[Reader-list] shared expereince - unpredictable encounters

Wed Mar 20 01:58:28 IST 2002

Dear all,

This is quite an immediate response to a line of
thought Jeebesh has posted, namely a "reflection on
the nature of list-based coomunication".

(I wish to comment on the book review, but will do
after I close-read it. For me, that means printing it
out and "conning" the text)

In terms of reflecting on the "nature" of list-based
communication, I wish to say: let us begin by thinking
about (a) the notion of "enlistment" and (b) a form of
communicative action that could be given the name
"Outer-textuality".

In this posting, I wish to dwell only  upon (b), that
is, on "Outer-textuality". This is a neo-logism that
came to mind while reading Jeebesh's posting. It
excites me. Immediately, I propose this notion in
opposition to "inter-textuality".

The notion of "inter-textuality" serves to represent
the way in which texts("readerly"or "writerly")"talk"
to each other, or can be made to "connect" to each
other (both these ways possess their own
"determinations": either texts make refernce to each
other, or texts are brought together in a kind of
"critical fit/filiation"). In other words, it serves
as a name for a kind of communicative action that
takes place between texts, that immanently possesses a
rationality in so far as there always exists a limit,
a discursive, historical limit, to the way -- the
what, the how, and the why -- texts "talk" to each
other, or can be made to "connect" to each other.

(I want to "con" Kristeva again. Then I will be able
to state more clearly, what "inter-textuality" means,
and so be able to formulate "outer-textuality" in less
probabilistic fashion, as follows).

"Outer-textuality" begins with the  need to formulate
a name for the way in which E-ecriture (an e-text,
whatever that means) is always already up for grabs.
Is it inherent in the nature of any word that that is
floated over the internet to become, by virtue of
being floated over the internet, to become available
for "absolute" borrowing? Can the meaning of a word
existing on the internet (once it has floated into it)
ne turned around any which way it can be? Can the
truth of a word be absolutely relativised, so that the
truth of that word e-depends (whatever that means) in
the e-context in which it is e-used? Is the entire
activity, signified by words appearing on the
internet, completely anarchic, or is the use of words
on the internet also rule bound (by e-rules, whatever
that means)?

I ask these questions to "firewall" the obvious
understanding that e-signifiers -- reference, truth,
meaning -- are "differant", that e-signifiers so exist
by virtue of being a priori non-essentialist
(transcendental). Such a Derridean understanding of
the way syntax "acts" on the internet really begs the
question of intentionality, of the ethical
responsibility to act that language use -- understood
here as a capacity to coordinate action -- possesses.

This should make clear that I ask these questions to
also point to the "other" side: to the positive
flexibility and reachability, of and to language-use,
that the Internet -- as a form of
textuality-cum-worlding that completely threatens all
existent, dominant, hegemonic (I am drooling to say, 
here:   "american", "americanised" "american
academia-fied) form/s of textuality-worlding -- makes
available despite itself, despite what it "means" to
its users. "Outer-textuality" is therefore a term for
the kind of communicative rationality that the
Internet has brought into being. It is the name of a
new chronotope. In the beginning, there was epic. Then
came the novel. Today, the internet.

List-based communication is "outer-textualised"
communication. It is a form of communication that
forces the communicator to use language in
exteriority, to use language in a way where "will"
always invents itself via speech-acts. It is a form of
communication that is mind-blowingly intersubjective.
It is a form of communication that cannot be anything
other than intersubjective. That is what makes
list-based communication so "civil-social". In
list-based communication, impersonality dialectically
interacts with intimacy.

So, as a form of "over-textuality", list-based
communication can be equally oplite and abusive. 

I will take up the notion of "enlistment" in a
subsequent posting. For the time being, could we
indulge in an activity? Could all of us, who feel
piqued by this word, dwell on exactly what
"enlistment" means?

Could we think on this? Share answers to questions
like: What does it mean to "enlist"? Are you already
"enlisted"? What form of social organisation (the
distribution of interests, the flow of micro-power,
the proliferation of propriety, the {im}positioning of
the body, the regulation of pleasure/s, the
institutional requirement, the attitudinal investment,
the socialisation of self) is germane to "enlistment"?

Are the words "enlistment" and en-list-ment different?

yours talkatively,
pratap     

--- Jeebesh Bagchi <jeebesh at sarai.net> wrote: > I am
enclosing a book review from nybooks.com.
> 
> The recent discusssion in the list around speech and
> silence initiated by 
> Gayatri Chatterjee and following other postings, we
> can initiate a new thread 
> reflecting about the nature of  the `list based
> communication` itself along 
> with issues that was raised during the discussion. 
> 
> This review raises a very interesting point around
> `formation of shared 
> expereinces` and `unpredictable encounters` and it's
> relation to the Net. A 
> discussion on this will be helpful in understanding
> the nature of 
> interactions that we are all in.
> 
> Pratap, Gayatridi and Shuddha lets give it a try.
> 
> best
> jeebesh
> 
> -----------------------
> The New York Review of Books
> March 14, 2002 ReviewHe's Got Mail 
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15180
> 
> republic.com
> by Cass Sunstein
> Princeton University Press
> 
> By James Fallows  
> 
> Is the Internet Good for Democracy?
> the Boston Review
> a discussion of republic.com in the Boston Review,
> Summer 2001, and on line 
> at bostonreview.mit.edu/ndf.html1.
> 
> The story of technology is largely the story of
> people who guess wrong about 
> which problems will be easy to solve and which will
> be hard. For example, 
> less than a decade before the Wright Brothers'
> flight, Lord Kelvin announced 
> that "heavier than air flying machines are
> impossible." The Scientific 
> American of 1909 concluded that "the automobile has
> practically reached the 
> limit of its development," on evidence "that during
> the past year no 
> improvements of a radical nature have been
> introduced." Thomas Watson of IBM 
> famously said in the 1940s that "there is a world
> market for maybe five 
> computers."[1] In The Road Ahead, published in 1996,
> Bill Gates of Microsoft 
> said that his?or anyone's? predictive writings about
> technology were bound to 
> be judged harshly ten years after publication. "What
> I've said that turned 
> out to be right will be considered obvious, and what
> was wrong will be 
> humorous."
> 
> People in the computer industry have already
> criticized Gates for one such 
> "humorous" error. In the early 1980s, Microsoft made
> its historic deal to be 
> the sole supplier of operating-system software for
> the first IBM Personal 
> Computer. This was like being the sole engine
> supplier for the first 
> mass-produced automobiles, and it was the foundation
> of Microsoft's later 
> dominance. But the software that Microsoft provided,
> known as MS-DOS, had 
> various limitations that frustrated its early users.
> One quote from Gates 
> became infamous as a symbol of the company's
> arrogant attitude about such 
> limits. It concerned how much memory, measured in
> kilobytes or "K," should be 
> built into a personal computer. Gates is supposed to
> have said, "640K should 
> be enough for anyone." The remark became the
> industry's equivalent of "Let 
> them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly
> condescension with a lack 
> of interest in operational details. After all,
> today's ordinary home 
> computers have one hundred times as much memory as
> the industry's leader was 
> calling "enough."
> 
> It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie
> Antoinette, who greeted news 
> that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de
> la brioche. (The phrase 
> was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when
> Marie Antoinette was 
> thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And
> it now appears that Bill 
> Gates never said anything about getting along with
> 640K. One Sunday afternoon 
> I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether
> the quote was accurate or 
> apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I
> found a long e-mail from 
> Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the
> reasons why he had always 
> believed the opposite of what the notorious quote
> implied. His main point was 
> that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the
> design of processing 
> chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing
> to raise the limit as hard 
> and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's
> convincing denial, the quote is 
> unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression
> of the computer industry's 
> sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.
> 
> There are many examples showing how hard it is to
> predict the speed of 
> technological advance or its effect on social or
> commercial life. Space 
> travel. Cloning. Cures for cancer. The search for
> clean or renewable energy 
> sources. The sense of apprehension in the last days
> of 1999 arose from the 
> fact that while most experts believed the "Y2K bug"
> would not shut down 
> computer systems, no one really could be sure.
> 
> The most dramatic recent demonstration of this
> problem involves the Internet. 
> As a matter of pure technology, the Internet has
> worked far better than 
> almost anyone dared hope. A respected engineer and
> entrepreneur, Robert 
> Metcalfe, who invented the networking standard
> called Ethernet, predicted in 
> 1995 that as more and more people tried to connect,
> the Internet would "go 
> spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically
> collapse." (Metcalfe 
> later had the grace to literally eat his words,
> pureeing a copy of the column 
> containing his prediction and choking it down before
> an amused audience.) In 
> fact, the Internet has become both faster and less
> crash-prone the larger it 
> has grown. This is partly because of improved
> hardware but mainly because of 
> the brilliance of the "distributed processing" model
> by which it operates, 
> which automatically steers traffic away from any
> broken or congested part of 
> the network.
> 
> The financial assumptions surrounding the Internet
> have of course changed 
> radically in a very short time. It was only three
> years ago that Lawrence 
> Summers, then secretary of the treasury, joked that
> Brazil could solve its 
> debt problems by changing its name to Brazil.com,
> since venture capital would 
> then be sure to flow in. Until the summer of that
> year, any dot-com was 
> assumed (by financiers) to be a winner, whether or
> not it had a plan for 
> making profits. Since the spring of last year, any
> dot-com is assumed to be a 
> loser, even if it in fact is becoming profitable. 
> 
> On-line sales continue to grow, despite the general
> recession and the 
> depression among dot-com companies. In 2001, sales
> at "normal" retail stores 
> were flat, but sales by on-line merchants rose by 20
> percent. The two most 
> celebrated dot-com bankruptcies in 2001 were
> DrKoop.com, a medical advice 
> site and on-line drugstore, and WebVan, a
> grocery-delivery service that in 
> 2000 had a market value of $1.2 billion. There was
> nothing preposterous about 
> either of their business concepts, only about the
> lavishness with which they 
> were carried out. Sooner or later some company will
> make money letting 
> customers fill prescriptions or order staple
> groceries on line. The 
> successful companies will probably be branches of
> established drugstore or 
> grocery chains. The hit film Startup.com, released a
> year ago, told the story 
> of the rise and embarrassing fall of GovWorks.com,
> which 
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