This time with a Meme: "Does Information Really want to be Free?"

The meme I am going to go with on this one is the Purdue Owl (or the online writing center in general).

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/

How does an online writing center change the nature of how information flows in a writing center?

The information available from the Purdue OWL is far more scripted and static than the information possible in a face-to-face site (if we define a face-to-face site as one designed by the original architects of writing center pedagogy: Harris, Bruffee, Kail, Trimbur, North, Grimm).   The Purdue interface presents in a square with a scripted and finite menu, whereas the traditional on-site writing center is arranged in a series of circles (round tables),  and because the consultants are listening beings, there is infinite potential in what can happen in those conversations.

A highly scripted site, like the Purdue OWL, slows down the flow of information, or at least changes its nature, because it controls what can and cannot be discussed.   The issue then becomes not just about information as "free," (because the Purdue OWL is open access), but how the proxemics, speed and the structure of the information shapes the impact of the message.

Because the Purdue OWL presupposes what questions students will ask, it instantiates a set of values about what is important to know, whereas an on-site writing center has room for the spontaneity of casual conversation.  In an on-site space, the consultant has to be ready for the conversation to move in an infinite amount of directions since there is only a loose script that the consultant follows and there is no script that the student follows.

The tutorial in an on-site writing center makes me think of a ping pong game: you don't know (beyond the limits of the table, the court or the actual rules of the game) where the ball will be placed when it comes flying back at you. So you pay attention so you can respond as quickly and effectively as possible.  The impromptu nature of a writing center conversation means that the conversation can be nimble,  can move very quickly; but as a result, it may not have a lot of impact (it is a low pressure and low stakes environment).  The more structure something has, the more impact (like a fire hose as compared to a garden hose, or an SUV as compared to a Mini-Cooper).

Even in an online writing center that is interactive, but asynchronous (like the one that the Western E-Tutoring consortium hosts for WSU http://www.etutoring.org/), there is more time for the consultant to respond, more time to craft a message.  The more honed and crafted a message, the more impact it has the potential to have. 

But here's the rub:  Writing centers are based on the theory that the student is the authority (the WC ostensibly seeks to move the student from a vision of him/herself as subordinate of a education to a vision of him/herself as a writer with a voice to challenge and change the status quo).  The WC enacts this theory by having the consultant ask prompting questions that build upon each other depending on what the student says in response.  In other words, the main communication skill for a consultant in an on-site space is listening.  In an online space the consultant does more reading and writing--(listening in an online space looks like absence more than it looks like presence).   The more writing the consultant does, the more it changes the relationship so it appears the consultant has more authority.  So it is a conundrum.  The main thing is to recognize that it is different;  the configuration of the space changes the message.

Information is never free (even in open access like the Purdue OWL) because everything  has a material instantiation with constraints; the best we can do is make sure the spaces we create for the visions we have are consistent with our original principles.  

Does information really want to be free?

I found the article "Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness" to be wonderfully written.  The topic in also incredibly provocative.

Does information really want to be free?   I don't think information wants anything.  Having information as the subject is an anthropomorphizing of an abstract concept, a reinforcing of a trend where "Human agency is muted, and technology becomes the revolutionary figure" (Christen 2877).

Gregory Bateson said that "Information is any difference that makes a difference."  He categorized everything else as noise.   Since different things matter to different people differently, whether or not something is information is entirely contextual.  It's not really information if there is a "lack of an adequate historical context within which to anchor these systems" (2878).

When language is concerned, there is no such thing as true open access.  You have to know the language, you have to be invited to understand the vocabulary, you have to have a handle on the whole complex symbol-system.  No matter how open something is, it is open to misinterpretation if you do not understand the cultural systems that created it.

Even from the generous perspective of knowledge as a "non-rivalrous good" (2878),  this generosity is not realistic when we still employ competitive tactics in education where language learning is concerned.  Language itself is not considered free to trade--after all, most of what we do in writing instruction is evaluate it for levels of competency, rank it relation to often-arbitrary standards, and exclude dialects and discourses that could add verve, color and perspective--so how will we make knowledge free to trade if we have not yet done that with language?

The "information wants to be free" rhetoric reminds me of the posthuman "utopian" idea that suggests that once information is liberated from its corporeal body (from whatever binds it to a material structure) then it is free to liberate us from all those cumbersome restrictions.  But everything needs a boundary, a body, to contain it, to give it limitations.  Limitations are usually created as representative of a set of values.  When everything is free it is unattached to a set of values, a discipline of respect.


I do, however, agree with Noam Chomsky, who (in his delivery of the Potter Memorial lecture) at WSU in 2005, argued that information created on state time (funded by state dollars) should belong to the state and not to the individuals creating (discovering, inventing) it. 

If we thought about information in social and moral ways rather than in economic ways (Christen 2875), it could be possible for more information to be absorbed into an intellectual commons, or at least possible for more equitable discussion to occur relative to that information.  But we don't.  In this culture, information is not even free when the state has already paid for it.

This obsession with ownership has over-taken public education (particularly in the university) where the comprehension of information is deemed of less importance than the giving of credit to the person who first (or best) articulated it.  But again, it depends on who that person is.  If the person is a state-supported scholar, the information is so valuable that we all-but tape dollar bills onto our in-text attributions.  If the person is (was) an indigenous artist, well, then that work should be in the free museum and belong to everyone. (Read sarcasm here, and also read that this thought evolves from Kim Christen's assumed perspective.)

For me Digital Resource Management and the issues it grapples in the management of subaltern resources, is a microcosm of the larger truth that culture-controllers, by having a voice in what is and isn't important in people's historical records, use technologies to script who people can and can not be. It is crucially important to be aware that what has been decided as "public domain" (or not public domain) has not been a consensual or communal process. The decisions have been made by people who have the economic clout to control, highlight or subordinate resources in ways that best benefit them.

"The framing of the digital landscape promotes a type of historical amnesia about how the public domain was initially populated.  In the United States, the rise of public domain talk is linked to Westward expansion and the displacement of indigenous people" (Christen 2897).

This image is hard to see and the resolution gets worse when it is enlarged, but it is the "information" of small pox being sprinkled on a set of "free" blankets

In other words, while many try to de-historicize notions of public domain (what is so precious it must be sequestered, and what is so mundane that it can serve as staples for the collective), it is important to realize that this selection process is highly historicized and we should not pretend otherwise (Christen 2880).

Information is like intention.  You can have a lot of it; you can manifest a lot of good things with it. You can make a big old destructive mess with it.

Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you have, it's not about what you have.   Wisdom is not free.

"We live in an age when the growth of the Internet has made it easier
than ever to gain access to information and accumulate knowledge. But
information is not the same as meaning, nor is knowledge identical with
wisdom. Many people feel engulfed by a tsunami of facts in which they
can find no meaning" (McGrath).

Spring 2015 Research Questions from Trevor Owen's blog

Ideal Goal
My overarching goal is do something that makes a difference.

Academic Goal To be able to better understand, and to effectively communicate, the degree to which excessive dependence on digital technology reduces human cerebral practice with proprioception, exteroception and interoception.  (I love those terms.)

As part of that larger academic goal, I am interested in investigating and exposing the degree to which the over-use of technology, in and around childbirth, has the potential to cause both short and long-term emotional and/or physiological problems in mothers and children.

Realistic Academic Goal: 

I am interested in doing a rhetorical analysis to show how the conversation in medical science (in peer-reviewed journals such as Medical Hypothesis and the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics) about the safety of digital imaging in pre-natal testing (specifically ultrasound) is very different from the conversation in the rhetoric of the popular media and in medical sites (such as WebMD, advertising for imaging services and hospitals).   (This disconnect between contemporary medical research and the rhetoric of current medical practice is also apparent relative to C-sections and the use of drugs in labor augmentation and pain relief.)

Embedded in this disconnect is the question of :

Who has the most authority to speak about medicine?

Hypothesis: It is not the researchers who are producing the current science who have the most authority; it is the for-profit institutions that are delivering the services.  This is no doubt related to who has access to popular avenues of information distribution, and the best ability to package the information in a consumer digestible  form.  (It is also, I imagine, related to liability issues for practitioners, who no longer have the option of being wrong, so they opt for the most current technologies to do the work, because for some reason technology is never wrong.)

My conceptual framework is as a 2^nd wave, presenthuman feminist* teacher-writer who is interested in cooperating with (and translating), rather than contesting, the partial perspectives of both narrative and empirical stories. 

*I do not agree with Donna Haraway that the goddess is dead (Cyborg Manifesto 301), and I do not agree with Haraway that the Posthuman Cyborg is a feminist liberator (Cyborg Manifesto 302), but I also do not believe that the goddess (as a metaphor for empowered and embodied womanhood) is more important or more powerful than her metaphorical ontological consort.  (I think that using an incrementum to weigh gender-worth is ridiculous; it's like using an incrementum to weigh the worths of hot and cold.)

My previous scholarly investigations, first-hand observations, and lived experience situate me to understand that unmediated  (and un-medicated) childbirth is far safer than the current media rhetoric suggests, and that techno-birth is far more dangerous than current media rhetoric suggests.  My previous scholarship (some of it conducted last semester in 597 as part of my final project) confirms this hypothesis.

I also want to investigate the degree to which a "rhetoric of risk" around childbirth not only encourages reliance on costly (in more ways than one) technology in this culture, but is being spread more and more throughout the 3^rd world. 

Two research questions are:

• What is the best way to reveal the disconnect between the rhetoric of for-profit institutions and the information currently being published in peer-reviewed journal studies in medicine? My specific focus is on the use of technology in childbirth, specifically the use of digital imaging such as pre-natal ultrasound as standard practice.
• What is the best way to communicate this information to childbearing couples? [Because no matter how effective I am in packaging this work for the field of Composition and Rhetoric, not enough people are willing to read--or are able to understand--the impenetrable discourse in the scholarly stuff we write.] 

My methods will be to:

• Find, Read and Document the birth and breast-feeding conversation in for-profit sites (WebMD, imaging services, hospital protocols).
• Find, Read and Document the medical research conversation about birth and breast feeding (peer-reviewed journal-based).
• Find, Read and Work from sources that investigate similar questions (like the work of Mary Lay, Marika Siegel, Amy Koerber and Robbie Davis-Floyd on the rhetoric of birth, pregnancy and breast feeding).
• Drink wine, make soap and play ping pong regularly to avoid letting this project take over my life.

The validity concerns I have are that:

I am highly emotional about this topic, and that compromises my ability to be systematic about studying it.  My tendency is to just want to scream-- and that isn’t persuasive.

Much of the data that I have unearthed--particularly about the relationship of autism to the over-use of technology in childbirth--is new, and it is based on correlation rather than causality.  

I have trouble implementing any systems consistently (even recipes) and that compromises my ability to be systematic about approaching any topic.

What do I want to gain from the course that will help me in the pursuit of this research?  Most specifically, I'd like to learn more about the expectations of the genre.  I am a writer, with the majority of my education occurring in the 20th century.  I am not opposed to learning the conventions of producing text (performing text) in digital space, but it is new to me.  I have access to 21st century support systems to figure some of this out, but I am hoping to learn what the expectations are for arranging evidence in digital space (since it is not exactly linear in its presentation) and what constitutes evidence.  Also, what are the most productive or persuasive venues?  What are the citation or copyright rules for linking to stuff?  How do you create a web-site?  Yes, I am also interested in the theoretical-conceptional frames, but I challenge conceptual frames that tout a utopian vision (I think we should leave that to missionaries and not to scholars).

Book Summary: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology

 Race, Rhetoric, and Technology is an amazing blend of story, history, philosophy, and design.  Oh wait, I guess I could say that it is an artful piece of rhetoric.  Each chapter is different from the others, but central to Banks' argument is this point, eloquently made by employing Dr. Martin Luther King as the supreme rhetor to deliver the message:

 "through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.  But somehow, and in someway, we have got to do this. We must learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools" (King quoted on page 63).

In the service of creating the transformation needed to become an ethical brotherhood, the most important sets of questions that Adam Banks poses are these:  "What does this transformational ideal look like? What set of attitudes, commitments, and goals might enable one to peruse this kind of transformation?" (46).

Banks recognizes that transformative access is not just about African American or Black inclusion in the dominant cultural technologies, but about taking agency in determining what those technologies become (45) and how they are used.

Banks writes, "This kind of look [transformational] at race and technology posits that our nation is a construct, or system, maybe even a technological system, and the Constitution, federal, state, and local laws, as part of the code that runs it. Social spaces like schools, cities, the workplace, and the court system are all interfaces where people use that system. African American struggle as reflected in its rhetorical traditions, was always an attempt to both change the interfaces of that system and fundamentally change the codes that determine how the system works" (45).

This argument for transformative change is, in my mind, where the "rubber meets the road" because the soul of this country is a very destructive place, and dedicated activists and conscious users of technology must rally in the spirit of transformation.  And, while Dr. King was willing to assign the term "neighborhood" to the world we have created in this country (the level once removed from brotherhood), I would argue that the neighborhood as a cultural metaphor is no longer even apt-- we are moving farther and farther in the wrong direction.

As Banks suggest, prior to a rally for transformation, groups of people must articulate the values (attitudes, commitment, goals) behind which they will unite so as to define the nature of the movement(s).  If Martin Luther King's values are the ones that light the path for transformation, that is a very different call to action than Obama's state sponsored values leading the call to action.   The politics of this country are horrifically violent (both domestically and in terms of foreign affairs), and they get worse by the day. 

Case in point is what Banks writes abut law enforcement:

"Law enforcement is a technological system for protecting the persons and property in a society, as well as the desired patterns of relations between them.  Regardless of the availability of individual tools available to police in their work (guns, nightsticks, pepper spray, hands, feet, squad car computers, dashboard video cameras) and the wide range of force those tools represent, young Black and Latino men (and increasingly, women) are killed, injured, arrested, charged, and convicted at higher rates than other groups of people in this country" (40).  Banks continues, "any decision to about how police use the tools and the force they have is largely a result of what they have been taught about when and how to use them and the mandates that police forces are given that construct crime and criminals in particular ways" (40).

In other words, our cultural technologies and its users are programmed with a certain set of values.  The values our technologies are programmed with are exclusionary and they are physically cruel, and nowhere is this more publicly apparent--especially in the aftermath of Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson MO--than in the realm of law enforcement.  Simply wanting access to cruel and racist technologies makes no sense if a.) you are a target of their cruelty or b.) if you are against a philosophy of life (and its concomitant practices) that uses cruelty to control.  What I love about Banks' argument is that it emphasizes (or emphasizes in accessible prose) that the tool is not the point,  the values its programmers and users use it to employ are what matter.

The other important take away from Banks' book is the conundrum about access to the literacies of technology when the technologies are changing too fast to allow mastery by people who have limited access (18).  Access is a rhetorical problem. This is more evidence of the lack of intention on the part of technology users and programmers to have it be accessible to all.  That attitude must transform first.

So, as Banks suggests, the issue of the Underground becomes vital.  At some point when confronted with a culture of bullies and their arrogant insistence that they do not want you (Blacks, women, etc.) to play their game, then invent a work around, invent a different game, invent a better game.

 I wanted Banks to discuss in more detail is how Black cultural traditions could be better facilitated through more technological access.  What traditions?  In what ways? Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me is what he refers to as "soul" (129).  That intangible aspect of culture seems entirely absent from mainstream conversations about technology use.  To me, it is the loss of the concept of soul (in conversations about American culture in general) that makes the trajectory of our tool usage so dangerous.  To me, infusing technology with soul is the needed answer.  How African American agency can use the concept of soul to transform our use of technology is a part of his conversation I want to hear more about.

Banks' discussion of the Black Jeremiad begins to get at it because the concept both brings him to the issue of "soul" in less spiritual language. and it also poses the need for defining technology.  He writes, "It is still somewhat difficult to talk about discursive conventions or genres as technologies because it then becomes easy to wonder if the definition of a technology is so hopelessly muddled that it no longer defines anything" (89).

Writing is a technology because it is instrumental in the "ordering of our social, economic, and political systems"(89).   As other technologies allow the emergence of competing literacies (competing for time if not for resources), the teaching of writing as the foundational analytical skill (and, while not free, is cheap if you have a pen), keeps the digital divide from determining access to higher order thinking.

Getting back to the Jeremiad: Not only does American culture deserves a lament right now, the genre of the Black Jeremiad as one of the Black cultural traditions that Banks alludes to in this work, is a useful genre for a.) challenging the status quo's blind optimism in the face of an eroding civilization, and b.) for preserving a linguistic tradition in which unauthorized knowledge can be stored. Whiteness has experienced privilege for so long that it isn't "putting by" for the future.  We are so entrenched in our literacies of expensive technologies and outsourced access, that our folk literacies are dying.  Folk literacy is in many ways survival literacy--and here, I imagine, is a place where Black cultural practices are rich in linguistic traditions that need to be preserved in Underground locations that have nothing to do with hard drives, softwares, or even electric environments.  To me, the Underground is the place where survival literacies hide until the culture is in need of them again.  As Banks suggests, art is a wonderful place to hide these literacies.  Hip hop is a place where transformation happens (128).

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/videos/id.18160/title.derek-minor-who-you-know-

I love the idea of designing freedom into our artifacts, and I recognize the highly subversive nature of this work.  Covert ways of coding knowledge (123) is my favorite topic.  Unauthorized knowledges are, in my mind, the Higher Ground.  I always think of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin when reaching for examples of how creative subversion can liberate.  Instead of using the standard method of subversion (overt violence), Cassy uses her understanding of psychology,  of Simon Legree's superstitious nature, to frighten him (making him think his attic is haunted) which gives her the time and the space she needs to run away.

Banks writes, "Finally, there is much that this book does not accomplish, many important experiences it does not document, many important ideas that it does not explore. This book is much like one of the quilts that slaves used to guide brave souls to freedom" (146).  In this touching conclusion, Banks invites us to design additional quilts.

Disability

A wonderful thing about disability studies is that it unselfconsciously suggests that compassion can guide conversations about pedagogy:

"For educators, it is ethically questionable to practice pedagogies and construct spaces that categorically exclude entire classes of people.  We need to pay attention to the teaching of composition through the lens of disability studies to remind ourselves of just how much our profession has to learn, and just how much we have been content to ignore" (Selfe and Howe).

And so not only do we need to face our need to be compassionate educators, we need to look at how our tendencies to try and enforce and extend "normal" impede that pursuit:
 
Dolmage quoting Lennard Davis's Bodies of Difference writes, "language usage, which is as much a physical function as any other somatic activity, has become subject to an enforcement of normalcy" (116).  I appreciate it when Dolmage  (Writing Against Normal) reinforces that the essay composing process is messy.  It is such a simple but vital reminder. There is no standardized or tidy process for composing (creating) anything.  We might expect standard products for standard purposes, but when it comes to creating things (like writing our own lives) there are few standard processes, and fewer standard purposes. Perhaps the more divergent we are, the better. (See Veronica's Roth's awesome book of this same name.) :-)

"The normate subject is white, male, straight, upper middle class;"... "The subject and his body translate as error-free, straight and logical prose; as a writing process this is a portfolio of progression towards perfection and away from all evidence of struggle and labor" (Dolmage 115).  Ah, yes, never let them see you sweat--got to make sure that disorderly body gets hidden.  I find it fascinating that Dolmage makes the connection that the enforcement of writing standards happens at about the same time that body standards become an issue (I am thinking that this is junior high school). 

Dolmage writes, "We see normalcy imposed multitudinously through 'surface features' like page layout and sentence length. We see normalcy interpellated through nebulous ideas like 'clarity,' which Trinh T. Minh Ha suggests 'is a means of subjection' and 'conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing'" (116).  

Yes! And we wonder why students act in such rebellion to this enforced conformity. It's not that they can't write, it's that they reject its rigid forms like teenagers reject controlling parents.

"Make it your first priority to design for people with disabilities" (Slatin 2).  Spaces that acknowledge the unique needs of all students challenge the control paradigm in favor of a compassion paradigm.  We can be in charge without being in control.

In recent years composition studies has offered us conversations in consideration of race, class, sexual orientation, SRTOL, and for the rich textures of difference. Unfortunately, these conversations are largely relegated to composition courses, publications and conferences with little reverberating out into the disciplines where error-free, straight and logical prose are still the order of the day.  How can we get this loving voice to sing loud enough for the rest of the academy to hear? How do we create an "ethical infrastructure" in the American institution? 

(Personally I think WAC and WID work is where the reverberation of these conversations can best be facilitated.)

Ironies abound right now relative to conversations about disability.  While a text such as "Disability and Kairotic Spaces" suggests that real energy is moving to break down barriers to access, the physically embodied truth is that able-bodied students on this campus are so tuned out of their own bodies that they cannot respond to each other let alone to disabled bodies.  The feedback awareness required of a body to be sensitive to another body in space is removed by the hyper-attention to sounds piped in by ear bud.  I see it everyday, everywhere.  I am a victim of it.   I am the one who moves out of people's way because while my knee might be unstable, none of my senses is compromised.  So we not only have true disability in people to be conscious of (temporary or permanent), we have manufactured disability: self-imposed hearing impairments that result in a conscious withdrawal from social and physical proprioception. 

And here is what is unfortunate:  these people I am referring to are not imagining disability for any higher purpose; I am not even sure they know they are enacting disability, but in their oblivion to social and physical cues, they are compromised from making quick and effective decisions.  Walking and i-podding is safer than texting and driving, but it is still a state of dis-ability.

"I become more convinced each day that practicing accessibility means closing the imagination gap that separates most people from people with disabilities. It means imagining disability, and working at it long enough to get over the first shock of being unable to do what you're accustomed to doing in the way you're accustomed to doing it--long enough so that you begin to find solutions and workarounds, long enough so that you can begin to tell the difference between good design and bad design, between things that you can't do because you haven't learned how to do them yet and things that you can't do because there's no way for a person in your (imagined) circumstances to do them" (Slatin, John. The Imagination Gap.)

Besides the work we can do as individual educators in our classrooms, how can we link up the conversations we are having in Comp and Rhet to the real world?  And here is perhaps the biggest irony of all: We could do this as writers, but what is deemed good writing in the academy is not something that ordinary folk would want to read; and if we disavow our academic roots to write for the masses, then those texts leave us with no professional credibility. Victor says that the field of Composition suffers from "an anxiety of sophistication" (personal blurt 11/4/14)

On a narrative note. I am no stranger to disability:
I was born with a dislocated hip that was not discovered until it was too late to do anything about it (after my baby-cartilage had hardened into deformed bones).  I grew up with a pronounced limp and  physical limitations that made me have to work twice as hard to physically catch up with other active kids. It also required me to have surgeries at inopportune times, and to wear uncomfortable casts,  braces and shoes for way too much of my youth. My family did not acknowledge this as a disability (except to tease me).  My "disability" was an obstacle to overcome and not an excuse for care.

While recuperating from surgery in the Wiesbaden Army hospital where I lived for over a month as a child, I was given a tour of the "discarded" children's ward (a subset of the children's ward where I had my bed). Abandoned children waiting to die of their deformities were stored in that ward. Suffice it to say that I learned more from that little tour (given late one night by a young Army Corpsman who should have known better) than I was ready at 10 years old to know.  It still haunts me.
Someday I will write about this.

These experiences are the fire my able self was forged in.

So when I read about disability, I appreciate the need to think beyond normal and to experience the world from the perspective of others who don't "fit in" even if they can "get in." But more than anything, I appreciate that disability does not just mean socially different.  It often means living with great physical pain.  So when Slatin, quoting Alan Cantor, writes: "People are not 'disabled,' rather disability is what we call it when functional limitations (of sight, hearing, for example; or of movement, speech or cognition) encounter design flaws in the environment" (6), I would offer that sometimes the design flaw in the body creates pain that can not be easily mitigated by the external environment, and that's no one's design fault.

In an effort to re-think normal, it is important that we don't make the category more inclusive.  Re-thinking normal means "retrofitting" our minds to see all individuals and their suffering (physical, social, emotional, intellectual) as worthy of personal and unique support.

So the questions remain:
What does accessible education look like?  How can it be tailored to each individual?  What are the lines between honoring dis-ability, accommodating it, and enabling it?

Posthuman in conversation with Cyborg Manifesto

Central to the texts How we Became Posthuman and The Cyborg Manifesto is a concern for how the posthuman and/or cyborg realities can be used to imagine a better world as opposed to a worse one.  In other words, both texts ask us to interrogate how we can interact with the "informatics of domination" so as to mitigate its potentially disasterous effects.  Both authors have hope that the "protean transformations" (Haraway 310) that can happen in an open playing field for identity construction might extend agency rather than reduce it.  

I appreciate the inherent optimism in trying "to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse..." (Haraway 293),  and why shouldn't I?  Imagination is vital in manifesting intention, and if a tool is just a tool (and I am still claiming that is true), then it should be usable for whatever intention its wielder has for it: domination and control or community and cooperation.

If it is true that “The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narrative within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science” (Hayles 22), and, as Haraway suggests,  we need to be weaving other things than shrouds (298), then weaving creative chimera tales that embody resistance is good work to be involved in.  

Haraway and Hayles suggest we should recognize outdated paradigms that no longer embody the energy of resistance that they used to.  Most notably is the end of the oppositional value in the organic versus technological position.  Haraway writes, "...their symbolic systems and the related positions of eco-feminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism" (310).   (I think they bewilder anyone, actually.)  Haraway continues, "There are great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self" (311).  In other words, Haraway and Hayles suggest that the images and practices that have governed thought-forms and the ability to act subversively in the 20th century world are no longer adequate for 21st, so rather than find ourselves waving powerless wands, reorienting our relationship to information will help us to see the liberation rather than the fetters in the cyborg role.

Hayles writes, ""If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288).   In other words, the posthuman concept contains the seeds of rebellion just like any other construct; we just have to see the potential and nurture it.

Hayles writes, "To conceptualize the human in these terms [as cybernetic cyborg, as distributed system] is not to imperil human survival but it is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system" (290).   Haraway agrees.  In fact her manifesto is really a call for optimism rather than dystopian depression in the face of the rapidly changing technological environments that are currently constructing world culture.

While I am reluctant to jump on this train, I do understand where Hayles and Haraway are coming from:  They accept that the train has already left the station.  Short of surviving off the grid (which is really no longer possible), I can either work with Hayles and Haraway to use our cultural tools to enact resistance or become an unconscious slave to those tools.  

I can't help but join forces with Hayle and Haraway because I am, after all, a writer.  "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs" (Haraway 312).  Knowing how a narrative works enables one to write one (or re-write one).  It's like code.  You have to know the codes.  Hayles writes, "...the narrator becomes not so much a scribe as a cyborg authorized to access the relevant codes" (43).

So why, as a writer, am I so offended by the idea of the cyborg as a cultural reality?  I am a cyborg  (and I have titanium hip to boot.)  I might mourn the loss of my goddess mother and the floral wreathes I never get to wear in my hair and the absence of fawns and hares to tell me nature secrets and bound after me in open meadows, but that doesn't mean that the purposes their instantiations served at one time in history cannot be served by other material manifestations.  I might prefer fur to plastic, but I work with what I have.  

But while Haraway can claim that god and goddess are both dead (312), she cannot claim that the earth is dead (yet).  And here I want to add John Berger (The Way of Seeing) into this conversation because I think he gets at something more directly than Haraway and Hayles do (or at least I find the way he gets at it to be more accessible): In art, there is an original, and while the farther the reproduction gets from the original the more the message changes, it does not erase the fact that there is or was an original.  So when it is claimed that god and goddess are dead, or claimed that the original is dead (or lost), that claim doesn't make it true.  Who can guarantee that someone isn't owning or hiding it?  And this brings me to this question:  What motivates a feminist to claim that the embodiment of the original feminine (the goddess) is dead?  In fiction and in narrative, things only die when you decide to stop honoring the story enough to keep telling it.  That is a choice, not an imperative.

Haraway continues, "It [her chapter] is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe a world without end" (292). In my interpretation, she is saying that utopia (in her view) blasts open boundaries--and those blasted-open boundaries will confound the control mongers who concentrate their energies there: "One should expect control strategies applied to women's capacities to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries--and not on the integrity of natural objects"..."For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers" (302).  This is already the truth.

But I still don't understand how deconstructing identity boundaries such that "There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourse and other social practices" (Haraway 295) makes reproduction safer from control-mongers; I do see that it makes reproduction more accessible. "With information, the constraining factor separating the haves from the have-nots is not so much possession as access (Hayles 39).

As long as birth is no longer something the female body uniquely does (the cyborg can now do it), then the reproductive process is purchasable by whoever wants to afford it; and while this solves the access problem, this access allows agents who heretofore were not permitted access to birth (non-female bodies for example) to try and control the process.  This is the history of modern childbirth. 

I do not fully understand what Hayles and Haraway imagine as the personal self that feminists might re-assemble with code (Haraway 302). If the original is gone (removed from history by too many changes in the reproduced message over time), and we can create a new way of being in the world, what do we want that to look like?  If it does look like a cyborg then are we aware of how our imaginations will work (or not work) in tandem with certain biological constraints (that may not evolve as quickly as our imaginations can)?

Book Summary (How We Became Post Human)

 How we became Posthuman is both a fascinating expression of cerebral gymnastics and (in my mind) a disturbing harbinger of a disembodied dystopia (even though Hayles might not agree).  This is what I take to be the core message of the whole dense treatise:

  “The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narrative within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science” (Hayles 22).  

It is not the information or its instantiation, it is the story we tell ourselves about it.
 
Hayles suggests that fundamental to the posthuman view is the privileging of informational pattern over material instantiation (2).  She writes that “virtuality implies we participate in the cultural perception that information and materiality are conceptually distinct, and that information is in some sense more essential, more important, and more fundamental than materiality (emphasis mine)” (18).   

Hayles also writes, "Implicit in nearly everything I have written here is the assumption that presence and pattern are opposites existing in antagonistic relation.  The more emphasis that falls on one, the less the other is noticed and valued (48).  

So why does this book read like a defense of (or at least an neutral posture toward)  separating the technologies of information from the biological and cultural materials which instantiate them (definition of informatics pg. 29) when the underlying paradigm Hayles admits is operating is one of hierarchy and power over, a paradigm she implicitly rejects when she cites the feminist scholars that she does (on page 288)?

Norbert Wiener (in Hayles) claims, as a criterion for a theory of materiality, that “information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day” (14).    

In other words, matter must honor information because it cannot survive without it.  But the reverse is not articulated as equally true.

Hayle’s asserts that “for information to exist, it must always be instantiated in a medium” (13).  In other words, information is nothing without form.  So if one is nothing without the other, why is one worth more?
 
So in this narrative, we have information positioned outside of the material world, waiting to be embodied by it, waiting to inform the bodies with its separated superiority.

 This the Abrahamic God narrative revitalized in modern software speak:  abstract power in the all-viewing perspective asking to be honored and acknowledged by the material and subordinated world.  There is nothing new here.  This narrative is a few thousand years old. 


 Hayles writes, "one of the most serious of these implications [the foregrounding of pattern/randomness over presence/absence] is a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment" (48).    Yes, that is a pretty serious implication, but she buries the drama of those implications.  Here is the powerful but dangerously short and sweet conclusion to chapter 2: 

"As we rush to explore new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49).   Yes, lets.

And why are we still colonizing stuff?  Cyberspace has not made space available for colonizing (here is the rhetoric of agency again), colonizers, people stuck in the narrative of conquest, keep creating stuff that lets them play out their colonial narrative.  (Anyone who plays or studies video games should not wonder about the cultural destination that such a continuously instantiated narrative of conquest ensures.)

While Hayles admits to vascilating between "terror and excitement" (283) when facing the post human future, I think Hayles should acknowledge that the two emotions have the exact same physiological manifestation-- because they are both outgrowths of FEAR. 

And while I agree that her "tend and befriend" (my words) strategy for facing fear can often mitigate impending danger, sometimes when things are scary you should just run away from them.  I think that Hayles is trying awfully hard to "tend and befriend" the post human future, when in reality she is cuddling up to an idea of instantiation that is more wild than a saber toothed tiger or a modern grizzly bear.  

Reproduction upon reproduction of art and text in layers and layers of digital encoding will change the meaning of what it means to be human.  And this fundamental alteration in the relationship of signifier to signified (30) is nothing to be taken lightly, because a change in the medium changes the message (see John Berger Ways of Seeing Youtube below).  There is no pure or pristine environment of information if it changes when materialized. Information is only a potential waiting for meaning to be established by its instantiation. Hayles writes that McLuhan saw that "electronic media are capable of bringing about a reconfiguration so extensive as to change the nature of 'man'" (34).

Will this play out so that our electronic prosthetics just continue to extend and expand every organ and appendage except the human heart?  

 I get that Hayles thinks that if we understand the "interplays that went into creating the condition of virtuality" (20), then we can demystify it; but few people have time to understand this historical trajectory, and even fewer have the requisite education to comprehend a book like the one she has written.

And despite her impressive intellectual web of dancing signified and signifiers, presences and absences, I think Hayles is fooling herself when she says:

"If, as Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminist critics of science have argued, there is a relation among the desire for mastery, an objectivist account of science, and the imperialist project of subduing nature, then the posthuman offers resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288).  

 I do not buy this.  The work of Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature) is based on a narrative of immanence,  the divine embodied in the material.  This narrative stands in direct opposition to the narrative of  information as worth more and material as worth less (worthless).
 
Let's not lose sight of the fact that the lost body of information Hayles refers to (21 and 24), is the body that instantiates human love  (a topic she says nothing much about).  It might be well argued in this work (Hayles paraphrasing Hutchins) that "modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition not because moderns are smarter...but because  they have constructed smarter environments to work" (289), but if those environments are simply environments for the more sophisticated enslavement and destruction of human bodies,  then the definition of intelligence needs to be interrogated much more thoroughly.  This work makes it clear that intelligence is more about information than it is about matter, but when bodies don't matter, it doesn't matter whether they are machine bodies or flesh bodies, they are expendable.  This argument can't help but be dystopian when the information-material instantiation split guarantees that physically manifested matter, compared to abstract information, is detritus (junk, junkie).

Hayles writes, "To conceptualize the human in these terms [as cybernetic cyborg, as distributed system] is not to imperil human survival but it is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system" (290).   

What Hayles does not comment enough on is this: if the images that we want to fashion ourselves as are related to or interchangeable with plastic and metal and glass (sharp, hard, non-biodegradable) instantiations, as compared to the myriad of shapes, colors, textures, tastes, sounds and smells of the body of nature (as it currently still exists for us), then we agree to trade the beauty of the human experience and habitat for an austere and ugly one.  To what end?  The answer is clear in her quoted desire for making "the entire world one system": The goal would be to exert more control over the human experience.  

How boring, how yesterday.  Survival is not the ultimate goal of humanity. It's joy.
Let's have a little fun with allowing a colorful human mess to just happen.

 I don't see anywhere in this Posthuman treatise that another narrative is emerging.  Another instantiation might be emerging (another "body"), but the information hasn't changed (and therefore makes no change). Using Bateson's definition of information (information is any difference that makes a difference), that makes the information not information, it makes it noise. 

Hayles writes, "The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence" (36).  (The person who believes this has never met the presence of my grand-daughter. :-))

"In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a multi-dimensional computer space"(36).  Creating more space or different instantiations doesn't solve the problem because it doesn't change the story. 

The problem is in a story that says if you  junk up your space you just move away from it into a different space.  (And Hayles writes about this junk narrative on page 42.) What about a "don't junk up your space" narrative?

Fundamental to Hayle's posthuman conversation are some of the "same old same old" questions: Who should have access to the relevant codes (43)?  What are the codes of authority?  Who has the authority to speak?  

Cyborg world might create a different system of authority, but it is still a narrative that implies prior authorization to a select few as the ticket for entry.

When Hayles says things like this: “Though over-determined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, anymore than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea that we are essentially information patterns” (22), she confuses me.  Her book tells us that virtuality is a world that accepts the premise of pattern over presence, but she doesn't  reject that premise.  She problematizes the hell out of it (and she makes tiny squeaks of worry about it), but she doesn't reject it.    

Every time  I re-read her conclusion I am stalled in cognitive dissonance. On the one hand my intellect is bombarded by layers and layers of impenetrable discourse, and on the other I can see her attempting to assuage my fears with a tidy little wrap-up caveat like this one: "Although some versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long range survival of humans and life-forms, biological and artificial, with who we share this planet" (291).  How nice.  Maybe I should re-read Robert Fulghum or go to Michaels and buy a glue gun.

What Hayles ignores in her cavalier conclusion is that crafting those versions depends on constructing a different power paradigm than one which frames the posthuman conversation.

"The more unlikely the event, the more information it conveys" (Hayles 32).   The embodiment of miraculous information is nothing to take for granted. :-)