This is a great piece, and really interesting to think about the difference between male and female dolls (or how even as children, we’re initiated into this doll concept in a gendered way), and the difference between gendered machines, like androids, Siri.
This also made me think about the outsourcing of “care” in the body of a doll: usually as children, we’re taught to care for dolls, and as adults the doll in turn becomes something that can care for us (where care has been sexualized)? I mentioned the movie “Her” briefly in my probe, and your probe made me also wonder, what would happen if it was a “Him” instead?
]]>“…Here I think Zambreno helps us dissent from Friedrich Kittler’s influential media theory of modernism. For Kittler, the muse gives way to the secretary. Modernism breaks the link between the author’s gesture with pen on page, and converts woman as muse to woman as typist, becoming the intermediary between the great man and the work. For Kittler modernism is about the disaggregation of sensory functions from the body and their attachment to various apparatus. But what we find in Zambreno is quite different. The muse does not go away. In some cases she becomes a secretary too but without losing the muse function. A more important part of the story, unobserved by Kittler, is her erasure as any kind of author in her own right. Sustaining the myth of the author as creator requires the omission, even the suppression, of those chattering women who were authors of themselves.
….
“There is a media theory story here, but not quite the one Kittler finds. Modernism is the era of mass print and mass literacy. So much of what became canonic modernist literature – even some supposedly leftist ones – reacted in panic against this. The tools of creation were not to be put in the hands of just anyone, if reactionary modernism could help it. Thus it came up with good and some not so good theories as to why this could not be so, of why creation had to remain a privilege.”
But here’s a twist: patients with sleep apnea use their Continuous Positive Air Pressure machines at home. Somewhat disturbingly, the newer versions of these machines collect all manner of data on their usage and on the sleep patterns of the user. In some cases, this information is saved to a memory card which is then physically delivered by patient to doctor so that the data can be downloaded and processed… or, increasingly, using wifi and cellular networks to silently and passively transmit sleep surveillance to some data centre somewhere. I guess in a lot of cases (at least in the USA), this data is used to ensure “compliance” — an insurance company code-word for the notion that patients supposedly don’t use their expensive medical equipment correctly and thus waste the insurance company’s money, thus creating the requirement for an elaborate spying apparatus to manage the risk of such resource leakage.
I’ve often wondered what sleep researchers and doctors actually think of all that. Having been in their lab, do you have any thoughts?
]]>I wonder why interpellation (of us, into the role of “quiet researcher”) is performed more successfully by the emoji than by the photograph of a human mouth? (further humiliated by the drawn-on moustache – nice touch).
Perhaps because the emoji is inhuman / representative it performs the symbolic “shushing” mechanism more effectively (or threateningly, despite the smile)?
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