Amphibian Digitism

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Salamander

Amphibian Digitism (Click pic to enlarge)

the object has a similar interiority and a different physicality, and this I call animism….

the object is devoid of interiority but possesses a similar kind of physicality, and this I call naturalism.

Phillipe Descola – Beyond Nature and Culture

If I describe my first shamanic journey on my own behalf, not Coleen’s journeying for me, mediating an entourage of power animals and beings, not her extractions of misplaced energies, not her soul retrieval journeys, but my own journey, not with the powerful bear, or the gregarious wolf or the insightful owl, but with beings I won’t name and with salamander then there’s only this:

Salamander vibrates between animism and naturalism and so even before the Manhattan Project, before digital computers, salamander was and is digital.

Salamander collapses subject and object, figure and ground, living not just in the ground and the water but of ground and water like pouring water into water.

The object has a similar interiority and a similar physicality and this I call digitism.

Digitism Part 4 (Awareness: Contingent and Ideal)

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The next dimension of my map of Digitism I want to consider is Awareness.

When I was in college I went  with my roommate to his home in Queens, NYC.  Growing up in the wilds of Upstate NY, I had not knowingly known any Jewish people.  I had never eaten a bagel.  Certainly I knew Jews existed, and their history of diaspora and persecution.

My roommate was Jewish, as were several of my college friends.  I was puzzled at first that foods they considered Jewish, I considered Polish.

My roommate’s parents were survivors of Auschwitz.  Upon release from there, my roommate’s father vowed to enjoy the rest of his life as much as he could.  Part of this was that he ate steak either with or for dinner every day.

So when I sat down with them for dinner, we might have gwumpki with various side dishes.  My roommate’s father ate stuffed cabbage, but had his steak as well.

One afternoon my roommate and I were in the living room listening to The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour.  After a minute or so of Strawberry Fields, my roommate’s mother burst into the living room from the kitchen.

Let me take you down, cos I’m going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever

“What are they saying about Israel?!” She asked, clearly upset.

“No no no” my roommate said, “They’re not saying anything about Israel.  They’re saying “Nothing is real.”

“Well OK then – that’s fine.”

Digitism Part 3 (Composition: Analog and Digital)

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Mapping an object with precision, requires eventually, an infinite modeling of the object that is indistinguishable from the basis of designation “object” or an abstraction traveling at the speed of light stopping time. The Borges short story, (although it represents itself as non-fiction) On Exactitude in Science, seems to me the analog pole of this.  I have written before.about Haraway’s phrase “copies without originals” which points to the digital pole.

So why distinguish the analog from the digital?  They both are composed of energy and matter. They can both be thought of as encoding and decoding information.  In a Borgesian universe, anything possible digitally is possible in analog form.

While any one digital thing, and even several, or many digital things are possible in analog form, the digital world we have today is not.  More precisely, and as Haraway points out, it is micro-electronics that make the digital world possible.  Compared to the analog, the micro-electronics/digital enables orders of magnitude more information malleable.

Focus on personal digital communication devices as a mark of the digital is common, but these devices and their functons are only the most visible pixel of the digitized world.  What this focus represents though is an aggregation of de-analogized information into an individual’s experience of interiority.  But this aggregation creates for many an experience of discomfort, of the uncanny.

I think this is why many experience digitized experience as less real than analog experience.  “Less real” is an attempt at naming the feeling of uncanniness the digital can evoke.

Becoming/Unbecoming

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In Digitism Part 1 (?), I quoted from Beyond Nature and Culture – Philippe Descola.   In these quotes he described what he posited as the four possible ontologies.  He defined ontologies as “ sociocosmic forms of aggregation and conceptions of self and non-self.”

Figure and ground is the basis for perception to distinguish this from that.  I think ground is a  more complicated phenonomen than simply being the undifferentiated backdrop to thingness.  The perception of ground contains a set of assumptions and guesses.  For instance a frog assumes that everything not moving is neither food nor  threat.  Everything that does not move is the backdrop allowing things (foods or threats) to manifest.

Humans require a more complicated backdrop – “sociocosmic forms of aggregation and conceptions of self and non-self.”

Descola’s intent is to distinguish how the experience of interiority aggregates portions of the physical world into the experience of self, leaving the rest as non-self.

Yet the language is also evocative of Buddhist ideas of Non-Self as a mark of existence.  So despite the experience of a Self as not only the referent point for perception, but as  truly existent, self-sufficient essence, its nature is in fact Non-Self.

Training in not only the idea , but the experience of this as well, leads to the recognition of the non-duality of subject and object – Space is Seen.

So meet Red Bob #2 – part of my own ongoing training in non-duality.

Red Bob #2(mask - Atomic Geograhy) (photo - Stephen Appel) Becoming/Unbecoming

Red Bob #2
(mask – Atomic Geography) (photo – Stephen Appel)
Becoming/Unbecoming

Cyborg Writing: Unbecoming

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Look: In my mind is a single flowing page, constant, unbroken; when I write it pours out of me. Not seamless but nearly so. It might be more seamless still, in time; there might be no more walls, just me and my words and the world. I reject the idea of “age-old”. What age? How old? Better to ask what the words look like when still inside, how they flow outward, what they look like when they are at once inside me and inside you, (Sarah Wanenchak, Cyborg Writing:becoming the Tools – Cyborgology).

See: In my mind are scraps, paper, crumpled and torn, neurons interrupted by infarcts and lesions, lacking object permanence to the illusion of the self that seems to have a voice of its own although its seems to be my voice (there’s that “my,me self” again) when it comes out of my (sigh) mouth in fits and starts, then sometimes, like somebody turned on some big ol’ reel to reel tape recorder (is this In Real Life Fetishiizing?) with a bad motor and when its done I sit there dazed and somebody takes the reel and puts it back on the shelf in my head and I look and wonder if anyone involved understood anything of what whoever said whatever they said or wrote or thought.  Better to ask were there any words at all.

Digitism – Part 2 (Mapping)

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Over at Cybogology, Jenny Davis has put up a post Multidimensional Material Mapping.  She argues and I quite agee:

In particular, I think the pole of material dualism or separation can more accurately be replaced with juxtaposition. I argue that a formulation of the material conditions of physicality and digitality should be relational rather than oppositional. That is, if we understand the physical and digital to be always co-present, the question is how physical and digital relate to one another within an artifact, space, place etc. I therefore argue that we can understand these relations in terms of integration and juxtaposition.

I won’t summarize her excellent work here, but rather leave it to the reader to give her post your full attention.  But the idea of relationality is crucial I think

I wish to present some ideas in the spirit of collaboration that Jenny articulates.

To map my largely unformed and inchoate idea of Digitism, I propose 4 dimensions, 3 spacial and time.

AWARENESS representing a continuum of regarding phenomena as a progression from contingent to ideal.

COMPOSITION  Here the continuum is from analog to digital.  It includes all elements of a functional assembly, so it in fact might be represented as a range, or discontinuous points rather than a single point.

AGENCY.  The spectrum ranges from machine to human.  All of these dimensions need considerable expansion, maybe this more than the others.

TIME. My graph shows an arrow of time although I’m not committed to a one way function.  This becomes useful in plotting the changes a functional assembly experiences in action

DIGITISM GRID

Honestly, I’m not sure where I’m going with this, so I would appreciate any reactions.  I wanted to kind of just spit this out, but it’s really all I can handle cognitively right now.