Projectories

Katherine Hayles’ book How
we became posthuman pops up all over the place (see for example Purse
Lip Square Jaw), and my supervisor recommended it highly before summer.
I found it a very interesting read. Especially the historical pieces describing
the development of cybernetics as a science - the literary parts become
a little to opaque for my taste.Hayles, in the book, argues for a re-materialization
or re-embodiment of information - that we should not forget that information
is never completely disembodied. Her point of departure is Cybernetics,
which she uses to understand how discourses on information has changed
over time.

One of the main themes of the book is how information became disembodied.
Hayles describes how “[t]he effect of these [digital] transformations
is to create a highly heterogeneous and fissured space in which discursive
formations based on pattern and randomness jostle and compete with formations
based on presence and absence. Hayles envisions a discursive struggle between
interpretations of information: one discourse which emphasizes information
as “a pattern rather than a presence”, and one subdued discourse
that relates information to its materiality.

Texts have bodies, readers and users have bodies, and meaning emerges from
material engagements with the rich resources of a physically vibrant world
as it is crafted through artistic practices and instantiated in artifactual
objects and processes. To settle for anything else than a fully embodied
and material practice of literary theory and criticism is to risk impoverishing
our understanding of the meaning-making practices through which we engage
the world.

Materiality
Has Always Been In Play

On Sunday I enjoyed Katherine Hayles’ and Bruno Latour’s lectures at Tate Modern. Katherine Hayles lecture was about cellular automata and reminded me about chaos theory. Latour’s lecture was, as always, about science and politics. Both were well worth the time.

Our ideas of nature affect the ways in which we understand many aspects of contemporary life, in relation not only to the environment but also to science, technology, human nature and art.

Nature seems partly produced by social forces, and yet continues to act upon us in many ways (disease, the weather) that resist being reduced entirely to culture and society.

The Weather Project deals with the representation of nature today, how nature can take on social and spatial forms, and how images of nature can be produced by machines and contraptions.

• What is happening to the concept of nature in the world today?
• How is it being transformed through the impact of contemporary issues, from genetic engineering to climate change?
• How do we view the difference between natural and artifice, the authentic and the simulated?
• Does the difference matter any more?

Tate Modern: Nature Space Society

Via Tesugen.

http://orlando.women.it/cyberarchive/files/

Roland Barthes’ lectures and seminars at Collège de France are out on a 28 hour double CD. It would be a real treat to be able to listen and understand - but I’m afraid my french isn’t up to understanding academic lecturing.

Via: La république des livres

The distinction between identity and subjectivity is quite blurry,
and the concepts are often used interchangeably in discussions on gender, normality
or disability studies. If we also add the distinction between identit/y/ies and
subjectivit/y/ies it gets even more problematic. We not only have the
distinction between subjectivity and identity but also of singularity and multiplicity.
At a recent seminar
on masculinity in Helsinki Ann
Phoenix tried to untangle the concepts in a short 20-minute lecture. The
distinction between the concepts according to her is a distinction of different
schools of thought.

According to Phoenix the identity concept has its root in a modernist
discourse where the core of an individual was seen as stable, and is founded
on a discourse on developmental psychology and identity crisis where our reflexive
center is developed during adolescence. Identity originally stressed
the need for continuity and unity, but it is, in the current discourse, often
used in the plural, due to the advent of the subjectivities concept and its
focus on multiple cores. Phoenix referenced Stuart Hall (1996) and Mercer (1990)
as users of the identity concept.

Subjectivit/y/ies on the other hand is founded on a postmodern and
post structuralist discourse and focuses the making of the subject, this include
the taking of subject positions and stresses the reflexive dimension. (Cf.
Althusser’s concept interpellation). Phoenix pointed to Judith Holloway
et al.’s (1984/9 Changing the Subject as further reading.

So the distinction seems to be not only a historical one, but also a difference
in perspective; one focusing an inner stable core, and the other stressing
the making of identity; one focusing modernist discourse, and the other
focusing post modern discourse. Important distinctions to bear in mind if one
plans to use the concepts.

I just wrote an e-mail to a friend of mine discussing how to lecture on gender
issues to technical students. Thought I would share it here:

Educating people about gender is quite straining. I just held my first lecture
in gender and technology for the engineer students at Linköping university.
It was very hard in some ways – it was a constant struggle not to piss
the students that were sure that biology was the foundation of gender off
– but still remain critical of the patriarchal power structures. One
guy was constantly in a battle with me over women being like this or that,
and it was hard to keep my temper at times. But I managed. It is really
tough when fundamentals like the distinction between sex and gender are questioned
from the first moment. But I hope some of them understood the lecture. You’re
right. There is a deep chasm [Between engineers and social scientists].
and it’s
really hard to bridge in a short time like a lecture or discussion.

Basically if I relate to my own feelings, I feel very guilty for
being a man when I think about gender equality. That makes it harder to think
neutrally about it – and it is easy to get into “defense” mode. Maybe
that’s what your friend did? In my lecture I tried to relate gender issues
to other social power structures within the genders, and then I kept going
with the discussion until we reached the power structures between the genders.
Or actually the lecture went like this:

1. Gender varies with class, ethnicity, age, historical period.
2. There are power structures in society both between men-men, women-women…
3. … as well as between men-women

Today I ran in to this article in National Geographic (Via Boing Boing) and it reminded me of how natural sciences help build the definitions of normality. It describes how male bass in the Potomac River have started producing eggs - which it describes as abnormal. Of course this article is interested in showing how pollution is affecting our environment, but through its seemingly neutral tone it also creates and reinforces what we perceive as normal.

The problem with biological descriptions is that normality is presented as founded in nature, when from a historical perspective we can clearly see that the concepts normal and abnormal are not so unchancheable as it seems in biological discourse. Rather, through the study of history, normality has been proven as historically contingent and heavily dependent on prescientific ideas as well as our blind trust in “nature as a fact”. The strange thing is that “abnormal” biological variation is inherent in nature (and we have hermaphrodites and freemartins to prove it) - but we still try to define and categorize natural occurences into the normal/abnormal categories.

Thus, it is not nature that defines normality/abnormality - it is biologists and scientists that apply social ideas to nature. We often envision materiality, in this case egg laying capabilities of bass, as reality, but what is often forgotten is how our description and interpretation of biology shapes our understanding of what normal is. (See Oudshoorn, N. who applies Ludwig Fleck’s concept to prescientific ideas to a history of the sex hormones)

Something fishy is happening in the headwaters of the Potomac River. Scientists have discovered that some male bass are producing eggs - a decidedly female reproductive function. …

Some 42 percent of male smallmouth bass surveyed showed signs of intersex development. A second sampling this spring produced an even higher rate - 79 percent showed sexual abnormalities.

Male Fish Producing Eggs in Potomac River

Reference: Oudshoorn, Nelly. (1994). Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones. Routledge.