Ken Hirschkop questions whether poststructuralism andself-referentiality offer workable alternatives to the military ‘WorldTarget’ that, according to Rey Chow, provides the framework forknowledge production in Departments of Comparative Literary Studies.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive)
Thomas Cohen on ecotourism in Bolivia and discovering the post-humans of the past.
What does it mean to tour, today, the outer reaches of the empire - which is an unnamed empire (America will not do, nor the West, and so on - as if some programming encompasses, now, this series of terms and its one-time others) legislating time and fashion as well as economy? When we go, say, as pleasuring witnesses to whatever still bears the trace of a certain otherness: a cultural imprint (Andean natives), the laws of a climate (tundra), a history so marked by recent disfiguration that we, today, seem to find comfort in the commodity of a readable catastrophe. Unlike several decades if not years ago (but what, now, is a “year”?), it is so easy to travel, to transfer oneself for brief episodes to distant points - which, in turn, appear woven, then, more firmly, as the mock-aura of a frontier of any sort recedes. What does it mean to write travel, today - and is not every genre of such invoked, every narrative twitch (anecdote, observation, description, rumination) mobilized, as obstacle, at the first rustling of intent?
Although human interaction with technological artifacts often involves treating them as if they are alive, the dominant discourse in our society portrays technology as the instrument of its human master. In the context of computing, our desire of absolute control over machines manifests itself both as the human computer interaction (HCI) community’s emphasis on “usability” and as popular culture’s apocalyptic imagination of the out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) systems trying to eliminate humanity. It is revealing that, for instance, the word “robot” comes from “slave” in Czech. This paper examines the social and aesthetic limitations of this narrow instrumental view of technology. It proposes an alternative interaction model based on machine subjectivity, that is, constructing and perceiving computer systems as an independent entity in its own right.
Based on Heidegger’s theory of the “enframing” nature of modern technology (Heidegger, 1977), and experiments of modern dance (Copeland, 2004), this paper argues that perceptual and sensory habits, including our interaction with computing artifacts, are political. Both the prevailing human-leader-computer-follower interaction model and the apocalyptic literary imagination are limited by and reinforce the discourse of hierarchical control and power relationship in broader social contexts. Machine subjectivity, on the other hand, offers a playground for exploring alternative relationships between human and “the other” (i.e., computer) and consequentially provides insights to new social orders, such as the ones based on “multi-dominance” (Lewis, 2000).
In addition to political commentaries, machine subjectivity also affords novel aesthetic and meaningful interactive experiences. This paper examines the manifestation of machine subjectivity in a range of cultural artifacts in electronic literature, music, dance and visual arts, and highlights the novel aesthetics and expressions afforded by allowing computers to act independently.
Finally, the paper discusses our text-based interactive narrative system Memory, Reverie Machine. The system algorithmically generates stories about a robot character, who is controlled jointly by the user and the AI system. The tension between user and machine subjectivity, foregrounded in the struggle to gain control over the main character, is used to explore themes such as agency, resistance, and dis/empowerment.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
We see before us a turning in free culture. This turning, lies between the claims of the ordinary against those of the extraordinary, and suggests that we need to carefully examine our current situation. The ordinary highlights the fact that even in the beginnings of free culture there existed its middle and its end, that its past invaded its present, and even the most extreme attention to the present is invaded by a concern for the future. Whereas the extraordinary highlights the possibility of thinking that brings us out of this life-world and instead opens out and unfolds the way in which we might reveal a different world. This world could be said to be both within capitalism and between capitalisms. Here we might think about the transformation of the economic base from an industrial fordist form of capitalism, to an economy founded on the valorisation of information and code, a postfordist capitalism. Free culture, then, could be said to lie in the interstices, and in so doing could be a rare chance to help to point the way from the lived to the desired.
In this short paper I attempt to follow Heidegger (2000) in suggesting that the work of a philosophy of free culture is to awaken us and undo what we take to be the ordinary; looking beyond what I shall call the ontic to uncover the ontological (Heidegger 2000c: 28-35). In this respect we should look to free culture to allow us to think and act in an untimely manner, that is, to suggest alternative political imaginaries and ideas. For this then, I outline what I think are the ontological possibilities of free culture and defend them against being subsumed under more explicitly ontic struggles, such as copyright reform. That is not to say that the ontic can have no value whatsoever, indeed through its position within an easily graspable dimension of the political/technical the direct struggles over IPR, for example, could mitigate some of the worst effects of an expansion of capital or of an instrumental reason immanent to the ontology of a technological culture. However, to look to a more primordial level, the ontological, we might find in free culture alternative possibilities available where we might develop free relations with our technologies and hence new ways of being-in-the-world.