Formalism and the Real -(time) Social Web @ PICNIC08

I am a film studies researcher and writer/curator of art and film. My interest in attending the PICNIC08 Conference was in gaining access to creative industry conversations about the kinds of social spaces, subject positions and cultural and political projects that are enabled, re-imaged, or indeed endangered by latest commercial and artistic networked platforms, projects, and paradigms. I attended much less than half of the conference, but in my own specific negotiation of the event I accessed, some of the key highlights were those projects utilizing visualization tools to activate the political claims of data in activist, ngo, and government campaigns, as well as by artists (CISCO - Connected Urban Development programs; Dept of Environment, San Fran; Govcom.org; The Tangible Earth Project, Shinuchi Takemura; Loca.lab). This seemed to be the strongest stream of the program and was very well received. What I wanted to submit however, to connect with my current work, and in a kind of parallel spirit with the speculative atmosphere of the Picnic, were a few thoughts and many more questions, about a certain perceived turn-of-media interest at PICNIC 08 in the post 2.0 real-time social web.

The 'live' face on the 'new' screen

Bela Belazs' famous early speculations on the newness of cinematic media ‘The Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art’i published in 1923 and heralding the arrival and unique qualities of the silent film, celebrated a line of development in mass (media) culture in which cinematic visuality and industry usurps print paradigm effects. The printing press's role in multiplying and distributing "products of the human spirit", which, drawing on Victor Hugo, Belazs argued took over the part played by the cathedral in the Middle Ages and splintered human knowledge into multiplicity and opinion, would no longer render "illegible" the faces of "man". Belaz's affirming claims of the rich and central import of the face and of gesture - and a concomitant gestural literacy - to mass international communication included a rigorous philosophical riffing on the new close up image, which was later picked up by Deleuze in his theorization of the affect image. It's interesting to note this long history of severed heads as ‘soul’ windows in film theory, when considering the communicative, informational, and rhetorical potential of the real-time web in video.

Questions about distributed conversational genres

What does it mean to say that the instant web is as close as possible to reality as you can get, as was the claim across multiple PICNIC08 sessions, including the presentation of Seesmic? If we can think of identities as having genres of (re)productioni what are the dominant genres of self-articulation made possible by the current and future networked realtime video. How might their current version in soliloquy form (youtube, Seesmic) when read as "video conversation" actually stand out from the rhythms of everyday life - as a way of explaining a reason for their new everyday privileging (by which I mean their popular take up), and to what effects? Who or what currently hacks the subject's easy disclosure as enclosure in the web cam's receiving gaze? That is, is everyone comfortable there? If so, why, and about what? How is the conversation thread vitalizing for offline life? I.e. who speaks the web cam in which networks and how? To avoid the universal ‘global' answer is to view more, participate. I've not spent enough time on Seesmic or other similar sites yet to theorise beyond the query. But I find the genre very interesting in terms of its capturing of an enthusiasm for networked bodily subjects, severed heads, speech acts, the notion of face to face correspondence as monologue, the rhythm of the subject thread of the video exchange... all that ‘the face to face' conjures as communicative event and metaphor.

Where the reality effect?

Of course proclaiming great proximity to the reality effect (and magnified) is as contentious for networked media to claim as much as any other media format. This is not to refute that the online social world cannot repeat, adapt, enhance offline perceptions, activities, tools, and relational experiences. More that realism (in this case, politically, post-cyberspace) always has a politics; and the web is an overdetermined and hyper-material space.

Thinking the network's ‘realism'

What emerged from PICNIC08 (from the many, not just me) is that we need a few more new ways to talk about social networks. It is not just that the "friend identity" is too limited, as was suggested in multiple sessions, and not only that an expansion of social roles in the network (as ascribed to the embodied identity, and perhaps as part of a broader and belated opposition to the increasingly politicised discomforts of personal data collection) would expand the version of subject-hood we are able to let loose online. The newly emerging sense that our participation within the kind and mild web of regulated alliances constructed by social network architecture has become "out of control" is not only a concern about whether or not these platforms steal our databodies, or take up too much life-administration time, or overwhelm us with the compulsory loyalties of neo-liberalist friendshipi, but also because once held by these worlds, we also suffer as subjects from what psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec, drawing on a 1968 essay in S/Z by Barthes calls "the realist imbecility".ii

Sociality and formalism

Whether video or text, real-time or not, polyphonic or soliloquy, claims about the social realism of mediated communicative experience are committed, Copjec argues in the service of a "referential plenitude". Copjec's reference to Barthes' work on Balzac, which identifies the realistic effect as a kind of false consciousness resulting from a collective or structural (in this case also software-constructed) disregard for the "tripartite nature of the sign - a sacrifice of the signified - the dimension of inter-subjective truth - in favour of the referent". In other words, reality is "freestanding" (the best example being facebook) because the particularity of the enunciator is partially (or entirely, depending on your mood) sacrificed in order for the "referential illusion" to take hold.i Thereafter, and in a rigorously formal sense, any nature of excessive reality report can be uploaded, received.

The argument here might be that we stay signed on to the democratically rendered online social network because it absorbs all of our particularity by creating enough routes for a cacophony of distributed utterances. In line with Copjec’s argument, I use democratic here to connote the socially enabling notion of the universal and Cartesian subject of de Tocqueville's model of democracy. Members are fine with the subtly Foucauldian paradigm not just because we "get" something from it (are given over to the social), but because enunciation itself is privileged by being taken at face value. Again with the face. This is the achievement of facebook. Or to put it another way, the reason the fallible facebook data-stealing master is forgiven is because it nourishes the desire of the universally proposed subject with an equal and ameliorative singularity; we can both express any pleasure or concern fully and never need be fully surprised by the flaws of the system because the flaws of the system are what foster and hold the enunciations in place. If the social network is often confused for public space however, then the question here is of course, how can difference and actual conflict and its movement in the social be recognized except in the formality of the hysterical utterance? My unformed thoughts are that it is going to be important to continue to write and think about this new kind of formalised, enunciative ‘radical innocence’ at it engages in recurrent returns to the network; fine-tune some politicized analyses of the structure of our scriptural and psychical engagements with networked architectures that might have political and design consequences.