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

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 (1984/98) 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

Wow. I thought social constructionism in science was on the way out. That there was going to be a material turn. Doesn’t look like the white house agrees with me.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Ron Suskind, from “Without a Doubt,” The New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.

Via [Relevant History: Quote of the day]

The last week I have been (among a lot of teaching) pondering Karen Barad’s article on Posthumanist Performativity that discusses a kind of “onto-epistemology”. She proposes that the concept of phenomena should be used to mark a joining of the subject and the object in scientific discourse. She bases this metaphysics on the Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s observations and theorizing on photons or light waves.

To me it seems somewhat related to Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges where the researcher must remove him-/herself from the “nowhere position”. The new
twist on Barad’s article seems to be that she includes the ontological dimension in the concept rather than leaving it on the epistemological level like Haraway or Harding.

Barad’s flirting with physics (she is a trained physicist herself so maybe it’s unfair to call it flirting) seems to mirror a “material turn” in social sciences where the dominance of the social level has been questioned by theorists like Bruno Latour or John Law. And although the article is an interesting read I’m a bit unsure if what she is saying is so revolutionary – material as
well as social reality matters.

[P]henomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.” That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata. The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful.

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

I have looked a little closer at the concept of Disruptive Technology that I wrote about previously, with a focus on understanding it in relation to education.

What seems like the main emphasis in the theory about disruptive innovation is how organizations (expressed mostly as firms) can win market share by targeting customers with new and cheaper products. These products will then either undercut the incumbent company in the segment (type II innovation) or create a new market (type I innovation). In Disruption in Education by Clayton M. Christensen et al. I find that the concept of education and knowledge is to a large degree depicted as a commodity – hence it fits into the general framework of the theory.

This commodified view of knowledge is often used in conjunction with vocational training, and also when talking about distance education, and it seems like the view of education as a quest for commodifiable knowledge is dominant in the economic part of distance education discourse.

This knowledge-as-commodity paradigm clashes seriously with both enlightenment ideals as well as the Swedish tradition of peoples education where knowledge and schooling are seen as key routes to democracy and an egalitarian society – where education is seen as a political tool to shape society.

The question that arises is what role education should play in a democratic society. Should education be viewed as a democratic force in that it gives people the means to educate themselves to further their success in the workplace or should it be viewed as a democratic force that imbues certain values to the citizens? If education is seen as a means to attain economic success through skills acquisition disruptive innovation might serve as a useful concept for understanding dissemination of education. If education is seen in light of enlightenment traditions or people’s education the value of education lies not in its commodified value – rather it lies in a harder to measure democratic or egalitarian effects.

I have 6 gmail invites to spare. Send me a message if you want to be invited.

Christensen’s concept of “disruptive technologies” has popped up two times during the last week. The first time was in my session at the EASST/4S conference. The second time was in this blog post on too many topics….

From a first look into the concept it seems to be a Schumpeterian concept to analyze the market effects of technology, and Christensen has used it to analyze technologies for distance education. The concept focuses on how companies (or universities) can steal market share from each other utilizing new technologies “to compete in a new way in new markets.”

The problem of this concept from my point of view is how it does not address issues related to the social aspects of technology. Rather it focuses on the adaption of technology on a large scale – leaving the effects of the technology out of the discussion. It becomes rather like looking at the spread of pollution without understanding the effects of the spread. It can be interesting, but it doesn’t tell you much about what is happening.