This blog is a manifestation of a performed collaborative paper I am writing with Mary Paterson.
In response to a post on the 'Performance Writing' FB account, intended to begin an exploration into "The Performance Writing Network", Mary suggested some changes and asked some questions of me. I will respond to one of them here.
referencing http://www.furtherfield.org/blog/channeltwo/writing-your-own-instructions-new-media-approaches-2022-rethinking-foundations
MARY ASKED where does reading come into this?
Reading is indeed interesting in terms of performance writing networks - writing is only a visible manifestation of a more prevalent practice of reading, where the practitioner forms 'unseen trajectories' (de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life)....
writing travels in the network, its contexts like so many ribbons running from its interior. A reference is only a ribbon isn't it? A decorative gesture.
We reference texts - and we can drop in links to the references - but these references take TIME to read. Too much TIME to read. Why read the 'referenced-text' when there is its inference, its shadow, in the 'referencing text' to deal with - its double. Is a cursory impression of a philosophical position a valid place to write-back from? Doesn't 'performance writing network' imply a performance reading - that is a 'pretend reading' - that this fictional reading would be a the basis for a performed writing, forming a performance network of writing - a kind of microcosm of the unknowable as the known? The unsayable as the said, the undoable as the done?
THE MORE I KNOW THE LESS I KNOW
A strange paradox exacerbated by networked learning and the time-lag (ref. comments by me on FB https://www.facebook.com/performancewriting?fref=ts&filter=2). The wealth of knowledge available at a button press throws the notion of education as the acquisition of knowledge, and therefore the status of the text as that which imparts knowledge, into disarray.
The reading then becomes a kind of impossible depth of a mirror upon a mirror - the unknown looking into the unknown. What kind of perverse network could be based on this model of infinite depths?
CHAOS and COMMUNITY
There is a meeting of the notions of 'Reading' and the limits implied by the 'boundaries of chaos and community' which we are finding in our discussions of Performance Writing Networks.
The network is defined by its limits: in our case, a limit of a definition dropped into the 'chaos' of art practices, (we have still not defined our terms - and therefore at the time of writing we can assume that we may never define them). The reading is defined by its contexts: a series of inferences which leap out of the text into the 'chaos' of the indefinite, or the 'community' of the known.
What is interesting to me, is that in collaboratively composing a paper across the network, the written text comes under the extreme, deep pressures of 'reading' . Can writing establishes a community of the shared known in this sense?
What is a community of knowns? A community of gnomes, standing around a small pool. This is not a network is it. What networks the community is the aspects of the community which aren't shared...
Neither of us has the time to acquire all the knowledge/opinion of the other - and nor should we - so the collaboration becomes a model of the shifting aspect which occurs between expert and amateur at each foray into the editing/writing moment.
The text being written changes as it enters each node of the network. Its depth of inference is occluded and exploded.
Comments
Dear Nathan
Let’s depart for a moment from the form of a paper and get down to business (or rather, play). Your comments about the limitations of definitions in the context of chaos, about reference as a decorative gesture, and about the shadows of knowledge dancing over our dialogue have made me think of three things:
1. I want to write to you. This is a strategy to deal with knowledge (which, like you say, is gently morphing from the understanding of things to the understanding of knowing how to find out about things), by personalising the network. (I am still troubled by the network’s untraceable lines. They snake over the horizon like the veins of an animal I can’t name.)
2. For various reasons, I have recently been reading a lot of John Berger, the writer and artist who deftly weaves politics and art, and who writes with an assurance that is at once true and anachronistic. (He was born in 1926, into a world that still embraced Modernism and hence the possibility of truth. You and I are too young for assurance. We have the internet instead; our hall of mirrors.) In 2002 he described the depiction of hell in a 15th century painting by Heironymous Bosch, “There is no horizon there. There is no continuity between actions. There are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present . Everywhere there are surprises and sensatons, yet nowhere is there any outcome. Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirum.” Berger says this is exactly like watching CNN. I think it sounds like an afternoon spent following links on Twitter.
3. I often spend an afternoon following links on Twitter. I find it pleasurable. But it’s pleasurable and sickening at the same time, like too many sweets. Here is another text written before mass social networking existed, but which could be a description of the types of networked non-knowledge it implies.
Note
[NB Berger also says that some works of art are like visual prophecies. Do you think some texts describe the future? Michel Foucault said (apparently), ‘truth is in the future’, and some of his theories have come true, like the Panopticon as social model: an all seeing prison that forces its subjects to internalise their domination, like Katie Price selling her distress to the press, or me, on the days when I update my Linked In profile for the sake of ‘employability.’]
[Edit:
I would like you to know three things before you read the points outlined above:
i) I have no time for nostalgia. I do not miss anything. The past was not better than the present and the future is already here (perhaps that means I embrace the continual present, which is no doubt a sign of my age).
ii) I believe that knowledge is cyclical, like visual perception, which relies first and foremost on things you already know.
iii) I hold i) & ii) to be true like articles of faith. At one point I discovered them. I knew them instantly and have believed nothing else since. This is either a) proof that there is a reality that can be intuited, even if it is a reality based on a model of knowledge that is both relational and preconceived b) a sign of my ignorance c) of only personal significance.]
What I'm trying to say is
The network is personal. Berger describes his hell of no horizon as a manifestation of a new world-order that puts profit above everything else. Just before I went into the library to read his words (NB The British Library has a space on each desk for an Ethernet cable; it was built in 1998, before I had an email address and when the future was going to be full of cables) I followed a link on Twitter to an article about the sexualisation of girls and young women in the Daily Mail. The article describes how people who condem the Daily Mail share links to it in disbelief. Each time a link is clicked the paper makes money. This profit is the imperative that drives the Daily Mail’s misogynist behviour or, more clearly, that compels it to continue.
I have strayed from the point, which is p(P)erformance w( W)riting and networks; strayed into the nature of knowledge and the motives of networked behaviour. All of this is a kind of reading which is, like you say, the active part of the meaning of our dialogue. Aware of the limitations of (reading in) online space, I want to finish with three questions:
x. Given that you and I can never share our knowledge, can we share meaning? Is that what we’re doing, or are we using each other’s meaning as leaping off points towards things we already know?
y. Can we share a series of misunderstandings? Is that what we’re doing, or are we suturing over our misunderstandings as if the performance of a network is coherence enough?
z. Do you write in order to remember or do you writ in order to change?
Comment
Nathan: when we spoke I said I was thinking of collective consciousness. I still am. Cyclical knowledge is a kind of collective consciousness, I believe, although I’ve not explained that here – i.e. in this location. Does the network need explanations? Or just the gesture of them?
collective conciousness
the network doesn't require any qualification except that of its circumstance. that was what I took from the paper by Irit Rogoff and her invocation of Hannah Arendt's "The Space of Appearance", where a theory becomes the space of a creative (as opposed to a 'reactive') position. In the space of the written network, ideas and roles are free to be played out.
in a sense though - thinking about performance writing networks - as real time persona updating networks - it's striking how 'real' - how close to the author's own role in society - most of the roles played in an online performance-writing network are. the written networked persona in this sense is rarely directly given the status of an 'extrusion' from the author, a moment of escape, but rather more often has the effect of complexifying the persona of the author - for example by deepening the reader's impression of their interests. or, alternatively is cut away from the author completely - as is the case with spoof accounts. (eg. @mothersagainst1 ??)
I think this links to your comment about 'nosalgia' - which originally took as an enlightening non-sequitur, itself complexifying my impression of you, providing an unanchored marginal note, but which we might now draw into the discourse:
your lack of nostalgia could be a sign of the age, as you say. is this the age of the communication network? is it integral to the communication network that there is a lack of nostalgia in the characters that make it up? is it integral also - a replication of anti-nostalgia across the axis of the present - that there is also a lack of hope? do YOU experience this lack of hope? is this conception of an idealised continual present a destructive act which collapses, dismisses, past and future as subservient to the moment of the utterance. this is Curt Cloninger's understanding of the glitch, which goes back to this idea of the performance writing network as one composed of errors, moments of otherness. The performed writen is the exception - to the readable (past) and writable (potential) - in this sense.
if we are able to idealise - fetishise? - the present and our roles inside it, then are we are free to 'be' ourselves and complexify our roles in the continual present? or are we then restricted into this replication of our ourselves across media?
i think now about invented persona online, 'trolls', pastiche accounts, errant actors who do not play to norms of selfhood online. is this what makes up the performance writing network - these errors that take advantage of its naive|(?) trust in the present as an ideal 'real' space.
the dichotomy appears to be between this idealised HONEST performance of writing ourselves in the present, and a (fictionalising?) ERRANT escapist or mischeivious mode of writing as characterisation, for archive, or a script for potential being
i want to collapse this dichotomy now. the truthfulness of the position of the writer in the networked present of the performance of writing is futile afterall. as we have explicated in relation to knowledge, a performance writing is very little but a rehersal for a performance reading, which takes place only (usually) from the position where the performance writing is an act of the past, and therefore its idealism is nostagic. i look back now at your comment that "I do not miss anything", in the light of OUR personal circumstances - you and I have both undoubtedly experienced reason for seismic movements in our position in the last month - and it is, however recent, an artifact of a time past.
performance writing networks are
firstly: invisible, 'idealised' spaces of 'shared imaginaries', envisaging the present as a utopia having no equal in the past, populated by creative beings, unaware of, and therefore free from, existing circumstance
secondly: apparent, representations, and therefore traces, of 'existing circumstance', viewable only in the context of contemporaneous circumstance - populated by pragmatic, self-assuring, extrapolations of our selves
i think this actually feeds into your questions. I'm going to answer them in the next post.
writing without basis
This isn't a paper at all.
I am writing without basis. As a collaborative enterprise the peice of writing in its current state becomes freed from the form and responsibility of verifiable assersion, which is afterall the basis of academic writing.
The performance writing network - the social network writing certainly, but also the space of the utterance as a performance act, and even the performed knowledge/writing network of Wikipedia - is not subject to basis, but exists as a present. It isn't nostalgic either in this sense.
These are things I know about you now - you aren't nostalgic and you aren't academic. Are these things intimately related for you?
Can you view your life as if it were a life led as a nostalgic person?
Does a reading of your online/real persona neccessarily imply one who is not nostalgic?
This is, is the the performance writing network (the one we produce here in this dialogue, for example) a site for the aspects of self that you envisage as integral to you? or are these aspects just that - aspect>perspectives - from which to develop a reading?
Does this baseless sporadic dialogue contain the ideas essential to it - or do these ideas only emerge as a perspective from which it must be read?
answers
Questions
YOU: Given that you and I can never share our knowledge, can we share meaning? Is that what we’re doing, or are we using each other’s meaning as leaping off points towards things we already know?
ME: i think we have been using each other's meaning as leaping off points - and occassionally also as landing places. Hopefully though, and I think this is an important distinction in the mode, I have been trying to avoid writing down anything which I already know/believe - although this itself is part of my own dogma to the effect that process is productive in itself
YOU: Can we share a series of misunderstandings? Is that what we’re doing, or are we suturing over our misunderstandings as if the performance of a network is coherence enough?
ME: misunderstandings, I'm not sure. I think we understand each other pretty clearly. In a sense the admission (by me) of the baseless nature of the collaboration means that there cannot be a misunderstanding, there is just the text. What basis would a mistake be compared to?
YOU: Do you write in order to remember or do you writ in order to change?
ME: In order to change. In order also to create - to supplement - and to reflect.