Dataspace: Agency and Determinacy

Dear friends at rhizome,

http://art.paultulipana.net/essay/Dataspace.pdf

is a link to new document by Paul Tulipana, "Dataspace: Agency and Determinacy." It is slated to be published in early 2005 by New York Studies in Media Philosophy.

For those readers interested in discussing new ways that the ontology of language can be explicated through the digital computer:

Dataspace is a glance at the space presented by the digital machine and an investigation into the possibility for constituted agency in a supposedly determinate language.

I would welcome your comments/criticism to paul at paultulipana.net, or on this mailing list.

Thank you. An graft from this document follows:

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“The sign is originally wrought by fiction.”
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena

"Someone asked: ‘In phenomena what is true?’ The Master said: ‘The very phenomena are themselves truth.’ ‘Then how should it be revealed?’ he asked. The Master lifted the tea tray."
Zen Koan

Language is a system of data, a way of communication between agents. Data itself is an extremely robust set, and includes a wide variety of sensory input that it inclusive beyond that of language: the sets of visual, audio, touch-sensory, and olfactory images are themselves only wrapped or communicated by language, never contained by it. Data can be singularly experienced (as much as anything can be singularly experienced), language is always experienced or understood-with - it communicates. Data is the inclusive way of signifying the world, not only as \_people\_ but as \_a person\_ (me) - it is the discretely singular and singularly plural relationships of (an) agent(s) to the world. Language is the communication of data - it is the pluralization of the singular, the conjunction of the disjunctive. There can be a sharing of the world before language, but only as a disjunctive sharing of being, a sharing of the sharing. Language is the origin of communicating data. It is the allowance for disjunctive sets of data - disjunctive origins of the world - to be interpreted and cast into usable social relations: laws, truths, science. [1] Data is the name of the interrelationship of the world and us here (all of us, each in turn), language is a technique for us relating to each other as regards all forms of data in the world, concrete and abstract. The problem at hand is to develop the space of that relationship - the spaces of data, language, and language-data, and to trace out the particular agency of this relationship … The digital computer (like its mechanical predecessors) is a model for a way in which we can understand the world. It is a concrete example of the felicitous and multifarious nature of language. Even better, it is a window into our mechanical understanding of language and simultaneously a concrete example of the way that language relates to the world.

[1] See Nancy (2000): 11. “In the same way, and reciprocally, ‘we’ is always inevitably ‘us all,’ where no one of us can be ‘all’ and each one of us is, in turn (where all our turns are simultaneous as well as successive, in every sense), the other origin of the same world.”