Both Heidegger and Keenan offer rather violent metaphors for the exposing of the self to the public sphere. Heidegger describes the essence of the modern age in sciene, which is characterized by research that is an investigation of that which is out there. But in order to access this outside knowledge there must be a “first sketch, a ground plan, a design” which the translator’s footnote 6 tells us also connotes a tearing and an opening up. Whereas for Keenan, the light offered by windows is a violent exposure, an introduction of vulnerability, a threatening of personal security. But despite the violent imagery they use, they both express a certain ambivalence as well (or at least they are both slightly less negative about this whole structure than Foucault). Keenan expresses the importance of the look upon the other as through a window as a tool for reaffirming our humanity and installing interiority, and Heidegger takes a similar slant on modern representation as a phenomenon that exalts man as the ‘measure of all things.’ The question then becomes, I think, do we really need to feel afraid or paranoid by the Foucauldian Panopticon. Keenan points out that its defined by a system of ‘nongazes,’ gazes that don’t look but only exist as the possibility of looking. And for Dienst, ideology is a mass mailing that never reaches its intended sender but instead allows us to peak in on other’s people’s messages, an apt metaphor in view of our packet sniffing activity last night. On p. 126 Heidegger uses the term ‘public anonymity’ to describe the role of the scientist who offers themselves to the public good. Is he reffering to a subject position that offers a way out of the violation of becoming visible to public sphere or is he referring merely to the role of those who control the reins of power and gazes, who sit in the panopticon tower.
posted by Anonymous at 2:00 PM

I guess since I am posting the absolute latest I write to you that I am the sorryest of sorrys.

If I could find my copy of "Pale Fire" by Nabokov, I would start this response with a quote – but as things are I will start it with a gist of a quote. As the protagonist sits in his sparse room day in and day out, he contemplates the window an how its role shifts. During the day he can look outside at the bird and the tree and is comfortable knowing that the outside world sees only the reflection of itself in his window. However, when day becomes night his gaze is shifted inward because all he can see in the window is his reflection. The people in the dark outside now see clearly into his lit bedroom and can contently watch him watching himself.

The notion of this window is that of a two-way mirror whose surface switches its reflectivity back and forth. In the beginning of Heidegger’s appendixes he writes, “ Reflection finds in Being its most extreme resistance, which constrains it to deal seriously with whatever is as the latter is brought into the light of its Being” (or as the “Being is brought into the light of its Being”) In order to be in the position to observe such an interaction of Being with its reflection, one must be in a position similar to that of the two-way mirror. Heidegger’s play on the word “reflection” (that it means both the literal mirroring of an image and the time spent thinking back to something) becomes a central convergence of definitions. Since most members of the population do not usually get a chance at real functional two-way, the most important moment of this relationship in a normal person’s life is the window scenario that Nabokov has worked out.

The “Pale Fire” set up is a visual example of the duality of intent in the shady dealings of the domestic window. The switch of night and day in Nabokov is for Keenan a switch between exterior and interior functions of the inside of the house. The fact that the interior of the Garcia house becomes the exterior viewing for tourists and philosophs is reliant on reflectivity and non reflectivity of the glass. It is odd that Keenan only quickly touches on the theme of “glare” as the “blinding light” of the populace looking into the window, and odd that this is the only real mention of reflection in his essay. The determining factor for Keenan in determining whether a space is activated as an exterior or an interior has to do with the placement of the populous and the position of their view point. What he seems to try to say by implementing the populous is where does the humanity stand that is two vast to see its own coherent reflection. The answer may be behind the two-way mirror of the camera lens - a technology certainly renown for its ability to let any being, with the help of enough light, be “brought into the light of its being.”



posted by Anonymous at 7:58 AM

Hoo boy is it late! I sure hope this response doesn’t reflect that, though at this point I’ve conceded that it will. Sorry, I’ve been up all night, working on all sorts of crazy stuff.

I was drawn to a particular question that Dienst poses in his article that I feel speaks volumes about the televisual system.

“What happens to the notion of textuality if it is cast as a matter of transmission rather than writing down or recording?” (p. 137)

I thought that this question was very appropriate to the subject matter of the past few weeks, and can be directed at the Keenan piece, in a way, as well. Dienst clearly argues that texuality is lost through telecommunication due to the diffusion of texts through a series of “instable” moments. But with the technology to record these moments, is this an act of inscription, or an act of collection?

Let’s extrapolate this into the sphere of surveillance. That which is displayed on a security camera functions the same as what Keenan describes as the stretching of the eye across a room. If the camera functions as an eye, then, as Keenan says, the television functions as a window. Television “transports the world into the homes of the world, opening them up and facilitating the arrival of the image and the other” (p. 130) says Keenan, reinforcing Dienst’s notions of the recipient, I suppose. Consider a television on which the display of a security camera is placed. If the “window” happens to be being watched at a certain “instable moment”, meaning is transmitted televisually.

But if no one were to be present at these “instable moments”, the images shown on surveillance monitors are recorded, to be used as evidence, not to create meaning, but to supplement it. If a crime takes place within a range of times, surveillance tape can be revisited (and in most cases, visited) so as to determine the perpetrator of said crime. Such is the way surveillance cameras work.

But wait, what happens to the remainder of the tape?? The recorded televisuality that goes unused, that contains no meaning, that is not “inscribed” as a crime would be? The tape exists, these images are recorded, the same way that printed text is, or was at some point. However, unlike “writing” in the Derridian sense, this recorded yet unused surveillance footage is completely meaningless. There is no sender, no receiver; there is nothing significant about it at all.

This recording is nothing more than a collection of what happened at a particular place at a particular time, recorded for no other purpose than for the possibility that a crime might be recorded. If a crime does not occur, this tape forever goes unwatched. If a crime goes unnoticed for a period, this tape goes unwatched for whatever that period is. If a crime is committed, portions of the tape may be watched, but none will be significant other than the specific moments of the crime as it takes place.

So, if Derrida says everything is writing, and Levi Strauss says everything is a sign, is this unwatched, unused surveillance footage writing or even significant? Is Dienst right about television not falling under writing at all, or is surveillance footage not writing? Is television just a glorified window then, as Keenan says? But doesn’t this make television writing? Or is everybody wrong? Or am I wrong?

It is late, as you can tell.

Dave

posted by Anonymous at 5:11 AM

I'm sorry I'm posting so late, guys. It's been a long night.

What struck me about the articles was: 1) Heidegger was hard. As always. 2) The Dienst was difficult. Some of it was really interesting; other parts of it were variously rehashings of articles that I've read (and I occasionally disagreed with his interpretations, especially Signature Event Context) or completely inaccessible.

What really fascinated me was the Keenan. I usually love Keenan, and this article was particularly fascinating to me. I have a few questions about the Keenan that I'd like to address:

1. Why the elipses? What do they do? Is there any significance to the fact that the numbers followed by the three periods are 2, 6, and 9? And what of the elipsis at the end?
2. What do you feel about the gaze that does not see (the gaze for which "only light--without sight--is required" p. 129)? What happens when the gaze is non-normative or pathological? Can this gaze fail by seeing? Or perhaps can the gaze fail in darkness? What happens to the human subject in darkness -- neither can he see nor can he be the object of a gaze?
3. I know this sounds rather silly, but Keenan makes a big deal of "what comes through a window?" (p. 132). For him, the window is the breaching of the public/private distinction. Both light and the gaze, the two constituative parts of the public/private binary pass through the window. But windows can be broken by objects passing through them? What would this mean? (I have this weird tendancy to carry metaphors to their (il)logical conclusions, sometimes seeming rather silly.)
4. How is Keenan's idea of the public as "the placeless place of ... others" (p. 135) work with other notions of the public sphere we've seen already? Does this conception give any clues as to the practice of public life? Or does his notion of the public/private dyad leave us with little room for political action?
5. Is is "just coincidence" that the most-oft used operating system is called Windows? Or does this have some significance? Can Keenan's argument somehow be redirected to the realm of Microsoft?

That is all for tonight. I have this habit of only ever asking questions. See you tomorrow.

--scott
posted by Anonymous at 1:38 AM

Toward the beginning of the Dienst piece, he references Godard in his comparison of film and television to the sending of sequential postcards at an immensely rapid rate. Godard then says that “nobody has the economic and technical means to send such postcards, so many and so far, except those who are “everybody and nobody” at once, that is to say, corporations, networks, and the State.” (129) An interesting insight into the overall commodification of the filmic and televisual mediums, yes—but even more interesting when thought of from the context of the audience or spectator. This concept of “everybody and nobody at once” is one we have already come across in our class. It is strikingly similar to the concept of the public which Thomas Keenan puts forth in his essay, Publicity and Indifference. The televisual “ open address” (Keenan, 7) which is posed by “everybody and nobody” is received by the same amorphous concept of a non-specific and all-inclusive public. The receiving end, it seems, is theorized to be just as ambiguous an entity as the producing one.
Keenan goes on to speak of the public as “the possibility of being a target and being missed,” a stigma directly connected to directing a message to “everybody and nobody;” the target does not exist in any concrete sense of corporeal being. Dienst alludes to this very concept as well in his discussion of the televisual form.

“electronic telecommunication transmits a regime of representation proper to our general socius, a writing that now crosses through all possible objects and audiences without necessarily representing or reaching any of them” (135)

According to Dienst, the visual address of television is so broad in it’s attempted representation, and so sporadic in its narrative, it succeeds in representing and thus, actually reaching none of them. The target is not hit. Dienst deems telecommunications a form which creates “a new rule of visibility,” altering “the scope of textual eventualities” and “changing the statutes and the range of the visible” (135). Interestingly though, it is much harder to actually define this new rule of visibility in terms of pure aesthetics. That television makes a change in the conception of the visible is for certain, but it what that change is seems uncertain. In his description, Dienst brings some key elements of televisual structure to bear, but he seats his change more in narrative than in the truly visible. I know that this is a visible narrative which we are speaking of and one necessarily informs the other—but I believe there is a more basic change in the in which television augments our seeing which is harder to grasp, as well as a topic for further inspection.

posted by Anonymous at 11:54 PM

This is somewhat of a shaky response – I apologize if it doesn’t make any sense, it is more of an attempt to understand the readings on my part, than it is a critique/challenge for any of them.
In Heidegger, I’m interested in the idea of the gigantic as a sign of the modern age in its development towards its essence. The gigantic is so large that it seems to disappear – the world is “getting smaller” because we have more and easier access to all of it. “The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness.” It becomes incalculable, in its movemnt from quantitative to qualitative. The gigantic – in terms of today, can mean the overload of information that we are bombarded with everyday from all sides – stops being quantitative. When it becomes incalculable, it points to something denied to us to know (except through reflection).
I’m trying to connect this to the idea of the public and the collective. Heidegger notes that the modern age is the first age which acknowledges the collective as having value (“But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism and that in no age before this has the non-individual, in the form of the collective, come to acceptance as having worth.”) In Keenan, we read of the public: “The public is not a collection of private individuals experiencing their commonality, not the view organized for and by the human of what might gather it together. The public is the experience, if we can call it that, of the interruption of the intrusion of all that is radically irreducible to the order of the individual human subject, the unavoidable entrance of alterity into the everyday life of the “one” who would be human.” and “Publicity tears us from our selves, exposes us to and involves us with others, denies us the security of that window behind which we might install ourselves to gaze.” So a public does not connote a common bond, but rather a common intrusion, the inevitability of the other and the gaze of the other. Somehow the public is also incalculable; it is an experience, not a collection.
If the gigantic can appear in “varied forms,” is it restricted to anything? If Heidegger sees the modern age as marked both by the appearance of the gigantic and the value of the collective, can the public be treated as the gigantic, that which can only be known through reflection (what is reflection? honest question – I don’t know enough Heidegger to know if he has a specific usage/definition of this word)? something which seems to disappear? something elusive to our understanding?
Publicity in Keenan’s essay is treated as a rupture, a realization that there is an other out there, outside of your “self” – something which places you under the gaze of (an) unknown other(s) and therefore makes you vulnerable. I suppose this is just a different treatment of studying “publicity” – how it operates, behaves… The public as a force which makes you aware of yourself in relation to others and their gaze.
It is hard to figure out whether or not this is going anywhere.

posted by Anonymous at 11:38 PM

i wanted to post this quickly for those who are interested. i'll leave the sniffing site up
tonight

http://msawkar.dhs.org

also for those who are interested in more information here are some url's that
you should checkout.
http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/sniffing-faq.html
http://www.surasoft.com/tut/packsniffing.htm
http://grc.com/oo/packetsniff.htm
3 good general information sites.

http://www.macslash.com/articles/01/08/02/1534209.shtml
(for those of you with osX who wanna do some sniffing).

http://reptile.rug.ac.be/~coder/sniffit/sniffit.html
(my favorite interactive sniffer... this is the unix/linux/etc version.)

http://www.symbolic.it/Prodotti/sniffit.html
(this is sniffit ported to win32)


From one central point, we can spy on the people who live in your building… only we can’t relate an IP address to a physical person easily, but wecan remember the number.. and we can trace a person’s constructed narrative through the database of the web.
This leaves us spying on people’s virtual constructs…
we, as a spectator, are in the unique position of being a true ‘virtual’ voyeur


have fun sniffing
-manu

posted by Anonymous at 11:06 PM

The Keenan article about the windows of vulnerability seems to reiterate many of the same kinds of questions that were raised in the article about Jenni and the Jennicam. In hindsight, I wish that we had talked more about the jennicam last week, specifically the “direction” of her performance (was it, like Burgin suggested, an outward directed performance only for jenni’s internal developmental benefit, something more classically exhibitionistic or something else entirely), because I think that it could become particularly interesting in relation to the opening of the window. The window is like the jennicam in that it allows the collapse of the private into public viewing, particularly the kind of ribbon windows designed by Le Corbusier which drew so much anger from the architectural critics that Keenan cites. The so-called “humanist windows” offer the subject access to the outside world, but also afford him adequate protection against it. The ribbon windows appear to have no such protection; there’s nowhere to hide. Even the jennicam only presents a certain window-shaped access to her world, but it does so to (potentially) far more people than could stand in the canyon and watch the Garcia house. The Garcia house, by contrast offers full-access, availability to everyone who is there to watch. Keenan defines the public almost combatively as “the experience…of the interruption or the intrusion of all that is radically irreducible to the order of the individual human subject” (Keenan, 133) But it is this intrusion that Dienst seems to take up when he discusses the reciprocity of communication. “There will always be a response if a message is delivered” (Dienst, 139). If the public interrupts the order of human subjectivity, what can be the subject’s adequate response to this? Can the subject’s returned gaze ever be disruptive to the public, or is it always re-constituted into the public gaze?
posted by Anonymous at 9:01 PM

|---------------------------------------------------->
“The fact that, despite this, the phrase ‘world view’ asserts itself as the name for the position of man in the midst of all that is, is proof of how decisively the world became picture as soon as man brought his life as subiectum into precedence over other centers of relationship.” (Heidegger, 134)

So what were the other centers of relationship? Man’s life as servant of God. Man as apprehender of the presencing of other Beings (as Heidegger interprets the Greeks)? I wish that Heidegger would be more specific about how and when these transitions took place. I agree that the subjectivity of humans has changed over time, but I question his claim that there is an “essence of modern science” (117) which is separable from the whole network of development which has brought us from times past to the present. I mean, it’s not even legal to say the word “essence” without quotation marks any more, right? Or: “Now if science as research is an essential phenomenon of the modern age, it must be that that which constitutes the metaphysical ground of research determines first and long beforehand the essence of that age generally” (127). He has definitely identified a major influence on the development of science, and humanity, but elides the gradual nature of change in favor of generalization. A basic problem of theory? Then again, perhaps my call for a step-by-step description of the evolution of our consciousness comes from my modern need to represent it to myself and be able to calculate its future, thus mastering it...
<--------------------------------------------------|
posted by Anonymous at 6:59 PM

Circulating Gazes Responses
3 March 2002
Shawn E Greenlee

Heidegger states that reflection is the path to “the world understood in the sense of the ecstatic realm of revealing and concealing of Being.” (p. 154). “Reflection transports the man of the future into that “between” in which he belongs to being and yet remains a stranger amidst that which is.” (p.136) Is it this ecstatic realm that Heidegger describes a means by which we seek to authenticate our lives? Is reflection actually a mode of self-surveillance? Reflection = Authentication? When we ‘reflect’, we contextualize our lives and enlighten ourselves. We reveal and yet also conceal. Publicizing (publishing) oneself could surely be seen as a means by which the individual authenticates their Being (Jennicam). Publicity implies importance to the general (of public concern). Heidegger states, “…human activity is conceived and consummated as culture. Thus culture is the realization of the highest values,” (p.116)

Keenan, describing the panoptic structure, states, “this play of nongazes, under the steady enlightenment of a cell whose walls are windows, converges in that strange obligation of self-surveillance that is the prisoner. The terrifying economy of the panoptic structure lies in the fact that this autosurveillance itself can do without seeing, requiring only light as the possibility of sight.” Thus the windows of this panoptic structure become mirrors for the prisoner. Keenan states that “Publicity is the intervention of the utterly nonhuman or nonsubjective, always already at work ‘within’ us…“(p. 134). Publicity is internalized, and so is the act of publishing, whether there is an audience or lack thereof, enough? Ultimately is it our internal realization of publicity that makes us feel authenticated and not the actual observation by others?

Dienst states “…ideology must be conceived as a mass of sendings or a flow of representations whose force consists precisely in the fact that they are not perfectly destined, just as they are not centrally disseminated. Far from always connecting, ideology never does: subjects look in on messages as if eavesdropping, as if peeking at someone else’s mail. …ideology requires a short circuit between the singular and the general, so that the reception of a representation becomes a sending back – a representation of a reception. “ (p. 141). This statement fits nicely into our discussion of the Internet last class. (The receiver as content-provider, but with a realization that this “view” is a representation of the process itself (a ‘fun-house’ mirror?)) In the Burgin article it was stated that for Jenni, the web-cam was a mirror, and for the observers a window. Is this a one-way mirror situation? Is the act of gazing through a window a means of self-authentication as well, because we in fact are able to see ourselves in the view (the reflection present in the window’s glass)?


posted by Anonymous at 12:20 PM