Projectories

Alf Rehn over at Text Sushi has been thinking about academic productivity lately, on one hand he rants on writing books , on the other he wants assistants to do it…

Sarcasm aside, I think these two posts really capture the risks with the publish or perish system. If every academic has to increase their research output there is bound to be people finding ways to circumvent the system: publishing with a mulittude of authors, makings students and assistants do your job, recycling the same ideas in different articles.

The increasing pressure to publish isn’t really an increasing pressure to research… It’s an increasing pressure to find creative ways to publish. Fordist research production… I’m thinking “Word Research Article Plugin”: File -> Export -> Article or “It looks like you’re writing a scholarly article? Do you want to start the Article Wizard.”

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman�s rifle and Speck�s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.“

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.�

Robert Francis Kennedy, Address, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, March 18, 1968

Actant, narratological term introduced by A.J. Graimas for someone or something
which plays one of the typical roles in a traditional story.

Nationalencyklopedin

The so-called actant model was originally worked out by A.J. Greimas on the
basis of V. Propp’s morphological investigations of Russian folk-tales. It
supplies a first general and simple diagram of some positions, relations, and
functions common to narrative developments; the most important characters and
their mutual relations. The general model helps us making precise observations
in the specific text. An actant is a genre-related type of fictional characters
like e.g. the Troll, the Princess, or the young Man in the folk-tale in general,
while an actor is the specific version of the type in the individual tale.

The
Actant Model

Algirdas Julien Greimas [was the man] who created something which is referred
to as the "actantial
model" or the "actant model" which is a way of breaking down what happens
in myths, folktales and other types of stories. Here’s a shitty
diagram of it on another site. Wait, here’s a better
page about it. Before I look at that page though, let me summarize what
I understand of it so far…

In this model, you can identify six elements
common to certain types of stories. These elements are referred to as "actants," rather
than actors because they may or may not be personified, or even characters.
But they do drive the action in the story. The six actants he identifies
are:

1. Subject – looking for the Object
2. Sender – of the Subject on its quest for the Object
3. Object – looked for by the Subject
4. Helper – of the Subject
5. Opponent – of the Subject
6. Receiver – of the Object to be secured by the Subject

This is easier to understand if you assign characters to each actant role. Another
site does that using a generic folktale and I’ll use their examples.
The only tricky part is that multiple actant-roles may be assigned to a
character. Anyway, they refer to the young man or "hero" of a folktale
as the subject. The king is the sender, because he sets the hero out on
his quest. His quest is to locate the object. In their example, the object
of his quest is the Princess. She is the thing which the king sends the
hero to locate. Along the way, the hero is helped in his quest by a wise
old man. The opponent whom he must overcome in order to acquire the object
(rescue the princess) is a troll. The role of receiver is one that gets
doubled up on a character. In their model, the hero is both the subject,
as well as the receiver. When the hero rescues the princess, he is rewarded
with her hand in marriage.

http://www.timboucher.com/

I propose to call whoever and whatever is represented actant. …
The micro-organisms on which Pasteur depended were made to betray him: they
appeared spontaneously [in the sterilized glass flasks] thus supporting Pouchet’s
position. In this case, the actants change camps and two spokesmen are supported
at once.

Latour, Science in Action, 1987, p. 84

The ‘things’ behind the scientific texts are thus similar to
the heroes of the stories we saw at the end of Chapter 1: they are all defined
by their performances. Some in fairy tales defeat the ugliest
seven-headed dragons or against all odds they save the king’s daughter;
others inside laboratories resist precipitation or they triumph over bismuth….
At first, there is no other way to know the essence of the hero. This does
not last long however, because each performance presupposes a competence which
restrospectively explains why the hero withstood all the ordeals. The hero
is no longer a score list of actions; he, she or it is an essence­ slowly
unveiled through each of his, her or its manifestations. ­

It is clear by now to the reader why I introduced the word ‘actant’ e­arlier
to describe what the spokesperson represents. Behind the texts, behind the
instruments, inside the laboratory, we do not have Nature – not yet,
the reader will have to wait for the next part. What we have is an array allowing
new extreme constraints to be imposed on ‘something’. This ‘something’ is
progressively shaped by its re-actions to these conditions. This is what
is behind all the arguments we have analyzed this far.

– – –

The act of defining a new object by the anwers it inscribes on the window
of an instrument provides scientists and engineers with their final source
of strength. It constitutes our second basic principle,
as important as the first in the order to understand science in the making:
scientists and engineers speak in the name of new allies that they have shaped
or enrolled; representatives among other representatives, they add these
unexpected resources to tip the balance of force in their favour. Guillemin
now speaks for endorphin and somatostatin, Pasteur for visible microbes,
the Curies for polonium, Payen and Persoz for the enzymes, Cantor for transfinites.
When they are challenged, they cannot be isolated, but on the contrary their
constituency stands behind them arrayed in tiers and ready to say the same
thing.”

Latour, 1987, pp. 89-90

Hayles uses the concept flickering signifiers to define the disembodiment
of digital texts: “technologies of inscription
are media when they are perceived as mediating, inserting themselves into the
chain of textual production.”

The relation between signifier and signified are directly correlated in a
material text-production. “… emphasis on
spatially fixed and geomatrically arranged letters is significant, for it points
to the physicality of the processes involved.” Changes with electronic
media: we percieve text differently – more fluid – “no simple
one-to – no correspondence exists between signifier and signified.”

When I coined the phrase "flickering signifier," I had in mind
a reconfigured relation between the signifier and signified than that which
had been previously articulated in critical and literary theory. As I have
argued elsewhere, the signifier as conceptualized by Saussure
and others was conceived as unitary in its composition and flat its
structure. It had no internal structure, whether seen as oral articulation
or written mark, that could properly enter into
the discourse of semiotics.

When signifiers appear on the computer screen, however, they are only the
top layer of a complex system of interrelated processes. Marks on screen
may manifest themselves as simple inscriptions to a user, but properly understood
they are the visible, tangible results of coding instructions executed by
the machine in a series of interrelated processes, from a high-level programming
language like Java all the way down to assembly language and binary code.

I hoped to convey this processural quality by the gerund "flickering," to
distinguish the screenic image from the flat durable mark of print or the
blast of air associated with oral speech. The signifier on screen is, as
you know, a light image produced by a scanning electron beam. The screen
image is deeply layered rather than flat, constantly replenished rather than
durable, and highly mutable depending on processes mobilized by the layered
code, as for example when a writer uses Flash to create animation or layers
that move. These qualities are not merely ornamental but enter profoundly
into what the marks signifier and, more importantly, how they signify. We
need a theory of semiotics that can account for all the qualities connoted
by "flickering."

Materiality Has
Always Been In Play

Information theory stresses the dichotomy between pattern and presence. Where
pattern means information and absence means non-information. But developments
in information theory countered this argument: it seemed that randomness and
pattern were both related to information – “each helps to define
the other; each contributes to the flow of information through the system.”

Determining what counts as the materiality of a given work is thus both
a creative act by the writer and an interpretive act by the user, as well
as an engagement of the cognitive properties of an intelligent machine for
texts written and implemented on a computer. I don’t see this as a cause
for anxiety. Materiality has always been in play, even when it was relatively
suppressed within literary criticism by considering the work an immaterial
verbal construction. In works that foreground their interaction with materiality
–"technotexts" is the term I have coined for such works–the material
properties are actively constructed by the text and made resonant with significance,
becoming semiotically important components of the text’s meaning-making processes.

Materiality
Has Always Been In Play

Hayles relates this line of reasoning to the transformation of biology and
meaning into information, and one might argue that our bodies increasingly
can be seen as embodied DNA information.

Virtual reality: full body mediation. “Virtual reality puts the user’s
sensory system into a direct feedback loop with a computer.”

Relevant boundaries change: “relevant boundaries for interaction are
defined less by the skin than by the feedback loops connecting body and simulation
in a technobio-integrated circuit.”