Google’s web search engine is an index of pages on the World Wide Web constructed and constantly reconstructed by algorithms running on thousands of computers in parallel. This “PageRank’” algorithm is a mathematical formalisation of the informal heuristic that academics use to judge the influence of a published paper. The more people cite the paper, or the more people link to the document, the higher its score.

This is an automated solution to an organisational or methodological problem. The users of the Web are faced with a highly interlinked but highly diverse space of information to search in order to achieve their various ends. There are alternatives to this. Yahoo and Dmoz are human-managed directories rather than machine-generated indexes. Wikia is a human-managed search engine, although it is currently in its infancy.

In Art & Language’s Index projects I see a precedent for both the practice and critique of web search. The Indexes took Art & Language’s written work, highly interlinked but highly diverse, and produced an index for it based on various concepts in such a way that an imagined audience could navigate this sprawling and opaque practice.

The later Indexes were computer generated (randomly according to one report) or crowdsourced by Art & Language New York, the earlier ones were typed up by the British group. Their production was a strong application of the technology of business (filing cabinets, typewriters, and then computers) to a social and procedural problem: how to map and represent the conversational artistic practice of Art & Language in a form meaningful to the group and to an imagined audience.

To use the Indexes you check a table on the wall or a hand-out and then look up the relevant document in one of the filing cabinets. The bundle of notes in a plastic envelope (or on microfilm) that results may be of more general interest, and similar or different documents can be found by consulting the table further. This looks like a low-tech precursor to Googling for information.

The Indexes have important differences from search engines in the way they operate. Documents in the Indexes are differentiated and classified, and are unranked. Search engines use only a single information-destroying ranking measure, not positive and negative relations or grouping concepts. Directories use grouping concepts but not relations.

What is obscured in considering the Indexes as prehistoric search engines is their social construction and the specific purposes they served. Google’s users mostly regard it as neutral, but it is neutral only with regard to the demands of global capital. The Indexes were both the product of disagreement within Art & Language and of Art & Language’s ideologically radical position relative to the mainstream contemporary art of the time. It is both a product and a producer of discord and hard interpretative work both inside thr group that produced it and between that group and society.

The Indexes provide a historical source of concepts that can be applied to search engine production and critique, both in their social and technical production. The most important question the Indexes raise for search engines is what social forms have produced them and what social forms they produce. These questions are all the more important given search engines professed neutrality.

(There is an image of Index 001 near the bottom of the page here.)

Imagine No Possessions

In Imagine No Possessions, Christina Kiaer investigates the Russian Constructivist conception of objects as being more than commodities. “Our things in our hands must be equals, comrades,” wrote Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925. Kiaer analyzes this Constructivist counterproposal to capitalism’s commodity fetish by examining objects produced by Constructivist artists between 1923 and 1925

gapingvoid on social objects

2. Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The latter act as “nodes”. The nodes appear before the network does.
[…]
6. The Apple iPhone is the best example of Social Object I can think of. At least, it is when I’m trying to explain it to somebody unfamiliar with the concept.
[…]
8. How do you turn a product into a Social Object? Answer: Social Gestures. And lots of them.

Wikipedia: Affordances

An affordance is the quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform action.

So…

Both state capitalism and neoliberalism have produced devices that are meant to be more than commodity fetishes. Are these just reification, however much academia and the blogosphere may protest to the contrary?

Under the theory of affordances the online social graph is produced through social objects, that is it is afforded by them. Is this reification? Are online social networks themselves hypostatization? Or are they intensification (pace Christine Harold’s OurSpace), or just implementation (utilities, to take them at Facebook value)?

If social objects are fetishized/reified they must at most be arcs, not nodes (lines not points). They will be the value of any line that they afford between other nodes. But if they are not fetishized/reified then they could be represented as nodes/points, with the lines they afford more clearly identifying that they are “comrades”, peers, or at least mediators.

Constructivist and technogeek objects, objects as comrades or social drivers, are affordative objects. They are morphisms on the social category. To avoid the “what is art” equivalent question for this we can declare all objects socially affordative and then ask which are better at it. Is an iPhone really a better socially affordance than a cup of coffee? Is a Facebook widget really a better way of making links really or virtually than meeting for a realtime conversation?

Online social networks would at most be events or contexts in a sociologist’s Social Network Analysis matrix. Would the telephone get a row, or a lonely hearts column? What kind of theory of society would that illustrate? What kind of theory of society would it illustrate if between Mrs Ingram and Mr Ippolito there was a column marked “iPhone”? And would every iPhone get its own column? Or everyone’s Facebook usage its own column? If not, why not?

Looking back into the history of ideas can expand the frames of reference that contemporary phenomena are considered in relation to. And applying contemporary sociological and mathematical concepts to social networks and affordative devices will be very fruitful. The problems of classifying relationships and of measuring relations in large populations were faced a long time ago in sociology but have just started to be of interest to bloggers encountering the iPhone. Treating social networks as sets, categories, topographies or graphs affords (fnarr) all kinds of analytical and philosophical tools.

It’s rare I encounter a term I can neither unpack nor Google.

So does anyone know what a “constitutive blank” is? I assume it’s Theory jargon borrowed from somewhere.

“…when one sees and senses thusly, then one has to work to do something about what one sees. To posess good intuition, goodly power, causes work.”
– Women Who Run With The Wolves p108, Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

The album “Floodland” by The Sisters Of Mercy was released on the 17th of November 1987.

It’s an absolute classic and one of the two major initial drivers of my worldview (the other being Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories).

If you don’t own a copy, buy one. If you do, the re-release has extra tracks on. 😉

I was listening to an episode of the Radio 4 programme “In Our Time” the other week which discussed taste. Here are some notes.

Early C18th Britain had become the leading commercial power in Europe. This brought new wealth and luxury into British society. The fear was that this would make the British soft and lead to their imperial decline, as it had for the Roman Empire before. Britain was a hard-working, Protestant, parliamentary democracy. France was its Papist, absolutist, decadent other across the channel. There was an anxiety that luxury (excessive self-gratification) will subvert virtue.

The modern concept of taste was born in France and became harnessed to the debates around luxury in Britain. After 1688 the authority of the British court declined so unlike Louis XIV’s dictation of taste in France, there was a much more open debate about what taste might be.

Taste has the economic basis of dignifying expense. It also has an intellectual basis; the exercise of taste is brought to the centre of philosophy by Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury’s deism sees aesthetic as the best proof of God. He also argues that taste explains virtue and moral judgement as the sense of beauty in society. The man of sophistication and taste is therefore a moral man as well.

Addison in The Spectator describes how people can be better than just pursuers of pleasure by pursuing the refined arts; taste is the capacity to be recpetive to these arts. It becomes a distinguishing competence of modern citizens.

British taste is opposed to enthusiasm and excess as a result of being opposed to religious enthusiasm and to the excess of the court of King Charles. A way of appropriate virtue rather than dangerous enthusiasm. The design rules of the time are a reaction to excess. Taste is a vocabulary for an ordered religiosity.

Taste covered deportment as well as visual aesthetics. You could have taste without having high birth. Taste is potentially a very socially subversive idea. Taste was mocked as well as embraced from the start. Bad taste was mocked savagely, for example by Pope.

Taste is based on a set of rules. This opens it to the masses. But it is also meant to involve long exposure to the rules, making them intuitive. Poor taste gets much more coverage than good taste. Critics fall back on the classical idea of decorum, that surroundings should reflect status. So commentaries on the tasteless gaudiness of those who dress above their station proliferate, as does hatred of new money.

Sheet music, novels, galleries etc. make culture more public and more publicly accessible, especially to the rising middle classes. Taste is deployed socially against popular fads and economically against imports, often at the same time. Good taste is the ingredient old money has that new money hasn’t. You can only really have taste if you’re born to it.

Taste as both innate and discriminatory and rule-based and emancipatory.

Wedgewood had to get buy-in from tastemakers when launching new works to ensure their success, a triangle of entrepenuers, critics and lords results.

Taste was very much a feature of the Empire. For settlers one of the aims of Empire was often to recreate yourself, which you did through displaying taste.

In Britain people fall back on the language of decorum when in doubt about taste.

Liberty has a similar trajectory to taste, spreading through society from the aristocracy. And now “tasteful” is the ultimate put-down.

Shaftesbury, Addison, George Coleman

Today at 4.15pm French time 100 years ago, Alfred Jarry’s final request was for a toothpick.

Find out more about Jarry at Wikipedia:

Alfred Jarry

‘Pataphysics

Pere Ubu

http://www.dragcity.com/news.html

SIGHS MATTERS

Lately, Mayo Thompson and The Red Krayola have been thrilling us to the extreme. The level of musicianship, surprise, deep thoughts, hot and cold running humor and really, all-round entertainment found in their Introduction LP/CD and “Red Gold” CDEP releases of 2006 might have represented a one-two punch for some – but damn if The Red Krayola don't intend to push their luck with a bit of the old three-four here in 2007. First (and finally!) was the return of Soldier-Talk, their 1979 punk-pop uber-work – a reissue nearly 30 years in the making, a classic slab never before compacted to disc. Now The Red Krayola have re-allied with Art & Language to produce an all-new work. Art & Language, as you may recall, are an arts collective whose lyrics provided The Red Krayola with a springboard to several of their classic songs – “A Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock,” “Black Snakes,” “Born In Flames,” “Future Pilots” and of course, all of the Kangaroo? and Corrected Slogans albums. For many, these recordings represented the epochal The Red Krayola contribution…but for those many, the new album Sighs Trapped By Liars will force extreme revisionism (or as the more stiff-necked may assert, revulsionism!). That's just how good the new album by The Red Krayola with Art & Language is. The cast of Tom Watson, John McEntire, Noel Kupersmith, Jim O'Rourke and Mayo Thompson roll out a deep-pile musical carpet for chanteuses Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang, who share lead vocal duties throughout the entire record. That's right – no signature vocal presence from Mayo, who contents himself in arranging vocal lines for the ladies straight out of his private libretto. They acquit themselves magnificently to the complexities of the Art & Language lyrics, which are as ever caught up in social and aesthetic conflicts – though a new and different wave of issues than the 70s and 80s lyrics addressed. To unravel the Gordian knot for yourself, you'll find great enjoyment in hearing Sighs Trapped By Liars, which will be available everywhere that the world is envisioned as a better place (and sells records) in the waning moments of September!

Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music

Art & Language and The Red Krayola (nee Crayola) have a new album out this month, around the 25th depending on where you are in the world.

Previews indicate that the sound is a very contemporary 1960s retro and as unlistenably brilliant as ever. The Art & Language work the title and cover draw on is a decade old, so I don’t know how long this has been in the works. But I am absolutely stoked that this is coming out now

More details from Drag City here (scroll down to September).

Order from Amazon US or Amazon UK if you must. But it would be better to order it through your local record shop.

Technorati Tags: Art & Language, music

The whole point is that there is no depth, and depth is just another name – treasured by the hermeneuts – for transcendence.

Where does a truth come from then, if its process is strictly immanent and it is not given as the secret depth or intimate essence of the situation? […] it has its origins in a disappearance.

– Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, p122

Badiou is fascinating for his genuinely atheistic philosophy built on the infinities of set theory. He’s a Lacanian but we won’t mention that.

Technorati Tags: philosophy