On the day of July 23, 1926, a strange case passed before Judge Harry Trelawney Eve. On the surface, it seemed like a pretty straightforward matter of copyright in which one Geraldine Cummins was contesting the rights of one Frederick Bligh Bond to a work called The Chronicle of Cleophas. The thing is: Geraldine Cummins was not claiming that she had authored the work instead of Bond; she was saying she was the medium through which the work had been channelled.

The Chronicle of Cleophas, asserted Cummins, had been received incommunicado with the spirit world through the interface of a Ouija board, over a period of about a year or so, and usually in response to questions she had been hired to answer by clients as a paid medium. As for the defendant, Frederick Bligh Bond was employed by Cummins as an assistant and had acted as amanuensis to the various Ouija board messages being received by the medium; in the words of Jeffrey Kahan, “for each of Cummins’s Spiritual communiqués, he [Bond] ‘transcribed it, punctuated it, and arranged it in paragraphs, and returned a copy of it so arranged to the plaintiff [Cummins].’ He further stated, and Cummins did not contradict his statement, that he, Bond, ‘annotated the script, and added historical and explanatory notes’” (92). If you’re confused at this point, you’re not the only one.

We have here a literary shell game, in which authorship is shuffled about until the client is utterly baffled. The difference is that, in a shell game, the client (or “mark”) understands who is doing the shuffling. In the case of a séance no one seems to be the creative center . . . The multiple hands recording the Spirits creates the impression that the creative center is not physically present (Kahan 91).

Who, then, did Judge Eve decide in favour of in 1926 — the medium who channelled the work, or the scribe who wrote it down, arranged, and edited it? And why should we care?

“Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor — primarily caregiving, in its various aspects — that is mostly performed by women.” In her 2015 article “Why I Am Not a Maker,” Debbie Chachra challenges a cultural attitude that privileges the act of making over the more invisible acts behind it, particularly the gendered acts of caregiving and educating. Walk through a text. Look around at the letters and words and margins and paper. It was the mediums of mid-19^th-century Spiritualism — an almost across-the-board female labour force — who presented a challenge to one very highly traditional order of men, namely, the order of the author.

What finally materialized in a court of law in 1926 was a practice that had in fact been a booming industry since the Fox sisters started charging admission to rappings on tables in 1848 and mediums started channelling under the moniker of Spiritualist and publishing under the monikers of spirits, which was, according to Bette London, “for some the only way to put themselves forward as authors” (152). This is a practice that literalizes Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s statement that “[a] wealth of invisible skills underpin material inscription” (245). The case of Cummins v. Bond is not so much a case that brings to the fore the act of making, nor does it propose a refusal to be a “maker” as Chachra puts it, but rather the act of unmaking.

For the purpose of this probe these themes will remain a little superficial, but the surface is the best place to start here. The title The Chronicle of Cleophas, throughout discussions of Cummins v. Bond, remains just that, a title without a content — the book is rarely considered in its own right and finding a copy of it leads to a ghost town of an Amazon.ca page where The Scripts of Cleophas is (hauntedly) housed. This is exemplary of research into automatic writing, the products of which are sometimes so illegible they cannot even be read, as in the invented language of medium Hélène Smith, who called her script “Martian.” Automatic writing, also called psychography or spirit writing, offers a process of writing in lieu of a product (the continuous verb writing rather than its gerund), and furthermore a process of writing in which the produced work is secondary if not tertiary to the act of creating it; a “transitional object” that connects the “sensory body knowledge of a learner to more abstract understandings” (Ratto 254, emphasis his own).

“No image available”: screenshot from Amazon.ca; Martian writing of Hélène Smith

In his 2011 paper, Matt Ratto outlines his experiments in “critical making,” which address a “disconnect between conceptual understandings of technological objects and our material experiences with them” (253). I was struck by how closely the drawbot, which Ratto had his participants construct in one of his workshops, resembles the planchette that automatic writers used during séances in the 19^th century. Whereas the drawbot moves across the paper by a process of mechanization via a small motor, the planchette moves across the Ouija board or piece of paper by a process of automaticity via the participant’s hand, part of what the Spiritualists called channelling, or what a cognitive scientist may call ideomotor action. My main question here is, how could the Spiritualist practice of automatic writing be revived and refigured as a model of critical making — where critical making combines critical thinking, a less goal-oriented form of “making,” and conceptual exploration (Ratto 253)? What would this look like and what are the “wicked problems” it could address?

In my last probe, I explored how sleep could be an interesting object of exploration for a Media Lab; automatic writing by contrast offers a methodology rather than an object — not so much the axis around which questions can be posed, but a way to create the questions in the first place. As sleep unmakes waking and any easy notions around consciousness, automatic writing unmakes the author-function and any easy notions about what it is to write.

The real difficulty is who or what is “Cleophas.” If it be assumed (which nobody can prove) that “Cleophas” has a personal identity of his own and could have been the author of the writing, his evidence would be material. “Cleophas” might be sworn and cross-examined by the process of automatic writing. Instead of being difficult, this might be no trouble at all. Once “Cleophas” is accepted as a real person, the problem of communication involved in swearing him and examining and cross-examining him very likely would not be as difficult . . . (Blewett 24).

Who or what is “Cleophas”? What is automatic writing? How does it work? Is it a shell game, as Kahan suggests? An experiment? A literary device? The fact that the above quote comes not from literary criticism, but The Virginia Law Review, 1926 edition, is indicative of the ripples Cummins v. Bond was causing in terms of conceptions around authorship, marked not least by the quotation marks unrelentingly hovered around the Cleophas in question. “Cleophas,” we could say, is an assemblage, as is, we could also say, any “writer,” as is any piece of “writing.” In “What Is an Author,” Foucault discusses how the 19^th century saw the rise of a figure who was not just an author of a text, but an entire discourse, such as “Freud”; “Marx” (228); at the same time, the practice of mediumship that cropped up with automatic writing composed the other side of the spectrum of this canon, folded it back, threw a mirror up to it, but one that hardly anyone was able to see. In the case of Cummins v. Bond, it was the medium Geraldine Cummins who came out victorious, and not Frederick Bligh Bond who’d physically held the pen to record the text. But what is not recognized in either the resolution of this case or the Amazon.ca screenshot above is that on the title page of The Scripts of Cleophas, Geraldine Cummins credits herself as “recorder,” not as “author.” Though she won the case, she was still not granted the right to self-representation. According to Jeffrey Sconce,

Long before our contemporary fascination with the beautific possibilities of cyberspace, feminine mediums led the Spiritualist movement as wholly realized cybernetic beings—electromagnetic devices bridging flesh and spirit, body and machine, material reality and electronic space (27).

It’s a seductive notion, but, really? The mediums of 19^th-century Spiritualism often published under the male names of the spirits they were channelling and thus, as London pointed out above, were able to publish at all, and furthermore earn a living for themselves in a position of power as mediums. The history of automatic writing, in contrast to Kahan’s statement, is physically present. These days, our automatic writers are quite literally transitional objects, drawbots: in 2014 alone, one billion stories were generated by Automated Insights’ Wordsmith program (Podolny), which uses NLG algorithms to “write” articles, while tamed automata are often gendered female, such as Siri, Archillect, “Her.” The embodiment of work and working is changing, and so are the questions surrounding it. How could a writing process that is seen as plural from the get-go change discussions around copyright? What does automatic writing say about fanfic, for example, or creativity, labour, or the ways in which these categories are parsed out according to gender? Finally, if the question, as Bernhard Siegert proposes, is no longer “how did we become posthuman? But, how was the human always already historically mixed with the non-human?” (53), then maybe we can also ask: is there any writing, has there ever been, that is not automatic?

Works cited

Blewett, Lee. “Copyright of Automatic Writing.” Virginia Law Review 13.1 (November 1926): 22–26.

Chachra, Debbie. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” [1969]. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977: 113–38.

Kahan, Jeffrey. Shakespearitualism: Shakespeare and the Occult, 1850–1950. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979.

London, Bette. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Podolny, Shelley. “If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know?” The New York Times, March 7, 2015.

Ratto, Matt. “Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life.” The Information Society 27 (2011): 252–260.

Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000.

Siegert, Bernhard. “Cultural Techniques: Or the End of the Intellectual Postwar Era in German Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 30.6 (November 2013): 48–65.

The post Cummins v. Bond: Unmaking the Author appeared first on &.

“Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak of external space.” —Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

“What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Room at the Centre d’investigation et de recherche sur le sommeil, Lausanne, Switzerland

1a) Space

If you happen to be in Lausanne, Switzerland, and if you happen to be at the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois in Lausanne, Switzerland, you can take the elevator six floors down from the main floor—yes, that far, to the basement, to the basement of basements—and find yourself at a place called the Centre d’investigation et de recherche sur le sommeil (CIRS), and this is where we’ll begin. 

CIRS comes alive at night. If you walk inside, you’ll see that five closed doors fold around a night nurse sitting in the middle of five screens. Behind each closed door is a room that looks identical to the other four: like a bedroom or like a simulation someone created of a bedroom, but with cameras hooked up to the walls and a cornucopia of heteroclite gadgets hinging sleeping bodies to bedside units. These sleeping bodies appear to be armoured in wires and tapes and their breathing patterns are rhythmic and deep under the quilts.

On the screens that encompass the night nurse, data from the sleeping bodies is projected, external mirrors of the internal.

This is the place where sleep has come under surveillance. Not as something that happens or as something that one does, but as something that happens wrong, that one does badly. In fact, being bad at sleep is the act that both isolates this space and makes it penetrable (Foucault 26), it’s what allows you entrance at all.

The heterotopia (of deviation) of the sleep clinic is the object of this probe, but actually it’s possible to go a bit further—it is the snow globe that you shake and look into at the scene within, it is the peephole, the CCTV into the heterochrony of sleep.

Here, the private act of sleep, a space of complete alone-ness where we spend one third of our lives, is made public and populated in the arena of the faulty body’s data.

Electroencephalography data with video of sleeper (Somnologica)

The alphabet of oscillations

1b) Time

Sleep is a behaviour. As such we can say it exists in a special relationship to time. It is daily and ahistorical, it is a routine that has multiple other routines orbiting it, like flossing, washing, putting on that old T-shirt before going to bed, even waking up, drinking coffee. Yet in order to study sleep, science has made the behaviour into an object, or what Bruno Latour, quoting Gaston Bachelard, might term a “reified theory” (66). Polysomnography is the inscription of sleep, and it comes through the interface of programs such as Somnologica, which present a montage of continuous lines compartmentalizing the messiness of the living body, each into a particular graphy (for the brain/mind, electroencephalography; for the heart, electrocardiography). A portrait of sleep in electroencephalography, for example, is drawn mostly in delta waves (𝛿), theta waves (θ). Polysomnography is the mirror cast up to sleep, where knowledge is formed from a space in which “knowledge” has traditionally been seen as momentarily suspended.

Now we can know sleep, construct it. In the uncanny valley of the data of our bodies lie avatars of our sleeping selves: “I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface . . . From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there” (Foucault 24).

Yet like an image in a mirror, sleep is fleeting: behind all the data produced by sleep research, the basic function of sleep remains mysterious, making sleep, as Allan Rechtschaffen notes, “the biggest open question in science” (Goode). In relation to the sleep clinic, then, how can we say that something is being done wrong when we do not even know what that thing is for?

What kind of place is this? How to read the self when the self is over there?

1c) They collapse

The establishment of the sleep clinic as a “real” space was a relatively slow evolution, but we can say it was minted around the time Allan Rechtschaffen and Anthony Kales put out a manual for sleep scoring in 1969 (Kroker 362–66). The clinical study of sleep gave way not necessarily to a breakthrough concerning the function of sleep, but to a massive industry, where, for example, you can pick from over seventy different drugs to “cure” your insomnia alone (the fact that sleep requires curatives at all is relatively novel, but by now a pretty stable concept).

These days it’s not only sleep that is of interest, but also sleeplessness, which is either seen as dangerous (“drowsy driving” anyone?) or desirable, as in current military research. About the latter, Jonathan Crary notes in his book 24/7: “Sleeplessness research should be understood as one part of a quest for soldiers whose physical capabilities will more closely approximate the functionalities of non-human apparatuses and networks” (2). The pathology of sleep, a societal construction built around an ahistorical event, has invited a species of questions that may not have existed previously; i.e. is it possible to function outside of sleep altogether? If so, what kind of heterochrony would that be? (One that needs in any case a longer probe…)

2) A possibility of networks

The science of sleep brings to light an event where the internal intricately aligns to the external: where a private and invisible behaviour becomes public and reified.

Yet the data sleep gives up is difficult to read, somewhat like deciphering bits and pieces of the Voynich manuscript; sleep is asemic and maybe that’s where it will stay. If the heterotopia par excellence is the ship, as Michel Foucault posits (27), then the data washing up from the heterotopia of the sleep clinic is the mess of the ocean fossilized and frozen, seadrift on the shore of the waking.

And maybe, this makes the study of sleep rife for other laboratory models, ones more similar to those Jentery Sayers describes in relation to the infrastructure of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at UVic; that is, labs informed as cultural practices, where a “research team performs or practices multiple definitions of a given field.” How could such a space open an area of research where sleep is not necessarily pinned down to biological data, but where this data, such as that produced by polysomnography, is one point in sleep’s movement (Foucault 23)?

I was granted access to the heterotopia of the sleep clinic not through the pathological (although that could be a funny way to put it) but through an outside foundation that placed me in the lab as a resident poet. Like Jentery Sayers’s MLab, this lab was separated into two physical places: the Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG) at the University of Lausanne, where foundational research on sleep is carried out, and its clinical component described here in text and pictures, where patients are treated and their data collected and filtered back down to the CIG. As one person in the lab carrying out a vastly different kind of research than the others, I found the exchange of information to be mostly asymmetrical: while I learned a lot from the scientists, I was often seen as a curiosity and sometimes as a personified affront to the state of research in general, and there were at least two occasions when I was approached by a colleague with the sole purpose of telling me they didn’t read poetry (“um… thanks for letting me know…?”). It was clear, though, attending meetings, participating in experiments, speaking to technicians and lab directors and nurses and doctors and postdocs, that sleep was proving more elusive than the sum of the efforts being deployed; furthermore, the fact that I was put into this situation at all suggests that the need for broad collaboration was and is being recognized.

How then could a laboratory configured as a “network that connects points” (Foucault 22) offer a different perspective on a concept like sleep, and what would this look like? How does altering the research method change the research object? Because maybe sleep, as it is currently being studied, will not give up its secrets; maybe sleep is asking for different kinds of questions and we require different ways of posing them.

Or maybe, taking a page from science fiction, sleep itself is the laboratory and we the subjects under its study (cue spooky exit music).

Polysomnography selfie

Works cited

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22–27.

Goode, Erica. “Why Do We Sleep?” The New York Times, November 11, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/science/why-do-we-sleep.html

Kroker, Kenton. The Sleep of Others, and the Transformations of Sleep Research. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971.

Sayers, Jentery. “The MLab: An Infrastructural Disposition,” Maker Lab in the Humanities | UVic, website, http://maker.uvic.ca/bclib15.

The post Sleep, a laboratory appeared first on &.

Disclaimer

The thoughts expressed in this blog posts are my own and as such do not reflect on any one person at TAG. My intention is not to restrict or depreciate TAG, nor to cause anyone undue harm. Like Latour’s Observer, I am but one voice trying to make sense of what could potentially be classified as “disorder” – however, does order necessarily need to be established? I do not think so.

This week we looked at Bruno Latours’ Laboratory Life, an influential book on what is called “laboratory studies”. In the first few chapters Latour’s Observer conducts an ethnographic study of a group of scientists and their day to day activities in a laboratory. Based on their own understanding of science and literature, the observer is able to produce hypotheses about laboratory life and what it produces (documents and scientific facts).   However, “where the naïve observer visited the “strange” laboratory, it is clear that he constructed his preliminary accounts out of disorder. He neither knew what to observe, nor the names of the objects in front of him. In contrast to his informants, who exhibited confidence in all their actions, our observer felt distinctly uneasy” (255).

This led me to my own observations about TAG, the Technoculture, Arts and Game lab right across from our class.

What is Tag?

Walking in one might see

• Computers, video game consoles, a game library
• Sewing material, Sewing machine and a 3D printer
• Blackboard, desks, tables, chairs
• Designated quiet study rooms

When entering the room one might be confused as to the form of knowledge and “facts” that TAG produces. Where else could you see sewing machines interacting with games?  

Going to their site leads to slightly more information about the meaning of TAG:

Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) is an interdisciplinary centre for research/creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art based at Concordia University in Montréal.  TAG brings together scholars, artists, designers, engineers and students from all departments at Concordia and we welcome participants from other universities, the game and media arts industries and community based groups.  See our members page.At the heart of TAG is a shared interest and concern with digital games as exemplary objects for cultural research, artistic creation, technical innovation and social mediation, all in the context of an expanding information society and the changing fabric of everyday life.TAG has a triple mandate to:

• » Initiate and support collaborative research/creation of projects in digital game studies and design, both at the student and faculty levels.
• » Build bridges and establish partnerships with games related industries, independent game developers and international researchers and artists.
• » Actively explore and develop viable models of interdisciplinary research collaboration.
• http://tag.hexagram.ca/about/

Additionally, at our first meeting this year, the group came up with the idea that TAG is all that is “game-y”: anything (creative projects, research, etc) that could and can relate to games. But then, what are games? What is “game-y”?

Here’s the catch: if we were to study a multi-disciplinary laboratory like TAG in a similar way to Laboratory Life, and Latour’s Observer, we would realize that the “scientists” in this lab are students. Not only students, but students from different fields. Students from the english department, communication, media, computer engineering, fine arts, computation arts, and the list goes on.

So what does that mean and why is this important to TAG?  How does it differ from the lab that Latour’s observer observed?

In Laboratory Life, the observer oversaw the daily activities of a lab focused on creating academic papers about a single topic, Neuroendocrinology. The work force – all those who are part of the lab, have an important part to play in the creation of documents that establish “facts” about the one topic they are studying. At Tag, we could say that the “single topic” is games, however, the plurality of projects –the sheer differences in what the “scientists” are doing at TAG — are in many ways so different that they could technically only link to other projects in that they are from the same lab. TAG’s output comes in numerous forms; interactive projects, wearable technology, programs, games, game studies, scholarly articles — and so much more.

Could we even study TAG as Latour’s observer studied the laboratory? Perhaps over a period of two years the observer would begin to understand everything that was happening, however, TAG is not a typical 8-17h lab, the lab is open 24/7 for its members — would this require the observer to stay overnight to oversee those projects that only happen after hours, or would they necessarily have to omit these from their observation?

Additionally, asking individual members about their projects and why they think it is important leads to a plethora of answers. In my experience, I find that TAG members are more likely to defend what they are working on than my friends in the science department. I myself as a member constantly feel the need to express why my work in games studies is important to contemporary society, and this is perhaps because we are still a growing research field.  Although Game Studies is becoming more influential and accredited we are still carving our own place (as demonstrated in the growing fields of game research in universities such as Concordia, Mcgill, MIT, and with conferences and publications such as Digital Game Research Association, and Game Studies, a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to computer games research).

When asked to explain what TAG meant to them, members scribbled and filled a black board with comments.  I only have the remnants of part of this conversation, namely: What is TAG?

When I asked a few members what TAG meant to them, I received different answers (for the sake of brevity I will only post two):

For me, the lab space is foremost a place to be “alone together” (not in the negative sense of Sherry Turkle’s book either). As grad students, we tend to be absorbed in our own individual work, but being surrounded by people who are also working can be energizing, or at least comforting (because we’re all equally stressed and miserable). There is periodic human interaction, sometimes intellectually pertinent, sometimes refreshingly frivolous. People are there if you read something you want to share, or need help with something.

It’s also nice to have a bounded space designated for work. I can leave the distractions of home and go to a place and say, “As long as I’m here, I’m gonna get shit done.” Then, if I feel like I got enough done, I won’t have to spend my evening at home feeling like I should be working. When working at home, it’s harder to focus, and also harder to decide when the work day is over.

[anonymous]

Although I’ve only joined TAG this semester, it has always appeared to be a hub of like-minded individuals who appreciate video games as more than just a frivolity – and rightfully so.  For me, personally, TAG embodies a validation of my interests that has been lacking throughout my life, as people are quick to write off video games as inconsequential and frivolous. To find a space where this is not the prevalent mindset has made it an oasis of sorts. When compounded with TAG’s politics (and particularly its safer spaces policies), it seems like even more of a rare gem, as far as game-centric communities goes. At the same time, as one of the handful of undergrad members and certainly one of the less experienced, it’s easy to feel intimidated – but I’m looking forward to getting more involved.

[anonymous]

“When an anthropological observer enters the field, one of his most fundamental preconceptions is that he might eventually be able to make sense of the observations and notes which he records. This, after all, is one of the basic principles of scientific enquiry. No matter how confused or absurd the circumstances and activities of his tribe might appear, the ideal observer retains his faith that some kind of a systematic, ordered account is attainable.” (Latour 43) – however, I wonder, if the anthropological observer entered Tag would they be able to observe some kind of “systematic, ordered account”? Can the plurality of voices at TAG be condensed to just one idea, or is it impossible to view TAG through this lens?

What is interesting in observing TAG as an ethnographer now is that I can look back on my first experience back in 2013. Latour explains, “lack of familiarity with disciplines outside natural science can provoke suspicion” (Latour 19).  When I learned about TAG, I was only beginning my undergraduate degree and had no idea game studies was a field of research. I was very interested and wanted to participate. In one of my courses, my professor encouraged us to use the desktops in the TAG atelier room (the same room we use for class). I was met with suspicion.  

TAG is very different now than it was before. It was hidden away in the hall connected to the washroom with no signs to tell you of its existence.  First, we might want to explore why it was hidden and how this might impact the way others will understand the lab. Does their research need hiding? Was it something the school was not ready to share with the general school population?  

I knock on the door, nervous.  I’ve never been to this room and I feel intimidated: the door is closed and locked, the windows frosted. A male opens the door and looks at me skeptically.  The lights are dark.  They ask me if I need “help” and I tell them that I am here to play a computer game for class and that my professor had told us we could use the computers.  I am an outsider and they grudgingly let me in, four more guys peering at my from their computers.

I settle down at a computer and turn it on. Oh-oh, what’s the password?

I turn to the quiet group working:

• do you know what the password is?

Two of them are on other computers across from where I am sitting while the other three are sitting at a table looking at a Mac book screen.

• “No, sorry, I don’t know”, “Tag hasn’t given you the password?” They all mutter and keep looking at me with narrowed and suspicious eyes. They are not rude per say, but I know that they are withholding the information from me. I am not one of them. I must fend for myself.

Thinking logically, i find the password (on the computer case!) and log on. We all work in silence until I leave. No one has spoken to me, and the lights have remained off the entire time.

I still feel nervous the next times I go to the TAG atelier room to work on something, but I start seeing the same people working in the room and the suspicion begins to ebb (but never truly leaving)

Today TAG is much more open – especially with their open door policy, and while some people might still react with unease and suspicion at first, members are quick to help newcomers (through tours, information, etc).

To go back to my previous line of thought on the placement of TAG, what does it mean today that the room has changed location to a more accessible location? What does it mean that the room is much bigger now and more open–that in addition it has an open door policy?  The open door policy could be a way to encourage students to explore the lab, to explore the different projects we do and why we do them. Does the open door policy allow Concordia to validate TAG’s hard work?  Although, one student did say in our class TAG is still pretty hidden in that it is on the 11th floor (the top floor), and has little to no promotional posters or advertising.

Again, I would like to say that these are my own observations and not necessarily those of TAG.

There is no one right way to talk about TAG. However, observing TAG and allowing Concordians and the community access to TAG through the open door policy might have a beneficial effect to the way TAG produces and circulates knowledge. Additionally, “The study of laboratories has brought to the fore the full spectrum of activities involved in the production of knowledge” (Cetina NP) and this is no less true when observing TAG with its plethora of projects, and its multidisciplinary nature.

A question remains though:

Are we part of TAG too then? Does our work inform TAG? We share their space.  And finally, what does it mean that multidisciplinary laboratories that combine so many different programs exist? By combining our knowledge together (knowledge from the English department, Computer Science department, Arts departments, Dance, Music, etc, etc) we are informing each other’s work and creating new knowledge that takes into consideration more than just one field. What kind of “facts”, what kind of “artifacts” and knowledge can this combination create in the grander scheme?

CETINA, KARIN KNORR. “7 Laboratory Studies: The Cultural Approach to the Study of Science.” Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Peterson, and Trevor Pinch. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1995. 140-67. SAGE Research Methods. Web. 30 Oct. 2015. https://srmo.sagepub.com/view/handbook-of-science-and-technology-studies/d12.xml

Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986. Google. PDF. http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/LatourLabLif.pdf

Websites:

Schools:

http://gram.cs.mcgill.ca/

http://tag.hexagram.ca/

https://mitpress.mit.edu/disciplines/game-studies

Game studies journals:

http://gamestudies.org/1501

http://www.digra.org/

The post Blog post 3: “Laboratory Life” Observing TAG appeared first on &.

In their anthropological study of a tribe of scientists, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar speak of the methodological problems involved with drawing conclusions from observation. A key component is the familiarity of the observer to the evidence being observed: “it is important that testing be carried out in isolation from the circumstances in which the observations were gathered,” they write. “On the other hand, it is argued that adequate descriptions can only result from an observer’s prolonged acquaintance with behavioral phenomena” (37). This is the essential difference between two schemes of validation, “favouring the deductive production of independently testable descriptions” (etic) versus “favouring the ‘emergence’ of phenomenologically informed descriptions of social behavior” (emic) (38). Ultimately they side with the emic, producing a document which describes the life of a laboratory in situ, but not without warning of the dangers of “going native,” that is, an “analysis of a tribe that is couched entirely in the concepts and language of the tribe” (38).

This seemed to me an essential concern not only for the observer-anthropologists, but for the scientists they are studying. Although Latour and Woolgar insist that they are describing social phenomenon, and thus producing something different than scientific facts, there is a definite tension about how and why to differentiate observer from participant. I began to wonder where the line between emic and etic began to break down, and the extent to which an observer has always-already “gone native” with respect to their observation. Since the emic/etic divide is essentially a question about description, one might look to how observations are produced by language. And since language is largely thought of as a social phenomenon (at least for literary scholars and anthropologists), the way it is observed by scientific analysis, that is, as a material effect produced by the brain and vocal organs, calls our validation schemes into question.

I thought it might be productive to use Latour and Woolgar to think about the emergence of thinking about language as a material and embodied process, as intimately connected to our brains and bodies as to culture and history. Interestingly enough, in the history of science, the moment at which the ‘fact’ of language begins to take hold is the moment it begins to break down. The identification of aphasia as a loss of ability to read or write, not caused by genetic deficit but by disease or wounding, challenged the notion that language was the seat of rationality or a direct extension of our cognitive abilities. Like Heidegger’s proverbial hammer: it is only when the hammer breaks, thus revealing a deficit, does it become apparent in its being. The shock of aphasic deficit displaces habitual models of perception, turning normative linguistic brain function into something strange. Medical inquiry usually begins with a realization of a negative capacity, and this is thoroughly present throughout the history of aphasia studies.

In 1783, Samuel Johnson suffered a mild stroke leaving him unable to speak for several weeks. During that time he provided an account of his condition in letters, detailing a paralysis in his ability for speech while his cognitive abilities remained intact. Being a religious man without a modern clinical vocabulary, Johnson attributes this loss of speech to spiritual intervention: “it hath pleased the almighty God this morning to deprive me of the powers of speech,” he writes to his doctor (Eagle 2).

Several decades later in 1866, Charles Baudelaire, living in exile in Brussels, falls into ill health and begins to experience aphasic symptoms that he struggles with until his death a year later. There are biographical records of confused patterns in Baudelaire’s speech, such as “asking his friends to open (rather than close) an already open window” and “saying ‘see you tonight’ (rather than ‘goodbye’) as they parted” (3). Baudelaire’s autopathographic description notably diverges from Johnson’s, as he writes in a letter to his mother that “you need to understand that writing my whole name now is a great task for my brain” (3).

Chris Eagle notes that what is interesting about these two letters is how they “illustrate a major paradigm shift which takes place in the decades between their strokes: from the traditional conception of language as a spiritual faculty to the modern view of language as a biological process rooted in the brain” (4). Between these two literary figures we see the historical implications of considering how the loss of proper speech functioning may be discontinuous with the faculty of language as a whole.

Of course, the progression that leads to Baudelaire’s self-diagnosis of his speech disorder is only the beginning of modern aphasiology; the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries are marked by the exploration and development of accounts of language that stem from materialist approaches to neurological functioning. In his study of the medical literature on aphasia in modernity, Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain, 1825 – 1926, L. S. Jacyna states that “It is possible to assign an inception date to the literature on aphasia: 1861” (3). Jacyna is referring here to the early work of Paul Broca, who famously attributes the faculty of articulate language to the left frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex.

The assignation of a specific inception date for aphasiology is significant not only because it confirms the paradigm shift between Johnson and Baudelaire, but because it emphasizes modernity’s obsession with novelty, the sense of the ‘now’ brought about by scientific discoveries that allow progression from a less developed past. Although the neurolinguistic findings on aphasia develop over time, we can see how within a modernist framework individual case studies can have immediate epistemological purchase on problems as fundamental as the relationship between mind and body. Here we can identify something of the the kind of social factors that determine the construction scientific facts that Latour and Woolgar are interested in.

While there was some debate on the adequacy of Broca’s account of aphasia, by the mid 1860s the discussion shifted from the question of whether language had a localized function in the brain to how this function could be conceptualized. In order to clarify this question, Broca hypothesized three levels of language function: The “general language faculty” which refers to the ability to establish a relationship between an idea and a sign encompassing all forms of signification, the “faculty of articulated language” which involves the conversion of ideas into speech through “emission or reception,” and the “voluntary organs” such as “the larynx, the tongue, the soft palate [voile du palais], the face, the upper limbs, etc.” (web).

Antonio Damasio writes “the true hallmark of Broca’s aphasia is agrammatism, a defect characterized by the inability to organize words in such a way that sentences follow grammatical rules and by the improper use of nonuse of grammatical morphemes” (532), for example, “utterances such as ‘Go I home tomorrow’ instead of ‘I will go home tomorrow’” (533).

Although more sophisticated accounts of neurolinguistic functioning build upon Broca’s formulation, I refer to his 1861 paper because it marks the emergence of thinking about the articulation of speech as a faculty apart from both physiological and cognitive conditions. Broca writes that “There are cases where the general language faculty persists unaltered, where the auditory apparatus is intact, where all the muscles, not even excepting those of the voice and those of articulation, obey the will, and yet where a cerebral lesion abolishes articulated language” (web), a special condition he terms aphemia.

It should be noted this famous presentation of aphemia wasn’t Broca’s primary objective at the time. It was part of a case study he presented at a symposium at the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris on the question of whether there was a causative relationship between the mass of an individual’s brain and their intelligence (for which he interestingly cites the autopsy of Lord Byron as evidence) (Jacyna 69). Broca then, can be evaluated not only as a significant historical figure, but also as a case study for the kind of reductive materialist impulse that posits an inherent and totalizing link between the faculties of personality, reason, and intellect to physical and localized neurological conditions.

Although Broca’s model was amended and updated, the view that a very specific, circumscribed area that functions as the seat of language remained dominant for multiple decades. In an 1889 survey of cerebral localization in aphasia, the American neurologist Dr. M. Allen Starr defines three “epochs” in the history of aphasiology. The first of these was Broca’s, and the second occurs with Carl Wernicke’s distinction between motor and sensory aphasia in 1874. Damasio describes patients with Wernicke’s aphasia a “[having] no difficulty producing individual sounds, but they often shift the order of individual sounds and sound clusters and can add or subtract them in a way that distorts the phonemic plan of an intended word; for example, they may say trable instead of table” (534).

In other words, observing a difficulty in word production that is unrelated to motor defects allows Wernicke to hypothesize these as separate functions. The third epoch is inaugurated in 1883 with Jean-Martin Charcot’s call for a more refined account of sensory memory in which both spoken and written language interact (330-1). Charcot’s model views the word as a “complexus” in which one can discover “four distinct elements; the auditory memory picture […], the visual memory picture […], and also two motor elements, the motor memory of articulation and the motor memory of writing; the first developed by the repetition of movements of the tongue and lips necessary to pronounce a word; the second by the practice of motions of the hand and fingers necessary for writing” (331). Although Charcot’s descriptive terms would certainly not be accepted by neuroscientists today, it is the first step toward a more integrative, embodied approach to cognition and memory in which the movement of the hand is intimately connected to the articulation of language.

In giving this account of the history of aphasia studies, I don’t mean to say that we should group language in with other bodily occurrences such as digestion. In fact, I’d like to combat forms of ‘bad materialism’ that reduce everything to physical processes. But if we are to state anything about language as a ‘fact,’ it must therefore be situated somewhere between social and embodied articulations. Also, as we see in the surprisingly late realization of language production as a faculty apart from comprehension, the production of scientific knowledge is inseparable from its social situation. I think Latour and Woolgar would agree.

Works Cited:

Broca, Paul. “Remarks on the Seat of the Faculty of Articulated Language,Following an Observation of Aphemia (Loss of Speech)” Bulletin de la Société Anatomique, 6, 330-357. 1861. Web.

Damasio. “Aphasia.” New England Journal of Medicine. 326.8 (1992).

Eagle, Chris. Dysfluencies: On Speech Disorders in Modern Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

Jacyna, L. S. Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain 1825 – 1926. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

Latour, Bruno and Woolgar, Steve. Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Malabou, Catherine. Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Salisbury, Laura. “Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity.” Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950. Ed. Salisbury, Laura and Shail, Andrew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Starr, M. Allen. “Discussion of Cerebral Localization: Aphasia.” Transactions of American Physicians and Surgeons. New Haven: The Congress, 1889.

The post Between Language and Materiality: the History of Aphasia Studies appeared first on &.

Halloween is a scary time (for those outside the dominant ideology, for those on the unfortunate side of power dynamics). I (We? No, too many variants in that we. Only common in our antagonist …and even I am only implicated indirectly) spend the days leading up to the 31^st much the way my cousin taught me to behave while passing a graveyard – by holding my breath.

Halloween in contemporary culture is deeply entrenched in capitalism. Halloween itself seems to be historically rooted in the celtic practices on the day preceding the festival Samhain. It was believed that on the day preceding Samhain, the deceased returned (as ghosts). Because of this, people would leave food and wine on their doorsteps and, if they left their houses, they would don masks so that they would also be mistaken as ghosts. There are other similar practices that have also contributed to our contemporary iterations of Halloween, but this one is what stuck to the dominant ideological formation and found itself being articulated and transformed throughout the middle ages – such as the interruption of the church, transforming the celtic festival into All Saints Day and the evolution from leaving out food and wine to ‘souling,’ a practice in which peasants would beg for food and would pray for people’s dead relatives in exchange. According to what history tells us, these traditions were revived by celtic immigrants in the 19^th century. However, it wasn’t until the 1950s that Halloween became a family affair and an occasion for elaborate costuming and candy-giving. Since this time, though, Halloween seems to have continued on this path, becoming the second most profitable holiday after Christmas.

What does it mean then to have a business model based around the concept of dressing up? What sorts of costumes get made? What are “the characteristics of the […] ideal user” (Latour 301)? Perhaps, more importantly for me, what happens for the non-ideal users?

The types of Halloween costumes that people buy (or create) tend to “come in three categories: scary, funny, or fantastical” (Wade). Halloween costumes, if one only looks around, also seem to be an exercise in exaggeration. The superhero costume, for example, falls quite firmly into the realm of the fantastical [though some certainly have aspects of the scary, where villains are concerned, or funny where certain characters (Deadpool?) are concerned]. The superhero is, themself, an exaggerated human possessing super strength, abilities, physique, wit. What does it mean then that these costumes (often with built-in abs) are prevalent? Perhaps this type of costume (and the figure of superhero in pop culture) speaks to the sorts of iterations of self that are to be aspired to in accordance to the discourse of the dominant ideology. What is to be desired, what is desired by the majority and then reinterpreted back into what is to be desired, is this physical exaggeration of self, is the “pinnacle” of human evolution. But then whose pinnacle? According to whom? What is the presence of built-in abs on a costume teaching a child to feel about their body? The ideal user of this costume isn’t meant to ask these questions, though; the ideal user subscribes and “accept[s] or happily acquiesce[s] to their lot” (Latour 307).

So what happens when you aren’t the ideal user? What happens when you are not in the position intended for articulation, not the intended “cab” for the “trailer,” as Stuart Hall describes it (in terms of an articulated lorry) (53)?

Well, from the perspective of the insider, from the perspective of the person on the inside of the dominant ideology, it is the job of the user to become ideal and anything outside of that is a failure on the user’s part. When we speak, for example, of “historical” and “cultural” costumes, it is clear from the articulations of the costumes themselves (the intended facsimile versus the materials used versus the “liberties” taken in design) that they are not intended for those who have knowledge of such things, not intended for those who can see their breakages. Even the pictured models betray this point. For good measure, here are a few popular examples of costumes on a costume website:

(complete with confederate flag on the hat!)

“What’s the big deal?” the insider asks. “It’s just a costume. It’s funny,” he says.

And yes, he does say this. In response to the recent attention a BC Halloween store received for its costumes’ trivializing of Indigenous cultures, the owner Tony Hudgens response was: “It is not our intention to offend any race or creed. We would like to stress that as some Halloween costumes might come across as controversial, our intention at Halloween Alley is to celebrate life (Halloween Style!), and have fun with our friends and families during Halloween festivities.”

But oh, Tony. Tony Tony Tony… Gentle, innocent, Insider Tony…

Your intention (if we are to take you at your word) and the costumes are not isolated things. As with what Hall claims of Baudrillard’s argument about the implosion of meaning, your desire to have this simplistic fun also “rest[s] upon an assumption of the sheer facticity of things: things are just what is seen on the surface” (49). To you, dear Tony, your bottom line and the use by the dominant culture is more important than those who are harmed by these iterations and by the intended articulation of the dominant subject donning such a costume.

Have you even listened to the voices of those who you are attempting to clumsily represent? Look, Tony…

You see, the costume may have certain properties that grant it certain agencies on its own, but it exists, as with all things, “in a particular formation […] in relation to a number of different forces” (Grossberg 54) . Even if the costume has “no necessary, intrinsic” belonging, it still has a meaning (it exists within the systems of ideology and language …from which nothing can entirely escape) and this meaning “comes precisely from its position within a formation” (54). You see, you cannot simply have a costume of an indigenous dress, intended for the dominant (thus white settler) consumption void of its existence in relation to the genocide of indigenous and first nations people in Canada or the erasure of indigenous and first nations languages and cultures in the name of assimilation. In the same vein, it is not okay for Miley Cyrus to continue sporting dreads and it is not okay that I used to have my ears spaced to 00g. The narrative of activism around cultural appropriation works in direct relation to the theory of articulation and assemblage. Tony, Miley, if you were to accept that “contingent relations among practices, representations, and experiences […] make up the world” and that these articulations have a “structured and affective nature,” (Slack 126), I’m certain that you would start to see how the things you do are harmful and, maybe, how you could make them better.

With these issues in mind, I’d like to return to a different sort of ‘funny’ (offensive) costume. For now, let’s call these the ‘drag as joke’ costumes. These are the costumes, usually intended for cis d00ds, that involve over-accentuated breasts, a wig, and some sort of mock-sexy get-up.

note the description here…

Unlike drag (which I’ll admit has some of its own problems in its contemporary manifestation), it is not a parody of traditional gender roles and presentation, it is not a social commentary, it is not connected to a history of activism and oppression in its own right, and it doesn’t attempt any sort of artistry. Simply put, it is not trying to be part of that conversation. These costumes, as actants, are not seeking these assemblages – but they can’t entirely escape them, either. As such, the person donning these costumes is presented with a contest of “the different regimes of truth in the social formation” (Grossberg 48). In order to assert the power of the dominant ideology, the actor exaggerates the drag to obscene and ‘comical’ levels. They perform a parody – both of drag itself and of the traditionally-gendered female subject – in order to reassert the power of the dominant ideology of the m/f binary, constructed around and constructing our arbitrary ideas regarding genitalia and gender. In making this performance a joke, they also make femininity, drag, and transgressive gender performances/identities a joke, thus reasserting the power dynamic within those articulations.

I believe that this sort of costume and the ideas around it play a significant role in this year’s ‘hit’ costume. It’s received a good amount of backlash yet it’s still one of the top selling costumes and has sold out in many stores…

To the Insider, this costume probably doesn’t seem that different to the ones depicted earlier… and in a sense, that’s true, because those earlier costumes are still contributing harmful ideas to this cultural assemblage. At the same time, however, it is drastically different.

For those of you out of the loop, Caitlyn Jenner came out this past year as a trans woman. Now, of course, there have been plenty of (ok, not even close to plenty, but definitely ‘some’) trans women in the media (srsly, mom, have you never heard of Laverne Cox?) recently who could have easily ‘represented’ the trans community, but Caitlyn’s class status, whiteness, and age all worked together to create maximum visibility. This visibility, however, also made her the easy target of the dominant ideology’s ‘jokes.’ We see this manifesting here in the creation of a costume marketed primarily to cis men. Now, what does that do? Well, in the first place, by making it into a costume, it delegitimizes trans identities, it converses with the discourse that asserts that ‘gender’ is what is assigned at birth and that there are no deviations (this also erases intersex identities and discounts the extensive variation in hormones and genitalia that actually exist). Further, by marketing the product to cis men, by treating cis men as the ideal user, it undermines the process of self-identification for trans folks and asserts, in line with the dominant ideology and narrative of ‘trans deceit,’ that trans women aren’t really women and that, consequently, trans folks of all sorts aren’t really what they say they are.

It is for this reason that, at Halloween, I hold my breath. Now, if you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of interpellating me according to the articulations presented by the dominant ideology, you probably don’t get it. So I’ll just say this: clothing (‘costumes,’ if you will), behaviours, assigned genders at birth, sexual attraction/orientation, hair style/length, and names are all singular elements within assemblages. None have the inherent agency to gender anyone or anything – they only do so when articulated within the dominant ideology. If a self-identified man wears makeup, it does not change his gender – that makeup is merely the “trailer” to a different “cab” than what you were expecting. In the same way, those who – insofar as gender is concerned – have no “cab,” can pull at any “trailer” without it needing anything more – they “need not necessarily be connected to one another” (53).

The difference though, I think, is that it is up to the person affected by the assemblage and made an Outsider by the dominant ideology to choose when these things are ok (for themselves alone).

Works Cited

“‘Racist’ Halloween costumes should be pulled from shelves, says B.C. man.” CBC News. CBC/Radio-Canada, October 27 2015. Web.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 45-60.

Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298-310.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl, and J. Macgregor Wise. “Articulation and Assemblage.” Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. 125-133.

Wade, Lisa. “Racist Halloween Costumes.” The Society Pages: Sociological Images. W. W. Norton & Company, October 29 2009. Web.

The post Halloween Articulations and Assemblage appeared first on &.

For the last few weeks we’ve been talking about assemblage, objects, infrastructures and articulations. But we’ve also been talking about bodies. It seems impossible to escape perceiving, feeling and thinking about the world from our subjective, human position, even when we employ object oriented ontology to level the playing field between humans and things, as we did this week. But is it possible to eschew correlationism or think a world of things outside of our human subjectivity? Our readings this week (specifically Latour and Bennett) prompt a conception of the human (body) that is no more privileged than the “things” that shape and surround it.

Some questions:
Where do the lines between human/nonhuman entities and bodies/technologies exist?
Are those lines always already blurred?
Can (nonhuman) objects have agency?
What is agency anyways?

For Bruno Latour, the agency that the “nonhuman delegate” possesses is its ability to impose behaviours “back onto the human” in a method that he (and Madeleine Akrich) call “prescription” (301). In Latour’s famous example of the mechanical door-closer, behaviours such as walking quickly when passing through the doorway and holding the door for others before it slams in their face are “prescribed” to humans by the non-human apparatus of a spring-loaded mechanism. Similarly, Latour explains, one can learn better how to drive a car by actually doing the driving than by just reading a manual. “Prescription” is an “embodied,” “intra-somatic” practice (305). Jane Bennett’s work sits somewhere on the spectrum between ecocriticism and speculative materialism, and therefore a large part of her project has to do with rethinking the body of the human subject, not as transcendent, natural or given, but as an assemblage of nonhuman materials.

Latour writes that he “sees only actors—some human, some nonhuman, some skilled, some unskilled—that exchange their properties” (303). Likewise, Bennett wishes to “flatten the ontology” between human and nonhuman entities. She prefers the term “actant” to “actor,” as “an actant can be either human or nonhuman: it is that which does something, has sufficient coherence to perform actions, produce effects and alter situations” (355).

Latour briefly touches on the computer as an actor in his paper, joking that he “talks” to his, making it (the computer) more like a human, but he fails to say how he has become more like a computer. Of course, this type of analysis (of how our technologies are making us less human and more programmed/robotic; how texting is ruining our ability to converse, etc.) is by now old news. In her influential work How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles writes that our daily interactions with various screens and cybernetic systems do indeed change us: “As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens…you have already become posthuman” (xiv). By putting Latour and Bennett in conversation with Hayles, we can think about how information age technologies produce new definitions of (human and nonhuman) agency and behavior, including a disintegration of the body as we know it.

Consider Freya Olafson’s 2013 performance artwork HYPER_:

In HYPER_, technologic objects and practices intertwine with Olafson’s corporeal feminine presence, granting her an (albeit temporary; albeit visual) “erasure of embodiment” (Hayles 4) and “independence from subjectivity” as rooted in the materiality of her body (Bennett). Bennett describes “thing-power” as “the nonhumanity that flows around but also through humans […] a protean flow of matter-energy” (349) that can be detected in actants like electricity, oil and methane (Vibrant Matter).

I would like to propose that the kinds of artistic techniques and kinetic affects produced in HYPER_ stand as a visualization of Bennet’s “thing-power,” a manifestation of the swirling movement of the materiality and information at the “heart of the condition of virtuality” (Hayles 14).

As the show begins, the lights come up on Olafson wearing a black strapless dress that fragments her body by highlighting her chest, arms and face and erasing her torso into the black scrim behind her.

Olafson assumes dancerly poses, at once both sexualized and mechanical, stopping now and again to check for her pulse. Even she, it seems, is unsure of whether she is human. Over the course of the piece, Olafson inhabits various states of “undress” by donning a bodysuit printed with human musculature and then, later, a skeleton painted directly on her skin.

HYPER_ features a mix of dance, computer animation and improvisations with technology to strip Olafson’s human body down to the “assemblage” of skeletal and muscular structures of which it is composed. If humans are, as Bennett posits, made up of a “particularly rich and complex collection of materiality,” then her further statement, that “agency is a property less of individual entities than of assemblages of humans and nonhumans,” prompts us to ask questions like where does agency really lie? (359, 360). Indeed, it is sometimes unclear who or what is controlling or motivating the dancer’s disintegration in HYPER_. Olafson’s blank eyes and listless movements suggest a lack of agency, yet these moments are interspersed with bursts of incisive kinetic energy that indicate intentional action.

In a section of her piece called “Release Technique” (7:56), Olafson projects a video of a movement study game, featuring an animated woman whose body the player manipulates through keystrokes in order to facilitate her free-fall, maneuvering her around and between large round obstacles that block her path.

The female body in this “virtual choreography” is disturbingly corpselike (her eyes are closed, her limbs are limp) and dressed in overtly-sexual attire (a black string bikini). Also unnerving is the violence the player must perform upon the female body in order to guide her path: bending her in half, hyperextending her joints and allowing her to fall directly upon her face. In fact, the virtual woman’s inhuman flexibility is the only feature that saves her body from being completely cumbersome to the game’s goal — ultimate maneuverability. That the game has no endpoint suggests an infinite infliction of brutality upon this virtual body, and the effect is both mesmerizing and revolting. What effect, I wonder, does this technological sadism have on real bodies? Is the virtual (or simulated) body more human or more nonhuman?

Towards the end of the piece (42:40), Olafson emerges from the wings having painted her limbs, torso and face with glow-in-the-dark paint to resemble a skeleton. When viewed in darkness, and with the 3D glasses provided, the rest of Olafson’s human body melts away and the audience is left with only her performative skeletal presence, which, aided by a projection, has now multiplied by three.

When she dances with her skeleton clones, they are a balletic trio that dance in perfect unison, a feat technically impossible for three real human bodies. Her counterparts are both completely her yet also separate from her, a fact that fuses the mechanical and the corporeal into a kind of emotionless ecstatic sublimity, enacting what Hayles calls our “ultimate horror” — the nightmare that the machine might absorb the human being, trapping them within “inflexible walls that rob them of their autonomy” (Hayles 105). By this point in the piece, Olafson has transformed from perceptibly human to something “other” — a cyborg presence at once both material and ephemeral, “cold” and “warm.” She dances her way through this transition, her body always in motion.

It is interesting that Olafson should use dance as her metamorphic medium. Scott R. Hutson calls the specific type of movement inspired by electronic dance music and the rave scene “dance as flow” and he notes that this type of dance “merges the act with the awareness of the act, producing self-forgetfulness, a loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of individuality and fusion with the world” (Hutson 39). The self no longer controls the body. Instead, the movement of the body becomes involuntary, controlled by music and rhythm alone, allowing the mind to abandon it. Because HYPER_ performs an illusion by which the body is dissolved into pure movement, it works as an example of the shift that Bennett also makes, from body materialism to thing-power materialism. Whereas body materialism “has tended to focus on the human body and its collective practices” as well as “the extent to which cultural notions and ideals are themselves embodied entities,” thing-power materialism “focuses on energetic forces that course through humans and cultures without being exhausted by them” (Bennett 367).

HYPER_ ends with a visual of swirling red and blue ribbons, like rogue DNA strands. The ribbons, which are guided by Olafson’s unseen hands, move in abstract and haphazard (“aleatory”) ways; they are the unpredictable flow of information, materialized. Although they are manipulated by a human’s (invisible) hands, the resulting movement of the ribbons can be seen as an artistic representation of Jane Bennett’s thing-power materialism or “vibrant matter,” possessing as they do, an “active, earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness” (3).

Tensions of autonomy and control, intimacy and impersonality plague HYPER_, which reinstates the body, and particularly the female body, as both a vehicle for and an obstacle to freedom. But what kind of “freedom” is this? What kinds of issues arise when technological escapism is posited as a means of transcendence from the body? Is the result a kind of neoliberal fantasy? Computer technologies have claimed that they can help us accomplish all that neoliberalism requires of us — precarity, availability, un-rootedness, distributed agency and skill. Is the body just a hindrance to these qualities?

Works Cited

Bennett, Jane. “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter.” Political Theory 32.3 (June 2004): 347-372.

———-. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hutson, Scott R. “The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures.” Anthropological Quarterly 7.1 (2000): 35-49.Academic Search Premier.

Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35 (1988): 298-310.

Olafson, Freya, chor. HYPER_. Freya Björg Olafson, 2013. Vimeo. 17 Apr. 2014.

The post Becoming Posthuman: Disappearing Bodies & Dance as Thing-Power appeared first on &.

Probe, or Rogue Suicide-Bomber Probe Droid? (Is that a fact?)

In view of our reading of Latour’s rearticulation of the assumptions informing the concepts of “facts” and “values” into new terms that recognize the processual cyclicity of institutionalizing always-debatable uncertainties into useful certainties, and in view of Alice Munro’s having just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an article entitled “Denied Nobel Prize Yet Again, Margaret Atwood Plots Post-Apocalyptic Revenge” seems timely. The article appears on the website Newslo, which boasts (with apropos unabashedness with respect to facticity) the title of “The First Ever Hybrid New/Satire Platform!” The title captures accurately, however, the Newslo site’s hallmark article-viewing functionality: a toggle for “Show Facts” and “Hide Facts” foots every article. Activating the former button highlights the portion of the article that has been institutionalized to the realm of what we would previously have called facticity; re-negating these highlights (back to the article’s default appearance) returns smoothly and non-libelously the factual portions into formal homogeneity with the sensationalist satirical tabloid remainder. “Just Enough News,” runs the site’s motto, which is just as well an ironic motto for news in general nowadays: there’s too much news, and yet never enough “(f)actual” news in that news (and never enough fiction in our “fiction“). How can we better define that “just enough” (with pun on “just”)? We need what Latour proposes: a better “power to take into account” (Facebook account or otherwise): we need to evolve our filter-feeders.

Indeed, Newslo’s filtering system typifies the related problem of facticity in regard to digital public spheres that we discussed both yesterday in relation to a Quebec provincial voting commercial, which we argued exemplified the complex relations governing the way in which the mob rule of social media gets billed as democracy via that social media itself, as well as last month in relation to our discussion of print newspapers versus databased newspapers and the personalized newsfeed. “Filter bubbles,” Ted Talker Eli Pariser calls it, this Internet censorship phenomenon in which our bias towards our own politics of interest can actually work against our own interests – especially when, as Pariser relates, Facebook one day decides to run an algorithm (just for “you,” i.e. for you) that converts all your visible news into whatever your Good News happens to be. While the talk is scarcely worth skimming beyond what I am graciously filtering for you, Pariser does end up proposing that databases like Google adopt what amounts to an extension of the logic of Newslo’s system: namely, including among our “sort by” options checkboxes for things like “Relevant”, “Important”, “Uncomfortable”, “Challenging”, and “Other Points of View”. The metaphysics of presence points to an obvious problem with this system, or rather with the utopian version of it (a database will never represent what is truly Other to it – we, and even Google, simply cannot know how “Other Points of View” is itself being filtered; and is a comfortable way to find the “uncomfortable” possible?), but nevertheless the gesture seems valuable, and maybe even represents a crude attempt at doing for the database what John Law proposes scholars do for research in general: making explicit to our readers the always-messy contingency of that research. Perhaps databases should have a “messy” filter (kind of like the trope of the button which you’re told never to press because no one knows what it does), which when you press it simply puts everything through a glitch-randomizer and fucks everything up.

It is such mess, though, that Latour likewise encourages as the one of two requirements of his proposed initial phase for institutionalization (what in the old language we would call fact-making), the phase of taking into account all of the entities that we have at our disposal to debate for institutionalization candidacy: namely, the requirement of perplexity, a “provocation (in the etymological sense of ‘production of voices’)” in which “the number of candidate entities must not be arbitrarily reduced in the interests of facility or convenience” (110). Its corollary is the requirement of relevance – considering the relevance of the various stakeholding voices to perplex what is being, by debate, perplexed. This latter somewhat relates to Pariser’s proposed (re)search filter category, but more to that mark is the requirement of hierarchization in Latour’s second of the two institutionalization phases, arranging in rank order. For, Pariser’s category of “Relevance” (and rather than simply pertaining to the already-familiar category of “sort by relevance” vis-a-vis search terms) comes in critical response to Mark Zuckerburg’s cited remark that “[a] squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Pariser’s point is that, if newsfeeds or other search results are ever to even approach something more like the impossible ideal of information democracy to which popular media discourse so often articulates them, then the squirrel pictures that come up in our newsfeeds should perhaps not be placed at the same level of relevance as humanitarian crises in what Latour calls society’s “hierarchy of values” (107) (which also, notably, functions by a “[r]equirement of publicity” [111, emphasis added]).

The comparison to be made, then, is between the (in the old terms) “fact-evaluation” process that Latour proposes for constitutional democratic government, and the way in which information is similarly filtered to and filterable by the public of such democracies within their digital news and (re)search platforms. Latour’s proposed process begins with perplexity and relevance – in other words, the collection of search results (the terms – relevance – and their results – initially, perplexity) that then, in the second part of the process, the move toward actual instutionalization (“closure”), must get hierarchized accordingly in terms of their hierarchical ethical valuation. In sum, it would seem that, in extension to Newslo’s and Pariser’s unique filtration systems, and indeed as a corollary component to the type of public network resultant of precisely the kind of (public sector) debate apparatus that Latour proposes, our new digital filtration systems should involve not just parameters like “Show Facts” and “Relevant” but precisely such a process as Latour’s, with its unique re-articulation of “facts” and “values” into less contradictory categories. Then a system such as Newslo’s could only constitute absurdity insofar as “facts” would no longer be a category for filtration. But more importantly, because the relative contingencies of what we used to call “facts” (and get mixed up with “values”), and the (traces of the) process by which they became such, might be explicitly built into all our articles and newsfeeds and other search databases. That is, the equivalent of “Show facts”, for example, would show (by a kind of markup, perhaps) what had been successfully put through Latour’s process of institutionalization.

Otherwise, Margaret Atwood might still be in the running, according to her own personalized fantasy newsfeed. For the division between “facts” and “values” (where the latter equals the explicitly skewed satire in Newslo’s articles) is never so clear as Newslo makes it. Hence the need and use for Latour’s proposed new articulations.

Works Cited

Latour, Bruno. “A New Separation of Powers.” Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 91-127. Print

Law, John. “Making a Mess with Method.” Lancaster: The Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, 2003.
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Law-Making-a-Mess-with-Method.pdf

The post Show Facts, Hide Facts: Applying Latour to Database Structures appeared first on &.