Rereading the Fringe as a Point of Invention

Reading Zeros and Ones as a kind of multi-faceted feminist biography is perhaps more entertaining than theoretically engaging. I understand the main points (the back cover calls them “polemical”) that Sadie Plant is trying to make: A) Women were and still remain oppressed by the misogynistic regime of male enterprise. B) Although this has and will remain a problem for at least a very short time period (she sites work statistics that indicate women will soon hold more significant positions of economic power), women still continue to make important contributions at what initially might appear to be the fringe of development, but later must be understood and read as the point of invention.

It seems that Plant’s main point, following on the second issue addressed above, is that the very marginalization that denied women many positions (employment, social, and otherwise) actually put them in an important place; the fringe. Here, Plant is trying to reinvent or at least reclassify what the fringe means. In order to rewrite the narrative of feminine participation – to demonstrate that women actually gave impetus to the digital culture that we still see evolving – Plant has to turn to the fringe as it is classically interpreted (outside, detached, etc.) into what one might call the point of invention. For such prominent figures as Ada Lovelace, it was the act of being pushed aside, that potentially contributed to her development of technological precursors to automated computing. As Plant puts it, quoting others, “[Women] have functioned as, ‘an infrastructure unrecognized as such by our society and our culture.’” Though man appears to have been at the center of certain developments, women were the actual “infrastructure”:

 Man once made himself the point of everything. He organized, she operated. He ruled, she served. He made the great discoveries, she busied herself in the footnotes. He wrote the books, she copied them. She was his helpmate and assistant, working in support of him, according to his plans. She did the jobs he considered mundane, often fiddling, detailed, repetitive operations with which he couldn’t be bothered; the dirty, mindless, semiautomatic tasks to which he thought himself superior.”

Though I think it is pretty clear where Plant is headed with this analysis, I’ll quote a little further:

“women have not merely had a minor part to play in the emergence of the digital machines. When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on…Hardware, software, wetware–before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines” (Plant 37)

The dramatic shift that one encounters in Plant’s text is a rather simplistic and temporary inversion of hierarchy. Plant’s polemical point is simply that though women have been fucked around for as long as the human species has been in existence, it seems that this might have given impetus to the development of contemporary computing (digital and otherwise) that we encounter today. Plant even makes mention of the increasing marginalization of men in certain economic and cultural circles. This doesn’t mean, though, that we should read digital/techno-culture as being wholly advantageous to women. In fact, I’m pretty sure that this will be the point that Plant addresses in the next section entitled “culture.”

If something can be grasped from this point though, it might be the part about rereading the point of disadvantage (the fringe) as one of invention. More appropriately, one would have to understand this as both the point of disadvantage and the point of invention. Here, I’d be interested in discussing the networks of operators that have been set up to play games like Second Life. Though now a quite a familiar story, I’d like to try and trace something similar to that which Plant is trying to accomplish though outside the lines of femininity. This is not to counteract her work, but rather, to comprehend the group at the fringe (something like the employees of Double Happiness) as being much larger and much more complex. I feel like understanding this group and its contributions might be important to a more complicated reading of digital and techno-culture.

By Popular Demand – Reading List Updated

Alright, the consensus is that we need to push the Baudrillard deadline for The Ecstasy of Communication back a week.  Instead of removing one of the many planned texts, we will just push the whole reading schedule back an additional week. As a result, the Sadie Plant text will officially kick off next Monday the 29th. All necessary changes have been made to the tenative schedule provided as part of the side bar to the right. Those that have already started the next text feel free to ignore the posting deadlines.

Shortly…

Just a reminder that this week we are picking up Sadie Plant’s Zeros + Ones:

Exclusivity and Authenticity: Problematizing Nostalgic Scholarship

What follows is likely just a short-sighted beginning to a larger and more succinct analysis of Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication.  Though I’ve only had the opportunity to read the first two sections of this text thus far, I thought that we might get this big ball of wax rolling.  If anything, perhaps some of the ideas that follow will provide an opportunity for us to begin a more important conversational thread.

Perhaps, the best place to start this reading is with Baudrillard’s attempt to grapple with the ways that technology seems to mitigate one’s public/private and social/intimate experiences.  Here, Baudrillard falls, almost categorically, into rank with mainstream discourse on the dis-virtue of the form that our techno-interaction takes.  In Baudrillard’s terms, not unfamiliar to the terms that guide most every critic’s unabashed criticism of television, the moving image specter that haunts the household disconnects the individual from his/her “original universe.” Though such an assessment is frustrating on the very grounds that it is based (one might remember Steven Johnson’s popularly unpopular reading of reality television), I’m more irritated by Baudrillard’s attempts, syntactically, to dress this argument up in intellectual garb: The viewer is no longer separated from his/her peers, but orbiting as a “satellite” to the everyday. He is at, “an infinite distance from his original universe.”  

Though the only thing more redundant than Baudrillard’s assessment is the rather obvious finger I’m wagging at it, his analysis warrants this for at least one very important reason.  Although Baudrillard’s critique of television centers largely on the ways in which the medium denies spectacle, public space, and otherness, it also touches as much on the issue of exclusivity.  Here, two important and slightly discordant threads operate in the beginning pages of this text: The first current or thread addresses the dramatic losses that we experience with the emergence and proliferation of television – we lose public interaction, the public space or forum (perhaps even performance or gesture) and, most importantly, our sense of something other than ourselves.  As Baudrillard argues, we lose our sense of what it means (or at least meant) to be human.  Or, more aptly put, we lose our sense of what it means to be humans.  Though this is the thematic concern that underpins the initial segment of his argument there is much to be gained from a better understanding of the second thread and concern of this text; Baudrillard’s fascination with alienation and exclusivity.  Though it is, perhaps, too much to say that the two threads are somewhat oppositional, as it seems that one almost logically follows the other, I think the friction these ideas produce creates an interesting opportunity for critique.  Here, though, I need to expound on the latter of these two currents.

Ultimately, the value that is lost to the medium is exclusivity.  What Baudrillard seems most concerned with is not really even the type of interaction that occurred in the public space (i.e. plays, festivals, carnivals), but what one might refer to as ownership over experience.  For Baudrillard the problem is that we have lost the exclusivity of the event; that a new obscenity seems to have manifest:

We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, of functions and objects in their legibility, availability, regulation, forced signification, capacity to perform, connection, polyvalence, their free expression (22)

Not to rely on too ridiculous a word play but television, in Baudrillard’s terms, puts out way too much. More than anything, Baudrillard wants that “sensual feeling” back.  Here, Baudrillard is entirely hell bent on contrasting the intimacy of the monogamous sexual moment (the public performance) with the orgy of information that is televisual interaction…All jokes aside though, this type of scholarship has rather unfortunate implications for a greater discourse on technological accessibility.  Baudrillard puts too much emphasis on the truly original or authentic moment and, seemingly, ignores the potential ramifications of such an assessment. 

Jumping ahead a bit, it might be fruitful to consider the ways in which the internet diverges from the model Baudrillard established concerning television; the ways in which the internet seems, at a very base level, to have reconstituted the type of spectacle that Baudrillard claims that we lost to earlier forms of technological interaction. There is something much more exclusive about the type of digital interaction that we encounter on a daily basis.  Though, as this analysis evidences, I’m pretty frustrated with Baudrillard’s call for a certain type of aesthetic and performative exclusivity, I’d still be interested in a more detailed comparison of the way this exclusivity operates in the digital space as opposed to the physical space.  I’m a little short on time but I’ll post more later.

Book One: June 8 – 22

This is just a quick reminder that we’ll be moving ahead with Jean Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication beginning this week Monday and ending sometime around the twenty-second of June. If you haven’t picked up the text yet, remember that you still have a substantial length of time considering that we devoted two weeks to the first text. Of course, contributors can log-in and post whenever they choose.

Updating the List

Well after some preliminary discussion, it seems that we can form a tenative reading list. Noting the shared interest in Baudrillard I’m thinking that we can use his work as one of the head-lining acts this summer. This would give us the opportunity to really digest Baudrillard’s extended ouevre. I’m not sure which text everyone wants to start with, but going somewhat chronologically I thought it might look something like this. Keep in mind, that we would start reading sometime in the middle of June as this will give everyone enough time to purchase and/or borrow each text:

June 8-22: Baudrillard (The Ecstasy of Communication) – This will allow everyone at least two weeks to pick up the first of the texts and give them time to spend a little more time with this work.

June 22-29: Sadie Plant (Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture) – I’m taking Jane’s suggestion with the author here. I’m not particularly familiar with Plant’s work and I’m not sure how this will link up with Baudrillard’s text but we can give it a try. If someone wants to suggest a different text by this author or a different author, speak up.

June 29-July 13: Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil) – As you will notice, I’ve given two weeks to this text expecting that this might be a point for us to make some observations cocerning any parallels between these three texts.

July 13-20: Philip K. Dick (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) – I think we should throw in some science fiction. In many ways, Dick preemptively diagramed digital interaction.

July 20-27: I think we should go with another science fiction text. I’d be down to read Dick again – something like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – or whatever someone else might find interesting.

July 27-Aug 10: Baudrillard or Virillio – Here we could return to the common thread that seems to be running through this reading group. Again, I’ve given two weeks for reflection. This would provide us the opportunity to post multiple times about the congruencies between the texts we’ve read.

Even though I’m interested in continuing for a longer period of time, I’ll stop here. The only text that should be considered somewhat set in stone is the first Baudrillard text listed above, as it is crucial that we have something firm to begin with. With the rest, I’m totally open to dramatic changes in author, title, and dates. I’m hoping that you will all comment on this soon so that we can get rolling.

Gone Fishin’

Sorry I haven’t been active on our blog, yet. I’ve been bogged down with teaching and I’m at a film/music festival in Austin right now (Female Ejaculation, whu!). I really want to do this and I will be able to contribute more once I get back. But Baudrillard is a big one for me, and then of course Virillio. But I suppose Virillio is not so much about INTERACTION. I haven’t really read any of the “basics” like Sandy Stone, Sadie Plant, etc. I’d also like to read about mobile communication. More/better later.

some suggestions

Well, I guess I’ll kick this whole thing off: Considering the nature of this reading group I thought it would be appropriate to work with the more general thematic of digital interaction. Though I know this is rather vague,  my research turned up a few points of departure and, more importantly, a few points of connection. This is to say, that I’m particularly invested in what certain textual combinations might produce. In any event, here are a few ideas to get us started:

Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism) and The Ecstasy of Communication

I’m not really that familiar with Baudrillard’s work but I’m particularly interested in what these two texts might have to offer to a more serious discussion of digital communication and to our collective understanding of what that entails.

Michael Heim – The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality

This text really seems like a shot in the dark but it might be worth considering.

Philip K. Dick – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Ubik

I think that Dick’s work would provide a nice counterpoint to some of the more serious philosophical or theoretical investigations that we might encounter. Though I’ve already read both Three Stigmata and DADES I would be up for going through both again. Plus, if I’m not mistaken, there are a few series out there that include all three of these texts. This would likely save us some financial burden.

Though this is barely a start I’m sure that, with the rest of your suggestions/lists, we could come up with a pretty substantial reading schedule. Hopefully that list will include some graphic novels as well as some free online texts.

DR

Introducing…

The Criminal Rabbit Reading Group is a collective of students interested in pursuing collaborative online scholarship. Though the group’s founding members are mostly graduate students in the English department at Wayne State University, anyone with a serious interest in the matter discussed here is welcome to participate.

For now, the main objective of this group is to develop a suitable reading list. With this in mind, the next few posts should include proposals as to the nature of this list.