Category: panel

• Surveillant Anxiety: Pleasure in the Surveillance of “Others” and Seveillance at the Deep Lab

  Yesterday I was on a absolutely amazing panel (video at link) at the Deep Lab on Surveillant Anxiety.

  Panel Description

  What are the lived effects of surveillance? From the anxieties of the surveilled to those of the surveillers, this panel considers the cultural, physiological, political, and psychological effects of mass surveillance.

  Moderator: Kate Crawford [Deep Lab]
  Speakers:
  Simone Browne
  Jade Davis (HASTAC)
  Biella Coleman (McGill)
  Karen Levy (NYU)

  My talk specifically looked at how, from the early mid-to late 90s as internet enabled surveillance and distribution of private/amateur video footage become one of the past times of the internet, we culturally learned how to take pleasure in consuming the surveillance of “others”.  I related this to  the contemporary phenomenon of watching black men being killed on social media because my working thesis is this is an act of (America) citizenship.

  The conclusion was, given our current moment we need to be reflective about our roll in the surveillance machine that has been culturally normalized through social media in our current moment. This is different than surveillance and sousveillance. The terms I used is

  SEVEILLANCE: 

  Reflective surveillance and censoring in acknowledgement of the “other”.

  The thing that I want to add to this larger conversation is Seveillance. This is outside of the phenomenological self, because that tends to have some idea of unification, and I don’t think there is such a thing and I am okay with that. Seveillance is a reflective practice in mainly socially media environments where both surveillance and sousveillance collide in a stream of information where, as individual users, people are forced to encounter a media mirror that, while pleasurable for some, is painful for others. It is the thing that gets people wrapped up in flame wars or trolling as they attempt to define a safe space in an open stream of information.

  This becomes important when we (society) start to break down some of the alienation we experience as a result of our digitally augmented social lives. We are able to talk to a more diverse group of people than in the past, because social streams feed the same algorithm, we need to think about what we are sharing and how, and who we are asking to watch with us and why. It is one of the ways we need to self-censor that we do not often discuss. And it leads to my big questions.

  1.What does it mean for something to be both a place where we come to watch playful things and sacred men die?

  2.How do we reconcile that we allow their deaths to render invisible the countless others who die in the same manner?

  The Nitty Gritty of the Talk

  I laid out three types of pleasure in a foreign language, because that’s how I roll, with definitions taken from the internet. Jouissance, Divertissement, and Schadenfreude. A working hypothesis for why the three examples were sticky or different is because people see them as something that could happen to them but did not. They are also all types of pleasure that have some pain, discomfort, or cringeworthyness attached to them. I think it is so so so important that we acknowledge that without pain there is no pleasure.

  Jouissance: Physical or intellectual pleasure, delight, or ecstasy.

  

  The Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape, leaked on line in 1998, wasn’t the first sex tape made, but, with the proliferation of 56k modems and T1 lines at universities, it was able to spread in a new way thanks to the internet. It allowed people to watch a what happened behind closed doors of a popular sex symbol. The eventually licensing of the tape also paved the way for Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.. And it was a predecessor to the recent “The Fappening“, the leaking of celebrity photos stored in their icloud accounts.

  Divertissement: A minor entertainment or diversion.
  

  Unfortunately, most of the Audience hadn’t had my experience of big brother, and the video didn’t work, but here is the opening for the first minute that I was unable to show during the talk.

  For me, the show that was a predecessor to what we are seeing today in terms of day to day surveillance, and privacy is Big Brother. The US version premiered in 2000. I thought it might be fun to watch the first minute of the first episode to hear what the host says, and to see what was shown on TV.

  What this clip doesn’t mention is the 24 hour feed that was available on the internet. As someone who was home that summer in a small semi-rural town in California, most of my friends were online. We’d spend hours in the chat rooms watching and wondering if Brittney, one of the house guests they made a big deal about in the marketing for being a virgin, would lose her virginity.

  What I find so interesting about how Big Brother was position versus how we are positioned now in a day to day environment that resembles the house is, they agreed to this for a large cash prize. We pay for the privilege. Watching people early on do this was merely diversion and entertainment though.

  Schadenfreude: Pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune.

  This form of surveillance pleasure is most popularly seen in Sousveillance Genre of Russian Dashboard Cameras, and, I think for our contemporary moment, and where I will be going next, this is an important comparisons. These films show accidents, scams, fights, and other Russian craziness. The seemingly endless feed of Russian dashcam footage caused many to ask Why they have this. The reason is corruption. These films allow people to protect themselves in court from corrupt police officers and scam artists. It serves the people filming and provides them a level of agency they would not have otherwise. And, as a side bonus, it gets them tens of thousands of views on sites like YouTube when they capture and upload something Schadenfreude worthy… like a cement truck driving over a road and falling into a hole because it couldn’t handle the weight.

  Surveillance vs Sousveillance

  That thing we’ve culturally been calling for as a fix. The wearable police camera… but, it is false sousveillance, and it has shown, thus far, that, it will not bring about change in the current social order, so to speak. Politically, even our attempts at sousveillance, given what we now know about how or devices and communications are tracked or how they are taken out of context by state power means that in the US we culturally have a very limited potential for what I would consider true souveillance. What we do have is this..

  PLEASURE IN THE SURVEILLANCE OF “OTHERS” IS A DISTRACTION FROM A LOSS OF AGENCY AT A CULTURAL LEVEL.

  WE DEFINE THE OTHER BY ALIENATION, and IN THE PROCESS ALIENATE OURSELVES.

  At this point I shared a link to my post, “Black Men Being Killed is the New Girls Gone Wild” and provided a list of names I will not being sharing here of the black men and boys whose deaths have been shared on social media as clickbait because it combines all three forms of surveillance pleasure into one, if you are an ideal citizen (and not everyone is).

  And now the wall of text…

  

  I am thinking through this with both Agamben and Fanon.

  ‘The sacred man is the one who people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet, he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunation law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” This is why it Is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred’ (pulled from an ebook of Homo Sacer so I don’t have a page number)

  Black men represent both the sacred man and bare life in a meaningful way. Bare life reduces a person to just a body, unable to participate in politics or the good life. As a sacred object, it is the space we look to to make things okay. The watching of these deaths is not new. We have the history of lynching, and slavery (Simone did a fantastic job speaking of slavery). This is a historical American past time. In fact, the ability to take pleasure in this is part of what defines the good life in America.

  The other side is what Karen, one of my other co-panelist was speaking about in terms of care, family, and surveillance. For all of the people that are able to take pleasure in the watching, there is another group that suffers, those that see a mirror of themselves in these bodies that die from both sousveillance and police cam footage that is then uploaded and shared online. Rather than joy, seeing these image repeated and the amplification of the positive reactions to these deaths (and I consider lots of clicks a positive reaction), means that certain bodies are still seen as always already dead. Additionally, if you are a political being (or citizen) in the United States, you are already implicated in the idea that there are some bodies that deserve state death, as we do have capital punishment. These men are bare life. And media and education, for Fanon, are, psychic mirrors. In these mirrors heroes and history are the realm of whiteness. Blackness is the realm of monsters, death, and fear.

  The thing that is important to remember is that these actions are Jouissance, Divertissement, and Schadenfreude all at once. And they are a placeholder. The high visibility of the scared man is a distraction from the fact that these actions that are culturally seen as reasonable when done to certain bodies is inevitably happening to all of them, because, any citizen has the potential in the future to be homo sacer, or experience bare life. And, the distraction that homo sacer provides is that the future is now. These things are already happening to everyone. But because homo sacer is the visible representation of the opposite of citizen ship, we focus, in this case, on his black male death, ignoring the black female death, the latin@ death, the queer death, the white death, and all the other deaths that are happening in the exact same manner.

  Jade

  May 30, 2015

  panel

  * * *

• Dissertation Abstract #remixthediss

  After the wonderful panel yesterday, I had some people ask for more details on what I’m doing. Here is an abstract:

  Historical glitch: Understanding digital media through the photographic lens, explores the intersecting media ecologies of social media, digital heritage content, and culture. Specifically, this project focuses closely on what a digital project that takes advantages of the formal changes inherent in the shift from analog to digital media looks like. The project highlights how social media can be used as platforms for change and also looks at their limits and potentials for knowledge and culture when such media are used to construct alternate historical narratives. The case study for this project, Vintageblackbeauty, which was digitally born on the social networking site Tumblr, puts digital tools into practice by disseminating historical photographs of black women in their everyday lives from across the black diaspora. The effects of this experiment are theoretically understood through the works of Fanon, Hurston, and McLuhan. Additionally, a digital performance piece that analyzes the effects of this practice, informed by Dada art practices, puts the theoretical implications into motion by placing the digitized photographs gathered on Vintageblackbeauty in conversation with media from the same time periods. Through exploring this ecology, I posit that we can gain a better understanding of some of the differences between digital and analog media, their different potentials for change, as well as the inherent limits they pose. While digital media do allow for greater access and dissemination, they are still tied to a screened experience and held to ethical standards determined by various stakeholders who are often ephemeral or evolving and in contradiction with how we have been trained to conceive of knowledge production.

  Jade

  Oct 11, 2014

  my project, my work, panel

  * * *

• Digital Media Saturation & Knowledge Creation (or a trick of the light)

  “Official culture still strives to force the new media to do the work of the old media. But the horseless carriage did not do the work of the horse; it abolished the horse and did what the horse could never do. Horses are fine. So are books.” – Marshall McLuhan

  The other day I picked up a book and tried to look through it. I didn’t flip through the pages or turn the book over, I simply held it in my hands and brought it closer to my face to see if anything became clearer is the distance between my eyes and the thing in my hand diminished. Much to my dismay, rather than anything contained within the book becoming clearer, I found all I was doing was make the world around me darker. The contained universe of the book is fascinating because it is something we are, for the most part culturally literate in. It contains its own beginning and end and the mind of its creator. It can fit in the palm of our hands. Because most of us have had experiences where we had to write something but couldn’t find the words to fill in the space, we understand the labor that goes into the task of its creation. Because we can hold in our hands and take time to look through it, because even when it is not in our hands it doesn’t change, the book becomes its own standard. And it is the standard we have for where knowledge worth knowing is contained. The book is the prism we use to understand knowledge. The book seems to be the model we’re building from to determine what knowledge online should look like. Me writing this is no exception. There is a slight difference I’d like to call attention to though by asking a question:

  

  What color is the sky?

  I recently asked this question during my session at DML, with a different image of a blue sky, text in blue. There was no response. I had to ask twice, and everyone said blue. It was the only answer that was logical given the givens of the image and the cultural understanding we have of the color of the sky. I have to confess I spent a good portion of my life thinking the sky was blue as well, until I listened to an episode of the podcast radiolab called “Colors”.

  It is an fantastic episode. I highly suggest anyone who has time listen to the whole thing. There is a section in the podcast titled “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?” that brought me to using the question about the sky to understand the digital as a space of knowledge production and what I like to call knowledge-play that. The piece explains that the sky has not always been blue because across cultures, blue is the last color humans learn to recognize. The sky, without the cultural knowledge of blue then is something without color. But, because we have blue, the sky is blue.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  What I think is fascinating about this is even with blue, the sky we experience is capable of being so many more colors within the limited range of colors we can see (another topic explored in the podcast). It is many colors we can’t see as well. But cultural we know for certain that the sky is, in fact, blue.

  

  I googled “the definition of saturation” so you don’t have to. It makes one of those wonderful little google boxes pop up that contains a bunch of information including the definition of saturation that is important to my thinking here:

  (esp. in photography) the intensity of a color, expressed as the degree to which it differs from white.

  My chapter in Field Note’s for the 21st Century is titled “The Medium is Light”. It is freely available on the HASTAC website and Rap Genius You can see the condensed video version created as part of an assignment give to me and my co-authors from Omar Daouk

  What is the 21st Century Medium? from Duke 21C on Vimeo.

  a video exploring aspects of digital media through McLuhan’s the Medium is the Massage and the Medium is the Message.

  Since writing the book, and I more thoughts on the important for understanding light and why McLuhan’s statement that “light is pure information” is so important in this moment as we still try to figure out how the digital can be used to create a classroom without walls. I’ve already pointed to the problem of using the book as the prism for knowledge in the digital age, and provided some other things from McLuhan that show that this conversation is not a new one. What is new though is how light based electronic media have become as discussed in the chapter and video linked to above. I am a bit obsessed with backlit screens and fibre optic cables because they are our primary information sources now:

  The information me we see is reflections of information that is projected and I think that is a theoretical explosion (and I sort of love thought explosions because they lead to the creation of new worlds).

  If we go back to the episode of radiolab, it starts with a story of Newton trying to figure out if the color was in the prism or if it was in the light. You should listen to the podcast to hear the cultural beliefs and how he eventually figured out the prism (It worth the time!). We cultural know how prisms work. And we can use it as a metaphor, as I did when I started. The book is the prism we have for knowledge. Our devices, computers, smart phones, tablets, phablets, etc. are the prisms we use to filter and render digital data and information. Prism has a specific cultural relevance with regards to digital information given the revelations from the summer. I don’t think that is a coincidence. What my message is with all of this, especially with regards to understanding knowledge in our current information age is that, we have to think of how playful light can be. There is something from the book that I think translates very well to light. A book is like a shadow, it blocks out a lot of stuff so you get a silhouette of relevant information. Right now,
  when we think of the light of the internet it is like the light of the sun, blinding if you look directly into it, but helpful and necessary to live in a world where data and information are currency.

  I recently went to a Ken Wissoker talk at Duke University. He was speaking about the (academic) book. He said it is no longer the place to create new information because the information is already on the internet. The more interesting books will come up with new ways of interpreting or putting the information together. So what is the role of the digital then? I think it is to make shadow puppets. When we use it as a flashlight, like I’ve tried to do with this post, where we highlight, play with, bring together, and make move information that’s relevant to the thing we are trying to understand, if we learn to apply filters, and change the data we are rendering with our electronic devices into meaningful bits of media that resemble media from the past, we might just figure out the color(s) of the digital information age. I hope that it doesn’t end up being like the sky, stuck in a single hue, but instead it is a dynamic ever-shifting gradient that pushes the limits of our perceptions and understanding.

  all photos from pixabay
  find out more about the panel at DML 2014

  Jade

  Mar 9, 2014

  digital, my work, panel

  * * *

• Second Iteration: A letter to Fanon & McLuhan

  Department Colloquium is over.   I had some nice questions on why I chose to do a letter and some good feedback on some areas to expand/move forward.  The act of putting the first first draft online was good. I thought it might be nice to share how it evolved since people were kind enough to read the first iteration and send me feedback.

  The Talk

  For the past few years anytime I’ve read McLuhan it has been while I am in the process of reading Fanon.  As a result, their words swirl together in my head as though they are in conversation.  While the most common link take McLuhan and Fanon together because McLuhan samples A Dying Colonialism in War and Peace in the Global Village, I am making another connection today. Arun Saldanha briefly touched on this connection in the 2010 article “Skin, affect, aggregation: Guattarian variations on Fanon”, but I am pushing it further as I move towards developing a way to understand the intersection of race, media, and technology, especially as we trace the evolution of this intersection to its present moment of the Digital.

  The piece I am sharing with you today is a thought experiment.  It is influenced by D. Soyini Madison’s Performing theory/embodied writing. It’s playing with McLuhan’s method of writing as though making a collage, and it’s answering Fanon’s call in The Wretched of the Earth, to use imagination to create a new now.  My new now speaks with the both McLuhan and Fanon through the “Playboy Interview” and the introduction of Black Skins, White Masks.

  My hope with this piece, tentatively titled “A Letter to Frantz and Marshall”, is that it can eventually move into a larger project that might or might not be a dissertation chapter examining the role of fibre optic cables, light as pure information, and the “net of colonization” to examine how the digital creates a reparative space where we as a society can create explosions that allow us to imagine the body and the human in a new light.

  Please note, for the purposes of this piece I will be speaking with both men on a first name basis. Frantz is Frantz Fanon and Marshall is Marshall McLuhan.

  === A Letter to Fanon and McLuhan===

  Dear Frantz  & Marshall,

  I know the two of you never officially met, except for that brief instance where Frantz’s words become yours in War and Peace in the Global Village Marshall.  You are meeting now though, in my head, and I am attempting to move that meeting to an external data storage device as words on a virtual page, that will eventually move to ink on paper.

  Marshall, you said something along the lines of technology is the extension of the human body  in the Medium is the Massage. The entirety of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man also explores this relationship.  When I think of this idea in relation to your reflections in “the Playboy Interview”, reflections that lead you to saying black bodies are left outside of technology, I can’t help but smile a little as I remember Fanon’s point in Black Skin, White Masks.  The Black man is not fully human.  It seems that what you are speaking towards when you speak of the issues of the Black man (and the Indian to a lesser extent) Marshall, are the societal effects of the technologically extension of a Human body that is assumed to be less than Human.  This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a bit of a circle because the black man/person being less than human is directly linked to their inability to be seen as fully connected to and through technology.

  Frantz, you said something that I am finding myself seeing true about the Human experience, what and who is human is determined by the negation of the black man.  If media technologies are all just an extension of the human body, and that which in fact makes us fully human and connected, returning us to the global village without margins or centers, then it stands to reason that to understand the Human we must also understand the relationship between the black man and technology.  It is the relationship defined by a technological lack that will show us the blind spots in our Utopian vision.

  If we look at technology as the extension of man, it seems we must begin to see slaves as the foundational technology of not just the United States, but the West as a whole as connected through the Atlantic slave trade.  If we understand that these bodies were seen as a lack due to their distance from the technologies of the West we can see that they are not human bodies but are rather  a media technology like any other media technology.  It becomes easier for Black bodies to be subsumed into a system of commerce.  As media technology they served as an extension of the body of their owners, increasing the size, scale and pace of agriculture in a plantation economy as machines in the garden.  Their bodies, not their humanity, made them central to the process of taming the frontier and cultivating the new world towards a European vision.  Their bodies allowed for time and capital to grow at a new pace, across more space in ways not seen before the Atlantic slave trade became a well-oiled machine, delivering raw technology for hundreds of years.  If we extend this beyond the Atlantic slave trade to include the colonization of Africa in the 1800s, Jim Crow in the United States, and Apartheid in South Africa, the timeline is even longer. When we look at the issues of Neo-colonialism, the continued territory, protectorate, or militarily occupied status of many formerly colonized African states, as well as the penal labor system that is currently growing in the United States, we might even say that the black body as part of the industrial machine never ended. It is important to note though that black bodies are no longer the only bodies that make up this labor technoloy. That is, however, a separate conversation.

  Both of you think an over extension of the body through technology leads to psychosis.  The psychosis is predicated on a loss of self in relation to the body. Technology is to be built upon, extended, evolved and, subsumed.  For the black man the extension is based on an over association with the White Man. If we are thinking through this with the parameters Marshall laid out coupled with the history of Black slaves as technology, the extension you are illustrating Frantz shows a moment of technology becoming sentient, believing itself to be too Human.

  The difference seems to be, if I understand you both correctly, that the causes and results of the manifestation of the psychosis differs from the White man to the black man.  The black man’s psychosis is in the realization that he can never be as human as the white man in his quest for more and more technology even as the white man tells the black man to try and catch up.  The rhetoric we continue to hear today around digital divide constructs the black man this way.  The white man though, in a need to assert his own humanity and recreate centuries of social structuring is compelled to increase the distance between him and those bodies he imagines as closer to raw technology. The White man overextends himself in this quest, losing sight of his body, becoming post-human.  In his post-humanity he removes the capability of seeing the Black man as human, even as he, the white man, longs to go back to an imagined before time, a time where he too was Human.  The psychoses of the white man comes from the Black mans closeness to his body.  His inability to be extended keeps him closer to the human than the flight away that is occurring in the White post-humanism movement. A second layer of psychosis for the white man comes from watching the Black man work through his own psychosis, a psychosis characterized by a compulsion to emulate the White Man in an attempt to be recognized as Human, without access to the technological tools required to do so.  No matter how hard a black man tries to reach the world of the white man, his almost human hands can never touch it.

  Attempting to understand this psychosis is why I am writing both of you. I think both of you are hinting towards a level of consciousness that is innate to humanity that the black man has better access to perhaps because he hasn’t extended his body outward through technology as much as the white man (his extension, while outward facing, is more internal).  Despite the internal nature of this extension, the message received through technological mediation outside of the body causes misunderstanding that blinds and alienates the Black Man from this other level of consciousness because for the black man to have the realization that he can access it on a total scale would be an annihilation of the current social order.
  Marshall, you said,

  “The cultural aggression of white America against Negroes and Indians is not based on skin color and belief in racial superiority, whatever ideological clothing may be used to rationalize it, but on the white man’s inchoate awareness that the Negro and Indian — as men with deep roots in the resonating echo chamber of the discontinuous, interrelated tribal world — are actually psychically and socially superior to the fragmented, alienated and dissociated man of Western civilization,”

  Are you not speaking directly to Frantz and his beliefs that that it is the mistake of the black man to not already realize he is the defining instance of humanness and humanity, for it is he who has access to the zone of non-being. I think, Frantz, you can clarify this for me.  You said,

  Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that the Black is not a man.

  There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, and incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.

  Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding.  Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world” (xii).

  While you started with the transcendental consciousness, Marshall, it is where you ended your interview:

  “I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.”

  Both of you see this movement towards the transcendental starting with the tribal, or black man.  And both of you see the inevitable violence the path of technology leads us on if we continue to see certain Humans as wretched and others as technologically superior.  As long as superiority is understood by the ability of a group of Humans to master, contain and control the messages of the mediums, and make them obsolete we will never break society of our racially based psychoses. (As an aside, if we see the black slave as pure technology, and technologies as building on top of each other making previous versions obsolete, the black and Indian man never had a chance.)  When I read these lines,

  “The one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro”.

  I am not sure who I am reading until I remind myself that Marshall, you were more interested in the Indian.  Had it been you Frantz, I think you would have said Arab.  Marshall, You spoke of the real possibility of the negro being exterminated through, something that I think can be softly confirmed if we look at statistics showing various ways people are moved from society, through imprisonment, literacy, or lack of access to the tools and technologies needed to be fully Human.  As though you saw this on the horizon as well, Frantz, you had already written a response, a call, and a reminder:

  I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me. In a fierce struggle I am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility (193).

  Where do we go from here though?

  I am thinking the three of us can push this a little bit further.  If we acknowledge that the black body represents pure technology, and technology is simply a way that we extend our own human bodies, and the medium that we use for this extension has its own message, then I think we can say the medium that represents humanity is the black man. Just as the light is pure information, to understand how we have come to define the human, especially as we try to understand the human through media technology, we must first understand the relation of humanity and humanness to the black body, the body that I think became a cyborg long ago.

  The next step for me is to expand this conversation and explore it through the role of black women, looking specifically at society’s current cause of psychosis and division, Digital Media.

  Sincerely,Jade

  References:

  Fanon, Frantz. Black skin, white masks. Grove press, 1994.

  Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the earth. Grove Press, 2005.

  Hayles, N. Katherine. How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

  Madison, D. Soyini. “Performing theory/embodied writing.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1999): 107-124.

  Marx, Leo. The machine in the garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.

  McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore. The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.

  McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT press, 1994.

  McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. War and peace in the global village. McGraw-Hill, 1968.

  Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, eds. Race after the Internet. Routledge, 2012.

  Norden, Eric. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan.” Playboy Magazine(1969).

  Saldanha, Arun. “Skin, affect, aggregation: Guattarian variations on Fanon.”Environment and planning. A 42, no. 10 (2010): 2410.

   

   

  Jade

  Feb 13, 2013

  blackness, digital, my work, panel

  drafts, talk, text

  * * *

• Defining the Human Through Media/Tech: A Letter to Fanon & McLuhan

  Any feedback, questions, comments are not expected (hi lonely blog), but would be greatly appreciated, as I still have more than a week before I need to submit and a little less than month before I present.

  I was invited to speak at a small graduate student colloquium to discuss my work.  The topic is defining the Human.  I was asked to speak of this in terms of how I am defining the Human through media.  There will be one other speaker speaking from a Media perspective and two others speaking of the Human through Rhetoric.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, and then, re-reading McLuhan amidst the forever reading I’m doing of Fanon it hit me.  I decided to write my thoughts out as a letter to both of them, as a performative exercise, using primarily the following two texts.

  Playboy Interview:

  http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/

  Fanon French Introduction:
  http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/fanon_franz/peau_noire_masques_blancs/peau_noire_masques_blancs_intro.html

  I assume a base knowledge of “The Medium is the Message“, and Fanon’s general arguments regarding the Human and the Black Man.  This is something I’ve explored previously in a graduate seminar.  You can find those thoughts here: http://jadedid.com/ancyhu/

  The Letter-First Draft

  Dear Frantz  & Marshall,

  Frantz, I’d like to start with you. You started Black Skin, White Masks, with “L’explosion n’aura pas lieu aujourd’hui. Il est trop tot…
  ou trop tard” (5).

  “Don’t expect to see any explosion today. It’s too early… or too late” (xi).

  It happened today. I exploded and built myself anew, just like you said I would. But Marshall, I couldn’t have done it without you. I know the two of you never officially met, however, you downloaded your consciousness into words on the page. I then proceeded to upload your data into my own data storage facility, and I am downloading it here now.

  Marshall, I think you said something along the lines of technology is the extension of the human in the Medium is the Massage, and black bodies are left outside of technology in the Playboy Interview. Frantz, you said the black man is not fully human in Black Skin, White Masks. I think that the black man/person being less than human is directly linked to their inability to be seen as connected to technology. What I mean to say is that, if it is true that what is human is determined by the negation of the black man, where man here means universal human body, Frantz, and media technologies are all just an extension of the human body, as you say Marshall, then it stands to reason that to understand the Human we must also understand the relationship between the black man and technology. In fact, if we look at technology as the extension of man, it seems we must begin to see slaves as the foundational technology of the west (especially the United States). If we do this, we begin to see how their bodies, and their humanness, were subsumed into a system of commerce so easily, like any other media technology. Rather than being human in and of themselves, as bodies of technology they increased the size, scale and pace of agriculture because they were the machines in the garden, that enabled the taming of the frontier as they extended the body of their mostly white slaveholders allow for work, holdings, time and capital to grow at a new pace and across more space. What tickles me about this is that both of you think an over extension of the body leads to psychosis. There is no difference between the two of you on this. The psychosis for both of you is predicated of on a loss of self in relation to the embodied body.

  The difference instead seems to be, if I am understanding you both correctly, that the causes and results of the manifestation of the psychosis differs from the white man to the black man. The black man’s psychosis is in the realization that he can never catch up to the white man in his quest for more and more technology even as the white man tells him that is what he needs to do. Even the rhetoric of the digital divide places him in this manner! The white man, as he increasingly goes out of his way to increase the distance between him and those bodies that are more rawly technological, ends up overextending himself to the point of losing sight of the actual body. In doing so he continues to remove the capability of seeing the Black man as human, even as he, the white man, longs to go back to an imagined before time where there was simply the Human. The anger from the side of the white man, then is that the black man is so much closer to a simpler less extended, less technologically mediated life. A second layer of anger comes from the imperative that all the media force the black man to adapt as though it were a compulsion. If we take a step towards media content we see that the aspirational messages aimed at the black man that come from places of political power (outside entertainment power) always tell the black man to do better, and reach higher, and achieve more. The way to do this? Try to be better than other black people, be like us and reach for the world of the white man.

  Obviously, this is a little bit crazy. Even if you aren’t black, I am sure you can understand how the contradicting messages from media content to media technology might lead to a psychosis brought on by no matter how hard a black person tries to reach the world of the white man, it can never be touched by his almost human hands.

  But, this is why I am writing both of you. I think both of you are hinting towards is a level of consciousness that is innate to humanity that the black man has better access to, but the message of mediation is that he is to be blinded to it and removed from it because to have the realization on a total scale would be an annihilation of the current social order.

  Marshall, you said,

  “The cultural aggression of white America against Negroes and Indians is not based on skin color and belief in racial superiority, whatever ideological clothing may be used to rationalize it, but on the white man’s inchoate awareness that the Negro and Indian — as men with deep roots in the resonating echo chamber of the discontinuous, interrelated tribal world — are actually psychically and socially superior to the fragmented, alienated and dissociated man of Western civilization,”

  Are you not speaking directly to Frantz? It is the mistake of the black man to not already realize he is the defining instances of humanness and humanity, for it is he who has access to the zone of non-being.

  Ah, I realize you, Frantz, must clarify this for me. You said,

  Dussé-je encourir le ressentiment de mes frères de couleur, je dirai que le Noir n’est pas un homme.
  Il y a une zone de non-être, une région extraordinairement stérile et aride, une rampe essentiellement dépouillée, d’où un authentique surgissement peut prendre naissance. Dans la majorité des cas, le Noir n’a pas le bénéfice de réaliser cette descente aux véritables Enfers.

  L’homme n’est pas seulement possibilité de reprise, de négation. S’il est vrai que la conscience est activité de transcendance, nous devons savoir aussi que cette transcendance est hantée par le problème de l’amour et de la compréhension. L’homme est un OUI vibrant aux harmonies cosmiques. Arraché, dispersé, confondu, condamné à voir se dissoudre les unes après les autres les vérités par lui élaborées, il doit cesser de projeter dans le monde une antinomie qui lui est coexistante (6).

  Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that the Black is not a man.
  There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, and incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.

  Man is not only the potential for self-consciousness or negation. If it be true that consciousness is transcendental, we must also realize that this transcendence is obsessed with the issue of love and understanding. Man is a “yes” resonating from cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, dispersed, dazed, and doomed to watch as the truths he has elaborated vanish one by one, he must stop projecting his antinomy into the world” (xii).

  While Frantz, you started with the Transcendental consciousness, Marshall, it is where you ended, your interview,

  “I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form.”

  Both of you see this movement towards the transcendental starting with the tribal, or black man. And both of you see the inevitable violence the path of technology leads us on if we continue to see certain as wretched and others as technologically superior, not as their ability to see themselves as technology, but because they are able to master, contain and control the messages of those mediums, and make them obsolete. (As an aside, if we see the black slave as pure technology, and technologies as building on top of each other making previous versions obsolete, the black man and the indian never had a chance.) When I read this line,
  The one inexorable consequence of any identity quest generated by environmental upheaval is tremendous violence. This violence has traditionally been directed at the tribal man who challenged visual-mechanical culture, as with the genocide against the Indian and the institutionalized dehumanization of the Negro.

  I wasn’t sure who I was reading until I reminded myself that Marshall, you were more interested in indians. Had it been you Frantz, I think you would have said Arab. Marshall, You spoke then, of the possibility of the negro being exterminated. As though you saw this on the horizon as well Frantz, you had already written a response:

  Je demande qu’on me considère à partir de mon Désir. Je ne suis pas seulement ici-maintenant, enfermé dans la choséité. Je suis pour ailleurs et pour autre chose. Je réclame qu’on tienne compte de mon activité négatrice en tant que je poursuis autre chose que la vie ; en tant que je lutte pour la naissance d’un monde humain, c’est-à-dire d’un monde de reconnaissances réciproques.
  Celui qui hésite à me reconnaître s’oppose à moi. Dans une lutte farouche, j’accepte de ressentir l’ébranlement de la mort, la dissolution irréversible, mais aussi la possibilité de l’impossibilité (177).

  I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognize me is against me. In a fierce struggle I am willing to feel the shudder of death, the irreversible extinction, but also the possibility of impossibility (193).

  Now, here I am thinking the three of us can push this a little bit further. If we acknowledge that the black body represents pure technology, as the slave, and technology is simply a way that we extend our own human bodies, and the medium that we use for this extension has its own message, then I think we can say the medium that represents humanity is the black man. Just as the lightbulb is pure information, to understand how we have come to define the human, especially as we try to understand the human through media technology, we must first understand the relation of humanity to the black body, the body that I think became a cyborg long ago.

  I think the next step for me is to expand this conversation and explore it through the role of black women specifically, looking specifically at societies current causes of psychosis, Digital Media.

  Sincerely,

  Jade

  Jade

  Jan 21, 2013

  my work, panel, reading

  blackness, body, Fanon, human, McLuhan, technology, thoughts, whiteness

  * * *

• DML 2011, Cool Stuff & My Stuff

  I totally survived.  In fact, I kind of sort of had an amazing time.  By far though, the most amazing for me thing was the Echo Park Film Center:

  http://www.echoparkfilmcenter.org

  I first saw them at the Mozilla Science Fair, on Thursday night, the night I arrived, and was exhausted (the super shuttle took 2 hours!!!).  I also presented at the Science Fair on Future class (more on that later), and was put next to this table with tons of DVDs, prop films, buttons, and two super charismatic guys (I wish I had taken a picture.  I’m sure someone did, and I’ll find them and add them later).

  Anyway, Out the Window consists of many film and media centers that are doing outreach to marginalized youth.  It gives them a space to create, express themselves, explore etc.  They brought a group of kids that had participated in the various programs to speak during their panel, well, really during the question and answer session.  They were AMAZING!!! All of them said that they were empowered, and all of them, without prompting, explained their experience as a chance ot think critically.  I LOVED it.  So I had to ask a question, that is related to my research interests of course.  I asked them if participating in these groups, and learning how to and actually creating these alternate narratives and representations of themselves and their neighborhoods and communities had changed how they view their communities, neighborhoods and how their role in them.  One kid stood up.  He was latino, tall, lanky with long hair and a red ski cap on.  His name was Walter.  Let me tell you, Walter blew us ALL away.

  He talked about how all the representations he’s ever seen were made by people who had the money to control all the messaging that gets out on a massive scale, and all that messaging made people like him and from his neighborhood seem bad, less than and not worthy.  But the project had allow him to see what he can do, and explore the rest of LA and see what it was like, and he was just like everyone.  His participation made him feel empowered, and let him think critically about the situation and it allows him to show it for what it was.. and you could just feel the love and empowerment and it was seriously, tears.  I talked to other people and they had the exact same experience.  Just phenomenal and mind blowing.

  The best part of all of this is of course that there is a big blue bus called the film mobile that has been gutted and turned in to a mobile cinema and production studio and it will be coming to North Carolina over the summer.  I am SOOOOO there.

  http://www.filmmobile.org

  Even cooler, I got a couple of the DVDs of things the kids have made and I’m planning on sharing them with some of my classes and of course, guarding them as the sacred items they are for years to come.

  Then there was the DML Showcase, which was amazing! I will have to write more about that later (probably with video), but it was soooo inspiring.

  On to what I did

  SCIENCE FAIR: Future Class

  So, there was a Mozilla Science fair at DML2011.  I exhibited as Future Class.  I had my drumbeat site up and explained that my role in the class was to see how digital media could be used in ethnographic projects.  The best comment was “isn’t that just a blog?” my response was of course, yes, and I explained that the purpose was to show a quick and easy way to create a discursive space where you field site can visibly say yay or nay to your observations. Even if it is just a blog, most people aren’t allowing for that type of exchange yet and blogs are easy and simple.

  I also had a very small activity.  I explained that future class was about thinking in the digital age and exploring what that means and what the challenges are in the university setting.  It was a project based tutorial for the most part, but we also had to determine what needed to be different than the traditional classroom experience.  I had tons of post its and pens and let people cover the table with words, sentences and paragraphs of what they needed to be changed.  Almost everything centered around assessment and community/engagement.  There were also quite a few on media.

  A Taste of Mozilla Drumbeat: Storming the Classroom Grading and Community

  The next thing I did was have a workshop session at the drumbeat workshopping session.  The purpose of this was to create a foundational idea of what we want grades to do so people could then move on to brainstorming tools and methods to get them to where they needed to be.  I had the smallest group but we had a wonderful time.  I brought a ton of markers and a roll of paper and we created a “cloud” of thoughts (there were 4 of us), first on what was bad about how grading currently works, then what was good about how grading currently worked and finally on what are wishless was for how grading should work in the future.  Everything ended up being that grading needs to be a community driven type of thing that allows for continuous feedback rather than relying on test that are incapable or measuring what people actually learn.  Oh, and collectives.  Classroom spaces need to be more community driven.  I think the paper we had ended up being at least 14 feet. We taped it up on the wall.  Even though we were few, we did something big, literally.

  PANEL: New Collectives HASTAC Scholars as a Case Study

  The last thing I did was a panel with Cathy Davidson, Fiona Barnett and Dixie Ching, on the HASTAC Scholars.  I showed a short film (final edited forth coming) and share a website: http://jadedid.com/dml2011

  The other three women on the panel? Simply amazing. I continue to be humbled to be sitting with these people.

  I also shared my big revelation from DML2011.

  ACADEMICS are just HACKERS and REMIXERS and FORKERS of KNOWLEDGE! By that I mean, what is a dissertation or a thesis other than taking the existing body of knowledges, mixing them, remixing them, forking them, modifying them, changing them, breaking them and coming up with something new and then publishing them?  We just do it on paper (and that is starting to change slowly but surely).

  I don’t know why it took me so long to come to that realization.  When I think about academic work like that though, it makes me super happy.

  So, all in all… wonderful amazing trip.  There are so many people out there doing amazing work, and being around them is simply inspring.  I’ve got to do more. I just have to.

   

  Jade

  Mar 6, 2011

  (un)conferences, digital, my work, panel

  (in)visibility, dml2011, drumbeat, lfw

  * * *

• What I’ve learned about New Collectives thus far

  I am preparing for a panel at DML2011: Designing Learning Futures that is a part of the new collectives track.  The panel is titled “Modeling a New Collective: HASTAC Scholars as Case Study”.  I will be sitting on it with four amazing women, Dixie Ching, Fiona Barnet, Cathy Davidson.   The idea for the panel is, it will not be a traditional panel where we present papers.  Instead, we all are going to represent different parts of what HASTAC is and does.  I am lucky in that I’ve gotten the best part, in my opinion. I will be on the panel representing the scholars.

  I have spent the past few weeks, speaking with, skypeing, emailing and getting video from various HASTAC scholars where they shared their thoughts on new collectives, being a part of HASTAC and how they see digital media and learning being beneficial in higher ed.  I’ve also spent some time talking to people outside of HASTAC to get their thoughts on New Collectives.  As a result of this, I have come to a preliminary hypothesis regarding what it takes to make new collectives successful:

  goals, community, freedom, openness & action tends to = success

  Almost everyone I’ve spoken to is tired of just talking about great ideas.  They want a space where they can vet their ideas, get feedback, get other people interested in the same thing and take those ideas to the next step.  They want a space with clear and realistic goals or purposes.  They want a place where, despite the set goals, they have the freedom to try other things within the group (playing).  And finally, they want to know (not just meet) who is in the collective and what they are doing so they can find ways to work together.  So far, all the successful collectives people have mentioned had these things in common.  These are also the things that people tend to start discussing without prompting.

  Over the next few days I will be curating all the information/media I’ve gathered and preparing something to show at DML2011 so people can “meet” the scholars.  Once the panel finally happens, it will be open to all the HASTAC scholars via chat and twitter.  The hope and goal of this little panel collective, as I understand it, is to have an unpanel, where people in the actual and virtual audience are encouraged to join the discussion and help guide where the panel goes.  So far, based on what people have contributed, I think it is going to go somewhere wonderful.

  Jade

  Feb 26, 2011

  my work, panel

  dml2011, hastac, lfw

  * * *