Convergence

Zach Horton

Category: Philosophy

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Theorizing Scale

May 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A few months ago, after over 8 years of research and writing, I published my first academic book, The Cosmic Zoom. Writing this incredibly meaningful book changed my life, and it is my ardent hope that it will assist others as well. This post is an introduction and guide to the book. But first, my immense gratitude to my amazing editors at the University of Chicago Press.

This is a book about scale. About how one thing transforms into another, about how different subjects and objects encounter one another across scales, and about how we—as disciplined or creative thinkers—come to know (and unknow) the parts of the world that inhabit different scales than we can access with our senses. Such knowledge is the product of mediation, of conjoined processes of communication, sensory stimulation, and transformation. All media is trans-scalar, and everything we access that is trans-scalar is mediated.

The Cosmic Zoom develops a medial theory of scale that accounts for its disciplinary history, the scalar politics of today, and what I call the “scalar paradox of knowledge production”: the fact that scale seems to be arbitrary, a human convention, and yet investigation of both the material and social world reveals that scalar difference is a fundamental dynamic of the universe, and one that confounds disciplined knowledge production more than it bolsters it. How do we account for this paradox? Is the cosmos scaled, or do we impose scale upon it? Rather than collapse the paradox, this book argues that both are true, and the cyclical process, or circuit, of human stabilization of particular scales and the irruption of scalar difference beyond the human constitute the medial dynamic of scale.

The Cosmic Zoom considers the current moment in history as one of profoundly important scalar politics, which formulate or contest the constellation and characterization of particular scales, producing zooms that distribute and mediate affect, engendering particular scalar identities. Scalar politics determines human relationships to anthropogenic processes at planetary scales like climate change and big data, as well as human relationships with non-humans at all scales. To take the measure of our current, troubled epoch, I argue that we must come to a far better understanding of scalar mediation.

It is my hope that this work will provide a foundation for and help to catalyze the new interdisciplinary field of Scale Studies.

I thought it might be helpful to provide something of a guide to this sprawling book, so here goes…

First Chapter and Index

Here’s the first chapter of the book, plus the index.

Full Table of Contents

Here’s an unpublished, complete table of contents that includes all section titles in the book (the published version includes only the chapter titles). Along with the published index, this may help you hone in on the conceptual needle in the cosmic haystack!

Key Concepts

The book develops a number of key concepts, a few of which are listed here:

Scalar Difference: A fundamental difference of intensity between all assemblages that impels change. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 5.

Scalar Spectrum: The range of possible scalar difference, without implied continuity between its ranges. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3.

Scalar Collapse: The negation of difference between different ranges of the scalar spectrum through their superimposition in speculative media. Ch 1, Ch 4.

Resolving Cut: The relative stabilization of a scalar milieu produced by an observing entity. Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 4, Ch 5.

Resolution: The degree to which ecological detail can be differentiated within a scalar milieu, as outcome of the conceptual and technical stabilization of particular scales. Ch 2.

Pan-Scalar Humanism: An ideology that positions the human at the center of the constellation of scales. Ch 1, Ch 3 (“Toying With Ideas: The Scalar Analog”), Ch 4.

Analog Scale: Scalar difference represented visually as continuous space, optically and conceptually equidistant to the human subject. As distinct from analog media, which must occlude its own seams in order to produce analog scale. See also “Zoetrope Model of Scale” and “equidistant optics.” Ch 3, Ch 4.

Digital Scale: A representation of scale as a spectrum of discrete and discontinuous milieus. As distinct from digital media, which often produces analog scale, especially when non-recursive. Ch 4, Ch 6.

Trans-Scalar Ecology: Tracing the scalar relations, co-constitutive dynamics, and interdependencies of entities across scalar difference (scalar relationality as metadiscipline). Ch 5.

Drama of Resolution: A form of narrative that continually resolves new scales, re-articulating unresolved detail with newly resolved detail. See also “scalar memory.” Ch 2.

Trans-Scalar Encounter: The perspectival encounter between assemblages across discontinuous regions of the scalar spectrum, as resolving event. Ch 1, Ch 6.

Intensive Scale: Scale as primary differentiation, prior to particular knowledge formations (ontological). Ch 5.

Extensive Scale: Scale as secondary negotiation between stabilized surfaces (medial). Ch 5.

Recursive Database Subjectivity: The encounter of the self from different scalar perspectives afforded by database-driven media. Ch 6.

Disciplinary Resolution: The stabilization of particular scales for knowledge production through resolving cuts and the establishment of epistemic protocols. Ch 4, Ch 5 (“Disciplinary Scale”).

Trans-Scalar Constellation: The articulation of multiple stabilized scalar milieus into a world. See also “Zoom” and “Scalar Politics.” Ch 4.

Here’s a PDF version of this guide.

Disciplinary Guide

For those coming to the book from diverse vectors…


Media Studies: Entire book.

Visual Studies / Design (especially Ray and Charles Eames): Ch 3, Ch 4.

Literary Studies: Ch 1, Ch 2.

Science and Technology Studies: Ch 1, Ch 4, Ch 5.

Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Studies: Ch 6.

Software Studies: Ch 5 (“Lost in Trans-Scalar Ecology: Powers of Ten Interactive”), Ch 6.

Environmental Studies / Ecology: Ch 1, Ch 5.

Philosophy / Critical Theory: Ch 1, Ch 5, Ch 6.

Cosmic Zoom History

Beyond its theoretical content, The Cosmic Zoom is also a history of the cosmic zoom form. I wrote a blog post for Chicago University Press with some cosmic zoom film recommendations here.

This book lays the theoretical groundwork for my future academic and creative work, and mode of living. I earnestly hope it assists you in your future endeavors, whatever form and scale they may take.

Blueprints for our eco-retreat house.

Building, Thinking, Dwelling

May 14, 2016 / / 0 Comments

As I simultaneously plan my move from Santa Barbara to Pittsburgh and get ready to build a retreat house with my sister in northern California, the notion of dwelling has been on my mind. What does it mean to dwell, to call a place “home”?

In a late essay, “Building, Dwelling,Thinking,” Martin Heidegger links dwelling to thought and building. To build, or to think, one must first dwell, which is to say inhabit a particular relationship with space:

“The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.” (Poetry, Language, Thought 157) Similarly, thought belongs to dwelling as an ordering of space.

I think this is right. To dwell is to inhabit a place, in body and mind: to be sheltered by it, to be sure, but also to mend it, modify it, shape it, explore it, contemplate it, meld with it. As Virginia Woolf famously proclaimed, every woman needs “a room of one’s own” to properly develop as a thinker and creator. Such a dwelling place affords privacy, or relative protection from the tumult of the world and the thoughts and demands of others. Shelter, in this sense, fosters independence and creativity by providing a break in the affective, material, and ideational flows of our culture, introducing stoppages that allow for mutations. Creativity.

This is not to say that thought develops in a vacuum; to dwell is to engage one’s surroundings and thus also to give up some forms of agency. Dwelling is a being-with. What all should be included in this circle of cohabitation? Physical structures, ideas, affects, animals of many sizes and types (including other humans), plants, pollen, textures, surfaces…

House-site-2

Near the build site.

There are many different possible relationships that one can form to one’s dwelling, and social relationships that can form within and around it. Nomadic peoples trace patterns on a landscape by moving through it; not the individual place or structure, but rather this larger map of habitation, constitutes the home. Nomadic living is also nomadic thinking. Likewise, farmers dwell in part by rethinking the land around them, narrowly circumscribing their resources and range to produce something new.

In the US, at least since the 1930s, the average home has grown steadily in size even as it has housed fewer people. In the 1940s it became a stagnant site of middle class consumption (occupied by a nuclear family, the basic Keynesian consumptive unit in Postwar America) which is being partially restructured today as a neoliberal site of self-improvement and flexible workspace (the home office).

Don t be afraid to sound viagra uk fun and witty all the time. Women can consume Gynecure capsules in taking care of generic cialis in australia their genital and reproductive health? They do, many of them are not under any kind of therapy. Previously, buy a drug for sexual disorder cheapest viagra professional was a real easy job getting a drivers license about 15 years ago. In order to hinder these possibilities, coming up or devising ways of keeping the brain less focused to realities of life but rather composed to samples of levitra click for source a different dimension of life can truly help minimize the entire overload of the brain that leads to stress. How houses are conceived, built, and dwelled in is determined in large part by the relative availability of energy. The postwar nuclear family dwelling was made possible not only by a particular ideology and economic system, but by the availability of inexpensive (for the consumer) energy. See John Perlin’s Let it Shine: The 6,000-Year Story of Solar Energy for a history of innovative solar programs, technologies, and building materials for the home that were more or less scrapped in the postwar period when vast housing tracks made with cheap, mass-produced, energy efficient materials became the norm. For developers, it made more sense to build large and cheap, and then make up the difference in energy requirements by slapping on complex HVAC equipment to heat and cool the homes in perpetuity. Dwelling in this mode meant being plugged in to a vast system of petroleum extraction, refinement, and burning, ensuring the necessary supply of gas and electricity in exchange for the perpetual flow of money back into utilities. This more or less remains the equation in the US today, despite dawning awareness of our global ecological crisis, economic hardship, and the increasingly high cost of burning post-peak oil, dirty coal, and dangerously difficult to capture natural gas.

Given these conditions, it may seem shocking that the majority of new houses are built for yesterday, not tomorrow. There is something conservative about dwelling, as if our large, empty houses and always-on temperature control will somehow stave off the destruction of the planet, ongoing outside. This is building and thinking cut off from dwelling.

view

One view from the build site.

With this in mind, my sister and I set out, a little over two years ago, to conceive of a house for the future. One that wouldn’t take energy for granted. One that would serve as a dwelling place in the fullest sense: a place to live in, live with, and think among. Our basic guidelines were that it must serve the future needs of others, at least 250 years into the future, must not rely upon petroleum-based energy, and must be a dwelling place that inspires creativity, not utilitarian grimness or hermetically sealed escapism. With these constraints in mind, we were forced to design far beyond our own needs, and our own lifetimes. Such a dwelling place must be tough to last so long, but it must also be supple, flexible in use, to remain capable of meeting the unknown.

In the end, after a long collaboration, we chose to build two half domes, constructed out of a shell of concrete (dome structures are the strongest possible from an engineering standpoint, and thus require far fewer materials than equivalent rectilinear structures) and mostly buried in the earth. Not wooden boards and siding and shingles to keep the elements out and the heat in, but soil and wild grasses. Building out of wood ensures horrifically poor energy efficiency. What you save (in environmental as well as monetary cost) in the production of materials you lose many times over during the lifetime of the building to petroleum energy production in order to keep it warm and cool. Our structure will require far less energy to maintain, as it will heat and cool itself. One large retaining wall, facing south, will gather through many windows the heat of the sun in the winter. In the summer, the house’s under-soil condition will keep it cool without air conditioning. When additional heat is needed, it will be generated from solar thermal collectors that will turn sunlight (even pale winter sunlight) into hot water, stored in a tank inside and distributed throughout a radiant floor to keep the structure warm. When there is no sun, a powerful electric water heater will make up the difference. A solar photovoltaic system will generate the electricity for such needs. Will all of these advanced techniques cost a fortune. No; this house will cost significantly less to build than a traditional structure.

Most importantly, this will be a space unlike any other. One half dome will have no “walls” at all; it will be a large Great Room for meeting, working, cooking, relaxing, and viewing the beautiful valley below our building site in the mountains of Mendocino County. A short passageway will connect to the second dome, which will provide the “room with a view”: private rooms to sleep, work, contemplate. Fewer flat walls, and almost no conventional ceilings, will provide a new sort of space to think in and with. What sort of thoughts will such a space generate? We cannot yet know.

We are building this as a retreat house, because it only seemed right to share this with a collective of individuals who want to partake in its construction and maintenance. No one person, at least for the foreseeable future, will monopolize this space. It will see a constant infusion of new dwellers, new purposes, and new ideas.

I will always maintain a dedicated page on this site to the house, which can be accessed here. I will also continue to blog about it as we build it (we start on the foundation next week, but the extended process will continue for at least another year) and learn to dwell within it. If you wish, you can join us.

Swerve’s Futures

November 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe, but after nearly five years of work, we have completed the first academically produced, nonprofit, science fiction epic: Swerve. This cinematic exploration of nanotechnology, virtuality, ecology, corporate-industrial patriarchy, and the relationship between data, the body, and the environment is over three and a half hours long, divided into ten chapters. Each functions as part of the larger narrative and as a thematic whole. This surreal, cyberpunk, Deleuzean, feminist, philosophical science fiction film would never have been possible to make in a commercial system. To accomplish this, over 150 people worked in one capacity or another on this mammoth project, which has been housed in the English Department at UCSB from 2010 to the present.

Why did we make such an unconventional film, and how?

The original concept for this project was hatched by Lindsay Thomas and myself during our second quarter of graduate school, in Alan Liu’s “Literature +” seminar. Alan challenged us to build innovative collaborative projects, and we hatched the idea of a science fiction film that would be collaboratively produced by students at the University out of content generated by the academic humanities. Instead of the endless reproduction of tropes for their own sake exhibited by commercial media, and instead of academic media that merely responds to cultural production “out there,” we thought that it would be interesting to scramble the codes, to bring some commercial tropes into contact (or collision) with academic theory produced by the humanities, with the challenge of making our own fictional, speculative product. We thought that the genre of cyberpunk was ripe for such an exercise.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

As literary fiction, cyberpunk rose to prominence in the 1980s along with the first wave of home computers, exploring electronically networked culture, navigating an infoscape or datascape that seemed the inevitable future heralded by ubiquitous computing. What new identities, dangers, and possibilities would emerge within this new world of digital virtuality? After William Gibson’s visionary cyberpunk trilogy in the 1980s, the 1990s saw the proliferation of flashy, virtual-reality-driven versions of cyberpunk in both literature and film. The alterity of cyberspace (a concept invented by Gibson in his 1983 novel Neuromancer) was becoming tamed, literalized, and linearized (using the terminology of philosopher’s Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, reterritorialized) as the digital gamescape. Indeed, this subgenre finally reached its cinematic apotheosis with the Matrix Trilogy, which thematically and aesthetically combined the video game with live action. The convergence was complete: the genre was exhausted.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

And that’s why we chose it. As a genre that was about visualizing the new spaces that could arise out of ubiquitous, networked computing, it had been caught and perhaps exceeded by Facebook. Cyberspace was no longer alien territory. It was everywhere. That is the starting point for Swerve. Virtual technologies have become so ubiquitous that they are no longer visible. The interesting question is no longer how to visualize datascapes but rather, how to visualize non-datascapes? Not a historical space before digital technology, but a future space that exceeds itself. This means both a return to the visionary qualities of 1980s cyberpunk, which sought to imagine a completely alterior space, as well thinking about potential paths forward, ways to take back the agency of systems subject to technocratic logics of ubiquitous surveillance, forced upgrade cycles, the gamification of labor, and the commercialization of behavioral data. Swerve takes on both of these tasks, narrativizing the process of disengaging from invisible technologies of virtualization into the shockingly new space where technology is visible, tangible, and embodied, as well as considering the potential for new spaces that are ineluctably virtual and actual at the same time. One of the ways to explore this paradox emerged later in the form of the character Charlie, who fuses an enthusiasm for technologies of virtualization (especially simulation) with the notion of virtuality developed by French philosopher Henri Bergson—that is, the virtual as an atemporal space of pure potentiality that is concentrated to a single point of becoming by the mind. (Charlie is also an homage to Afrofuturism, a celebratory movement in the 1970s to the 1990s that explored African identity in the context of high-tech, cosmic science fiction motifs.)

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

One of Swerve‘s primary mechanisms for collaboration and visionary exploration of potentials is combinatoric. Different characters embody different philosophical stances toward technology, identity, virtuality, and ecology. The ten chapters of this long film allow various combinations to clash or coalesce into different material-symbolic-philosophical assemblages, each of which charts potential futures.

The raw content for these philosophies, theories, and fictional experiments came from discussions in graduate seminars around related topics at UCSB. Participants in those seminars fed their thoughts into forums, which were then accessed by a team of world builders who synthesized this rich academic work into narratives, characters, and a fictional world. Others wrote script segments, poetic fragments, etc. Over multiple years, I worked all of this material together into a coherent script. While this long-term unfolding remained true to the original plot outline, segments were only written in cycles of six months or so, allowing the script to emerge as segments were filmed. The filmmaking process thus mirrored the feedback loop between the virtual and actual worlds that is depicted within the film. The process itself is documented in the form of its ideal circuit diagram here.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

Because Swerve is about a sense of expanded ecology—an ecology of the “natural” world combined with an ecology of the virtual—many people from the “world builders” to location hunters to the cast had to work together to produce a milieu that functioned as a complex, ecological whole. We filmed over a three year period around Santa Barbara, Ventura, Ojai, Los Angeles, and the incredible Sedgwick Reserve, once Edie Sedgewick’s family’s ranch, and now operated as a research reserve by the University of California. More than one member of the cast or crew lost themselves, seduced by this hypnotic landscape that may be from the past, or may be from the future.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

I brought my own aesthetic to the project, my love of analog film stock (used to portray the virtual world in the film, in jerky, unstabilized 8mm), my background as an independent film director, and many of my friends who work in the film industry. Our all-volunteer cast and crew was formed from the ranks of incredibly talented professionals, alongside passionate students learning the ropes. Many of these latter have gone on to work in film or other creative industries. Several undergraduate students on the crew started when they were freshmen, worked throughout their college years, and graduated before the film was completed! I have never worked with a more passionate, gracious, brilliant, and giving group of people. I cannot thank you all enough for your incredible work.

I hope that Swerve demonstrates that when enough people contribute enough passion, time, and energy to a project, it is possible to make something that would never happen in a commercial system. The point here was not to make something using alternative means of funding (“independent” filmmaking), but to make something that absolutely cannot make a profit, that must live and die by its own rules and perverse desires. I hope that it will live on for a very long time, enjoyed by science fiction fans, casual viewers, academic theorists, and whoever else is willing to embark on this strange journey. Further, I hope this film will be used in classrooms. It is meant to be not only a film, but a creative ecosystem of ideas, a form of pedagogy, and the jumping off point of new speculative imaginings.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.

The film is free and always will be. It can be streamed, downloaded, remixed, re-authored… We provide the disc images and cover art to produce your own DVD or Blu Ray set, and hope you do so. (The film is so long that it spans three discs.) If you are reading this blog, Swerve should probably be on your shelf!

Swerve was made on a miniscule budget, provided by a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation in New York, a starter grant from UCSB, a very modest IndieGoGo campaign, and a number of direct donations from beautiful souls when the going got rough. Still, this 3.5 hour film cost about as much as shooting only three days on an average ultra-low-budget independent feature. That was only possible due to the incredible dedication and generosity of this cast and crew. Many faculty members at UCSB worked on or helped to facilitate this project. I’d like to give a special shout out to Doug Bradley, who served as production designer and general engineering genius, and Alan Liu, who has supported this project all of these years, and even donated a chunk of his own research funds to purchase the Avid system upon which it was edited. (And which is serving us still, as I edit a streamlined theatrical version meant for screening in one sitting.)

Adelle-and-Kaja-with-orchids

Still from Swerve.

The “swerve” of the film’s title refers to Roman poet Lucretius’ concept of clinamen, the fundamental nature of chance, or non-determinism, that enables single atoms to change course, setting into motion radical systemwide effects, escaping the homogeneity of matter. The swerve irrupts and determines the present, and is the hope (or fear) of difference, of the new. (The title of the film is not derived from Stephen Greenblatt’s book, titled The Swerve, which shares Swerve’s derivation from Lucretius, but was subsequent to it.)

Making this film has been a strange and wonderful journey for many of us, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who made it a (virtual and actual) reality. So much for history. What, I wonder, will be Swerve‘s futures?

 

SWERVE LINKS

All chapters can be viewed and downloaded from the main swerve site: www.swerveinterface.com

This site also contains a “theory wiki” with ties to the film, behind the scenes photos, and a complete cast, crew, and participant list.

Please like our Facebook page here.

Please consider contributing a vote and/or a review of the film at IMDB.

You can help spread the word by sharing this blog post, the Swerve site, or individual Vimeo files on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

And of course, please subscribe to this blog, only updated with occasional essays.

Still from Swerve.

Still from Swerve.


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Doors

October 31, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Swerve-door

8mm still from Swerve, by Zach Horton

The door, simultaneously barrier and threshold, invites us to approach, awakens our desire to pass through, to enter (or to exit), but bears the power of refusal. The brute inertia of the door, its solidity of both material form and cultural decree, can give pause to even the most tenacious of trespassers.

A room without a door, the most horrific vision Poe could conjure up, appears again and again in his speculative architecture, from “The Pit and the Pendulum” to that improvisatory room in “A Cask of Amontillado.” The most diabolic deed is surely to wall someone in, when no provision is made for a door. Perhaps of his literary brethren, only Kafka would disagree. Worse by far, he might say, is to have too many doors, leading to too many corridors, an overdetermination of possible passages that ensures that you never reach your destination. One always dies between two doors.

Poe, haunted by those doorless rooms, died outside.

Rome- Forum- copper doors- Temple of Romulus- 1700 years old

1700 year old copper doors in the Temple of Romulus, in the Roman Forum. Photograph by Zach Horton.

Most doors are meant to keep others out. As such they are signs (VERBOTEN), but they are also sorting devices (UNLESS…). Do you know the keeper of the house? Do you know the password? Do you know the combination? If so, the door will let you pass, and you will become sorted across that threshold. Rules and sorting. The nineteenth century made much of this mechanism: Maxwell’s demon, on one hand, was a thought experiment that posited a small creature who opened or closed a small door between two chambers whenever a molecule of a certain type approached. With only passive doorkeeping, claimed James Clerk Maxwell, the demon could build up potential energy in the form of difference. This was the opposite of entropy, of homogeneity. Was it therefore possible to cheat death, the universe’s heath death, the eventual state of maximum homogeneity that would leave no energy differential to do any useful work?

Dresden- ELREMA 1959 accounting computer

1959 ELREMA Computer, East German. Photograph by Zach Horton.

 

The second sorting machine of the nineteenth sentry, invented by Charles Babbage, went further: by representing numbers with mechanical cogs on wheels, those numbers could, through complex sorting—transfer from one mechanism to another—be manipulated in theoretically unlimited ways. The universal, programmable computer had come into being. The threshold it mediated was between the material and the symbolic. The latter could be manipulated in theoretically limitless ways; the challenge then became encoding, or the representation of the material within homologous data structures. Later computer engineers, and particularly Alan Turing, realized that the simpler the logical structure, the more universal the machine, in both representation and manipulation. The universal binary computer was born (with Konrad Zuse), using only two characters to represent any arbitrarily large structure. Best of all, it could be materially instantiated by something far simpler than Babbage’s complex machinery: the any electromagnetic switch, vacuum tube, or transistor. Each of these serves the function of a logic gate. One input, two possible outputs: 0 or 1, on or off, in or out. At the heart of the computer, and everything the computer generates, is a humble door.

Of course, not all doors are meant to be opened. Some are there to remind you that none shall pass, or that the pleasure, even necessity, of exit is but an illusion.

Rome- doorway

Chalk door in Rome. Photograph by Zach Horton.


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Other doors may be obliging, but serve to obscure the other side. Who will be brave enough to exit the known for the unknown? Contestants of Let’s Make a Deal had to ask this question of themselves. More lucratively, so do cat-burglars. I simply wonder who is behind each of those cold doors in the hotel hallway.

As I finish my Ph.D. and enter the academic job market, I’m thinking a lot about doors. That which they conceal, the thresholds they guard, and whether or not they lock behind you.

I discovered my favorite door by accident one day in Rome. Having thrown away my map, determined to wander aimlessly, I ended up on a narrow, unremarkable street with a solid wall lining one side. As I wiped the sweat from my brow, I noticed, with a start, that the wall had sprouted a head. It was made of the same red clay and jutted outward defiantly. A wall that refused to remain flat. I followed its gaze and discovered a second head, and then an ear, an eye, and a nose. I walked on, dumbfounded at the community of body parts embedded within this wall. Finally, I came to the door. And here, amidst this anthropomorphic wall, the door framed a question: what or who was behind this wall?

Rome- Artists house 6- doorway

Door to residence in Rome, Italy. Photograph by Zach Horton.

I considered ringing the off-kilter doorbell or intercom. I stood for nearly a half hour studying the clues provided by this threshhold. Finally, I turned and began to walk away.

A rusty creak rang out behind me. I spun just in time to witness the door opening by just a crack. A young Italian woman slipped out, carrying a handful of laundry. The door closed again, before I could make out any detail within. She walked in my direction.

“How is it,” I managed to ask in a blunt English that she might or might not understand, “that you came to live behind that door?”

She stopped, regarding me quizzically. “My father,” she finally said by way of explanation, “is an artist.” She smiled and continued away on her errand.

Why was it that this encounter affected me so sharply? Was it the incongruous presence of a human where there should only have been a silent door, waiting through the ages? Was it that the granting of my wish, to have experienced the inside behind this door, was accomplished only through a shift of modality, from the material to the symbolic? I had nothing but the word “artist,” a signifer, to show for my adventurous curiosity and humble patience. (This is, after all, within the purview of the door’s alchemical magic.) Or was it, quite simply, that in my phenomenological egocentrism I had forgotten that other great function of the door? To open, not to allow entry, but to facilitate an emergence?

Convergence

August 13, 2014 / / 0 Comments

This blog existed for several years before I actualized it. It hurts to become. It also never ceases. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze reminds us, it is the traversing of the virtual, affirming difference and embracing potentiality, that is the hard part. The rest, however necessary to actually produce something, is about placing limits on the dimensionality, the freedom, of our concepts, our affects, and our bodies. This is one of the paradoxes of becoming: it requires a reduction of potentiality (actualization) at the same time that it requires the emergence of something new, something not determined by or derived from what was there previously. Deleuze and his collaborator, Felix Guattari, call this “miraculation,” because it seems to violate Newtonian conceptions of matter and involve some holy or unholy spirit, some dark magic to those who cleave to a determinist ontology. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

One day in October of last year my sister and I, on a quest for famously opulent cupcakes, found ourselves inside hip Georgetown confectionery “Baked and Wired,” in Washington, D.C. This establishment provides a large wall to customers as a surface upon which to exhibit their artistic inspiration, provided that such inspiration is representable in the medium of napkin art. This is the napkin that caught my eye:

Hurts to Become

Photograph by Zach Horton

It turns out that this is a quote by poet and LGBT activist Andrea Gibson. It is from her poem, “I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power is Out,” a poem about the potentials of the body. Walt Whitman transposed through Andrea Gibson, delivered via concrete napkin to myself in a neighborhood that was decidedly not my own (I live in California, for starters). This is convergence.

My sister Jessica and I developed what we jokingly called “Convergence Theory” quite a few years ago, when we began to see our paths in life take shape retrospectively. Why, we wondered, do we suddenly feel that we are on the right track, that nothing we had done previously was superfluous, even though (a) we had never articulated or understood these paths previously, (b) had in fact had other goals in mind, since discarded, and (c) couldn’t tell, even at this latest juncture, where it all would lead. Somehow, the disparate interests, pursuits, skills, and experiences that we had accumulated had intertwined themselves and produced… something new. Convergence is another way of expressing becoming. It isn’t what can happen, as if guided by fate, despite the discontinuities represented by (a), (b), and (c). Rather, it is what results when these conditions are met.

We might say, along with John Lennon, that “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” But convergence theory goes beyond the acknowledgement that planning, shaping, and controlling are forms of hubris, and that the most interesting details emerge out of the cracks of identity, in the gaps and fissures of intentionality. Convergence follows from the interconnectedness of all things, an ecology of environment, body, and mind, but recognizes that all connections are not equal. Connections, assemblages, are assembled. They are produced through intra-action in the world. Everything connects to everything else given enough degrees of separation. All players of “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” know this.

Photograph by Zach Horton

Photograph by Zach Horton


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I would like to suggest that convergence is fundamentally an affirmation of the emergent potential of a life lived experimentally. An experimental life is simply one that increases the potentialities of the bodies within a sphere of influence (one’s “own” included). Concretely, this means that no experience is irrelevant to a life as long as it increases future potential. If I learn to knit, it increases my future potential. If I encourage a friend to learn to knit, it will likely increase both her potential and the potential forms of our future interactions. Ditto for listening to other humans and learning about their experience of life. Even better: spending time with nonhumans and posthumans and attempting to understand how they experience the world. This all sounds intuitive enough.

And yet it flies in the face of Neoliberal culture. We are taught to visualize concrete goals and then work hard to achieve them. This approach reifies identity (it is assumed that the “I” who is to pursue these goals is unified, differentiated from others, autonomous and self-determining, and exists prior to and outside of the discursive structures that articulate these goals as choices to begin with) and elevates the individual above all other units and scales in order to suggest that all goals should be individualized. It also implies that life should be linear and goal-driven, with every potential action pre-judged on the basis of whether or not it moves one closer to the imagined end state that constitutes the “goal” in question. And finally, it assumes that goals, or static end states, are actually desirable to reach.

Convergence theory playfully challenges all of these assumptions. Here the “I” is undefined and amorphous: it may include one’s entire family, one’s near and dear assemblage of non-human entities from inert objects to electronic devices to animal co-habitants to colleagues. Because this “I” is always in a state of becoming, it does not exist prior to a series of actions and thus cannot articulate a coherent “goal” or imagined end state. Any attempt to do so is foolhardy and illusory at best, and dangerous and destructive at worst. In other words, the “I” only emerges through the series of experiences and transformations that constitute it as a subject. Because this conception of identity is fluid, fixed states are anathema to it, symptoms of a breakdown of the creative process; certainly not goals to which we should aspire. Convergence, then, is not a linear path that moves one, step by step, closer to a desired end state, but rather a non-linear accumulation of potentials over time that open up new forms of becoming. These becomings are actualizations in the sense that they reduce a field of virtual potentials to concrete forms, but they must always be incomplete so that they continue to propel us forward into new paths, new connections, new combinations.

Photograph by Zach Horton

Photograph by Zach Horton

Stated simply, then, convergence theory holds that all experiences must converge upon something new and that the larger the difference between experiences, the greater the differential leap of becoming. The more varied and less linear one’s experiences, the greater will be the acts of becoming upon which they continually converge. The correlate here is that linear, goal-driven behavior produces minimal convergence. This is because convergence is a kind of short-circuiting, the crossing of wires across difference in order to produce yet more difference. Linear behavior produces minimal convergence because it is already nearly homogeneous: there is no difference to converge. One of the implications of convergence theory is that the more difficult it is to cognitively link one’s actions in advance, the more clearly one will be able to link them retrospectively as components of emergence.

This blog will be one small experiment in convergence. Here I will attempt to catalog some of my varied interests and experiences, mostly in textual and photographic form, as an exploration of the connections between them. In this way it must be not merely an excavation of pre-existing connections, but also, through the process of exploration itself, the production of new vectors, new directions.

The primary subjects of this blog will thus likely change. At this moment, though, I take the following to be my starting points: photography, film, ecology, philosophy, cultural theory, technological systems, open source, creativity, innovation, literature, energy conservation, and scalar mediation. (This last, which happens to be the subject of my PhD dissertation, will be explained in a future post.)

Where will we go from here?

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