Manipulated (Jullien instruction 1)

In The Propensity of Things, the way of life, unknown to the Chinese people, is manipulated.

On page 69, Jullien notes: That logic also implies an inherent distrust of words, since words allow a kind of manipulation through rhetoric. But rhetoric involves turning towards other people so that they know what they are getting themselves into when they agree or when they reply in the negative. Rhetoric then also allows a person to be in conflict with what is being argued. They can rebel. This is where Greek democracy was born. Manipulation, not persuasion or rhetoric, is the way that the Chinese acted [it was an art], since it was both an individual and collective behavior towards others. But this pattern of conditioning is so pervasive and "natural" that it never has even become a theoretical discourse in China. They don't think anything of it, even if we on the outside can't help but observe it, because they accept it completely. No one ever thought to investigate its logic

In this paraphrase, I think it's important to note the actual contrast at play here: there is rhetoric and then there is manipulation. Dr. Ulmer mentioned rhetoric/persuasion several times during seminar. The thing is that you can have the most logical and persuasive argument ever, but you're going to keep saying the same thing over and over until you're blue in the face if the person you're trying to persuade won't be. In fact, persuasion will never work unless there is a small kernal of doubt to begin with.

The process of manipulation creates that kernal in the first place. It creates it and fosters it until it grows and there is no need for people going blue in the face. It becomes logic. This is done behind the owner's back, so to speak.

How can we think about this in instructional form? How does it, more importantly relate and allow us a contrast in our understanding of Electracy.

Here is an instruction: using some kind of photo manipulation program, take a "thin" celebrity's face or body and make them "not thin." 

We are used to this type of manipulation, but in reverse. The resulting rhetoric is this: All these people are so perfectly shaped that it is causing a massive population spike of people who suffer from some kind of eating disorder. Reversing the mechanism totally by re-manipulation of the image, but backwards, in the opposite direction, will cause one of two reactions: "OMG, is blah blah blah got so (overweight/fat/obese/...)" or "That picture is NOT real. Someone made it like that." One feels the reality of the image and the other questions it, despite perhaps not questioning it when the celebrity is made to look thinner than they actually are.

Here is an interesting fact: In order to do this, one must use a tool called "liquify." I'll leave the implications to you.

Scroll Painting (Jullien Instructions 2)

In the Chinese culture not only were the paintings infused with Shi, but the material the paintings were painted on were also infused with Shi.

Jullien makes it a point to note that the scroll was an important part of the painting process, especially since its unfolding allows for the necessary affect of time: the bottom part of a scroll is spring, the middle is summer, and the end is winter (138).

This movement in the painting can be seen in static form with images such as this one:




This is a static image. Sure, our eyes move in circles as the season changes, but we don't feel the actual motion of the season: There is no feeling of plentitude during the summer, for instance, that we would get as the scroll physically fills our hand as we are unrolling it.

Another interesting feature is this: The name of the scroll. In modern times, when someone says that word "Scroll" the first thing that comes to mind is the computer interface, not the ancient form of paper.

I find the idea of scrolling interesting in this respect, and with the respect of different cultures. Let me explain:

If I'm showing my parents something online and I'm controlling the mouse and they say "scroll down" what they mean is to go back to the top of the page. I'm not sure if you've noticed, you probably have, but the scroll bar to the right of the screen (usually) goes in the opposite direction of the page that needs to be scrolled. You move the scroll bar down, and the text moves up.

When I say "Scroll down" what I mean is move to the bottom of the page - I mean to go forward in the time of the text, but my parents (and others) mean to go backwards.

This is particularly interesting when it comes to comics and other forms of visual rhetoric (but especially comics in the digital age). When artists feel the freedom to create comic strips that denote movement, so that, for instance, as you move (forward in time) down the page, a character seems to be falling.

We are here presented with a contrast: Do Chinese people now read bottom to top, as if unrolling a scroll? I don't think they do, but how does that change (everything?)?

Of course, the blog format is also altering time in a way because we DO read present to past when we're reading blogs - the most recent post is on the top. This is telling of the subscription feature since no many people will go through most blogs and read every single post (past -> present).

The only time one could do it is in situations like this. For this reason, I am going to purposefully just draft all of my posts so that I can manipulate them spatially so that they adhere to the reader's time. This is a process, an experiment in time manipulation. But here is the instruction:

Instruction: Post something really long and then post it upside down. whether this is a series of photographs that you've taken, or just a random, simple/complex art project that you've done. Your first post should be the upside down one so as to disengage you from your original work.What does scrolling in basically two different directions do to your perception? Do you gain a different meaning from the different way that the "scroll was unraveled?"
 

Zoom in Zoom out (Jullien Instructions 3)

Aesthetic reduction, as Jullien calls it, is the act of stepping back from a work of art, of viewing its lifelines (95-6). I'd like to post a kind of quoted paraphrase of these two pages because I think they're important to the instructions.

The farther away you are from a painting the more easily you are able to take its contours. "Contemplating a landscape from afar, one grasps its lifelines (shi); considering it close up, one seizes its substance." From close up one enjoys the details, but they are unable to explore the vital tension of the landscape or the painted lines. Only from a distance could dynamism be expressed, rendering it more accessible to contemplation because it removes all the unessential things so that we can just focus on the essential lines of the piece. By exploiting the magical shortcut that painting provides us -- by allowing us to see vast distances on a short distance of paper -- the spiritual dimension is opened and we are able to transcend all the unreality of things.

Reading these two pages brings to mind artists like Georgia O'Keefe, whose highly zoomed in flower paintings incited a lot of different criticisms. In the age of photography and computers, this kind of O'Keefian style is highly achievable, especially now because our digital photographic technology is so clear. One wonders, however, or at least I wonder, when I look at O'Keefe's paintings, what dwells beyond them.

These instructions are two-fold.

Instruction Part 1: Take a picture of anything - a landscape, a flower, a cityscape - so that you can see a lot of it at once, the way that one's eye takes in what it's viewing. On the computer, zoom that picture to its maximum zoom potential and scroll through the enlarged image until something clicks in what you're seeing. This could be the colors, the shapes, the textures, a mixture of those three or something new. Take a screencap (and the crop the unessential window borders). You now have two images: the original and the highly zoomed in selection. 

Instruction Part 2: Open both images in some kind of paint program (obviously separately) and take a black paintbrush (or some kind of contrasting color) and trace what you perceive are the lifelines of your images. Make sure that you are drawing a continuous line: Do not let your paint brush leave the surface of your image until you are finished drawing that lifeline. Do the same for the other image. Post your images side-by-side. Compare the lifelines. Are there any similarities? Did your Zoomed out lifeline intersect the portion of the image that you had zoomed in on?

Time Machine Propensity (Jullien Instructions 4)

In Chinese metaphysical thought, Jullien tells us that there is no ontological concept: They do not have a concept of the end.

This is quite unlike Western (really general) metaphysics, where ontology is alive and strong.

Can these two concepts be combined? Could we somehow construct an asymptotic moment where one never lands yet is always going towards [the end]? Would that allow Western or Chinese metaphysics to win out?

Some blogs allow for a programming structure called the continuous flow. In this way, what happens is that once you scroll to the end of the page, new blogs come up. This is the way that Facebook and twitter operate. This method of newsfeed, of going in the past, is interesting because it tries to remove ontology, especially since the blog format goes towards a beginning rather than an end.

There is also a website time machine that allows you to see different websites that no longer exist. The history of the internet, then, is interestingly archived so that history is not only a constant present, but also constantly in flux.

The other day, I made it to the end of a Facebook blog and it gave me an interesting message:.

Gifs are interesting in this way because they are inherently looped. There is no end to them. Many gifs however, obviously have a plot, a beginning, middle, and end. This is especially true if there are words running through them. But there are some gifs that seem to be never ending. It is interesting to see and observe them because they are sometimes very mesmerizing.

Instruction: Make a Neverending gif, and if there are words make sure they can continuously read so that there is not "beginning" or "end" to the sentence (more complexly: Make a never-ending photo gif, where only one element of the gif is moving. There quite a famous one of liquid being poured that just continues on and on.)

Outside Over There (Jullien Instructions 5)

How can we think of being outside the box of the internet? Jullien states that people inside a certain metaphysics can't really see their the full extent of their metaphysics.... so how can we be outside the internet? It's become such an obvious part of life.

This instruction is a little bit different because it attempts to remove us from the way of life that we know.

It's another two-fold instruction.

Instruction Part 1: Do not use your computer/tablet for one week. This includes your (smart)phone for everything except phone function (that means no texting to let everyone who you usually text know ahead of time.). Every time you feel the urge to use the internet, your computer, the texting function, write (yes, with a pen or pencil) down a reflection entry trying to think about why you  need to use it, what you would do if you didn't have it, and how it makes you feel. Try to analyze your situation. At the end of the week, write a larger reflection piece telling us the general role of the internet in your life and how you felt as the week progressed (more or less frustrated? More or less on the outside). Analyze the role of the internet in people's lives, especially now that you've lived outside of it. If you want to challenge yourself: Go a month or more without technology. 

Instruction Part 2: We write differently when we're online or when we're texting. Attempt to write this way using traditional means - Basically, one of the things you would be doing would be writing in text speak on a piece of paper. Does it feel weird? How has our writing become less literate and more electrate? 

I know, it's ironic that I'm telling you not to use the internet on something that you would never have seen had the internet not been invented, but go with me and I think everyone will get different results (at least slightly) that will allow us to separate ourselves from the internet culture we find ourselves in: we will begin, I hope, to see more of the metaphysics of the internet than we've seen before.

Caught in the WWWeb (Email 1//Jullien)

Hello Everyone,

Although I am interested in the contrasts that Jullien elaborates in his text, _The Propensity of Things_, I think what strikes me the most are the moments when the Eastern/Western thought dichotomy tends to converge. Although there are usually other factors working in consideration with these rare connections, allowing the addition of contrast its prevalence, I think it's also important to highlight these similarities, as they might allow us a different track to understand and arrive at some kind of electracal mode of thought.

The first time that I noted a point of convergence was when Jullien discusses the "innovation" of the Panopticon into the surveillance system of the West. Notably, he does make sure to let us know that, while Western thought did come to a conclusion about Surveillance similar to the Chinese notion of Sovereignty, they arrived at this notion a lot later than the Chinese had (56-7). Moreover, even though I accept Jullien's statement when he says that the Panopticon functions even if there is no guard inside, like the Chinese system, where "the sovereign could continue to occupy 'his position' perfectly well even if he left his palace," the Western Panopticon still professes a visibility, I think, that I feel the Eastern Sovereignty has occluded (56). I use, perhaps too naively about a place I will not profess to know, an example of The Forbidden City. Upon initial research, I note that though it did operate from the center of Beijing, it was an immense palace of almost one-thousand buildings that equality obscured the "guard" that the very-visible and solitary Panopticon hinges its power on [there are two windows in the circle of cells surrounding the Panopticon for a reason]. If the Panopticon were to fall, so too would its power.   

Despite these points of contention, I still believe that the way-station that both modes of thought arrive at are similar enough that they might enable us to transport electracy, as a third rhetorical vehicle, to the same station. These days, for instance and especially post-9/11, we have seen an increase in the kind of Panoptic surveillance on the internet. In fact, when teaching the Panopticon to students, utilizing the internet as an example is helpful because it allows for a visceral, immediate reaction that explains to them that feeling they have of being watched. But I now think for a moment not about the political implications of "being watched" that the post-9/11 era has instilled in us [with various laws that allow for that surveillance to occur], but instead on the more invisible - through its apparent visibility - mode of surveillance that many internet users have "accepted" as "just a part" of their internet experience: Capitalism and, more broadly, the Economy (as mandated and enforced by Search Engines that we depend on, like Google, Bing, or whatever poison you choose [Yahooligans was the Gateway Search Engine of my youth, for instance]). 

As we use the internet, I think right now of Facebook, the internet nudges us with ads that reflect back what we are interested in [in Purchase/Commodity mode], so much so that sometimes it appears to have the Clairvoyance of a Chinese war strategist. I don't know if any one remembers this, but years ago when someone made a search on Google the first link it gave was whether you wanted to purchase an amount of [insert search word(s) here]. So if I searched "The Revolutionary War" Google would kindly let me know, in hyperlink form, that I could go to whatever site if I wanted to purchase The Revolutionary War in bulk. As Google worked on its Third eye, what it was doing became more and more invisible to us, until we couldn't see it no matter how opaque it was. Google still does this, but in a more subtle-unsubtle way (go ahead and search something on Google, it, at least, has a "storefront" for it if it doesn't literally highlight it as the first result that comes up). 

In that sense, the internet operates on both modes of surveillance. On the one hand, we understand that our work on the internet is being monitored [as I write this email, certain words, at least, are being flagged down for possible anti-government activity, like "anti-government" or "9/11," (that's why our email drafts are constantly saved on servers -- it's nice, but it's also like when, during war, letters were read and lines blacked out before it was sent, if it was sent at all), and I see that as a way to filter/or not the kind of words I use to write or the way I conduct any kind of research. On the other hand, we have ways of surveillance in place so that we in no way, shape, or form, feel like we can do anything about how we are in most ways ruled by the internet economy and the archive of facts it keeps on us. We are like the Fine-Beard, in a way. 

How can we think about Electracy as a metaphysics that aims to control, to persuade or manipulate? Or does Electracy operate on a combination between the two, on something totally new that's beside persuasion and manipulation. These are my initial thoughts that I hope to continue thinking about as I contemplate, plan, and write my blog posts, other emails, and future projects. As of now, I believe I have written too much (or nothing at all?).

Until next time, 

Asmaa  

P.S. As a side note, the internet economy and the political one (that visibly aims to be more Panoptically invisible) have, in that sense, followed a similar historical timeline that the Eastern and Western modes have taken, where the Eastern came first and the Western followed, long after.

--------------------------------------------------------------Response

   1) Good to include the Internet in our considerations since it fills the Target slot of the CATTt (and blog as tale).  We are more or less assuming the Internet, or rather, Internet Invention is our one "reading" invoking it.  At the same time, we all use it constantly  so are "natives" of its "surround."  The assignment does not include a separate set of posts to  inventory the relevant features of the Internet, but they can and should be referenced in all the categories (perhaps especially with Cinematics as Analogy). 

     2) Your method advice is good also, to note similarity as well as difference -- the very points of comparability between East and West, even if they perform contrary or complementary versions of the feature.  We can think about "efficacy" as "style," for example, and see that, as with surveillance, the West has taken a turn more aligned with the Chinese decision and away from the Classical West (even as the East swerves symmetrically towards the West).  The insight is that civilizations seem to overlap considerably in potential, but actualize only some parts of what is available and background others. 

    3) Jullien's insight about surveillance, and your point, are well-taken.  The comparison is apparent in theories of ideology, which show that the Panopticon is a crude device indeed when compared with ideology.  Foucault, as you know, explained the three forces at work in an episteme or set-up in our context:  knowledge, power, subject.  Societies are "disciplined," and at the end of his career he was most interested in how discipline is internalized and appropriated by individuals for themselves.  Various French thinkers (Barthes, Bordieu et al), showed how ideology becomes second nature, is that which  goes without saying, what Bordieu called habitus.  That is the term Jullien used when he noted how absolute sovereignty becomes invisible by transforming into habitus. This form of control is not recent in the West, obviously.  The challenge of any society as a political collective is how to get citizens to cooperate with order.  Althusser talked about the difference between the police state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus.  Ideology is far preferable in the sense that its violence is soft.  The metaphysical question is the relation among necessity, freedom, and the manner of their interaction (covered in Kant's Critiques, for example).