Forecasting the Seminar Paper

TITLE: "(Dis)Locating Thought: The Graphic Ontology of World Browsers"

The first part of title names a quintessential experience of the media in question, much like the title of a short essay by Jenny Edbauer Rice -- "Overhearing: The Intimate Life of Cell Phones."  Furthermore, like Edbauer Rice's "Overhearing," "(Dis)Locating Thought" serves as a theoretical departure point: the work of the essay is to unpack the rhetorical or grammatological implications of the phrase.  In my case, the phrase suggests from the outset that, by making it possible to "geotag" thoughts (or, more precisely, writing) to specific GPS-enabled locations, the emergent genre of smartphone apps known as world browsers actually disrupt the conventional, literate experience of thought.  While I do not mean to claim that everyone experiences thought in exactly the same manner, we clearly share the notion that thinking is typically a silent meditation or dialogue with one's self, located in the brain.  An icon of philosophy and the act of thinking, Auguste Rodin's 1902 sculpture The Thinker -- a highly regarded masterpiece of Western art -- depicts precisely this image of thought (as do each of its appropriations):

A powerful twenty-first century appropriation of The Thinker would be to place a smartphone into the figure's bottom hand.  As smartphones rapidly gain popularity, they seem ever increasingly to enter into the scenes of thought in everyday life.  Indeed, industry experts predict that in five years people will turn to smartphones for internet access more often than desktops or laptops.  Given this turn toward "small tech," it makes sense to examine internet applications, like world browsers, that are designed around the specific affordances of mobile hardware, such as augmented reality, GPS, and QR coding.

World browsers exemplify a new way of moving through information.  My essay, however, will not just move from one example app to the next; my aim is to emphasize the significance of this emerging genre in terms of the history and theory of writing.  To that end, the structure of my essay is guided by another observation about world browsers: world browsers bring together an array of different hardware and software, thus creating a unique constellation among media that, until now, have been developed and used apart from one another.  

STRUCTURE: After a 3-4 page introduction, the rest of the essay will be broken into six sections, which will each be about 2-3 pages.  Each of these sections will focus on a prior media that world browsers mobilize (pun intended); I will reference concepts advanced by scholars writing about that media before the advent of world browsers, using (and reworking) those concepts as a means to theorize the rhetorical/grammatological implications of world browsing.  At this point, I'm pretty settled on the following six sections:

1. Cell Phones

2. Web Browsers & Search Engines

3. Web 2.0 Platforms

4. Locative Media Art

5. Augmented Reality

6. Iconic Photojournalism

Human-Computer Relations

Questions concerning the relationship between humans and computers (or, more generally, technology) pervade -- and evade -- Ron Burnett's How Images Think.  That is to say, the value of Burnett's book lies in its capacity as an intellectual map that clearly identifies a handful of urgent/important landmarks for theorists writing about contemporary human-computer interaction; Burnett himself does not offer much in the way of directions or the insights we'd expect from someone who has reached a critical destination.  Below are a few of these signposts that I've extracted from the book.

Signpost #1

Burnett repeatedly critiques the terminology that (digital) humanities scholars who study images/technology have adopted from the computer scientists and engineers who build imaging/writing technologies, as if these terms like "user" and "input/output" were simply inherent or natural.  The fact is that our routine acceptance of the descriptor "user" implies a particular view of the human-computer relationship.  To position the human as user consequently positions the computer as tool, and this relation suggests the paradigm of augmentation (i.e., the machine as a prosthetic extension of man) that has been the leading model in computer science since Vannevar Bush and John Von Neumann, as well as the conventional wisdom in media theory Marshall McLuhan.  Burnett insists that our habitual repetition of mechanical metaphors inhibits from realizing a new paradigm that would account for "the shifting ground of human subjectivity" evident in (and spurred on by) the current/emergent mediascape.

Signpost #2

Recent digital imaging technologies provide a plethora of examples showing how images have literally become interfaces -- fluid and dynamic spaces (imagescapes) in which processes of visualization generate relationships between individual/collective thoughts, feelings, percepts, affects, and values.  (Indeed, images have perhaps always functioned as interfaces in this sense -- perhaps digital media just makes it more apparent for us.)  Even more profoundly, in concert with grammatology, Burnett proposes that images have always been the interface through which human perception operates: "To see images is also to be seeing with images" (33).  In other words, seeing is a function of images and our visual experience of any given reality never attains outside of images; images do not threaten or distort (nor mirror) reality and image-making does not represent reality but produces 'the real as image": we never experience a reality that is somehow prior to or purged of images (I guess this claim excludes cases of visual impairment, though?).  Is it possible to claim, then, that our "reality" have always already been "augmented" by images?

Signpost #3

In gesturing beyond the augmentation model, Burnett describes the interactions between human and computers (particularly in video games) in terms of symbiosis, which is of course reminiscent of J.C.R. Licklider's metaphorical use of this biological concept in his 1960 landmark essay "Man-Computer Symbiosis".  In my estimation, symbiosis is ultimately a fruitless metaphor when applied to human-computer interaction; it does not displace the centrality of use that delimits the scope of relations under augmentation.  The only notable change modeled via symbiosis is that the use-relation doubles and becomes a two-way street: the insect pollinates the fig tree and the fig tree yields food to the insect, and, so too, the human user decides on certain data input and the computer calculates/outputs that data for the human to draw conclusions (Licklider).  The specific (even contrasting) talents of each entity produce a benefit for both entities: the human is incapable of calculating at the speed and magnitude of the computer, and the computer is incapable of producing intelligible results without the human's data input.  Like augmentation, however, each entity uses the other as a means to the fulfillment of their own intention, reinforcing the contours of their self and their own self-interest, going about their business without ever having to change (or notice the already occurring changes accruing) in light of the interaction.  Late in the book, just for a few pages, Burnett does flirt with the idea of a "third level" emerging out of the symbiosis metaphor.  Burnett calls it "hybridization" (a term which also has roots in biological discourse).  I find the concept of hybridization much more promising than symbiosis because it foregrounds the proposition that human-computer relationships are about learning and transformation as much use and execution.  Having drawn from Bruno Latour, Burnett builds to a ripe summary of hybridization:

Hybridization, then, is about more than a mixture of elements with a particular outcome or result: rather, hybrids underlie the processes of change and evolution as technologies and humans encounter each other.  To think in these terms is to put intelligence and subjectivity back into human-technology relations.  Rather than modeling technology in the broadest sense as a series of tools for pragmatic use, there is a need to think about how human subjectivity and the ability to self-reflexively examine identity has evolved out of the relationships humans have with machinery, artifice, and their creative engagement with technology. (174)

In his discussions of hybridity, Burnett is at once outlining the emergent figure of the posthuman.  For all his mentions of subjectivity, though, Burnett never really sustains a rigorous, theoretical account to accompany his claim that, for example, "humans are now communicating in ways that redefine the meaning of subjectivity" (221).  For the conceptual building blocks of such an account, one of the best sources to turn to his Felix Guattari's late writings on ecosophy, which concerns the emergence of posthumanism every bit as much as it concerns ecology.

Toward a Theoretical Framework for AR Apps (Learning from Barthes)

Of all the great French theorists, Roland Barthes is probably the best at generating original critical frameworks immanent to a wide variety of new and/or non-canonical cultural artifacts.  For instance, he wrote the essays of Image-Music-Text at a time (the 1960s) when few philosophers took seriously the photographic or filmic image; indeed, academic film studies was still in its infancy as a discipline.  Here, I'm thinking about the first three essays in the collection: "The Photographic Message," "The Rhetoric of the Image," and "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills."  Barthes introduces three related but uniquely termed sets of concepts with which to analyze the still images of press photography, print advertisements, and film.

While these approaches are generally useful, I believe the most valuable lesson we can learn from Barthes concerns the act of generating new critical frameworks immanent to the form/materiality of the media in question.  That is, rather than apply his terms as a means to study contemporary augmented reality apps, I want to parallel his critical/theoretical invention process by using his work with still images as a relay for generating a framework for AR apps.

Barthes, like many critics, is concerned with the units of analysis that structure our readings/viewings.  He discusses photographic and filmic images as a whole united by common material and structural properties; he also isolates more specific genres: "the press photograph," "the advertising image," etc.  Then he focuses on specific images within those genres (e.g., the Panzani ad) and, from the individual instances, generalizes levels of meaning and categories of elements that he claims are intrinsic to the significance of the medium itself.

If we want to claim or show something about the significance of AR apps, then I think it makes sense to start at individual instances and generalize insights from the emergent intermingling of such instances.  But what constitutes an individual instance of an app?  Surely we can't take as a consequential unit of analysis the individual instances of a particular user's image/text contribution the app (assuming the app is fueled by user-generated content, as is the case with most of the AR apps I'm interesting in).  I am less interested in the writing that occurs when people type words with their phones (i.e., the smartphone as an instrument/tool for the writing subject) and more interested in the writing of the phone that occurs when one's hands do not engage the keyboard or the speech recognition software (i.e, the smartphone as a posthuman writing system, by virtue of user content and AR app capabilities).  I suspect that the significance of these AR apps is not in the choices they afford to writers, or at least, that we are bound to miss some of their significance if we remain bound to the decision-centered frameworks traditional to rhetoric.  The pregnant moment, to use Barthes's expression, lies not  in the writer's input but in the app's extension of possible input sources--the app's capacity to register, connect to, and be affected by the non-human enunciative assemblages of a given location.

This approach to AR apps resonates with Barthes's discussion of writing in the latter half of Image-Music-Text.  In "The Death of the Author," he works from Stephane Mallarme's poetics to rethink the assumptions at the forefront of literary criticism prior to the 1960s:

For him [Mallarme], for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is...to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs,' and not 'me.' Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing." (143)

Writing is distinct from the author in that writing does not belong to the author; instead, the author is a function of writing: "the author is never more than an instance of writing" (145).  Suppression of the author occurs when writing provokes the reader away from the habit to hunt for meaning in terms of authorial intent (i.e., when readers stop asking what is the author's message, what is s/he mean by that, etc).  In other words, the birth of the reader beyond the author (the birth of writing in this Barthes/Mallarme sense) is synonymous with several other transitions posited in Barthes oeuvre, most notably the shifts from work to text and from readerly text to writerly text.  

Barthes description of the modern scriptor (who no longer writes or is read as an author) provides an strikingly useful approximation of the grammatological conditions or scene of the writing of the phone (see above):

In complete contrast [to the authors primacy over the work], the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. (145) 

Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt. (147)

There is the production of writing and its circulation, which I govern(?) by directing my phone toward the sources of writing, which the phone (by virtue of GPS) detects or "knows" much more readily than I ever do.  That is, I direct my phone according to the directions it presents.      Am I this modern scriptor or is it my phone?

Arguably of Mallarme's tradition, Samuel Beckett endeavored throughout his career to suppress the author in the interests of writing. For example, in his one-act play That Time, Beckett completely abandons punctuation, leaving the reader/actor to direct the meaning of the by reading the writing in one way or another way.  Embedded within each passage are multiple paths of emphasis: “when you went in out of the rain always winter then always raining that time in the Portrait Gallery in off the street out of the cold and rain slipped in when no one was looking.”  Here, the act of reading necessitates a performative ascription of meaning, more radically than a carefully punctuated text, because the reader implicates herself, through spontaneous selection, as a structuring principal of the text.

Both Beckett's theatre and AR apps disrupt and conflate our conventional distinctions between acts of reading and acts of writing.  But we can say more than that.  With Beckett (and Mallarme and other writers Barthes mentions), we experience a separation of author and meaning.  And this is, according to Barthes, the critic's worst nightmare, since the task of literary criticism has been primarily that of "discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work" (147).  Without the critical/authorial imposition of a final signified, writing opens itself up beyond such representation and the question of meaning shatters into infinite variations.  Writing becomes more a field for the play of signification and less a mirror supposed to represent the mind, society, nature, etc.  

If the writing of the text (particularly the writerly text) announces a separation of author and meaning, then perhaps we are sensing in AR apps a (historically unique) separation of the act of writing from the writer.  In other words, AR apps clarify and popularize a set of writing acts that occur autonomously from the input of a human subject and that circulate writing which is imperceptible to the naked eye.  And so, to connect this crucial dynamic with the above discussion regarding units of analysis, it may be fruitful, in the case of AR apps, to conceive of the particular instance not as an individual user's contribution to the system but as a specific posthuman configuration/process mapped out and set into motion by the writing of the phone app as an augmented reality system.  Therefore, rather than levels of meaning (Barthes), my framework would be positioned to articulate a few of the most significant posthuman tendencies establish by (or accruing along side of) the widespread use of AR apps. 

 

AR is not VR

Augmented reality is distinct from virtual reality.  The technologies of virtual reality try to "block" the user's perception of the physical/external (ie, non-computational) world, favoring instead a totally immersive experience within a 100% computer-generated field of audiovisual sensations.  James Vallino clarifies this distinction in his webpage Introduction to Augmented Reality:

The user [of virtual reality] is completely immersed in an artificial world and becomes divorced from the real environment...The visual, and in some systems aural and proprioceptive, senses are under control of the system. In contrast, an augmented reality system is augmenting the real world scene necessitating that the user maintains a sense of presence in that world. The virtual images are merged with the real view to create the augmented display...Augmented reality lies near the real world end of the line with the predominate perception being the real world augmented by computer generated data. 

Given AR's imperative to blend human senses with computer sensors, as well as the landscape with the mediascape, the development and use of such technologies should be extremely relevant to the (transdisciplinarly) theoretical projects of posthumanism and ecology.  Furthermore, from the standpoint of grammatology and writing studies, one might ask how AR as a digital writing system is transforming the location/dynamics of thinking in a posthuman age.

Search engines and other forms of information databases on the web have already affected thinking in obvious ways.  For instance, the frustration one used to experience when unable to remember a commonplace fact--the named of the actor that starred in that movie or the approximate travel time between two cities--is already becoming an ancient sensation thanks to websites like IMDb and Google Maps.  Without these sites, the location of thought remains in one's head; thinking is the ransacking of one's memories, augmented by whatever cognitive processes can be called upon to piece together what I know in order to channel what I don't know (or, in this case, what I once knew but am now unable to recall).

Of course, I could ask someone this question that stumps me, but doing so would not lead to a qualitative change in the location of thinking--it merely shifts or extends to location of thinking from my head to the other person's head.  We could also try to find the answer to the question by reference to some print form/institution, and yet looking at a map or flipping through a reference book are much too clumpy (at least in digital hindsight--the expectation for customization and interactivity) to accommodate our everyday, perpetual search for information.  As one consults the alphabetic writing systems (or information structures) of print culture, the location of thought is not redistributed beyond the individual mind/cogito.  (Indeed, this form of identity experience--the subject--is a function of alphabetic writing and literate metaphysics.)

The writing of alphabetic writing bears meaning for readers only to the extent that it simulates a verbal utterance or conversation, which, as we already said, only relays between various individual human minds as the exclusive location of thinking.  (Moreover, somewhat resemblant if not perpendicular to virtual reality, alphabetic writing--as evidenced throughout the history of rhetoric--generally conditions its users to immerse themselves in the virtual/verbal significations of the written word, while systematically downplaying their awareness of the actual/visual sensations of the writing technologies.)  When a print map starts to wrinkle or fade over time, these signs of visual transformation are not said to constitute thinking.  In other words, the wrinkle is not taken as an expression of the map's intelligence.  The map as a material has no intelligence except for what has been written/printed onto it by a human author; this is, whatever agency the map has is only considered in terms of the unique material affordances its supplies to the ready hand of the thinking subject.  With the augmented reality apps of digital media, however, such visual transformations are signs of thinking, if not (a crucial coordinate in) the new location of thinking.