Crossed Signals

Whatever this is, it seems to involve “affect”, in all it’s dimensions. But what’s affect? There’s a great Affect Theory Reader coming out this year, edited by Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. It’s great for lots of reasons apart from the fact I co-wrote a chapter for it, along with Lone Bertelsen (who’s written some great things on affect and photoworks, our chapter is ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities And Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain ). And it’s not as though there’s not a lot of other wonderful material around on affect.

However, I thought I’d put something up here that tries to sum up the basics from a number of viewpoints before heading toward my favourite takes on affect. This is in part because I know so many people working on affect who find it difficult to reconcile the concepts involved with the normalising requirements of their various disciplines, which tend at times to cage affect in one or other of these definitions (or worse, a reluctant acceptance of a minor role for affect, at best). At the same time, both as a concept and in itself, affect seem to shake up a lot of these disciplines, even those working most closely with it.

I should note that what follows below is very much an out-take from a very early version of chapter for the reader. Greg and Melissa will undoubtedly cover this introduction to affect much more subtly and powerfully in their introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Until then, what’s below is pretty much a set of notes to add to all the other takes around. I think I wrote most of this section, but Lone might have written some too. I’ll say up front that it’s not terribly well referenced, though I have at least tried to get the names in the right places.

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Affect

‘Affect is a process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of heterogeneous durations of being and, given this, we would certainly be better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of scientific paradigms and to deliberately turn ourselves toward ethical and aesthetic paradigms’ (Guattari, 1996: 159).

This is certainly the definition that I prefer, but what does everyone else think?

Well, three things can be said about the recent move towards thinking about affect, and not only in cultural theory (also in neuroscience, for a start). First, it’s shown that affect is crucial to culture (and not only to culture). Second, affect is much more powerful and central than we may have thought—in everyday life as much as in theory. It is increasingly seen as key, for example, even to concepts/processes such as reason, or agency. At the same time it forces us to rethink these. Third, no one quite agrees what affect is, and, with quite a few notable exceptions [see lots of links at the end], it often tends to become defined according to disciplinary requirements, and often with only minor alterations to previous ways of thinking about how the world works, and how we know the world and act within it.

A list of the many ways in which affect has been defined might include the following … Simply affecting or being affected. Affection. Emotion. Feeling. Background feeling (Damasio). Mood (which can be different to background feeling). Affective tone (Whitehead). Motivation. Interest. Many of these are often seen as separate (and often subordinate to other cognitive processes), as in ‘The generic character supposedly shared by pleasure, pain and the emotions as distinguished from the ideational and volitional aspects of consciousness’. Then there are false displays of emotion (’the scientific term used to describe a subject’s externally displayed mood’) as opposed to real hidden feelings (in these terms one fakes “affect” so that, for example, one could be discharged from a psychiatric institution). Or, affect can be the opposite, the “real” thing, ‘the inner motive as distinquished from the intention or end of action. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, bk. III. — L.W.’. In this, feelings can be considered as different to emotion, in that feelings are a hidden series of feeling-thoughts in some kind of relation to more public and basic, obviously embodied emotion such as anger or disgust (e.g. in Damasio). For some, affects can be categorised (for Silvan Tomkins there are eight affects [maybe nine?], for example, though for him these are different to emotion, which is much messier). Others differentiate “categorical affects” (Daniel Stern) from those that possess infinite variety (for Daniel Stern these are “vitality affects”). For some, the question is one of how to control affect (notably in recent psychology in what is called “Affect Control Theory“).

Freud defined affects as somatic as against the psychic, or as against the ideational representative, with many problems lying between the two. Ideational representatives could be repressed without too much transformation, but for affects it was a different story. What happens to them in repression, and how do they return? This question is answered so vaguely in Freud as to cause the more recent psychoanalyst of affect, Adam Phllips to remark that there was a missing theory of affect in psychoanalysis.

For Spinoza, of course, the question was of the power to affect and be affected (see Greg Seigworth on affectio etc .. see also Greg’s work elsewhere, for example, “From Affection to Soul,” in Charles Stivale’s Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts). For some, these two “powers” in Spinoza are always intertwined (see the first page of Joel McKim’s interview with Brian Massumi). Of course, this power associated with affect immediately suggests a political approach to affect, a politics as appropriate to everyday life as it is to larger political events. Indeed, it links the shifting play of capacities and capabilities to the individual tolerance (or not) of intensities on the one hand, and to an interlinked general world on the other. This power to affect and be affected, as a power of transformation within the wider world has motivated Deleuze and Guattari’s affects as becomings, or even becoming-animal (the “surprising kitty” above even).

This is where things get complicated, however. Although I think this just adds to our understanding. For Deleuze and Guattari, affects, as becomings and mutual contagions, can operate independent of emotion or feeling. Writing about the work of painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze writes -

But there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects; that is, “sensations” and “instincts,” according to the formula of naturalism. Sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage of one sensation to another, the search for the “best” sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contradiction or dilation …) (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation:39)

For some cultural (and other) theory, the politics of affect is separated from this broader set of events, taken only to be that of feelings, emotion, or even only a question of the agreeable/disagreeable. There’s nothing wrong with the ideas here, in many ways. On the contrary. It’s just that the affect being discussed is not quite the same as the affect being discussed elsewhere. Again, this wouldn’t matter, except that some kind of disciplinary competition sometimes seems to emerge, which likes to bracket off one part of the whole process as “affect”, while ignoring or diminishing the importance of the rest. This is completely unnecessary (although very much explainable via a multi-disciplinary theory of affect). In any case, this only emphasises the fact that we need to know which definition of affect we are taking up. And obviously, although I head to a specific, if broader, understanding of affect, I also think that affect studies works better as an appropriately multiple assemblage, rather than a discipline.

If I move away from “emotion” in what comes next, it’s only because I think in the end that this move is what some approaches to affect avoid doing, and what still needs most explaining. For this I return to Deleuze, and of course Massumi.

Although the approach to affect as emotion, feeling or pleasure has value, Deleuze above suggests something very different - a possible politics that takes into account instinct, in the sense of filling the flesh. And perhaps when Foucault, at the beginning of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, famously asked questions about why we constantly live out a micro-fascism within everyday life, the answer is at least in part to be found in this passage of sensations, both with and without feeling, or even with or without our “agreement”.

This is a question then, of intensity.

For Brian Massumi, one of the best thinkers of affect in the contemporary world, and upon whose work many of us draw extensively, along with Félix Guattari, affect is indeed first equated with ‘intensity’ (Parables for the Virtual:27). This is an intensity in which there is ‘a crossing of semantic wires’, which begins to explain why affect theory sometimes trips over itself (Parables for the Virtual:24). This intensity is not only a matter of what affect means, but what it does. Affect is intensities coming together, moving each other, transforming and translating under or beyond meaning, beyond semantic or simply fixed systems, or cognitions, even emotions. This is not to denigrate any of these. In fact, it gives more precision to our understanding of the contexts of all of them. In Aristotle’s terms, affect is, for Massumi ‘the excluded middle’ (24), and thus a consideration of affect undermines much of twentieth century thought and habit based upon Aristotle’s opening gambit (for example in the founding of common principles for ontology—beings and Being with an exclude middle in-between and so many other basic divisions). Even the sometime troubling division of active from passive affections in Spinoza’s philosophy can fall apart in the light of this previously excluded middle -

Spinoza’s ethics in the philosophy of the becoming-active, in parallel, of mind and body, from an origin in passion, in impingement, in so pure and productive a receptivity that it can only be conceives as a third state, en excluded middle, prior to the distinction between activity and passivity: affect. (Massumi: 32)

Suggesting that we still largely lack a ‘cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect’ (27), Massumi attempts to provide one. Affect, as intensity, is of a different order to personal emotion,

Reserve the term ‘emotion’ for the personalized content, and affect for the continuation. Emotion is contextual. Affect is situational: eventfully ingressive to context. Serially so: affect is trans-situational. As processual as it is precessual, affect inhabits the passage. It is pre- and postcontextual, pre- and postpersonal, an excess of continuity invested only in the ongoing: its own. Self-continuity across the gaps. Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together. In event. The world-glue of event of an autonomy of event-connection continuing across its own serialized capture in context. (Massumi:217)

Affect is then immersed in the way in which the changing world constantly trades its forces, with us always immersed in this trade, whatever story we tell ourselves about it, and whatever disciplines or concepts we form to talk about it, or try to tweak this trade. Intensity arises as the infinity of real relations, and their real potentials, actualize in specific events and processes. For example, in the infinite number of possible connections between neurons, just to name one part of the world in which affect resides (without suggesting affect as an origin in itself). Over time, this infinity actualizes as specific connections (thoughts) that are never quite removed from their potential for infinite other connections. In short, affect is the emergence of actual relations on the one hand, and their falling back into virtual relations (relational potential) on the other. The entire complex situation is summed up as follows (in this unapologetically long quote, because it is here that emotions and cognitions are situated in the broader trade of intensities):

Emergence, once again, is a two-sided coin: one side in the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation). What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sidedness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly. For affect is synesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the measure of living thing’s potential interactions is its ability to transform the effects of one sensory mode into those of another. (Tactility and vision being the most obvious but by no means the only examples: interoperative senses, especially proprioception, are crucial.) Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality [Stern again], or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted) expression of that capture - and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is most intimately and unshareable in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect [so affect is also the autonomy of things - that which gives them autonomy]. (Massumi:35)

Affect is therefore more than “important” - in many ways it is the world in motion, in emergence and disappearance. Affect is central, before and after our assumptions of stability, subject or object. As Deleuze notes in The Fold -

…nothing authorises to conclude in favor of the presence of a body that might be ours, or the existence of the body that would have happened to affect it. There exists only what is perceived…. (Deleuze, 1993:94)

Even perception comes after affect. Deleuze suggests that if we were to stick a pin into our hand and move it about, the pain would not be that of “a pin” but of a sharpness intercepting our flesh - at least at first (see my article on the Virtual and VR systems, Deleuze, 1993:95). Perception is an aftereffect of affect. It “evokes a vibration gathered by a receptive organ” (95).

As I have begun to suggest above, affect also, for many thinkers, comes before, during and after, “cognition”, if indeed cognition is not just a special, misrecognised case of affect. Deleuze suggests, for example, that for Spinoza ‘The whole problem of reason…will be converted by Spinoza into a special case of the more general problem of affects’ (Daniel W. Smith, 2006, in Duffy:151). Although affect comes before bodies, constituting them perhaps in an ongoing manner, insofar as they are alive perhaps, it also inhabits them, if as a passage through them. As Eugene Thacker notes, ‘affect is a differential force accommodated by the mode of a body at a given moment - what a body is capable of. … the way that both feeling and self are constituted through and through by modes of individuation, or what Deleuze calls “nonsubjective affects”’ (Biomedia:186). Just as importantly, Thacker notes (188) that the more complex a body, the more we might say it is able to sustain the intensity of relational autonomies, the more complex the affects. Thacker also points to the kind of ethics involved—an ethics of good or bad forms of composition. And this might also be what a well-composed, and open concept is meant to assist.

With these definitions in mind, and taking our lead from Massumi, Thacker, Guattari and others, I can say this about affect. Although I obviously do think affect can be most usefully defined in a certain manner, I am more interested in considering the complex set of processes and events that all definitions attempt to address. This is, if you like, to emphasise the entire constellation of events that most theories of affect address, if with different emphases. It is then to ask how everyday life, and politics within everyday life, move through and are moved by this constellation. It asks what difference it makes to think in terms of this broad constellation, why it might be more useful ways to think in these terms than others. One can use this constellation as a way of expanding upon what Félix Guattari termed an “ethico-aesthetic” approach to everyday life. The ethico-aesthetic paradigm is useful because its precisely because it brings the aesthetic—affect—sensation into the question of practice and experience in everyday life. This in part involves what Guattari calls “sensory affects”—which accord with what he calls “simple refrains”. However, there is also something like a generalisation and overturning of the question of taste in the acceptance of the autonomy and infinite multiplicity of relations (registered in what Guattari calls “problematic affects”, which accord with “complex refrains”). This is also a matter of relational potentials (the virtual—cf Massumi). If ontologically we take the whole constellation as a kind of “worlding” that pre-exists and post-exists the more usually constrained versions of our ontologies and ethics, let alone our disciplines and methods, we need an ethico-aesthetic paradigm rather than a “systematic” scientist paradigm (for example, based on a cognitivist notion of dominant rational agents choosing what the world will be next, if in competition with others choosing—this is definitely Lone Bertelsen’s point!). Such paradigms can neither comprehend the constellations of affect, nor work with them except to bracket them out, or subordinate them to a scientistic, cognitivist or rationalist form of control (even occasionally within “affect studies”).

We end up living with these restrictive paradigms a lot, and that’s a pity. Yet perhaps all approaches to thinking more seriously about affect have the potential to free us up from such limited modes of living.

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[some "exceptions", in addition to those mentioned above] Brian Massumi, Erin Manning [I hope her amazing paper on choreographic objects and mobile architectures comes out soon], Anna Gibbs, Steven Shaviro, Doris McIlwain, Sher Doruff, Lone Bertelsen, Glen Fuller, Jonas Fritsch, Mat Wall-Smith, Liz Wilson, Ros Diprose, David Bissell, Gillian Fuller, and of course quite a few others, including friends, I can’t list here (please forgive me if I haven’t mentioned you and you’re reading this!). These are the people I work with most, so I’m biased :).

I wrote this for our first year course in media, and it’s also an outline of some of my basic thinking … as well as a lot of links

I’m giving a lecture to the good people in ARTS1091 this week on the media and Climate Change, so I’ve been a little more attentive than usual to how the issue is panning out in the media right here, right now. This is emerging as a research interest for me (habit, everyday life, media and Climate Change). Although it’s a research interest for just about everybody else and their dog at the moment.

It’s interesting and perhaps revealing to take a fairly random snap shot. So this is a kind of ‘Climate Change this week’ (with a bit of my collection of links concerning events so far). Focusing on my own reading about the issue via a range of media (from online newspapers to Twitter) I’ve found it interesting to realise how much “heat” Climate Change as an issue generates now in media terms—across all media.

There are links throughout, and also quite a long list of links at the bottom of the post.

The Basic Info

If there’s anyone left out there who still doesn’t get Climate Change and some of the debates and interests involved, look at the video on this blog entry by George Monbiot.

One phenomenon in media coverage of Climate Change is that people are getting better at summing up the issues. If our local paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, is any indication, even scientists, including my university’s Matthew England and Andy Pitman, seem to be getting on top of their communication issues. This is one of the clearest pieces I’ve ever read in a newspaper on Climate Change—although Matthew England has written some other good pieces for quite a while. The piece is even accompanied by a context article, which is also good.

Science and Media; Climate Change, Media Ecologies and Us

Now for some quick generalisations—all of which have many exceptions.

First , there is the fact that journalism is often not great when it comes to science, and science often has a fairly basic idea of how the media works.

Second, thinking about the media’s involvement in the complex and urgent issue of Climate Change is one of the most best ways to understand a heap of things about the media in general. I’ll be suggesting in the lecture that they have some basic things in common as well: we’re deeply immersed everyday in both the weather and media “ecologies”; we talk about them all the time; we like to predict what’s going to happen; but both are getting more complex and unpredictable by the day, with deep social and political implications. And this means we really understand neither very well. Nor do we quite know what to do about them. In combination they’re dynamite to established social and political worlds.

The result of all of this … e.g. for quite a while, I’ve seen and read a lot of scientists valiantly trying to put their case in scientifically precise but media-obscure (and sound-bite unfriendly) terms. The issues are of course complex, and communicating this complexity has its own value. It educates the media and “punters” (people like me) into science (a hidden benefit of Climate Change in general!). And there’s little doubt in my mind that the mainstream media, as much due to cut backs, with journalists and editors losing their jobs, as due to editorial policy or anything else, is currently weak when it comes to most scientific issues, at a time when one would like to see the opposite. I’m not saying there isn’t some good science journalism around—there’s heaps. Just that, often when it matters, there are a lot of misunderstandings across these two very different worlds. This is partly because what counts as a “fact”—to put it bluntly—is very different for a journalist or a scientist (or editor, or politician, or businessperson, or you or I). It’s obviously a question of different “interests”, in more or less an innocent sense (to begin with anyway).

In the middle of all this, complex points don’t always help a debate about the reality of Climate Change within the public sphere. We know this debate should be over by now, but it doesn’t quite seem to be. The sceptics arguments are like zombies that keep coming back. Here a ‘quirky’ (if not corporate funded think tank fed) sceptic, with a few pat answers in nice sound bites, and what is usually some very shonky “science” will often win hands down (in media terms). This is if they can get a “seat at the table” (the first aim of sceptics and organization promoting them—see SourceWatch, by the way, for an account of who is behind many of these organizations and individuals) and “create a bit of doubt” (the second aim—especially when most of us don’t want to change things too much in our everyday lives, and politicians will use any excuse, emotionally, not to have to face the political changes required), selling a few books in the meantime.

Interestingly, for my money, the blogging community has been much better (and often much worse) on this issue—and for all sides of the debates (you can aggregate the blogs I read on this with this link). One of my favourite bloggers in the world for several years has been Deltoid (Tim Lambert, again at my university, UNSW). I was lucky enough to interview him recently for a research project on the social uses of new media. The combative side of me has very much enjoyed his engagement with mainstream media, especially his series of entertaining posts, ‘The War On Science’ (by another Australian newspaper), now up to post 39. Via Deltoid, this week I’ve read the blog Larvatus Prodeo’s wonderful send up of the “rules” that sceptics use for evidence relating to Climate Change, another good summary of how things work in the debate. Just as interesting of late has been the forced take down from YouTube of a video critical of many of the sceptic Anthony Watts’ claims. George Monbiot’s blog puts this in the broader context of claims of media censorship. Meanwhile, as always, if you want to read some real but accessible science about Climate Change, go to RealClimate.

This Week in Climate Change

Other discussions that I’ve come across in the past week:

* The military thinking hard about climate change in terms of the challenges to security it provides, leading to a ‘new security paradigm‘ (the article is interesting on the way that the military can think very imaginatively about the long term). This article is on the interesting OpenDemocracy site.

* From The Guardian, ‘Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide‘. This is about spy satellite photos showing the extent to which polar ice is disappearing.

* Sociologists are starting to think seriously about Climate Change in the social context. Then there’s Elinor Ostrom call for analysts to take on board the full complexity of ’social-ecological systems’, something to which complex media events only add.

* A bit more off beat but related to the above—’ten thinking traps exposed‘.  It’s worth reading this, just to get thinking about the way in which media tend to reinforce common habits of thought, instead of working as critically as people sometimes claim. Of course, this is what is used by savvy persons wishing to muddy the possibility of action on issues such as Climate Change. Here’s a more specific article by George Lakoff on framing the Climate Change debate. More generally again, I think this is kind of interesting—‘why you’re stuck in a narrative’, about our need to turn everything into a story, and when this might be counter-productive. This seems very basic to media production, journalism and media engagements.

* Also off the beaten track perhaps, but I think relevant, is the question of affect and politics. I just found an excellent course online, with great links (this is not about climate change however—just generally about affect and politics .. but I digress).

* Some of the ways that university research and politics come together. Here the ANU determines that ‘current emissions targets won’t stop climate change‘. This seems critical of the government, but here’s how the government takes it up, as critical of the opposition. And there’s been a lot of debate about green jobs for young people, a promise with which Prime Minister Rudd opened the recent Labor Party conference.

What to do

Of course, the real problem everyone faces is how to reconcile all these complex issues and investments with the size and urgency of the problem (one that could easily be reaching a ‘tipping point’ of no return in which feedback amplifies the problem very quickly). The obvious issue is what to do—now—and how to do it (or for some, how to stop or delay something happening, if it damages their business interests, their jobs, or their political power). This is where things get really complicated, but very interesting. This is echoed in the media uses involved.

There are lots of groups, sites, collective, activists, concerned scientists, think tanks, industry lobbyists, individuals serious and wacky, institutes, research centres, political parties, local councils, etc etc … all trying to grapple with these problems. And all of these want access to the media. Some example of events/groups (some of the events here and soon):

* The United Nations Copenhagen Climate Change conference in December this year will bring all of these together. When I went to the front page just then I found a picture of the Australian Prime Minister, accompanied by a discussion of the importance of Australia’s commitment to action on climate change.

* In fact there was already a non-UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen this year, in March. It was at this conference that scientists suggested things were getting more worrying, and Climate Change happening quicker, than they thought (interesting discussion of this by Mike Hulme).

* The Copenhagen conference is going to be surrounded by analysis and activism. Here’s one short analysis from OpenDemocracy. Here’s one activist group. Here a group helping other groups get together—the Copenhagen Climate Network iForum.

* Activism, democracy and political organization: see for example Avaaz, and Get Up, Al Gore’s work, Repower America, Greening Campaign (UK), 100 months, Worldchanging, Care2Action, and many more .. then there are broader based groups/sites such as Evolver or Inhabitat …

* At UNSW, August 26, ‘Climate Action: How Citizens Acting Together Can Save the Planet‘, Free Symposium and Book Launch.

* 2 Degrees: Art, Activism and Climate Emergency—4.30-6pm, Wednesday 12 August, 2009 .. Gallery 4A, 181-187 Hay Street, Sydney (between Pitt and George Streets

* The exhibition Transclimatic about Climate Change and Design.

A more bizarre experience this week was the ultra-conservative LaRouche group campaigning at the front gate of UNSW, with placards reading “Carbon Trading Caps are Genocide”.(If you want to know what/who LaRouche is—and it’s a group that many people find worrying—check out Sourcewatch.org).

Thoughout all this it’s clear that the main questions are shifting towards what we can do, and this question in turn towards social organization (and new forms of this). Social media are proving to be particularly effective in this regard.

Industry, Democracy and Climate Change

There are of course problems when it comes to social change and Climate Change, as we all know but try to keep to the back of our thoughts.

I was reading Italian activist Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s book on Félix Guattari this week. Both Bifo and Guattari are/were long concerned with the environment. Bifo seems to capture both the history of our current dilemma and the complexity of the questions now involved when it comes to what we can do—with this, about the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit of 1992.

The alternative between returning to a livable dimension of the natural environment and maintaining the rhythm of development and consumption to which Western public opinion has become accustomed is a chokehold that the political class is absolutely unable to loosen. (Berardi, Franco Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography London:Palgrave, 2009:25)

That’s it in a nutshell. I was talking to a friend on Friday about this (they will have to remain nameless) but we were suggesting that, especially in the light of the “financial crisis”, there is now a reluctance to criticise social conditions/economics assumptions etc on the part of many (including many scientists), when it comes to Climate Change. We “must” have the Capitalism we’re used to, the lifestyle we’re used to, our old habits, and make major adjustments at the same time. There is of course much anger about this series of attachments on the part of many others (generally speaking, the younger the more so perhaps).

Even this quick snapshot, however, shows us that in the end everyone is going to have to change habits, question assumptions, etc: politicians, business people, scientists and media. And soon ..

.. and of course much of this in the end relates to issues of habit, of affect, of how we come to do what we do in everyday life, whether we are politicians or just living our suburban life.

Many more links from my Delicious page on Climate Change, Media, Society and Politics

Some more links that I’ve found about very recent events, with some generally useful sites thrown in:

A very revealing “non-debate” between George Monbiot and Australian sceptic Ian Plimer. See also here and here (on how sceptic’s bad science is picked up in mainstream media)

SourceWatch’s Climate Change Portal (very useful, and includes a section on ‘becoming a citizen journalist on climate change’)

You might like to look up various institutions via Sourcewatch—try the conservative Heartland Institute (read the Sourcewatch account here, it’s very interesting)—this recently convinced Australia’s Steven Fielding to become a sceptic (this links to the interesting Crikey site—independent Australian news review); Science and Public Policy Institute (Sourcewatch account); Christopher Monckton (Sourcewatch account); or more pertinent to Australia’s interests, see this article on Jennifer Marohasy and the Institute of Public Affairs and follow the links through (Sourcewatch on Jennifer Marohasy, on the Institute of Public Affairs) .. to balance all this, even if you’re a sceptic yourself, you might also check out the Australia Institute and Clive Hamilton. Here’s a debate between Jennifer Marohasy and Clive Hamilton. And after all these sites—you can see how complex the various battles over “facts” are .. and why you need to do some delving deeper into claims and counter-claims, and some thinking about how you might get through to what’s really going on.

UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre

CSIRO 2007 report on Australia (see also this) (BBC on Sydney)

(map of world 4° warmer from New Scientist)

Climate Action Network (this page is on International Policy .. some explanations, eg of the Kyoto protocol)

UN and Google Create Climate Change Mapping Resources (the map itself)

And Australia as the ‘canary the coal mine’: this, this (pdf), this, this, Sydney, 50 years to live, and this

Conservative rejoicing in the number of Americans who don’t think Climate Change is caused by human activity.

Animals are evolving already to try to adapt to Climate Change (seems too quick to me but I guess it’s a speeding up of natural selection in drastic circumstances)

Finally, here’s a good recent YouTube video, highlighting the  links between data, science, sceptics and politicians.

Tags: climate change, media

Here’s a practical and subtle example of crossed signals - between still photography and video. We sometimes tend to think of “trans” anything as a relation between two distant and well-defined entities. Yet all kinds of interesting complexities emerge, and lovely shifts occur, in work with closer, smaller and hazier relations - such as those between close cousins video and still photography.

SCINTILLATION from Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.

Not technically cross-signal processing, but a beautiful example of what it might be about.

Tags: photography, video

A very good friend of mine, a natural philosopher, once said “The world is full of everything”. We laughed—she was ahead of her time and we didn’t get it—but I’ve thought a lot about this ever since. It sums up what I think’s worth thinking about. Much of the work that I enjoy is multi/inter/transdisciplinary, and I’m attracted to large questions, a range of key social issues, and a range of interesting new approaches to dealing with these. I want to know how things might sometimes come together differently. It’s this that led me to the crossroads (and crossed signals) between ideas, society and technics.

By the latter I do mean, in part, technologies, but I’m probably more interested in techniques or practices (and technologies themselves are a gathering of techniques). If there’s one thing that is constant for me—it’s an interest in how techniques (models and even concepts) work out, quite specific, in daily life, in, or even sometimes as “the social”. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I began directing theatre and performance works seriously at university and after, I was getting a thorough going over by the question of technique in the context of social interaction. As a theatre director, you’re not only analysing what’s going on on the stage for weeks at a time. You’re also constantly trying to drag up some technique from the depths of everyone’s souls that is going to make what’s going on on stage work for an audience. I’m only now realising how much this experience has influenced everything else that followed. For one thing, the kind of theory I’m interested in, from Deleuze and Guattari’s “mecanosphere” or understanding of philosophy as the creation of concepts, to postconnectionist theories of thinking processes, is to do with how things work, technically—and again how understanding this allows them to change/be changed.

What do I mean by “theory” (transversal theory at that)? Well that’s a bit of a winding road. As an undergrad studying theatre and literature in the late 70s in Armidale, we didn’t do much “theory” as we know it now, not beyond Brecht and Aristotle in any case (Chekhov was my favourite). Then, the first time I tried my hand at a PhD, before I got distracted by the theatre again, I took up structuralism and theatre semiotics. I found it interesting but kind of stuck in a fairly fixed views of things. Encouraged, over games of Space Invaders and Galaga, by Tony Twaites, I quickly moved to post-structuralism and had it all sorted. I read Lacan’s Ecrits (it took me 3 months, 3 hours read 10 pages a day), Foucault’s The Order of Things (which I still think is a mess of a book), Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva .. the whole canon. I was decidedly Post (modern, structuralism, Marxist, whatever) and had all the answers—a fix for everything. It was a lot of fun and I still love it all.

As it happens, however, I didn’t have all the answers (surprise, surprise). First up, my favourite supposed “postmodernists”, Deleuze and Guattari, explicitly hated postmodernism. They thought, along with most supposed “postmodernists” (who are actually usually critical of postmodern culture), that pomo was a vacuous if not dangerous expression of late Capitalism, marketing and apolitical banality. Second up, I became interested in a whole lot of other things. For one thing —via a great reading group run by my friend John Sutton—I became interested in “postconnectionist” cognitive science, eventually embodied and extended mind, human-computer interaction and neuroscience. Third, there was the eternal return from my past. I never really lost an interest in performance, and somewhere along the way had gained interests in technology and performance (currently in VJing, which I’ve enjoyed trying my hand at), art, and electronic music. More recently, all this has branched out into interests in critical accounts of performance management systems, education, the questions of models and concepts as they play out (rightly or wrongly) in society and technics, biophilosophy and biopolitics, a questioning of innovation. In short, technological change (broadly conceived) and what this might mean for what Guattari called the three interactive ecologies of socius, self and environment. I seem to be developing an interest in ecology, in Gregory Bateson, and in Buddhism, Whitehead, not to mention biosemiotics, new forms of collaboration, open access publishing, and most of this coming together in questions involving contemporary media (I edit an international refereed journal, the Fibreculture Journal, that deals with this)  … the world is full of everything. Luckily, over the last few years, I’ve been working with others with similar broad interests—I guess across philosophy and sociology, art, science and technics. In particular, I’ve had some great experiences with the people at Senselab in Montréal. It’s the reading and work I’m doing at the moment that might be seen as somewhat “post-post”, but in many ways a return to something like critical theory combined with the fostering of new forms of social organization (including those close to my heart, research and education, networking and collaboration in response to social issues).

I have to say for some weird reason I think it’s all coming together for me at the moment. This is partly in the ongoing question of technics, and partly through the connections across often previously heavily-defended territories as the whole world is not only full of everything, but goes transversal as everything connects up (a sad example is the synchronous economic crisis at the moment). A major research question at the moment concerns the tensions between territory and transversals in what are becoming very complex ecologies (for example, drawing together media, global warming, politics and the everyday technics of living). I guess, like a lot of people, I feel these kinds of issues are no longer obscure. Being trans and post-post are everyday experiences, and there’s an urgency to dealing with the complexity involved much better than we seem to be doing.

More specifically, I work on an Australian Research Council funded project I’m working on with Anna Munster, Brian Massumi and Adrian Mackenzie—Dynamic Media: Innovative Social and Artistic Development in New Media in Australia, Britain, Canada and Scandinavia since 1990. We’re currently building an online database for this. We’ve also interviewed a lot of interesting and innovative people, and hope to have some of that material online soon. It’s a comparative analysis—transversal in fact— and we’re particularly interested in the material ecologies of code as they challenge and transform older cultures and models based on concepts of representation.

I’m also writing a couple of books (but isn’t everyone?). I’m getting more involved with open access publishing, research, collaboration and education. I’d like to explore VJing and other forms of visual media from a creative practice perspective, and I have an ongoing interest in electronic music - Australian and otherwise.

So this blog could visit a lot of topics.

Tags: technics, theory