event mechanics

I’ve been reading Michael Polanyi‘s book Personal Knowledge (1958). Some aspects of Polanyi’s work have been popular in organisational studies primarily due to his conceptualisation of ‘tacit knowledge’. I have been reading Polanyi’s work for the purposes of the article I am currently writing on an ‘economy of know-how’. Maybe I’ll write another post engaging with how organisational studies have used Polanyi’s ‘tacit knowledge’, at the moment I need to finish this article I am writing.

The subtitle of the book Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy indicates Polanyi’s general program of locating affirmation as a central element of the discovery and development of scientific knowledge. Indeed, instead of a heuristic of doubt or a suspension of belief, Polanyi argues for a heuristic of passion premised on belief. Although deployed in any number of occasions in his argument the character of passion is a given and is nearly always described in terms of its function. In those occasions where Polanyi does discuss the character of this passion it is largely through analogy with what he calls the inarticulate intellect of animals and also in the context of instinctual drives. Silvan Tomkins’s work on the ‘analog’ ontology of affect as compared to the ‘digital’ ontology of drives enables contemporary readers of Polanyi’s to explicate what Tomkins calls a “co-assembly of affects” as characterizing the motivational drive of the ‘passion’ he describes.

For Polayni, ‘intellectual passion’ is an integral element in the process of scientific discovery and development of scientific knowledge. He argues that “into every act of knowing there enters into a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known, and that this coefficient is no mere imperfection, but a necessary component of all knowledge” (329). The passion coefficient of knowledge is necessary for the process of discovery. In his discussion of explorers , Polanyi describes commitment to belief as an integral element of intellectual passion that is satisfied by discovery. The explorer enjoys a “daring anticipation of reality” (327). He isolates this as the creative dimension of scientific progress, and this creative dimension relies on ‘heuristic passion’:

“We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality. Like all ventures in which we comprehensively dispose of ourselves, such an intentional change of our personality requires a passionate motive to accomplish it. Originality must be passionate.” (151)

Polanyi argues that the gratification of instinctual appetites (hunger, sex and fear) is a manner of verification. There is a parallel to intellectual passions in that “all passions animating and shaping discovery imply a belief in the possibility of a knowledge of which these passions declare the value” (183). That is, Polanyi suggests, a (not infallible) ‘competence’ of intellectual passions is to recognise truth. The satisfaction of intellectual passions is a kind of verification of discovery, as discovery “terminates the problem from which it started” and “leaves behind knowledge” (183). The knowledge is expressed as part of the ongoing development of an “articulate framework” (183).

He argues that the interpretative framework built upon previous discoveries is changed by future discoveries; hence it is “logically impossible to arrive [at future discoveries] by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework” (151). This insight is troubled, however, by his use of ‘recognition’ in the process by which problems are identified:

“To see a problem is a definite addition to knowledge, as much as it is to see a tree, or to see a mathematical proof—or a joke. It is a surmise which can be true or false, depending on whether the hidden possibilities of which it assumes the existence do actually exist or not. To recognize a problem which can be solved and is worth solving is in fact a discovery in its own right.” (127)

There is a contradiction of discovery based on ‘recognition’. This is not a question of mere semantics, but relates to the functioning of ‘intellectual passion’ itself. Useful here is Deleuze’s development of a post-Kantian philosophy of the Idea as essentially ‘problematic’ instead of ‘regulatory’. That is, without regulatory universality ideas become problematic, and ‘recognition’ in the way Polanyi discusses it here is no longer straightforward. Polanyi himself argues that radical manifestations of this process of breaking with conceptual frameworks dissolves a “screen” between us and things and in doing so dissolves the subjective into experience itself as a form of radical contemplation distinct to our normative experience of experience: “as observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself” (209). Perception itself is co-assembled though experience…

Polanyi is primarily concerned with the freedom of intellectual passion necessary for scientific discovery. There is an “essential restlessness” of the human mind expressed through the scientist in terms of pondering new problems and discovering solutions to them (209), but it is not only the scientist that enjoys that satisfaction of discovery. The scientist, in Polanyi’s analysis, is concerned with the “natural order,” while another, for example, the technician or technologist, although working within a similar framework of discovery, has a far more focused heuristic passion.

“He follows the intimations, not of a natural order, but of a possibility for making things work in a new way for an acceptable purpose, and cheaply enough to show a profit. In feeling his way towards new problems, in collecting clues and pondering perspectives, the technologist must keep in mind a whole panorama of advantages and disadvantages which the scientist ignores. He must be keenly susceptible to people’s wants and able to assess the price at which they would be prepared to satisfy them. A passionate interest in such momentary constellations is foreign to the scientist, whose eye is fixed on the inner law of nature.” (188)

The constellation of interests organized around the focused heuristic passion of the technician is in part determined by the set of material advantages afforded by a technology; what Polanyi calls a technology’s “operational principle”: the rules by which a technology “teaches us actions undertaken for material advantages” if we “imputed [in the technologist] the purpose of achieving the consequence of this action” (186). My interest is in ‘know how’ which describes a form of knowledge that engages with such ‘operational principles’ and their material instantiation in a particular technological state of affairs. Unlike the knowledge of qualified technicians however, ‘know-how’ is the accumulation of partial understandings, but full appreciations of such “operational principles”. I call ‘enthusiasm’ the heuristic passion that is in-acted as a constituent element of the experience of discovering the operative principles of technology.

One of the pleasures of having worked in a bookstore with a secondhand books department is being able to access original publications of journals and other collected works. I discovered the joy of finding older publications during my PhD research where I had to construct my own archive. Here are some previous finds. A recent trip to Gould’s Bookshop in Sydney turned up some absolute crackers.

Some of the finds includes the volume that Adrian Martin references here Language, Sexuality & Subversion. He speaks of reading this as a 17 year old! I was reading Plato’s Republic still, hadn’t got to the post-structuralists yet! ha!

Another is “Cultural Studies 6: Cultural Studies and Theory” one of the edited collections from the Birmingham School’s Working Papers in Cultural Studies series. These were central to the development of British Cultural Studies in the 1970s. In this volume the authors stake out a shift away from a ‘radical liberalism’…:

The two sections of WPCS 6 signify out experience in this Centre, of a theoretical shift in our approach to cultural studies. In this introduction we aim to outline the dimensions of this shift, in the context of our understanding of its historical and political situation. Generally speaking, we are signalling retrospectively, from an emerging Marxist perspective, the theoretical and political limitations of the liberal radicalism from which ‘cultural studies’ and the Centre emerged in the early ‘sixties, and trying to clarify, in a preliminary way, the contemporary forces which shape us, and within which what we produce is to be taken into account.

I’ll post more material from this volume and the others over the forthcoming weeks. It is part of a long term project of mine to map the circuits of publishing and translation in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. I am in no rush to do ‘proper’ research in the area, rather I want to use it as a way to remain enchanted with the drudging egoistic mechanics of scholarly publishing. Maybe one day when it is time to settle up I’ll turn to this new archvie that I am creating.

I am going over my writing from the last few years and sorting out what should go where. The problem I face is that there is a paper I really want to write to do with Kant’s discussion of enthusiasm and there is no way, that I have figured out at least, that I fit a proper discussion of Kant’s discussion of enthusiasm into the context of my empirical research. This is not a simple matter of me trying to ‘apply’ some theory or another to my empirical research, rather my concept of enthusiasm was developed through my empirical research (fieldwork and archival research of 30 years of magazines and other materials). Therefore it is annoying, almost disheartening, to realise I am going to have split my work into two papers. One that deals with enthusiasm as a concept and is therefore primarily a philosophical work and the other that delves into my empirical research to outline a historical example of a culture and political economy of enthusiasm. This separation should not exist in my mind but there are good reasons for it.

1) Readers of the two papers would be very different. The philosophical paper is essentially a reading of Kant. The cultural studies paper is essentially a Foucaultian genealogy of enthusiasm within modified-car culture. On the one hand, I hardly think too many bourgeois academic philosophers would be interested in my empirical work. On the other hand, the empirical work presents a strong example of the ways enthusiasm can be harnessed as a resource by cultural industries and with the emergent dispositif of labour relations organised around immaterial labour and so on it is a useful way to understand what is at stake.

2) I have misgivings about my own abilities to do a reading of Kant justice. Some philosophers specialise in Kant and his various works (and secondary readings) are practically all they study for their entire lives. I am a competent reader of Kant, I think. In that I recognise an interesting argument made about Kant’s work when I read it. Maybe I’ll present some readings of Kant here? (I just created a Kant category for my blog.) The issue of course is that I am only interested in his discussion of enthusiasm. His general philosophy about the legislative function of reason as a synthesis of the faculties is not that interesting to me at the moment. Anyway, a separate paper on Kant’s enthusiasm would force me to properly engage with Kant’s enthusiasm in a sustained manner.

3) Theory. I loathe the notion. I am not sure what people were thinking when they thought it was a good idea to invent this category of academic work. There are only conceptual tools. Theory should be banished. I don’t want my Kant paper to appear as if it were ‘theory’. That is why I am so reluctant to give up on a paper that incorporates empirical research.

4) My style of writing is to trace influences on my work and influences on others’ work to the page or series of pages and reference these pages so readers can follow exactly where I am getting ideas from. One of the best things about A Thousand Plateaus for example are the footnotes. There is a question of competence here, particularly when reading or using something in a particular way, so others familiar with the work can follow what you are doing. There is also a question about a creative ecology or milieu to which my own work belongs. Its totality is only ever a partiality of another totality and so on. I want to be able to frame the horizon of intelligibility of my understanding and imagination. This makes my writing rather dense and requires a patient reader. Splitting what I am working on at the moment into two papers will at least save the reader having to be patient on two counts for the philosophical stuff (Kant, Deleuze, etc.) and the empirical historical work (magazines, newsletters, etc.). I can understand why Foucault chose not to include footnotes in some work. Splitting it will make each paper appropriately energetic or at least less of the inverse.

I got paid for my new role for the first time today, which is a relief. Now I am economically connected to the institution. One thing I’ve observed being noted by most existing staff when they visit me in my new office is that it doesn’t have a window and that I don’t have a name on the door (rather it has a sheet of paper says ‘Journalism 9B08′ with the 08 crossed out and a handwritten 34 beside it). None of this is too much of a concern for me. The window, of course, is a signifier of prestige, while the lack of a name on the door bespokes a deficient professionalism. What I’ve been far more concerned with is developing a ‘window’ on my pevious research and thinking and developing it into journal article length arguments.

This other ‘window’ is not a hole in the wall, but both a discursive framing and a question of visibility across a number of registers. I guess it is a common problem for anyone entering into academia from a professional background and it is compounded if, like me, the new entrant has carried out extensive research in the past. My research has become far more fluid. Sure my dissertation was organised a central argument regarding the character of enthusiasm within the subcultural scene of modified-car culture and an historical investigation into the way enthusiasm has been turned into a resource by the cultural industries that service a given scene, but I also produced a huge amount of other material. This blog served as one of the sites of ‘overflow’ of research and thinking, but I have dozens and dozens of other pieces of work that only exist on my computer.

The challenge for me right now is to produce what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘plane of consistency’ that enables me to organise the different threads of my existing work and adapt them to the context of the current state of various research fields. My scholarly disposition will therefore by an expression of the ‘virtual office’ that emerges on this plane of consistency. The ‘virtual office’ will be actualised according to the ways my research can connect with the current state of various research fields. In effect, I shall be producing multiple ‘windows’ on this research.

My main two interests now involve positioning a concept of enthusiasm that is useful as a tool for other researchers and critically engaging with the niche magazine publishing industry based on my archival research, but influenced by my professional experience.

As an extension of my previous post about online business models I have been thinking a great deal about different kinds of online content in the context of how journalism students are taught to write. This post is a continuation of my work developing some rough notes for a book on writing for the enthusiast media based on my professional experience and my PhD research. I hope to finish a complete draft by the end of the year.

Journalism students are taught to write in two primary modes ‘news’ writing and ‘feature’ writing. There are different ways to define the two modes of writing, but the most relevant way to define them in an online publishing context is temporal. ‘News’ writing is timely and is normally concerned with covering events as they are happening. Feature writing takes a longer or more in depth perspective.

When it comes to writing for an online publishing environment for enthusiast publications the question of timeliness becomes even more important. In the markets pertaining to the car enthusiast magazines I work for there are a couple of good examples of what I regard as the three main forms of content: evergreen, churn and viral. These three forms of content are not entirely distinct and the terms I’ve used are somewhat arbitrary. There are two main ways to define the types of content in terms of their structural relation to the media ecology within which they appear. The first way is in relation to the scene and enthusiasm, i.e. a consumer side definition. The second way to define the three main forms of content is in relation to different revenue streams that can be combined in different ways depending on the business model.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content does not have an expiration date. In the context of enthusiast media, evergreen content is always about critically representing how to engage with challenges that pertain to a given enthusiasm. These are more often than not ‘how to’ articles. Within modified-car culture, the challenges are mostly technical and pertain to automotive mechanical design, repair and modification. Other enthusiasms organised around other challenges will have slightly different kinds of evergreen content. A recipe is a classic example, while a how to article on setting up port forwarding on your home router for correct torrent connection is a contemporary example.

Evergreen content is written not so much for the immediate number of readers that are interested in it. Rather evergreen content is written for the searchable database. Challenges that pertain to a given enthusiasm very rarely expire, they simply transform depending on the cultural shifts that are occuring more broadly in the scene. A good example in modified-car culture is the centrality of the Ford flathead V8. Powering the iconic 1932 ‘Deuce’ coupe, the flathead was the engine of choice for the generation of young hot rodders during hot rodding’s initial wave of popularity in the immediate post World War 2 period. The ‘hot rod’ as a particular configuration of automotive technologies has coalesced into a coherent cultural form that now mostly transcends short term trends within the scene, which means that a flathead V8 is often used as the motor of choice even though there are more advanced engines easily and more cheaply available. The flathead is a culturally appropriate engine choice. Due to the shifting cultural significance of the flathead V8 it will be written about in different ways now compared to the way it was written about in the 1950s, but because the basic technical design of the engine has not changed in almost 80 years there will be some commonality across all articles.

A good example of evergreen content is the now near-defunct site, Autospeed. Autospeed was started in 1998 by Julian Edgar and went live in 1999. The site has gone through a cycle of free, paid and free content and advertisement, subscription and then advertisement-based business models. There was a great deal of critical discussion when the site shifted from a free content and advertisement based model to a paid content subscription model. In some ways it is similar to the US-based Ford Muscle online magazine. Co-founder of the site, Jon Mikelonis, commented on my previous post about content to say:

I believe you’ve touched on something critical by making the distinction between “evergreen” content and “news”. With respect to the automotive enthusiast niche, where a technical barrier exists in most cases, I do agree you are best to focus on tech content for online publishing.
We shut down feature stories and do very little news for the sake of allocating more time to creating and incentivizing technical and investigative content, “evergreen” content as you said. Yes, there is more mileage there. We still monetize from content produced more than 7 years ago.

Ford Muscle seems to have an advertising-based model, but another way to produce content that is relevant for a given scene is to produce sponsored content. Sponsored content is not the same as advertorial in the traditional journalistic publishing model, particularly when it comes to enthusiast publishing, if it is produced in a relatively sophisticated way. Advertorial is basically PR content dressed up as editorial and often appears in print and online as buyers guides or similar. Sponsored content if produced correctly taps into the expertise of an advertiser and represents the advertiser’s ‘know how’ in producing a ‘how to’ article. The advertiser will offer their ‘know how’ as a commercial service, which is why they will pay for the content, but the sponsored content represents technical information for the audience from someone with professional expertise in a given endeavour. The skill in producing sponsored content from the editorial side is in isolating what exactly is worthy of representing and valorising in the advertiser’s practice or ‘know how’ by having a very good understanding of your audience’s interests.

There are other ways to produce sponsored content based around a hybrid business model that incorporates event management, where seminars or courses are run to connect the professional expertise of journalists or advertisers with one’s audience. If such events are filmed or reported on then they can be tapped for more than one revenue stream. In fact there are some online publishers that use their online reporting simply to bolster their image so they can run profit making events.

There are other forms of evergreen content not directly tied to editorial for an online publishing environment, such as branded wallpapers.

Churn
Churn content has an expiration date and includes event coverage (before, after and during an event), ‘soft news’ based on media releases and ‘hard news’ based on investigative reporting. Churn is best defined in terms of who has the best coverage quickest will get the most readers. Within modified-car culture, blog-based sites are almost entirely driven by churn editorial content. A good example is the Speedhunters site created by EA Games for the Need for Speed game franchise and launched May 2008. Speedhunters delivers ‘up to the minute’ coverage of global car culture relevant to the audience of their video game franchise. Car culture here is not based around an active enthusiasm full of challenges, but something more ephemeral. The site serves as a space for fans to voice their opinions about cars, styles, drivers or events.

It is possible to produce content for more active enthusiasts that is churn-based. Rather than drawing on fans’ taste cultures, churn-based content for active enthusiasts is mostly a narrative organised around the challenges faced by other enthusiasts. For example, race coverage is not a superficial account of an event with nice looking images, but a blow by blow of the problems overcome by certain race teams. Churn-based content for fans, rather than enthusiasts, can be produced by interested amateurs, but to get an insider’s point of view of an event requires access to insiders which is normally only afforded to professionals actually working in the media.

There is a bigger issue here to do with one of the primary functions of the enthusiast media to select and valorise certain elements of the scene. Within a fragmented media ecology where a given scene is not serviced by a single dominant enthusiast media brand (an example of dominating single media brand is Street Commodores), and is fragmented across a number of forums, blogs, websites and traditional print magazines, the question of valorisation becomes a tricky one. I may write more about this in the future.

Traditional journalistic skills are required for producing churn content. The who, what, where, when, why and how, and the rest that journalism students are taught at university. There is a real problem that I have encountered when teaching new writers in on the job training. Part of what I need to teach is the ability to search beyond Google and Facebook for answers and the slightly more complicated problem of new writers being able to ask questions that do not have answers that are Googlable. This is a real problem, particularly when working in an industry that traditionally hires from enthusiast ranks and not the university-educated. Teaching writers about the different values of newsworthiness and more often than not all a story needs is to ring up a few key figures in an event to get a quote or two. This is less of a problem for those new hires that have gone through a traditional journalism course. If an answer can be Googled then whatever churn content is being written is already out of date. If a story has broke through another outlet and even on an enthusiast forum somewhere, then follow up with further research for fresh content.

Churn is an exhausting way to produce content. New content has to be published at least two or three times a day. If a day is missed then numbers will drop immediately. If on the other hand, evergreen content is also produced then the numbers for a site will be driven by the ‘long tail’ of enthusiasts trying to figure out ways to engage with a challenge.
Churn content is excellent for branding purposes as it demonstrates that a media outlet is contemporaneous with the happening (or broader inclusive event) of a given scene, i.e. the media outlet has its collective finger on the pulse.

Churn-based content is good for informing an audience about developments in the market from advertisers in the form of new products, new services, changes of address and achievements. It is a way to keep advertisers happy, by being mentioned, even though evergreen content may be a far better investment in the long term. Churn helps exposure, but evergreen content helps reputation. In an era of online forums and user-generated content or user-led discussion reputation management is an absolute priority for advertisers.

Viral
Viral content is designed to be shared through various social media platforms. Online media professionals will talk about ‘a viral’ as if it is a specific genre of media content. I am not convinced it is. Every form of media content is potentially viral if it is written for an appropriate audience. What is transmitted by a viral is not so much the actual media content, although it may be if it is a single image or a video, but the excitement about the piece of media. Viral media is primarily affective in character. The question then that needs to be asked is: What will make my target audience excited enough to share their excitement with others?

It gets a bit tricky when social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are used as media channels for the dissemination of content. Speedhunters uses Twitter relatively effectively and Twitter suits the churn-based model of media content. Evergreen content almost by definition will not be viral, that is unless it ‘solves’ some long standing problem or another within a given community of a scene.