Félix Guattari, writing both on his own and with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, developed the notion of schizoanalysis out of his frustration with what he saw as the shortcomings of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, namely the orientation toward neurosis, emphasis on language, and lack of socio-political engagement. Guattari was analyzed by Lacan, attended the seminars from the beginning, and remained a member of Lacan's school until his death in 1992. His unorthodox lacanism grew out of his clinical work with schizophrenics and involvement in militant politics. Paradoxically, even as he rebelled theoretically and practically against Lacan's 'mathemes of the unconscious' and topology of knots, Guattari ceaselessly drew diagrams and models. Deleuze once said of him that 'His ideas are drawings, or even diagrams.' Guattari's singled-authored books are filled with strange figures, which borrow from fields as diverse as linguistics, cultural anthropology, chaos theory, energetics, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Guattari himself declared schizoanalysis a 'metamodeling,' but at the same time insisted that his models were constructed aesthetically, not scientifically, despite his liberal borrowing of scientific terminology. The practice of schizoanalytic metamodeling is complicated by his and Deleuze's concept of the diagram, which they define as a way of thinking that bypasses language, as for example in musical notation or mathematical formulas. This article will explore Guattari's models, in relation to Freud, Lacan, C.S. Peirce, Louis Hjelmslev, Noam Chomsky, and Ilya Prigogine. I will also situate his drawings in relation to his work as a practicing clinician, political activist, and co-author of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

Pia Ednie-Brown - Plastic Super Models: aesthetics, architecture and the model of emergence

Modelling is at the core of what architects do, rendering the discipline especially fragile and sensitive to shifts in the nature of models and modelling. A digitally-based, explorative architectural milieu has been actively modelling in tune with a socio-cultural paradigm related to the concept of emergence, presenting numerous challenges to a range of assumptions about the activity of architectural design. This paper explores how this milieu has acted to unsettle the cool containments of architectural composure by bringing affective activity emphatically to the foreground.

Gary Genosko - Regaining Weaver and Shannon

My claim is that communication considered from the standpoint of how it is modeled must not only reckon with Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver but regain their pioneering efforts in new ways. I want to regain two neglected features. I signal these ends by simply reversing the order in which their names commonly appear.

First, the recontextualization of Shannon and Weaver requires an investigation of the technocultural scene of information ‘handling’ embedded in their groundbreaking postwar labours; not incidentally, it was Harold D. Lasswell, whose work in the 1940s is often linked with Shannon and Weaver’s, who made a point of distinguishing between those who affect the content of messages (controllers) as opposed to those who handle without modifying (other than accidentally) such messages. Although it will not be possible to maintain such a hard and fast distinction that ignores scenes of encoding and decoding, Lasswell’s (1964: 42-3) examples of handlers include key figures such as ‘dispatchers, linemen, and messengers connected with telegraphic communication’ whose activities will prove to be important for my reading of the Shannon and Weaver essays. Telegraphy and its occupational cultures are the technosocial scenes informing the Shannon and Weaver model.

Second, I will pay special attention to Weaver’s contribution, despite a tendency to erase him altogether by means of a general scientific habit of listing the main author first and then attributing authorship only to the first name on the list (although this differs within scientific disciplines, particularly in the health field where the name of the last author is in the lead, so to speak). I begin with a displacement of hierarchy and authority. I am inclined to simply state for those who, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, ‘know my method’, that I focus my attention on the less well-known half of thinking pairs – on Roger Caillois instead of Georges Bataille, on Félix Guattari rather than Gilles Deleuze. In the absence of my own sympathetic Watson, I will provide two detailed accounts of the effects of this reordering of names and reprioritizing of features. Weaver’s task was to communicate about the mathematical model in non-technical terms; he did this in the original writings on the model and much later in his career as a scientific proselytizer. He was assigned this later task by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and didn’t realize, by his own admission, was he was getting into; yet, he managed to produce several versions of explanatory texts as well as theorize about popular scientific writing (Weaver, 1967). This displacement of authority allows me to circle back to an older technology, namely telegraphy, that newly figures in the regained history of the mathematical model I am offering here. This both unfixes the scholarly preoccupation with telephony under the sign of Ma Bell, and foregrounds the service environment of the telegram office that influenced the model in the first place and recurred in later reflections on it in the second place.

Steven Maras - On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray)

Transmission functions as a key image of communication in media, communications, and cultural study. At times, largely linked to the mathematical theory of communication, it has played a foundational role in defining this field, and the study of the process of communication. At other times it has become a key object of critique. A conventional argument is that transmission represents a simplistic, inadequate and inferior model of communication. But this does not explain how, for some critics, transmission can be activated as an enabling, productive term. This essay explores aspects of the critique of the so-called transmission model of communication. But it is also interested in what authors do with the concept. It looks at how Wilbur Schramm and Stuart Hall engage with ideas of transmission, and then explores how transmission is deployed in parts of Régis Debray’s work.

Mat Wall-Smith - Toward an Ontology of Mutual Recursion: models, mind and media

In Parables for the Virtual Massumi describes 'The Autonomy of Affect' in our ecology of thought (Massumi 2002 : 35). The object of Stiegler's Technics and Time is 'technics apprehended as the horizon of all possibility to come and all possibility of a future' (Stiegler 1998 : ix). The ecological dynamic described by the recursion between this 'affective autonomy' and a 'technical horizon of possibility' describes a metamodel of the relation between body and world, between perception and expression. I argue that this metamodel allows for the technical architectures that enshrine media processes and models as both the manifestation and modulation of the 'industry' or vitality of mind. I argue that these technical architectures are crucial to the creation and maintenance of dynamic ecologies of living.

Gerard Goggin - The Models and Politics of Mobile Media

In this paper I seek to critically evaluate the models at play in an important area of new media cultures -- mobile media. By 'mobile', I mean the new technologies, cultural practices, and arrangements of production, consumption, and exchange, emerging with hand-held, networked devices --especially those based on mobile cellular networks. These mobile phone technologies are now commonly being framed as media; and so we see the appearance of objects such as mobile television, mobile film, mobile games, and mobile Internet. This much-heralded move, with its large cultural and commercial claims, raises important theoretical and political questions. To zero in on what it at stake in the shift from mobile phone to mobile media, I consider three distinct though related models that for ease of reference I will term: phones; commons; publics. Firstly, I look at the model of the telephone (latterly, telecommunications) that is still strongly influential in the shaping of mobiles as they now figure as media. This is something that is not widely recognised, however -- for instance, when mobiles as simply seen as an extension of new media cultures based on ideas formed through the experience of the Internet. Secondly, I consider the model of the commons and what light it throws on the politics of mobile media. Discussions of the commons -- for instance, the lucid work of Yochai Benkler in his 2006 The Wealth of Networks -- typically take the Internet as their paradigm example. But what how does the model of commons relate to mobiles, and what might it tell us about mobile media? Thirdly, while the telephone and mobile phone also have often been modelled through the concept of 'community', mobile media encourage us to think about the different and sometimes opposed model of publics. In drawing upon recent work on publics, what I am interested here is how new kinds of publics are emerging with mobile media.

Jan Simons - Tag-elese or The Language of Tags

The core "meme" of Web 2.0 from which almost all other memes radiated was: 'You control your own data' (O'Reilly, 2005, 3). Key instruments for this user control are tagging systems that allow users to freely assign keywords of their own choosing to Internet resources of their own making as well as to documents produced by others. Of course, freely chosen keywords tags do not necessarily follow prefixed taxonomies or classification systems. But going by the maxim that interaction creates similarity and similarity creates interaction, the idea - or hope - is, however, that the tagging practices of individual users will eventually converge into an emergent common vocabulary or folksonomy (Merholz, 2004; Shirky, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005b; Mika, 2007). It is far from clear, however, that free tagging systems will eventually yield controlled vocabularies, and there are many incentives for idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and inconsistent uses of tags. Left to themselves, free tagging systems seem to be too wild and too chaotic for any order to emerge. But are these free tagging systems really as "feral" as they seem to be, or do they only look uncontrolled because one has been looking for order in the wrong place? I have done a quick-and-dirty" analysis of Flickr's tag cloud. The concept was: if folksonomies encourage users to tap on their own vernacular, everyday natural language must somehow "guide" the tagging practices of users of tagging systems. Flickr's tag cloud has been choosen because it may teach us something about tagging systems and folksonomies, and not - or not primarily - because of what tags may tell us about pictures.

John Potts - Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory

This paper assesses the strengths and weaknesses of medium theory as a model. In surveying the critical reception of medium theory, the paper re-evaluates the charge of technological determinism that has been brought against this theoretical model. Alternative models incorporating technologies and social systems, such as Actor Network Theory, are considered, but the paper affirms the emphasis in medium theory on the intrinsic properties of media technologies. The paper points to the tacit influence of medium theory in everyday claims made for new media technologies and their transforming capacity. As a result of a reconsideration of medium theory, the paper proposes a theoretical approach sensitive both to the social context of media technologies and to the properties of those technologies themselves.