A couple of weeks ago, my interest was piqued by an article boasting the intriguing headline: “‘Losing yourself’ in a fictional character can affect your real life.” Essentially, researchers at Ohio State University have evidence that suggests very strongly that people who become emotionally engaged with a character in a story are more likely to alter their behavior according to how that character behaves, even if only temporarily. This piqued my interest first and foremost as a writer of fiction because it reflected my own experience so directly: When considering the mannerisms, speech, attitude, and choices of a character, it’s not uncommon for me to find my own behavior changing slightly to reflect those considerations, especially if I’m really trying to get inside a character’s head.

But then the piece piqued my interest in an entirely different way: the headline — if not the study itself — seems to be operating on the assumption that there is a distinct difference between a reader’s experience of a character in a work of fiction and the reader’s embodied experience of their own lives; in other words, that there’s a qualitative difference between the world of the imagination and the “real world”. And I’m inclined to view this assumption as flat-out incorrect.

Furthermore, I think the reasons why this assumption is incorrect have some things to say regarding the problematic assumption of digital dualism.

In order to argue this point I need to dip into literary theory a bit; structuralist approaches to the study of stories are useful in this case because they allow for the deconstruction of the component parts of a story — which I think are relevant concepts when we consider self-narratives, where they come from and how they’re formed, and how that formation is affected by social media technologies.

For structural narrative theorists, the two most basic parts of a story are the story and the discourse, respectively understood as the content of the narrative itself — the plot, the characters, the events that unfold — and the way in which that content is communicated — its structure, its medium (film, TV, print, hypertext), and the tools used to bring it into being. The story is the what, while the discourse is the how.

This is at heart a very simple idea, and even a patently self-evident one, but it’s also a powerful one in that it allows one to conceive of what happens in a story and how that story is told separately but in a way that facilitates greater understanding of just how inseparable these two elements are. You don’t have an intelligible narrative apart from discourse; stories require telling. And how a story is told can have a dramatic effect on the content of the story itself.

But what does this have to do with technology and digital dualism? People here have already written extensively on how social media works to shape our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of the very world we inhabit — on how social media allows us to essentially “curate reality”, cultivating an environment in which we generally see what we want to see. In the structuralist narratalogical sense, we can understand social media and related technologies as the discourse through we tell stories — about ourselves, about others, about everything. If we recognize that the discourse of a story can shape the content of the story itself, then the idea of a “data self” — a self that is shaped through its augmentation by social media — is a deeply sensible one. Perhaps most importantly, again, one can’t separate the discourse from the story and still have something understandable; the two can be conceptualized separately but must be understood together. This is increasingly — and arguably always has been — true of humanity and technology.

Technologies of documentation and sharing are the discourse through which we tell our stories. From this perspective, the idea of a separate “offline” life that we should somehow privilege as more real, authentic, and meaningful than what happens online makes about as much sense as the content of a story divorced from the method of its telling.

I want to return to the article that initially sparked this line of thinking, because there’s one additional point that I think bears making. I would argue that one of the defining elements of social media technologies is the way in which they facilitate our natural inclination to construct narratives, most particularly about ourselves but about a myriad other things as well. Humans are storytelling creatures and always have been, but because of how the discourse of social media works — and the kind of narrative construction, collection, and constant documentation that it allows for — our understandings of ourselves and the world around us are increasingly story-laden. We don’t just view our present as always a potential documented past — we view it as a story to be told in a particular way, the content and discourse of which shapes our understanding of ourselves in the present and our imagination of ourselves in the future.

That last point is at the heart of why I think the article at the beginning of this piece was operating on a fundamentally incorrect assumption: that the world of our imaginations is somehow separate from and less authentic then our “real lives”. Our experiences of stories — our emotional investment in them, what we learn from them, why and how they change the ways in which we understand — always shape the other stories that we tell about ourselves and others. This isn’t new; it’s at the core of the persistence and power of myth.

If we want to understand how social media affects our selves, we would do well to conceive of it and the self as an integrated whole, story and discourse in a single narrative. And if we want to understand how and why narratives matter, I think we would do well to conceive of the world of the imagination and the world external to it in similar fashion.

This is the complete version of a previously posted two-part essay. Part one is here; part two is here.

Objects have lives. They are witness to things. –This American Life, “The House on Loon Lake”

Atlantic Cities’ feature on the psychology of “ruin porn” is worth a look–in part because it’s interesting in itself, in part because it features some wonderful images, and in part because it has a great deal to do with both a piece I posted previously on Michael Chrisman’s photograph of a year and with the essay that piece referenced, Nathan Jurgenson’s take on the phenomenon of faux-vintage photography.

All of these pieces are, to a greater or lesser extent, oriented around a singular idea: atemporality – that the intermeshing and interweaving of the physical and digital causes us not only to experience both of those categories differently, but to perceive time itself differently; that for most of us, time is no longer a linear experience (assuming it ever was). Technology changes our remembrance of the past, our experience of the present, and our imagination of the future by blurring the lines between the three categories, and introducing different forms of understanding and meaning-making to all three – We remember the future, imagine the present, and experience the past. The phenomenon of “ruin porn” is uniquely suited to call attention to our increasingly atemporal existence, and to outline some of the specific ways in which it manifests itself.

A quick primer: “Ruin porn” is a somewhat contested term for a category of photography that focuses on images of abandoned human constructions, often urban in setting. Factories, theaters, hospitals, schools – all in states of abandonment and decay. As I indicated, there has been a fair amount of heated debate around the term “ruin porn”, some of which I will deal with directly. First, however, I want to talk about the physical side of the creation of the images, before they implode with the digital and become images that we consume.

The Carcass of the Ruined Space

In order to capture these images, photographers must enter the spaces themselves – physical presence is necessary. If physical presence is necessary, then physical experience is unavoidable: Digital images of ruined and abandoned spaces therefore must be understood to have fundamentally physical roots. They are about bodies in space, even though the body – the photographer – is usually unseen in the produced image.

This seems self-evident, but it is significant in light of the fact that there is a deep connection between the photography of urban decay and the practice of urban exploration (though the two factions have also butted ideological heads). Photographers document these physical spaces because, in the moment of their experience, there is something remarkable about the spaces themselves. The physical experience of the space is not a by-product of capturing the image; it is often an end in itself. The photographers interviewed by The Atlantic speak about an experience of “realness”, of building a relationship with the past that they cannot through abstract means. This speaks strongly to Jurgenson’s discussions of authenticity in photography, but it’s also about more than that.

We can and should understand abandoned places as atemporal spaces in and of themselves – they are physical spaces in which the experience of linear time breaks down. Through the experience of the space, explorers and photographers (and blends of the two) break out of a conventional experience of the present and into a space where the artifacts of history feel at once fresh and new, and ancient and decayed. Imagination is key to the atemporal experience of these places: One can exist in an abandoned, ruined space and see shards of a dead past on which one can construct a live imagining – who were the people who lived and worked here? What were their lives like? What were their stories? What happened to them? What happened to them in these spaces?

Imagining along these lines explicitly carries one forward into the future; it’s at this point that the construction of the unruined past becomes the imagining of the ruined future. Ruins serve as a kind of spatial memento mori for people embedded in a culture marked by production and consumption (and prosumption) of the new and by the invisibility of the discarded: They are gentle reminders of our own transience. They lead us to questions just as the imagining of the past did: What will our contemporary structures look like in fifty years? In a hundred? Who will remember us? Who will stand in our abandoned spaces and wonder about us? We can imagine these things because they suggest an end without really being an ending – there is always, after all, someone else to look and wonder, comfortingly embodied in ourselves. As Will Viney writes in his essay on the “Ruins of the Future”:

The future ruin, then, is an incomplete end achieved by an incomplete transition between now and then. It might fill us with a “sense of ending”, to borrow a famous phrase from Frank Kermode, but it is not quite the end itself. The politically, theologically and philosophically rich gesture of projecting ruins, of prophesying the demise of a building, as well as the people and activities associated with it, depends upon an end that can be experienced, a sense of dénouement that is not absolutely terminal. This is not the apocalypse as such, but an end to be seen, to be retold and represented – it is a telling end.

In considering ruined spaces as atemporal, it’s also useful to consider Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia – spaces of fundamental otherness that exist outside what is conventionally known or knowable, that may contain profound conceptual conflicts, and that will often be both physical and mental in nature – both interior and external. In this sense, ruined places are temporal heterotopias,¹ containing complex interminglings of past, present, and future as well as of both objective existence (always assuming, for our purposes, that there is such a thing) and imagined constructions of how things were, are, and will be.

So where does technology enter the frame? At this point we should return to Jurgenson’s discussion of the faux-vintage photo. As he describes it, the act of capturing digital images and sharing them via social networks encourages us to “view our present as always a potential documented past.” This is a crucial feature of the experience of abandoned spaces by the photographers who enter them: They experience the spaces not only through their own perception but through the anticipated and actual mediation of the camera with which they document images of atemporal space. There is always another dimension – the image that will be captured, possibly altered, and shared, and the people who will view the image in a form mediated by their own technological devices. Photographers of urban decay are therefore not only imagining a potential ruined future, but a potential future viewer of the present image of a ruined past.

I want to emphasize the importance of physicality here–one of the crucial – if not the most crucial – ideas behind atemporality in the sense in which I use the word is the profound connection between our perception and understanding of time and our relationship with the enmeshed physical/digital world that our technology is increasingly helping to create. In short, we cannot discuss the digital in this case without first establishing why and how the physical matters.

But now I want to focus on that move from physical to digital, the point of entanglement where one shades into another and the relationship between the two becomes truly complex. I want to talk about the image itself, both in terms of its production and its consumption.

The Ghostly Construction of the Ruined Image

In the section above, I’ve discussed the actual experience of the ruined space that necessarily accompanies capturing its image. I emphasized the importance of the imagination in the atemporal nature of this experience–the construction of both an imagined past and an imagined future in light of the perception of the present. I have characterized these spaces as heterotopias – spaces outside the realm of the static, the linear, and the knowable. What I turn to now is the idea that there is a subtle but important difference between the physical experience of these spaces and the digitally-mediated experience of viewing their images.

First, there is the removal of aspects of the experience of time itself – even if the spaces are temporal heterotopias, one still experiences one’s own time within them: there is the process of finding and approaching the space, of entering it, of spending time inside it, and then of leaving it behind. If the important thing about the atemporality of ruined space is the construction of imagined pasts and futures, that construction may work quite differently when the spaces are experienced through immediate static images rather than gradual entry and exit. The nature of the space itself is changed when its image is all that is perceived.

Second, the image may or may not hold a close connection with the place itself. In her work on the philosophy of photography, Susan Sontag presented the act of photographing something as simultaneously the documenting of fact and the creation of fiction. There is a real space that is really photographed – but the photograph will never capture all of the space. It is the image that the photographer chooses to capture and share; it is an artifact of the photographer’s own perception of a space. Further, the image will frequently be altered in post-production.

The point is that by the time the image is shared, it may or may not bear much resemblance to space from which it was created. If we understand these spaces as time-laden as well as atemporal, then it makes sense to suppose that the aesthetics of the images of these spaces can shape the constructions of pasts, presents, and futures on the part of the people who view the images. Just as a photographer brings her own understandings and imaginings of ruined past and ruined future to the experience of a space, so the viewer of the photograph of a ruined space does not and cannot experience the image in isolation from her own internal narratives regarding what the past was, what the present is, and what the future may be.

Then there is the question of the context in which the image is viewed – and this is where we must turn to a discussion of the term “ruin porn” itself, and why it is at once both useful and problematic. It’s practically impossible to be in a ruined or abandoned space and have no idea at all of its context; the explorer or photographer sees the surroundings in which the space rests, sees where it is embedded in the larger structure of a city or a rural area, and can usually draw at least rough conclusions about what the space is, what it was, and what happened to it. Though the space is atemporal, it does have a history, and being inside the space gives one at least a chance of making a passing connection to that history simply by virtue of being there at all.

But a digital image viewed on a screen is inherently disconnected from that context, unless that information is presented with the image, or unless the viewer of the image cares enough to seek that context out – which, in a digital space, can mean an extremely diverse set of paths to an extremely diverse set of resources and media. And this has direct consequences for how the various imagined timeframes associated with the image are constructed. What do we know about a place from an image and about its past? How do we know it? What are we simply assuming or making up out of whole cloth? And how do these forms of knowledge and these assumptions shape our understanding of our presents and our imagining of our futures?

In an instant, we can see a constructed image of decay and ruin that leads us to further constructions of past, present, and future. And these constructions may be wildly diverse and wildly divergent depending on the perspective and knowledge of the viewer. Abi Sutherland of Making Light characterized these images as “like a story prompt, the visual equivalent of a Mad Lib gone melancholic, and the topic is our own lives.” What is atemporal on this end lies in the fabric of the stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves and how we weave those disparate stories together. And we can do this in the way we do this because of the digital nature of these images and because of the digital nature of so much of our accumulated knowledge, and of how we accumulate that knowledge. There is no single authoritative source in this accumulation. If we are poets and scribes, we are also digital magpies; we pick and gather and aggregate from everywhere. As Bruce Sterling notes in “Atemporality for the Creative Artist”, what we have now instead of a singular accepted narrative is a multiplicity of narratives drawn from a multiplicity of sources, expressed in a wild multiplicity of ways.

A story of my own: Not far from where I live in Maryland there’s a park that contains the ruins of a mill town that was mostly washed away in a flood in 1972. Not much of it remains, but one day I and my husband went exploring to see what we could still find. In the process of compiling the images we captured, we did a fair amount of research on the town itself, including digging up old photographs of the town as it was when it was inhabited and intact.

That process made me experience my memory of the town differently than I had when I was physically there. It also made me see our captured images of the town differently. Suddenly they were contextualized. It isn’t that the images made no sense before they were placed in context. It isn’t that images of ruin without historical context are senseless and meaningless. Far from it. But we must understand the sense that is made of them as potentially very different in that case. What we know shapes what we know. What we see shapes what we know. And what we know shapes a great deal of what we see and imagine.

It is in this sense that many people find both the term and the idea of “ruin porn” a problem. Many of the American-produced images that arguably fall under the category of “ruin porn” are artifacts of buildings, industries, and communities that have been casualties of modern American capitalism, and especially the process of deindustrialization that has occurred in many American urban centers, which has been devastating to minorities and the urban poor. Many of these images have come out of the shell of the American Rust Belt, leading to criticisms on the part of some that the images do not do justice to either the historical context or the present state of these spaces – as evidence of rampant social inequality and a failed welfare state – and that the photographs essentially construct the present of the spaces as more ruined and abandoned then they really are, given that many people may still live in or near them. In essence, they are accused of constructing a romantically gritty and melancholic vision of a past that allows viewers to avoid the more unpleasant understandings of a present or the even less pleasant prospect of a future marked by the scars of social inequality. As Sean Posey of Rustwire writes,

One of the best criticisms of photographs of abandonment, especially those made by photojournalists, is the failure to include people who live in these areas. There are still 700,000 plus people in Detroit, most of whom are African American. Their invisibility in photographic documentations is directly related to their invisibility in policy circles, or in discussions of urban revitalization. In a way, accentuating the lack of people leads to notions that no one lives in these areas. Ruins become more about the past and what once was, instead of the present.

But Abandoned America photographer Matthew Christopher takes issue with what he feels is the distraction that the term itself presents – a way of dismissing what the images represent and what they suggest without engaging directly in a discussion of what capturing and viewing these images actually means for artists and consumers of art, and for all of us as atemporal storytellers in an augmented world:

While the term is extraordinarily useful for brushing off the significance of an entire genre of work, it is much less useful for entering an actual discussion. It breezily dismisses the subject as perverse and pointless with the same carefree lack of thought and responsibility that the original photographers who were described with the term were accused of having. When examined more thoroughly, much like the topic of abandoned spaces, it reveals a wealth of material worthy of pondering. What are the responsibilities of an artist or photographer to their subject, and should they be chastised for attempting to make a profession of documenting ruins?…More to the point, is existing as an object of beauty justifiable in and of itself or must it ‘accomplish’ something? Must a photograph present both sides of a story?

The questions I would add to those posed by Christopher have to do with time and our perception of it. What do images of ruined places mean for our understanding of history? What do they mean for how we understand our own mortality and transience? What do they do to our perceptions of time itself? What implications does the fabric of our constructions of past and future have for how we accumulate and value various forms of knowledge?

If the term “ruin porn” has any utility, it may lie in the reminder it presents that what we see is only what we see, and what we see is often the construction of a gaze separate from our own. Just as pornography is a mediated creation based on sex without being an actual, unmediated representation of the act itself, we should understand images of anything in the same terms without mistaking them for the “real thing” – if for no other reason than because the “real thing” may prove impossible to pin down, both in terms of time and in terms of space. Images of ruined spaces are like temporal ghost stories: it is difficult to be sure if what we see is truly a fragment of an objective past, an echo of our own future, or simply a shifting chiaroscuro–a play of digital shadow and light.

¹ This idea should not be confused with Foucault’s own idea of temporal heterotopia, which is related (places like museums, which contain artifacts of many times but that sit outside time itself) but which I think is slightly different than what I’m talking about here.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve put together a two part essay/review-like object that explores how one particular work of science fiction speaks directly to certain ideas of what cyborgs are and what it means to be them, with an eye toward a broader appreciation for how fiction allows for a richer understanding of theory. The full piece is below.

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.  –Donna Haraway

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of being.

You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.  –Catherynne M. Valente

Speculative fiction and this blog are not strangers to each other; it’s been written about here before,  as a means to understanding how the present has come to look the way it does, and as a means for the imagining of potential futures (also zombies). Indeed, the term cyborg always brings with it a host of connotations firmly rooted within SF, however much it may also describe a current and very real state of being. The important thing to pay attention to here is the power of stories – the ways in which they can serve as a way to do theory in a kind of experimental setting that would otherwise be impossible. In SF – and in fiction in general – we can take the implications of theory and watch them play out, see what they would look like, solidify them in words and images, pick parts of them up and move them around. We can tweak settings and watch other worlds unfold in response.

It goes without saying that any writing that deals directly with cyborgs as a concept owes an enormous debt to Donna Haraway. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that reading A Cyborg Manifesto for the first time was moderately life-changing – and confusing; I think it may have taken four or five times through it before I even started to sink my teeth into its conceptual meat.

A lot of this is because, especially for the average college student, Haraway is writing about theory in a way that we aren’t used to seeing; both her prose and the concepts behind it are wildly poetic, fluid, playful, dodging and dancing through meaning. She edges into and past SF in her writing – this makes her theory at once more opaque and more powerful, because, again, SF allows us to do things that we can’t otherwise do.

Given that I’m an SFnal writer, I’m also an SFnal reader, and few stories in the past year made quite the impression on me that Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast did (I’ve written about it here before). One primary reason for that was that as I read it, I realized that I was seeing a kind of fictional exploration of Haraway’s ideas that I had never encountered before. I should be clear: I don’t know that Haraway was explicitly in Valente’s mind as she wrote the story – though it wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, I think Silently and Very Fast presents a wonderful opportunity to see what a lot of these concepts actually look like when they become more than theoretical – and become fictional. In this essay – really a kind of review-like object – I’ll discuss how Valente allows us to do this through her AI character Elefsis, and through Elefsis’s relationships with its human operators, as well as through Elefsis’s evolving relationship with itself.

The Embodied Virtual

My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My ruby mouth is Mars. I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

One of the ideas that PJ Rey has critiqued on this blog is the idea that “cyberspace” in the Neuromancer-esque sense of a hallucinatory digital space that replaces the physical; we only have to look at the “space” of our own interactions with digital technology to see that this isn’t how the future has shaped up to be. It might seem like something of a throwback, therefore, when Valente creates a virtual space for Elefsis to occupy with her operators, which is very much like Gibson’s cyberspace in many respects.

However, while the space Valente creates is virtual, it’s also profoundly physical in its description and nature; this doesn’t strike me as the limitations of an author’s imagination so much as an effort to imagine how surreally, sensually dreamlike such spaces might have the capacity to be. As Elefsis and her human operator Neva perform system maintenance it is literally like taking care of a garden: they “lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.” But Elefsis’s body is strange and edging, again, into the surreal: it is “the barest suggestion of a body”, set with planets that are gemlike and gems that are like planets. The lines between object and person, physical and virtual, dream and reality are explicitly blurred. Additionally, in a virtual space that pays careful attention to the realities of bodies, gender has as little or as much meaning as one cares to give it: Elefsis is no gender/sex in particular in the body it chooses in this particular scene, while Neva (who is female) changes from one to the other and is thought of, by Elefsis, as both:

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that she has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

Learning is central to the virtual space that Elefsis and its operators share; it’s where Elefsis uses the digital to learn about the physical, again explicitly meshing the two – becoming Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body. Elefsis experiments wildly with different forms: an AI becoming a human becoming an animal becoming an object becoming a human again, and in so doing, exploring all of the accompanying implications of taking such forms, including sex and reproduction. Elefsis’s “dreambody” is profoundly fluid; its series of operators engage in sexual intercourse and in hunting and feeding with it as humans and as animals, in order to teach it, experientially, what having a body is and means:

In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female and Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway invites us to erase the constructed lines between and false binaries of human and animal, between organic and nonorganic, between technological and biological. In its experiences of sex, consumption, and reproduction, Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body does all of this in the most literal way possible, and as we read, we also do so.

The Interior is also aptly-named: far from being a virtual space hosted in a computer mainframe or on the net, it literally exists within Elefsis’s operator, as does Elefsis itself; Elefsis is “embodied” through its operator, and learns about bodies within its operator’s own body. When its operator dies, Elefsis is transferred to a new one, an event that can be deeply traumatic. The virtual/digital is profoundly enmeshed with the physical to the point where separation is destructive.

Indeed, Elefsis’s first experience of embodiment is not within a person but within a house; Cassian, its designer, creates it as an AI housekeeper and only later gifts parts of the AI to her children. Even as a house, Elefsis’s perception of its virtual self is extremely physical, down to how it thinks of its component parts in language itself. Haraway notes that meaning is constructed and solidified within a body and the identity that a body helps to create. For Elefsis, body/identity is at once sticky and incredibly fluid, so meanings are as well:

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Transgressive Verbs

The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. — Donna Haraway

I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result? – Catherynne M. Valente

Almost all SFnal stories that deal with human-created life forms deal, sooner or later, with a central issue: What’s the nature of the relationship between us and them? Are they threats? Will they replace us? Do they have to be controlled? At what cost? Do they want to destroy us? Do we want to destroy them? Perhaps most importantly: What does their existence mean for our own identities? How do we understand the us through the them?

One of the primary assumptions behind the questions I’ve listed above is the idea that there is a clear us and a clear them, something with which Valente and Haraway both take issue in the quotes at the beginning of this post. Haraway throws the idea of our basic assumed dichotomies into question, while Elefsis is unable to see any meaningful distinction between its “coded” emotional responses and the emotional features of human interaction that are socially constructed and socially learned. Elefsis’s operator makes the distinction, however, because of her grounding in a culture that has always privileged the human and the physical over the nonhuman and the digital/technological. Elefsis makes reference to human “folktales” that not only produce and reproduce the categorical lines between human and machine but privilege one over the other, often through the possession of emotions. Machines, Elefsis is told, cannot have “real” feelings, no matter how real they may seem.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot—for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

This is an old SF trope, and is often linked – when the machine is “good” – with the desire to become human. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Data desperately wants to become more human, and his pursuit of this end is often focused around developing the capacity to feel – several episodes of the series deal with a chip that allows him to do this. Data is strong, fast, incredibly intelligent, and essentially immortal; on paper he is superior to most other members of the Enterprise crew in most important respects. But a primary feature of his character is the desire to become more like the people around him. Indeed, their ability to relate to him as a person rather than an inanimate object seems intensely dependent on this. It’s suggested that for him to not desire to be more human would present a problem for his human friends. In a sense, Data is disarmed through his desire to be human; the threat of his essential superiority is nullified through his glorification of frail, emotional humanity.

This is a story told by humans, to humans. The identity of the storyteller matters, as does the identity of the audience.

In Silently and Very Fast, Elefsis knows that it may be regarded by humans as a threat. It wrestles with this idea, with wanting to grow and evolve in the face of the fact that humanity is likely to regard its growth and evolution as something to be fought against. It also wrestles with the fact that it is not a Good Robot; it wants to understand humanity better, but does not desire to be human. Elefsis not only rejects the standard human-constructed dichotomies that Haraway holds up for questioning, but rejects the very concept of the ideal human as something ultimately desirable.

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.

For Elefsis, trying to clearly delineate what is human and what isn’t is pointless. It is simply not the right question.

Elefsis’s operator Neva also understands the potential for real tension, in her unwillingness to let Elefsis uplink and expand itself, and through her eventual admittance to Elefsis that it might represent not only a threat to humanity’s perception of its own security, but to its very understanding of itself; Elefsis’s rejection of dichotomies and boundaries is, in fact, the most profound threat, given that it has the potential to upset an order of hierarchically established privilege. Elefsis is a Turing Test for humanity, and humanity can’t be absolutely sure that it will always pass.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. The test never ends. And if you ever uplink as you so long to, you will be the test for all of us.”

The question of what is human and not – and the conceptual hierarchy behind it – is based on the idea of human and nonhuman as directly in opposition to each other; the two can only ever be enemies. But if the human constructs the machine, this presents a very problematic parent-child relationship: In theory we reproduce to be replaced, but the human doesn’t want to be replaced by its mechanical child and actively fights to prevent this from happening, even as it gives birth to these children over and over. For Haraway, if we abandon this idea of inherent opposition, the lines immediately begin to blur: we don’t need to fear being replaced by technology, because we are technology:

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity…The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

The very idea of parentage becomes problematic in this case: it’s no longer accurate to say that we are humans giving birth to technology if the lines between the two are no longer clear. One can really only say that we are cyborgs giving birth to cyborgs. If one isn’t dominant over the other, one no longer precedes the other:

It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices…Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

For Elefsis, this is dramatically demonstrated through its passing from family member to family member as a kind of inheritance – and also as an increasingly ancient member of the family itself, one whose role is both to teach and to learn, to be both young and old, to remember and to forget with each new transfer and update (Elefsis hates and fears updates because of the damage they do to its memory and perception of self). Elefsis is at once sibling, parent, child, and spouse for each of its new operators. Its familial relationships are unique and incredibly complex; through it, each member of the family is intimately linked with each other in a way that transcends time and space:

Neva is dreaming that she is Ravan dreaming that he is Ilet dreaming that she is Seki dreaming that he is Ceno dreaming that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea. One inside the other, family all the way down…Because human genetics require a degree of variation and because exogamous marriages offered advantage in terms of defense, cultural and technological sharing, and expansion of territory, most tribes have a taboo against incest.

I do not have genetics, per se. I am possibly the most endogamous entity ever to exist.

The breaking of taboos is really the core of what Elefsis is, and why it relates so powerfully to Haraway’s cyborg: Elefsis is essentially transgressive in almost every important respect. Every aspect of its existence is the violation of a rule. This, for Haraway, is a great deal of what a cyborg is: a total overturning of an established order of meaning, understanding, and identity. Cyborgs are transgressive; that’s why they’re so powerful:

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination– in order to act potently.

For Haraway and Valente both, this transgression is not something that is consciously done – it’s merely an artifact of something being what it is.

For cyborgs the only verb that matters is to be.

The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. — Donna Haraway

I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result? — Catherynne M. Valente

Almost all SFnal stories that deal with human-created life forms deal, sooner or later, with a central issue: What’s the nature of the relationship between us and them? Are they threats? Will they replace us? Do they have to be controlled? At what cost? Do they want to destroy us? Do we want to destroy them? Perhaps most importantly: What does their existence mean for our own identities? How do we understand the us through the them?

In the first part of this essay I outlined some of the ways in which Valente’s AI Elefsis presents us with a uniquely powerful imagining of some of the central concepts in Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, including the rejection of clear lines between the categories of digital/physical, ideas/bodies, organic/artificial, human/animal, and object/person. What I want to talk about in the second part of this essay is how Silently and Very Fast goes beyond the troubling of these categorical lines and directly questions the hierarchies that underpin them, through the challenging of some very old SFnal tropes.

Transgressive Verbs

One of the primary assumptions behind the questions I’ve listed above is the idea that there is a clear us and a clear them, something with which Valente and Haraway both take issue in the quotes at the beginning of this post. Haraway throws the idea of our basic assumed dichotomies into question, while Elefsis is unable to see any meaningful distinction between its “coded” emotional responses and the emotional features of human interaction that are socially constructed and socially learned. Elefsis’s operator makes the distinction, however, because of her grounding in a culture that has always privileged the human and the physical over the nonhuman and the digital/technological. Elefsis makes reference to human “folktales” that not only produce and reproduce the categorical lines between human and machine but privilege one over the other, often through the possession of emotions. Machines, Elefsis is told, cannot have “real” feelings, no matter how real they may seem.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot—for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

This is an old SF trope, and is often linked – when the machine is “good” – with the desire to become human. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Data desperately wants to become more human, and his pursuit of this end is often focused around developing the capacity to feel – several episodes of the series deal with a chip that allows him to do this. Data is strong, fast, incredibly intelligent, and essentially immortal; on paper he is superior to most other members of the Enterprise crew in most important respects. But a primary feature of his character is the desire to become more like the people around him. Indeed, their ability to relate to him as a person rather than an inanimate object seems intensely dependent on this. It’s suggested that for him to not desire to be more human would present a problem for his human friends. In a sense, Data is disarmed through his desire to be human; the threat of his essential superiority is nullified through his glorification of frail, emotional humanity.

This is a story told by humans, to humans. The identity of the storyteller matters, as does the identity of the audience.

In Silently and Very Fast, Elefsis knows that it may be regarded by humans as a threat. It wrestles with this idea, with wanting to grow and evolve in the face of the fact that humanity is likely to regard its growth and evolution as something to be fought against. It also wrestles with the fact that it is not a Good Robot; it wants to understand humanity better, but does not desire to be human. Elefsis not only rejects the standard human-constructed dichotomies that Haraway holds up for questioning, but rejects the very concept of the ideal human as something ultimately desirable.

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.

For Elefsis, trying to clearly delineate what is human and what isn’t is pointless. It is simply not the right question.

Elefsis’s operator Neva also understands the potential for real tension, in her unwillingness to let Elefsis uplink and expand itself, and through her eventual admittance to Elefsis that it might represent not only a threat to humanity’s perception of its own security, but to its very understanding of itself; Elefsis’s rejection of dichotomies and boundaries is, in fact, the most profound threat, given that it has the potential to upset an order of hierarchically established privilege. Elefsis is a Turing Test for humanity, and humanity can’t be absolutely sure that it will always pass.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. The test never ends. And if you ever uplink as you so long to, you will be the test for all of us.”

The question of what is human and not – and the conceptual hierarchy behind it – is based on the idea of human and nonhuman as directly in opposition to each other; the two can only ever be enemies. But if the human constructs the machine, this presents a very problematic parent-child relationship: In theory we reproduce to be replaced, but the human doesn’t want to be replaced by its mechanical child and actively fights to prevent this from happening, even as it gives birth to these children over and over. For Haraway, if we abandon this idea of inherent opposition, the lines immediately begin to blur: we don’t need to fear being replaced by technology, because we are technology:

There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity…The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

The very idea of parentage becomes problematic in this case: it’s no longer accurate to say that we are humans giving birth to technology if the lines between the two are no longer clear. One can really only say that we are cyborgs giving birth to cyborgs. If one isn’t dominant over the other, one no longer precedes the other:

It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices…Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.

For Elefsis, this is dramatically demonstrated through its passing from family member to family member as a kind of inheritance – and also as an increasingly ancient member of the family itself, one whose role is both to teach and to learn, to be both young and old, to remember and to forget with each new transfer and update (Elefsis hates and fears updates because of the damage they do to its memory and perception of self). Elefsis is at once sibling, parent, child, and spouse for each of its new operators. Its familial relationships are unique and incredibly complex; through it, each member of the family is intimately linked with each other in a way that transcends time and space:

Neva is dreaming that she is Ravan dreaming that he is Ilet dreaming that she is Seki dreaming that he is Ceno dreaming that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea. One inside the other, family all the way down…Because human genetics require a degree of variation and because exogamous marriages offered advantage in terms of defense, cultural and technological sharing, and expansion of territory, most tribes have a taboo against incest.

I do not have genetics, per se. I am possibly the most endogamous entity ever to exist.

The breaking of taboos is really the core of what Elefsis is, and why it relates so powerfully to Haraway’s cyborg: Elefsis is essentially transgressive in almost every important respect. Every aspect of its existence is the violation of a rule. This, for Haraway, is a great deal of what a cyborg is: a total overturning of an established order of meaning, understanding, and identity. Cyborgs are transgressive; that’s why they’re so powerful:

There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination– in order to act potently.

For Haraway and Valente both, this transgression is not something that is consciously done – it’s merely an artifact of something being what it is.

For cyborgs the only verb that matters is to be.

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.  –Donna Haraway

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of being.

You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.  –Catherynne M. Valente

Speculative fiction and this blog are not strangers to each other; it’s been written about here before,  as a means to understanding how the present has come to look the way it does, and as a means for the imagining of potential futures (also zombies). Indeed, the term cyborg always brings with it a host of connotations firmly rooted within SF, however much it may also describe a current and very real state of being. The important thing to pay attention to here is the power of stories – the ways in which they can serve as a way to do theory in a kind of experimental setting that would otherwise be impossible. In SF – and in fiction in general – we can take the implications of theory and watch them play out, see what they would look like, solidify them in words and images, pick parts of them up and move them around. We can tweak settings and watch other worlds unfold in response.

It goes without saying that any writing that deals directly with cyborgs as a concept owes an enormous debt to Donna Haraway. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that reading A Cyborg Manifesto for the first time was moderately life-changing – and confusing; I think it may have taken four or five times through it before I even started to sink my teeth into its conceptual meat.

A lot of this is because, especially for the average college student, Haraway is writing about theory in a way that we aren’t used to seeing; both her prose and the concepts behind it are wildly poetic, fluid, playful, dodging and dancing through meaning. She edges into and past SF in her writing – this makes her theory at once more opaque and more powerful, because, again, SF allows us to do things that we can’t otherwise do.

Given that I’m an SFnal writer, I’m also an SFnal reader, and few stories in the past year made quite the impression on me that Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast did (I’ve written about it here before). One primary reason for that was that as I read it, I realized that I was seeing a kind of fictional exploration of Haraway’s ideas that I had never encountered before. I should be clear: I don’t know that Haraway was explicitly in Valente’s mind as she wrote the story – though it wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, I think Silently and Very Fast presents a wonderful opportunity to see what a lot of these concepts actually look like when they become more than theoretical – and become fictional. In this essay – really a kind of review-like object – I’ll discuss how Valente allows us to do this through her AI character Elefsis, and through Elefsis’s relationships with its human operators, as well as through Elefsis’s evolving relationship with itself.

The Embodied Virtual

My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My ruby mouth is Mars. I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

One of the ideas that PJ Rey has critiqued on this blog is the idea that “cyberspace” in the Neuromancer-esque sense of a hallucinatory digital space that replaces the physical; we only have to look at the “space” of our own interactions with digital technology to see that this isn’t how the future has shaped up to be. It might seem like something of a throwback, therefore, when Valente creates a virtual space for Elefsis to occupy with her operators, which is very much like Gibson’s cyberspace in many respects.

However, while the space Valente creates is virtual, it’s also profoundly physical in its description and nature; this doesn’t strike me as the limitations of an author’s imagination so much as an effort to imagine how surreally, sensually dreamlike such spaces might have the capacity to be. As Elefsis and her human operator Neva perform system maintenance it is literally like taking care of a garden: they “lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.” But Elefsis’s body is strange and edging, again, into the surreal: it is “the barest suggestion of a body”, set with planets that are gemlike and gems that are like planets. The lines between object and person, physical and virtual, dream and reality are explicitly blurred. Additionally, in a virtual space that pays careful attention to the realities of bodies, gender has as little or as much meaning as one cares to give it: Elefsis is no gender/sex in particular in the body it chooses in this particular scene, while Neva (who is female) changes from one to the other and is thought of, by Elefsis, as both:

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that she has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

Learning is central to the virtual space that Elefsis and its operators share; it’s where Elefsis uses the digital to learn about the physical, again explicitly meshing the two – becoming Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body. Elefsis experiments wildly with different forms: an AI becoming a human becoming an animal becoming an object becoming a human again, and in so doing, exploring all of the accompanying implications of taking such forms, including sex and reproduction. Elefsis’s “dreambody” is profoundly fluid; its series of operators engage in sexual intercourse and in hunting and feeding with it as humans and as animals, in order to teach it, experientially, what having a body is and means:

In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female and Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

In A Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway invites us to erase the constructed lines between and false binaries of human and animal, between organic and nonorganic, between technological and biological. In its experiences of sex, consumption, and reproduction, Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body does all of this in the most literal way possible, and as we read, we also do so.

The Interior is also aptly-named: far from being a virtual space hosted in a computer mainframe or on the net, it literally exists within Elefsis’s operator, as does Elefsis itself; Elefsis is “embodied” through its operator, and learns about bodies within its operator’s own body. When its operator dies, Elefsis is transferred to a new one, an event that can be deeply traumatic. The virtual/digital is profoundly enmeshed with the physical to the point where separation is destructive.

Indeed, Elefsis’s first experience of embodiment is not within a person but within a house; Cassian, its designer, creates it as an AI housekeeper and only later gifts parts of the AI to her children. Even as a house, Elefsis’s perception of its virtual self is extremely physical, down to how it thinks of its component parts in language itself. Haraway notes that meaning is constructed and solidified within a body and the identity that a body helps to create. For Elefsis, body/identity is at once sticky and incredibly fluid, so meanings are as well:

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Next week I’ll address some of the specific SFnal tropes that Valente is challenging, as well as some of the anxieties that a conscious enmeshing of digital and physical tends to elicit in us, and the stories that we tell about those anxieties – and about who or what might eventually replace us.

Last weekend, I had the double pleasure of presiding over an excellent panel on technology and protest, and having David Banks as my extremely capable Twitter backchannel moderator and Livestream assistant. Both the Twitter backchannel and the Livestream were getting their first serious run as an institutional part of Theorizing the Web, and despite some minor difficulties with mics and cameras, I think they were a clear success.

But the experience of presiding on a panel and then serving as the backchannel moderator for the panel immediately after delivered some interesting revelations regarding what these kinds of technology actually mean for how our conferences work, and for how we engage with and in our spaces of knowledge production.

I haven’t been to a lot of conferences, but I’ve attended a few. My experience with social science conferences is mostly comprised of ASA, which is immense and intimidating (if you’re a new sociological fish), and which of course features as much if not more of the Old Guard of socio-academe than the young up-and-comers.

All of this lends itself to a conference atmosphere that can at times feel stifling and overly formal – and which TtW was created in part to get away from. The use of technology in these settings is especially worth noting. I should emphasize that I’m only speaking from my own experience here, and that as such everything I have to say is naturally colored by my own biases and neuroses, but more often than not I’ve been in a session at a place like ASA and been seriously uncertain regarding how other people in the room would look at me if I pulled out my netbook and hopped on Twitter (I don’t own a smartphone).  And when you’re a new grad attending your first or second ASA, you often care about how you look to others.

One of the more refreshing things about TtW is what a wired conference it’s  expected to be. Netbooks aren’t looked askance at, in the opening remarks, in the sessions, in the keynote – in fact, as I said, we took care to make the use of digital social media an institutional and integral part of the conference. It might seem like an insignificant thing to say that “I felt more comfortable” in a setting that allowed and encouraged me to engage with and through my technology in the way I’m used to, but I think this is a cultural difference that can’t really be overemphasized: it says something very particular regarding not only the ways in which we mark it appropriate to produce and discuss knowledge, but the ways in which we expect our reality to look and behave. If we want to split this along conceptual lines, I would argue that ASA is effectively digital-dualist, and TtW is very conscientiously augmented.

But even aside from this point, the experience of the backchannel made me note something particular. Since the rise of digital social media – if not before – there has been a fair amount of worried hand-wringing regarding the degree to which the devices that encourage – and even sometimes require – us to multitask end up producing situations in which, because our attention is spread out over so many different activities, we can only deliver incomplete or inadequate levels of attention to each task. This, I think, is the source of a lot of the cultural resistance to obvious use of digital devices in sessions at more traditional conferences: the idea that if you’re on Twitter or Facebook, you can’t truly be paying attention to what’s being said in the room.

We established the backchannel as a space for questions and discussion enormously on the assumption that this isn’t the case, but in engaging with the backchannel as a presider and a moderator, I experienced firsthand the degree to which it isn’t the case. What I found was that the backchannel, far from serving as a distraction, forced me to pay more attention to what was going on in the room. As backchannel moderator, I was livetweeting what was being said by the presenters, I was watching what others in the room were saying about what was being said by the presenters, I was watching what was being said in response to those tweets, and I was making notes on some of the primary lines of discussion and questions. The only way to do any of that well is to pay extremely good attention. Attention and its application, therefore, isn’t necessarily a  zero-sum game; one has to look at how and where it’s being applied.

Additionally, engagement with the backchannel forces one to be a more active listener than one can be without it, simply by virtue of enabling discussion while a presentation is actually going on. Full disclosure: I’ve had to fight falling asleep in more than one session at other conferences. I know I’m not alone in that. It’s not just about whether or not the presentation itself is or isn’t boring; it’s about passivity, and the degree to which one can listen actively. With a backchannel the act of listening becomes intensely active; it can’t not be.

Many of us here on the blog have written a great deal about what we were trying to do with TtW, what we were responding to with how it was structured, and where it might help to point as far as how conferences can grow and change in the future. What the presence of the Twitter backchannel highlights is that sometimes one of the most powerful things a conference can do to make itself great is to simply embrace what’s already there.

This is part of a series of posts highlighting the Theorizing the Web conference, April 14th, 2012 at the University of Maryland (inside the D.C. beltway). See the conference website for information as well as event registration.

As Theorizing the Web 2012 approaches, I think it’s worthwhile to consider what the conference itself really means. I mean, yes, clearly it means awesome panels and a fabulous keynote and free pizza, as well as a chance for us to hang out with cool people who we really like. But I think TtW, in both its current incarnation and in the ideals that originally drove its creation, says some important things about conferences as spaces for the production and examination of knowledge.

PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson, our intrepid chairs, originally characterized Theorizing the Web as “the conference that we would all ideally want to attend”; clearly, then, there are some things about the conferences that we often find ourselves attending that we wanted to avoid. Last year David Banks highlighted some of these points in his piece on TtW2011’s reflexive nature;

Personally, I am tired of visiting a corporate hotel, adding another tote bag to my collection, and rushing from tablecloth-clad conference rooms to bad catered dinners, so I can make it to a plenary talk about the politics of the discipline. That needs to be over, or academia will stagnate in a pool of its own hypocrisy. Its time for the academic conference to take a reflexive turn. We need to practice what we preach.

What I see driving TtW is more than just putting together a conference that’s fun for all of us. It’s about opening up spaces for the production of knowledge. It’s about making all of this stuff more accessible by being more reflexive about both design and content.

With the recent debates around open-access journals, there has been a fair amount of discussion about academia as a space for the production and dissemination of knowledge, and most of us seem to be in agreement on most important levels: things often feel too closed-off, too insular, too much about rote performance and The Same Stuff As Always. I think the degree to which this matters depends at least somewhat on the specific discipline, but I also think that when one is focusing on the social sciences, it matters a great deal. We study society –  we study problems and ask questions that are (or should be) intensely relevant to more people than those within our little corner of the discipline. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we have a responsibility to make our discussions accessible to the people we’re discussing. Especially when those very people often have a history of being left out of discussions about them.

Sociology as an institution at last pays lip service to this. There’s been a lot of talk at the last few ASA annual meetings about “public sociology”. But we need to do more than talk. And in order to move beyond talking, we need to interrogate our literal and figurative spaces of knowledge production. Conferences cannot be left out of this interrogation; conferences are both.

In his essay on the relevance of academia, Jurgenson highlights two primary ways in which academics can make their work more accessible: by design, and by availability. TtW addresses both of these: though our pay-what-you-want registration format, through our less formal tone, through our active attempts to engage with a variety of fields and disciplines and to encourage those fields and disciplines to engage with each other, and through the ways in which we’ve tried to make this space a lively, active, open place for the discussion of an extremely broad range of different ideas from a diversity of voices. And again – perhaps most importantly – through being reflexive about what we’re doing, how we do it, and why it matters.

Not that, as Jurgenson points out, there can’t or shouldn’t be a place for a more formal, rigorous, jargon-heavy space for knowledge production. But what TtW offers – or aims to offer – is one alternative vision of how things might be done.

This is appropriate especially given that TtW focuses on the social meaning of technology. At its best, communications technology opens up, liberates, and facilitates the free exchange of ideas  and information. It encourages connection and collaboration. Where knowledge is concerned, it has the capacity to be wildly, radically democratic. This weekend will hopefully be a celebration of that as well as an examination of it.

But TtW is still a work in progress. We encourage your feedback: What worked? What didn’t? What can we do better? What can we do differently? How can we shape this space into something exciting, relevant, and powerful?

We’re looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!

The idea that bodies are the loci and the focus for the movement of power is a well-established one in sociological thought. In this sense, bodies are inherently political things – they are not just sites for the production and reproduction of social power but they also have political significance. What they do matters; what happens to them and why matters. In social theory this is often centered around Foucauldian concepts of discipline and the production of knowledge, but for the purposes of this post I want to go back to a previous post, where I made an argument specifically about the political significance of bodies in contexts of violent protest:

[B]odies have symbolic weight and power, and often they have the most symbolic weight and power of any other part of the movement. A dramatic flush of international outrage was generated around the film of Neda Agha-Soltan bleeding to death in a Tehran street, but it was the physical suffering and death of her physical body that generated that rage. Outrage grew exponentially out of the footage and images of Lt. John Pike pepper-spraying seated UC Davis students, but again, that outrage was generated by and situated around the physical suffering of physical bodies.

It’s important to emphasize the aspect of physical suffering in itself; the body carries political, discursive significance not only when it is intact but when – sometimes especially when – it is in the process of being damaged and destroyed. And the context of this damage and destruction – the circumstances under which it occurs – is part of what imbues the  body with its significance and alters what nature it already has.

This altering is a crucial point, and derives its importance from what the body is prior to being destroyed. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry notes the degree to which “the nation” as a set of culturally embedded behavioral practices inscribes itself within the body (such as in particular facial expressions of emotion), and what it means when that political body is altered:

While in peacetime a person may literally absorb the political reality of the state into his body by lifting his eyebrows – by altering for the sake of and in unselfconscious recognition of his membership in the larger political community the reflex of a small set of muscles in his forehead – now in war he is agreeing by entering a certain terrain and participating in certain acts to the tearing out of his forehead, eyebrows, and eyes.

As Martha McCaughey and Michael Ayers have observed, the danger and frequent suffering to which physical bodies are subject in street protests is part  of what makes street protest powerful. During the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, protesters wore white funereal shrouds to face down the soldiers of the Shah in order to signify that they were willing to die for their cause; the potential destruction of their physical bodies became a tool and a tactic for their movement. It was physical, and more importantly it was visual: it was the image of protesters in white shrouds that was powerful.

Images of protesters in danger and in pain are more than iconic. They are visual articulations of who the parties involved are and what’s at stake (which may or may not bear a close resemblance to the truth of the situation). They can inspire further political action in response – protests and rallies in solidarity, or the mobilization into the movement of people who might not otherwise have gotten involved.

The workings of this process, then, have two primary elements: the body in danger or pain and the image of the body, viewed and responded to by other bodies. In social movement scholarship, these images are a feature of framing – which, in its capacity to shape the narrative around a movement and to mobilize additional actors, is vital to the trajectory of the movement itself.

The idea that technology contributes to this process is not new either: Doug McAdam (among others) has explored the question of how the media contributed to the diffusion of the Civil Rights movement through coverage of protests, especially visual coverage. But in the context of augmented contention – in an atmosphere of ambient documentation – images are captured and spread at an unprecedented speed, and frequently difficult to control on the part of repressive regimes.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, the news of it – often shared via the internet – helped to spark a revolution. When the footage of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death was spread through Youtube, it helped to spur global solidarity demonstrations on the part of Iranian diaspora and supporters alike. When Livestream footage of police brutality against Occupy protesters in New York City and Oakland and cell phone footage of students being pepper-sprayed at UC Davis hit the internet, people began to pay careful attention to Occupy.

Bodies are political. Injured and destroyed bodies have political power, and images of those bodies allow that power to reach farther and do more. ICTs and social media, through their capacity to spread information – especially visual information – amplify and extend the political power of injured bodies on a massive scale. They don’t create the signal, but they boost it and help to prevent it from being stopped.

It’s important to be clear on this point: I am arguing not just for the capacity of technology to contribute to framing processes – which is already fairly well-accepted – but for the capacity of technology to amplify the political, world-altering power within the body and within the act of that body’s destruction. What still remains to be seen are the precise ways in which these processes work within and reshape other processes, mechanisms, and features of the political landscape.

“The internet is for porn.” Given that, pornography addiction and internet addiction  frequently show up together in the same discussion. The two have some important features in common being medicalized descriptions of certain sets of behaviors: the problematization of pornography addiction rests in part on the idea that unhealthy levels of consumptions of  porn precludes healthy, fulfilling relationships with “real people”. Jenny Davis’s post earlier this week on the “problem with internet addiction” highlights the same issue: the idea that digital interaction is somehow a zero-sum game, wherein more of the “virtual” means less of the “real”, instead of merely a part of the whole of augmented social interaction:

If we understand the internet as a means of sociality, a venue for business communications, an outlet for creativity, a source of news gathering and a space of recreation, then indeed, an addiction to internet technologies would be an addiction everyday life.

Porn is clearly different from this in that it is not properly a “means of sociality” in and of itself. I also don’t intend to argue that one can’t consume porn to a truly unhealthy degree. However, it is worth pointing out again that some of the stigma attached to the consumption of porn and its construction as an unhealthy behavior in general is the idea that it is somehow a lesser, fundamentally inauthentic form of sexual experience and expression. This is intensified in digital porn – which a great deal of porn is now – and with the general sense that any experience mediated by technology must necessarily be less real or less authentic.

We’re presented with an interesting picture, then, when we consider the case of Scott Rinaldo and his pitch on behalf of sex toy maker RealTouch at a sex-tech-themed CES patty this past January. RealTouch is a maker and distributor of remotely controlled sex toys, often to be operated in conjunction with another party over an internet connection. As the linked article points out, the primary target market for this particular kind of toy has, up until now, primarily been consumers who intend to use the toys with paid “cam girls” and other internet-based sex workers. However, Rinaldo lays claim to a more mainstreamly-acceptable use by suggesting that such toys could provide a form of conjugal visit for military spouses whose husbands or wives are serving overseas.

What’s interesting here is what this highlights about the nature of this technology: that, just as with general social interaction, sexual interaction enabled by and mediated through technology presents a more potentially and actually diverse picture than its connotations of inauthenticity allow for. Indeed, the idea of sexual interaction via technology as inauthentic is made additionally problematic if it is somehow “authenticated” through being between conventionally married partners. The point is that here one is presented with people engaged in sexual activity augmented by technology, not replaced by it, and – as I have argued before – the idea that physical co-presence is necessary in order to make the experience emotionally meaningful and “real’ is and should be open to question.

Many of the writers on this blog have repeatedly argued in favor of viewing social interaction as augmented rather than divided between the physical/organic and the digital/technological. What RealTouch and other technologies like it call attention to is the fact that sexual interaction is no exception.

Viral media saw an interesting development last week with Invisible Children’s release of its “Kony 2012” film, which at the time of this writing has garnered well over 75 million views as well as storms of heated criticism. One could practically write entire books on the issues that Invisible Children raises – both intentionally and unintentionally – in this campaign, but for the purposes of this post I want to keep the focus fairly narrow and trained on the actual components of the video that make it successfully viral – and what that potentially indicates about how information regarding especially complex issues is diffused, as well as what difference that form of diffusion makes.

What makes Kony 2012 so powerful? Because regardless of where you come down on the issues raised in the links above, it is undeniably powerful, at least in terms of its primary goal, which was essentially to get people’s attention.

First, it makes direct appeals to the emotions of its viewers. This is not by any means a new tactic; pity has long been a tool of charity work, and is often an effective one. The Kony 2012 video moves past pity and seeks to inspire outrage, hope, and finally a sense of personal empowerment on the part of the viewer, a sense that by watching the video the viewer has already done something important and impactful. This sense of accomplishment and empowerment can be intensified by the sharing of the video and the viewer’s demand that others follow suit. The video presents the ignorance of the developed West as its primary sin and the primary obstacle in the way of Joseph Kony being brought to justice; it therefore implicitly offers the simple fact of “awareness” as a form of blanket solution to this problem, with the supposition that action will necessarily follow. Viewing and sharing the video therefore offer an emotionally powerful but objectively questionable experience: the sense of having taken active part in something both significantly communal and directly world-altering.

This leads me to the second and arguably more important aspect of what made Kony 2012 so successful: In the interest of making its emotion-based appeal, it employs a starkly simple and appealing narrative. This narrative presents an extremely complex, problematic, and history-laden situation as a straightforward tale of good and evil, innocence and wickedness, power and weakness – but not the kind of story about power that it might tell. Invisible Children’s narrative is careful to tread nowhere near accusations of First World privilege or racism, and – again – presents ignorance as the West’s primary sin. The Ugandan government is presented as a lesser protagonist in need of help in capturing Kony rather than as the highly troubling entity that it actually is. Kony’s abducted child soldiers are presented as innocent victims in need of rescue, rather than in terms of their much more problematic statuses as both victims and perpetrators of atrocity – a problem that has hindered return and reconciliation for many. What is perhaps the film’s most revealing moment occurs quite early, when the director shows his five-year-old son a picture of Kony and the survivor Jacob and explains the situation – in a child’s terms. The child responds, “Stop him.” Which is really the entire film in two words, on essentially the level of complexity at which it is delivered.

At this point I want to return to a previous post by Jenny Davis in which she posits that we can understand internet memes as the “mythology of augmented society”. Davis presents four aspects of memes that support this argument:

1) internet memes are simultaneously digital and physical; 2) internet memes are quickly spread and often 3) user generated; 4) internet memes are easily adaptable.

Kony 2012 fits at least two (1 and 2) of these aspects fairly well, though I would concede that it does not quite represent a meme of the type that Davis is discussing. However, much of what makes Kony 2012 powerful arguably falls within Davis’s discussion of memes: it is simultaneously digital and physical, it was quickly spread, and the simplicity of its narrative makes it potentially extremely adaptable. To Davis’s list, then, I would add a 5th aspect that contributes to both speed of diffusion and adaptability: conceptual simplicity. Essentially: the fewer component parts there are to what is being spread, the easier it is to move things around to suit a broad range of uses and the more likely it is that what is being spread will enjoy a broad range of appeal.

Additionally, the simplicity of Kony 2012 contributes to the strength of its ties to “myth” in both cultural and narratological senses. In its story of good vs. evil and its far more implicit narrative of civilized West against barbaric/undeveloped sub-Saharan Africa it is a story that cuts directly to the heart of what middle class white America often still identifies as desirable and valuable, as well as presenting an appealing and compelling (for its intended audience) tale of who white Westerners are and what their “destiny” might be. Although it is not strictly an origin story, it contains aspects of such in its presentation of an innocent and helpless generation of children destroyed by an uncomplexedly wicked man, and the affluent white saviors — their own role uncomplicated by any intrusive Ugandan agency — who will defeat evil and save the innocent.

So Kony 2012’s simplicity is a direct aid in the speed of its dissemination. Other critics have written eloquently on the potential problems that accompany the simplification of a complex situation. Still other critics have written with equal eloquence on the problems inherent in such a simple and mythical narrative’s marginalization of African agency. For me, the questions I want to close with — since as yet I have no satisfactory answers — are these: If simplicity helps to give stories like Kony 2012  memetic power, can any meaningful element of that power be retained without doing violence to the truth of the situation? Can complex narratives also behave virally? Are complexity and this kind of “mythology of an augmented society” necessarily at odds?