Abstract
The essay presents a novel theory of meaning-as-response inspired by the pragmatist cultural historian Morse Peckham in the mid-twentieth century. This approach is useful here in consideration of how artistic behavior can make a difference in technical culture and in relation to innovative technical practices. Continuing from Félix Guattari's notion of the machine as a partial object, this essay examines the essentialist idea of computational machines as creative collaborators which haunts the model of interaction prevailing today. Following this negative critique, the essay advances a positive approach emphasizing partiality in experimental design practices as a step toward a renewed art of living.
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Notes
Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari (1995), Bruno Latour (1993) and Prigogine and Stengers(1984), it may be that an anarchic generative force literally goes further down, that at the limit the universe resists conceptualization and categorization in a plane of pure immanence. This is an interesting and daring philosophical proposition, one I don't seek to affirm or deny here.
Peckham (1977) wrote “Grace Andrus de Laguna said many years ago that the language coordinates behavior, I would go further to say that language controls behavior, and I would extend this to all configurations to which there is a response, that is to nonverbal signs as well.”
For an extended and provocative explanation of the “poetic” and literary function of the philosopher in relation to the ongoing narrative of ideas in Western philosophy since Plato and Kant, see Richard Rorty's work, in particular Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989).
Much of this work has been conducted alongside work projects undertaken with the Topological Media Lab and Dr. Sha Xin Wei at Georgia Tech (United States) and Concordia University (Quebec, Canada) since 2003.
For convenience and shorthand I have subsumed under the label HCI those models put forward more recently by human-centered computing (HCC), including computer mediated human–human communication models and its variations The field of HCI itself is currently experiencing something of an taxonomical crisis as it tries to sort through the vastly different applications and multiple perspectives which have emerged in recent years vis-à-vis advances in information and computational technologies, as well as their expanding applications.
In his essay on Artaud—“The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Repetition”—Derrida (1978) is careful to distinguish between the double Artaud (1958) wrote of and the kind of doubling, or repetition that takes place through “a frightful transfer of forces/from body/to body”, including the interiorization of a presentational act by way of its movement of thought. For Derrida this movement is “irrepressible.” The unrepeatable difference “is the enigma of that which has no meaning, no presence, no legibility”—no witness. Derrida seems to say in conclusion that representation—as the infinite repetition of difference—is a necessity without there can be no possibility of life.
For further discussion of the senses of intensity, see Brian Massumi's “Introduction, Concrete Is as Concrete Doesn't” (2002).
For Derrida's Artaud, the theater is the only place where a gesture with the force of life can be made, and like gesture of life can be made only once (Derrida 1978).
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Smoak, H. Machinic articulations: experiments in non-verbal explanation. AI & Soc 26, 137–142 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0293-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0293-3