net.narrative environments

In honor of Ada Lovelace, I made a pledge to post — something here today. What I pledged to myself, actually, was just to reboot this weblog. Yes, I thought, happening across the pledge site, I owe it to myself to do that. So, I’ve been at it, working on a redesign, and here we go. It’s still Ada Lovelace day, where I live.

I thought I might write something up, if time allowed, about Joan Rivière (1883 – 1962), a British psychoanalyst who was among the first to translate Freud’s writings into English. Rivière’s own writing later inspired Jacques Lacan’s infamous dictum, “There is no such thing as woman.”

A fine thing to say on Ada Lovelace Day!!

In her remarkable essay “Femininity as Masquerade,” what Rivière argues is not that femininity is “put on to hide masculinity,” as Wikipedia has it, but rather something more complex than that. Or convoluted perhaps (Lacanian pun). It’s about the difficulty of speaking from the position of being “not,” as in “not male” — even, or especially, in Riviere’s own clinical findings, for intellectual women.

Through Lacan, Riviere’s writing had a powerful influence on the French feminists of the 1980′s, and on me in grad school, grappling as we were with issues related to women occupying the position of speaking subjects, as opposed to that of listening posts objects.

I’d say more but I still have to change the DNS and put a redirect on the finish up a few technical details to get this up and running before midnight strikes. For now, this fragment of a citation will have to do.

Thank you, Ada, Joan — and Molly the owl.* And, thank you, Ada Lovelace Day!

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* Working on the redesign, I’ve been kept company by the rustling, hooting, chucking, screeching, other worldly sights and sounds of the Live Barn Owl Nest Box Cam, where two owlets have hatched in the 30 hours I’ve been watching. I’m not sure exactly what this has to do with Ada Lovelace Day, or with Joan Riviere, but I’m saying it anyway.

“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain —”

“Uncle Gottfried says, ‘Whatever acts cannot be destroyed.’”

“The Doctor means that in a fairly narrow and technical metaphysical sense,” Eliza said, “but it’s not the worst motto you could adopt.”

— Eliza with the 13-year-old Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Leipzg, 1694, in Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, Vol. II of The Baroque Cycle

It costs to possess knowledge of the world: not necessarily because it costs anything to obtain this knowledge, but because it is difficult to get rid of it again. Pure, clear consciousness is the true cost — and we cannot know anything about the world without this clear consciousness, which, on the other hand, we cannot possess unless we have discarded all the information we had in our consciousness a moment ago.

Computation and cognition consist of discarding information: picking what matters from what does not. The discarding of information is the thermodynamic proper, that which costs.

Information is interesting once we have got rid of it again: once we have taken in a mass of information, extracted what is important, and thrown the rest out. In itself, information is almost a measure of randomness, unpredictablity, indeterminacy. Information is more related to disorder than to order, because order arises in situations where there is less information than there could have been. . . .

The complexity of the physical and biological world can be described as depth: the amount of discarded information. What interests us in life is not that which contains the most information and thus takes the longest to describe. . . . Nor is it the extremely well ordered and predictable, for there are no surprises there.

What interests us are things that have a history, things preserved in time not because they are static and closed but because they are open and concurrent, because they have discarded quantities of information along the way.

–Tor Nørretranders, ”The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size”

I’ve spent the past year or so — a year and a half, actually — pushed back, way back from the mediasphere, discarding information. Not wandering in the desert, exactly. But I’ve been on a pilgrimage, in actual fact: putting things in perspective, reacquainting myself with (offscreen) worlds of physical and personal and psychical depth. It’s a journey I embarked on quite intentionally. A luxury but, at a certain point, a necessity, too.

Among other instigating factors, I’d come to distrust my strategizing, narrativizing mind, often eighteen steps ahead of the rest of me and, for that reason, not always a trustworthy guide. I’ve been practicing listening instead. As John Cage puts it (I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have the book here): “Instead of making the unconscious part of the mind turn and face the conscious part, we make the conscious part of the mind turn and face the unconscious part.”

I’ve been working on that now for about twenty years. It’s easy to get distracted.

So, yes — it’s taken time to get here, longer than I would have thought. I haven’t done things I assumed I would do — like, say, clean out the legacy code and cruft and overhaul this website (ach!).

I’ve written two small (very small) pieces in the past year. For Mountain Wind, the newsletter of the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center, I wrote a short reflective essay, Drawing on Silence, on the practice of kyudo, a traditional Japanese form of archery. And at Wikipedia, a week after attending BarCamp San Francisco, I re-wrote the article on BarCamp, pretty much from scratch, coming out of the woodwork, apparently, to save it from deletion.

I’ve done other things. Small things, modest initiatives, things that register — embrace, even — the resistance of the material world. Things that take time and patience. Things with traction, a certain history and depth.

Then no sooner was I ready to re-engage but opportunities came to meet me, and called me out to play. And a bit embarrassing, really — the Ruby Slippers effect! Where I’m ending up looks a lot like where I started from, except that, now, things look different. More thingly, maybe. The world scrubbed fresh.