Review: New Media Articles
Mar. 29th, 2014 18:29![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy." Public Culture 2, no. 2 (spring 1990): 1-24.
Main Argument: "The crucial point, however, is that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes" (4). Moreover, global cultural processes are now organized around what Appadurai terms "the imagination as a social practice," by which he means "a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice) and a form of negotiation between sties of agency ('individuals') and globally defined fields of possibility. … The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order" (5).
Argument, Sources, Examples Appadurai argues that the new global cultural economy "has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order," the complexity of which "has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics" (6). He identifies five dimensions of this global cultural flow, namely ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes, which are the building blocks of what Appadurai calls "imagined worlds, that is the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe" (7). A critical point--and reason for disjuncture--is the fact that each of these scapes "is subject to its own constraints and incentives…at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others" (8). Global flows occur in and through the disjunctures between these scapes, meaning that the flows of the units which make up these scapes are now increasingly non-isomorphic: people travel far less easily than goods, money, images, and ideas. Turning Anderson neatly on his head, Appadurai argues that states and nations have been affected by these disjunctures to the extent that each is now the project of the other in a battle of the imagination. "Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular. … The critical point is that both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures" (17). Appadurai argues that we must "think of the configuration of cultural forms in today's world as fundamentally fractal" and that these cultural forms are also overlapping, so that "we need to combine a fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polythetic account of their overlaps and resemblances" (20). To get the answers to the questions right, we need to bring in chaos in its contemporary, productive sense, and also most likely to presume that "the relationship of these various flows to one another, as they constellate into particular events and social forms, will be radically context-dependent" (21).
Bibliographic Data: Latour, Bruno. “On Technical Mediation–Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy.” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994): 29-64.
Main Argument: Latour talks about the relationship of people and τεχνη in its broadest sense, beginning with the myth of Daedalus and his δαιδαλια, his crafty inventions. As Latour summarizes, "that we are not Machiavellian baboons we owe to technical action," i.e. technical mediation, which is "a form of delegation that allows us to mobilize, during interactions, moves made elsewhere, earlier, by other actants. It is the presence of the past and distant, the presence of nonhuman characters, that frees us, precisely, from interactions" (52). Technique is thus "the socialization of nonhumans" (53). For Latour, then, "responsibility for action must be shared, symmetry restored, and humanity redescribed: not as the sole transcendent cause, but as the mediating mediator" (54).
Bibliographic Data: Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” The new Blackwell companion to social theory (2009): 141-58.
Main Argument: Law offers a basic sketch of actor network theory, with the proviso that in some sense abstracting the theory from concrete examples is a betrayal of its first principles, one of which is the fact that there is no knowledge without exemplars. Actor network theory can also be understood as an empirical version of poststructuralism, because its approach "asks us to explore the strategic, relational, and productive character of particular, smaller-scale, heterogeneous actor networks," and thus "it can also be understood as an empirical version of Geilles Delueze's nomadic philosophy," because "both fever to the provisional assembly of productive, heterogeneous, and (this is the crucial point) quite limited forms of ordering located in no larger overall order" (145, 146). Since the early 1990s, actor network theory has moved in certain directions: one, to the idea of enaction or performance, because "we are no longer dealing with construction, social or otherwise: there is no stable prime mover, social or individual, to construct anything, no builder, no puppeteer. …In this heterogeneous world everything plays its part relationally. …all of these assemble and together enact a set of practices that make a more or less precarious reality" (151). Another direction is multiplicity, which argues that "most of the time and for most purposes practices produce chronic multiplicity. They may dovetail together, but equally they may be held apart, contradict, or include other another in complex ways" (152). A related notion is that of fluidity, which holds that objects may reconfigure themselves, that different realties may be loosely rather than rigidly associated, and that we do not have to imagine a single actor network. The point of all of this is that
Bibliographic Data: González, Jennifer. “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage.” Race in Cyberspace (2000): 27-50.
Main Argument: González looks at the construction of avatars online [remember that this was well before Web 2.0] through the lens of two art projects and discusses the ways in which all of these examples present the body as an assemblage of parts--parts that can be swapped at will, along with somatic markers of racial and ethnic identity--as examples of "appended subjects," which she defines multiply as "comprised of appendages…or that of a subject or person who is defined by a relation of supplementarity," or "an object constituted by electronic elements serving as a psychic or bodily appendage, an artificial subjectivity that is attached to a supposed original or unitary being…In each case a body is constructed or assembled in order to stand in for, or become an extension of, a subject in an artificial but nevertheless inhabited world" (27-28). Drawing on Althusser as interpreted by Joseba Gabilando, González in fact argues that subjects in these arrays are interpolated not just by mimesis but also by position; with the result that "embedded in fantasies of collecting body specimens and creating hybrid subjects is a matrix of desire that seeks to absorb or orchestrate cultural differences" (46). Moreover, "by representing a shifting locus for a distributed subject–radical in the sense that it is perhaps shifting and changing, living, dying and nonessentiallized–the appended subject in the form of an online body also defines a relation to a so-called global interface as primarily one of consumption, not opposition" (47-48).
Argument, Sources, Examples
Critical assessment: 1999 was a very long time ago, much as it feels like everyone in the West Bay is currently partying like it's 1999 (meanwhile, a lot of people including me are just waiting for the coming crash), and I really wonder to what extent Web 2.0 (which is a terrible term, but useful; see the post bysynecdochic below) and in particular its aspect as the "visual web" changes these dynamics. If anything, I would wager that Web 2.0 has reinscribed race and ethnicity, or attempts to, even as the networked, content-producing aspect of Web 2.0 allows raced and gendered and non-privileged subjects to, however vulnerably and provisionally, construct their own alternative spaces and discourses.
Bibliographic Data: Morley, David and Kevin Robins. “Techno-Orientalism: Japan panic." Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes,and Cultural Boundaries (1995): 147-73.
Main Argument: Exoticism of Japan + technologically-inspired anxiety = techno-Orientalism.
Argument, Sources, Examples Japan has always been one of the West's Others, and in the 1980s, Japan seemed to be calling the terms of Western (and particularly American) modernity into question, partly through technological and economic advancement, but also partly through the perception of Japanese culture as fundamentally non-Western, i.e. non-individual ("domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!"). The trick, however, is that "the West both needs and wants its Japan problem," which of course is the point of Orientalism: the West constructed a mirror in which it could see itself in reverse and thereby construct itself as the obverse, with little if any reference to the actual "Orient." Another wrinkle comes from the fact that the West constructed itself as "modern," whereas Japan was the first society to achieve visible postmodernity, thus figuring postmodernity as other when in fact it is/was/shall be us. In other words, "what Japan has done is to call into question the supposed centrality of the West as a cultural and geographical locus for the project of modernity. It has also condoned the assumption that modernity can only be circulated through the forms the West has constructed" (160). The twist of techno-Orientalism, however, is that the association of high technology with Japan/eseness now serves "to reinforce the image of a culture that is cold, impersonal and machine-like, an authoritarian culture lacking emotional connection to the rest of the world" (169).
Further reading: Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age; Said, Orientalism;synecdochic, "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure, Parts 1-3"; Nakamura, Digitizing Race; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Meta notes: "What you don't know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too." – Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Main Argument: "The crucial point, however, is that the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes" (4). Moreover, global cultural processes are now organized around what Appadurai terms "the imagination as a social practice," by which he means "a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice) and a form of negotiation between sties of agency ('individuals') and globally defined fields of possibility. … The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order" (5).
Argument, Sources, Examples Appadurai argues that the new global cultural economy "has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order," the complexity of which "has to do with certain fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics" (6). He identifies five dimensions of this global cultural flow, namely ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes, which are the building blocks of what Appadurai calls "imagined worlds, that is the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe" (7). A critical point--and reason for disjuncture--is the fact that each of these scapes "is subject to its own constraints and incentives…at the same time as each acts as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the others" (8). Global flows occur in and through the disjunctures between these scapes, meaning that the flows of the units which make up these scapes are now increasingly non-isomorphic: people travel far less easily than goods, money, images, and ideas. Turning Anderson neatly on his head, Appadurai argues that states and nations have been affected by these disjunctures to the extent that each is now the project of the other in a battle of the imagination. "Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlightenment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular. … The critical point is that both sides of the coin of global cultural process today are products of the infinitely varied mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures" (17). Appadurai argues that we must "think of the configuration of cultural forms in today's world as fundamentally fractal" and that these cultural forms are also overlapping, so that "we need to combine a fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the plural) with a polythetic account of their overlaps and resemblances" (20). To get the answers to the questions right, we need to bring in chaos in its contemporary, productive sense, and also most likely to presume that "the relationship of these various flows to one another, as they constellate into particular events and social forms, will be radically context-dependent" (21).
Bibliographic Data: Latour, Bruno. “On Technical Mediation–Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy.” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994): 29-64.
Main Argument: Latour talks about the relationship of people and τεχνη in its broadest sense, beginning with the myth of Daedalus and his δαιδαλια, his crafty inventions. As Latour summarizes, "that we are not Machiavellian baboons we owe to technical action," i.e. technical mediation, which is "a form of delegation that allows us to mobilize, during interactions, moves made elsewhere, earlier, by other actants. It is the presence of the past and distant, the presence of nonhuman characters, that frees us, precisely, from interactions" (52). Technique is thus "the socialization of nonhumans" (53). For Latour, then, "responsibility for action must be shared, symmetry restored, and humanity redescribed: not as the sole transcendent cause, but as the mediating mediator" (54).
The mistake of the dualist paradigm was its definition of humanity. Even the shape of humans, our very body, is composed in large part of sociotechnical negotiations and artifacts. To conceive humanity and technology as plat is to wish away humanity: we are sociotechnical animals, and each human interaction is sociotechnical. We are never limited to social ties. We are never faced with objects. This final diagram relocates humanity where we belong–in the crossover, the central column, the possibility of mediating between mediators. (64)Argument, Sources, Examples Latour defines four senses of mediation: the first, the "program of action" is "the series of goals and steps and intentions" that agents undertake; if they are forced to deviate from that program by another agent, a third possibility occurs: "the creation of a new goal that corresponds to neither agent's program of action," which Latour calls translation, meaning "displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and that to some degree modifies two elements or agents" (31, 32). He then switches to actants, "a borrowing from semiotics that describes any entity that acts in a plot until the attribution of a figurative or nonfigurative role" (32), since "agents" is too familiar and overdetermined--the crucial point is that we and things all have our own intentions, but when people and things act together, in whatever combination, our capacities change. We are not essences but networks of affordances, just as actions are not something that only people take; as Latour says, "action is simply not a property of humans but of an association of actants," which is the second meaning of mediation (35). Heidigger was wrong; "humans are no longer by themselves"--technology is congealed labor, and "I rely on many delegated actions that themselves make me do things on behalf of others who are no longer here and that I have not elected and the course of whose existence I cannot even retrace" (41, 40). Or, to put it another way, "there is no sense in which humans may be said to exist as humans without entering into commerce with what authorizes and enables them to exist (i.e., to act)" ((45-46). Thus the only meaningful difference between ancient and modern τεχνη is that "the latter translates, crosses over, enrolls and mobilizes more elements, more intimately connected, with a more finely woven social fabric than the former does. The relation between the scale of collectives and the number of nonhumans enlisted in their midst is crucial," and the adjective "modern" "does not describe an increased distance between society and technology or their alienation, but a deepened intimacy, a more intricate mesh, between the two" (47). Thus for Latour, the new paradigm, "to view people and nonhumans as interacting within collectives, to define objects as institutions, to fuse subject and object in a corporate body," needs explaining, but we cannot rely on social theory to do it because most sociologists take the social order as the source of explanation rather than the object of inquiry (49).
Bibliographic Data: Law, John. “Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics.” The new Blackwell companion to social theory (2009): 141-58.
Main Argument: Law offers a basic sketch of actor network theory, with the proviso that in some sense abstracting the theory from concrete examples is a betrayal of its first principles, one of which is the fact that there is no knowledge without exemplars. Actor network theory can also be understood as an empirical version of poststructuralism, because its approach "asks us to explore the strategic, relational, and productive character of particular, smaller-scale, heterogeneous actor networks," and thus "it can also be understood as an empirical version of Geilles Delueze's nomadic philosophy," because "both fever to the provisional assembly of productive, heterogeneous, and (this is the crucial point) quite limited forms of ordering located in no larger overall order" (145, 146). Since the early 1990s, actor network theory has moved in certain directions: one, to the idea of enaction or performance, because "we are no longer dealing with construction, social or otherwise: there is no stable prime mover, social or individual, to construct anything, no builder, no puppeteer. …In this heterogeneous world everything plays its part relationally. …all of these assemble and together enact a set of practices that make a more or less precarious reality" (151). Another direction is multiplicity, which argues that "most of the time and for most purposes practices produce chronic multiplicity. They may dovetail together, but equally they may be held apart, contradict, or include other another in complex ways" (152). A related notion is that of fluidity, which holds that objects may reconfigure themselves, that different realties may be loosely rather than rigidly associated, and that we do not have to imagine a single actor network. The point of all of this is that
This new material semiotics insists that the stories of social theory are performative, not innocent. It also assumes that reality is not destiny. With great difficulty what is real may be remade. And it is with this thought, the possibility and the difficulty of living and doing the real, that I end. … But, and this is the crucial point, the two are only partially connected: goods and reals cannot be reduced to each other. An act of political will can never, by itself, overturn the endless and partially connected webs that enact the real. Deconstruction is not enough. Indeed, it is trivial. The conclusion is inescapable: as we write we have a simultaneous responsibility both to the real and to the good. Such is the challenge faced by this diasporic material semiotics. To create and recreate ways of working in and on the real while simultaneously working well in and on the good. (155)Argument, Sources, Examples Law investigates what he calls 'actor network theory 1990,' identifying its important elements as semiotic relationally, heterogeneity, materiality, an insistence on process and its precariousness, and attention to power as an effect, to space and to scale, and above all, it questions how a particularly network worked. Actor network theory "does this by eroding distinctions in kind, ontological distinctions. In short, the toolkit can be understood as a powerful set of devices for leveling divisions usually taken to be foundational," such as the difference between human and nonhuman (147). The challenge for actor network theory 1990, having overthrown the whys of the social by foregrounding the hows, was whether it was possible to say anything about network-stabilizing regularities (islands of order in a sea of disorder). It did this in three different, overlapping ways, one of which was material durability, i.e. the argument that "social arrangements delegated into non-bodily physical form tend to hold their shape better than those that simply depend on face-to-face interaction;" the second, strategic durability, which includes "teleologically ordered patterns of relations indifferent to human intentions," i.e. the more or less reliable winds and currents of the South Atlantic through which the Portuguese empire plied its imperium; and discursive stability, which is in fact the marshaling of multiple discourses--modes of ordering--to secure the relative stability of a network so that "when one mode of ordering became problematic others might be more effective" (148, 149).
Bibliographic Data: González, Jennifer. “The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage.” Race in Cyberspace (2000): 27-50.
Main Argument: González looks at the construction of avatars online [remember that this was well before Web 2.0] through the lens of two art projects and discusses the ways in which all of these examples present the body as an assemblage of parts--parts that can be swapped at will, along with somatic markers of racial and ethnic identity--as examples of "appended subjects," which she defines multiply as "comprised of appendages…or that of a subject or person who is defined by a relation of supplementarity," or "an object constituted by electronic elements serving as a psychic or bodily appendage, an artificial subjectivity that is attached to a supposed original or unitary being…In each case a body is constructed or assembled in order to stand in for, or become an extension of, a subject in an artificial but nevertheless inhabited world" (27-28). Drawing on Althusser as interpreted by Joseba Gabilando, González in fact argues that subjects in these arrays are interpolated not just by mimesis but also by position; with the result that "embedded in fantasies of collecting body specimens and creating hybrid subjects is a matrix of desire that seeks to absorb or orchestrate cultural differences" (46). Moreover, "by representing a shifting locus for a distributed subject–radical in the sense that it is perhaps shifting and changing, living, dying and nonessentiallized–the appended subject in the form of an online body also defines a relation to a so-called global interface as primarily one of consumption, not opposition" (47-48).
Argument, Sources, Examples
If the transcendental subject of an enlightenment reason was a unified, predictable subject that could only be imagined because of a homogeneous cultural context, and if the postmodern subject emerged from a recognition of, among other things, a complex heterogeneous cultural context, then these two art works enact the return of a transcendental subject as an endlessly appendable subject. … It is precisely through an experimentation with cultural and racial fusion and fragmentation, combined with a lack of attention to social process, a lack of attention to history, and a strange atomization of visual elements that a new transcendental, universal, and, above all, consuming subject is offered as the model of future cyber-citizenship. (48)
Critical assessment: 1999 was a very long time ago, much as it feels like everyone in the West Bay is currently partying like it's 1999 (meanwhile, a lot of people including me are just waiting for the coming crash), and I really wonder to what extent Web 2.0 (which is a terrible term, but useful; see the post by
synecdochic below) and in particular its aspect as the "visual web" changes these dynamics. If anything, I would wager that Web 2.0 has reinscribed race and ethnicity, or attempts to, even as the networked, content-producing aspect of Web 2.0 allows raced and gendered and non-privileged subjects to, however vulnerably and provisionally, construct their own alternative spaces and discourses.Bibliographic Data: Morley, David and Kevin Robins. “Techno-Orientalism: Japan panic." Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes,and Cultural Boundaries (1995): 147-73.
Main Argument: Exoticism of Japan + technologically-inspired anxiety = techno-Orientalism.
Argument, Sources, Examples Japan has always been one of the West's Others, and in the 1980s, Japan seemed to be calling the terms of Western (and particularly American) modernity into question, partly through technological and economic advancement, but also partly through the perception of Japanese culture as fundamentally non-Western, i.e. non-individual ("domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!"). The trick, however, is that "the West both needs and wants its Japan problem," which of course is the point of Orientalism: the West constructed a mirror in which it could see itself in reverse and thereby construct itself as the obverse, with little if any reference to the actual "Orient." Another wrinkle comes from the fact that the West constructed itself as "modern," whereas Japan was the first society to achieve visible postmodernity, thus figuring postmodernity as other when in fact it is/was/shall be us. In other words, "what Japan has done is to call into question the supposed centrality of the West as a cultural and geographical locus for the project of modernity. It has also condoned the assumption that modernity can only be circulated through the forms the West has constructed" (160). The twist of techno-Orientalism, however, is that the association of high technology with Japan/eseness now serves "to reinforce the image of a culture that is cold, impersonal and machine-like, an authoritarian culture lacking emotional connection to the rest of the world" (169).
Further reading: Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age; Said, Orientalism;
synecdochic, "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure, Parts 1-3"; Nakamura, Digitizing Race; Hayles, How We Became PosthumanMeta notes: "What you don't know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions, too." – Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass