2-4 November APCAP 2007 Desires of Time and the Digital - Marta Celletti Desires of Time and the Digital Marta Celletti School of Cultural and Social Science

2-4 November APCAP 2007

Desires of Time and the Digital - Marta Celletti

Desires of Time and the Digital

Marta CellettiSchool of Cultural and Social Science

University of Western Australia





Overview

Method

The concept of Desire

The concept of Time

Some Digital Times

Some productive desires of Time

Bibliography



Nomad Thought

playing with conceptsconcepts as tools (hammers, fork and knife…)how they are usedto which aim in various context

• a lot of ideas• production of change•political intervention





Time

I am not interested in what it is, what is the real and true nature of this concept.

I am curious about how it works,

for what it has been used for,

and how it has been used so far.



The interesting question

What is time?What is digital time?The opposite of real time ?What reality is?

What people do with the concept of time?





Lacanian Desire

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the term desire designates the impossible relation that a subject has with objet petit a. According to Lacan, desire proper (in contrast with demand) can never be fulfilled.



Object petit aIn the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire. objet petit a as the imaginary part-object an element which is imagined as separable from the rest of the body. He articulates objet a with the term agalma (Greek, an ornament). Just as the agalma is a precious object hidden in a worthless box, so objet petit a is the object of desire which we seek in the other. (1957, Les formations de l'inconscient) (1960-1961 Le transfert ) objet petit a is defined as the leftover, the remnant left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real. (1962-1963 L'angoisse) (1964 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis)In the Discourse of the Master, one signifier attempts to represent the subject for all other signifiers, but a surplus is always produced: this surplus is objet petit a, a surplus meaning, a surplus of jouissance. (1969-1970 The Other Side of Psychoanalysis )objet petit a (object little-a) Lacan always insisted for it to remain untranslated "thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign." (Écrits).



The Politics of Lack

Lacan

Freud (libidinal economy) consciousness/desire

Marx (political economy) production/ideology

Plato Desire is lack. Impossible to fulfill other than in dreams



The body/mind divide

Embodiment

Disembodiment

Politics at play

What is my politics here?

Virtuality as terra nullius?



What is more postmodern than the Internet?

What is more modern than the dichotomy body/mind?



Ramachandran Box



Ramachandran BoxThe patient places the good limb into one side of the box (in this case the right hand) and the amputated limb into the other side. Due to the mirror, the patient sees a reflection of his good hand where his or her missing limb should be (indicated in lower contrast). The patient thus receives artificial visual feedback that the "resurrected" limb is now moving when he or she moves the good hand



Ramachandran Box



learned paralysis Their hypothesis was that every time the patient attempted to move the paralyzed limb, he or she received sensory feedback (through vision and proprioception) that the limb did not move. This feedback stamped itself into the brain circuitry through a process of Hebbian learning, so that, even when the limb was no longer present, the brain had learned that the limb (and subsequent phantom) was paralyzed. Often a phantom limb is painful because it is felt to be stuck in an uncomfortable or unnatural position, and the patient feels he or she cannot move it.

Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998



Synesthesia

Because this visual feedback elicits kinesthetic sensations, Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran refer to this as a kind of visual-kinesthetic synesthesia, although this is true only in the broadest sense of the term.

Ramachandran & Rogers-Ramachandran 1996



Synesthesia

Synesthesia from the Ancient Greek σύν (syn), meaning "with," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), meaning "sensation"'—is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway



Spatial Neglect

Hemispatial neglect, also called unilateral neglect, spatial neglect or neglect syndrome is a neurological condition in which, after damage to one hemisphere of the brain, a deficit in attention to the opposite side of space is observed.

Neglect may also present as a delusional form, where the patient denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of the body.



DelusionDelusions typically occur in the context of neurological or mental illness, although they are not tied to any particular disease and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders and particularly in schizophrenia.



DelusionA false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a handbook for mental health professionals that lists different categories of mental disorder and the criteria for diagnosing them, according to the publishing organization the American Psychiatric Association



The Politics of Lack

Lacan

Freud (libidinal economy) consciousness/desire

Marx (political economy) production/ideology

Plato Desire is lack. Impossible to fulfill other than in dreams





Desiring Machine

Deleuze and Guattari oppose the Freudian conception of unconsciousness as a "theater", instead favoring a "factory" model: desire is not an imaginary force based on lack, but a real, productive force.



Desiring Machine

They describe the mechanistic nature of desire as a kind of "Desiring-Machine" that functions as a circuit breaker in a larger "circuit" of various other machines to which it is connected.



Desiring Machine

Meanwhile, the Desiring-Machine is also producing a flow of desire from itself.



Politics of Desire

Desire as distinctly political

Desire as Productive Desire (not ideological, not unconscious)

Capitalism as the greatest repression of desiring production in history

Desiring machines: those that are engaged in productive desire

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari Anti-Œdipus (1972).





“What is Time? If no one asks me about it, I know; if I want to explain it to the one who asks, I don’t know”

Augustine XI



Let’s have a look at time

different conceptions of time,

how they get used in society and

in knowledge organisation

their stratifications in the discourses on digital technologies





Different conceptions of time

Classic Time

Modern Time

Contemporary Time



Time used in society/culture

Cyclical Time

Linear Time

Chaotic/Complex Time



Time used in Organisation of Knowledge

Time of Habits

Time of Memory

Time of Becoming



Stratifications on Digital Technologies

Time of Procedural Technology

Time of Data Base

Time of Search Engines



Some Times of the Digital

Reversed Time: day/night, work shifts, solitude, sociability

Parallel Time: following the rhythm of events, recomposing continuity, asynchrony of blogs, mails, alerts

Speed Time: Intense, slow motion, different speeds.





Asyncronicity

without the presence of the other?



Desire: desiring an answer to an e-mail, extension of imagination?

Productive Desire: producing the possibility for this time to come





Virtuality as Desiring Machine

It is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence

Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, Anne Boyman, trans., New York: Zone Books, 2001.



Virtuality as Desiring Machine

An opportunity to politically act

To reshape the concept of the body

To rethink the concepts of space and time

To learn to use these concepts differently





BibliographyAugustine. Confessions, book XI.Bergson, H. (1913). Creative Evolution. London: Macmillan

and Co.Crutchfield, J. P. (1990). Complexity: Order contra Chaos.

Paper presented at the International Conference on Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks, Iizuka, Japan.

DeLanda, M. (1997). A thousand years of non linear history. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. (1978). Le cours of Gilles Deleuze on Kant. Retrieved July, 2005, from www.webdeleuze.com

Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and repetition. London: The Athlone Press.

Deleuze, G. (2004). Fuori dai cardini del tempo: lezioni su Kant. Milano: Associazione culturale Mimesis.

Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the Other: how anthropology makes its object. NY, Oxford: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis : an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Sydney: Power Publications.



BibliographyKant, I., Wood, A. W., & Guyer, P. (1998). Critique of pure reason.

Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life : the social

construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.Mandelbrot, B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature. San

Francisco: Kant, I., Wood, A. W., & Guyer, P. (1998). Critique of pure reason. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Freeman.

Nicolis, G., & Prigogine, I. (1989). Exploring Complexity. Munich: GmbH & Co.

Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos : man's new dialogue with nature. Toronto ; New York, N.Y.: Bantam Books.

Ruelle, D. (1989). Chaotic Evolution and Strange Attractors. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Sophocles, Hölderlin, F., & Constantine, D. (2001). Hölderlin's Sophocles : Oedipus & Antigone. Tarset: Bloodaxe.

Stengers, I. (2000). The Invention of Modern Science (D. Smith, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.



Documents

2-4 November APCAP 2007 Desires of Time and the Digital - Marta Celletti Desires of Time and the Digital Marta Celletti School of Cultural and Social Science