Research and Concept Update from Week 2

This week I began reading Vibrant Matter, and not to be dramatic, but one major take away from the first chapter is that we (people) seem to be viewing the world in an increasingly apathetic sense. I don't know a better word than apathy, but I will think about it, because I don't mean to sound negative. There seems to be a philosophical trend toward slowly realizing the lack of agency that people have. For example, the unit of evolution was reduced to the gene, from the individual and the species in the sixties, and subsequently intellectual and idea evolution was reduced to the meme level, where perceivable concepts are mere consequences of infinite minor negotiations. What Bennett is calling "thing-power", emergence and network theories became the leading views in organization and research, and as a result the person became a vehicle for these systems , acting on their behalf. People have less agency both in comparison to things, which have increasingly more agency, and in being seen more as a complicated system of things, or becoming things themselves.


Theodor Adorno's "nonidentity" places the world entirely in the realm of (non vibrant) things, and addresses the gap between the conceptual (identity) and reality. Although he claims that "this gap is ineradicable", Bennett denies his acceptance of this by saying that he is still attempting to cross the gap by allowing that it may be possible through thinking about it. He calls that which is not knowable "nonidentity", and says that it haunts us, and that we can only learn to deal with it by accepting it. The reason I bring this up: according to Adorno, concepts are "moments of the reality that requires their formation" and so conceptualization is immediately removed from the reality, and must be scrutinized in light of reality, which we are able to discern in much more complete ways. This reminds me of mathematics, where we perform operations on abstractions, that inevitably refer back to reality, and are often accurate again, but are completely unrepresentative within the process. As part of Adorno's process of getting to know nonidentity, he describes the act of "clowning", or accepting the clownish traits that are part of the known denial of nonidentity that is necessary for conceptualization. Accepting the act as an act of clowning is a way to deal with the haunting nonidentity, that is the "painful, nagging feeling that something's being forgotten or left out. . . .the inadequacy of representation."


Ok, so back to my point about recognizing through this text a trajectory toward the thingifying of everything and denying the agency of anything by seeing action as consequence of systemic processes, two things. First, clowning about representation seems to be the current state of everything, in accepting this act both literally, in the postmodern world of re-imagining and turning everything upside down, as in current art, or fashion in Williamsburg, or any skepticism, to the conceptual clowining of continuing to philosophize in this way. In a way weather or not things, once everything is reduced to things, have vibrancy or not becomes a moot point. Things, which become the smallest component of a system, through their agency or non agency, behave in some way, and weather we attribute to that our original concept of agency, which doesn't stem from such an understanding, but rather from a human centered view of free will, I think, doesn't seem as relevant as our desire to do so. Distorted through an outmoded perspective, agency and lack of agency become opposites, but in a different conceptual world, starting from the fundamental thingism as a reference point, they could be referring to the same thing. Instead of ascribing agency to things, we can remove the concept from everything.


I'm not sure if my proposal has changed, but I am much more engaged with the concept of vibrancy.And these thoughts have lead me to try to think of less prescriptive behaviors for my phones and modules. I am now thinking in terms of setting up building blocks for interaction that define and 'grow' the communications over time.


My goal for this week is to develop a literal plan of action for building the first of these, which I think will be a wearable speaker application. And for doing more research on proximity activation, which at this point is still a mystery to me, and is the most important part of my project.