The world is becoming non-western

“The world is becoming global, nonwestern, at an incredible rate.” Geert Lovink announced this at UC Irvine in Feb 2009, at the Critical Theory Emphasis (CTE) Winter Mini-Seminar. Yo, somebody tell the guy the world has been non-western, largely so, for a a very long time. But there’s Ethan Zuckerman in Africa, “he’s trying to help empower people to speak in their own languages.” These are just random quotes, but they seem no less bizarre out of context than they were in the context of this lecture. In its general form, however, it was all too familiar : several slides with statistics and maps of internet usage, predicting its worlwide expansion and calling for radically new theory to address this new object. As a graduate student pointed out, it was all delivered in corporate speak, using the language of commodities and markets.

Question on Property

This is a question for Kavita, following our discussions of distributed ontology.

I’m wounder if property is a candidate for rethinking via distributed ontology. If property is understood a a relation, rather than a thing with a status, might we then think of the question of ontology — becoming– as located in the relations (which are multiply moded, yes, but also uneven spatially dispersed and extensive, as well as sedimented via multiple genealogies and ways of mobilizing time) ?  Does McPherson help here?

Distributed Ontology II

Kavita’s comments about my previous attempt to grasp at “distributed ontology” has pushed me to try again. I’m finding what I want to say quite elusive, so I’ll try starting with some things I don’t think I want to mean by the term:

Distributed ontology is NOT simply multiple things at once (I think this is a general feature of ontology — that becoming is by necessity a bit of a mess). I very much like the way Kavita brought up “Hauntology” –that existence is haunted by other overlapping modes of becoming. And while this goes some way, I still think I want to think/say/apprehend something else besides this grappling overlapping becoming that converges to constituted a haunted materialization of being.

distributed ontology is NOT simple entanglement. It is not just that things are connected, meaningfully or arbitrarily (like a wikipedia entry).

Okay, so, now for an attempt at something more productive. I want is to think of becoming as distributive among multiple political economies/modes. Not as the effect of those converging modes, but as extending into, or maybe as extensive in, as a filigree presence in political economies. Unlike my above two NOTs (that becoming is multiple, haunted, grappling, entangled) that could be claimed for just about any object or entity, I’m interested in the idea of distributed ontology because I am also interested in taking as my “objects of inquiry” processes (not objects, in fact) that are materialized as extensive — reproduction and production.

Production is not locatable in any singular site in space, but instead is only brought into being in the accummulated and dispersed instances of enactment over time. Production, in this sense, has a distributed ontology, it is not cohered as a circumscribable thing with boundaries traceable in space and limited time. If production has a distributed ontology, then certain questions become politicizable — where is it? at what scales? what is brought into imminence? (as in subsumption), and so on). Entanglements in a distributed ontology become vectors of subsumption, where practices, places, objects, technologies, forms of life, even assemblages become not just connected, but ewterritorialized (even if incompletely and partially) as part of production. In this way, distributed ontology is part of the logic of capital (though not only).

Likewise, I want to resist the contemporary impulse — profoundly shaped by liberal investments– to site reproduction in bodies, or even in species, as a biological capacity open to technical alteration. Instead, since there is a larger genealogy of reproduction that goes back to the 18th century which is about ongoing processes of bringing what is outside in, as well as generating continutities, and since later in the 19th century reproduction becomes a conjuration of difference (a living difference engine of life), then what is poliitcally at stake in:

a) the relegation of reproduction to bodies

b) the relegation of reproduction to living-being, sans capital and political economy

c) tracking a distributed ontology of repro in which sex’s becoming is imminent in uneven distributed, discrepent political economies?

I think that distributed ontology of repro might be a way of naming some of the complex and interconnecting generative capacities of life that does not fall into the romanticism of some of the new vitalism scholarship, but still shares partially in a certain impetus to not be satisfied with relegating ontology to coherently demarcated thingness.

A metaphor might help here– any suggestions?

In our docks now

Well, now that visa problems prevent euro travel this summer, i might as well turn my mind to what’s in my dock, what’s moving across my desk, what’s in the hopper, and what need concentrated work. Summer’s a time when we must turn ourselves more than ever to productivity concerns, hmm?

It would be nice to see what you’re processing too. In that sense this space could do some of the more traditional bloggy thing, that is, frame and bring attention to the products of our labor. [ We both tend to enjoy focusing on the processes of our co-ponderings, so we rarely mention our actual output here! ] Or, as Chris K. suggested, think about linking to actual products, ours or others.

I like our focus on process, and ideas, so this isn’t a suggestion for radical redirecting, really. Just thinking aloud about stuff, so ok, here’s an attempt to link it:

Tactical Biopolitics is out, the end product of a couple years’ work. It was a fun project to work on, but perhaps because it draws in so much of the interdisciplinary frames we’ve been working in and around and on, as it neared completion, I could only think of the people who could’ve also been a part of it, like Michelle’s writing-in-progress about foucauldian/deleuzian takes on the body, population, health and the state, and Adele Clark’s important work on feminist health politics.

Also out earlier this year was a short piece in CNS which drew some quick links between feminist media arts (such as work by Beatriz and Natalie), feminist environmentalist photography (work by Connie), and traditional red/green concerns of justice and environments.

Postcolonial Computing: About ready for submission is a piece mainly authored by Paul Dourish and his grad student Lilly Irani, in which I had input over the past 6 months (some of my bleariness many mornings last January / Feb was because of this project). The piece is addressed to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, and works basically as a critique of some popular, essentializing modes of analyzing culture and computation. It deploys postcolonial studies and STS as a way of redirecting attention to transnational histories and co-constitutive technological dynamics.

Also in the background is a joint project with CS professor Susan Sim and her graduate student Marisa. (Note: Lilly and Marisa, both graduate students in Informatics, are excellent writers. It’s been so interesting to see my computational colleagues train their grad students to become like colleagues by their 2nd or 3rd years; this happens so much later in the humanities, and of course collaborative writing rarely happens in the humanities, especially with grad students. I wonder about that a lot.) Anyway, we’re all 3 currently interested in particular dynamics of software – the politics of code, the practices of sharing, the distributional political economies of piracy, etc. This paper in progress is on Code.

Feminist Environmentalisms in South Asian History is a piece in progress with Shubhra, dogged by the vagaries of our lives, travel, competing interests, and so on. The topic of the piece and the fact of feminist transnational/ immigrant lives seem to really bring things together in ways that are both exciting for thinking with, and frustrating for scheduling! This is a really fun piece but I fear it has been back-burnered for years now and continues to be.

Proper Knowledge is the reason most other things are being back-burnered. It is way too full of different ideas, needs to be tamed and packaged so people other than me can stand to read it.

Flows in the Victorian Economy

In the context of our June 5 08 discussion about the specific nature of the connections between reproduction, generation, and political economies of the late 20th C, I recalled Shuttleworth’s attempt to do something similar with female bodies and the 19th C. so I thought I’d post some quotes from Sally Shuttleworth’s essay Uterine economy  (in the book edited by Mary Jacobus, Shuttleworth, and E Fox Keller)
p 52-3
The social effectiveness of Victorian gender ideology derived to a large degree from the lack of apparent novelty in the formulations. Women were not for the first time being associated with the forces of the body; nor were they thereby being cast forth from their other ideological role of spiritualizing and civilizing force. .. Woman, … though rarely identified with mind, can emerge on either side of the nature/culture divide, depending on the specific historical and social context of the argument. With changing economic and social formations, different aspects of these polarities are mobilized, often in seemingly contradictory conjunctions, their articulation both containing and contributing to wider social tensions and conflicts. … The introduction by Linnaeus of a sexual system of plant classification in the 18th century was indicative of a whole shift to a taxonomy of gender that was to emerge in the biological and social sciences in the nineteenth century.

53-4 Until recently, feminist criticism has tended to argue tha the Victorian ideologyof femal domesticity was deisgned to suppress and control the treat of female sexuality … Although many factors are once again in play (including the displacement of class antagonisms into gender terms), I would suggest that one strong impetus behind Victorian ideologies of womanhood springs not from the need to control women, rather from the problems involved in assimilating men to the new conditions of the labor market.
P 54 .. By the early-Victorian period gender demarcations in social and medical texts were mobilized within forms that responded directly to the contradictory formulations of laissez-faire economics.

desire, value, consumption– Curtis’s Century of the Self

Adam Curtis’s four part documentary Century of the Self manages to brilliantly capture some of the involutions between notions of creativity, emotional expresson, marketing, public realtions, and new modes of flexible capital. The third installment, like Kavita’s discussion in earlier post, makes the argument that counter-conduct in the 1960s and 70s  became constituent features of emerging capital formations. The turn to  value and express emotion, to reject conformist mass capital and instead to become “acutalized” individuals was then captured in new “lifestyles and values” marketing techniques that identified ‘value” and consumption patterns to lifestyles that could then constitute new markets. Instead of old mid-century worries that consumption would dry up when needs were fulfilled, individualized expressivities were continuously generative of modified desires for products to fulfill. Commodities not only produced economic value, but were the infrastructure of individualized “values.”

The “lifestyles and values” approach came in the late 1970s, using computer processed questionaires at SRI in Stanford– most famous for its military research. SRI in fact moved off campus in the 1960s as a reaction to anti-war protests.

By early 80s, Reagan and Thatcher manage to then capture this sense of individualized commodified expression as an anti-government, pro-capital valuation.

By the 1990s, “the left” — read Blair and Clintons — use the same marketing techniques to reformulate the terms of “left” party politics.

I can’t praise this documentary enough. It is utterly fascinating and manages to get at the involutions of desire, commodity, capital, individuation, science, politics, marketing, and affective labor we’re wrestling with on Red Technopolitics.

you can catch it streaming at Internet Archive

Diamond Mines and Appropriated Feminism

Here’s a new disturbing twist on reproduction/Production and the entanglements of feminisms in global capital. The International Women’s Health Coalition, the New York based transnational feminist NGO that was so influential in reappropriating international policy language towards feminist projects of “reproductive health and “reproductive rights” have themselves become entangled with diamond mining in South Africa, particularly De Beers Group and Anglo American.

How to make sense of this conjuncture of necropolitical accumulation of diamonds and feminist biopolitics?

Counterculture/Cyberculture

“From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism” is a nice book by Fred Turner (U of Chicago Press, 2006). It parallels the story of ’70s feminists and neoliberalism that Murphy tells. The 1960s hippie scene and its embrace of visions of wholeness, interconnection (-systems theory), social connections (-networks), and transcendence (-God’s-eye view) did not just accidentally grow into the Bay Area computation scene. Turner tracks key players like Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others, and tells the story of how the network culture of the Whole Earth Catalogue morphed into the network culture of computer programmers and corporate futurism. For example, here’s Turner’s comment on Kelly in the late 1980s: “…. like LSD, computers seemed to make it possible to envirion life itself as a whole. If the New Communalists had sensed that they were “all one,” the computers of the Artificial Life Conference seemed to prove the point: The natural world and the social world really were all one system of information exchange. That vision of singularity in turn allowed Kelly to link his religious yearnings to the particular form of sociability common to both the cold war research world and the New Communalist wing of the counterculture: collaborative networks.”

This sounds a lot like the genealogies of the term “group” and other countercultural/neoliberal imbrications.

Also, the metaphysics of nature that pervaded eco-hippie talk is transformed into the metaphysics of the machine. It’s good to have a philosophical hunch confirmed by rigorous historical research! I’ve been performing analytical pretzel-moves to argue something like this to tie together my chapters on nature and technology. I’ve been teaching the feminist critique of “uploading consciousness to the net” and the historical connection between Mondo 2000 and Wired. But until now I didn’t have the specific historical steps that connected the 1960s eco-commune-CA-phenomenon to the 1990s network society, again CA-style. Here’s another quote from Turner:

[so, the HArvard Business Review picks up Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, seeing tihs as the ultimate goal of the new economy - competition plus democratic individual satisfaction.

” In the pages of Out of Control, the Long Hunter of the Whole Earth Catalog had become an entrepreneur … Almost 30 yrs earlier, thousands of young, highly educated Americans had tromped off into the wilderness seeking to build an egalitarian, fun-loving world. Today, suggested Kelly, they should look to technology and teh economy for satisfaction.

They should do so, he argued, because the world itself was an information system. In his view, to manipulate computers and to work with information was not simply to hold down a job; it was to gain access to a hidden world ,,, Kelly’s vision echoed the New Communalists’ celebration of consciousness. It also resuscitated the commune-dwellers’ disregard for the demands of the material world. … Throughout his book, Kelly underplayed the work of embodied labor, celebrated intellect and the collaborative styles associated with intellectual institutions, and so offered a model of a world inhabited exclusively by freelancing elites. In the early 1990s, as in teh late 1960s, that turn away from teh material world helped legitimate teh authority of those who controlled information and information systems by rendering invisible those who did not.” (p 204)

Micro-credit– signs of accumulation by dispossession

The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh opened up an American branch in Jackson Heights, New York.  Here’s the agencies blog: Grameen America – Blog.

This is surely a symptom of at least two things:

First, the continued, and perhaps even intensified, traffic in the articulation of neoliberal economic practices and epistemologies  between the U.S. and South Asia.    While the figuration of the Indian– U.S.  IT economy is one gradient, surely the arrival of Bangladesh microcredit in New York City is symptom of another figuration worth attending to.

Second, the extent of dispossession currently unfolding in the U.S.  in the wake of subprime mortgage crisis, the U.S. figuration of the credit card maxed indebted subject-citizen, and the financial appropriation of  State funds and intergenerational debt financing for the Iraq war.

What will be interesting to see is how the “16 decisions,”  a set of rules that guide the comportment of borrowers, is reworked.

Commons & Pirates

Peter Linebaugh (who co-authored Many-headed Hydra with Marcus Rediker) has a new book out, which reads the Magna Carta and the Forest Charter together as manifestos/ procedural mechanisms of the commons. I read one chapter (published as an essay in CNS Dec 07) which draws primarily on the work of south asian historians of forestry. First off, how weird that one of my favorite pirate-historians (and a student of E P Thompson, trained as a Europeanist) should write a chapter of a book on commons ( my current obsession) drawing from the obscure forest-historiography circuit I spent a decade in, and which I thought I had to (reluctantly) leave behind as I engaged with the twenty first century. Well actually it’s not really weird, as much as fabulous. I am excited largely because the connections I’ve been trying to make in my head (forests, nineteenth century british colonial admin, early modern science and economics, marx, material conditions, and social reproduction, commons experimental communities, the narrowing of commons under neoliberalism, the pre-figuring of this under 17th century liberalism, subjectivation under conditions of  coercion/ colonialism as well as resistance/ freedom, the lessig-type creative commons, etc etc) seem to come together in this book. I’ve only seen one chapter so far, so perhaps it is not so much the structure of the book as the fact that these themes are out in the public and it seems feasible to put them together. Some people are dismayed when their “thesis” seems “scooped” by others but I see it as a sign that there is something in the world, historically and in a lived sense, that people are picking up on (and today I am thrilled that it is a favorite historian, as opposed to a slick stanford law prof, but hey, i am happy about lessig’s work too; just amused by his a-historicity). Anyway – this post is so bloggish that i really havent advanced an argument, have I? I shall have to post again when I have actually read the book.