The virtual is a liminal space that consists only of its becomingness-state
"One of the simplest ways to conceptualize the becomingness of liminal space in media is to think of the virtual. In his essay 'The Reality of the Virtual,' Slavoj Žižek addresses Gilles Deleuze's notion of the virtual as 'pure becoming without being,' which is ''always forthcoming an already past,'' but is never present or corporeal.[7] The virtual is a liminal space that consists only of its becomingness–state, and not an actual being or object to become. It exists as pure becoming that suspends both 'sequentiality and directionality'; it is a passage, but there is no line of passage.[8]"
(Allison Wright, The Chicago School of Media Theory)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
NHS Innovation Diffusion: digital tools and social movements
"There is innovation inside the NHS. But innovations tend to stay local, failing to be adopted by other healthcare organisations or diffusing very slowly. This challenge is well recognised. But what's the problem? Given the assembled talents and good intentions of NHS staff, how can the systemic sum of innovation be so much less than its parts?
The NHS is sometimes described in terms of it's hierarchical structure. For my purposes it's useful to describe the current NHS using the language of philosopher–activists Deleuze & Guattari. In their terms, the NHS is a striated space marked by linear boundaries, restricted to a particular plane of activity in the space of all possible potentials[1]. For Deleuze & Guattari, like Foucault before them, power does not simply operate as a pyramid but in myriad multifaceted directions and relationships. Foucault said 'One doesn't have a power which is only in the hands of one person who exercises it alone... it is a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power as much as those over whom it is exercised.. it becomes a machinery that noone owns'[2]. The overall effect is an institutional environment that acts to tame energies it is a social machine that produces conformity. As Deleuze & Guattari would say, the NHS is highly codified, where a code is a pattern of repeated acts. Of course, there are many situations where this is desirable–an ICU emergency needs a practiced response. But it doesn't make for a system that diffuses innovation.
Anyone who's returned from an innovation workshop and tried to applied new ideas in their NHS workplace has experienced this striation. It's the overlap in particular experience of all the dynamics that limit change: lack of autonomy in a hierarchical structure, the expectations of colleagues, the time it takes to deliver your daily targets, the lack of incentive, the lack of peer support, lack of sense of entitlement to change the way things are done all of which can combine to deliver an experiential straitjacket which is an impersonal affect, a pattern across the system and one that stifles diffusion as effectively as individual innovation.
The alternative is a system marked by flows, connections and zones of intensity. In the abstract terminology of Deleuze & Guattari, an innovative system would include smooth as well as striated spaces. Smooth space is occupied by intensities and events, by the continuous variation of free action. The characteristic experience of smooth space is short term, up close, with no fixed points of reference. I will try to show how the combination of social movements and digital technologies could blend smooth space with the more rigid boundaries and caste structures of the NHS in a way that aids the spread of innovation."
(Dan McQuillan, 2011)
[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1980). A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York:Continuum, 2004.
[2] Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Smooth and striated interactions between sound and digital technologies
"In the plateau '1440: The Smooth and Striated' from their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose a distinction between smooth and striated space. Presenting a dialectical construction of space in which 'the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture' they argue 'smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space, striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space' [46]. In particular the technological model of smooth and striated space Deleuze and Guattari put forward serves as a useful construction of the interaction between sound and digital technologies. Using the example of fabric, Deleuze and Guattari explain a conception of striated space in which there are 'two kinds of parallel elements; in the simplest case there are vertical and horizontal elements, and the two intertwine, intersect perpendicularly' [47].
Performing different functions, one of these remains fixed, the other mobile, as demonstrated by one piece of thread remaining in place while another interweaves, or transverses, it or by the x–axis of time in a digital sound buffer which remains linear, straight, as its corresponding y–axis of amplitude simultaneously traces and diverges from it. It is crucial that 'a striated space of this kind is necessarily delimited, closed on at least one side', as 'fabric can be infinite in length but not in width' and though time does not constrain sound the limited headroom of digital audio means amplitude must [48]. Technological striated spaces are constructed with top and bottom, as belied by the seams of fabric or bit depth of digital sound [49]. Digital sound involves a constant process of translation in which sound moves between the smooth phenomenal space of actualized sonority and the striated space of potential that is the digital domain, while still presenting a smooth space of its own, and so is itself nothing more than a functional abstraction."
(Ben Byrne, 2009)
Byrne, B. (2009). "Digital Sound: On Technology, Infidelity and Potentiality". Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference. Edith Cowan University, Perth.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks
Tony D. Sampson (2012). "Virality. Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. University of Minnesota Press.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Deleuze Guattari: Societies of Control and Antipsychiatry
"if the energetic machine expressed the disciplinary bourgeoise society of the 18th and 19th centuries, computers, electronic and cybernetic machines express what Deleuze calls the 'society of control.'"
(Jeremy Jae, 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
