. . . even a lone particle has an associated wave as a
flow that defines the coexisting space of its presences.
(D+G 1984:280)
Connectionist networks are intricate systems of simple
units which dynamically adapt to their environments.
(Bechtel & Abrahamsen 1991:21)
"To be strung out" is a phrase most often associated with drug
addiction and then again with reference, mainly, to the so-called
"hard" drugs like crack or heroin. In order to be "strung out",
we must exhibit at least two different properties: we must have
totally subsumed ourselves to the pursuit of a drug induced high;
and we must be almost continually high, or "fucked" to use another
common phrase. This brings to mind Judge Schreber caught rigid
in a million divine threads, like prey stuck fast in a spider's
web, yet different insofar as these miraculous rays from God are
penetrating him literally, for Schreber, fucking him up. We have
an image of Judge Schreber strung out on God's web not merely
a worldwide web, but an infinite, universal web in receipt of
God's spunk like so much celestial smack, delivering him into
schizophrenia. And within this web Schreber's body empties, disconnects,
fills-up and reconnects according to a bizarre and convoluted
schema.
The co-ordinating system used by the schizo is as unlike the familiar
Cartesian system as we could imagine. Any schizo decoding is a
fluidification of our ordinary systems of organization. The fluid,
strung out Schreber can adopt multiple positions within his system
of schizo geometry: he can become woman, he can become a politician,
he can become parent and child, dead and alive, which is to say,
he is situated wherever there is a singularity, in all the series
and in all the branches marked by a singular point, because he
is himself this distance that transforms him into a woman, and
at its terminal point he is already the mother of a new humanity
and can finally die. (D+G 1984:77)
At each singularity, at each point where all the divine rays converge
forcing him deep into a schizophrenic gravity-well, Schreber's
subjectivity is radically and unalterably reconfigured. The spacetime
of the schizo is radically unfamiliar to us. In cosmological theory,
matter entering the event horizon of a singularity undergoes "spaghettification"
the subjective consequences of this strung-out stuff must be the
schizophrenization of D+G: Dn par excellence.
To be strung out is to undergo the constant destruction and reappraisal
of individual subjectivity; whether "really", in terms of drug
involvement, or "virtually", as this characterization of Schreber
could be termed. (We should remember, however, that both of these
forms of "becoming-strung-out" operate according to different
impulses, or follow different vectors, or perform different functions;
for example, we could characterize drug dependency in DeleuzoGuattarian
terms as a function of the process: Tn?>Dn?>Rn; whereas Schreber's
schizo becoming-strung-out is more of a Dn.) Furthermore, becoming-strung-out,
the fluidification of social coding and the dissolution of traditional
co-ordinate geometry all relate to operations on what D+G call
the plane of consistency; they must, therefore, also be related
to what, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia 2. A Thousand Plateaus,
D+G call the principle of multiplicity. And once we get into multiplicities,
well, anything can happen....
Already we have here a jumble of concepts as convoluted as any
schizo's paranoiac system. The link I want to make in what follows,
thereby mapping this jumble, is between "becoming-strung-out"
and contemporary techno/cyber culture, with special emphasis upon
our notions of subjectivity. The question of art will follow these
mappings.
Emergence
To talk of "emergent properties" or "emergent behaviour" seems
to be philosophically de rigeur at the moment. Emergence appears
to refer to two historically different, but currently connected,
as we will see, concepts. The first is contained within Chaos
Theory and can be summed up in the phrase, "the spontaneous emergence
of order out of chaos" (DeLanda 1991:229). In the terms favoured
by such a theory, emergence describes the transition from one
type of behaviour to another, a phase transition, or even a bifurcation
event. To this we can add, again from Manuel DeLanda: "Roughly,
we could say that phenomena of self-organization occur whenever
a bifurcation takes place: when a new attractor appears on the
phase portrait of a system, or when the system's attractors mutate
in kind" (Crary 1992:138). A kind of change which happens without
any outside input.
The second predates contemporary Chaos Theory, finding many of
its theoretical elucidations in the 1920s; Kevin Kelly explains
in his 1994 book, Out of Control. The New Biology of Machines:
"The emergent step, though it may seem more or less saltatory
[a leap], is best regarded as a qualitative change of direction,
or turning point, in the course of events," writes [C. Lloyd]
Morgan in Emergent Evolution [1923] . . . (Kelly 1994:15). And
the Web-published essay "The Concept of Emergence" provides a
contemporary (elenchic) critique of Professor Stephen Pepper's
(1926) critical essay "Emergence". (Pepper's essay criticizes
the notion of emergence for its epiphenomenalism, the dualistic
doctrine that consciousness is merely a by-product of physiological
processes and has no power to affect them. (Collins English Dictionary).
Indeed, epiphenomenalism may seem to be very similar to some of
the ideas propounded by many contemporary theorists of consciousness-as-emergent.
Though this is not the place to provide another critique of epiphenomenalism,
I think that in what follows we shall not find any advocation
of dualism.) Kelly characterizes these theories (or versions of
the theory) thus: "In the logic of emergence, 2 + 2 = apples"
(loc. cit.). According to these notions, emergence relates to
a philosophical "becoming".
In its current usage, a usage inseparable from the theories of
Chaos & Complexity the concept of emergence is bound up within
the myriad architectonics of Connectionism. Kevin Kelly writes
the following, "[Daniel] Dennett is slowly persuading many psychologists
that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the
distributed network of many feeble, unconscious circuits" (Kelly
1994:54). And as soon as we hear the invocation of the "distributed
network", we know we are in Connectionist territory. In Sadie
Plant's "The virtual complexity of culture" (Plant 1996:203-17),
the term "connectionism" has swarmed from the specificities of
Computer & Cognitive Science to infiltrate a general cultural
arena; indeed, Plant's work can also be seen as influencing such
an infiltration. The import of the connectionist model, for her,
goes beyond purely postmodern liberalism (as Sherry Turkle characterizes
the non-technical use of conectionist metaphorics). A connectionist
approach, for Plant, is one which has a strong DeleuzoGuattarian
political impetus.
Unlike traditional serial processing, Connectionism does not propose
the linear hierarchy of information. Rather, it endeavours to
connect all its parts to each other (parts that have been called
"demons" in some systems, or "agents" in the early Perceptron
system), it lets relationships form where links are strong in
an effort to let the multiplicity "learn" from its "experience".
What happens within the Connectionist arena is that information
is not skimmed from the top of a hierarchic processing of pieces,
but emerges from the entire machine working in concert. Turkle
explains, albeit mystically: "Unlike information processing AI
. . . the conectionists did not see information as being stored
anywhere in particular. Rather, it was inherent everywhere. The
system's information, like information in the brain, would be
evoked rather than found" (Turkle 1996:132). Plant is somewhat
less spiritual when she writes of the equation of intelligence
with the workings of the Connectionist Machine:
What is now described as an "order-emerging-out-of-massive-connections"
approach defines intelligence as an exploratory process, which
learns and learns to learn for itself. Intelligence is no longer
monopolized, imposed or given by some external, transcendent,
and implicitly superior source which hands down what it knows
or rather what it is willing to share but instead evolves as an
emergent process, engineering itself from the bottom up. (Plant
1996:204)
Plant shows that the Connectionist approach, especially as it
is informed by the philosophy of D+G (both separately and combined),
is emancipatory rather than oppressive.
Now we can see re-emerging some of the ideas outlined in the opening
section of this paper. On one level, at its most fundamental,
Connectionism provides for a multiplicitous approach to processing;
in which case, the whole idea of "processing" goes out the window,
for it loses the notion of a step-by-step, process towards a goal
(information, intelligence . . . ) and favours something approaching
a swarm. A multiply connected "processing" swarm bears a remarkable
resemblance to a strung-out Judge Schreber. We remember Schreber
penetrated by a myriad celestial rays, his subjectivity multiplied
& infected with a mutagen which enhances hiw powers of becoming.
He is connected & through these connectins all his bodily organizations
are dissolved. Schreber ceased - long before Freud's textual encounter
with him - to be limited, or defined by the boundaries offered
by his body. Thus an easy answer to D+G's question: "How do you
make yourself a Body without Organs?" could be, "Get Connected."
Plant shows that the workings of Connectionism are not only theoretically
and functionally valid within a singular discipline, but should
be allowed to flow across disciplines too. In terms of the human
(rather than the transcendental workings of theory), however,
such an approach has a profound impact. Connections can happen
across species "barriers", across material "barriers" as well
as across conceptual "barriers".
Subjectivity, Art, Culture
As a response to problems posed by the desire to infect machines
with something approaching human-like intelligence, Connectionism
seems currently very successful. There is an added irony in that
the feedback-like re-mapping of human consciousness through Connectionism's
approach to machinic intelligence has also been insightful. I
have already mentioned the assertion (from Dennet via Kelly) that
consciousness is an emergent property. Sherry Turkle notes that
connectionism has had important ramifications for ego psychology
too:
For [psychoanalyst David] Olds, connectionism challenges ego psychology
by providing a way to see the ego not as a central authority but
as an emergent system. Through a connectionist lens, says Olds,
the ego can be recast as a distributed system. Consciousness can
be seen as a technical device by which the brain represents its
own workings to itself. (Turkle 1996:140)
The similarities between such a statement as this and the subjective
concerns of - for example - Hume (personal identity as a jumble
of perceptions), Kant (the subject as both a synthetic construct
& a construct of synthesis) and even Nietzsche (the "I" as nothing
other than a grammatical exigency), I think are remarkable. The
individual subject, the ego, can no longer be seen as the fundamental
basis upon which everything else can be built. It is not an Ursprung
from a special point of mystical origin, but rather, emerges from
the necessary affects, and capacities for being affected, of bodies.
Once we follow Plant's advice and pursue connections beyond their
disciplinary boundaries, we may have to rethink our notions of
the construction of subjectivity too. Once subjectivity is seen
as emerging out of the complex and chaotic machinations of neural
networks, then the attachment of these neural nets (Haraway's
"biotic information processing systems") to other networks must
radically alter the ways in which subjectivity is constructed.
(It is interesting to remember that in his "Regimes, Pathways,
Subjects", Guattari characterizes machines as "hyperdeveloped
and hyperconcentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity"
[Crary 1992:18]. Before we are even materially connected to our
technological offspring, Guattari shows that we are theoretically
and psychologically connected to them.) Just as Judge Schreber
felt himself to be strung-out on, and multiplicitously fucked
by a network of divine threads, his body emptied of its organs
and their workings spread out on a universal scale around him,
to be connected and reconnected at will; so we may be seen - especially
with the growing emergence of the Internet, some would say - to
be strung-out upon a network of inter-connected systems. The stuff
of subjectivity swarms ever more chaotically. And individuality
seems to be an ever more redundant and oppressive notion within
this vast distributed, dynamic network.
Subjectivity does not represent the only way in which the concepts
of emergence and connectionism relate to contemporary cultural
concerns. In fact the very notion of "culture" itself can be regarded
as an emergent property of widely connected phenomena-as Plant
shows in the following, long passage:
Connectionist conceptions of the cultural do not merely operate
within the parameters of a humanist discourse of individuals and
societies, but they collapse distinctions between human life,
natural life and the artificial lives of economies, on-line libraries
and complex systems of every kind. Cultures are parallel distributed
processes, functioning without some transcendent guide or the
governing role of their agencies. There is no privileged scale:
global and molecular cultures cut through the middle grounds of
states, societies, members and things. There is nothing exclusively
human about it: culture emerges from the complex interactions
of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns,
cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance
nights and bacterial exchanges. There are eco-systems under your
fingernails. You live in cultures and cultures live in you. They
are everything and the kitchen sink. (Plant 1996:214)
Thus we are presented with subjectivity and culture as emerging
from similar (if not the same) material. For Deleuze - following
Spinoza - the body is described in terms of speeds and slownesses,
capacities for affecting and being affected (see Crary 1992:625-33);
he writes: "We call longitude of a body the set of relations of
speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that
compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed
elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body
at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous
force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In this
way we construct a map of the body." (Crary 1992:629). Taking
this Spinozistic perspective, we can see that these subjectivities
& cultures are defined according to the same material. Once all
our connections are materialized and desired, the multiplicitous
flows constitutive of our subjectivities will be able to ooze,
to proliferate. Distinctions and differences will breed and be
fleeting as connections are grown & lost, weighted & ignored at
will. What will emerge from this pullulating mass of stuff? this
soup of organs, chemical & digital information, software, hardware
& wetware? I dunno...but I can't wait to find out.
Final Remarks relating to Art
How, then, do we relate all this to the question of Art? Or, rather,
can all of this not be related to Art? I have already quoted Guattari
as saying that machines are "hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentrated
forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity", can this not
also be true of art? As emergent and interconnected as any other
cultural practice. And in this respect, does it matter just how
such stuff emerges from the network of machines-subjectivities-cultures
&c? (We should not forget that the word "technology" comes from
techne and logos; and that techne relates to art, skill & craft,
in all their possible definitions.) Once we are attuned to the
importance of Connectionism, to subjectivity and culture as emergent,
to the role of art in promoting such connections and emergences,
then the way in which such art is produced, surely, becomes unimportant.
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© Jamie Brassett