Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Article Conversation #3: Embodiments vs. Cyborgs

In my last blog post, I explored the dynamics of N. Katherine Hayles' project in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. In this blog post, however, I will put Hayles' project in conversation with that of Donna Haraway in "A Cyborg Manifesto," placing a particular emphasis on the ways in which their conceptualizations of the human body converge and/or depart from one another.

Though written nearly ten years before How We Became Posthuman (1999), Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991) still shares a relatively common vernacular with Hayles in terms of how they both write about intersections between informational code and the human body. Indeed, much like Haraway, who suggests that understanding the discursive boundaries of the human body involves "the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (327), Hayles similarly frames her own argument around the transition to virtuality and a virtual age as a significant cultural shift in which "material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (13-14). In their respective pieces, Haraway and Hayles treat "coding" and "informational patterns" as touchstones for articulating and intellectualizing the human body and the material spaces through which it navigates. In so doing, they do not so much emphasize the static, hegemonic, and implacable nature of information and knowledge so much as the prospects for transgressing and/or contesting existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries.

For Haraway, internalizing this perspective on information means not so much thinking "in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints" (325). The salient point in both of their projects therefore centers on the idealized prospect of divesting oneself of the constraints, limitations, and patterns of the world in which marginalized and socialized individuals are situated, and thus enacting and performing alternative subjectivities. These alternative subjectivities therefore emerge from imagined and/or performative spaces, spaces that, in Hayles' estimation, re-constitute boundaries and "change the locus of selfhood" (279), therefore "offer[ing] resources for the construction of another kind of account" (288) of reality as more fluid, malleable, and open to interpretation.

Though both Haraway and Hayles locate much of this liberatory and subversive potential in and around performances and discourses of the human body, their specific points of entry for initiating this dialogue are slightly different.

For Haraway, the notion of the cyborg serves as the medium or mythos through which one might re-work hegemonic, patriarchal, and capitalistic codes and re-draw the discursive boundaries against which the social realities of gender, race, and class consciousness are determined and embodied. "A cyborg," according to Haraway, "is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (315). By crafting the cyborg around both "social reality" and "fiction," Haraway seeks to elucidate upon the ways in which individuals are constituted, but not determined, by a multitude of dominant codes and restrictive social structures. While these codes and structures are "lived" and "real" in the sense that they act as the social, cultural, and political spaces through which individuals navigate, Haraway places a particular emphasis on the interests, structures, and institutions that such spaces actually serve. In this sense, codes and structures are not so much "objective" realities and/or "self-evident" truths so much as potent and pervasive fictions and propaganda that organize and dictate the terms of "reality" and intelligible life. This sense of reality and "intelligible life," however, comprises just one constitutive piece of the cyborg, a piece that the cyborg might "disassemble" and "reassemble," all under aegis of exposing the fact that "no 'natural' architectures constrain system design" (326).

Like Haraway, Hayles is also committed to problematizing the purported "'natural' architectures" of "reality" and intelligible life. Unlike Haraway, though, Hayles does not use the cyborg or any other related mythos to articulate her project. Instead, Hayles frames her project around the "interplay between the body as a cultural construct and experiences of embodiment that individual people within a culture feel and articulate" (193). This interplay ultimately makes an important distinction between "the human body" and "embodiment." While "the human body" serves as an "idealized form" (196) that connotes and prescribes particular behaviors and manners of being, "embodiment" serves as the actual material performance of various behaviors and manners of being. These material performances of "the human body," as Hayles emphatically suggests, might, on the one hand, align and enact the existing tenets that comprise "the human body," but, on the other hand, they also offer opportunities for "randomness," opportunities that subvert, transgress, and contest the entire institution of "the human body." In this sense, "bodily practices have a physical reality that can never be fully assimilated into discourse" (195). Ultimately, by integrating "randomness" into and onto existing dominant codes and discursive boundaries, "embodiment" functions as "the creative ground from which lnew] pattern[s] can emerge" (286).

Where I feel that their projects might not necessarily overlap is in the way that they position the transgressive potential for their respective conceptualizations of the human body. In "A Cyborg Manifesto," Haraway indicates that "[t]he cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbols, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (316). Though locating the cyborg in a "post-gender world" might serve more as a rhetorical feature for her project, I feel that it is important to note that Haraway is in fact imagining materialities and discourses well outside of the confines of "reality" and our immediate surroundings. Hayles, on the other hand, takes a more sobering and pragmatic approach in her analysis on Philip K. Dick's work when she suggests that "the construction of the observer cannot finally be separated from the construction reality" (190). While I feel that Hayles' project certainly hinges on the sorts of material and discursive imaginaries that comprise Haraway's notion of the cyborg, I also feel that the breadth and trajectory of Hayles' project cautions against divorcing and/or divesting oneself from lived reality. But, again, these distinctions may speak more to the rhetorical scaffolding of their respective projects than any profound or substantive difference in their general approach to the prospects for transgression and subversion.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Blog Post #5: Embodiments are Soooo Random

In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, N. Katherine Hayles articulates the ways in which emerging digital technologies have transformed the shape and scope of knowledge and information to the extent that the very foundation of what constitutes and comprises "subjective human experience" has become something else altogether. This "something else" might be referred to as the posthuman, a significant cultural and intellectual position through which human beings assume the role of an "informational pattern" of sorts, a codified husk unmoored from materiality writ large.

For Hayles, the emergence of the posthuman represents a signigicant discursive shift, one that clearly cordons off information from materiality, bringing forth an age in which "it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). Ultimately, these distinctions re-route discourses around the material and intellectual contexts that human beings navigate from questions of "presence/absence" to questions of "pattern/randomness."

By locating these discourses within the realm of "pattern/randomness," Hayles places an emphasis on information and code as the metrics of sorts through which the posthuman inherits, understands, and embodies a particular iteration of reality. However, throughout How We Became Posthuman, she seeks to problematize this iteration of reality, perpetually challenging assumptions about its purported "organic wholeness" (160). In Hayles' estimation, theories, institutions, and/or metrics of information, particularly those introduced by Claude Shannon, in the age of the posthuman generally contain a "conservative bias that privileges stasis over change" (63), a bias that therefore also "privileges exactness over meaning" (67). In this sense, information serves as a stable, intelligible, and normative framework for constituting reality as a self-evident "pattern," a "pattern" that human beings merely simulate and reify as predictable "manipulators of code" (46) as opposed to creative or autonomous agents of change and "randomness."

While the age of the posthuman might expose the ways in which "conscious agency has never been 'in control'" (288), Hayles' analysis of the role that human beings play in internalizing and perpetuating this systematic thinking seems to suggest at least the prospect for other alternatives and/or some form of resistance. Indeed, if human beings in the age of the posthuman are in many ways "placed in the middle of the circuit, where [their] output and input are already spliced into an existing loop" (68), and if "the observer cannot stand apart from the systems being observed" (221), Hayles seems to really struggle to locate subversive and contrarian potential within practices and performances of embodiment that challenge and destabilize prevailing ideas about what comprises information, "pattern," and normativity. She does this in part by juxtaposing the "human body" against "embodiment." In Hayles' estimation, the "human body" is "naturalized within a culture" (198) to the extent that all material practices and performances are measured against a normative and idealized conceptualization of the "human body." Embodiment, on the other hand, is more individuated and "improvisational" in nature, "becom[ing] naturalized only secondarily through its interactions with concepts of the body" (198). As a material performance of the body, embodiment therefore represents a more elusive and flexible practice, one that might, on the one hand, automatically incorporate into "bodily memory" those norms and mores inscribed within the "pattern" of the "human body" (199); or, on the other hand, engage in the sorts of "emergent behaviors" (225) that problematize the "ideological underpinnings of naturalization" (198).

Ultimately, Hayles makes these distinctions between the "human body" and embodiment in order to elucidate upon the advantages and possibilities of "the posthuman." By in effect talking back to and re-mapping "the locus of selfhood" (279), she engages in the sort of systematic thinking that celebrates and might help instantiate "an open future marked by contingency and unpredictability" (285), a future that might also shirk the vestments and restrictions of "pattern" and "disembodied information" (287). Yet while Hayles suggests that "human functionality expands because the parameters of the cognitive system it inhabits expand" (290-291), she also acknowledges that subversive embodiments in the age of the posthuman may not decisively or automatically destabilize the "pattern." Regardless, Hayles locates any semblance of subjectivity within embodiment and "randomness," and thus within the "emergent rather than [the] given" (291).

PS3 Robot Demo

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Final Project Proposal: Anonymous Travelers: Scaffolding Peer Review in the Composition Classroom

INTRODUCTION:
So, last week during class we were charged with the task of presenting our tentative ideas for our final projects for ENGLISH 597 to our fellow classmates. Everyone had anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to articulate the general framework and/or inquiry questions they are working with in these nascent stages of conceptualizing, researching, and composing the final project. Our classmates asked questions and offered suggestions based on their understanding of the final project, oftentimes pushing the presenter to consider new or different contexts that might help nuance and/or crystallize their ideas and help develop a solid point of entry for the presenter's project.

PROPOSAL:
In my presentation, I proposed a sort of exploratory project that pertains to the ways in which digital technologies, anonymity, and deliberate course scaffolding might be used to improve peer review practices among students in the composition classroom. My project is a two-fold response to the efficacy of traditional, face-to-face peer review procedures. It responds to: 1) the general discomfort and/or tenuousness that students oftentimes exhibit when responding to their classmates' work in peer review sessions; and 2) ineffective peer review sessions that not only cause students to disregard the merits of peer review altogether.

Peer review serves as one of the more potent and palatable platforms available to composition instructors through which to emphasize a larger audience or community of readers outside of instructors themselves. It is also provides for unique and valuable opportunities for students to test out and externalize their existing and emerging composing skills and strategies, and to function as facilitators of sorts in the composition classroom.

I would like to explore the prospects for using digital platforms like Google Classroom, ELI Review, SWoRD, etc. to conduct anonymous peer review sessions between two separate composition classes. By juxtaposing students from separate composition classes alongside one another, I envision a kind of "cross-talk" between the classes, a "cross-talk" that alleviates much of students' initial apprehensiveness about traditional face-to-face peer review, and places a great deal of emphasis upon notions of ethos, audience, and community in unorthodox and potentially-fruitful ways.

Most importantly, I see digital anonymity as just a point of entry in a semester-long sequence on peer review, a sequence that slowly and progressively works towards peer review as an embodied practice. By in effect staging (scaffolding) peer review across four major inquiry projects and four separate delivery systems, this approach reinforces the value and importance of peer review as an institution and better positions students to understand the dynamics and possibilities of peer review across various media.

In a brief and separate note, I would also like to say that I see a number of overlaps between my final project and a number of areas of scholarly interest, including: distance education, inclusivity, writing center pedagogy, online education, and embodied writing, just to name a few.

FEEDBACK FROM CLASSMATES:
My project was generally well received by my classmates, but they did provide some very useful and important feedback about how I might organize and further elucidate my ideas and some of the potential downfalls of its application in a composition classroom.

Much of the discussion revolved around the role I would serve as an instructor instituting the platform across classes and overseeing overall student progress. As I am still exploring different mediums to stage the digital anonymity portion of my project, I cannot speak on that as of yet. (Of course, I welcome suggestions here.) However, there were some really great suggestions about having students review one another and reflect on the process. This might avoid my serving as a sort of digital big brother looking over their shoulders, therefore creating a friendlier space for students to compose and navigate.

Presently, I am kind of oscillating back-and-forth between where, how, and why I should position myself one way or the other, but I suppose I will have to read a bit more and digest the ideas before I can map this out. Either way, this quandary will absolutely play a role in the final project that I compose.

There was also quite a bit of talk about how I (and, of course, students) may or may not make direct or significant enough distinctions about what it actually means to engage in peer review in different spaces ranging from digital to embodied, and why these choices matter. Some of my classmates suggested that I pay particular attention to how questions are tailored and how they correlate to the overall conceptual goals and course outcomes of ENGLISH 101 as we navigate various units and delivery systems. Again, I do not have a fleshed-out response to this suggestion, but I am very grateful that it was brought up. I would love to get some feedback here about how I might make such distinctions, though.

Lastly, they recommended getting in touch with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) about my platform and overall project, particularly if I have any intention of truly implementing this in my classes next semester and perhaps using my findings in a publication in the future. This is absolutely on my radar. And this final project will go a long way in exploring the virtues of conceptualizing and materializing the peer review process as a sequence from digital anonymity to embodied practice.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Article Conversation #2: Digital Literacy Practices in the Cuban Blogosphere

In the "Introduction" to Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times, authors Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe, articulate the provisional terrain for a more inclusive and global approach to composition, one predicated on more fluid conceptualizations of digital literacy practices. The impetus for their project emerges from a call for more nuanced theories of digital literacy practices that speak to the increasingly globalized world in which we live in the 21st century and the sorts of intersectional, transnational, and hybrid identities that comprise life in this globalized world. This miasma of identities, perspectives, and subjectivities produce almost as many digital literacy practices, therefore destabilizing dominant, hegemonic, and more exclusive institutions of "literacy." Though we did not engage with the participants that the authors use to illustrate this paradigm, it is important to briefly note that these case studies consisted of writing, oral narratives, videos, etc. to help construct a more robust and complicated continuum of digital literacy practices.

I would like to put this paradigm into conversation with Rainer Rubira and Gisela Gil-Egui's article, "Political communication in the Cuban blogosphere: A case study of Generation Y." In the article, Rubira and Gil-Egui use the emergence of Yoani Sanchez's blog, "Generation Y," within the fraught socio-political landscape of 21st-century Communist Cuba, a landscape saddled by state surveillance, economic inequalities, and tenuous political conditions. Despite these obstacles, Yoani Sanchez's blog emerged in 2007 to worldwide recognition and fanfare. Though the authors of the article celebrate "Generation Y" as an important and potent site for exchanges of ideas about the past, present, and future socio-political trajectories of Cuba outside of the control and confines of state power, they also seem to denigrate the ways in which users--most of which are outside of Cuba-- actually navigate this unique and unbridled communicative space. Indeed, Rubira and Gil-Egui make important distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication, distinctions that seem to compartmentalize approaches to political dialogue in such a way whereby exuberant and/or emotional dispositions fall short of a kind of "rational" yardstick that might prevent "Generation Y" from achieving the status of a more traditional civil or public sphere.

And that's the rub for me. It seems that while Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe locate their project in a call for more inclusivity within conceptualizations of digital literacy practices, Rubira and Gil-Egui articulate the legacy of "Generation Y" in terms of a deficit model, whereby the author and the blog's users are simply trying to keep up. I do not doubt that Rubira and Gil-Egui were intrigued by the liberatory potential of Yoani Sanchez's blog, but those aforementioned distinctions between expressive and deliberative forms of communication strike me as rather backhanded, almost as if lamenting, "If only those silly, emotional, and disorganized commies would be more rational, then maybe they wouldn't be in this mess." I guess what bothers me about such an approach is that it does not exhibit the sorts of sensitivities towards unique or alternative digital literacy practices that Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe seem so committed to in Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. In this sense, Rubira and Gil-Egui were not nearly as accommodating of literacies in the plural, and not nearly as complementary of the obstacles that Sanchez navigated in order to create and maintain "Generation Y."

Friday, October 3, 2014

Blog Post #4: Whose Network? Whose Outrage? Whose Hope? Whose Democracy?

So, I must be honest before I launch into this blog post. I'm not sure there's another text this semester that I've had more difficulty reading than Manuel Castells' Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. My difficulties with the text (I believe) did not emerge so much from issues of comprehension or affinity with content and ideas as from questions about style, audience, and intention.

In short, Networks of Outrage and Hope attempts to articulate and theorize the terms through which protest, advocacy, and revolution materialize in the "real world" in the 21st century, and how such activities are spurred by Internet enclaves of dissent and collective action. Castells is particularly interested in the ways in which movements of this kind are, on the one hand, addled by the crippling weight of economic insolvency, and, on the other hand, mobilized by an overwhelming and united sense of outrage and scandalization at related misuses of state power that perpetuate social, cultural, and political inequalities. This outrage, in Castells' estimation, serves as the catalyst for rather profound and potent sentiments of hope, sentiments that ultimately espouse the efficacy of the Internet as a host for legitimate social activism and a space in which likeminded individuals might work together and make wholesale, systematic changes in the "real world."

That being said, I did find many of the premises of Castells' arguments a bit dubious, particularly in light of the texts we have read up to this point in the semester. Indeed, while the case studies that Castells analyzes in the text (Tunisia, Iceland, Egypt, etc.) perhaps in some way attest to the veracity and potency of the paradigm he constructs in Networks of Outrage and Hope, I did not always feel as if he attended to enough of the complexities of articulating a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm. To be clear, though, I give Castells more credit than that, as I do trust that he might also be flexible as he continues his research. I just find it a bit problematic when he states things like, "By sharing sorrow and hope in the free public space of the Internet, by connecting to each other, and by envisioning projects from multiple sources of being, individuals formed networks, regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments" (2).

On the one hand, I understand the rhetorical purpose of using terms like "outrage" and "hope" to apply to radically different and disparate individuals and communities, whom form these sorts of digital collectivities "regardless of their personal views or organizational attachments." I mean, commonalities and overlapping interests across difference(s) can certainly help expand what constitutes "collective action" and extend membership to such a collectivity to a wider and wider population, right?

On the other hand, by perpetually gesturing to these shared interests, Castells might overlook the virtues and ethics of preserving and keeping in mind that which distinguishes one manner of "outrage" and "hope" from another. In an effort to stoke the fires of collective action, I fear that Castells tacitly stabilizes human experience and activity in ways that could "ghettoize" expressions of "outrage" and "hope" that do not conform to his own designations. And while the case studies perhaps seek to make such distinctions clearer, they still serve as instruments and/or premises for his larger argument in Networks of Outrage and Hope, and his efforts to construct a paradigm around these case studies. Not to mention, his reference to "the free public space of the Internet" presupposes levels of accessibility to not only the content available on the Internet, but also the Internet and digital technologies themselves. Castells attempts to address this at particular points throughout the book, but not, in my mind, in a sustained enough manner that would truly allow readers to imagine as global a reach for his paradigm as he suggests.

These omissions and/or underdeveloped components of Castells' argument are made all the more apparent in his casual investment in the prospects for "democracy" within and outside of the networks he represents in his book. On one of the final pages of Networks of Outrage and Hope, he writes, "The legacy of networked social movements will have been to raise the possibility of re-learning how to live together. In real democracy" (246). It is important to note that the legacy of Castells' project rests on a deficit model that suggests that the social, cultural, and political relationships and power structures that comprise communal life in the 21st century are broken and/or untenable in terms of enacting systematic changes. While I generally agree with Castells on this point and don't necessarily find this terribly provocative, I find myself terrified by the way in which he suggests that a "real democracy" might somehow spur authentic and valuable revolutionary activity and change. By harking to "democracy" in this way, he may perhaps be seeking to re-claim or re-purpose the "colonizer's language," so to speak, but this intent raises important questions about the relative "capital" of a term that has been bandied about in the Western world within neo-colonial and peace-making endeavors. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if Castells' general conceit in Networks of Outrage and Hope is not only to unpack various case studies but also construct a more universal paradigm around the fruitful relationship between the Internet and the "real world" in terms of enacting change and advocating for social justice, it might behoove him and us if he used a more inclusive (and less Western?) term to denote all of this.

I don't mean to give Castells such a hard time, really, but I can't help but be at least a little prickly when I engage with writing that conveys liberatory ideas in such a prescriptive, totalizing manner. What I found as I was reading Networks of Outrage and Hope, is that Castells (like myself in this blog post) generally articulates many of these ideas in the passive voice. Which is to say that while he takes pains to deduce and arrive at his claims, these claims tend to take on a rather direct, colloquial, and implicit form that undermined the part of his project that sought to construct that universal paradigm. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

The networked social movements of our time are largely based on the Internet, a necessary though not sufficient component of their collective action. The digital social networks based on the Internet and on wireless platforms are decisive tools for mobilizing, for organizing, for deliberating, for coordinating and for deciding. Yet, the role of the Internet goes beyond instrumentality: it creates the conditions for a form of shared practice that allows a leaderless movement to survive, deliberate, coordinate and expand. It protects the movement against the repression of their liberated physical spaces by maintaining communication among the people within the movement and with society at large in the long march of social change that is required to overcome institutionalized domination (Juris 2008). (229)

Perhaps I might be in the minority of readers who are less inclined and comfortable embracing the liberatory potential of theory when it appears to become more and more invested in certainties and definition, but I hope (there's that word again) that my views and critiques are taken with a grain of salt. My goal in this blog post was not to tear Castells down and/or undermine his overall project in the book. Rather, I have merely sought to avoid taking theory as axiomatic or inherently true, to push back against those components that seem to depart from the author's lofty project, and to meditate upon the sorts of terms that might be used to promote more inclusion and differentiated representation within and outside of universal applications.

Rage Against the Machine - "Testify"