Using Big Data Tools on Petit Objets

As an entry point into my poetics (a productive synthesis of my instructions from the three texts used for our experiment) I wanted to test the generative potential of some topic modeling software (MALLET) that has become somewhat popular amongst digital humanists. Essentially, MALLET organizes words from a set of document into a preset number of “topics” based on their statistical likelihood of appearing in the same document.

After running  my 15 blog posts through MALLET, it generated the two data sets below. In the first table, the right column (Terms) is the set of terms that MALLET deemed statistically correlative, and the left column (Possible Topics) is my best guess at the conceptual string that connects these terms. It might be useful to revise the left column as I continue with my poetics or take suggestions for alternate topic possibilities in class.

Possible Topic	Terms
Interpretation	relationship desire painting art position viewer importance material artistic individual attention locating things determined focused artist social author extrapolating
Experimentation	images essay moving process filmic creation experiment audio representation felt unique bresson event metz object collection put logic project
Disparity	writes photography movement frame role kind world campany terms absence late elements part don control means mountain element doesnt
Precision	media julien search bragaglia specific focus tension claims locate photodynamism technology poetry poetics list initiated earlier subtle explicitly explores
Psychoanalysis	subject real agency human lecture approach freud repetition theory network act moments encounter consciousness leads relation traumatic place back
Fluidity	jullien shi contrast metaphysics chinese general western ulmer reality move thinking eastern situation culture aesthetic dynamism victory agent disposition
Unconscious	lacan unconscious function signifiers language conscious relations essential signifier description identical system pre constitutive mapping cut processes state understanding
Discovery	electrate important term metaphysics method concept century level matter characteristics word fact due definition question place made describes addition
Experience	image time film point present de duve nature refers photograph motion simply difficult order past photographic barthes literacy psychoanalysis
Jargon	instruction notion thing post space text moment section mind formulating contradiction instructions structure subjective clear similar posits claim binary

Most of the topics are fairly predictable as is their distribution which essentially aligns with the three different texts. In coming up with names for my topics, I just read the list of words two or three times and wrote down the word that came to my mind. I think the best topics I got were “Precision” and “Experimentation,” a somewhat contradictory pair, both of which figure prominently in my cinematic blogs. Topics such as “Unconscious” and “Psychoanalysis” were not very illuminating, although I think its interesting that “interpretation” figures  prominently in my lacan posts.

Blog	Topic Prevalence 1	Topic Prevalence 2	Topic Prevalence 3
cinematic1	Precision-38%	Discovery-11%	Fluidity-10%
cinematic2	Experience-54%	Discovery-10%	Interpretation-8%
cinematic3	Experimentation-29%	Interpretation-16%	Experience-14%
cinematic4	Disparity-32%	Experience-14%	Experimentation-13%
cinematic5	Experimentation-39%	Experience-17%	Jargon-9%
julien1	Fluidity-26%	Disparity-26%	Interpretation-14%
julien2	Discovery-27%	Fluidity-16%	Disparity-11%
julien3	Fluidity-53%	Discovery-10%	Jargon-8%
julien4	Fluidity-35%	Jargon-15%	Precision-11%
julien5	Discovery-25%	Precision-25%	Jargon-8%
lacan1	Unconscious-33%	Discovery-15%	Jargon-9%
lacan2	Unconscious-38%	Discovery-13.5%	Jargon-11%
lacan3	Interpretation-38%	Psychoanalysis-12%	Jargon-12%
lacan4	Unconscious-30%	Psychoanalysis-25%	Discovery-8%
lacan5	Psychoanalysis-43%	Jargon-14%	Unconscious-12%

Of course, this data is only really valuable for its generative potential considering it is almost entirely dependent on interpretation. But, since “all roads lead to Rome” (i.e. the unconscious), I don’t see a reason why we can’t use tools like this in electracy for mapping constellations of signifiers. Maybe an instruction could be formulated from the most prevalent topics in the three blog sets (unconscious, fluidity, and experience). Here is an attempt: An electrate metaphysics explores the unconscious fluidity of experience.

Toward Techniques of Flippant Precision

My last set of instructions from The Cinematic is a bit more difficult to condense into a single idea because they are more technical in nature. I suppose my best attempt at a single instruction would be: have an attitude of flippant precision in capturing images of the particular event, technique, felt, or object you are focusing on. Hopefully this instruction will become less vague as the post continues.

In his essay “Images a la sauvette,” Henri Cartier-Bresson navigates the border between genuine “picture stories” and contrived compositions, citing the former as that collection of images which “can strike sparks from a subject” (43). For Cartier-Bresson, the role of movement is vital to the creation of a picture-story because “you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.” Unlike the static, analytical method of literacy, electracy flows according to the logic of its object. Similar to shi, you have to position yourself in accordance with the dynamics of the situation as it presents itself to you. Be flippant about your control over the representation, just be precise in maintaining this element of flippancy.

Similarly, Cartier-Bresson mentions that in the creation of a picture-story (the “spark” for the subject, the punctum, objet a, etc.) one must resist the urge to overshoot as this will “clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole” (44). This is an especially important point to keep in mind in our era of practically unlimited image taking and archiving capacity. Don’t leave all of your editing until later; discriminate during the creation process itself. Also, Bresson invites us to integrate text into our images as well, since captioning can “illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of camera to reach” (46).

Gaensheimer writes about a six-minute film called Gellert that might serve as a good model for our experiment. The film is simply a montage of photographs all taken within the same hour combined with a continuous stream of audio from the event. The effect of the still images and streaming audio collapses the temporal barrier between past of the image and the present of the audio to the point that “what was, what is, and what will be merge smoothly with one another” (76).

This experiment could even be accomplished with images and audio found online. This experiment would be mostly flippant in selecting the materials; the precision comes into play in the final product, or that reified moment of hitting the play button and watching the object organically unfold. Blake Stimson refers to this (post)process in his essay “The Pivot of the World” as “entering into a dynamic relationship that gives its truth only in the process of its unfolding” (94).

As a final note from the Stimson essay (and the collection as a whole), I would like to drive home the point that you should intersperse moving and still images in your experiment since each genre conveys a unique relationship to time. Stimson astutely points out that film is actually much more limited in its representation of time because it homogenizes time into a “false synaesthetic naturalism” which sacrifices the atemporal abstraction offered by photography. The question to propel my next series of posts on my electrate poetics would then be: how can I capitalize on this unique perceptual experience offered by the combination of still and moving images in the creation of my felts?

Circling the Imagistic Object

My next constellation of instructions begins to tie together Lacanian psychoanalysis with specific filmic techniques from The Cinematic. This will be an important post to return to in formulating my poetics.

Instruction: represent the objet petit a by creating circuitous images of displacement while keeping in mind that to “get at” what is “not-get-at-able”you do not actually “get” there, you can only circle it.

Gaensheimer writes that the blurred movement between images in a photo montage plays the role of “that which is not representable in the concrete idiom of the medium” (74). Its self effacement simultaneously reproduces and conceals the object of its mediatic desire, which is perhaps the same tension between motion and stasis which unites the essays in this collection. This is reminiscent of my previous post about how media betray their innate desires by traumatically obsessing over their representational barriers. Thus, it becomes clear what Gaensheimer means when she writes that this transition from image to image is the thing (the limit) which is “present only in the form of absence.”

Likewise, Wim Wenders discusses how the lack of interpretive clarity in certain films creates potentiality in her essay “Time Sequences, Continuity of Movement.”  She writes that the enumeration of “little details” can be utilized to create “images that don’t come complete with their interpretations” (88). Although the unreflective sustenance of ambiguity can lead to the worst kind of post modern abstractionism, one could take Wenders’ instruction as “don’t force literacy onto the electrate.” Or, more simply, don’t do the speaking for your images because they need to be given space (and time) to communicate in their own language.

A more practical instruction comes from Christian Metz’s “Photography and Fetish” in which he isolates the distinction between off frame displacement in film and photography. Using Pascal Bonitzer’s terms, Metz claims that filmic off frame space is “substantial” while photographic off frame space is “subtle.” Essentially, the distinction is that filmic off frame elements always hold the potential of entering the frame (either visually or auditorily) while photographic elements are held in perpetual abeyance. For Metz, this perpetual absence marks photographics as more explicitly fetishistic than films. Although Metz doesn’t offer much in terms of technical application of this theory, he does allude to Barthes’ notion of the punctum as “the only part of a photograph which entails the feeling of an off-frame space,” thus emphasizing the point that the absence of the off frame element must be evoked by a feeling that is within the image’s frame. Similar to the temporal tension between past and present that I discussed earlier, this punctum propels the viewer outside the frame of the photo only to discover that the “thing” she is in search of was always already the lack initiated by an element within the image itself. This is Lacan’s image of the rim as a diagram of the movement of desire, entering into the gap only to return from where you came.

David Campany explores the notion of absent presence (or present absence) in our current media ecology in his discussion of “late photography” in “Safety in Numbness.” Campany defines late photography as the “trace of the trace of an event,” referring to Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of the World Trade Center wreckage as a paradigmatic example. He refers to these traumatic images as “remnants of activity.” These are images that arrive late on purpose because the rise of motion in our visual economy has forced photography to relinquish certain claims to knowledge dissemination to other forms of media, thus forcing it to negatively redefine itself in terms of its unique capacity to invoke a contemplative return.

In part, Campany’s goal in this piece is to locate the unique function of photography in our increasingly visual-digital culture and how it has (or will) restructured our subjective relationships to memory. He writes, “The structure of memory is in large measure culturally determined by the means of representation at our disposal. As our image world shifts in character, so do our conditions of remembrance” (187). Continuing, Campany claims that the new position of late photography is less a reaffirmation of a photographic’s affinity with remembrance than a “nostalgic wish that it still has such power.”

In many ways, Campany’s essay reveals how the photograph's search for the thing (the objet petit a) that is missing is the search for photography itself, which is always a position in a constellation of competing media.

I think Campany’s essay is instructing me to discover the new role of photography by returning to those sites of wreckage that are passed over every fifteen minutes or so in the media blitzkrieg of instant access and take some late photographs.

Contrast: Playing Nice with Jullien

In addition to his general contrast between Western and Eastern metaphysics, Jullien presents a series of more specific contrasts between various Western and Eastern cultural entities (theorists, aesthetics, strategy). For this post, I want to focus on Part Two, or the section on art and aesthetics, which I believe most explicitly outlines the role and importance of Contrast within the notion of shi.

In his first section "Absence of Mimesis: Art Conceived as the Actualization of Universal Dynamism," Jullien explores the Chinese emergence of “an autonomous aesthetic mindset” following the disintegration of the unified empire at the close of the second century A.D. Contrasting this Eastern artistry with the West’s propensity for mimesis or representation, Jullien describes a Chinese aesthetic that simultaneously captures universality and particularity rather than merely depicting universality or particularity. He writes, “artistic activity was seen as a process of actualization, which produced a particular configuration of reality….The particular disposition that receives form can potentially express the universal dynamism” (75). In this way, the painting is not an replication of the dynamism within reality but is itself a new dynamic moment of reality. Shi innovates rather than recapitulates. Possible instruction: MOVE AWAY FROM REPETITION AND TOWARD INNOVATION. This is an instruction we know well by now, even if we do not always heed it.

As he moves to a more specific example of aesthetic shi (poetry and literature), Jullien complicates this notion of contrast as I have been presenting it as a movement from one place to another (away from X and toward Y). Instead, Jullien argues, one should “exploit the potentials of both those contrary qualities” in order to adequately reveal their essences which can only be grasped through their differences. Jullien warns, however, not to confuse this  contrast that promotes originality with the “contrariness, contradiction, and quasi-mechanical subversion” that leads to mere novelty (87). Contrast, as opposed to contradiction, strikes a balance between a subtle “tension” and an overt “saturation that permeates the tension and brings about relaxation and enjoyment.”

The important thing to glean from this example in thinking about our instructions for Contrast is to keep in mind that contrast maintains, rather than “moves away from,” differences, and not only that, but it maintains differences only to the extent to which the false resolution toward which tension inherently gravitates is forestalled by the “harmonious saturation” that makes the tension tolerable. An instruction: PUT YOUR CONTRASTS TOGETHER, BUT MAKE THEM PLAY NICE.