the same time feed into aesthetic experience. More correctly, these representations/diagrams feed into a kind of pre/post mapping of aesthetic events and potentials. The whole mapping - a kind of metamap or ecologies of diagrams, diagrams - in the more dynamic, full immanent sense - the ecologies of aesthesia in situ. The status of the low level diagrams within this broader ecology might be something like Stiegler’s “pseudo a priori” in technics (look up “a priori” in the linked page).

On the other hand, as you point out, networks also “diagram” in precisely the more dynamic, immanent sense, and this is perhaps the other side of technics, one that runs counter to the pre/post mapping (though they form circuits together).

Does the real aesthesia of networks lies between these, or in these circuits or ecologies? In the light of your careful account of maps and models, perhaps the truth is indeed that aesthesia lies between these dynamic events of networking and the more static maps and models (between what Whitehead called presentational immediacy [sloppily put, events as they immediately occur in perception] and causal efficacy [just as sloppily, the given contexts in which sensations becomes perceptions]).

As we’ve discussed a few times now over lunch, it seems like you do have to take representation into account as aspects of dynamic media. The crucial qualifier is that you don’t do this within a representationalist metamodel (and it may be the metamodels that count here - although this is obviously going to be a question of level of description).

This seems to me to be a necessarily hierarchical qualification. That is, representation is only even a member of an assemblage of collective enunciation which is subject to/dominated by process. Dynamics, intensity and so are in charge, as per intensity over extension, the virtual over the actual?

There are, however, also what I might call non-hierarchical aspects to these ecologies - such as when the I and the we mutually co-emerge (Stiegler speaks of contemporary networked capital’s violence against this). More non-hierarchical relations might be found in the case of the net and the self (reading your notes here has made me realise that I think Castells maybe draws too harsh a line between these two, unlike perhaps Terranova). A more general case of non-hierarchical relations in found as presentational immediacy and causal efficacy co-shift (the very basis of dynamism in perception/aesthesia). All these seem to me to be non-hierarchical dynamics and of course there are dynamics between them all (a field of vectors, or as Bernard Cache has written of architecture which might apply to network architecture, of framings, inflexions and vectors in topological fields of relation.

So, with all this in mind, I look forward to reading more of your thinking about images and networks. The material on the way that models represent the aesthesia of networks while delimiting it seemed (at “to be continued”) about to go into this other side of network aesthesia. This is that which can’t be recuperated by the models .. I guess what you might call the real aesthesia as an event evading pre-post capture. And from there to the engagements between the two? And the opening out?

A simple way to sum all this up … how do you pose the question of the way in which images in networks are constitutive, powerful but ontologically subjugated factors in network processes, flows and their regulation?

The third step might be to ask - and one can only begin to ask this - how these really come together. This is not perhaps a question of how to map the whole network but how to even think it. There is no doubt that there is an aesthesia of networks - we can feel them alright, but whether we can really think this aesthesia - give it a concept which is appropriate - is an interesting question. This would have to be a concept beyond models or metamodels, perhaps one built in terms of the differentials or problematisation of existing relations involved. Maybe Russell’s purer maths (that of the calculus perhaps) might be more appropriate here. You could take this in the direction of one of those crazy Lacanian mathemes.

Well that’s what you do when you haven’t slept much … Maybe you need one of Guattari’s semiotic metamodelisations from Cartographies Schizoanalytique … Of course you’ve started this work already.

This is all of course, thinking more or less in terms of one person’s aesthesia in relation to the complex ‘aesthetics of the network’, even if the latter is thought in global terms (the problematic image here might still be Stelarc’s body wired up to internet in Ping Body).

And yet one could go beyond this to the truly collective and shared experiences – aesthesias – of networks those pose only a collectivity (or a baroque series of nested collectivities). This is another really interesting aspect of your work. What if there are events of aesthesia throughout the network, beside those that are reducible to the aesthesia of the individual against the universe (the sublime etc)? And what if these are not always as locatable as events of aesthesia experienced when standing in front of a painting, or even talking on the telephone?

Or, what sensations are conserved by the network, and how is this conservation different to those conserved in more static forms where representation appears at least to be less problematised? Or in more complete Deleuze-Guattari terms, how, in networks, are the percepts and affects conserved in blocs of sensation (actually this term works perfect for the circuits of networks) talking to the concepts (as assemblages not only of models and metamodels but of differentials, and as you put it, productive vagueness, in thinking as production), and both talking to functives (taken here as technical limits in the productive sense)?

… It seems to me that thinking in these terms allows us to differentiate questions of aesthesia (real sensation and experience) and aesthetics (how this experience has been metamodelled, at least since Kant).

As above, you can still take the models etc into account while differentiating them from the aesthesia in total.

You could even, for example, understand the classic Kantian question of taste in the terms posed here. Although, as I put it at the AGNSW paper in 2005 on Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, this is a Kantian aesthetic which is seriously “hacked” by the new configurations of aesthesia within networked technics. As hacked, the Kantian aesthetic formula needs to be inverted (its hierarchies turned upside down, its linearity short-circuited), so that the problem is not one of generating taste from the individual out to the imagined community, but of understanding a more direct experience - aesthesia - of community as never before. One that problematises the “I” and the “we” that Stiegler thinks was the basis for modernity.

This kind of inversion or short circuiting explains a lot of my networked experience I think, For example, there is perhaps not only a “repeated cycling through euphoria and boredom” but something that is both at the same time … and more (here I’m reminded in an insomniac associative way of Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, in which he talks of an ongoing re-arragement of the very nature and forms of the faculties - we don’t just have to have imagination, reason, understanding, in a particular arrangement, etc).

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Some other quick responses ..

“For I want to suggest that this diagram’s status as a kind of meta-image of networking is literally anaesthetic – numbing and disengaging from the chaotic and experiential engagements in networks.”

right on! and then I started to wonder how much there is a co-emergent (Lone Bertelsen would call it, after Bracha Ettinger, “co-emergence in differentiation”) series of events here that can only be aesthetic.

“I wonder whether this might not be a useful comparison to import into what I have to say about the ways in which the diagrammatic (rather than Benjamin’s symbolic) and the allegorical differ in network visuality”

This is a great parallel …. and I was wondering how exactly the network aesthetic is like this allegory? Is there another hacking of the modern aesthetic needed (not only of Kant but of Benjamin, whose concept of the masses might need to be rethought in terms of network aesthesia - I don’t think any of the new “the work of art in the age of cyber” articles have quite done this yet). You know most about this (as your book attests)!

“both the role of network diagrams and the role of alternative imagings of networks that I want to unfold today”

The more I think this through in fact, the more I think that the relation of network aesthesia and the aesthetics of representing networks come together as a (somewhat unexplored if crucial) question of our times. Although I think that this is only a sub-question underlying the larger question of network aesthesia and modes of living/politics etc (beyond representations - straight or alternative) .. ?

“I’m also especially interested in a kind of emerging web visuality that develops through a mash-up of the diagrammatic and the allegorical by layering geodata and imaging in conjunction with personal and collective data and imaging”

Again I’m wondering about the synaesthetic qualities here - the in-between aesthesia that is so crucial to networks and the re-imagining (re-imaging of the visual in synaesthesia in a kind of basis for cross-signal process). Perhaps network aesthesia itself is the cause of the problem, it produces all diagrams, even those that attempts to pre/post map it.

“Hence we end up not with a history of the processes that are sampling but rather a history of samples (bits of trackable data).”

Absolutely, the potential in sensation (memory is crucial but only in so far as it feeds into potential, which after all is what directed movement/sensation at every turn) … an aesthesia of the future is perhaps accented all the more in networks. And of course it’s not always comfortable to feel the future in such intense, at times stark, terms. ..

“The circulation and repetition of this kind of diagram as a network map, mnemonic and actualisation now dominates the visual landscape of networking, informing social network analysis, network visualisation and net aesthetics”

Yes - and perhaps for a historical reason (one day I’ll finish reading that great Paul Edwards book on Computing and the Cold War). Maybe it occurs in the context of the failure of SAGE to really, as it was supposed to do, map out and control a grid. In the light of this failure, things perhaps slipped to meta-models of control, or control via constantly adaptive and often vague meta-models (thus the importance of considering the aesthesia of these models alongside the aesthesia networks). This makes the descriptives surrounding networks knit together into a processual semiotic of “seeming” to create stasis and control (which is of course a control in itself, especially if considered as a form of aesthesia plugged into the nervous system, as Brian Massumi writes concerning fear and coloured warning systems). This is even what we might call a drive (a powerful if delusory one)… and forms the main mode of engagement with networks by academics and bureaucrats (though not always artists or the military).

Perhaps one of the most interesting points you make here (for me, anyway) is along these lines, where you suggest that -

“Baran was not so much invested in the realisation of this diagram as a blueprint for the network but rather was focused upon network processes – the capacity of data to divide up, rearrange and reassemble itself as it moved around connections - in other words, packet-switching.”

In a sense, this acknowledges all the sides involved. I had been wondering a little where aesthesia went til this point -

“Baran’s memos network processes are entwined with a kind of implicit understanding of the aesthesia of networked inefficiency and breakdown.”

Do you mean that the system is aesthetic in relation to itself (as well as people etc)? A central question here you might go on to answer (if only to make me happy!) is what the aesthesia that worked through network processuality might feel like (especially to the network itself).

thanks, it’s been fun.

all the best, andrew