{adiscourse.net}, in both hidden and overt qualities, is meant to be an anarchic subversion. This seems a funny way to begin an introduction to a thesis document which will inevitably submerge into route technical explanations, precedent studies and the presentation of MediaArchitecture content, but nevertheless the conditions of anarchy are as much involved as the message of any medium, especially if one is to take McLuhan at his word.
Before describing the effects and materials of the project, one must first engage with what is meant by “anarchic subversion” and more generally what is meant by anarchism. These don’t refer to chaos, which has been equated with anarchy through numerous propaganda campaigns by democratic, socialist, and totalitarian governments alike, but a set of negotiable values and outlooks which surround what Colin Ward called a “social and political philosophy out of the natural and spontaneous tendency of humans to associate together for their mutual benefit.” 1
In terms of MediaArchitecture (this is the field of study, after all), and as much for discourse, anarchism provides the orientation of critique and alternity for {adiscourse.net}, an organizational position where any number of ideologies (market naturalism, Marxism, or an unexamined spectacle of aesthetics) might usually take their place. Beyond the continuously beautiful ways that Ward describes anarchism, I must explain the position of anarchy as I see it, seeing as the definitions of an ungoverned political theory tend to proliferate and take on as many perspectives as there are anarchists.
First, one might best understand the conditions of anarchism through the terms of negotiation and contradiction. These present a good initial framework because much about anarchism is determined through the negotiation of contradictions: absence of hierarchical governance but the presence of organization, libertarian self-realization but the necessity of social solidarity, the building of tactics and practices but the imperative to dissolve and negate what has been previously been constructed. A central core of anarchic contradiction was described by Mikhail Bakunin, contemporary and antagonist of Karl Marx in the First International, who wrote that “Liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”2 Unlike the unitary values of liberal democracy, a humanist equality made possible through negating the human quality of much of the population, or Marxist socialism, social equality achieved historically through the division of mass and leadership, anarchism is a suite of competing values which cannot be prioritized.
However, the terms of anarchism here are not direct extensions from its classical formation, much as contemporary Marxist theory recuperates and reorients the intentions and perspectives of Marxian doctrine. Anarchism in {adiscourse.net} is understood after the post-structural turn embedded within the work of Colin Ward and various other anarchists who shifted away from utopic visions of a final society and the end of a teleological project, beginning to focus on anarchic tactics and exchanges as enmeshed practices within immediate social relations. This anarchism dissolves into myriad activities which antagonize and un-organize systems of hierarchical control and coercive management; anarchism becomes immediate contestation negotiated through a political theory of contingency, the continuous inversion between praxis and theory.
Constructing an anarchist ethics in response to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Simon Critchley describes this situational anarchism as “a radical disturbance of the state, a disruption of the state’s attempt to set itself up or erect itself into a whole (s’eriger en Tout). In our terms, anarchy is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the continual questioning from below of any attempt to establish order from above.” 3 This anarchism deal with the negation of coercive force, systems of false legitimation, and the supportive liberation of the individual. Ethics becomes the tension connection between Self and Other, “the experience of the multiple singularities of the encounter with others that defines the experience of sociality. Each of these singularities overwhelms and undoes us and we can never do enough in response.” 4
There is no permanence to anarchism, no final form, but only continuously re-formed positions against well-known and emergent forms of coercion; anarchism believes in the end of things, the end of processes which no longer can be collectively legitimated, the end of projects which have run their course, the end of beliefs which can be adequately disproven. Where one might ask if anarchism itself has not been adequately disproven, in Catalonia or the Haymarket, the answer is visible in the ways in which solidarity is still shown without enforcement and erroneous observance of law is still defied. As of 2020, there are systems of mutual aid being established (and actively obstructed) in reaction to the Covid19 pandemic, and there are distributed movements of direct negation in the streets (also actively obstructed) in reaction to an endless stream of racist murders performed by police. Anarchism remains as the negation of stable forms of uneven management. Fundamentally, this view of anarchism precludes totalities - nothing is perfect, not is essentially stable, and everything can be contested and created.
Accepting the terms of negotiation and contradiction, anarchism take an important view towards agency - the belief in equal constitution of agency and the goal of immediacy minimizing or abolishing styles of social reproduction which structurally deny the expression of agencies. Because anarchism denies the existence of totalities, the uneven distribution and efficacy of individual agency must be an artificial and changeable construction. And also because there are no totalities, no single society or single ideology, there will always be agents which occupy frontiers of friction on the internal and external edges of these artificial constructions.
Dealing with an expansive constitution of agency, anarchism reacts in direct opposition to methods of simplifying agency down to binary choice or the serving of the cohesive society through a comprehensive authority. In anarchism there is no possible bifurcation of movement into mass of followers and leadership, no alternating terms of how and when types of people can express their agency, no tactical limitation of one group’s agency in order to court the allegiance of another. Largely, what this develops is the impossibility of achieving general consensus - instead there are always forms of antagonism or, stealing from Chantal Mouffe’s theories of radical democracy, agonism. There is no escape from necessary and immediate negotiation within a field of equally expressed agency.
As a network model, what this brings into focus is a style of full distribution; a type of full distribution which doesn’t have one goal. Unlike the terrorist organization, which must unify and focus (and subdue) internal agencies in pursuit of a privileged goal, and unlike capitalism, which seeks to homogenize expressions of agency down to the ease or conflict of capital flow, anarchist distribution is not unitarily focused and must be established without the meta-structural faith in centralized ideology, god or market.
Colin Ward, with bottomless poetry, declares that “an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.” 5 This brings up a final (for now) contradiction: anarchism is always already present, here and now, and always permanently absent, there and away. As an overflowing void, anarchism can never come into being because it already is - a practice of in-between activities and a theory of solidarity in tension, the shadows of transitory structuralisms lurking in the interstitial space.
Altogether, this is a hopelessly incomplete overview of anarchism, avoiding the deep waters of immediate action, insurrectionary practice, unstable epistemologies, and (as with all political theories) the position of violence in liberation. But it has described the way in which anarchism, {adiscourse.net}’s anarchism, denies static equilibrium through the acceptance of contradiction and the need for consistent and equal negotiation among equal agency. It is in this way that anarchism can transition into the more direct matter of discourse.
If {adiscourse.net} is meant to be an anarchic subversion, discourse is the field in which it subverts, and MediaArchitecture the context of operations with which it subverts. “Discourse” will be more explicitly detailed in its terminology within {adiscourse.net}, but right now it is important to understand discourse in terms of negotiating meaning. One’s own discourse pins down the individual interpretation of meanings as they relate to any subject at hand, disciplinary discourse defines the interiority of meanings in a collective subject, and general discourse is the double fold of elucidating the positions of contestation and consensus within recursive boundaries.
In general discourse these recursive boundaries are constantly illusive, so that the general discourse of a town is distinct but within the general discourse of a nation, which is distinct but within the general discourse of a continent, which is distinct but within a general discourse of a hemisphere, and so on and so on. Of course, the matter of general discourse - and, cascading backwards, all of discourse - is complicated by the fact that discourse and boundaries act more complexly than a nesting doll. There is a discourse of experience, such as that of being young or knowing trauma, just as there is a discourse of event, such as surrounds film quotes or the “oh, the humanity” of the Hindenberg coverage. These areas of discourse bleed into each other asynchronously and translocally.
However, as incomprehensible and generative and polyglot as the field of discourse is, artificial structures of regulation emerge in a number of ways. These managerial structures determine what the locally acceptable forms and objects of discourse are - the correct words, the correct pronunciation, the correct ideas- as well as link the technologies of production with the terms of discourse’s material and immaterial mediation.
Michel Foucault examines a possible method for determining specific conditions of disciplinary discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge through “rules of formation”: surfaces of emergence, authorities of delimitation and girds of specification. 6 Each of these rules approach discourse in an isolated manner which unveils the ways in which an incomprehensible exchange of meanings can both be analytically probed historically and can be understood in relation to the power structure which produce them.
Through any discrete review of discourse it is clear that, as Foucault puts forward, the matter of knowledge and power are codependent, and the exertion of power, the expression of agency, is chronically built to be uneven in a way which is capable of temporarily fixing a static interior to discourse functions. This unevenness is also recursive within disciplinary discourses (architecture, media, political theory, mathematics, etc.). The deleuzian faction of any discipline must adhere to norms of both the discipline and their chosen framework of thought, established by specific texts, specific authors, specific interpretations.
Of course, the construction of these static interiors and their doctrines cannot successfully achieve totality or else the disciplines would have already resolved themselves. The permanent flexibility - or unfixity - of discourse constantly produces exteriority within interiority, and so the managerial constructions must react and reorient themselves to reattain higher levels of static constraint.
In academic and disciplinary discourse, the intellectual is a specific type of managerial role and the production of stable meanings, supported by abstract systems of recognition and concrete systems of financial investment. The creation of central heroes and trappings of interpretation creates a chronic scholasticism which extends far past the theocratic involvement of pre-Enlightenment academia. Cycles of commentary reproduce the special essences of texts written within previous academic institutions, supporting the reproduction of power relations and the position of the academic within that system. Accepting this, Foucault declares “The role of the intellectual is no longer to place [themself] “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse”.” 7
The anarchic subversion of {adiscourse.net} reemerges here as the subversion of uneven discourse as it is actively maintained by technologies and abstract operation within academia insomuch that it dissolves the boundaries which academic intellectualism has built around itself. In this subversion, the delimitation of discourse in focus becomes intellectual production and organization without management. How this must be done, just as the artificial construction of management is performed, is through a set of practices and operations. These practices and operations of {adiscourse.net} orient away from the reproduction of management toward the reproduction of free agency, and do so through the negation of authorial attribution, impermeable disciplinary borders, and finality of outcome.
Without specifying the exact roles and situations in which {adiscourse.nt} can be used and deployed, a specific set of operations can be applied and manipulated in many unexpected ways. {adiscourse.net} is used as s tool for unmanaged intellectual engagement in the circumstances of a thesis project, a work of MediaArchitecture, but its abstractness is also a flexibility which allows for a site of social organization or generative dialogue outside of pure erudition. But in any of its applications, the base code - materially and metaphorically - reproduces an anarchist exchange of data and meaning.
From here, an explicit explanation of {adiscourse.net} operations may take place:
In creating a collective space for discourse, {adiscourse.net} takes form as a networked interface. The deployment used within the context of the thesis work is hosted on a node.js server with the appropriate domain (www.adiscourse.net). In the browser, the interface animates a collection of crowd-created discourse spaces which can be chosen and overlapped. New inputs are added to database of elements on the server and new connections can be added to the elements and visualized on the screen.
In the human space of engagement with the networked interface, {adiscourse.net} takes form as a local collection of areas for the human scale process of discourse: ruminating, reading, drinking coffee, and using the technology necessary for network communication.
As a tactile output, {adiscourse.net} takes form as a process of pen-plotting on a roll of butcher paper via a custom-designed cnc plotter, providing an inscripted scroll of the various discourse elements translated from the digital environment.
Each of these forms (exchange, engagement, output) together elicit a microcosm of discursive process. This microcosm - {adiscourse.net} - explores the immediately material and immediately social qualities of a discourse without direct management. In contrast to academic discourse, there is no projection of superior recognition and no competitive curation of acceptable submission. In contrast to social media, there is no algorithmic attenuation of review and no central focus on amplification over exchange. In contrast to both, there is no prioritization of static outcomes or dynamic immediacy. In {adiscourse.net} there is a slow-fast-continuous engagement with discourse in space and discourse in temporary arrangement.
{adiscourse.net} orients itself as a collection of material practices and operations of networked discursive contribution and corresponding forms of output. Fundamentally, these practices are the extensions of a drive toward a more flexible discursive field beyond disciplinary isolation and the contestation of canonical and directly authorial forms of discourse production. In simple language, this means exploring new modes of building intellectual and practical discourses - modes which avoid the pitfalls of defining sets of knowledge as bordered by their relevance to limited contexts, like architecture or media or politics or economy. Recent attempts at transcending disciplinary discourses have come via vague invocations of “trans-disciplinary” collaboration in professional and academic environs. While “trans-disciplinary” understanding and exchange is quite attractive, insomuch that it describes a cross-section of knowledges focused on a unified project, the concept itself reinforces the abstract borders of disciplines even as it calls for disciplinary agents to meet on some superior plane of action. Instead, there must be an alternative perspective toward the spaces of discourse in a way undefined by disciplinary restriction or other forms of entrenched gate-keeping.
To achieve such a vision of flexible, non-hierarchical and relatively equal forms of discourse, traditional models of social and intellectual exchange are not useful precedents. Radical models and theories of cooperation must be the road map, negotiating opposing values with flexible and extinguishable protocols, and this style of radicality is easily developed from anarchist theory. But the anarchist theory must be practiced in the space as modern control methods - the protcological exchange which distributes operations while maintaining centralized forms of validation. The protocol as derivative management of digital processes, procedural social reproduction as discussed in the dispassionate terms of Alexander Galloway, is both the indirect site of attentuating cybernetic values, but also the site for negotiated new forms. 8 In {adiscourse.net}, the protocols and practices of discourse are built on relatively normal grounds, both in tactile-human space and digital development, but the tactics of producing new directions of temporary social reproduction must exert themselves in between highly coercive operations, just as anarchist practice is built as interstitial spaces within the structures of dominant power.
The three forms of {adiscourse.net} follow loose methods for tactical production - interstitial production - which follow up the social focus of Christoph Spertz’s theory of “Free Cooperation” (insomuch that the theory is already quite anarchic without directly speaking the word), but in its intertwined form with minor methods of exchange. 9 The space of statement and materialized thought, the space of auto-discursive practice and the preparation for engagement, and the tactile space of the object output. Each is discursive in telecopic manner, from the signified content of the screen to the gcode operations in the plotter, to the placement of the mouse and keyboard to the side of a monitor, but nevertheless entirely material and entirely present. Working with the new agencies provided by digital communication, the anarchic interstial space that is created within {adiscourse.net} is as curious and unresolved as the object and meaning which are always at hand.
{adiscourse.net} understands “discourse” as the general exchange of semiotic meaning between objects. Generally, this leaves the traditional confines of “disciplinary” knowledges, i.e. legal or medical “discourse” as investigated by Foucault, or its binary of simple linguistic exchange, i.e. the conversational exchange which is usually the focus of technical analysis. 10 {adiscourse.net} takes discourse as an expansive field which includes language (and its recursive structures), action and practice. In this way, {adiscourse.nt} follows up on a wide breadth of theory and critical production from the past century, from the linguistic turn at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Object-Oriented Ontologies of the past decade. The main conceptual points which help position an understanding of discourse in {adiscourse.net} follow as: (1)materiality, (2) no point of determination, and (3) unfixity.
The discursive field, as understood in {adiscourse.net}, builds on the extension of discourse made by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their inclusion of physical action and articulatory acts as elements of discourse. 11 Laclau and Mouffe push the limits of discursive production from the restrictions of language and norms, as provided by the structuralist thinkers Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, as well as beyond the generation of images and myths of Roland Barthes. 12 In their theories, discourse is also not an ontologically privileged field, as they understand that there is material existence outside of the discursive dimensions of objects and events, but the aesthetic-discursive dimension does involve the generation of contingently collective understanding .
The material quality of discourse is supported by materialist media theorists, such as Friedrich Kittler and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, as well as by the Object-Oriented theorists Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost and Graham Harman. In Kittler’s Discourse Networks: 1800/1900, the transition of human subject networks into the technical procedures of dissemination and reproduction site discourse within material operations, effectively developing a materialist understanding of how meaning is exchanged among animate and inanimate objects. 13
In this way, the discourse between two people or ten thousand must be mediated via a series of material operations, whether that comes in the form of ink from a pen on papyrus, the audio waveforms from a throat, or the “voltage differences” from computer screen. 14 Even in the situation of auto-discursive operations, the negotiation of meanings within a single human subject, the presence of concepts and recall are a fusion of semiotic and material qualities. {adiscourse.net}, as a set of discursive practices, is involved in the discourse among machines to machines, humans to humans, and humans to machines - all operations which engage in semiotic exchange (which is always paralleled by materiality) is discursive.
Another important orientation of {adiscourse.net} toward discourse is the absence of a “meta-discourse”. There is no priority of the “final” composition as a whole in relation to its parts - something called “overmining” by Graham Harman and Timothy Morton - nor is there is a special privilege of the word, utterance, or sentence in relation to its assembly - an example of “undermining”. 15 Just as Object-Oriented Ontology resists the usual flattening of ontological privilege into atomisms or totalities, discourse in {adiscourse.net} resists such styles of privilege usually given to “disciplines” - overmining - or signs - undermining.
Within their conception of the discursive field, Laclau and Mouffe define a flat recursion of institutions, events, subject positions and ideologies, thus developing a political discourse which also denies the presence of a determining form. 16 These ideas also overlay with the Lacanian perspective of the absence of a “meta-langugage”, stating that there is no plane of discursive determination superior to a coexistent milieu of negotiated meaning. 17 Discourse, in this way, is simultaneously negotiating letters, words, syntaxes, languages, actions, and ideologies co-determinantly.
Laclau and Mouffe utilize the terms “element” and “moment” for describing isolated discursive events and elements which begin to relate to each other. 18 “Nodal points” are the most cautified and static areas in the discursive field, fundamental to building ideological structure - pride in independence can be seen as a nodal point of the United States’ historical ideology, just as white supremacy is being currently uncovered as a nodal point within their national discursive field. While nodal points might have a more extensive influence on immediate positions within the discursive field, they are still not ontologically privileged - the discursive field cannot be exclusively understood from the nodal point, just as it can’t be from the moment nor the isolated element. All of these elements and types of assembly are equally constituted within the field - much less simple to understand, as it precludes a unitary perspective, but much more relevant to any productive understanding.
Ian Bogost uses “unit” as a descriptor within his understanding of OOO specifically because it avoids scalar privilege; metaphorically, unit systems can be infinitesimal as well as gigantic distinctions. 19 Further, he proposes the idea of “tiny ontology” as a form of the simplest ontological operation in contrast to the complex discernments which might produce a globally coherent ontology (which would be overmined or undermined). 20 “Tiny Ontology” is specifically of interest in {adiscourse.net} because it encapsulates the general distinctions of Laclau and Mouffe’s unprivileged discursive field and Levi Bryant’s theory of “flat ontology”, while also avoiding pitfalls of privileging processes and relations as determining forms in themselves. 21
In {adiscourse.net}, the surface effects of elements, connections, entanglements, sets and organized outputs does not ontologically privilege one type of element or assembly above others. The full network is not more important than the single contribution and vice versa, which is a huge transition from the final-format compositions of traditional publishing or social media which engage in the privileging of single types of objects above other (books, articles, tweets, etc.). Instead, {adiscourse.net} provides a malleable scope of elements and outputs which are examinable and isolated recursively. In the terms of OOO, objects themselves at all scales - discourse elements, databases, discourse spaces - are constituted a priori to the relations and operations among them. This ontological privilege of the object is what allows for the precarity of relations and meanings to become constructed, fortified, augmented and destroyed within the same discursive field.
{adiscourse.net} does not take discourse in terms of pinning down thematic or disciplinary perspectives. While Foucault establishes a manner of discursive analysis in respect to disciplinary meanings, structuring the modes in which discourse can be established through understanding the “surfaces of emergence”, authorities of control and grids of specification, even he only offers these modes contingently. 22 Discourse does not have mechanical equilibriums which can settle into static establishments. Discourse is the temporary operation of fixing meaning in specific conditions within an inherently “unfixed” field. From the theories of Laclau and Mouffe, “unfixity” is the inability for social meanings to find final positions within the discursive field, generating a constant, albeit uneven, precarity of meaning. Laclau and Mouffe’s conceptions of the “social” deny the possibility of any sutured totalities, even such as that assumed in the concept of “Society”. 23 For Laclau and Mouffe there is never a finality or completion of the social system which is able to avoid frontiers of contestation, whether the majority voices of a social structure openly recognize these contestations or not. The “social” is a delimited set of practices which constantly attempt to construct the impossible object - society; the discursive field is the space in which impossible objects - static meanings - are attempted to be constructed, reproduced or destroyed. {adiscourse.net} is an assembled space for this construction, reproduction and destruction to be actively negotiated in a limited capacity.
The “unfixity” of the field of discourse, as Laclau and Mouffe conceive it, is unavoidable due to all discourse elements containing a surplus of potential meanings and contexts, a condition they call “overdetermination”. 24 Any discursive event, articulation or object contains a wellspring of potential interpretations which must be limited and constrained in order to fix a temporary specific meaning. This idea is also paralleled in Object-Oriented Ontology/Philosophy in the way that objects proliferate in their observable qualities and contexts of interaction. Timothy Morton builds a bridge from Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics to basis of Graham Harman’s OOP “withdrawal” in stating, “In order to be coherent, a system must be incomplete. Let us extend this axiom to physical things: in order to exist, object must be fragile.” 25 Fragility, precarity, unfixity.
Because all discourse - its words, its signs, its images, its actions - are overdetermined, no momentary position is unchangeable, whether the process is instant and easy or arduously prolonged. In the summer of 2020 one can see the fixed quality of “peaceful protest” challenged and recast as a liberal avoidance of revolutionary praxis, rather than the accepted moral high ground as it has been generally regarded. The position of looting in the protests of the summer instigated by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis begins to separate the crystallized meanings of the term and its multifarious roles within civil disobedience because of its discursive overdetermination. As an action and as a concept, “looting” can be adjusted because its potentials of meaning can’t be exhausted by any single understanding. In reverse, Colin Ward interestingly recast the terms of “vandalism” in the 1970s to include the ecological and community vandalism perpetrated by developers, architects and governments, a transformative definition which is possible - even if not immediately repositioned within all discourse - because the potential of vandalism is ever expansive. 26
In Object-Oriented Ontology the quality of “overdetermination” is matched by object “withdrawal”, an operation which pulls back full essences from objects as they are interacted with by other objects. “Withdrawal” implies both the futility of realizing a total and final conception of an object, as well as the process of simplification for its temporary perceptive understanding - two implications which heavily relate to “overdetermination” in the discursive field and tie the effects back to a material base. 27 Discourse is malleable and unfixed, both as a semiotic exchange and as the material which produces that exchange.
In {adiscourse.net}, the instability or flexibility of its forms - the network of elements, the elements themselves, the syzygy of specific elements - is a performative quality of discourse, though it must also be understood that the same quality is present in the published book, even if the static mode of inscription doesn’t show itself in the same way.
In the language of {adiscourse.net}, specific words must be fixed against in contrast to their alternative forms: units, objects, elements, moments, spaces, faces. Several of these words are inherited from the various discursive sources previously discussed, and a couple must be defined in terms of the project alone.
“Objects” is generally taken in the manner developed by Graham Harman, Timothy Morton and Ian Bogost. An Object is a thing - an object is also an aggregate of other things - an object is also a component of other things. The space button on a keyboard is an object, the audio wave when the button is clicked is an object, the user is an object, the database of all {adiscourse.net} elements is an object, the visualized element in the browser in an object, the visual connection between two objects in the browser is an object, the custom made plotting device used to output discourse “states” is an object, the output itself is an object. As has been stated before, objects are increasingly and decreasingly recursive, can come into existence, can endure, and can be destroyed. Generally, “object” will be used rather surgically, specifically because their constitution is delicately and bluntly composed in Object-Oriented Ontology/Philosophy.
“Elements” are taken from Laclau and Mouffe’s descriptions within Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, though more specifically used in {adiscourse.net} as the basic input submission, saved as a database item with assorted data such as text content, position, space of submission, etc. 28 Visualized in the {adiscourse.net} interface (as described in a subsequent chapter), elements appear as boxes with text.
Just as Laclau and Mouffe use the word, elements are not tied to the classical elements (earth, water, air, fire), but rather to colloquial use such that an element is an object within a set or collection of similar objects. In architectural parlance, a louver element can be isolated and singular, used decoratively along a building level, or within a system of louvers, hung in an array as to block and deflect specific angles of natural light.
“Moments” are also taken from Laclau and Mouffe, who describe moments of contingently connected elements. Moments are not hard fixed relations among elements, but an aggregate form which might eventually build up enough mass to evolve into a “nodal point” which acts as an anchor of hegemonic meaning. 29 Moments is apt use in a discursive context, as the word also implies duration. Moments have lengths of duration, but like all things also must have beginnings and endings. The duration of a moment is the necessary counterpart to its precarity. In {adiscourse.net} moments take the form of the spatial arrangements of elements. A moment does not represent a set of related elements, as relations are expressed in attributional form within the object, but are a duration of syzygy with parts or wholes of sets. An moment in {adiscourse.net} can be ended by inserting an element between two other elements, thus breaking the signified placement of the original two. A moment can also be reinforced, extended in its duration, due to the same circumstances, as the condition of the moment is on whether the aesthetic/discursive context endures.
“Spaces” and “Faces” are each specifically developed within the context of {adiscourse.net}, though used in an operational manner which is central to the terminology and functioning of the interface. “Space” is used for a thematically separated area, chosen and combined from a previous list or created anew, in which to submit elements. {adiscourse.net} elements are visualized only if their space is entered or if the user chooses the global space of “[entire]-vollstaendig”. Specific spaces might be separated by thematic intent or type of submission, depending on the creator and contributers of the space. Spaces can be individually chosen, or multiple spaces can be entered simultaneously, allowing for an overlap between themes in which the elements produced belong to the combination of spaces and show up in both of the individual spaces as well.
These discourse spaces are a limited forum of presentation and reaction, a “space of appearance” which focuses on the material interactions of objects in the browser. Unlike Hannah Arendt’s description of the “space of appearance”, {adiscourse.net} spaces are constructed for the presentation of disembodied elements, moments, connections, all that is formed together by human interaction, client code and network communication. 30 Action within these spaces is similarly restricted by the norms and methods of the space (index.js + content.js), but can be contested and recreated as one augments the underlying code structure.
The two main operations of persistent exchange - the submission of writing into a newly formed discourse element, and the creation of a relation between existing elements - are separated in {adiscourse.net} into “faces”: the “geist face” and the “verbindungs face”. “Face”, as used here, has its roots in geometry, especially when investigating polyhedra, which are made up three basic types of data: vertexes (points), edges (lines), and faces (areas).
From another direction, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari build up the idea of the face - “faciality” - as an exchange locus between a formless white wall of signification, a similar sort of “arche-writing” surface as described by Jacques Derrida, and the “black hole” of subjectification:
"Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of frequency and probability, delimit a field that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness of passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality.” 31
Deleuze and Guattari approach faciality from the operations of the human face, the medial object between subject and the systems of collective meaning, which supplements the understanding of “face” as a plane dividing geometrical orientation. The face is an orientation through which to interact - to analyze, to describe, to transform - with an object which must be observed perspectively (whether in a rational parallel projection or via the fish-eye lens). Whether in the form of meshes or polyhedra, facet edges between faces determine a distinctly three-dimensional understanding of geometry. Even the two-dimensional mesh is embedded with the information of face “normals”, which describe the vector orientation - the one side from the other - which generates a dimension perpendicular to the face. To look into or interact with a geometry is to construct an orientation in relation to specific faces, to view the dodecahedron in a specific fashion which negates the possibility of examining all orientations at once. To unroll all faces and edges and examine all faces within the same orientation at once is an operation which simplifies and transforms the geometry into, yet again, a very specific perspective in understanding the geometry. As Timothy Morton writes on the impossibility of understanding the essences of objects, to know an object completely is also to not know an object discretely, thus precluding an comprehensive understanding of all perspectives towards an object at once. 32
The trouble with Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of faciality is a problem which is critiqued and transitioned away from within Object-Oriented Ontology and Philosophy: the prioritization of human subjectivity. In terms of {adiscourse.net}, this would mean only understanding the working of faciality through language and the human users which operate it in exchange processes, which ostracizes any technical or non-human sets of objects. OOO is able to avoid this by constituting subjectivity equally alongside objectivity, and placing their media of exchange - their faciality - within the “interobjective”. Morton describes interobjectivity as “nothing other than an aesthetic effect - it is produced, in other words, by the interaction of 1+n objects” and alternately as “the configuration space of relatedness.” 33 In general, the interobjective is an OOO subsumation of the subjective and the intersubjective, the de-privileging of the human subject over objects and non-human exchanges.
In this manner, the geometrical face and the human face share many different qualities, which allow for “face” to perform as a stand-in for medial object, like the glass and latex gloves which separate and combine the scientist and contagion. {adiscourse.net} faces allow for different interactions of persistence, different orientations toward exchange between human users, hardware, software and the network. Activating the “geist face” does not only conceptually reorient the user to the contributing operation, but materially reorganizes the medial object through code. The “verbindungs face” does the same, and each in turn deorients the other. Unlike polyhedra, the orientation process can’t be visuallized as simple terms of rotation or translation, but the effects are innately similar in their augmented terms of engagement.
As a project which addresses discourse, {adiscourse.net} attempts to visualize and allow for the inherent equality, flexibility and strangeness of discourse in its practices without reliance on traditional methods of constraint and dislocation. In this manner, {adiscourse.net} is set up as a frontier contestation of disciplinary discourses, as well as normal material production cycles and the commercial and social entanglement of authorship. Rather than seeing discourse as a binary spectrum between lawless twitter threads organized by corporate algorithms or intellectually gate-kept spheres of accepted terms and positions, {adiscourse.net} presents a limited alternative outside the gradient. Discourse has no perfect or correct practice, but the production of situated and radical practices is the only way of dissolving the entrenched (albeit always unfixed!) assumptions of technological and human interaction.
{adiscourse.net} deals with the interplay of dynamic exchanges, such as discourse, and separate forms of parallel production which are described as “states”. Most pointedly, there is a “getSTATE” button which produces another html page filled with a different style of similar content which can be saved in a few different ways. Subtly, within the interface, each frame of visualized content is a state of its own, updating with the scroll event like a generative flip book or strange reel of film. Left alone, states are simply wrapped back into an amorphous whole, assumed to be something they aren’t. In order to correctly expose a few distinctions of the state, as well as their limits of importance, {adiscourse.net} must define its perspective toward the state as well as the operations of statecraft.
Politically, the State generally represents an organized Other, a structure over and around, regardless of one’s position or temperament towards it. The State is understood as a hyperobject which endures and transforms, thus must be materially composed in space-time. To a majority of anarchists, the State is something to destroy, just as it is something to wear for authoritarians, or manipulate for liberal democracies, or usurp and transition for Marxists. The State means something very real in these conceptions, just as climate does, even though these very real things can hardly be described in any specific fashion.
As a revolutionary foil to the usual slew of understandings of the State, the German anarchist Gustav Landauer espouses a transformative definition:
“The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another – One day it will be realized that Socialism is not the invention of anything new, but the discovery of something actually present, of something that has grown…We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.” 34
Suddenly, the State is no longer a giant amorphous blob which is always outside and away, a god-like plane of determination, but simply a state of the system. The capital S shrinks down into something smaller, but much more interesting. As Landauer poses the state, just like any other “state of the art” or “I was in a bad state”, it is a frozen and examinable view of systems constituted equally, though not evenly.
Extrapolating from Landauer, the flaws of conceiving the State as a structural body are exposed in how reacting to the State becomes fighting a ghost, an exaggerated Picard Maneuver performed by dynamic institutions, production cycles, and roles. 35 When when approaches the State it becomes somewhere else, because the State is not the State, but merely a state. The state is a condition, a frame of objects and their connections, a frame of cycles and processes, a frame of power relations and subversive counter insurgencies.
As Laclau and Mouffe described the impossibility of Society, the inability of creating a solved and sutured social space without frontier, the State is also an impossible object in constant attempt of creating the perpetual power machine. Requiring systems of social reproduction and persistent storage, whether in the form of Police, Private Property, Ideology, or disciplinary knowledge, what is understood as the State is actually an ethereal other which can only be examined in the cadaver form of states. Landauer views this transition as joyous and optimistic, because it signals the very possibility of newness and change. However, Landauer still envisions leaving the state, somehow transcending the state within socialism, rather than viewing the state as a separate and derivative image which cannot be extinguished.
As an image, something that is virtual and extended from an original dynamic form, all states, whether the state of play or the nation-state, are examinable directly because they are false and frozen reproductions of the thing they represent. Bruno Latour describes images as “no longer a record of anything: they are the provisional translation and a possible rendering of data that could take any other shape.” 36 The state is as much a view into possibility as it is into constriction, something to act upon in the same way a CEO reacts to the graph-image of falling profits in the third quarter. The state is a coherent corpse of dynamic things, a simplification in the pursuit of understanding. The state is a magic trick where one thing recedes in order for another to take its place under the microscope.
Discourse performs similarly in this regard, examinable only in corpse-form as a reading of trajectories, as a state of objects and tensions and vectors. Discourse is never static nor local, thus entirely incoherent. Michel Foucault developed a situated mode of power and discourse analysis only through marking residual points and relations on the “surfaces of emergence”, like radiation onto a film dosimeter. 37 Ferdinand de Saussure wrote on the synchronic analysis of semiotics, pinning down its subject like a butterfly into museum board and intricately examining the cross-section of all system parts as frozen components. 38 Yet both the surface of emergence and synchronic analysis are techniques at developing states as side-glances at the real object of interest.
OOO/OOP describes this effect, yet again, in terms of “withdrawal” - as the examined quantum particle variously changed during observation, the examination of partial contexts while staring at where the full thing is supposed to be. The state represents a relation of the core sample to the glacier, a useful thing which has been de-contextualized because the full thing is too unwieldy. As Timothy Morton puts it:
“An architect makes an exploded view of a cross section of the [cinder] block. But a cross section of a cinder block is not a cinder block. A finger’s impression of a cinder block is not a cinder block. A butterfly’s touch on a cinder block is not a cinder block... Imagine the cinder block develops telepathic powers. In a single instant it knows its blockness in its entirety. But knowing a cinder block in a single instant of telepathic communion is not - wait for it - a cinder block!” 39
As much as it contains the readable and usable residuals of discourse, the discourse “state” is crossed over with an invisible and impenetrable watermark which reads “this is not a discourse”. The “state” is a different object than the discourse, and in {adiscourse.net} its pushed to an additional webpage, logging the skeleton millisecond skeleton of the interface in a sort of Bodies: The Exhibit style presentation, all while {adiscourse.net} continues dynamically elsewhere, whether being actively changed or left stagnant. The state is a metaphorical toe-nail clipping left behind. The state is a Covid-19 test you took yesterday in that its useful but not permanent, declarative but contestable, and nothing more than a momentary fragment of a dynamic condition. In discursive terms, a state is a translation or mediation of something.
{adiscourse.net} involves states, but doesn’t privilege them. There is nothing is more useful about the calcified discourse state within a book than there is in the river of discourse, merely a slower style of engagement provided by filling a cup with what used to be river. {adiscourse.net} states produce a similar form of isolated and immobile structure to Saussure’s synchronic image, but do so in a way which makes no claim of final completion. Pressing the “getSTATE” button does exactly that - it gets you a state you can permanently save in three types of data. When saved, this new object separated from {adiscourse.net} can be thoroughly reviewed and marked up, but it no longer has any effect on {adiscourse.net}. Two states saved within 5 minutes of each other are separate, whether they contain no deviations or one has been tripled in size. Traditionally, the continuity of states is materially reinforced through a reification of state-forms, such as the book or article, but {adiscourse.net} is a shifting of scales; not completely toward a reification of the dynamic interface, but toward a better style of back and forth pulling.
In The Dialogic Imagination, linguistic philosopher and theorist M. M. Bakhtin cultivates the differences of the Novel in comparison to early literary forms, ending in the Novel’s enmeshed relation to a incomplete world. 40 In contrast to the epic, containing an uncontestedly complete world, the novel describes a world it cannot fully conceive through various glimpses. These states, both viewable as portions of the novel as well as the novel itself, can become what Bakhtin calls “chronotopes”, which describe space-times of the novel’s perspectives. 41 But the chronotope is never definite, because the space-time is never fully describable, withdrawing along with objects.
{adiscourse.net} follows this Bakhtin path, respecting the states it produces while never believing their illustrations to be complete. More interesting is the indeterminate core of the dialogic exchange, of discourse, in each of the forms with which they mystify. The user must bounce between the discourse spaces, the discourse elements, and discourse states. In this way, seeing that both {adiscourse.net} and its states never achieve completion, it reproduces itself - it continues. Laclau and Mouffe form the idea that the overdetermination is what generates the possibility for change and continuation in discourse, Timothy Morton describes the condition for an object to exist as “precisely by being in a state of constant contradiction”, and Landauer’s anarchism is a push-pull between the state and the change of the social relations which construct the new state. 42, 43 {adiscourse.net} exists in exactly this disorienting duration.
{adiscourse.net} has no unilateral claim to discourse production - in no way does it suppose itself as a privileged form of discourse, nor is it a proposition to a “correct way” of discursive exchange. It’s an alternative set of practices, a proliferation of different interactions, which follows the image of mass differentiation which is central to the first wave of digital radicals like Ted Nelson as well as an anarchic praxis. {adiscourse.net} is the development of a minor practice among a field of minor practices. Ideally, we should all have strange methods of exchange and experimentation which endlessly search for more equitable and localized terms of agency, and, ideally, {adiscourse.net} is but one of them.
The state of software and hardware in {adiscourse.net}, the specifics of the interface coding and the styles of engagement and output, must be continually revised and - in gitHub terminology - “forked”. This implies the same need for technological literacy as written on the cover of Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib: “You Can and Must Understand Computers NOW.” 44 But it also implies a need for agential literacy, understanding how a field of minor events and minor operations functions in contrast to technological and social structures which commonly internalize “bottom-up” or “crowd-based” cycles of reproduction.
With the state as a freeze-frame of object relations, its construction is in the same space as resistance to it, and a truly recursive understanding of agency (and objects) is the prerequisite for establishing practices of free agency. {adiscourse.net} is a disturbance, something which has an immediate context and eventually dissolves, and further disturbances must be adapted for their immediate contexts. The social reproduction of anarchist agencies, the contingent goal of {adiscourse.net}, cannot be exclusively accessed through one project or approach. There should not be a total or stable vision of deconstructing totality and resolution, so {adiscourse.net} is joyously temporary, saved and archived only to be broken apart and diffused.
Each of the following divisions showing the forms of the project (Interface, Space of Engagement, Output) show the more practical developement of three major aspects, but also show how easily the topics bleed into the edges of each other and how starkly they also avoid overlap. Their stability is also shot - they work together, but not completely and not forever. Similarly, the precedent trajectories in the first section show how dimensional aspects of literary, technological and artistic work can provide for forming generous vectors of erratic development, but also that beyond the dimensions of overlay there are always deviations at play. There is no carrying momentum, even if its easier and (maybe) happier to think that way. Instead, there are constant exertions of force and brakes applied - the interplay of collective direction and the frontiers of difference which always present themelves. There is where {adiscourse.net} takes place, in the same confusion as other things, just more aware and more content in its temporariness.
- Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 19.
- Mikhail Bakunin. “Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism” (Speech, International Workingmen’s Association, Geneva, 1867). https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm
- Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2012), 123.
- Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, 123.
- Ward, Anarchy in Action, 18.
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 40-9.
- Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” (Panel Conversation, 1972). https://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze
- Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), .
- Christoph Spertz, “Free Cooperation” in The Art of Free Cooperation, ed.s Geert Lovink & Trebor Scholz (Amsterdam: , 2006).
- Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006).
- Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, (New York: Verso, 2014), 82.
- Roland Barthes, “Myth Today”, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
- Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
- Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software”, Stanford Literature Review vol. 9.1 (1992), 84.
- Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013), 45.
- Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 90.
- Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 688.
- Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 92.
- Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like To Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 25.
- Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 21.
- Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011).
- Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 40-9.
- Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 82.
- Ibid, 84.
- Morton, Realist Magic, 189.
- Colin Ward ed., Vandalism (London: Architectural Press, 1973).
- Graham Harman, “An Outline of Object-Oriented Philosophy“ in Science Progress 96 (2013), 195.
- Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 92.
- Ibid, 92-3.
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998), 199-212.
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 168.
- Morton, Realist Magic, 52-3.
- Ibid, 64.
- Gustav Landauer, “Weak Statesman, Weaker People” in Revolution and Other Writings (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), 214.
- Star Trek, “The Battle”, episode: 9, Directed by Rob Bowman, Written by Herbert J. Wright, November 16, 1987.
- Bruno Latour, Foreward to Signal Image Architecture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 17.
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 40-9.
- David Howarth, Discourse (London: McGraw-Hill Education, 2000), 21-2.
- Morton, Realist Magic, 50.
- M.M.Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
- M.M.Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel”, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.
- Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 98.
- Morton, Realist Magic, 174.
- Theodor Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines (Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press, 1974), cover.