Candace's E-learning and Digital Cultures site

I haven’t had a good look at the content in this journal, but I like the fact that it exists–and that it’s both interdisciplinary and crosses academic/practitioner boundaries (terribly post-human…expect that it’s a traditional journal…). Here’s what they cover:
‘…all aspects of ambient intelligence and humanized computing, such as intelligent/smart objects, environments/spaces, and systems…various technical, safety, personal, social, physical, political, artistic and economic issue…’

This brief interview (apparently procured by a journalist pursuing Daniel Dennett out of the lecture theatre and down the road to his lunch appointment, and only taking the hint when the starter arrived) touches on a couple things we’ve been discussing.

One is memes, which Dennett seems to be suggesting rely on a social hierarchy to be passed from the top on down. (I guess for modern times he’s thinking of marketing/advertising, curriculum, political parties, religions here as well as more microcosmic social hierarchies like a workplace or club…I wonder if things like wikipedia would have an effect on this or not…or does wikipedia hold a certain position in the hierarchy of crowdsourced information repositories…?) But he does also point to a spectrum of memes, from ‘mistakes’ akin to genetic mutation (e.g. a malapropism becoming the standard word/phrase) to purposeful meme-creation (e.g. as far as I can tell, anything knowingly created and made public in any way). The crux here is just quickly quoted, but I think is quite important to post-humanism: ‘The mind is the effect, not the cause.’

This is expanded a bit more later in the interview, where Dennett criticises the ‘greedy reductionism’ that equates the brain with the mind, turning them both into unresponsible machines. This certainly echoes Hayle’s problematisation of separating thought from body, but from a slightly different angle. I would interpret this as saying mind, differentiated from brain, is that constantly fluctuating non-subject; the genes of the brain are mostly unchanging, but the memes, the food, the weather, the beauty and horror of the environment are all constantly working on the pliable mind.

And lastly, in a little throw-away bit (when the man clearly wanted his lunch), Dennett confessed to Short Circuit being his favourite AI movie. Why? Because we can’t help but anthropomorphise the robot.

I think I can best summarise my scattered thoughts over the past week with a quote from my undergrad Anthropology professor: ‘Invention is the mother of necessity’.

He was speaking in terms of biological evolution, but this concept quite nicely hints at a nexus joining those much maligned categorisations of the real, the ideal and the virtual.

To start with, the ‘natural’ state of humans is problematised biologically: evolution is all about adaptation to the outside world, regardless of whether is was created by ourselves or not, or whether we want to adapt or not. Moreover, it is driven by anomalies: ‘informational’ mistakes–accidental inventions–that eventually came to be necessary to survival, and necessary to be called human (and not neanderthal, etc.).

From this point of view, the ‘cyborg’ is as unremarkable as a grey moth in Birmingham. The invention process just added another step–there was the accident of a gene that made us capable of considering using animal skin to keep us warm; we just had to enact it. Ditto building shelters, fire, weapons, vehicles, farms, radios, Facebook (more or less). It’s just the complexity of the current invention system that tricks us into thinking that our latest adaptations are ‘unnatural’ or ‘abnormal’.

And the complexity can also be understood in ‘natural’ terms. Dawkin’s ‘meme’ seems to have had a cultural resurgence in helping to define social media phenomena, and is a pithy way of thinking about evolution in post-human terms as the adaptation of a complex [of anything] to inventions external to it (if anything is really external in this sense) and of its own making. Crucially, this is a completely dynamic complex; it doesn’t stop evolving, moving, changing.

I’m arguing here as if ‘post-human’ is a description of how things ‘really’ are, and we’re only just realising it now. I don’t think that’s quite right. First, I’m using the ‘nature’ argument mostly as a challenge to the mystification of the cyborg–not necessarily to say ‘whatever is, is right’. But I’m also aware that a self-satisfied ‘we’ve finally got it all figured out now’ is precisely what post-humanism is not. So I’ll just leave post-humanism as a potentially useful way to perceive…stuff…

I certainly found Hayles more comprehensible than Haraway (which brought me much pleasure in itself…). I ‘ve just highlighted a few points that struck me:

• The concept of information as disembodied. I’d never thought about this before, particularly to the extreme that Shannon suggested. I think if someone had presented me with this view outside of this context, there’s a 50-50 chance I would have completely accepted it (either in a simplistic way, because info isn’t tactile, or in a semantic way, because it’s only interpretation that makes the various 1s and 0s that form an Excel spreadsheet, for example, ‘informative’–which seems relevant to McKay’s argument); I could have rejected it just as easily on the grounds that Hayles discusses, or because I don’t know enough about neuroscience or computers to decide for myself whether ideas or data files are material or not…! And I think my ambiguity betrays a pervasive cultural attitude about information, whether it’s a both/and idea (sometimes information is material, sometimes it’s not), a typology (this type of information is material, that type is not) or, again, a semantic riddle (e.g. is it only ‘information’ when it is material, but something else when it’s not?).
• The body as incidental to consciousness. This is of course connected to the first point, but is interesting as a possible link between humanism and posthumanism (p. 4); is Hayles implying toward the end that this is a skeuomorph–a strangely significant leftover from an older philosophy? It doesn’t seem to me that this disembodiment factors into Haraway’s cyborg or Pickering’s posthuman…rather the reverse…
• The experience of an information/material duality is a culturally limited phenomenon. Hayles points this out clearly, and I think we could take it further to say that much information is only information (I know I’m playing the ‘meaning’ card again, but it seems to keep resurfacing) if it can be translated materially. Impoverished people could be given access to the world’s data on disease cures, agricultural techniques, manufacturing processes…insider stock market tips, my PIN and internet banking password, the PM’s private email address…but without the material objects to make use of this information, or to offer it to people who can, it really is just a collection of blots of ink, 0s and 1s, vibrations of air molecules.
• But what does all this have to do with education? After blagging my way through an explanation of what I’d been reading this past week, I was confronted by this question. The answer that I pulled agilely out of the hat was that it gives pause to our usual ways of perceiving the entire learning process. To be fair, this goes back to IDEL discussions, and the example of Aristotle’s concern that writing things down spelled (so to speak) the end of good education. But what I pulled from Haraway, Hayles and Pickering was that not only does the typical education process artificially separate fields of study which are really all intertwined, but it presupposes that both these subjects and the students themselves are (as far as learning is concerned) disembodied–Platonic forms of information that can be exchanged and compared, decontextualised, to each other. Examples could range from a spelling test to an economics seminar discussion on stock market fluctuations. In the first case, the actual knowledge being tested is decontextualised, but a part of the cyborg (the dictionary or spell checker) has also been amputated. In the second case, the seminar leader may expect the students to look at socio-cultural factors, the psychology of traders, the history of market economies, etc.–but only in a distilled form in line with the learning outcomes of the course…and, in a live seminar situation, all from the students’ own heads. The simpler version of this is nothing new: would you rather have a doctor who was good at cramming for an exam, or who knew where to look for the latest information?

Steph’s post on papal intrigue made me think (in a rhizomic way, of course) about this site, a virtual church. This seems to highlight the porous relationships among the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional, and between humans and digital creations, especially as traditional physical religious spaces are meant to point (in some way) to something non-tangible…

On another tangent, this is linked to the Ship of Fools site, which perhaps suggests the pastoral idea of the church as community more than a pixeled nave…although perhaps loses something in the architecture of a discussion board?

This seemed appropriate for a discussion of where a person ends and technology begins–fits quite well with Pickering’s temporal emergence. And it adds a new dimension to speech act theory

Also, if it had been real, what would my reposting do…?

These are my notes and reflections about the Haraway chapter, in no particular order or rationalisation…

For the first few pages I felt like I was reading James Joyce (and much amused by a later reference to the same). I’m not sure if the style changed or I just got used to it, but I think it also had something to do with my pretty much complete lack of knowledge about feminist theory/history/tropes. I didn’t feel like I was a member of the community Haraway was addressing (online or off!).

Maybe this is why one of the points under ‘State’ struck me: ‘invisibility of different social groups to each other’ (p.50). I felt that the ‘book audience’ was a social group that was invisible to me; not that I would not be interested in the same things they were, or that I might disagree with them politically or socially, but that I didn’t have the assets that I would have needed to be a member. And I think this is closely related to Haraway’s problematisation of ‘unity’. As identity is neither one-dimensional nor static, uniting a group based on a single, unchanging identifier is (at least) unsatisfactory. Her mention of affinity groups (p.38), then, struck a chord as far as our conversations over the last couple weeks about what defines community and whether and how much identity is involved… Obviously I didn’t have the right ‘affinities’.

But Haraway seems to struggle with this a bit, which is perhaps why I noticed it more. For example, from my uninitiated perspective, I felt that ‘developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with anti-military science facility conversion action groups’ or the ‘welding’ of ‘personal preferences and cultural tendencies’ onto politics (for middle-class professionals) (p. 49) was unification on the assumption that ‘if you have affinity A, then you’ll probably have affinities B and C’). This didn’t seem to fit in with the heterogeneous cyborg at all. There’s a high likelihood that I’m missing the point, but I’m concerned that it might be more difficult to sustain messy plurality than Haraway sometimes intimates. Haraway certainly doesn’t try to hide her potential subjectivism, but it is interesting to see it creep in unexpectedly, as when she generalises from specifically American issues.

I found the insistence on questioning the existence of an objective ‘organic or natural standpoint’ (p.39) especially applicable to conversations around online/offline duality. I was wondering if this relates to survival. Several times Haraway makes it clear that the aim of the cyborg is survival (p. 49, 53, 54) but I’m not sure if this is meant to be the aim so much as the explanation of a process of natural selection by which the people who are the best at being cyborgs are more likely to survive…? Or if it’s meant to be conscious survival, it does seem to suggest a curious Machiavellianism. Or is it the survival of an evolving kind of cyborg feminism? Or something else?