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<title>Learning to Code - Week 4</title>
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<h3 id="week4">Monday 15 February</h3>
<p>Looking back, turns out it was quite a week…</p>
<p>For the class on <b>“Document numérique et design de l’information”</b>, reading on “autogestion” (self-management) and free/open source software and GNU, texts to be annotated with a tool in development as part of the ANR project <a href="https://www.fmsh.fr/fr/recherche/30328">Archival - Valorisation d'archives multimedia</a>, to which the class contributes by annotating some of these materials (“Le projet ARCHIVAL travaillera sur la compréhension automatique multimodale du langage pour développer de nouvelles interfaces intelligentes de médiation et de transmission des savoirs.” – in addition to texts, the objective is to develop machine reading methods for video and other media and better navigation/exploitation of archival materials. The project leader, Prof. Ghislaine Azémard, <a href="http://www.chaire.fr/">Chair UNESCO ITEN</a> (Innovation, Transmission, Édition Numériques, FMSH / Université Paris 8), is on the teaching team, led by Khaldoum Zreik, which is great). We were introduced to the annotation software (still a bit clunky and awkward, with a bugging cursor they need to sort out) and reflected on some passages together.</p>
<p>The readings (Castoriadis, “Autogestion et hiérarchie” (1979), from the <a href="https://www.syllepse.net/syllepse_images/encyclope--die-internationale-volume-8-b.pdf"><i>Encyclopédie internationale de l’autogestion</i></a>; Olivier Blondeau, "Genèse et subversion du capitalisme informationnel. LINUX et les logiciels libres: vers une nouvelle utopie concrète?" in <a href="https://www.cairn.info/libres-enfants-du-savoir-numerique--9782841620432.htm"><i>Libres enfants du savoir numérique</i></a>, dir. O. Blondeau, Editions de l’Eclat (2000), and Richard Stallman’s <a href="https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html">“GNU Manifesto”</a> (1984) in the same (in Fr. translation)) were really interesting in highlighting the links between organizational structures in society, economy, technology and their interdependence – ie. you cannot create a truly horizontal structure inside a hierarchical framework, according to Castoriadis; self-management requires the abolition of all hierarchical (power) structures and (economic) inequality. A radical leftist thought from the 70s, which resonates well with Stallman’s free software movement, which is in a way the continuation of Castoriadis’s thought in/for the digital environment: proprietary software entails unequal economic and power relations and enables dependency and exploitation. Blondeau explains the Linux vs. MS as a mode of resistance against Fordist economy, and highlights the insufficiency of a Marxist approach to (material) production and property in the (supposedly) immaterial digital economy and (direct) intellectual value production (this might need some update today, better taking into account the massive material infrastructures required by the supposedly immaterial digital production and information). He also points out that the concept of intellectual property, created to <i>protect</i> the interests of humanity, for the work to be able to survive its creator, is now turning into its opposite and becoming an obstacle in the digital economy. Blondeau also makes reference to Eric S. Raymond’s metaphor of the “cathedral vs bazaar” to describe the hierarchical organisation vs Linux-style free and open source project (this also made me think of the Ihab Hassan-style opposition between modern vs postmodern: Proust-like cathedral idea (eve if there is an actual bazaar inside his circular cathedral…) vs fragment-like / networked construction à la Cortázar, for instance, or Bolaño’s <i>2666</i>, the loss of belief in the possibility of a Whole as a finished Thing…). The bazaar, despite its chaotic appearance, seems (proves…) to be a more stable structure than the cathedral – just like the network that doesn’t rely on a central piece (a keystone or <i>clef de voûte</i>) – because an issue at any point can be balanced out by alternative options/routes – or in the case of free software, the fact of multiple users being able to pick up and correct bugs rather than having to wait for the provider’s reaction and solution, results in a quicker and more flexible solutions. Things can of course go wrong, but they do with a centralized mode of organization as well – and often with farther reaching impact, if the system resists quick and easy reaction (NB the free software in itself surely still won’t lack hierarchical structures, and even the organization of at least some of the work would be overlooked by someone, at least in the design/conception phase – but perhaps here some hierarchy appears inside the horizontal framework, rather than the other way round?) </p>
<p>In any case, all this has taken me back (and forward again) somewhat unexpectedly to two key concepts I’ve been playing with which keep coming back, two projects I drafted at some point in different contexts and forms but which never materialized as such: one on <b>hierarchies</b> – this came from my musings on narrative paradoxes, in particular the aporetic mise en abyme, which collapses the hierarchy of diegetic levels (and narrative worlds), as well as the question of whether a networked society without hierarchy is conceivable at all, or how horizontal network and hierarchy can be complementary – and the other one on <b>complexity</b> and complex systems, where feedback loops replace hierarchical communication and command channels. All ends seem to meet again now – and the political, economic, social, and ecological importance of resisting dependency (both from companies and products, but also from structures held by a single power) through just accepting the black boxes we are offered. In any case, all this seems to confirm again the importance of learning to understand a bit better what it is we don’t have access to, and some of the potentials of code to (consciously or unconsciously) manipulate users and spread ideologies. This is just a first step, of course, but an indispensable one – like learning a language in a foreign country is indispensable for creating an autonomous life in it… In parallel, I’ve been reading Gao Xingjian’s <i>Le Livre d’un homme seul</i>, his memoire of sorts of living, surviving, and running away from communist China from the late 60s, with many direct and indirect references to oppression and the impossibility of not taking a position in certain moments – any action or non-action, enunciation or silence would be interpreted as a position of one kind or another anyway, without that one can always know on what basis a word or action is interpreted as a criticism or danger etc… and I watched a couple of documentaries about Mao and China, and how he managed to keep his power facing the many millions of people he made suffer (not alone, but with people who could never feel entirely safe again…), how fear and violence was used to make a large enough insurrection impossible, how lack of information could make believe in his ideologies, etc… and how dangerous it is to close our eyes and just accept… (not that we didn’t know… the banality of the evil, here too… but we can begin the resistance with just as banal means in the end…). Same applies to the ecology movement à la Greta Thunberg – Stiegler did make the link…</p>
<p>Half-day seminar on <a href="http://reticulum.info/3/"><b>Reticulum</b></a> with Everardo Reyes et co. – similarly about self-management and getting away from the surveillance and quantification-focused approach to academic research databases (ie. institutional repositories like HAL, commercial repositories like Academia.edu, ResearchGate etc.)</p>
<p>First class this term with Philippe Bootz, rehearsal of the basics of HTML/CSS. Philippe’s introduction was much more structured and abstract, explaining concepts and principles but giving less place to practice. An interesting contrast with the informaticians’ approach (Guillaume Besacier, Rodolphe Richard made us work through examples, but Philippe’s was a good overview and filling some theoretical gaps of terminology and background – the difference feels much like the one we’d find between a communication-focused Anglo-Saxon style language class (the informatician’s approach) vs. a European [Prussian?]-style theory- and structure-focused grammar class – Philippe’s use of a Word document to show bits of code HTML/CSS also materializes his more static approach, even though he did show us his code editor screen as well, and explained us how to use and what, not much space left for in-class practice, only a homework to do based on the examples he gave…)</p>
<p>First meeting with Serge Bouchardon and his class of three for the workshop on transcoding/recreating his 2009 Flash work, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxiohmeg780"><i><b>Toucher</b></i></a>, in HTML/CSS/JavaScript (à suivre…)</p>
<p>Reading on <a href="https://www.sitaudis.fr/Celebrations/tibor-papp-1936-2018.php"><b>Tibor Papp</b></a>, the visual-sound-digital poet whose oeuvre (ex. <a href="https://archive.org/details/hypercard_disztichon-alfa_2018-07-29"><i>Disztichon Alfa</i></a>) and legacy I’ll be working on with Philippe Bootz and Erzsébet Papp – slow exploration through Erzsébet’s monograph for now, I’ll need to call his widow, Zsuzsa to see if/when I could come look at the unpublished documents she has.</p>
<p>Also started working my way through <b><i>Architecture et technologie des ordinateurs</i></b>, with the chapter of the basic structure of the computer as we know today, the role and functioning of the CPU and the central memory, and the importance of the latter’s management. Serge Bouchardon likes to emphasize the memory management issue, as key to both programming and electronic literature, working with a living memory.</p>
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<p>In sum, many tiny steps in many directions, but I feel it’s not without a coherence – and giving a taste again of how everything is linked up – including with things I’m doing “outside work”, outside this project… I’m struggling to write it all down, it’s a fancy buzz inside my brain…</p>
<p>(And to start this new week, finally changed the background here, it was frankly very lame… Now I have a little issue with the display of images, as the background’s opacity seems to impact them and I’m not managing to block their transparency at 0%... work in progress too…). <br>
Here is a little before-after again:</p>
<img src="before2.png">
<img src="after2.png">
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