Conversational vehicles: conventional and paradoxical

Transforming the Art of Conversation (Part #10)

Especially interesting is the sense in which conversations are understood metaphorically as offering "vehicles" for social interaction. Given the worldwide use of vehicles of contrasting technological sophistication, and the intense focus on the development of vehicles (most notably automobiles), does "technomimicry" then suggest ways of transforming conversations?

Conventional vehicles: Imaginative reflection can most readily focus on:

automobiles, whose familiarity to so many could imply a corresponding familiarity with a particular style of conversation. The preoccupation with developing their energy efficiency, speed, power and safety invites speculation on the development of conversation. The tendency for their designs to converge to the point of becoming indistinguishable merits consideration with respect to conversation. The need for all-terrain vehicles and off-road vehicles extends the possibility of reflection -- especially in the light of the territorial concerns fundamental to many conversations.
public transport, as with buses, trains and planes, again suggests (through their very familiarity) the sense in which conversations are typically "packaged" according to some convention. The experience of a cruise ship is especially indicative of how a particular style of conversation is enabled -- even including the efforts of animators to transform that experience.
load-moving vehicles, typically trucks in all their variety, are indicative of how a conversation may be configured to shift a weight of concern. Further reflection may be inspired by earth-moving equipment (bulldozers, etc).
horse and cart ****
bicycle -- cycle paths

Frames of reference: Space ships are particularly interesting in that, understood abstractly, they are "frames of reference" moving in relation to other frames of reference within the universe of knowledge -- the known universe -- fruitfully to be explored in the light of the Special Theory of Relativity. Disciplines as modes of knowing can similarly be understood as credible frames of reference -- irrespective of how "incredible" any other frame of reference may appear from any one of them. More generally still, the metaphors in relation to which modes of knowing are articulated can themselves be understood as "vehicles", as separately explored (Metaphors as Transdisciplinary Vehicles of the Future, 1991).

Paradoxical vehicles: Especially intriguing is the possibility of "paradoxical vehicles", constructed on the basis of paradoxical topology, as exemplified by the Klein bottle. As frames of reference, such vehicles may lack any distinction between "inside" and "outside" characteristic of other vehicles as containers, as extensively discussed by Steven M. Rosen (Topologies of the Flesh: a multidimensional exploration of the lifeworld, 2006; Dimensions of Apeiron: a topological phenomenology of space, time, and individuation, 2004). These containers might be the vehicular equivalent of the paradoxical staircases in the drawings of M. C. Escher (such as Relativity, 1953) -- a theme of Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, 1979).

An earlier reference to such vehicles, by William I. Gorden, offers a fruitful link to the above consideration of games as implicit (or disguised) conversations:

Games are paradoxical vehicles for trying out alternatives and consequences with both involvement and detachment, where mistakes can be made without serious injury. Some academic games create miniature environments particularly suited to studying concepts and content of speech communication. (Academic Games in the Speech Curriculum, Central States Speech Journal, 20, 1969, 4)

In a discussion of the synchronicity explored by Carl Jung, Ira Progoff offers further insight into such vehicles:

As long as they remain fluid, however, they are like deep dreams and myths that provide a living connection to the elusive and transpersonal reality of the universe. Then the symbolism of each provides a way. While one is literally true in itself, all are true in some form and in some degree as paradoxical vehicles traveling toward a place of spirit that can only be reached indirectly (Jung Synchronicity and Human Destiny, 1973, p. 14)

Brian Holmes examines the attempt by Félix Guattari to create a "metamodelization" of the ways people join experimental assemblages in order to escape the behavioral patterning of cybernetic systems. These "assemblages" might well include conversations. For Holmes (Escape the Overcode: Guattari's schizoanalytic cartographies, or the pathic core at the heart of cybernetics, Continental Drift, 2008):

Guattari... was particularly aware of the ways that behavior is patterned and environments are constructed. His lifelong preoccupation with delirious machinism clearly has literary and artistic roots in the French avant-garde tradition... but it is also an attempt to respond to the construction of homeostatic environments and the patterning of behavior within them. The key concept here is "overcoding."

Overcoding is defined in A Thousand Plateaus [1980] as the expression of the capitalist axiomatic, resulting in "phenomena of centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization and finalization." But far from being just a linguistic phenomenon, overcoding works through the built environment, which must be conceived as inseparable from its many language machines (billboards, speakers, televisions, computers, etc.). The desire to formulate collective enunciations through participation in deterritorializing flows is an attempt to speak another kind of language, and more than a language..... However, Guattari in particular would always insist that semiotics extends beyond language, to embrace all signifying systems, whether visual, affective, gestural, volumetric, musical, etc. Thus his call for the creation of truly complex machines, simultaneously aesthetic and logical, pathic and rhizomatic: paradoxical vehicles of an embodied attempt to escape the overcode. [emphasis added]

Holmes helpfully clarifies Guattari's understanding of how this could be done in relation to cybernetics and the theory of general systems:

Again we must refer to cybernetics. The bugbear of early cybernetic engineers was positive feedback. It was conceived as a danger for homeostasis; and any correctly designed cybernetic system had to have damping mechanisms, to keep excessive feedback from causing the system to oscillate out of control. However, what Heinz von Foerster dubbed "second-order" cybernetics was interested precisely in positive feedback, and thence, in the passage of critical thresholds and the event of phase-changes.... A Thousand Plateaus, on the other hand, consciously partakes - though on its own highly idiosyncratic terms - in a larger, counter-cultural shift toward second-order cybernetics, a shift which is signaled in the very title of the book by the reference to Bateson (a transitional figure between the two periods of cybernetic theory).... From the early 1980s, Guattari's theoretical and experimental practice articulates a deliberate opposition to the environmental overcoding imposed by the models of first-order cybernetics.

For Holmes, Guattari's Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989) remains practically unread in the English-speaking world, due to its linguistic and theoretical difficulty. It is a work of "metamodelization" (of considerable potential relevance to future understanding of conversation as discussed here):

In other words, it is an attempt to invent a diagrammatic matrix that can indicate the ways different models are put to work in existential and social worlds. It is based on four coordinates or "functors": existential Territories, which appear in the form of cutouts; Universes of reference, which appear as constellations; energetic Flows, which appear as complexions; and Phyla of abstract machines, which appear as rhizomes (T, U, F, Φ). The interrelations of these four functors map out a self-overcoming system oriented toward the event of the phase-change, in which Guattari sees the possibility of collective speech. What's being sought is the capacity, not only to describe, but above all, to experiment with a process of becoming. And this is what has made the schizoanalytic cartographies such important tools for the experimental assemblages of artistic practice.

Consistent with reference above to embodied cognition in relation to patterns of movement in ball games, Holmes argues:

The beauty of Guattari's metamodelization is that, unlike the models of cybernetics or cognitivism, it leaves ample room for a pathic core of endo-referential subjectivity. This subjectivity is grounded in its own intensities; but its actual cutouts of territory are linked to the virtuality of artistic constellations via the continual echo in embodied consciousness of refrains, or "blocks of content," which have the effect of deterritorializing the experience of an existential territory. What the metamodelization aims to reveal, however, is the movement from the content of this subjective, enunciative field into the expression of objective social process, from which concrete enunciations emerge.

Holmes raises valuable questions concerning the relative value of such metamodelization following the subsequent emergence of "complexity theory", but especially:

... how has the original goal of cybernetics (instrumental mastery over the dynamic interactions of a complex system) been further developed by contemporary cognitive science, and what kinds of built environments are now coming down the governmental and corporate pipe? Does the pathic core of Guattari's schizoanalytic cartography offer any clues as to how such built-and-informationalized models could be subverted or subsumed? Or should his metamodelization be cast aside, as no longer useful for the problems of the present?