event mechanics

Extracts from Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life” in Pure Immanence: Essays on Life (extracts p. 28-32, ital. added):

Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a “Homo tantum” with // whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life …
But we shouldn’t enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death. A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by // are neither grouped nor divided in the same way. They connect with one another in a manner entirely different from how individuals connect. It even seems that a singular life might do without any individuality, without any other concomitant that individualizes it.
[... //]
A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself. But however inseparable an object and a subject may be from their actualization, the plane of immanence is itself virtual, so long as the events that populate it are virtualities. Events or singularities give to the plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events their full reality. The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities. A wound is incarnated or actualized in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the plane of immanence that leads us into a life. My wound existed before me: not // a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field). There is a big difference between the virtuals that define the immanence of the transcendental field and the possible forms that actualize them and transform them into something transcendent.

What is a singularity? It is a simple question, but any answer is not so simple and I am not so sure. There are the scientific answers. Whatever. They are too simple, because they assume too much.

In The Logic of Sense Deleuze isolates the ‘fourth person singular’ as a dimension of language found in the infinitive verb — to walk, to battle, to die. Each singularity correlates to a singular event — a walk, a battle, a death. Think about an infant learning to walk. The infant does not internalise in a conscious manner the biomechanics of the act of ‘controlled falling’. There is no fully thought concept of ‘walking’ present in the infant’s mind before walking. How do I know that? Think of stroke or spinal injury patients who are taught to walk again.

The act of walking is perfectly singular — everyone/every situation has a walk — and immanent to the act itself. Each act of walking does not actualise ‘to walk’ (the third person infinitive) of every possible act of walking. There is always an otherwise to walking that remains dormant as pure potential captured by the infinitive ‘to walk’. Each act of walking belongs to the series of walking. ‘A walk’ is the pure event of this series.

The next problem relates not to the complexity of events — the above example of walking is already highly complex — but to the complicatedness of situations. A ‘situation’, as I am using it here, is a manifold of events, which, for example, may contain millions of events and therefore millions of singularities. How does one talk about the singular dimension of a situation? In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of Haecceity:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. [...] Tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects. Among types of civilizations, the Orient has many more individuations by haecceity than by subjectivity or substantiality: the haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines constituting a complex individual. In Charlotte Bronte, everything is in terms of wind, things, people, faces, loves, words. [...] A degree of heat, an intensity of white, are perfect individualities; and a degree of heat can combine in latitude with another degree to form a new individual, as in a body that is cold here and hot there depending on its longitude. [...] A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as in certain white skies of a hot summer. This is in no way an individuality of the instant, as opposed to the individuality of permanences or durations. A tear-off calendar has just as much time as a perpetual calendar, although the time in question is not the same. There are animals that live no longer than a day or an hour; conversely, a group of years can be as long as the most durable subject or object. We can conceive of an abstract time that is equal for haecceities and for subjects or things. (261)

A haecceity correlates to the ‘thisness’ of a singular actualisation. Although they do not argue it, I want to suggest that their concept of haecceity allows Deleuze and Guattari to deal with the problem of the complicatedness of situations. ‘Individuality’ as used in the above extract from A Thousand Plateaus relates to the singular nature of a “season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date”. These individuated ‘things’ do not correlate to a singularity but a whole constellation of singularities.

This is not a problem of rhizomatics or the mechanics of complexity, rather it is a problem of language. The most obvious example of a singularity is found in the infinitive verb. Yet, like any mode of representation, any infinitive verb is a reduction. ‘To walk’ surely contains the singularity of ‘a walk’ when actualised or in potential, but ‘a walk’ is constituted by many singularities. Think of all the movements of the body demanded when walking. ‘To move’ is another infinitive correlating to ‘a move(ment)’. There is a fluidity of the body whereby one might suggest that the whole body moves in a singular movement when walking. Why separate the arms from the legs from the hips? Indeed, think of all the movements required of the body when living! Why separate out one particular movement — a walk — from the fluidity of living? Or, for that matter, from the fluidity of the chaosmos? Because we can, because of language, because of sense.

Deleuze’s solution to this problem is partially answered in The Logic of Sense in his concept of death and of the crack-up. Death is a pure event. The ‘crack-up’ is a crack that forms on the surface of all things. It is a little bit of death in everything. I shall write a follow up post to this expanding on this point as my current bed-time reading is “Pure Immanence… a Life”. I have a feeling he will expound the other side of the event.

Dear Nan, Some lives are full of importance and the extraordinary, but by taking on life without regrets, you demonstrated what was important about an ordinary life. I hope to live a life as worthy as yours. Glen

I have scanned the Gomart and Hennion piece on what they call the ‘sociology of attachment’ but which also discusses ‘event-network theory’. It is a hard and fast ‘event’ theory influenced by Foucault and Actor Network Theory, but different to Deleuze’s hard-to-explain ‘singular’ conception and Foucault’s ‘historical periodization’ conception of events.

I am pushing for an event-based Cultural Studies so if anyone wants the article email me or leave your email in the comments below and I will email it. I have got the PDF down to about 5mb I apologise if this is too big for your mail server. (I tried turning it into a torrent, but I’ll be buggered if I know how to do it.)

Lastly, a poster I bought of the shortlived Big Kev V8 Supercar racing motorport team. Big Kev was a ‘larger than life’ entrepreneur who died last year from a heart attack. His sponsorship of a V8 Supercar team provides a unique affective congruence. His tagline “I’m Excited” dovetails very nicely into the mode of coverage for motorsport which is organised around the ‘action’. Racing is represented as much as the ‘action’ as event is captured and transmitted into the home or where ever. Big Kev produced ‘action’.

Nick over at Memes of Production links to an essay (via Crooked Timber) entitled Critical Information Studies: A bibliographic manifesto (PDF document) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. It is a very well written paper. Vaidhyanathan writes:

Critical Information Studies investigates four dynamic fields of scholarly analysis and debate:

1) the abilities and liberties to use, revise, criticize, and manipulate cultural texts, images, ideas, and information;

2) the rights and abilities of users (or consumers or citizens) to alter the means and techniques through which cultural texts and information are rendered, displayed, and distributed;

3) the relationship among information control, property rights, technologies, and social norms; and

4) the cultural, political, social, and economic ramifications of global flows of culture and information.

CIS is not a subfield of Cultural Studies, nor of communication. It is a ‘transfield’ that both cuts across and gathers together scholars in many fields and disciplines.

A few people seemed to be turned off by what can be charitably called the ‘urgent tone’ of the piece. Normally I would locate this squarely in the self-aggrandizing scholarly-arm of the cultural industries, but I think Vaidhyanathan is actually saying something important and relevant.

My only problem with the paper is that it borrows those elements from Cultural Studies that are largely irrelevant to what I am trying to do! I am doing an event-based Cultural Studies, rather than one which is text based. The form/substance of many cultural expressions/contents are not ‘textual’. They require a ‘mechanics of the event’, rather than a ‘reading of the text’. I am currently writing up this section of my dissertation where I construct an ‘event’ for Cultural Studies drawing on Adorno, Debord, Foucault, Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Massumi and others.

Another article in the same issue of Cultural Studies by Gilbert B. Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt’s “Music for nothing or, I want my MP3: The regulation and recirculation of affect” comes close to what I am talking about. The article highlights how music as well as legal threats affectively modulate a given situation. In the case of music, the example provided is of a dinner party whereby guests took turns downloading songs to effectuate the evening in a particular way. Similar, music companies pursue file sharers not through the courts but by using the atmosphere of fear produce through the threat of court action. Thus they modulate the affective terrain of IP and so on, which is in part Rodman & Vanderdonckt’s argument.

My problem is that ‘music’ (like literature, film, etc) is too easily defined as cultural. The affects of music are easy to understand as cultural as music itself is understood to be cultural. If we work from Raymond Williams definition of culture then there are many aspects of everyday life that are ‘cultural’ without properly being recognised as such. The obvious problem for me is to figure out how enthusiasm, technology and culture all intertwine.

In terms of Rodman & Vanderdonckt essay, the affects of discovering, locating and aquiring music and the cultural practices performed in this pursuit (pgs. 250-251, 255) are not the same affects produced by the music and act of listening itself. Using the problematic terminology of Grossberg, they describe these practices as forming “popular circuits of affective investment” (251) that exist in opposition to the multi-national music company strategies of distribution.

Listening to music and plugging into the various immaterial and material infrastructures that enable and produce a ‘scene’ are two separate dimensions of the singular event, which in this example is ‘finding and downloading music at a dinner party’. To elide the distinction between the different dimensions of this event is problematic because the music itself is largely irrelevant. The music enables a kind of becoming-together between the dinner party guests.

Part of my response to the problem posed by the event is to think about the affective dimension of technology and the cultural dimension of the technical. This is crucial for my work because the difference between working on a car, driving a car and watching someone else do something with the car or whatever involve different affective relations but all may be necessary parts of a singular event. Are these dimensions of the event ‘cultural’? I am assuming they are for the purposes of my dissertation!

The Fast and the Furious Three: Tokyo Drift is due for release in a couple of months. One of the interesting things from the recently released trailer is the tagline:

This Summer
Speed Needs
No Translation

Translation implies a cross-cultural exchange. The ‘translation’ line is relevant because the film is largely set in the ‘underground drift racing scene’ of Tokyo. Funnily enough, my only two publications online deal with both aspects of this tagline. Regarding the relation of alterity between Japanese and US car cultures see my article here on the failure of the Pontiac GTO (aka Holden Monaro) in the US. The article includes extensive commentary on the Fast and the Furious franchise.

What is ‘speed’ and how could it be translated? If you read my short article here on the affects of speed and automobility you’ll get some idea of why this is only partially true. To the extent that the affects of speed pertain to a particular single culture of automobility, then ‘speed’ doesn’t need to be translated. However, ‘speed’ in itself is not transcultural, only the mass-produced affects and commodities of automobility are, including mass-produced ‘road users’.

Other interesting things to come out of the impending film release is that a video game is being released for mobile phones. The fellows in Melbourne whom I have had some dealings with have also experimented with mobile phone media.

Heaps of stuff on this French blog.

Lastly, it will be very interesting to do a comparative reading of the Initial D live action movie against FF3, both come out of very successful franchises and both deal with enthusiast Japanese car culture. FF3 is looking very Hollywood compared to the almost quaint but definitely restrained realism of Initial D. On opening in Hong Kong Initial D made more money than Mr and Mrs Smith and Star Wars Ep3.

I am not sure if I’ll have enough time to squeeze FF3 into my dissertation.

I was on the incline bench press yesterday and my left shoulder popped out on the last rep of my last set. It is a weird feeling to look down at part of your body and see a concave deformation where there shouldn’t be one. I dropped the bar, as you would expect, and signalled to a fellow gym patron that I would appreciate it if he would, “Get one of the dudes, my shoulder’s popped out.” He got one of the dudes. There wasn’t much he could do, so I slid my legs around and pushed myself up with my good arm. (I was on the incline bench you would normally use to do sit-ups but at the squat/press frame doing incline bench presses.) As I slid up and my back was near vertical I could feel the joint moving back into place. It slid back in by itself.

The feeling of it sliding back into place was a very weird feeling. It was not so much pain, like your body is telling you something is wrong, even though it hurt like hell; no, this feeling was beyond mere get-you-hand-out-of-the-fire information. It was like my body was a parent who had stayed up late to make sure a wild teenage son or daughter made it home alright. My shoulder made it back home, into place, and like a worried parent, the rest of my body let out this internal or inaudible sigh of relief.

So now I am on the drugs. Mad drugs. Yeah.

I am going back to the gym tomorrow, just to do some cycling or something. I need to do something to stay relatively fit otherwise I’ll lose it.

I have been thinking about the definitions of ‘adult’. Pierre Bourdieu defines adult in terms of ‘social age’ which is separate from ‘biological age’. When one is an ‘adult’ one assumes certain responsibilities in exchange for assuming certain freedoms. However, there is another definition of ‘adult’ (and therefore ‘age’). This was made apparent to me while rewatching the early seasons of The Sopranos. It relates to Adorno’s conception of mass-culture as belonging to an infantile milieu. Here he describes it in terms of mass-produced music:

Not only do the listening subjects lose, along with the freedom of choice and responsibility, the capacity for conscious perception of music, which was from time immemorial confined to a narrow group, but they stubbornly reject the possibility of such perception. They fluctuate between comprehensive forgetting and sudden dives into recognition. They listen atomistically and dissociate what they hear, but precisely in this dissociation they develop certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring. They are not childlike, as might be expected on the basis of an interpretation of the new type of listener in terms of the introduction to musical life of groups previously unacquainted with music. But they are childish; // their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped, but that of the forcibly retarded. [...]
Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible. The sickness has a preservative function. [...]
Regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising. Regressive listening appears as soon as advertising turns into terror, as soon as nothing is left for the consciousness but to capitulate before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods, // literally its own thing. In regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character. (The Culture Industry, 46-48, bold added)

The Sopranos itself, particularly the first and maybe second seasons, is a complex text. The tensions staked out between the main characters are purposeful and crisp. They involve complex everday life problems (rendered mildly cartoonish through the sex and violence and mobsterisms). The vehicle of this network of tensions is the psychiatrist-guided self-exploration of mob boss Tony Soprano. One of the core tensions is between the image of the media-spectacle ‘mob boss’ as a powerful totality and the unfinished dimension of Tony’s character. The media itself is tackled and represented in terms of its capacity to block or close off relative to the open potential of Tony’s (dare I write it) becoming. (Or should I say the becomings of the Tony-Psychiatrist assemblage.) There are various other tensions similar to this mainly in terms of identity (fatherhood, childhood, motherhood, sexual identity, drug addiction, etc).

Although there are some problems with the obviousness of the matriarchial-victim/agitator plot line of the first and second seasons, it is obvious that in later seasons the death of the actress (Nancy Marchand) who played Tony’s mother, Livia Soprano, was to the show’s detriment. Instead of Tony’s singular unfinished nature, with all his strengths and frailties, gentleness and violence, the horizon of the ‘mob-boss/mafioso’ image spreads to that of the ‘minor’ characters. The ‘minor’ characters are much less engaging. The plot mechanism is still often psychiatry or psychiatric help, and the horizon of potentiality is constructed through various tensions being played out through other characters.

What might be useful here, in part, is Agamben’s reworking of Deleuze’s initial conception of cinema and the ‘movement-image’. Agamben rethinks the ‘movement-image’ as being the ‘unity of gestures’ (from an essay on Agamben’s work here):

Cinema, especially silent cinema, is the primary and exemplary medium for trying to evoke gestures in the process of their loss. Deleuze defines the images of cinema as, initially, movement-images, and Agamben extends this analysis. If Deleuze breaks down the image into movement-images, Agamben will further break down the image into gestures. If the unity of the image has been broken, then we are left with only gestures and not images. What is this fragmentation of the image? The image is a kind of force field that holds together two opposing forces. The first is that the image reifies and obliterates the gesture, fixing it into the static image. The second is that the image also preserves the dynamic force of the gesture, linking the gesture to a whole. What we need to do is to liberate this dynamic force from the static spell of the image.

Debord’s cinema reinstates the gesture as part of the image and not the image as a reified segment of an image-series. The ‘gesture’ is Agamben’s term for the molecular components of the image that allows us to think the potentiality of the image, rather than is subsumption in the cinematic totality of pornography or advertising’s endlessly deferring image-series:

The spontaneous ideology of communication is that the medium is secondary to expression. When something is ‘properly’ expressed we no longer notice the medium. The repetition and stoppage of montage reveal the medium, the ‘pure means’, and allow it to be shown as such. Not so much particular images but the image as medium: ‘The image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing into what makes it visible’. Agamben gives two very different examples of this showing of the image as such, which reveal that the image is, in fact, imageless, because it is no longer an image of anything. One is pornography or advertising, in which the image is revealed as deficient, exposed as such, *but only to lead us on to more images*. There are always more images promised that will fulfill our desire but this image as such is not it. The other way, Debord’s way, is to exhibit the image and so to allow the appearance of ‘imagelessness’. In this case there is no longer some other image but the end of the image. It is in the difference between these two strategies that the ethics and politics of cinema exist.

Agamben’s ‘gesture’ I think is going to be useful for eventually thinking through how it is possible to imagine a minoritarian use of the cinematic. The cinematic is not cinema. Cinema is the industrial-cultural mechanism for the distribution of cinematic properties (ie commodities not states or capacities) for consumption. On the other hand, the cinematic is the dimensions of everyday life that has been described as ‘the aestheticization’ through the proliferation of ‘screens’. It is precisely the tension between the cinematic expressionism of the spectacle and the materialist semiotics from which it derives that can serve as another motor for the end of the image. The problem is that cinema is not even the privileged arm of the cinematic anymore. Maybe Pop Art has already done all this? I am not sure.

Anyway, it is possible to think of The Sopranos as combining elements of Adorno’s aligned infantile milieu through the sex and violence and Agamben’s gestural imagelessness through Tony’s (and others’) multiple splayed tensions. This is the paradox of so-called ‘adult entertainment’. One has to be an ‘adult’ so as to be infantile enough to be subsumed by the gross stupidity of the totalizing reified image. This is a principle of recognition ‘adult’ whereby one becomes part of a vertical hierarchy. Not only does The Soprano’s contain this as part of the show’s actual storyline, but the show’s power comes from it representing representations of adult media not as media, but through the characters themselves as (non)expressions of this media. The best example is the singular image of Silvio’s impersonation of movie mobsters. The actor playing Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) plays a mobster playing an actor who is playing a mobster. Silvio perform’s a stylised voice and gesture of actor Al Pacino’s line from Godfather III, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” The ‘gesture’ is part of an image that has an unfinished gestural dimension. It is a ‘dark precursor’: a differentiator between two (or more) heterogeneous series. Not between two media commodities (The Sopranos and The Godfather III) or the serial cultural event franchise of mobsterisms, but between the gestural potentiality of the image (to ‘articulate’ and ‘become’) and the ‘closed totality’ of the pornovertising’s endless image-series of infantile subsumption.

EDIT 23/04/06: The problem for critics and critical scholars is that the distinction made above between the unfinished gestural and the closed totality of the image is never absolute or definitive. One activity of the fan is to potentialise the ‘image’ through forcing a gestural cleave by tracing to a sufficient end the circuits/networks within which the image is suspended. That is, the image in itself may not be interesting, but the gestural dimension of the inter-textual image-chain or circuit may be. This act of tracing is similar (in the sense of being an extended version) to the significatory chain that Deleuze writes about in Proust.

I had a month (roughly the duration of Feb) where everything gelled and I was in what I call ‘machine mode’ looking good to finish PhD. Then I had my bike stack, some work came up that was too good to refuse, and I just got busy, busy, busy doing things other than my dissertation.

Now I am back in the swing of things. I’ve bought a new bike. This time I spent a little more and the difference is amazing. (The gears change without protesting!) I am also going to the gym again on a daily basis. Getting injured and then sick and then busy really disrupted the good pattern I had going on. What is weird is that even though I can see I have put on weight after 6 weeks of sporadic gym (and injury, illness, and busy-ness) and I have become unfit, I actually weigh less than I did just before my bike stack. Now I am 115kgs and before I was 119kgs. Crazy. That means I have lost more than 4 kgs of muscle in 6 weeks of relative non-gym. (I still went to the gym in these 6 weeks but onlu once or twice a week.) I had to sort out my body first so I can become the champion neoliberal just-do-it subject required to finish my PhD in ‘time’ (which is ‘in time’ for a post-doc).

I realise I must be an expert of something now, not because of what I know I know, but because of what I know I don’t. Yes, I have an intimate relation with my ignorance and stupidity. I would’ve liked to have been in this place at the start of my PhD. Sure three and a half years of work will mean I know something, but it is only over the last two or three months I have started to realise to what degree I have become close to my unknowing. Unknowing isn’t an absence of knowledge, it has a full positivity, sometimes it is a lack congruence between information that might be affected by a change of perspective as much as anything else. Part of my problem is that I am forgetting that I have already figured shit out. This is annoying and can squarely be located in my problematic reticence to write-out my thinking compared to my preference for thinking-out my writing. I think I am beginning to realise that, as a Humanities person (scholar? not quite yet), part of the labour of thinking and research is writing.

I have had many things which I have started half blog posts on. I’ll finish them off and post them up today.

I have a couple a hundred magazines now. Does anyone know of any good (preferrably free) database programs that will allow me keep track of my collection?

MediaMan appears to be very good. One problem is that it is US based and another is that the ‘price-tracking’ feature which allows you to connect to any amazon.com site is useless for vintage items or if you are in Australia.

What would be totally excellent would be a database program that communicates with eBay (US AND the australian site) and has a similar function of being able to export item information, images and prices. eBay is fast becoming the only place to find certain items. Anyway, at the minimum, what will need to be developed is a certain form-guide for information on auction items, like certain information would be necessary, publication details (year, company, etc), cover photo, contents, etc.

Any smart programmers out there should seriously think about doing something like this. How many people do you know use eBay for buying stuff? Sneakers, car parts, magazines, funiture, etc. Maybe come up with a working prototype and approach eBay to get them to buy it from you. They could market it as an extension of “My eBay”.

Imagine if this information was networked as a kind of non-centralised library. Like a wiki, but the non-auction information would be contained on individual computers and when things were being sold eBay would access the respective wiki-style database or information, pricing, etc associated with that item and ‘host’ it. It would be ‘wiki-style’ because it would be produced by enthusiasts/fans/amatuers or similar. The qualititave difference between this information and that of wikipedia is the reputation function of eBay that is currently set up as purely determined by buyers and sellers with which an ebayer exchanges goods. How hard would it be to set up a correlative ‘informational’ rating system for the wiki-style database.

There would be a differential between item quality and condition versus the stock information on the wiki-database that would need to somehow be incorporated. For example, a magazine that is all torn up and missing images may be suitable for a researcher who only wants editorials or something, but a collector probably wouldn’t want it. Knowledge would take on a properly swarm character that would be tied to the various markets. I am not sure if this would help buyers or sellers. I think with such a set up the increase in knowedge available would help those with genuinely good items to sell and punish the sheisters.

eBay, are you listening?

eBay would get another level of ‘added value’ to their product that could be easily accessed by consumers. Consumers would in turn by able to harness the truly MASSIVE amounts of information that circulates on eBay’s networks of exchange. Surely this is a win-win situation? Connect this ‘swarm’ information with slightly more permanent source of information, such as wikipedia, and you might a have a mechanism for harnessing one dimension of capitalism’s dynamism, expressed as the minute-to-minute auctions on eBay, for the purposes of producing a relatively easily accessible body of knowledge.

This would be taking eBay’s attempts to harness networks of enthusiasm to another level. They already do it on the level of the spectacle with some of the cars built by famous car builders they have helped produced and which have used eBay networks of exchange for aquiring parts. Perhaps it is time to tap into the networks of enthusiasm on a more structural level and in the process produce a knowledge resource? eBay?