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Haraway and Hayles suggest we should recognize outdated paradigms that no longer embody the energy of resistance that they used to.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. :-)

Project proposal conversation

Lots of thinking in this post.  Mostly it is becoming a drafting space for the paper idea.  Right now it is really unfocused:

The Way, the Witch and the Web-master: myth, magic and the re-instantiation of information in the re-membered and material-mattering body. 

The main thing I want to explore in this paper is the concept of unauthorized knowledges.

I want to put Feminist matristic thought that argues that “creation is literal, the energy of thought is integrally related to the creation of matter” (Orenstein 20) in conversation with the posthuman conversation.

Both areas of thought are making the same argument that information and matter are inextricably linked but ultimately separate entities.  The difference is that in Hayles it is clear that information and matter are placed in a dominant and subordinate relationship.  In Feminist matristic thought, there is no reason to separate them or give them different worth.  They are two halves of a whole.

Authorized knowledge systems keep bringing us back to the machine or techne' as the metaphor for how the human world works.  That insistence on mechanistic mediation dis-empowers ways of knowing that are traditionally associated with women (or with Indigenous peoples-- as a scholar I know eco-feminism, but nothing of indigenous rhetorics or ways of knowing), and perpetuates a "power over" rather than "power with" paradigm.  It is a paradigm of separateness-es, separation, estrangement.

Hayles writes, “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 suggests that what keeps us from changing this perception of "inevitability" is the story we tell about it: “The heart that keeps this circulatory system flowing is narrative—narratives about culture, narrative within culture, narratives about science, narratives within science” (22).  Our over-arching world cultural narratives (as studied by Joseph Campbell) are by and large only about the masculine journey. 

Hayles wants to “replace a teleology of disembodiment” with competing narratives  such literary texts, scientific narratives that challenge the abstractions of disembodiment" (22),  but I think we need to be re-membering a different (older) cultural myth.  One that re-members rather than dis-members the body of myth prior to patriarchy (the work of Merlin Stone, Marija Gimbutas, Carolyn Merchant, Starhawk, Charlene Spretnak, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gloria Ornstein, Riane Eisler etc.). 

The feminist movement in my life-time has provided me more economic agency, but it has done nothing to privilege the ways in which I prefer to know and be in the world.  Those ways are actually less valued now than they were in the 1970's and 80's. The thought-forms that guide my sense of what is possible are deeply entrenched in patriarchal myths and constructions of reality.

Gregory Bateson said that "information is any difference that makes a difference" (Mind and Nature), so what I gather from what little difference the Goddess culture scholarship made is that it had no fertile vessel to grow in--and without material instantiation it can't (hasn't really) survive(d).  So perhaps rather than re-hashing old territory, I need to look at what we are left with when we have information that is "conceptually distinct from the markers that embody it" (Hayles 25).  In other words, what does disem-humanbodied (machine-embodied) information look like, and how does it function as compared to human-embodied information?

Perhaps it looks the Digital Doula. http://www.peggyomara.com/2013/12/16/digital-doula/

 So,  perhaps I will look at what a woman would get from her Digital Doula compared to an embodied one.  Not sure yet what this will entail..............  But my over-arching point would be that there are some major things that mothers can't get from a web-site--things that they can only get from human care-givers.  But the bottom line I would keep returning to is:  Who benefits from the privileging of information over matter?  What is the perceived benefit?  (Because It's not a benefit to anyone to destroy life forces or to ignore them into non-existence.)  But why do people buy that it is? (Yikes.)

So the class Wednesday was awesome and exhausting.  It went past 6:00 p.m.

The feedback I got was to try and anchor my thinking in a digital text (like a TV show).  That's where I got the idea of the digital doula thing. But I don't know................

I started wondering about the magic thing when I was grappling with the concept of material instantiation, power and privilege (and Goddessess). Magic has interested me since I was a graduate student in the 1980's (the question of is it or is it not rhetoric).  But prior to being able to answer the question of whether magic is rhetoric (and I know Covino did this and so has Miles, but I have a different spin on it), magic has to be defined.  I think Covino and Miles don't do a good job of defining it because they are dealing with it as an abstraction rather than as an embodied  understanding.

The definition of magic (at least what I can distill from the sources I have consulted) is that it is essentially culturally unauthorized information, and the lack of cultural authorization makes it  suspect (at the very least), or considered dangerous (at the very most).  According to management professor Chris Miles (Persuasion, marketing communication, and the metaphor of magic), "There is no agreed upon definition of magic, or magic's relation to religion or science" (Miles 2005).

Although, having said this, Miles does site sources that indicate that magic, despite the fact that it is "a conceptual mess," (2005) tends to be seen as a contrast term to science and religion (2005).  The fact that magic is commonly defined in contrast to science and religion (Ward; de Romilly), supports the thesis that the only difference between magical thinking and scientific or sacred thinking (since those two appear on the surface to be worlds apart), is that, for whatever cultural reasons exist at the time, magic is the realm of unsanctioned knowledge.  This is true from what I have read over the years (Frazer and the Golden Bough; Malinowski) who have identified magical cultures and labeled the belief systems as erroneous.  I have no doubt they labeled the cultures as magical too (meaning the cultures themselves probably didn't claim their beliefs were erroneous or stood outside of a paradigm of sanctioned information)--but perhaps from Frazer and Malinowski's point of view,  a way of knowing that they did not understand could only be wrong.

According to Starhawk, Magic is information manipulated to alter perception; in other words, it is the act or art of changing consciousness at will (13). (Starhawk doesn't define magic perjoratively.)

From what I understand, in order for magic to work, it has to be "downloaded" into a material instantiation.  (Because all information has to be instantiated in order to manifest anything.) The first material instantiation magic requires is language.

Ultimately, magic has less to do with what the information is and more to do with who or what instantiates it.  It is all about who has the authority to create and manipulate reality.  That interests me; but that doesn't help me focus :-)

Here is a focused thought: the paradigm of power that values information over its material instantiation  (the person who communicates that information, if not the technology that instantiates it), is what shapes public schooling (really any state schooling).  Grades are how teachers exert power over and control student learning.  The one place that grades are dangerous is in language acquisition.  As Frankie Condon reminded us, "Language is a shared resource."  It is not a scarce resource (in that way it is like love), and so we don't need to control it within a competitive system.  Holding power over a student's (person's) experience learning to use language well ensures that the resource (literacy) is restricted.  That's why the Writing Center is such an important place.  It is a commons for communication. It has nothing to do with evaluating student work and everything to do with expanding it.  Power-over depends on compliance.

So as writing teachers we are acting in  a contradictory posture when we grade student writing.  On the one hand we are offering to expand student power (empower them with the skills to use the technology of writing well), but on the other we are controlling that acquisition with a system of rewards and punishments more aligned with training dogs.  The solution for me to this is simple: i evaluate my students as students and I respond to their writing as a separate enterprise.  In other words, in order for the system of education to run smoothly there have to be some areas of organized compliance: come to class, come on time, do the work, turn it in on time; be respectful; be awake.  I grade based on your ability to demonstrate a discipline to the role of student.  But as a writer, I will only offer you encouragement.  I will give good observational feedback and experienced guidance for improvement, but I will only label your performance as a competitor when you are ready to enter the ring.  This isn't new information.  I am not the first person to instantiate this practice, but it is a practice that is important to our field (limiting the "control over" postures in the classroom).

Anyway, in terms of SRTOL, it is not their own language that students have a right to, it is a right to voice their own experience without being punished for it (like with a "C" or "D" grade or a sliced tongue or a wrap on the knuckles.  They are all behaviors of domination).  Ultimately we don't seek for students to stay stuck in a limited repertoire of language use, we seek to liberate them to their highest potential by showing them they have a right to information in any and all language, but you have to know a lot of language to be able to access as much information as possible.  Plus there is no "their own" in language, if it is a shared resource.

Lisa

The problem isn’t with the tool, it is with the power paradigm

Article conversation #2 for 10/8/14 (Boyd-Barrett, Hawisher et al)

Even though it steps outside of the terms of the assignment a bit, I am going to put a narrative of my childhood into conversation with a couple of these readings.  I am going to start with how the alphabet soup of the Boyd-Barrett piece rings some pretty hefty life bells.

Slogging through all of the N acronyms (NIEO, NWO, NWICO, NAFTA, NIC) that Boyd-Barrett wields in "Cyberspace, globalization and empire," I am compelled to establish a modest ethos relative to his topic since my early childhood years were framed pretty substantially by the N acronym, "NATO."

Boyd-Barrett's piece sets the historical stage for global Information and Computer Technology (ICT) proliferation by documenting the beginnings of the technology with the Department of Defense.  Lining up nicely with the inside time edge of Boyd-Barrett's study (referred to on pg. 21), in 1970 my father worked for AFTAC-TOD (Air Force Technical Applications Center, Technical Operations Division), a subsidiary of the State Department and the DOD.  He was an international attache' monitoring nuclear weapons proliferation across the world, and specifically Eastern bloc compliance with the Warsaw pact.  He was a telecommunications and electronics specialist.  (Read here that he was a Cold War spy.) His job was to protect "U.S. hegemony and strategic interests" (B-B 23).

Boyd-Barrett writes "Microprocessor, computer and networking technologies, developed by US defence (sic) and other federal agencies, partnering with electronics corporations and universities, developed to a point where deregulation of AT&T's telephony (sic) and equipment monopoly had dramatic consequences for technology integration, innovation, networking and commercialization" (25).  I guess this is where the proverbial cat gets let out of the bag and the technology leaks out of the hands of the US military.  (Perhaps that's what they got for including universities in the loop.)

Much of what I learned that my father did--all after the fact since my father's job was declassified in 1999--resonates off the pages of Boyd-Barrett. My father not only engaged in covert operations, but also responded to "the backlash of covert interventions, including the Iranian revolution" (24).  My household as a child was full of books and conversations about the middle east, specifically about the Shah of Iran (a US political ally).

While this life might sound romantic and artfully edgy, it was a stressful life (or became one) as my father's retreat into alcohol and philandering, to cope with his high-powered career, left him unavailable to his family. 

Despite the eventual crash and burn of my parent's marriage (and of my father's career), my childhood was idyllic in many ways. We lived for three years on the North Shore of Oahu while my father traveled the Pacific to monitor nuclear testing on atolls; we lived in magical, snowy Oslo while he monitored nuclear deployments in the neighboring USSR*, and we lived in the suburbs of the most exciting governmental city in the country during Watergate.

But there were back door horrors in my childhood that were related to his job as well. 

As the child of a prestigious Air Force attache living abroad, when a medical condition I had sustained at birth made it imperative for me to have major surgery, I was transported to a top-brass Army hospital in Germany for a stay that lasted over a month.  This was 1970, and the Vietnam war was in full swing.  What goes on in an Army hospital during a major American military event?

A lot of maimed and mutilated veterans go on there.

As a privileged and well-traveled American, growing up mostly in the middle class, I have been lucky enough to not know the brutality of war in my neighborhood or inside my nation, but I know it as someone who (as an impressionable child) saw and heard--in the halls and elevators, in the waiting rooms, in the solariums, in the medi-vac air transports--what the human casualties look and sound like.  And it is fucked up. 

The ideology of superpower superiority comes at quite a cost. The ideology of power over, rather than power with, constructs a world where everything is a competition, everything is a quest for more--more wealth, more power, more territory, more control.  It is not ICT's that are the issue, it is the paradigm of power and how it uses the technology.

ICT's, as demonstrated by Castell's, can connect, or, as demonstrated by studies of Boyd-Barrett, they can conscript, co-opt and compete. That competition for domination (Boyd-Barrett uses a version of the verb "compete" almost a dozen times in his article) results in a freaking lot of institutional/governmental power and that ideology of power is used most often to destroy (cultures, civilians, soldiers, landscapes) rather than build--and all under the auspices of the protection of national interests, (protecting the symbiotic relationship between national and corporate interests). World supremacy is so much about greed. 

The Boyd-Barrett piece is not about cyber-space media as communication; it is about media as commodity.  In other words, globalization, as he writes about it, is not about a more networked world (which insinuates a horizontal communication pathway), globalization is about reinforcing the paradigm of hierarchy and supremacy.  ICT's are the commodity for establishing world domination because not only do they have the capacity to control 'semiotic constructions,' but because the best spying is all predicated on having access to the best in telecommunications technology.

Boyd-Barrett writes, "Communication industries contribute to global 'semiotic constructions,' through images of the world, nations, institutions, people and activities, that media create and distribute, or not" (B-B 28).

The construction going on here is the construction of potential totalitarianism, and whoever has the power to buy and control the most ICT's gains the power to take over the world.  While the US is predicted to hold its military dominance for the next 15 years (B-B 26),  the "attraction of adversaries" as a result of our drone-obsessed-destruction-disposition is likely to create some real security problems for Americans in the second half of the 21st century.

Put simplistically, he/she who communicates best, wins.  As scholars of writing and rhetoric (as doers of writing and rhetoric) we know this.  But what is important is the structure of how we disseminate our communication: either as a community with all of our interests represented, or as a field of competition where the supremacy of only one team matters.  I think the former is the only avenue for peace.  At issue here is a Way of Knowing.  It is risky to call it feminine, but horizontal communication is certainly more commonly practiced by women.  This is reinforced by how women have used and are using the blogoshere (Yoani Sanchez for example) to share information rather than to control it. 

Below are the vision and mission statements for the AFTAC TOD (and a link to their site).  The site is dated, but this is what the vision and mission were when the organization was operational:

VISION

Become the nation's premier collector and exploiter of technical signatures ... enabling policy makers and warfighters to achieve information superiority.

MISSION

Enhance national security: Collect and exploit worldwide technical measurements and deliver timely, accurate information to national authorities and warfighters ... teaming to monitor treaties, counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and achieve information superiority. Its overall mission is to conduct nuclear treaty monitoring through seismic and atmospheric data collection and/ or analysis for national command authorities and to conduct information warfare operations for U. S. and allied warfighters. In addition, the unit mission includes an Information Warfare element which conducts telecommunications monitoring and communications exploitation training.

*http://fas.org/irp/agency/aftac/intro.htm

------------------------------------------
From Hawisher, Selfe and Berry:

"John Seely Brown and Richard Adler (2008) explained the rapid technological changes this way:

'The world has become increasingly ‘flat,’ as Tom Friedman has shown. Thanks to massive improvements in communications and transportation, virtually any place on earth can be connected to markets anywhere else on earth and can become globally competitive. But at the same time that the world has become flatter, it has also become ‘spikier’: the places that are globally competitive are those that have robust local ecosystems of resources supporting innovation and productiveness. A key part of any such ecosystem is a well-educated workforce with the requisite competitive skills. And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills (p. 16)'"(3).

So I want to take issue with the Flat World thing.  I realize I am not taking issue with Hawisher, Selfe and Berry.  I am just responding to the conversation about how ICT's make a flat and spiky world and how ecosystems supply a workforce and provide resources "supporting innovation and productiveness."  WHAT?  This is more wolf in sheep's clothing stuff.  The world is round.  A lot of indentured sailors died helping 15th century explorers to prove that (after the Vikings proved it before them).

Also, "ecosystem" is not the right word to use to describe competitive workforces.  That is euphemism at its finest and its most dangerous.  The rhetoric of globalization (ala Friedman) is creepy and sneaky and dis-embodied, and I think we need to be hyper-aware of how it manipulates language (makes semiotic constructions) to deny the body.  Once you deny the body you can exploit the hell out of it.  Humans are nothing without their bodies (or the control of their bodies).

In reaction to the popular adage, "Think Globally, Act Locally," poet/essayist Wendell Berry argued (in his article "Think Little"), that people can't think globally, they can only think locally.  Berry knows that global thinking is something that  governments and corporations do, not individuals.  Individuals don't benefit from global thinking.  When individuals attempt to "think" globally (projecting out of their physical/spatial selves to wrap their minds around disembodied abstractions), they lose their navigation system, their echo-location/eco-location; they disconnect from immediate information that is crucial to maintaining the agency and autonomy of the present circumstance.  This is a great way to enslave people without them even knowing it: make body-destroying addicts out of them (so they can't survive without the commodity you are selling and they lose the agency to resist).

Two weeks ago the 20 year old son of one of my partner Bryan's co-workers texted himself right into an on-coming semi.  Tragically, the young man left this world with his cell phone slammed into his chest--implanted right over his heart.  It is a chilling metaphor for what happens when the body forgets itself and defers to the incoming/outgoing/oncoming messages of an ICT.

So on the note of that horrifying image, I will wrap up with some local technology trivia as it relates to me and to "Transnational Literate Lives."

When I moved to Eastern Washington as a teenager, areas of Northern Idaho and Eastern Washington still did not even have land-line telephone service, and places that did were often still using "party lines" (this was true of lake Coeur d' Alene in 1976).   As a child of the "sophisticated" D.C. suburbs, I thought I had gone back in telecommunications time at least 50 years (because I had). The Inland Northwest ABC affiliate at the time had a show on prime time called High School Bowl that featured local schools doing an amateur version of Jeopardy, and the news on KLEW (Lewiston) looked like it was being produced by those same high school kids (it kind of still does).

 I guess my point is this: during the the telecommunications explosion of the late 1980's and 90's (when transnational ICT literacy was gaining "velocity"), and while much of the world was starting to hop on the bandwithwagon, the US still had remote outposts of disconnection that felt like the railroad had just arrived there.  And we are just 50 miles away from some of them.

Pullman, thank goodness, was an oasis in that desert of access. There is nothing like a university to invigorate a telecommunications environment.  And, as a graduate student in 1988, I got my first PC (an Amstrad from Sears).  Fashionable me, I was right on top of this trend:

"In just two years, from 1986 to 1988, the number of personal computers in the world increased by 35,638,216, or 92.8% ("Personal computers by country," n.d.), although these computers remained distributed largely along existing axes of national wealth and development" (Hawisher, Selfe, Berry). 

And here I am now--far more literate in ICT's, but just as concerned about what they have the potential to distract us from as I was 27 years ago.  I don't miss type-writers though.  Not one bit.

Castells Book Summary # 4 (Blog Post #5)

Much of what I know about activist networks comes from Starhawks' 2002 book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising.  Unfortunately I loaned it to someone and they never gave it back, otherwise I would be flipping through it right now for similarities to Castells' book, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age.

Much of the way I live my life as a woman and a scholar sits on a foundation that Starhawk built with her 1982 book, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. This work introduced me not only to a philosophy of activism and non-violent resistance, but to a philosophy of life.  In the years since reading Dreaming the Dark, I have read almost everything Starhawk has written, but I no longer feel the need to don a black cape to "draw down" full moons at midnight.

Despite  following in Starhawk's footsteps as a feminist with a penchant for earth-based spiritual practice, I have never followed in Starhawk's footsteps as an out-spoken activist.  She chains herself to the gates of nuclear power plants and to old growth cedar; she creates and participates in non-governmental organizations that go forth and enact huge demonstrations of resistance (like Code Pink: Women for Peace) and she has spent way more time in jail than I have.  I have my places where I like to subvert dominant paradigms--most notably at work in the Writing Center and as a doula and critic of unnecessary interventions into the healthy childbirth process--but beyond that I am more slacktivist than activist.

I do, however, fully appreciate the degree to which non-hierarchical structures can work to bring about social change, and Manuel Castells' book illustrates how the internet can act as a web of power, a site that can bring people together in horizontally, rather than hierarchically, structured social movements.

Horizontal organizational strategy can and has worked--specifically in the "Occupy" movement--because "Most occupations follow the same general rules, although some may have slightly different norms" (180).  In other words, leaderless organizations do not necessarily result in anarchy; they can have very loosely structured--based on soft survelliance practices (24)--,but communicatively effective, designs.  Those designs are web-like.  That makes them quite compatible with the www.

The sharing of information (as compared to the hoarding of it), is crucial to non-hierarchical systems.  The key is organizing units to only need certain types of information in order to function.  In other words, some information isn't necessary, it's just noise.

In the Occupy movement, decision-making groups all grow out of a connection with a General Assembly.  In the GA, "Anyone is free to propose an idea or express an opinion" (180).  Affinity groups and Working groups constitute smaller units of the organization.  Each realm of decision making handles a domain.  "Ideally, only decisions that affect the entire group are brought to the GA" (180).   The sub-structures are often designated by a division of labor.  For example, group facilitation, media issues, public outreach, food supplies, peace keeping/security, sanitation/sustainability, and budget supervision (181) are just some of the committees that might be sanctioned by a GA.  There also might be Spokes Councils or caucuses that contribute representation to the GA, but from the microcosm to the macrocosm, the network or the web is the metaphor that guides the ways information is shared.  These organizations embody power with rather than power over.  I would call these "tend and befriend" movements as compared to "fight or flight" movements (for more on "Tend and Befriend" responses to stress see the UCLA research of Dr. Shelley Taylor).  Castells call this kind of power (the kind that challenges traditional institutional power) "counterpower" (5). 

Because "social movements are emotional movements" (13),  they are triggered when the emotional conditions of people's lives become untenable.  According to Castells, those reasons usually include: "economic exploitation, hopeless poverty, unfair inequality, undemocratic polity, repressive states, unjust judiciary, racism, xenophobia, cultural negation, censorship, police brutality, warmongering, religious fanaticism (often against others' religious beliefs) carelessness toward the planet (our only home), disregard of personal liberty, violation of privacy, gerontocracy, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and other atrocities in the long gallery of portraits featuring the monsters we are" (12).

Castells distinguishes the difference between social movements and civil wars, showing how very tenuous the line between them is. A social movement can devolve into civil war when people lose  focus on non-violence as the one form of resistance whose means is consistent with the movement's ends.  Castells writes, "Since my main interest here is not about war games, but about the fate of social movements, what appears clearly is that once the movement engages in military violence to counter military violence, it loses its character as  democratic movement to become a contender, sometimes as ruthless as its oppressors, in a bloody civil war (100).  He continues, "In a certain sense, civil wars not only kill people, they also kill social movements and their ideals of peace, democracy and justice" (100).

One of the vital strategies of the Indignada movement, resulting in its ultimate success in Spain, was/is the fact that "The indignadas was and is a peaceful movement whose courage allowed for the de-legitimization of violent repression, thus achieving a first and major victory in the citizen's hearts" (136).  The key here is courage.  As Castells explains, the decision to participate in a collective uprising to challenge oppressive political institutions is not an easy one (218).  It is risky because the institutions that want to preserve their control (or the power-hungry folks operating those institutions) have access to state-of-the-art destructive machinery that hurts, maims and kills.  To face such potential consequences, people have to get so angry they no longer care, "...the trigger is anger, the repressor is fear" (219), but the "Fear is overcome by sharing and identifying with others in a process of communicative action"(219).

From Reykjavik to Tunis to Alexandria, Libya, Bahrain, Spain, to Occupy U.S.A (read hundreds of cities here), to Ferguson Missouri, it is clear that, as a tool used by dedicated and empowered protesters, the Internet has the potential to serve as a major force of hegemonic subversion.  It has the potential, through easy uploads and insta-links to fast footage and technicolor images, to show the  ugliness of power hungry thugs who don't just want to be in charge of organizing things, they want to control things by whatever means possible. And that macho leadership bull-shit is just so tiresome.  The real courageous action, whether coordinated off-line or on, is the willingness of people to be harmed or even to die in the pursuit of a more peaceful, joyful, agency-filled life, and that can only happen if  the social movement is disciplined enough to set and maintain a peaceful example.

One of my favorite stories of using peaceful protest to challenge a police barricade is in Webs of Power, (but I can't check the citation facts until I get another copy of the book).  The protesters in this situation were trying to interrupt a set of hearings in D.C. that were to result in sending troops into Iraq (the post 9/11 Bush administration stuff).  Rather than yell, rant, scream at or push into the police (who were forming a human wall around the White House), a black woman protestor singled out an African  American police officer, went up to him and starting singing, "We Shall Overcome."  Her voice moved him, and he stepped out of her way.

Beauty as rhetoric matters.  It's like kryptonite to ugly.

s