Studi culturali e postcoloniali

1
Studi culturali e postcoloniali

• The virtual complexity of culture

2
A new social formation?

• Estensione del pensiero/discorso economico (il
  mercato concorrenziale) a tutta la
  società/cultura
• Riformulazione della cultura come capitale umano
• Economia dellinformazione e della conoscenza
  (valorizzazione economica dei saperi)
• Egemonia del lavoro immateriale (comunicativo,
  affettivo, linguistico, simbolico, cognitivo)

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Critica della società/cultura neoliberale

• Intensificazione della produttività e dello
  sfruttamento
• Finanziarizzazione della vita quotidiana (debito)
• Crescita delle ineguaglianze economiche
• Distruzione dellambiente
• Precarizzazione, insicurezza, ansia (soggettività
  divisa)
• Decisionismo, erosione della democrazia
  rappresentativa, autoritarismo politico

4
Sadie Plant (1996) The virtual complexity of
culture

• Oltre le scienze umane il connessionismo come
  approccio interdisciplinare
• Implicazioni per concezione dellintelligenza,
  apprendimento, sapere, e della relazione tra
  teoria e pratica

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The dynamics of complex systems

• The essay takes its cue from the self-organizing
  processes at work in human brains, artificial
  intelligences, and the new lateral configurations
  of text made possible by digitization. The
  dynamics of complex systems can also, however, be
  perceived in economies, ecologies, social
  formations, evolutionary processes and cultures
  of all kinds. (p. 203)

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Connectionism as method

• Klaus Meinzer defines connectionism. As an
  interdisciplinary methodology to explain the
  emergence of certain macroscopic phenomena via
  the nonlinear interactions of microscopic
  elements in complex systems, regardless of the
  scales or materials of which such systems are
  composed. Complex systems do not follow the
  straight lines of historical narratation or
  Darwinian evolution, but are composed of multiple
  series of parallel processes, simultaneous
  emergencies, discontinuities and bifurcations,
  anticipations, and mutations of every variety.
  (p. 210)

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Brains as complex systems

• The term connectionist was used to problematize
  notions of the brain as a given organ unchanged
  by what it thinks, and instead allow it to be
  defined as an emergent neurochemical system which
  is modified by every connection it makes. (p. 204)

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Donald Hebb (1949)

• Hebbs key innovation was to develop the
  understanding of synapses Arguing that
  connections between neurons are strenghtened and
  developed as they are made, he effectively
  suggested that learing is a process of
  neurochemical self-organization and modification
  (p. 204)

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Dal computer alla rete

• This early computer was a serial processor,
  performing one step at the time.. Neural nets
  function as parallel processors in which multiple
  interconnected units operate simultaneously The
  extent of interconnectedness.. Means that subtle
  shifts in activity in one area can have great
  implications for others, again without reference
  to any central site In effect, they are
  self-organizing. (p. 205)

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The Internet and hypermedia

• It is precisely this connectionist model which
  now emerges in the new arrangements and
  conceptions of knowledge necessitated by
  hypermedia How does text work when it becomes a
  component of multimedia? What happens when the
  reader and the writer lose their distinctiveness
  among texts which can be endlessly rewritten as
  they are traversed? (p. 206)

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From books to links

• Particular volumes or articles fade into the
  background of a system of textual organization
  composed only of links, links to links, and more
  links again. The virtual library is a complex
  communications systems in which contacts and
  junctions function like Hebbs synapses,
  reinforced and strenghtened every time they are
  made. Unused links may fade into the background,
  but nothing entirely disappears. (p. 207)

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Undermining mediations

• The emergence of the Net and hypertext is also
  concurrent with a shift in attitudes to
  publishing, teaching, the role and status of th
  academy, and, by extension, of all aspects of
  education and the so-called production of
  knowledge The mediating function of editors,
  curators, tutors and teachers are equally
  undermined by these shifts.
• (p. 207)

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Models of learning

• Todays academy still has its sources in Platonic
  conceptions of knowledge, teaching and the
  teacher-student relationship, all of which are
  based on a model in which learning barely figures
  at all The top-down imposition of knowledge
  becomes redundant and anything which might be
  called growth, evolution or development occurs in
  systems which function without such external
  governors or even centralized control of their
  own. (p. 207-208)

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From teaching to learning

• Released from its relation to teaching, learning
  is no longer coded as study and confined to some
  particular zone, specialized behaviour or
  compartmentalized period of time. A teacher no
  longer controls the process, ensuring the
  development of well-rounded individuals one step
  at a time, serial fashion those once defined as
  students learn to learn for themselves. (p. 208)

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From teaching to learning

• Machines learn and learning is a machinic
  process, a matter of communication, connection
  and material self.organization You live in
  cultures and cultures live in you(p. 214)

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A new interdisciplinarity

• Just as texts and computers lose their individual
  identities, so do the authorities, teachings,
  canons, bodies of knowledge and orthodox
  methodologies which were once proper to
  particular agencies. Bottom-up learning,
  hypermedia, and the Net do not merely facilitate
  a new interdisciplinary approach they demand
  one. (p. 208-209)

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Connectionism as method

• What were once separated lines and modes of
  research interact with each other, and also with
  an entire culture of equally complex, dynamic and
  mutually influencing systems the Net and
  hypertext, for example the Net and hypertext as
  they interact with markets the Net, hypertext
  and markets as they interact with neural nets
  the Net, hypertext, markets and neural nets as
  they interact with similarly complex individuals.
  (p. 211)

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Cultural studies and connectionism

• Cultural studies as the area with greatest
  potential to develop connectionist approaches (it
  is already interdisciplinary (themes and
  methodologies from the arts,literature, film,
  history, philosophy, and social sciences already
  interested in the media, hence sensitive to
  development of the net)

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Cultural studies resistance

• Interdisciplinary limited to the human and social
  sciences
• It concerns itself only with representations
• It is committed to a notion of individual and
  collective agency
• It condemns all reference to nature as
  naturalization

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Theorizing and doing

• Connectionism challenges the old distinction
  between reading and writing, connectionism
  challenges the old borderline between theorizing
  something and doing it Writing becomes a process
  of software engineering, of making connections,
  and connecting with other the other connectist
  systems and their connections too it does not
  totalize but is an instrument for the
  multiplication and it also multiplies itself. (p.
  215)

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Interpreting and making

• Cultural theory then becomes a matter of making
  cultures as well as, or rather than, interpreting
  them. (p. 215)