[iDC] how long is a piece of string?

[Mark Shepard]

Hi Katherine,

Your call for us to consider how Situated Technologies might serve to  
help us "find ways of slipping through the boundaries in order to  
trace our own meanings and memories on the spatial world" would seem  
to reflect Brian Holmes' post on his blog of an abstract for an essay  
on Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies: http:// 
brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/escape-the-overcode/ - although  
knowing Brian (at least though his posts here and elsewhere) I'm sure  
he'll have issues with this correlation (which I look forward to  
reading). What's your take on this?

This condition of being betwixt and between - "the story comes into  
being in the space in-between" - is something I think anyone  
migrating from one place to the another is of course familiar with,  
and their stories are probably a good place to start in thinking  
through this. "Crossing the BLVD:  strangers, neighbors, aliens in a  
new America" is a book by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan that  
presents a kaleidoscopic view of new immigrants and refugees living  
in Queens, New York -  the most ethnically diverse locality in the  
United States. Excerpts are available here: http:// 
www.crossingtheblvd.org

Also, your question "how long is a piece of string?" poses  
interesting problems vis-a-vis ANT theory, at least as far as Latour  
articulates it. What are the limits by which we need to trace what is  
"strung together" or assembled by contemporary story-telling  
technologies and techniques?

Finally, what "kind" of narrative are we talking about here? Surely  
we're not thinking of the master narratives and grand schemes of  
orthodox modernism. But at what point does this "shared experience"  
become enmeshed in larger aspirations toward empowerment vis-a-vis  
networked technologies?

Below is an exerpt from a conversation with Gilles Deleuze on the  
television broadcast of Jean Luc Godard's "Six fois deux"; Cahiers du  
Cinema 271 (November 1976).

Best,
Mark

<snip>
AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of  
identities. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I  
come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife  
isn't the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and  
multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense  
of 'one more,' 'one more woman'. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the  
sense of 'one produces two, which then produces three'). Because in  
those cases it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and  
that supposedly becomes multiple.

When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there's  
morning and evening, he's not saying it's one or the other, or that  
one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in  
the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole.  
Multiplicity is precisely in the 'and' which is different in nature  
from elementary components and collections of them.

Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think  
Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in  
a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one  
thing nor the other, it's always in-between, between two things; it's  
the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow,  
only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things.  
And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass,  
becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.
</snip>