Academic literature on the topic 'Metal transition compose|act'

As the ball dropped on 1999, is it any wonder that No Doubt played, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” by R.E.M. live on MTV? Any discussion of the Nineties—and its pinnacle moment, Y2K—requires a discussion of both the cover and the glitch, two performative and technological enactments that fomented the collapse between author-reader and user-machine that has, twenty years later, become normalised in today’s Post Internet culture. By staging failure and inviting the audience to participate, the glitch and the cover call into question the original and the origin story. This breakdown of normative borders has prompted the convergence of previously demarcated media, genres, and cultures, a constellation from which to recognise a stochastic hybrid form. The Cover as a Revelation of Collaborative MurmurBefore Sean Parker collaborated with Shawn Fanning to launch Napster on 1 June 1999, networked file distribution existed as cumbersome text-based programs like Internet Relay Chat and Usenet, servers which resembled bulletin boards comprising multiple categories of digitally ripped files. Napster’s simple interface, its advanced search filters, and its focus on music and audio files fostered a peer-to-peer network that became the fastest growing website in history, registering 80 million users in less than two years.In harnessing the transgressive power of the Internet to force a new mode of content sharing, Napster forced traditional providers to rethink what constitutes “content” at a moment which prefigures our current phenomena of “produsage” (Bruns) and the vast popularity of user-generated content. At stake is not just the democratisation of art but troubling the very idea of intellectual property, which is to say, the very concept of ownership.Long before the Internet was re-routed from military servers and then mainstreamed, Michel Foucault understood the efficacy of anonymous interactions on the level of literature, imagining a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. But what he was asking in 1969 is something we can better answer today, because it seems less germane to call into question the need for an author in a culture in which everyone is writing, producing, and reproducing text, and more effective to think about re-evaluating the notion of a single author, or what it means to write by yourself. One would have to testify to the particular medium we have at our disposal, the Internet’s ultimate permissibility, its provocations for collaboration and co-creation. One would have to surrender the idea that authors own anything besides our will to keep producing, and our desire for change; and to modulate means to resist without negating, to alter without omitting, to enable something new to come forward; the unfolding of the text into the anonymity of a murmur.We should remind ourselves that “to author” all the way down to its Latin roots signifies advising, witnessing, and transferring. We should be reminded that to author something means to forget the act of saying “I,” to forget it or to make it recede in the background in service of the other or others, on behalf of a community. The de-centralisation of Web development and programming initiated by Napster inform a poetics of relation, an always-open structure in which, as Édouard Glissant said, “the creator of a text is effaced, or rather, is done away with, to be revealed in the texture of his creation” (25). When a solid melts, it reveals something always underneath, something at the bottom, something inside—something new and something that was always already there. A cover, too, is both a revival and a reworking, an update and an interpretation, a retrospective tribute and a re-version that looks toward the future. In performing the new, the original as singular is called into question, replaced by an increasingly fetishised copy made up of and made by multiples.Authorial Effacement and the Exigency of the ErrorY2K, otherwise known as the Millennium Bug, was a coding problem, an abbreviation made to save memory space which would disrupt computers during the transition from 1999 to 2000, when it was feared that the new year would become literally unrecognisable. After an estimated $300 billion in upgraded hardware and software was spent to make computers Y2K-compliant, something more extraordinary than global network collapse occurred as midnight struck: nothing.But what if the machine admits the possibility of accident? Implicit in the admission of any accident is the disclosure of a new condition—something to be heard, to happen, from the Greek ad-cadere, which means to fall. In this drop into non-repetition, the glitch actualises an idea about authorship that necessitates multi-user collaboration; the curtain falls only to reveal the hidden face of technology, which becomes, ultimately, instructions for its re-programming. And even as it deviates, the new form is liable to become mainstreamed into a new fashion. “Glitch’s inherently critical moment(um)” (Menkman 8) indicates this potential for technological self-insurgence, while suggesting the broader cultural collapse of generic markers and hierarchies, and its ensuing flow into authorial fluidity.This feeling of shock, this move “towards the ruins of destructed meaning” (Menkman 29) inherent in any encounter with the glitch, forecasted not the immediate horror of Y2K, but the delayed disasters of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, Indian Ocean tsunami, Sichuan Province earthquake, global financial crisis, and two international wars that would all follow within the next nine years. If, as Menkman asserts, the glitch, in representing a loss of self-control “captures the machine revealing itself” (30), what also surfaces is the tipping point that edges us toward a new becoming—not only the inevitability of surrender between machine and user, but their reversibility. Just as crowds stood, transfixed before midnight of the new millennium in anticipation of the error, or its exigency, it’s always the glitch I wait for; it’s always the glitch I aim to re-create, as if on command. The accidental revelation, or the machine breaking through to show us its insides. Like the P2P network that Napster introduced to culture, every glitch produces feedback, a category of noise (Shannon) influencing the machine’s future behaviour whereby potential users might return the transmission.Re-Orienting the Bizarre in Fantasy and FictionIt is in the fantasy of dreams, and their residual leakage into everyday life, evidenced so often in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, where we can locate a similar authorial agency. The cult Nineties psycho-noir, and its discontinuous return twenty-six years later, provoke us into reconsidering the science of sleep as the art of fiction, assembling an alternative, interactive discourse from found material.The turning in and turning into in dreams is often described as an encounter with the “bizarre,” a word which indicates our lack of understanding about the peculiar processes that normally happen inside our heads. Dreams are inherently and primarily bizarre, Allan J. Hobson argues, because during REM sleep, our noradrenergic and serotonergic systems do not modulate the activated brain, as they do in waking. “The cerebral cortex and hippocampus cannot function in their usual oriented and linear logical way,” Hobson writes, “but instead create odd and remote associations” (71). But is it, in fact, that our dreams are “bizarre” or is it that the model itself is faulty—a precept premised on the normative, its dependency upon generalisation and reducibility—what is bizarre if not the ordinary modulations that occur in everyday life?Recall Foucault’s interest not in what a dream means but what a dream does. How it rematerialises in the waking world and its basis in and effect on imagination. Recall recollection itself, or Erin J. Wamsley’s “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” “A ‘function’ for dreaming,” Wamsley writes, “hinges on the difficult question of whether conscious experience in general serves any function” (433). And to think about the dream as a specific mode of experience related to a specific theory of knowledge is to think about a specific form of revelation. It is this revelation, this becoming or coming-to-be, that makes the connection to crowd-sourced content production explicit—dreams serve as an audition or dress rehearsal in which new learning experiences with others are incorporated into the unconscious so that they might be used for production in the waking world. Bert O. States elaborates, linking the function of the dream with the function of the fiction writer “who makes models of the world that carry the imprint and structure of our various concerns. And it does this by using real people, or ‘scraps’ of other people, as the instruments of hypothetical facts” (28). Four out of ten characters in a dream are strangers, according to Calvin Hall, who is himself a stranger, someone I’ve never met in waking life or in a dream. But now that I’ve read him, now that I’ve written him into this work, he seems closer to me. Twin Peak’s serial lesson for viewers is this—even the people who seem strangers to us can interact with and intervene in our processes of production.These are the moments that a beginning takes place. And even if nothing directly follows, this transfer constitutes the hypothesised moment of production, an always-already perhaps, the what-if stimulus of charged possibility; the soil plot, or plot line, for freedom. Twin Peaks is a town in which the bizarre penetrates the everyday so often that eventually, the bizarre is no longer bizarre, but just another encounter with the ordinary. Dream sequences are common, but even more common—and more significant—are the moments in which what might otherwise be a dream vision ruptures into real life; these moments propel the narrative.Exhibit A: A man who hasn’t gone outside in a while begins to crumble, falling to the earth when forced to chase after a young girl, who’s just stolen the secret journal of another young girl, which he, in turn, had stolen.B: A horse appears in the middle of the living room after a routine vacuum cleaning and a subtle barely-there transition, a fade-out into a fade-in, what people call a dissolve. No one notices, or thinks to point out its presence. Or maybe they’re distracted. Or maybe they’ve already forgotten. Dissolve.(I keep hitting “Save As.” As if renaming something can also transform it.)C: All the guests at the Great Northern Hotel begin to dance the tango on cue—a musical, without any music.D: After an accident, a middle-aged woman with an eye patch—she was wearing the eye patch before the accident—believes she’s seventeen again. She enrolls in Twin Peaks High School and joins the cheerleading team.E: A woman pretending to be a Japanese businessman ambles into the town bar to meet her estranged husband, who fails to recognise his cross-dressing, race-swapping wife.F: A girl with blond hair is murdered, only to come back as another girl, with the same face and a different name. And brown hair. They’re cousins.G: After taking over her dead best friend’s Meals on Wheels route, Donna Hayward walks in to meet a boy wearing a tuxedo, sitting on the couch with his fingers clasped: a magician-in-training. “Sometimes things can happen just like this,” he says with a snap while the camera cuts to his grandmother, bed-ridden, and the appearance of a plate of creamed corn that vanishes as soon as she announces its name.H: A woman named Margaret talks to and through a log. The log, cradled in her arms wherever she goes, becomes a key witness.I: After a seven-minute diegetic dream sequence, which includes a one-armed man, a dwarf, a waltz, a dead girl, a dialogue played backward, and a significantly aged representation of the dreamer, Agent Cooper wakes up and drastically shifts his investigation of a mysterious small-town murder. The dream gives him agency; it turns him from a detective staring at a dead-end to one with a map of clues. The next day, it makes him a storyteller; all the others, sitting tableside in the middle of the woods become a captive audience. They become readers. They read into his dream to create their own scenarios. Exhibit I. The cycle of imagination spins on.Images re-direct and obfuscate meaning, a process of over-determination which Foucault says results in “a multiplication of meanings which override and contradict each other” (DAE 34). In the absence of image, the process of imagination prevails. In the absence of story, real drama in our conscious life, we form complex narratives in our sleep—our imaginative unconscious. Sometimes they leak out, become stories in our waking life, if we think to compose them.“A bargain has been struck,” says Harold, an under-5 bit player, later, in an episode called “Laura’s Secret Diary.” So that she might have the chance to read Laura Palmer’s diary, Donna Hayward agrees to talk about her own life, giving Harold the opportunity to write it down in his notebook: his “living novel” the new chapter which reads, after uncapping his pen and smiling, “Donna Hayward.”He flips to the front page and sets a book weight to keep the page in place. He looks over at Donna sheepishly. “Begin.”Donna begins talking about where she was born, the particulars of her father—the lone town doctor—before she interrupts the script and asks her interviewer about his origin story. Not used to people asking him the questions, Harold’s mouth drops and he stops writing. He puts his free hand to his chest and clears his throat. (The ambient, wind-chime soundtrack intensifies.) “I grew up in Boston,” he finally volunteers. “Well, actually, I grew up in books.”He turns his head from Donna to the notebook, writing feverishly, as if he’s begun to write his own responses as the camera cuts back to his subject, Donna, crossing her legs with both hands cupped at her exposed knee, leaning in to tell him: “There’s things you can’t get in books.”“There’s things you can’t get anywhere,” he returns, pen still in his hand. “When we dream, they can be found in other people.”What is a call to composition if not a call for a response? It is always the audience which makes a work of art, re-framed in our own image, the same way we re-orient ourselves in a dream to negotiate its “inconsistencies.” Bizarreness is merely a consequence of linguistic limitations, the overwhelming sensory dream experience which can only be re-framed via a visual representation. And so the relationship between the experience of reading and dreaming is made explicit when we consider the associations internalised in the reader/audience when ingesting a passage of words on a page or on the stage, objects that become mental images and concept pictures, a lens of perception that we may liken to another art form: the film, with its jump-cuts and dissolves, so much like the defamiliarising and dislocating experience of dreaming, especially for the dreamer who wakes. What else to do in that moment but write about it?Evidence of the bizarre in dreams is only the evidence of the capacity of our human consciousness at work in the unconscious; the moment in which imagination and memory come together to create another reality, a spectrum of reality that doesn’t posit a binary between waking and sleeping, a spectrum of reality that revels in the moments where the two coalesce, merge, cross-pollinate—and what action glides forward in its wake? Sustained un-hesitation and the wish to stay inside one’s self. To be conscious of the world outside the dream means the end of one. To see one’s face in the act of dreaming would require the same act of obliteration. Recognition of the other, and of the self, prevents the process from being fulfilled. Creative production and dreaming, like voyeurism, depend on this same lack of recognition, or the recognition of yourself as other. What else is a dream if not a moment of becoming, of substituting or sublimating yourself for someone else?We are asked to relate a recent dream or we volunteer an account, to a friend or lover. We use the word “seem” in nearly every description, when we add it up or how we fail to. Everything seems to be a certain way. It’s not a place but a feeling. James, another character on Twin Peaks, says the same thing, after someone asks him, “Where do you want to go?” but before he hops on his motorcycle and rides off into the unknowable future outside the frame. Everything seems like something else, based on our own associations, our own knowledge of people and things. Offline memory consolidation. Seeming and semblance. An uncertainty of appearing—both happening and seeing. How we mediate—and re-materialise—the dream through text is our attempt to re-capture imagination, to leave off the image and better become it. If, as Foucault says, the dream is always a dream of death, its purpose is a call to creation.Outside of dreams, something bizarre occurs. We call it novelty or news. We might even bestow it with fame. A man gets on the wrong plane and ends up halfway across the world. A movie is made into the moment of his misfortune. Years later, in real life and in movie time, an Iranian refugee can’t even get on the plane; he is turned away by UK immigration officials at Charles de Gaulle, so he spends the next sixteen years living in the airport lounge; when he departs in real life, the movie (The Terminal, 2004) arrives in theaters. Did it take sixteen years to film the terminal exile? How bizarre, how bizarre. OMC’s eponymous refrain of the 1996 one-hit wonder, which is another way of saying, an anomaly.When all things are counted and countable in today’s algorithmic-rich culture, deviance becomes less of a statistical glitch and more of a testament to human peculiarity; the repressed idiosyncrasies of man before machine but especially the fallible tendencies of mankind within machines—the non-repetition of chance that the Nineties emblematised in the form of its final act. The point is to imagine what comes next; to remember waiting together for the end of the world. There is no need to even open your eyes to see it. It is just a feeling. ReferencesBruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication 2006: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference, eds. Fay Sudweeks, Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Murdoch: School of Information Technology, 2006. 275-84. <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf>.Foucault, Michel. “Dream, Imagination and Existence.” Dream and Existence. Ed. Keith Hoeller. Pittsburgh: Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1986. 31-78.———. “What Is an Author?” The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1991.Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1997.Hall, Calvin S. The Meaning of Dreams. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.Hobson, J. Allan. The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered State of Conscious­ness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.Menkman, Rosa. The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Network Notebooks, 2011.Shannon, Claude Elwood. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423.States, Bert O. “Bizarreness in Dreams and Other Fictions.” The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language. Ed. Carol Schreier Rupprecht. Albany: SUNY P, 1993.Twin Peaks. Dir. David Lynch. ABC and Showtime. 1990-3 & 2017. Wamsley, Erin. “Dreaming and Offline Memory Consolidation.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 14.3 (2014): 433. “Y2K Bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 18 July 2018. <https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug>.

The article will explore the augmentation of cognition with the affordances of mobile micro-blogging apps, specifically the most developed of these: Twitter. It will ask whether this is enabling new kinds of on-the-fly collective cognition, and in particular what will be referred to as ‘collective volition.’ It will approach this with an address to Bernard Stiegler’s concept of grammatisation, which he defines as as, “the history of the exteriorization of memory in all its forms: nervous and cerebral memory, corporeal and muscular memory, biogenetic memory” (New Critique 33). This will be explored in particular with reference to the human relation with the time of protention, that is an orientation to the future in the lived moment. The argument is that there is a new relation to technology, as a result of the increased velocity, multiplicity and ubiquity of micro-communications. As such this essay will serve as a speculative hypothesis, laying the groundwork for further research. The Context of Social Media The proliferation of social media, and especially its rapid shift onto diverse platforms, in particular to ‘apps’—that is dedicated software platforms available through multiple devices such as tablet computers and smart phones—has meant a pervasive and intensive form of communication has developed. The fact that these media are also generally highly mobile, always connected and operate though very sophisticated interfaces designed for maximum ease of use mean that, at least for a significant number of users, social media has become a constant accompaniment to everyday life—a permanently unfolding self-narrative. It is against this background that multiple and often highly contradictory claims are being made about the effect of such media on cognition and group dynamics. We have seen claims for the birth of the smart mob (Rheingold) that opens up the realm of decisive action to multiple individuals and group dynamics, something akin to that which operates during moments of shared attention. For example, in the London riots of 2011 the use of Blackberry messenger was apportioned a major role in the way mobs moved around the city, where they gathered and who turned up. Likewise in the Arab Spring there was significant speculation about the role of Twitter as a medium for mass organisation and collective action. Why such possibilities are mooted is clear in the basic affordances of the particular social media in question, and the devices through which these software platforms operate. In the case of Twitter it is clear that simplicity of its interface as well as its brevity and speed are the most important affordances. The ease of the interface, the specificity of the action—of tweeting or scrolling though a feed—is easy. The limitation of messages at 140 characters ensures that nothing takes more than a small bite of attention and that it is possible, and routine, to process many messages and to communicate with multiple interlocutors, if not simultaneously then in far faster succession that is possible in previous applications or technologies. This produces a form of distributed attention, casting a wide zone of social awareness, in which the brains of Twitter users process, and are able to respond to, the perspectives of others almost instantly. Of course the speed of the feed that, beyond a relatively small number of followed accounts, means it becomes impossible to see anything but fragments. This fragmentary character is also intensified by the inevitable limitation of the number of accounts being followed by any one user. In fact we can add a third factor of intensification to this when we consider the migration of social media into mobile smart phone apps using simple icons and even simpler interfaces, configured for ease of use on the move. Such design produces an even greater distribution of attention and temporal fragmentation, interspersed as they are with multiple everyday activities. Mnemotechnology: Spatial and Temporal Flux Attending to a Twitter feed thus places the user into an immediate relationship to the aggregate of the just passed and the passing through, a proximate moment of shared expression, but also one that is placed in a cultural short term memory. As such Twitter is thus a mnemotechnology par-excellence, in that it augments human memory, but in a very particular way. Its short termness distributes memory across and between users as much, if not more, than it does extend memory through time. While most recent media forms also enfold their own recording and temporal extension—print media, archived in libraries; film and television in video archives; sound and music in libraries—tweeting is closer to the form of face to face speech, in that while it is to an extent grammatised into the Twitter feed its temporal extension is far more ambiguous. With Twitter, while there is some cerebral/linguistic memory extension—over say a few minutes in a particular feed, or a number of days if a tweet is given a hash tag—beyond this short-term extension any further access becomes a question of paying for access (after a few days hash tags cease to be searchable, with large archives of tweets being available only at a monetary cost). The luxury of long-term memory is available only to those that can afford it. Grammatisation in Stiegler’s account tends to the solidifying extension of expression into material forms of greater duration, forming what he calls the pharmakon, that is an external object, which is both poison and cure. Stiegler employs Donald Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object as the first of such objects in the path to adulthood, that is the thing—be it blanket, teddy or so forth—that allows the transition from total dependency on a parent to separation and autonomy. In that sense the object is what allows for the transition to adulthood, but within which lies the danger of excessive attachment, dependency and is "destructive of autonomy and trust" (Stiegler, On Pharmacology 3). Writing, or hypomnesis, that is artificial memory, is also such a pharmakon, in as much as it operates as a salve; it allows cultural memory to be extended and shared, but also according to Plato it decays autonomy of thought, but in fact—taking his lead from Derrida—Stiegler tells us that “while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact constantly compose” (2). The digital pharmakon, according to Stiegler, is the extension of this logic to the entire field of the human body, including in cognitive capitalism wherein "those economic actors who are without knowledge because they are without memory" (35). This is the essence of contemporary proletarianisation, extended into the realm of consumption, in which savour vivre, knowing how to live, is forgotten. In many ways we can see Twitter as a clear example of such a proletarianisation process, as hypomnesis, with its derivation of hypnosis; an empty circulation. This echoes Jodi Dean’s description of the flow of communicative capitalism as simply drive (Dean) in which messages circulate without ever getting where they are meant to go. Yet against this perhaps there is a gain, even in Stiegler’s own thought, as to the therapeutic or individuating elements of this process and within the extension of Tweets from an immediately bounded, but extensible and arbitrary distributed network, provides a still novel form of mediation that connects brains together; but going beyond the standard hyper-dyadic spread that is characteristic of viruses or memes. This spread happens in such a way that the expressed thoughts of others can circulate and mutate—loop—around in observable forms, for example in the form of replies, designation of favourite, as RTs (retweets) and in modified forms as MTs (modified tweets), followed by further iterations, and so on. So it is that the Twitter feeds of clusters of individuals inevitably start to show regularity in who tweets, and given the tendency of accounts to focus on certain issues, and for those with an interest in those issues to likewise follow each other, then we have groups of accounts/individuals intersecting with each other, re-tweeting and commenting on each other–forming clusters of shared opinion. The issue at stake here goes beyond the question of the evolution of such clusters at that level of linguistic exchange as, what might be otherwise called movements, or counter-publics, or issue networks—but that speed produces a more elemental effect on coordination. It is the speed of Twitter that creates an imperative to respond quickly and to assimilate vast amounts of information, to sort the agreeable from the disagreeable, divide that which should be ignored from that which should be responded to, and indeed that which calls to be acted upon. Alongside Twitter’s limited memory, its pharmacological ‘beneficial’ element entails the possibility that responses go beyond a purely linguistic or discursive interlocution towards a protection of ‘brain-share’. That is, to put it bluntly, the moment of knowing what others will think before they think it, what they will say before they say it and what they will do before they do it. This opens a capacity for action underpinned by confidence in a solidarity to come. We have seen this in numerous examples, in the actions of UK Uncut and other such groups and movements around the world, most significantly as the multi-media augmented movements that clustered in Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park and beyond. Protention, Premediation, and Augmented Volition The concept of the somatic marker plays an important role in enabling this speed up. Antonio Damasio argues that somatic markers are emotional memories that are layered into our brains as desires and preferences, in response to external stimuli they become embedded in our unconscious brain and are triggered by particular situations or events. They produce a capacity to make decisions, to act in ways that our deliberate decision making is not aware of; given the pace of response that is needed for many decisions this is a basic necessity. The example of tennis players is often used in this context, wherein the time needed to process and react consciously to a serve is in excess of the processing time the conscious brain requires; that is there is at least a 0.5 second gap between the brain receiving a stimulus and the conscious mind registering and reacting to it. What this means is that elements of the brain are acting in advance of conscious volition—we preempt our volitions with the already inscribed emotional, or affective layer, protending beyond the immanent into the virtual. However, protention is still, according to Stiegler, a fundamental element of consciousness—it pushes forward into the brain’s awareness of continuity, contributing to its affective reactions, rooted in projection and risk. This aspect of protention therefore is a contributing element of volition as it rises into consciousness. Volition is the active conscious aspect of willing, and as such requires an act of protention to underpin it. Thus the element of protention, as Stiegler describes it, is inscribed in the flow of the Twitter feed, but also and more importantly, is written into the cognitive process that proceeds and frames it. But beyond this even is the affective and emotional element. This allows us to think then of the Twitter-brain assemblage to be something more than just a mechanism, a tool or simply a medium in the linear sense of the term, but something closer to a device—or a dispositif as defined by Michel Foucault (194) and developed by Giorgio Agamben. A dispositif gathers together, orders and processes, but also augments. Maurizio Lazzarato uses the term, explaining that: The machines for crystallizing or modulating time are dispositifs capable of intervening in the event, in the cooperation between brains, through the modulation of the forces engaged therein, thereby becoming preconditions for every process of constitution of whatever subjectivity. Consequently the process comes to resemble a harmonization of waves, a polyphony. (186) This is an excellent framework to consolidate the place of Twitter as just such a dispositif. In the first instance the place of Twitter in “crystallizing or modulating” time is reflected in its grammatisation of the immediate into a circuit that reframes the present moment in a series of ripples and echoes, and which resonates in the protentions of the followers and followed. This organising of thoughts and affections in a temporal multiplicity crosscuts events, to the extent that the event is conceived as something new that enters the world. So it is that the permanent process of sharing, narrating and modulating, changes the shape of events from pinpointed moments of impact into flat plains, or membranes, that intersect with the mental events. The brain-share, or what can be called a ‘brane’ of brains, unfolds both spatially and temporally, but within the limits already defined. This ‘brane’ of brains can be understood in Lazzarato’s terms precisely as a “harmonization of waves, a polyphony.” The dispositif produces this, in the first instance, modulated consciousness—this is not to say this is an exclusive form of consciousness—part of a distributed condition that provides for a cooperation between brains, the multifarious looping mentioned above, that in its protentions forms a harmony, which is a volition. It is therefore clear that this technological change needs to be understood together with notions such as ‘noopolitics’ and ‘neuropolitics’. Maurizio Lazzarato captures very well the notion of a noopolitics when he tells us that “We could say that noopolitics commands and reorganizes the other power relations because it operates at the most deterritorialized level (the virtuality of the action between brains)” (187). However, the danger here is well-defined in the writings of Stiegler, when he explains that: When technologically exteriorized, memory can become the object of sociopolitical and biopolitical controls through the economic investments of social organizations, which thereby rearrange psychic organizations through the intermediary of mnenotechnical organs, among which must be counted machine-tools. (New Critique 33) Here again, we find a proletarianisation, in which gestures, knowledge, how to, become—in the medium and long term—separated from the bodies and brains of workers and turned into mechanisms that make them forget. There is therefore a real possibility that the short term resonance and collective volition becomes a distorted and heightened state, with a rather unpalatable after-effect, in which the memories remain only as commodified digital data. The question is whether Twitter remembers it for us, thinks it for us and as such also, in its dislocations and short termism, obliterates it? A scenario wherein general intellect is reduced to a state of always already forgetting. The proletarian, we read in Gilbert Simondon, is a disindividuated worker, a labourer whose knowledge has passed into the machine in such a way that it is no longer the worker who is individuated through bearing tools and putting them into practice. Rather, the labourer serves the machine-tool, and it is the latter that has become the technical individual. (Stiegler, New Critique 37) Again, this pharmacological character is apparent—Stiegler says ‘the Internet is a pharmakon’ blurring both ‘distributed’ and ‘deep’ attention (Crogan 166). It is a marketing tool par-excellence, and here its capacity to generate protention operates to create not only a collective ‘volition’ but a more coercive collective disposition or tendency, that is the unconscious wiling or affective reflex. This is something more akin to what Richard Grusin refers to as premediation. In premediation the future has already happened, not in the sense that it has already actually happened but such is the preclusion of paths of possibility that cannot be conceived otherwise. Proletarianisation operates in this way through the app, writing in this mode is not as thoughtful exchange between skilled interlocutors, but as habitual respondents to a standard set of pre-digested codes (in the sense of both programming and natural language) ready to hand to be slotted into place. Here the role of the somatic marker is predicated on the layering of ideology, in its full sense, into the brain’s micro-level trained reflexes. In that regard there is a proletarianisation of the prosumer, the idealised figure of the Web 2.0 discourse. However, it needs to be reiterated that this is not the final say on the matter, that where there is volition, and in particular collective volition, there is also the possibility of a reactivated general will: a longer term common consciousness in the sense of class consciousness. Therefore the general claim being made here is that by taking hold of this device consciousness, and transforming it into an active collective volition we stand the best chance of finding “a political will capable of moving away from the economico-political complex of consumption so as to enter into the complex of a new type of investment, or in other words in an investment in common desire” (Stiegler, New Critique 6). In its most simplistic form this requires a new political economy of commoning, wherein micro-blogging services contribute to a broader augmented volition that is not captured within communicative capitalism, coded to turn volition into capital, but rather towards a device consciousness as common desire. Needless to say it is only possible here to propose such an aim as a possible path, but one that is surely worthy of further investigation. References Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. Crogan, Patrick. “Knowledge, Care, and Transindividuation: An Interview with Bernard Stiegler.” Cultural Politics 6.2 (2010): 157-170. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind. London: Heinemann, 2010. Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh.” Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon. 1980. Grusin, Richard. Pre-mediation. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control.” Deleuze and the Social. Eds. Martin Fuglsang and Meier Sorensen Bent. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books, 2002. Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. ———. What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Dans la premiere partie de ce travail, l'adsorption de divers composes sulfures sur des catalyseurs palladium sur alumine a ete etudiee dans les conditions de l'hydrogenation en phase liquide et a une temperature inferieure a 100**(o)c. Dans une deuxieme partie, l'etude s'est portee sur l'influence du taux de couverture en soufre sur les proprietes catalytiques de pd/al::(2)o::(3) dans diverses reactions. Hydrogenation du butene-1, du butadiene-1,3, du butyne-1, ainsi que l'isomerisation du butene-1 en butene-2

Etude de la reactivite du manganese metallique vis-a-vis d'halogenures allyliques et d'halogeno-2 esters. Une etude de l'influence du solvant et de la presence de divers sels metalliques, a debouche sur la mise au point d'une nouvelle voie d'acces a des alcools homoallyliques

Etude de l'interaction entre les terres rares et les metaux de transition en jouant sur le mode d'impregnation, la nature des sels precurseurs des metaux de transition et des lanthanides et traitement thermique d'activation. Etude sur la dispersion et sur l'etat d'oxydation

Des couches minces amorphes d'oxysulfures de molybdène, préparées par pulvérisation cathodique radiofréquence, ont ete caractérisées par spectroscopie AUGER, RBS, microsonde électronique, diffraction des rayons X et diffraction électronique. Une étude XPS a permis de déterminer le degré d'oxydation et l'environnement des différents éléments en fonction de la composition des couches minces. Les propriétés électrochimiques de ces nouveaux matériaux ont été déterminees. Ils ont été utilisés comme électrode positive dans des générateurs électrochimiques au lithium. Un grand nombre de cycles décharge-charge a été réalisé. Il a été montre que le soufre et le molybdène participent aux mécanismes d'oxydoréduction.

Etude de la promotion par le potassium du catalyseur composite fe-co-c, c'est-a-dire de l'amelioration de son activite catalytique et de sa selectivite en alcenes. L'addition de potassium est realisee soit par impregnation par une solution aqueuse de k#2co#3, soit par la formation intermediaire d'un compose d'insertion avec le carbone de formule kc#3#2. L'evolution de la selectivite des catalyseurs promus et non promus par le potassium est etudiee a des conversions en monoxyde de carbone analogues a celles d'un procede industriel. Des tests catalytiques a faible conversion et des mesures de chimisorption de gaz reagissants sont effectues

De nombreux prototypes de porphyrines comportant des superstructures chirales elaborees ont ete synthetises au cours de la derniere decennie, en vue de l'utilisation de leurs complexes metalliques comme catalyseurs d'epoxydation asymetrique des alcenes. L'utilite de ces composes est en general limitee, du fait de leur synthese laborieuse et des etapes de separation d'isomeres qu'elle comporte. L'approche originale decrite dans cette these fournit des catalyseurs asymetriques de structure plus simple, d'obtention plus facile, et donc potentiellement plus utiles. Une etude preliminaire, centree sur la preparation de metallo-mesotetrakis(cyclohexyl)porphyrines, etablit les bases de la methodologie synthetique. Les nouvelles porphyrines chirales sont ensuite obtenues, en une seule etape, par condensation du pyrrole avec des aldehydes alicycliques chiraux facilement disponibles, tels que le (1r)-(-)-myrtenal ou l'ester methylique de l'acide (1r)-cis-hemicaronaldehydique. Dans le second cas, la porphyrine produite consiste exclusivement en l'isomere bb dont la symetrie d#2 est la plus appropriee a l'enantioselectivite recherchee. De fait, l'exces enantiomerique observe pour l'epoxydation de divers alcenes atteint 70% dans le meilleur cas (dihydronaphtalene). Des etudes structurales par rmn a temperature variable et par diffraction des rayons x permettent d'etablir une relation entre la rigidite stereochimique de la porphyrine chirale et l'induction asymetrique observee