the wherewithal

The day after the British government raised the UK terrorist threat level to severe, foreign secretary David Miliband came onto the Andrew Marr show to tell him that—in respect of the threat posed by Al-Qaeda ‘the danger remains very real’. He went on: ‘You’ve seen this week that the Home Secretary has thought it right to raise the threat level back to the level it’s been for most of the period since 9/11…It remains the case that we need to be extremely vigilant.’ At more or less the same time, I was reading Massumi’s essay on the US system of colour coded terror alerts (currently sitting at a relatively becalmed yellow (for ‘elevated’), I note).¹  (If I had more time and I wasn’t just a little intimidated, I would be tempted acquiesce to the shouty instruction on www.terror-alert.com to ‘PUT A REAL-TIME TERROR-ALERT WARNING ON YOUR WEBSITE’). Given this serendipity, what has Brian Massumi to teach to David Miliband?

Massumi opens with a Bushism: ‘The future will be better tomorrow’. Says/said Bush. (Except that it is likely he didn’t and that Dan Quayle, as Massumi notes, did. But that…is not the point.) For Massumi, this mangled bit of syntax speaks to the particular relationship to the future that these alerts have. They address not only the British/American citizen, but also the future. They address the future by promising a better tomorrow, that might one day progress gently from yellow to blue. And maybe, just maybe, one day from blue to green (the sylvan world of a ‘low risk of terrorist attacks’). But, argues Massumi, in so doing they also bring the future into the present. The future becomes a (Deleuzian) ‘virtual cause’—an effect of which may be—but not necessarily is—fear. The future, populated by not yet to be’s and possibly might happens, is invited to act in present, but–in all its colour coded vaguery—retains more than enough ambiguity/indeterminacy for the general public to be unable to respond in any meaningful way (what, for instance, might being extremely vigilant practicably involve?). As Massumi says, ‘A threat is unknowable. If it were known in its specifics, it wouldn’t be a threat. It would be a situation—as when they say on television police shows, “we have a situation”—and a situation can be handled. A threat is only a threat if it retains an indeterminacy.’

It is precisely this indeterminacy that David Miliband both invokes and struggles with in his interview with Marr. He—presumably—knows more than us, having access to some of the intelligence that has informed the raised threat level. He of course can’t convey this to us/Marr. But even so, this intelligence is still ambiguous. Even with his likely access to a wealth of intelligence information, for Miliband, the indeterminacy of the threat differs only by degree. Perhaps nothing will happen, but perhaps it will. Perhaps the intelligence is wrong, or perhaps he doubts it. Or perhaps plotters will bungle, or perhaps they will attack somewhere else. But all he has to give to Andrew Marr is the threat level. And a face set to stern. And the danger that remains ‘very real’.

Of course, this latter invocation of the hyper-real is something of a tautology: dangers are inherently real; they differ only by the amount of danger, not their reality. Swimming in a flood of doubt, Miliband strikes for reality, but finds it insubstantial, leaving him foundering to find another, realer version.

But rather than judge, perhaps Milliband and Massumi might be made to agree. Miliband evokes a real that not only transcends what we know, but also what he knows. A real that is a part of/immanent to, yet beyond what it is possible to know. Where Miliband finds the very real is perhaps where Massumi also might find ‘the virtual’, that realm of sheer potential, folding together pasts, presents, futures, with what could and should have been. Either way, such a meeting of minds is entirely in this spirit; after all, as Massumi says, ‘The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect.² That being the case, Massumi: meet Miliband.

Just a quick addition to the previous reflections on topology. I have just been rereading Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, and his distinction between Euclidean and non-Euclidean topological forms seemed particularly appropriate to the differences between networked and recursive topologies. The following passage, from a section titled ‘Notes on terminology’, certainly helped me clarify my thinking. He writes (the full chapter is also available on his website - I have also added a few relevant links):

“Topology” and “non-Euclidean” are not synonyms. Although most topologies are non-Euclidean, there are Euclidean topologies. A Möbius strip or a Klein bottle are Euclidean figures, of one and two dimensions respectively. The distinction that is most relevant here is between topological transformation and static geometric figure: between the process of arriving at a form through continuous deformation, and the determinate form arrived at when the process stops. An infinite number of static figures may be extracted from a single topological transformation. The transformation is a kind of superfigure that is defined not by invariant formal properties, but by continuity of transformation. For example, a torus and a coffee-cup belong to the same topological figure because one can be deformed into the other without cutting. Anything left standing when the deformation is stopped at any moment, in its passage through any point in-between, also belongs to their shared figure. The overall topological figure is continuous and multiple. As a transformation, it is defined by vectors rather than coordinate points. A vector is transpositional: a moving-through points. Because of its vectorial nature, the geometry of the topological superfigure cannot be separated from its duration. The figure is what runs-through an infinity of static figures. It is not itself determinate, but determinable. Each static figure stands for its determination, but does not exhaust it. The overall figure exceeds any of its discrete stations, and even all of them taken together as an infinite set. This is because between any two points in Euclidean space, no matter how close, lies another definable point. The transformation joining the points in the same superfigure always falls between Euclidean points. It recedes, continuously, into the between.¹

Just got back from the excellent ATACD Cultures of Change conference in Barcelona.

The conference explored the possibilities opened up by thinking of the social world along topological lines. In that respect, most interesting for me were those approaches that tried to take on the challenge posed to thinking about social (and material) connectedness as posed by mathematical descriptions of multidimensional, recursive, mutually enfolding topological spaces. These approaches sat in contrast to work that focused more on attempting to the connections between entities that are thought of as more or less discrete – descriptions of which were often accounted for by reference to topological networks. This can be somewhat oversimplified – with the help of some of Wikipedia’s finest – as topological space A vs topological space B:

Topological space A         Topological space B

Translating concepts from the natural to the social sciences is, however, a notoriously difficult and potentially problematic task, as – for me – was exemplified in one session, in which a discussion broke out about whether or not thinking topology could serve as a useful metaphor for the analysis of social life. The debate can be very loosely summarised as follows:

The challenge: given that a topological way of thinking about the world rejects seeing entities as standing for other entities, isn’t using topology as a metaphor inherently un-topological?

The defence: while mathematics can afford the luxury of operating in a world of pure concepts, entering the social world requires an entry into the world of the metaphor. This is because language is inherently metaphorical and consequently, so is culture. In that light, while the concept of topology may be useful in shedding a different light on the things we study, it can only do so when used metaphorically.

Perhaps there is a route between these two. For now, I will leave the question open, but if anyone has some thoughts, post away.

In the meantime, you might want to have a look around the topological media lab. This is a project that really does try to take the challenge of topology seriously. It’s chaired by Sha Xin Wei from Concordia University, who I not only saw speak at the conference – but who also led a group of PhD student in an interactive workshop. He was, it has to be said, pretty great. If you prefer the written word, there is also a draft of an article he wrote for the journal Configurations available to download here.

If you have a working knowledge of either Spanish or Catalan, you would do well do check out this Network & Matters blog, which addresses many things relational. My sources tell me that there may be some English posts too in future, so keep an eye…

Have just come across these irresistable 19th century reflections on the over confidence in reality that accompanies some altered states of mind. By pragmatist philosopher William James, in his essay ‘The Perception of Reality‘:

One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man’s very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.

Putting the simple pleasure of coming across this in what you expect to be a perhaps dry essay on perception and reality, William James’ essay is fascinating. (I must admit to only just finding out about James’ extensive personal experimentation with nitrous oxide).

The problem with trying to get to the bottom of ‘what it is’ to believe in reality, as far as James sees it, is that - as in the case of the overconfident drunk - belief on its own does not go very far to telling you about how real something is or isn’t. In fact a state of total skepticism as to the reality of the world (for James, not a hypothetical state - giving as an example those afflicted with what he refers to as ‘questioning mania’) is not a radically different state of mind, but, to put it simply, just the flip side of the same coin.

For James, you won’t really get very far in just trying to get to the bottom of a particular belief, in its own terms. The more interesting question is ‘Under what circumstances do we think things real?’ (his italics).

It’s an essay that also seems to have fascinated Erving Goffman. He quotes the same central question at the beginning of his sociological classic, Frame Analysis, commenting that

[t]he important thing about reality, [James] implied, is our sense of its realness in contrast to our feeling that some things lack this quality. One can then ask under what conditions such a feeling is generated, and this question speaks to a small, manageable problem having to do with the camera and not what it is the camera takes pictures of. ¹

What Goffman admired about James was his attention to the organisation of experience, not its its inner nature. Or, to continue his metaphor, an attention to the camera, its history, how it came to be facing a particular slice of the world in a particular way, held by a particular person, with a particular set of photographic skills.

But what Goffman perhaps misses is perhaps an attention to the transformative capacities of camera itself. This attention has been provided in sociological thinking by the loose collection of work that goes under the rubric of Actor Network Theory (a quite horrible term), which make central to their work an examination of the transformative role played by a full range of material entities (including, but certainly not limited to cameras) which continually, and in a quite practical sense, ‘make’ the world. These writers are happy to give agency not only to people, but to a huge range of things non-human.

That also perhaps makes them closer, here, to James than Goffman. After all, James is, in both his writing, and his personal experimentation, making explicit the transformative power of particular combinations of (non human) chemicals on the (human) body. Which in turn reminds me of a classic early Actor Network Theory paper by Gomart and Hennion, in their study of drug users and music lovers. Like James, they are interested in the ways a particular world is composed, rather than hunting for its inner cores. Or, as they put it, an attention to the ways that ‘the subject can emerge as she actively submits herself to a collection of constraints’ (whether by taking a drug, or entering a musical reverie).² The question is not, therefore, whether or not it’s ‘the drink talking’, but the ways in which ‘utter reality’ of drunkenness emerge.