work in progress: w 40 - radical democracy & the promise of monsters

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Radical Democracy & the Promise of MonstersParticipation Literacy, Part II

A Work in Progress by Peter Giger, Technoscience Studies, Blekinge Institute of

technology.

This is a backup copy of my writing project in action. The text is Creative Com-

mons 3.0, but I ask you not to spread this this pdf-le for any reason because it is

just a work in progress - of course you are free to spread the link. Things that can-

not be trusted in this version: I practice extreme writing which means that spelling

and grammatical can look odd until I go through the text and spot all the bad

spots. This also goes for the structure, references, footnotes and so on. As if that

was not enough, in many places I have just quitted the paragraph to return later.

I will upload a new version every friday afternoon, mostly for my supervisors eyes

but also because someone out there might connect, and want to reach out.

This project is going to be published as a dissertation. If you are an editor of a

journal and want to publish some of the essays, please contact me. Every main

chapter is aimed to be a separate essay and published elsewhere before or after

the dissertation is due in the end of 2009.

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I. An Essay about Social and Personal Change41. A Short History of Web 2.082. Strange as Gender 10

II. Activist Writing111. Sign and Play in Web 2.0122. Monster Writing Untouchable by the Raving Blogosphere133. Angels of the Becoming14

III. Posthuman Transformations161. Person Ecologies17

IV. Simulations, Monsters and Disabled Cyborgs in the Land of Becoming211. Timely Simulations212. The First Generation243. The second generation25

4. Free Radicals and Wikipedia Activists265. The Death of Deleuze28

V. The Panopticon at the end of Universe29VI. References30

Simulations, Monsters and the Promise of Becomings

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An Essay about Social and Personal ChangeThis essay is a historical, personal exposition of a time span from 2004 to 2008.

The story encompasses three case studies which could be called “The Emergent

Technologies of Web 2.0”, “The Library” and the “Battle against Carbs”. My intial

thought was to write three traditional case studies to function as the empirical

base in my dissertation, but it is difcult to separate these three stories. They are

so integraded in each other and so imbued with theories I was working with at the

time so this form pop up from some underlaying understanding about what kind of

story I had to write. So this is a personal story about a time then the technology of

web 2.0 emerged as an agent in me and my life world.

[1] November 11, 2001November 11, 2001, I was comfortably mounted in my ofce chair, a human tech-

nology unit in front of a computer screen reminding more of a napsack stuffed to

the breaking-point than the laptop I am using 2008. I had recently read Donna Har-

away’s essay A Cyborg Manifesto which made me realise that I had never been a

mere human. My birth had been an event to throw the biological I into an appara-

tus of technological production. I was a normal, healthy child but my rst years

was lld of all sorts of illnesses and sometimes even now four decades later, im-

ages of doctors pop up in my mind and I am lld with the intuative knowlege that

in an age without medicins, I had been nothing rather than something. Perhaps the

medicins made me, created me, both in a biological sense and in a more pervas-ing, personal sense. The person inside the ofce November 11, 2001 is a cyborg a

partly constructed by four decades of medicines, pesticides, pollution and a raising

degree of human-technology counstruciton of foods. I am a child of instrumental

rationality constructed by modernity to transform me into a countable unit, func-

tional in the age of mathematical alegorithms. I function as a material-social agent

inside the material-social agents making up the concept called an ‘ofce’. When I


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was thrown into my techology-social glass house, It was with such a power It took

an eighteen years long landing strip for me to nally stop and ask the obvious

questions for a growing man thrown into the world: what am I, who am I and

where am I?

November 11, 2001, I was comfortably mounted in my ofce chair when a an amer-

ican collgue rushed into my room and wresteled my computer to the eye of the

world, CNN. In chock, we viewed two ofce skyskrapers being rammed by two huge

passenger jet planes and tens of thousands of persons returnd to dust. The rst

thought was that modernity nally exploded in the human face and probably was

going to take the rest of the world with us. Only gradually, I realised this was a

separate incident constructed by purpose to destroy the two main symbols of west-

en capitalistic civilization, the crown of modernity. After a time, I also realised

this to be the rst event of apocalyptic proportions brought to me by the Internet

rather than traditional media as television, radio, or news papers. If Marshall

McLuhan was right, that the “medium is the message”, what was the message

here? If we would embrace the Internet, what would that lead to? What was goingto happend with our sense of embodiment, relations, authority structures and a

whole lot of the things we have learned to take for granted. Some of us not only

take life itself for granted, but also view tradition as a stable agent to lean to both

in our daily life and in times of upheaval. If Internet was going to be an omnipo-

tent agent for social change, how would that affect the rest of our lives and con-

tinuing history? Would 1994 be some kind of meta-symbol in hundred years or so,

or will the continuos fragmentation of our life world render this kind of authorita-

tive symbols impossible?

I see myself as a literary person, not mainly because I like good books, but because

I always see the narrative side of things. When the anchor on the television news

talk I do not hear a bundle of facts - words, syntax, denotations cannot possibly be

separated from the complex view of semiotics. The news anchor is not communi-


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cating facts, but more or less telling a story like the one I am engaged with right

now. Facts are only building blocks in a painted and furnished reality.

From the time I started to work in the research community until I published my li-

cenciate thesis 2006, I have been called a technological optimist and a life opti-

mist, the rst in a negative sense, the other in some kind of semi-conductive

sense, I think. Lately I have started to view this time as my naive period, more like

Picassos blue period than naive painters as the French Henri Rousseau or the

Swedish Nils von Dardel. I tried to spot the complexity of the world with the blue

glasses of optimism as a pragmatic standpoint - what would be more reasonable for

me to live in a world with some faith in technology or a pessimistic view of the

same. The answer became the former since I could not se people around me resist-

ing their own will to view technology in the liberal utopian perspective that we all

are moving towards the ultimate way of life with the parameters given to us in the

world we are trapped in. The last two years has lead me to drop all pretense about

myself and my view of the world. What I take with me from my time as a naivist is

the core in my optimism. We might call it hope. I have started to realize that anoptimistic world view is an impossible base for social change. If we already are op-

timistic there is no room for real foundational change. But we have to have hope.

At least if we are striving towards some sort of authenticity we have to have hope

to survive as social beings. Big words as knowledge and moral is rather empty con-

tainers without hope 1.

The rst time I realized that the learnings of ofcial authorities could be fatal I

had been regarded as a grown up in the eyes of the authorities in about ve years.My best friend in the upper teens, early adulthood and I got the driver license

about the same time directly after we turned 18. I regarded him as a decent driver

1. Please read Richard Rorty's small but delicious book Hope in place of Knowledge(1999).


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bedsides one peculiarity: he had been told by his driving teacher to locate the car

close to the opposite driving lane to make it easy for pedestrians, cyclists and

parked cars along the road. I said this was crazy and that he had to take an situa-

tional approach rather than get caught in some instrumental rule drummed in by

his driving teacher. And the fact was that he mostly drove unnecessary close to the

opposite roadway. It got so far that I started to avoid riding with him and one day I

heard that he had been killed in a frontal crash. It was impossible to know the

cause and effect relations here and even if this is an existential story with more

than one layer, there was one thing that still inuence me in everything I do: DONOT TRUST ANYONE JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE AN OFFICIAL, ADMINISTRATIVE AU-

THORITY. In a way this is the same realization Kant did in his manifest for enlight-

enment: "Think for yourself" (1784). In his case the authorities he was suspicious to

was the authority of tradition and the scholastic hierarchy ruling the world of

knowledge in the time we have named the slightly derogative term "the middle

ages" or "the dark ages". The modern society is built on the catch phrase "Think for

yourself", but there is reason to view this newly found freedom as ostensive. The

authority structures of tradition and the church hierarchy was replaced by a ratio-nalization process thinkers like Max Weber and Martin Heidegger has called instru-

mental rationality. Instrumental Rationality has to do with a process to reduce the

individual in the sense I call 'person' to the sense of an individual as an entity in an

algorithmization process. This process is driven by the bureaucracy, more and

more in the name of science.

In september 2008 there was a report on the television news that scientists had

found a gene for men's indelity. It was a fact that around forty percent of themail population had this gene and thereby were predispositioned for indelity. If a

similar claim had been done by philosophers, sociologists or psychologists most

people had laughed and viewed it as some sort of prank. But in some sense we still

live in an Lockean world where knowledge is about "nding" empirical facts and

treat them as readymade knowledge. Few people are willing to reect on the


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deeper relation between a cellular cluster and the social pattern between the con-

cept and praxis of indelity. And additionally, few are willing to take responsibility

for scientic ndings or constructions. Wether the indelity-gene is justiable ac-

cording to the rules in our truth paradigm or not, all actions have consequences

and a society built on instrumental rationality only presents "objective" facts. Ob-

jective fact reporting does not have any agency and therefore does not have any-

thing to claim responsibility for. This state of living beyond the world does not only

goes for the bureaucracy, but is even more obvious in mass media.

[2] Strange as Gender I stand in front of the mirror. Jacket, jeans, light beard, the cliché of man in my

early middle ages. And still, I feel a huge portion of hostility and alienation when I

am being classied according to the standard gender scheme. It feels like the word

gender is some kind of essential ballon a vicious prison guard is forcing into my

throat.

I have been a political feminst for several years. I do not think the world is possi-

ble in a teleological sense without participation, acceptance and realization of the

force of multiplicity. From time to time I also have been fascinated of the concept

gender. Mostly because I do not understand it at all. It has an essential aura. It is

very hard to understand how researchers can create classication schemes from it,

an even more puzzeling how they can place themselves inside one of these rigid

constructions. I can’t se myself in any of these classication schemes, and every-

one I view as persons with some kind of authenticity is also hard to place in a oneof these two schemes. In fact, everyone who seems to fall naturally in one of the

two gender categories, seems more like they have been created by these schemes

than the other way around.

Person and gender has to be aligned somehow. Gender is like an over-person

everyone have to relate to since the net of social relations to a great part draws


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on the fact of you having chosed or been chosen a side in the gender game. Gen-

der is a structuralist notion and we would probably be better off without it. The

concept ‘gender’ leads to massive group think and the excessive construction an

exclusion matrix. It’s like an assembly line creating gures for the main characters

in the lm Stranger in a Strange Land. We have no room for naive gender struc-

tures in a post-cartesian, posthuman, postmodern world.

[3] A Short History of Web 2.0An hegelian account of the history of web 2.0 could be like this: some "kids" create

hobbyish software to manage images and bookmarks in a techno-social setting.

Some persons in the techno-economical elite payed attention to this and wrote

some articles to differentiate this software from traditional computer software

and thereby created a new conceptual matrix for software producers to relate to if

they wanted to become or stay in the leading position among software producers.

Users liked this new kind of software and started to expect functions they would

not even thought of a couple of years earlier. The concept 'mindset' is most often

used to explain web 2.0 technologies and thinking, but other variants have been

used. A few times I have heard, rather carelessly, the word paradigm. Today it

seems like an hyperbole, but history has revealed itself in unexpected ways be-

fore, and I actually see some hope in a future mindset with roots in the web 2.0

political slogan "democracy, transparency and participation". Another word used to

describe web 2.0 is as meme 2, alluding to the sense of the web 2.0 developing likea gene. Personally I think it ts nicely into the conceptual structure we normally

use to point to a mindset, or at least I hope it is. One of the things that struck me

2. The term 'meme' was coined 1976 by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selsh Gene(2006, p. 189 ff). His point is that there are similarities of how the gene and languagedevelops through time.


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when we tried to set the agenda of web 2.0 was that the set of descriptor words

was a mix of political, ideological and technological. Together with words as

democracy, transparency and participation we used words as Ajax, database and

CSS. Some laid the weight at the technological words, but most of us mentioned

the technological words rst to emphasize that it was that the agenda was ideolog-

ical/technical rather than the opposite.

There has been some critics, most of it relevant, deserving more attention. The

most famous is perhaps Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur (2007). The

subtitle How todays internet is killing our culture is a good description of what the

book is about. The book is based on a series of blog articles discussing how the am-

ateurish side of web 2.0 was going to take over and destroy the knowledge and

structures built up by tradition. High quality culture would drown in a messy soup

of chitchat. A similar criticism comes from Geert Lovink, described as a media the-

orist and Internet activist, in the article Blogging, the nihilist impulse (2007). He

draws on a concept of nihilism from Gianni Vattimo [more..].

Carr, amoral and making us stupid.

The Journal First Monday devoted a whole volume for the criticism of web 2.0 3.

A problem with several of this texts are that they treat the blogosphere as a homo-

geneous unity. A blog is a web site software congured to produce texts sorted in a

date order with rss feeds, tags, sidebars with related links, and so on. The ques-

tion is wether it is possible to bundle bloggers as diverse as: the technology ex-

pert, the sixteen years old "me-chitchat-blogger", culture activist bloggers (realexamples perhaps). Also too general and does not carry any examples.

3. First Monday, Volume 13, Number 3 - 3 March 2008, http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/ bin/ojs/index.php/fm/issue/view/263/showToc (2008-10-04)


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Activist WritingI admire Jürgen Haberma's project about situating rationality in the real, everyday

communication act (1984). It is something immensely beautiful about searching for

logos i the local war zones of the daily communication. It is a shame there are no

logos to be found. But the search is not in vain, history has shown that the elusive

logos might function as a transcendental bait often leading to real world knowl-

edge included in the materiality of everyday praxis. But I also admire writers as

Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida who dares to go beyond the rationality of lan-

guage and explore the complexity of the innumerable layers of signier collisions

happened over the last three thousand years. Multiplicity is a virtue. I am sorry to

say that academic writing still suffers from the positivist project of numerological

divination leading to the impoverishment of the creative power in the intellectual

sphere. Numerous positivist project can be justied based on their contextual val-

ues; the main problem is - as always - about exclusion. The logocentric view of the

world leads to reductionism which in its turn leads to everything else estranged tothe fringes. The cone view of universe is destructive for everything happen to be

situated outside of the everlasting process of narrowing.

When I wrote my licentiate (2006) thesis, I had the intention to "give my self up"

and write as was expected to reach a large group of various professionals and aca-

demics. I struggled with linearity and concept hierarchies. I wanted to nd the

golden mean in my target audience. I succeeded, according to statistics, my licen-

tiate thesis has been on the top list of downloads in our university database for along time. This utility-thinking was not bad, neither for me, for the university and

all of those who could learn something from it. This way of conducting academic

writing is not so common. The most common form is to obey the authority of the

example, a traditionalist process practiced in academia for most of its history. For

a long time period between the rise of christianity and the activist thinkers of the

enlightenment, Aristotle had the almost unfathomable signier "the Philosoph", as


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if to exclude new thoughts by the sheer use of a word. It was a reason for this

reduction. The scholastic power had decided that Aristotle's clean, uneshly, ratio-

nal texts would suite their own knowledge of spiritual things. They saw Aristotle as

an instrument for knowledge in the mundane world, a world the christian church

would not invest too much time in themselves. So it was practical to be able to use

Aristotle as an emissary for knowledge about bodily things without real importance

for the real incorporeal life they all spent their life preparing for.

[1] Sign and Play in Web 2.0The history is full of activist writers and it can be difcult to separate those who

was viewd as activist at their own time, and those who feels activist compared to

the situation today. The most striking example is perhaps Web 2.0 and one of the

rst hast to be Plato. Web 2.0 as a writing process is sensational in every sense of

the word.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

The aphorism could perhaps be Nietzschean, but is actually by Montaigne, placed

as an emblematic introduction in Derrida's famous essay Structure, Sign and Play in

the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1978). This is of course an irony since the

sign 'interpretation' traditionally has a logocentric endpoint. One is searching for

the most diminutive point in the cone. But what I guess is Derridas point width the

quote is that every time the interpretation reaches the endpoint it bounces back

into the wilderness of multiplicity, perhaps because the endpoint in the cone i so

small that it can hold nothing else but itself. This leads to an endless play whereall endeavors to reach logos is hopelessly referred to other signs. It is like a unit of

meaning fed to the blogosphere which bounces wildly every time it reaches some

kind of interpretation.


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In the course of normal scientic communication 4, Derrida's style and aim touches

the monster of relativism, and even the super scary devil among monsters, ni-

hilism. If stable meaning is dead, what is it to search for? If you think short enough

the following reection could be that everyone with the honest work of searching

for some kind of meaning could pack her/his things and go home. This is the posi-

tivist child's view of poststructuralism or the old fools outburst of ressentiment 5. Is

it a choice of either / or in the Kierkegaardian sense? It might be if one with a

'true meaning' refers something transcendental and absolute in all possible

meanings of the word. But this sense of truth hardly exists today. If you look thesign truth up in a descent encyclopedia. The actual praxis of truth to day in acade-

mic institutions is probably a mix of the scientic truth, the consensus theory of

truth and the Nietzschean truth: One strives for a popperian falsication mode dy-

namically piloted by consensus, and a ight to the real by the subconscious knowl-

edge that all might be in vain because of visible or hidden power relations. Re-

searchers to feel kind of sorry for are those who want to be a part of the natural

science mode of research but sadly enough falls outside the invisible wall of de-

markation constructed by positivist humanists in the twentieth century, leavingthemselves on top of the wall leaving most of their colleagues on the wrong side of

it.

[2] Monster Writing Untouchable by the RavingBlogosphereIn the august/september 2008, the American banks was shaking. Swedish media

wanted to have their piece of the cake and constructed a monster based on some

4. Read this like Thomas Kuhn's 'normal science' (Kuhn, 1962).

5. The notion of ressentiment is probably used the first time by Nietzsche, see for exampleOn the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche, 2003).


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rumors about a Swedish bank together with the crisis in the USA. It seemed quite

plausible that the american crisis would infect the Swedish economy so their act-

ing was only normal according to the present, unofcial, rules of the media. They

raised the coverage i the same pace as the american crises grew worse. They start-

ed to knit a narrative based on news from the States mixed with stories about wor-

ried people on the street wondering about what to do if the banks crashed. The

apocalyptic narrative grew for each day and after a couple of weeks, the situation

was leaning towards a Swedish bank crash, even though the facts of the situation

had not changed.

[3] Angels of the BecomingThe most apocalyptic feature of our time is that a woman still is treated like a dis-

abled type of a man. It is apocalyptic since men obviously cannot create a functio-

nal society, and most sensible persons can see some form of apocalypse in the fu-

ture timeline of their comprehension. An apocalypse might be a chimera, but it is

difcult for a materialist to see how the man-made techoscientic monster calledprogress could be stopped with less than a big time technological disarmament -

and to believe that man would be prepared to take that step - that seems optim-

istic on the verge of nativity. If I lived in Plato's state, and was forced to take the

role of the philosopher king, I would take an extremely drastic decision: no no no,

I would not throw out the poets, I would throw out the men from all leading posi-

tions and force women to take their place. It would not be because I am sure it

will work, it would have to do with some irrational version of common sense,


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maybe intuition, and perhaps because I believe in hope more than rational

knowledge 6.

My research is located in a context constructed under the signiers techoscience

and feminist theory. I view the concept 'gender' as a very constructive key to un-

lock the cofn of binary relations we inherited from the damned father of binary

thinking more than two thousand year ago. But I myself is completely lost when I

try to use it. I guess it does not mean anything to me. My world does not have any

gender or any sex besides the animalistic kind. Feminist theory for me is a complex

reaction against the enlightenment road to the nowhere to be found land of be-

coming. For me, the concept 'feminist' falls in the well of nothingness, just as the

concept 'gender'. But the fact is that theorists calling themselves feminists have

produced a large amount of the academic innovation coming from the universities

the last decades.

6. The intuition would not be of a rational, theory driven, Bergsonian kind, but rather anartistic, aesthetic, poetic, creativity driven sort of intuition. With hope I aim in the samedirection as Richard Rorty in the small book Hope in place of knowledge: the

pragmatics tradition in philosophy (1999).


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Posthuman TransformationsDiscussing Donna Haraway's Cyborg and Posthuman gures in relation to Web 2.0.

One of the possibilities I will explore is if it is constructive to view Web 2.0 as a cy-

borg in itself in the same manner Harway view the Earth, Gaia a cyborg (Gray,

1995).


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[1] Person Ecologies

It a wonderful Saturday afternon in end of September in southern Sweden. My wife

and I just saved a robin who ew into the garden house and paniced by all the in-

visible walls suddenly emerged in the world. The red chest of the paniced robin

was mixed with the red framework in the glass house and red apples in the sur-

rounded trees. When we nally managed to manouver the bird to the door, it ew

away like it just had met its worst monster; something invisible restricting all pos-

sible paths without visible reason.

When I got to my computer I searched for “robin glass house” in Google to see if

someone had the same experience, but most hits was about the science ction

writer Charles Stross’ novel Glasshouse with a protagonist called Robin. I clicked

on the link for Amazon.com and read the editorials and customer reviews and in-

stantly got an urge to buy the book 7. One of the hits refering to something other

than the novel was an image at Flickr showing a robin on a tree branch in a sur-

rounding which is said to be a glass house [02]. I also tried to search on “robin gar-

den house” as well as “bird garden house”, but those searches suprisingly enough

did not give much. I tried to narrow the serach to “chasing bird garden house” but

the best hit seemed to be someone who’s hummingbirds in the garden were bullied

buy sparrows[03]. What I really searched for was someone who had the same prob-

lem as we have with birds ying into the garden house and go crazy when they fail

to break the invisible border to freedom. It seems resonable to think that a rigorussearch would lead to expriences better matching what I was looking for, but

searching the Internet is an endless task and you have to chose where to break. In

this way the Internet is beginning to be a spontanious simulation of the Derridan

7. see clip: http://research.petergiger.com/clips/2008-09-27_01.png


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view of language where signs always refers to other signs in an endless play

(Derrida, 1978).

Around the time Internet turned into its second decade, more and more of the dull

representational web sites started to sparkle with life. Some call this Frankestein-

ian life inducement communication, others view it more like a refector world

where every indication of real communication is broken by fragments bouncing

back and forth in a complete chaos. But it is ignorant to view the babbeling baby

of the Interent in dichotomizing terms. Like all childs it has some actuality, in a

relational sense, but an almost unfathomable potentiality. Most people does not

get any further than to the actuality of the Interent and that is only reasonable,

but everyone who reserach the realm of the Becoming have to recognize the Inter-

ents potentiality for deauthorization and radical democratisation. For four years,

since 2004 I have been calling this combination of actuality and potentiality Web

2.0. In my licenciate thesis 2006 I described web 2.0 as a mindset comprising of a

set of technologies mixed with human values as democracy, participation, deau-

thorization and communication transparence. However, I think the hasty chris-tening was unfortunate. It is not for nothing we call tendencies for modernity to

break down for post-modernity. We really do not see where the breakdown of

modernity is leading. History moves to slowly to give us enough leads to under-

stand the contents of a potential paradigm shift. The term post-modern is a place-

holder for the paradigm we sense somewhere in the near future. In analogy I am

going to reconstruct the term web 2.0 and call it the post-represenantional Inter-

net. The term points to the fact that the rst decade of the Interent can be char-

acterized as an explosion of name spaces representing people, companies ororganisations. The second decade was not a break with the representationalism,

but it was a move away from it. The direction is not much clearer four years later,

but the Internet denity seems more alive now. The entrepreneurilship of the In-

ternet is a constant race towards innovation.


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The social technologies emerging on the post-represational Internet might be g-

ured as a materialisation of person ecologies. The rest of this essay is devoted to

the guration of ‘person ecologies’.

Bateson

1. The human species, perhaps since the evolution of language, has attachedstrange importance to "spiritual," "mental," "moral," and even "supernatural" as-pects or components of life and death.

2. It seems today, from the growth of scientic knowledge, that special concernwith these matters is justied. Man's very nature, his relations with other men,and his "adaptation" to the biosphere of which he is a part are all affected andeven determined by his deeply-held opinions regarding these matters. Even themost materialistic persons are inuenced, by their very materialism, to treat oth-ers and the natural environment and themselves in special and peculiarways. (Bateson, 1976)

I have a dream of an intellectual conversation that avoids the traditional dogmas

of presentation, question, answer, analyse and so on; a conversation more lik the

spontaneus one sometimes emerging in private, personal settings behind the re-

side with a glass of a good wine and some quiet tones from good music. There is

something powerful in language, something that goes beyond all forms of mys-tesicm and trancedens. It is beyond everything we call design, beyond the rational,

more about serendepity, more about art. Design and rationality is there of course.

Escaping design and rationality would be the same as a nonworldly viewpoint, and

there is no such thing as nonworldly viewpoints since there are no nonworldly

worlds. It is like a jazz session with non-instrumental ideas.

Persons and person ecologies are entierly materialistic and still i feels strange to

call it materialism. Everytime we use the word materialism, it is to postition ourselves against metaphysical categories in Gregory Bateson’s example above, but it

is the notion of a transedens that creates a need for a counter position. In this

sense both transedens and materialism are unnatural worlds created by man’s urge

to alinate ourselves from the real world. Like Donna Haraway points out, we relie

too much on vision (1991) and there is no accident we use vision as a methaphor


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when we turn the gaze “inward” and trie to view the landscape through ourselvs

and beyond. A person ecology is about relations, ideas and embodiment. Persons in

a person ecology is not countable. Person ecologies resist the human will to rule by

instrumental rationality. There are no denite borders. The borders constantly

change, move, dissapear/reappear. There is not a start or an end of a person since

all persons, things, relations are interlaced in a process of constant learning. All

actions related to learning goes on in this person ecology and should not be sepa-

rated and isolated as in the instrumental classrooms of modernity(Ekdahl, 2005, p.

43).


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Simulations, Monsters and Disabled Cyborgs in the Landof Becoming

[1] Timely SimulationsThe rst time I learned about real monsters was the year I turned 18 and

fell into the process of becoming an adult. Since then I have always known that thereal monsters are located in front of us. Behind us, all monsters are in the process

of a reversed becoming. That is why we are so eager to search in the past. In the

past, all the scary monsters are disarmed, disembodied and nally disintegrated.

But the world of becoming is overcrowded by monstrosity. We are creating the

monsters at the assembly line in the factory of modern reality. All monsters have

the feature of potentiality. Many of them was something other before they turned

into monsters. In the beginning of 1945, the world was full of angles, angels of

modernity, angels of a time of hope and longing. Later that year the angeles fell

into a methamorphosic process and landed transformed into a bunch of confused,

irrational and futureless monsters. The nuclear disintegration of Hiroshima and Na-

gasaki was supposed to destroy a bunsh of maniac monsters, and it was a success

story, an incarnation of the American dream. But the destruction of 666 heards of

maniac monsters was not enough. The nuclear disintegration of Sodom and Gomor-

ra also struck the angels of innocence, women, children and real men who

dreamed about their becoming in a land of potentiality. But that was not enough.The apocalypse reached into the realm of becoming and dissimulated the simu-

lacra of the modern utopia. The positivist alchemists of the postmodern world still

tries to conjure up the wonderful image of pure rationality and humanistic devel-

opment created by enlightenment thinkers in the post-theistic hunt for the truth

of the human soul.


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Monsters are situated in the land of becoming. Their situatedness are only and ful-

ly in the land of becoming and therefore we, the critics, the black lambs of sci-

ence, also have to be in the land of becoming of even spotting them, to fear them.

In the land of becoming, our research will accountable rather than countable.

The postmodern novel of the 1980:s hit the Swedish literary establishment like an

angel of despair, a monster of reality, a reality of monsters. I was 18 when the

Personal Computer was born. A few months after IBM:s introduction of the PC, my

father died by the hands of his worst monster and thereby left me an inheritance it

was difcult to process with all the wonderful knowledge the lled me up with in

school. I deiced to get to know the monsters populating the time and space I lived

in and therefore thrown myself into the wonderful world of books. 1986 I had been

a at-mate with a Personal Computer for two years. It was not much of a commu-

nication device then; Its memory was scarce, and Its interface was heavily disabled

seen from the viewpoint the maturing cyborg. But still, it became my friend, my

writing buddy, my door of knowledge into the wold of becoming. I wrote my rst

paper together with my digi-bear. We were both disabled cyborgs viewed from thevantage point of the posthuman society, but we did not have a clue, in the same

way "disabled" people today would not have a clue of their disabeledness if none

had told them. Me and my friend of presumptive cyborgness wrote our rst paper

in literary studies about a Swedish postmodern author called Stig Larsson (1986).

The title of the book we wrote about was "Introduction". The author introduced a

gure/man who throw himself on me directly on the rst page and drank my soul

like one of the dementors in the books and lms about Harry Potter 8. I will call this

I Mr Nothingness. Mr Nothingness is completely separated from essential categoriesas time, space and meaning. The loss of meaning also rendered the time an space

8. Wikipedia: "Dementors, wraith-like creatures in the Harry Potter novels who can suck thehappiness and soul out of a person, make them feel like they will never be happy again, feedon peoples' happy emotions, and force them to recall the most horrible memories they havehad in their lives." (2008-09-23)


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meaningless. His body location varied, his time in life was decontexualised and the

soul he once listened to had crawled in under the sink and slowly, silently, slipped

into the realm of nothingness. He happened to kill a man, but just shrugged and

waved it off as a minor problem of where to tip the body. He is a simulacra of the

everlasting binary of soul-body, deconstructed to something functioning as a per-

son, but ostensively since the reader feels strongly that something is wrong in the

state of Denmark. If I am a person, is the anti-hero of Stig Larssons book really the

same as me? Are he and I more same than me and my dog, or me and my comput-

er. Where are the end of a person and the start of a non-person?

I viewed this gure as a literary simulacra of the post-war, post-modern, post-hope

society we lived in directly before we got an injection with an inch of hope when

the Berlin wall was dismantled from within. But about a year ago I run into a simi-

lar person constructed not in the avant-garde literature, but in a mainstream tele-

vision series called Dexter.

Dexter is also a "child" of his time, of our time, the time where the sparkle of hope

from the breakdown of the cold ware yet again shifted into despair and cynicism

when the two aircrafts run into World Trade Center. But if Stig Larssons anti-hero

was a reconstruction, relocalisation, postmodernisation of Kafka's K, Dexter is an

extreme acceleration of a hero from a Barbara Cartland Novel: a strong evil mon-

ster to a man who the female heroine falls in love with because she can see what

no one else is seeing; that the monsternenss is only on the surface and the real

person is buried deep inside many layers of onion skin 9. The plot is based on the

heroins' carful peeling, layer by layer until the core of the man is unfolded and cli-max is reached. Dexter is a mass murderer in the same league as Dr Hannibal

Lecter. But Dexter has a reason for being the way he is. When he was a child, he

9. This idea of the many layered self was probably first used by Hegel and inherited by theromantic movement. One of the earliest version well known to the public was CharlotteBronte's novel Jane Eyre.


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was a witness to the slaughter of his mother. Dexter only slaughter other mass

murders as if the love of his mother was so strong that something bursted inside of

him and drove him to go on the rampage, trying to nd ghost of his mother. Dexter

constantly reects on his own absence of feelings, emotions. He kills and slaugh-

ters other murders with an ice cold absence like a machine, sometimes reminding

of the Brett Easton Ellis American Psycho, but with the immensely important fea-

tures of popular culture: reason, causality and love.

The simulations of postmodernity are about culture testing its own borders, pro-

jecting images into the dark sky of human despair. Perhaps we have to view our-

selves in the mirror of the lost liberal dream and recognize our posthuman situa-

tion to regain some faith in the becoming. On the other hand, becoming is the only

thing we have. History is only about what we does not have, what we have lost.

Becoming is always about someone's responsibility for something.

[2] The First GenerationThe year was 1994. The cultural soup of human/machine relation erupted

and the result was a re-simulation of the future. Some say the re-simulation is a

promise of new monsters, others see it as a resurrection of hope. The lost angels

will reappear and lead our way into new future. 1994 was the symbolic birth of the

growing network of servers we call The Internet. On the Internet, basic dimensions

as time and space are simulations based on technological parameters as Mhz, RAM

and Bandwidth, how fast and how much, the inescapable parameters in the land of

becoming.

The Internet is a reversed simulation of platonism, which has occupied most intel-

lectual space in the twin towers of time we have experienced since the gures of

Socrates and Jesus is said to have walked upon this earth. The human gods built

the server cluster, wrote codes of behavior and nally turned on the switch. Since

then the server backbone and the growing consciousness of cyberspace is growing


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like the togetherness of Jack and the Bean-Stalk. But Internet does not simulate

the time, space and meaning of the present, it simulates something only located in

the becoming. It is like a bottle message of radical, radical democracy or the

promise of big, huge, giant monsters rendering the Ulyssus meeting with the cyclop

as mild and gentle as a bedtime story told to an ninety year old war hero before

her nal sleep.

When The Internet emerged, my computer was not the same as the one I bought

ten years earlier, of course. But in another sense it was. Its body was exchanged to

a newer one, a faster, better, a less disabled cyborg in the land of becoming. It

was more like me. We became better friends and my relation to my previous friend

seemed rather bleak in comparison.

[3] The second generationThe second generation Internet transformed my hardware/software friend into a

real person located somewhere in the world communicating with me as a woman

or a man. We are still disabled cyborgs of the becoming, but perhaps less so than a

generation earlier.

My computer is no longer a unit, someone I count as the number One. It is not only

that I have more than one computer, the soul of my computer appears whichever

unit I turn on. The rst generation gured a computer with Internet. The second

generation gures Internet with multiple computers. The computer as a sign of

empowerment has been disgured and transformed into a sign of enslavement. The

computer no longer induce a feeling of amazement. The computer is just a body

and it is not even biological. The second generation place the feeling of amaze-

ment (and terror) in the computers soul: communication, information, disinforma-

tion, spam, viruses, trojans, chat, blogs, wikiformations, images, music, lm,

reading, writing, chitchat, academic, business, organization, domains, buying, sell-

ing. This is a soul with multiple meanings. Everyone and everything is becoming in-


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tegrated in a worldwide dream or nightmare about things to become. Perhaps this

worldwide soul of the integrated circuit is a dementor 10 who drink our souls in the

name of some becoming.

[4] Free Radicals and Wikipedia ActivistsThe dream of free will induced by the activists of the enlightenment movement

has gradually been transformed to the glutinous mess of language we today see as

the location of meaning. Radicals are unarguable free only in the language of

chemistry. The freedom of the radicals is measured by the gluiness of the local dis-

course. The radicals of the le-sharing movement are free to rewrite the morals of

ownership only as long as they can nd a minimum amount of kinship in the glui-

ness of language.

One of my friends is a wikipedia activist. He is a friend of the second generation, a

friend which face is avataric and language completely digital. His diginame is para-

dox. Always written like that, with the initial letter in lower case, deauthoritized.

One day I was invited on a tour among his latest knots in the World Wide net of

Wikipedia. He changed a spelling in the title of one document, started a new stub

article, inserted a image in a document and discussed conceptual things on several

talk pages. The insertion of a picture was a story in itself. It was a document de-

scribing a traditional Swedish dish. The person identifying himself paradox thought

a visualization was necessary and planned his lunch according to the article, took a

picture and inserted it on the Wikipedia page directly after lunch was done. He is a

twenty-rst century, second generation cyber-worker - an encyclopedist cyborg ofradical democracy. His discourses is becoming more and more integrated in peo-

ples chitchat, he is a authority thief who himself is constantly raising in the au-

10. See page 22


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thority ranks of big corporations who enslaves and redeems the activists and

radicals of the digital enlightening.

A special signier in course of history is the academic. The academic signies the

one who is said to know, the one who disputes meaning and tries to impose it on

society.


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[5] The Death of Deleuze

ON THE fourth of November in 1995, after long suffering from a respiratory dis-ease, Deleuze killed himself by throwing himself out the window of his apartment.Since his death, many articles on his suicide have been published. Among them areseveral attempts to interpret his death philosophically. Some apply Diogenes Laer-tius’ method to Deleuze’s death, a method invoked in The Logic of Sense: ‘to ndvital Aphorisms which would also be Anecdotes of thought’ in the gesture ofphilosophers.1 In one essay, the author A. de G. compares Deleuze’s suicide toEmpedocles’ throwing himself in the Aetna, a philosophical gesture Deleuze him-self treats as such a ‘vital Aphorism’ and an ‘Anecdote of thought’. (Osaki, 2007)

My rst thought when I read the rst sentence of this text was a visual simulation

of the situation. I saw the man in front of me deadly sick. He had "a tracheotomy

and was 'chained up like a dog' to oxygen cylinders(Goodchild, 1996). I saw him

wear away to the window and...? I could not help wondering if he had leaned out

the window and looked what was going on in the street. Was Deleuze aware of the

Heideggerean notion being-unto-death, learning to live with death in your life,

creating authenticity11

? Was he aware the street was clear when he leaped or wasit just chance between him as a self-murderer and a murderer. I like to think it

was his being-unto-death that made him something else than the mass-murderer

acts of despair happened lately in USA and Finland among others, mostly by young

persons and the act is often performed in public places as schools or malls. The sit-

uations is completely different, but what if Deleuze had fallen in front of a car

which in its turn had hit the breaks leading to a gigantic collision comprising many

cars and persons? There has been a lot of text written about the death of Deleuze,

but most of the have an intellectual perspective like in the citation above. It has

even been articles talking about the suicide as an event (Colombat, 1996).

11. See for example Vogel, 1994


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The Panopticon at the end of UniverseAbout the Bentham/Focault guration of place where everyone can be watched

and how that is going to transform the communicative Interent, Web 2.0, to some-

hing we do not want to have. The title obviously refers to Douglas Adams, but

there is also a harawaian, god perspectis as well as the control society as gured

by George Orwell and others.

And as the number of media grew, the material became more up to date, and themethods for searching the Library became more and more sophisticated, it ap-

proached the point where there was no substantive difference between the Library

of Congress and the Central Intelligence Agency.

(Stephenson, 2000)

Illustrations

This Site is not real:

http://research.petergiger.com/clips/2008-10-04_01.png


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Quarterly , Fall , 3.Colombat, A. P. (1996). November 4, 1995: Deleuze's death as an event . Man and World ,

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University Press.Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Ekdahl, P. (2005). Medieteknik i en senmodern tid . bth.se .Giger, P. (2006). Participation Literacy: Part I: Constructing the Web 2.0 Concept.

Karlskrona : Blekinge Institute of Technology.Goodchild, P. (1996). Deleuze and Guattari : an introduction to the politics of desire.

London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.Gray, C. H. (1995). The cyborg handbook. New York: Routledge.Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Boston: Beacon Press.Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women : the reinvention of nature. New York:

Routledge.Kant, I. (1784). An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?Keen, A. (2007). The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture.

Currency.Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientic revolutions. [Chicago]: University of Chicago

Press.

Larsson, S. (1986). Introduktion. Stockholm :: Alba.Lovink, G. (2007). Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse . Eurozine. Retrieved June, 2007–01.Nietzsche, F. (2003). The genealogy of morals (H. B. Samuel, Trans.). Mineola, N.Y.::

Dover.Osaki, H. (2007). Killing Oneself, Killing the Father: On Deleuze's Suicide in Comparison

with Blanchot's Notion of Death . Literature and Theology .Rorty, R. (1999). Hope in place of knowledge: the pragmatics tradition in philosophy. Taipei:

Institute of European and American Studies, Academic Sinica.Stephenson, N. (2000). Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book ed.). Spectra.Vogel, L. (1994). The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's Being and Time.

Northwestern University Press.


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work in progress: w 40 - radical democracy & the promise of monsters

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