Mark Poster: What S the Matter with the Internet

Mark Poster: What’s the matter with the Internet?

One. The Culture of Underdetermination

Culture and new media

Avoiding instrumentalism / Of both the state and the economy. Obstructs research with the aim of showing how new media will generate new cultures.
New media as spaces / that encourages practices, which serve to construct new types of subjects.
Transforming networks / Practices carried out in networked computers change time and space, body and mind, subject and object, human and machine.
Still important to recognize the Internet’s relation to earlier forms of communicaiton and the constructedness of the Internet.
Nietzsche and Foucault / Allowing for historical understanding that both recognizes the continuities with the past and the disruptions and the innovations.

Subject and identity

Concepts / ·  Individual: an empirical given
·  Self: the mind, personality, soul of the individual
·  Subject: the modern configuration of the self. Descartes
·  Identity: when the coherence of the individual as a cultural figure begins to collapse.
Identity / Erik Erikson. The continually negotiated, fragile ego. Reflects the failure of the Western metanarrative of progress.
Poster on identity and media / The way selves are formed in relation to different media. Turning to a model of language/media assemblages.
Postmodern identities / Process of interpellation occurs through mediations of information in addition to face-to-face interaction. Which are both important for the constitution of subjects (modern) or identities (postmodern).
Hence, this seems to be related to social interactionism in the sense that we become what we are through interactions with others. And with Foucault. And with lots of other theories on the postmodern self. Sort of not-clear what this interpellation means: but:
Althusser: interpellation / The process by which ideology adresses the individual. We identify with subject positions or categories of identity which are predetermined within ideological frameworks. Our process of identification with these identities is called interpellation a process of (mis)recognition with an identity offered in society.
Postmodern / Lyotard: the collapse of the metanarratives of progress.
Jameson: change in the culture of capitalism.
A new figure of the self.
Lynne Joyrich on television consumerism / Consumer desires are brought to the individual with an immediacy that undermines the separation between subject and object.
Poster: the specificity of the media / In the process of self-construction.

Underdetermination

”the media equation” / Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass: how we interact differently with media machines than with mechanic machines. – We act as with humans because the media machine speaks to us.
Clearly to simplistic, but Poster too acknowledges that media machines are different (which is later part of his critique against Heidegger).
What is new with the Internet: underdetermination / In contrast to other machines that are overdetermined? Print and the Cartesian subject: The modern citizen, subject, is inconceivable without print. Print objects – open to a relation with an other, a subject.
Radio, film, television / The subject/object extended and broadened. Increased speed in the disembodied distribution of identical cultural object.
Baudrillard: how the electronic media construct a hyperreal/simulacral world à the subject/object relation changes and become diffuse, fragmented, multiple. ”The broadcast media structure objects that are both different from their originals and so deep intheir own mediation that the referential function of language is reduced” (15). Cultural objects as their own representations. As with any US-led war. But the hyperreal remains tied to the real.
The Internet / Objects whose determination is underdetermined.
Transgresses the limits of print and broadcast models by / 1.  enabling many-to-many communications
2.  enabling the simultaneous reception, alteration, and redistribution of cultural object
3.  dislocating communicative action from the posts of the nation, from the spatial relations of modernity
4.  providing instantaneous global contact
5.  inserting the modern/late modern subject into a networked information machine.
à a self that is no longer a subject / But operates within a machine apparatus as a point in the circuit.
Althusser on overdetermination / Adapted Freud’s concept to the context of social theory, for thinking about the multiple forces active at once in any political situation.
Social objects consist of many determinations, thus causality is not uniliniar.
Poster: underdetermination / Virtual objects are overdetermined in such a way that their indeterminatenes goes one step further. These objects are open to practice and solicit social construction and cultural creation.
Remains an invitation to a new imaginary.
Consequences for the self / The self is constituted in configurations that are outside those of the modern and late modern subject.

Two. The Being on Technologies

Terms and confusion

Point being / The term technology is semantically not very clear.
Poster’s aim, I guess, is to show how information machines are different from mechanical machines, and how earlier discussion of technology do not fit the complextiy of the digital age.
Baudrillard / Concerned with consumption.
”Simulacra and Simulation”: the effects of communication technologies in terms of change in the construction of reality. The media produced hyperreality, undermining the credibility of the representational discourse to capture ”the real.”
Virilio: space. Cinema and war. Speed / Detailed analysis of technology as culture and the culture of technology.
Problem with both / Dread of the machinic. They do not pay enough attention to the relations of machines to people.
Pierre Lévy / Space and time, body and mind, subject and object are reshaped by the parameters of the communication technology.
Deleuze and Guattari / Distinguish between arboreal and rhizomic cultural forms. The stable, centered and hierarchial against the nomadic, multiple, decentereed.
Guattari attempts an ontology of machines outside subject-centred perspectives. Proposes a cateogory of the assemblage to suggest combinations of machines and humans in unpredictable configurations.

The Question Concerning Heidegger

Not very suitable for information technologies / Still discussed by Poster in order to lessen the anxiety among technophobes.
The question of technology / is not about technology per se, but about modern humanity’s way of being. To Heidegger, modern ways of using technology deworlds us.
Poster proposes five theses against which he evaluates Heidegger’s discussion of technology
1. Culture is invisible t its members / The instrumental attitude obscures its cultural aspect. Heidegger claims technology is no mere object, but is the way this world is set up. The essence of technology is a way of being in the world. Technology as a standing reserve. But our being in the world is invisible to us.
2. One can dispel this invisibility by studying the Greeks / Ancient Greek philosophy as the answer. They were aware of their being in the world. Contrary, the modern agent is cut ff from its relation to Being, conceiving itself as transcendent to objects.
3. Thus: the return to the Greek is a rediscovery of ”the truth” / An authentic way of being in the world. Understanding technology as a mere tool is wrong – technology is a way of revealing.
4. The philosopher’s transcendentalism / affords an understanding of technology as culture.
5. The inability to differentiate between technologies / Heidegger’s understanding is flawed because of its inability to discern different technologies. Captures the modern technology only, not postmodern.
Poster: postmodern technologies as revealing / that request participants to Being as freedom. As a new configuration of human-machine and new combinations of body and mind, object and subject.
To Poster, postmodern technologies are fundamentally different.
The being of technology / which varies depending upon the material constraints of the technology.

Machinic Epistemology

Guattari: the specificity of the machinic / Attempts to grasp the being of technology by a phenomonology of technics. The singular power of enunciation of each type of machine.

Three. Capitalism’s Linguistic Turn

Four. The Digital Subject and Cultural Theory

Aim with essay / To clarify aspects of the technological change from print to digital texts. Brings together an analysis of the technical conditions of the online authorship with theoretical proposals for understanding the question of the construction of the author. Illuminate the relations between technology and culture.

Beyond the Author Function

The modern author / The eighteenth century – in a confluence of print technology.
Analogue / Authorship required a technology of the analogue. The printed book as a direct representation of an author’s intention.
Foucault’s position / “What Is an Author” (1969).
Foucault’s four perspectives / 1.  The humanist author – governs the meaning of the text.
2.  The structuralist rejection of the humanist author. Barthes.
3.  A poststructuralist rejection of the structuralist anihilation of the author. Instead: “the author function” as the discursive figure and institutional practice of modern society.
4.  An alternative, future nonauthor with resemblance to Poster’s digital author. Removes the presence of the author from the text. Interpretative focus on a discourse understood in its exteriority.
Poster’s analogue and digital authors / The centrality of the machinic mediation.
Author in modern period – bound to print technology.
Digital author – networked form of writing.

Gendered authors

The status of the subject / Feminist critique of the timing of the death of the subject.
However, Poster’s point is to illustrate how the subject is reconfigured in the networked world. “Digital authorship is about the performance of self-constitution” (75).

Five. Authors Analogue and Digital

Aim / Attempting to explore both the technical and theoretical dimensions of the analogue/digital distinction,
Poster refers to Kittler / Explores the technocultural difference on the basis of their ability to store, transmit and compute the real.
The role of the imagination – works to supply the absent information.

Analogue Authors

The origin of the analogue author / Books were produced by guilds – and hence the result of collective labour. Significant differences with early book culture: 1) a copy was not necessarily an exact replica of the original. 2) The author of the book was not automatically trusted.
Social and cultural changes that made the analogue author familiar / -  Litarcy had to become general
-  Markets for books had to emerge, books as capitalist commodities
-  Legal systems of copyright developed
-  The cultural sign of the author had to displace the guild master
The subject / Individuals had to be defined as intereior consciousness, which could be externalized in manuscripts, then in print.

Analogue Authors in the Regime of Broadcast Media

The cultural industry / and the mass market. Cultural works became economically significant.
The figure of the author began to decline.
à brand names, logos, images, trademarks.
The transformation to the postindustrial economies.

Digital Authors

The globally networked computer / “elicits a rearticulation of the author from the center of the text to its margins, from the source of meaning to an offspring” (91).
The unpredictability of new media/technologies.
A multiple, unstable author of postmodernity.

Stability of the Sign in Time and Space

The space/time configuration changes / From that of the analogue author.
Digital texts are mobile and changeable. Digital texts are subject to a material regime different from analogue texts.
For instance with hypertext – here Poster also critizices Espen Aarseth’s ambigious discussion of the significance of the materiality of the media.
All forms of cmc / Raise the fundamental issue of the medium and its reconfiguratin of the author.