Here is a copy of my thesis paper I wrote as an undergraduate of Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago, which I had the pleasure of presenting at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008.
CapII
Jafaar Akisikas
On Emergent Techno-Subjectivities:
Convergent/Fragmented Identities in the Era of Globalization
Felicia Caro
Abstract:
This project is fundamentally about some of the processes of identity formation and subjectivity constitution in the era of globalization. It is also a critique of Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, a critique which argues for another type of subject(ivity), a (post)-cold war subject(ivity), or what Caro calls—for lack of a better word—“the techno-subject.” Haraway’s cyborg theory, Caro argues, tends to overlook the importance of history and historical context. By engaging the texts of science fiction writer William Gibson, Caro maps out a new type of globalized individual-subject that is symptomatic of (post)-cold war politics. This new subject encounters—and has to live with—three kinds of crises: a crisis of history; a crisis of identity, and, finally, a crisis of community.
Introduction
In our capitalist era, society homogenizes into an increasingly globalized world. Although nationalism still plays an important role for many social groups, there are today emergent subjectivities where nationalist ideologies are no longer central in the development of social consciousness. This poses problems for many individuals concerning their identity. At the same time, late capitalist cultural production continues at an alarming rate. The development of new technologies, such as the television, the internet, and cinema, just to name a few, has immersed many individuals with an infinite array of commodities and narratives to consume from all over the world. As the idea of community becomes increasingly complex, if not problematic, basic questions such as who am I, where do I belong, what am I supposed to do, what can I do, am I normal, am I insane become extremely complicated components in the development of political agency. In order to challenge and overcome these questions, new subjectivities emerge. Factors such as colonialism, imperialism and capitalism have all acted as catalysts for the development of these new emergent subjectivities, which might be called, in a word, the technosubject. To be clear, the technosubject, used in the singular, refers to a plurality of subjectivities located within the global society as well as within an individual. The technosubject emerges as those subjectivities that begin to define themselves by the ever-changing and fluid materiality of their environment. The most stable materiality in today’s globalized society is the technological. The technological here refers to the industrial environment of the 21st century. This essay studies three crises of the technosubject: 1) a historical crisis, 2) an identity crisis, and 3) a crisis of community (specifically in urban landscapes).
- On the Historical Crisis: The decline of the modernist narrative, i.e. the decline of linear and/or chronological history, is the problem that the technosubject must come to terms with as he or she is relocated into another new geographies and cultural contexts. According to Jean-François Lyotard:
“the grand narrative has lost its credibility… the decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism… a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative…” (quoted in Easthope and McGowan, 211)
Explicitly stated, Lyotard perhaps is directly referring to to specific capitalist techniques and technologies, for example, the U.S. Open Door policy, and warfare technologies, like the atom bomb, which have drastically changed the social and biological atmosphere of our world – a world which for many, is still in an early stage of development – a world fragmented, chaotic, and unstable.
- On the Identity Crisis: In order to understand how people handle and manage entering a world such as this, mapping out an emotional affects of the present, rather than a moral politics of a past history, is crucial. Technosubjectivities are those who realize that they are immersed in a world constructed by a pluralistic history - today this is a history usually denoting war (in all its diverse geographies), economic strife, and power struggles between nations. Upon this realization, technosubjectivies begin to feel a crisis of identity – of cultural displacement. During periods of cultural displacement, the technosubject experiences a fluctuation of emotions that range from a calm and peaceful, and nostalgic outlook to a chaotic and paranoiac inner struggle.
- On the Community Crisis: As technosubjectivities undergo this fluctuation and try to stabilize themselves as well as their new urban surroundings, technological habitats, and industrial environments, many begin to construct spaces and places for collectivity and community. The technosubject does not, or cannot, use an ideology of nationalism or an explicit political ideology, precisely because the technosubject, as a product of globalization, is inherently a cross-cultural and cross-historical social being. Today, there are many articulations of globalization. Some see it as a problematic loss of traditional and authentic cultures, and others see it as a step in the right direction for a better, more progressive society. Although both of these articulations are valid, the task here is to provide an exploration and overview of the abstract imagined communities and collective spaces and places produced, and ironically, made somewhat invisible by processes of globalization. In the words of Ross King:
“do not expect the explosions of creativity, new worlds and a better space of everyday life to be laid out neatly, clearly and there for the taking… Rather the ideas, ideals, and logic of the reader [or audience] are also to enter into the equation, to be set against the conflicts and abrasions paraded in the arguments that follow…” (quoted in Bull, Boontharm, Parin, Radovic, and Tapie, xxiv)
This project explores the three cultural symptoms presented above in hopes to explore the difficult and traumatic experience of a seemingly materialist homogenizing culture, as well as the transformative power of diversity within the advanced industrial societies today. The theory of the technosubject presented here is an attempt to shed light on the global individual, perhaps to understand psychological context, but moreso to provide new cultural perspectives concerning the ever-constant process of globalization in the 21st century.
Part I
On the Historical Crisis
The current rhetoric and discourse about the apocalypse and the upcoming year 2012 is a good example of the historical nostalgia as well as paranoia of the masses in the 21st century. In these rhetoric and discourses, ancient Mayan culture is romanticized for its mysticism – many popular texts revere the ancient culture of Maya because of its age-old texts that supposedly contain predictions of the future. This is historical nostalgia. At the same time, many popular texts turn the idea of the apocalypse into a paranoiac expression of the explosive boundaries between the past, present, and future. This apocalyptic rhetoric seems to reveal the sentiments and desires of the masses in the face of globalization. Today, the boundaries past, present, and future are indeed blurred, as will be shown in the paragraphs that follow. Apocalyptic rhetoric includes the two radical extremes of experience: first there is this idea of transcendence and the development of a higher consciousness. On the other hand, the discourses around the apocalypse also signify the paranoiac expressions of “the end of the world”. People have their own theories on what these expressions mean. Whatever the case, there is an obvious desire to romanticize, investigate, or generally, clarify a certain type of dense psychological confusion, mystique, and ambiguity regarding society and culture in the 21st century. Perhaps the masses have just begun to understand what seemingly looks like the end of history – when a subject enters a global situation where clear definitions of national and political ideology are no longer taken for granted. Definitions of nation and ideology are complex, dense, and blurred. This is a moment of historical crisis.
Critical science and technology studies scholars and new scientific methodologies have studied subjectivities such as this already. Donna Haraway’s work stands out here. In A Cyborg Manifesto, she writes:
It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revived in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics… one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints (quoted in Bell and Kennedy, 301).
What Haraway is referring to is the destruction of the idea of an immortal symbol of an original unity. Whether this symbol is theological or mythological is not important here. What is of importance is the fact that Haraway begins to describe a new model by which to understand the new human experiences and the human in general – a model based on, in her words, “a polymorphous, information system” (pp. 300). Urging readers to think in terms of “design boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, and costs of lowering constraints” Haraway’s theory of the cyborg provides a good theoretical foundation for explaining emergent technosubjectivities. Here it is possible to pinpoint a particular history or particular histories suitable for analysis. Where Haraway sees the cyborg as a human realization that does not “want any more natural matrix of unity [where] no construction is whole”, the technosubject understands historical unity as an already partial abstract construction. This essay pinpoints historicity as an important factor that manifests as technosubjectivity constituted in/by of Cold War Era. Further, like the cyborg, the technosubject is not defined by a single gender, race, or class, but by an “affinity”; it is a collective community of “convergent interests” (quoted in Bell and Kennedy, 296). Thus, the technosubject signifies the globalized individual subject. Since the two World Wars and the Cold War that followed, the developments of new social worlds have begun to take a more definite form with the help of new technologies and scientific techniques.
Nigel Thrift, writing about the telecommunications satellite, remarks:
The satellite is itself a sign of a world whose economies, societies, and cultures are becoming ever more closely intertwined – a process which usually goes under the name globalization. But what sense can we make of this process of globalization? Again, the satellite provides some clues. Those millions of messages signify a fundamental problem of representation. Simply put, the world is becoming so complexly interconnected that some have begun to doubt its very legibility. The swash of money capital registering in the circuits of the satellite comes to signify the ‘hypermobility’ of a new space of flows… Finally, the shrinking world that innovations like the satellite have helped to bring about is signified by the time-space compression. Places are moving closer together in electronic space and, because of transport innovations, in physical space too (quoted Beynon and Dunkerley, 41).
Besides the satellite as a metaphor, new media technologies such as the television, the internet, and cinema are all part of what Nigel Thrift calls a “space-time compression”. It is now harder than ever to define oneself by the grounded geography of culture in advanced societies. This does not mean that all cultures of are a part of this system – many people still feel a deep connection to their country or ideology or people of origin – in other words, their national, traditional, or biological identities. However, in today’s globalized society, technosubjectivities, in an attempt to develop a coherent national, traditional, and biological identity, find themselves in a “placeless geography of image and simulation” (quoted in Beynon and Dunkerley, 80). When one’s culture begins to become increasingly immersed in media and technology, there is a phenomenon of feeling “placeless” – a situation in which the subject realizes that there is precisely no point of origin to return to as a reference for identity formation, or in the development of social consciousness. Thus, this is a moment of historical crisis.
A good picture of this phenomenon can be found in popular culture. Like the apocalyptic rhetoric described earlier, the genre of science fiction also plays the role as the social commentator concerning these ideas. The work of contemporary science fiction writer William Gibson seems to best articulate the cultural context of technosubjectivity.
Machine dreams, memory loss, cyberspace, psychosexual paranoia, artificial intelligence, and infinite synæsthetic dimensions create the fantastical world of William Gibson’s science fiction. These environments do not stray too far from reality in that they very much reflect the nature of today’s advanced industrial societies. Writing in 1965, Charles O. Lerche notes:
… probably the most important single contribution of the war years to the era of the cold war was the technological genie who had slipped out of the bottle during the war and who obstinately refused to go back in again when the fighting ended (4).
What is this ‘technological genie’? Well, for one, it refers to the Space Age and the development of Russia’s and the United States’ burgeoning technologies. The most important developments, in my view, are: 1) Sputnik, the first man-made artifice, a satellite, launched into outer space 2) The atom bomb, and 3) the internet. But these ‘technological genies’ also refer to the living realities of emergent technosubjectivities.
Gibson’s first full sci-fi novel Neuromancer was published in 1984, almost forty years after the Cold War made history books. His novels can be seen as an exploitation of the paranoia and desires of the masses in lieu of socio-political conflict that has escalated up until present day. In Neuromancer, the only escape from socio-political conflict is a space Gibson names cyberspace. Gibson describes as the main character Case enters this realm:
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information… the unfolding of his distanceless home his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond… (52)
In this text, nostalgia is abstracted completely - nostalgia is reconstituted as a technological referent. The ancient image of a mandala is a reconstituted as an apparatus of visual information, a graphic representation. The ancient image of a pyramid is seen as a space “burning beyond the green cubes of … the Bank of America.” This text is an example of the nostalgic romanticization of ancient artifacts in an attempt to find history away from the industrial, globalized society. This type of narrative is also seen in the SF film Stargate (1994).The film starts off in the modern world. Members of the military attempt to scientifically figure out how to access the code of a magical time portal named Stargate. This magical time portal, once it is figured out, leads them into an ancient Eastern land that, to their delight, is completely untouched. The magical time portal functions in a similar way that the images of the mandala and the pyramid in Gibson’s text do. Not only do these narratives express Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, where the East is romanticized, exoticized, and seen as an unchanging culture in the eyes of Western ideology. These narratives are examples of the language of globalization and can be interpreted as expressions of a historical crisis. It is a reflection on a globalized world constructed by images which are random, hypnotic and cinematic.
This type of phenomena can be analyzed in the case of the globalized Philippines. For example, many popular American songs, such as the songs of Kenny Rogers, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, the Lennon Sisters, The Beatles, Aerosmith, Simon and Garfunkel – practically anything that has once been a hit single in the U.S., are much more popular for longer periods of time in the Philippines. The television, radio, cinema, the internet, practically any technological item, are huge factors in the development of social agency. Most of the narrative shown in the media either come directly from America’s past or reflect it in some way. It is truly a postmodern society. Frederic Jameson says this phenomenon is “nostalgia for the present” since Filipinos “look back towards a world they have never lost” (quoted in Beynon and Dunkerley, 94). In the words of Appadurai:
…the uncanny Philippine affinity for American popular music is rich testimony to the global culture of the hyper-real, for somehow Philippine renditions of American popular songs are both more widespread in the Philippines, and more disturbingly faithful to their originals, than they are in the U.S. today. An entire nation seems to have learned to mimic Kenny Rogers and the Lennon sisters, like a vast Asian Motown chorus. But Americanization is certainly a pallid term to apply to such a situation, for not only are there more Filipinos singing perfect rendition of some American songs (often from the American past) than there are Americans doing so, there is also, of course, the fact that the rest of their lives is not in complete synchrony with the referential world that first gave birth to these songs… This is one of the central ironies of the politics of global cultural flows, especially in the arena of entertainment and leisure…(quoted in Beynon and Dunkerley, 94).
This is truly a space that is somewhere beyond or in-between national identity and political ideology. Filipino entertainment culture, in appropriation of American culture, begins to develop, as Appadurai notes, a hyper-real space. Filipino culture appropriates American culture from the media, yet cannot refer back to this culture anywhere in “real” space. Images of identity are constructed by technologically mediated manifestations which Filipinos consumed. In many instances, Filipino memory is not based off of actual lived experiences, but instead is the creation of memories taken from popular American culture that are then experienced as a type of historical memory that usually appears in the form of entertainment. These narratives are then imagined in a completely different context – socially and geographically.
For example, the popular Filipina singer Regine Velesquez, is a prominent figure in Filipino cultural history. Just as many of her songs are sung in tagalong (the main dialect of the Philippines) as they are sung in English. Therefore almost half of her songs are appropriated from American pop culture. As soon as an American pop song becomes big in the Philippines – interestingly, these songs are many times written by the Disney Corporation and taken from teen celebrity culture (i.e. Mandy Moore, Mariah Carey, etc), she produces a remake of it. There are whole hour length television programmes which feature her song performances in various venues. Regine Velasquez can be seen as an image of the hyper-real in that she develops a type of cultural identity which is neither rooted in American culture nor Filipino culture, but is a type of nostalgic hybrid of the two.
In cinema, the recent American blockbuster Twilight (2008) has already been transformed into a Filipino TV show, borrowing the same exact plot. All that is changed is the geographical location and ethnic “face”:
These are examples of a historical crisis because, on the level of the nation, Filipinos cannot define themselves as Filipinos culturally – their lives overflow with European and American media culture. At the same time they cannot be considered Americanized because ideologically they are radically transforming the concept of America itself by creating a hybrid, or a third space that mixes Filipino life, along with its traditions, with Western popular culture.
William Gibson’s novels shed light on this type of historical crisis. In Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) globalization is described as a “vast generic tumble”. The character Kumiko, a young girl native to Tokyo, is reinstated in London for unknown reasons. The clearest reason Gibson provides for her move is her father’s ambiguous “secret business trip”.
Gibson describes her condition as she explores London:
she looked out on a city that was neither Tokyo nor London, a vast generic tumble that was her century’s paradigm of urban reality … these structures revealed … the fabric of time, each wall patched by generations of hands in an ongoing task of restoration (161)
Places are constantly described as such by Kumiko - as neither here nor there, but instead as metaphorical reconfigurations as something intangible, such as “the fabric of time”. Kumiko’s inability to contextualize the surroundings in which she is a part suggests a certain initial desire to create utopia in the face of a historical crisis. Gibson’s particular description of utopia seems to alter empirical reality through massive conceptual metaphors. Kumiko can be prescribed by a certain kind of culture shock, but the inability to wrap her mind around the world through objective reasoning is paramount to understanding emergent technosubjectivites:
History had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by the government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire (5)
Here, we can see Kumiko connect history to architecture to corporate enterprise and biology, but the problem is that she cannot gather a stable context for these disciplinary abstractions. Gibson’s phrase “as if the city were… uncounted strata of message and meaning” describes a certain reaction to the overwhelming sense of information overload within a subject’s entry into a completely new world. In this new world, the subject literally sees every object in its infinite proportions. Seeing the world in its infinite proportions means the inability to grasp the inherent meaning or fundamental structure of any context – i.e. a historical crisis. Many times the only way to cope with this, such as in the case of Kumiko, is through strategic abstraction.
Part II
On the Identity Crisis
In almost all of his novels, Gibson’s characters represent a type of globalized or global citizen juxtaposed with robots, artificial intelligences, and technological landscapes. Gibson suggests the futuristic fantastical end: the human-machine. The human-machine is a representation of that historical trauma and cultural dislocation produced, generally, by capitalist materialism and communist hegemony. The human-machine might be said to represent the biological and political systems of labor in our society today. These systems now have materialized in society’s most advanced locales as industrial cities and urban landscapes. As the technosubject realizes that all worldly materials, technology, economic and social factors connote signs of capitalism, imperialism, biopolitics, and industry – infinite subjectivities are awakened. Gibson’s text also describes this particular state of the technosubject as like waking up from a nightmare. How does the technosubject cope with this kind of physical reaction to the world?
Looking at the initial reactions of U.S. immigrants who have situated themselves directly in cityscapes might help give us a better understanding of these expressions. Because immigrants mark the move of a person or people to a “new” space of culture and history, their expressions will provide good examples of how partial histories constitute many technosubjectivities. That is not to say that only U.S. immigrants that go through this process. But these examples can provide a picture of how technosubjectivity functions in a globalized world. The following excerpts are from a book titled First Generation: In the Words of 20th Century American Immigrants published in 1992:
…my immigration was very hard. I had so many times crying. That was really a terrible time. I saw so many movie. I saw cars… I can drive. I can watch TV, everything… I used to be with a lot of friends, but now I am alone always. I didn’t know what I am searching. I used a lot of philosophy book, but I can’t find any answers (pp. 201-202)
- Li Kee Chuck, immigrant from Seoul, Korea. He came to the U.S. in 1973
As an adolescent trying to choose what was right from which culture – it wasn’t just growing up and trying to choose what’s right and wrong. Here you’re choosing what’s right in which culture and what’s wrong in which culture. It was always a struggle… I don’t know. They’re all questions I’m still trying to figure out (pp. 243)
-Mai Lin and her family emigrated to the U.S. in 1977 from China
The most vivid thing I remember… was a hurting feeling. I knew something was happening, but I didn’t exactly know what… that night we drove from New York to Waltham. The surroundings were different. I don’t think I was impressed because I sensed something was missing… It’s quite an experience; it’s been good and bad. As a human being I’ve grown from it because I’ve seen two cultures, two different ways of looking at life and death, the whole process of living. I’ve been able to pick up a philosophy of my own about certain things. It’s really nice to be able to speak two languages, how can you turn your back on what you are? (pp.168-169)
-Pasqualina is an Italian-American who moved to the U.S. in the 1960s, when she was five years old
The historical crisis is clear. There is a strong voice of searching, not finding answers, a struggle, a figuring out, pain, and developing a sense of conceptual depth. Because these sentiments reflect the affectual symptoms of the post WWII and Cold War era, it is obvious that these technosubjects attempt to socially reconcile a present situation of conflicting histories, cultures, and political systems that have so little conceptual unity. Again, unlike Haraway’s cyborgs, these technosubjectivities must be placed in the context of history. Rather than a fetishized universal, organic, or feminine cybernetic whole, technosubjectivies do not provide expressions of a self-contained nature at all, either organic or technological, precisely because technosubjectivies must first constantly affirm their self-identity through a personal history. This leads to expressions of the self which take the form of conceptual abstraction. Li began to search philosophical texts for “answers”, Mai went on to higher education in biomedical engineering, and Pasqualina developed her own philosophy based on cultural duality.
In his essay titled Changed Identities: A Racial Portrait of Two Extended Families, Puerto Rican scholar Gabriel Haslip-Viera describes the unreliability of racial classifications. His story provides an example of how technosubjectivities can be embodiments of a number of subjectivities. He essay explains how he and different members of his family, each individual in different instances and contexts, has been marked in various and contradictory racial categories. For example, on his grandfather’s marriage certificate from Puerto Rico he was marked as “colored”. Then in the US Census he was marked “Negro”. On his Alien ID Card from New York he was marked black. On his military draft card given in New York he was marked white. In another US Census, he was marked white. For his US Certificate of Naturalization, he was marked white with dark complexion. For his US passport application, he was marked yellow in complexion. In another US census, he was marked Negro. In another military draft, he was marked white with dark complexion. Gabriel Haslip-Viera’s grandmother experienced the same range of racial categorization plus one – Spanish. He himself experienced these contradictory markings of race and in his essay, comments that it “means that I can identify in various ways depending on the context or situation” (46). This idea is progressive in today’s social world, a world that works usually works from reductive binary structures. This is a situation beyond “black” and “white”, metaphorically and literally. Haslip-Viera writes on:
I have continued to articulate a mixed race identity, although like most of my immediate friends and professional colleagues, I have also adopted the position that race has no scientific validity, that race is socially constructed, and that claims for a significant Amerindian background for Caribbean Latinos has little or no basis in the scientific and historical evidence (46).
Again the historical crisis is clear. For Haslip-Viera it is also a scientific crisis. Technosubjectivies undergo a situation similar to this. In our late capitalist era, an infinite amount of cultural narratives are imposed on subjects. When the subject cannot even grasp a solid and singular foundation for a historical and scientific identity, due to situations such as Li Kee Chuck’s, Mai Lin’s, Pasqualina’s, and Gabriel Haslip-Viera’s - the subject becomes hyper-aware of his or her surroundings. Here we can refer back to Gibson’s line, “like waking up from a nightmare”. Reality ceases to be a matter of ideology or a matter or nationality. It goes beyond wearing one set of perceptive eyeglasses. Reality is shattered – perhaps it becomes too real. Reality becomes a construction – and moreover, a continually changing construction – where different contexts shape who you are, how you act, and even how you materialize, as shown in Gabriel Haslip-Viera’s case.
He writes:
Having listed all of these somewhat different and even problematic identities, the reader might ask which one is preferable, or which one I would choose. In a society that to some degree permits self-identification, ‘ideological code-switching,’ silence and denial, and ‘strategic ambiguity,’ and rejecting all concepts of race as biologically and socially bogus, I would privilege none of these identities. However, we in fact live in a race conscious environment and not in an ideal world. Therefore, in a society where one has to play the game of race with some frequency, and given the presumptions and misinformation that permeate this issue, I can still articulate all of these identities, some of them, or none of them, with complete confidence and comfort depending on context and situation (47)
Immigrants such as Haslip-Viera provide a good example of technosubjectivity in that they mark a historical point of departure – a point at which subjects begin to move through contexts geographically, socially, and culturally. Their voices express personal expression in the voice of abstraction.
The processes of globalization, which shatter the cultural reality of the technosubject, at the same time urge the technosubject to create and innovate new ways of approaching and reapproaching the world, a world which for the first time, is seen as driven by capitalism and industry. Before the technosubject can learn to approach the world, several processes occur. In the words of Franz Fanon:
The technical instrument, the new scientific acquisitions, when they contain a sufficient charge to threaten a given feature of the native society, is never perceived in themselves, in calm objectivity (73).
The same can be said of the technosubject, but rather than representing native society, the technosubject represents the global society. When this global individual encounters industrial society – technology and industry is not initially seen in a ‘calm objectivity’ but instead it is seen as a force that threatens it – both its reality and its individuality. As technosubjectivities begin to understand the context for its shifting world, there begins a long process of reshaping and recreating meaning and identity.
Interestingly, today about a third of U.S. Nobel laureates in the sciences have been immigrants, covering all sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In my view, as many of these immigrants cope with difficult historical and cultural crisis, a deep affinity for these disciplines can develop. I do not want to reduce technosubjectivities to only U.S. immigrants, but immigrant voices today are making their mark, especially in disciplines that deal with abstract systems of thought.
Donna Haraway might argue that this type of rhetoric, the rhetoric of continuous illusion and abstraction in the realm of knowledge, falls under her “informatics of domination” (pp. 300). She writes:
I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system – from all work to all play (pp. 300)
Haraway describes a context of transition: a transitional period moving from an organic society to an information society. This is the same context for technosubjectivites. Modern to postmodern, the World War Years to the Cold War Years, the natural to the technological – Haraway is referring to all of these transitions. She makes a chart that shows how systems of thought are changing: for example: organic divisions of labor vs. cybernetics of labor, reproduction vs. replication, racial chain of being vs. United Nations humanism, nature and evolutionary inertia vs. fields of difference, physiology vs. communications engineering… and the list goes on (quoted in Bell and Kennedy, 300-301). This is, in her view, a society that goes from all work to all play - a transition she labels the “informatics of domination”. Perhaps for the cyborg the social world becomes all play. The technosubject intervenes here. The moment of historical crisis becomes extremely important - personal histories are taken very seriously on an individual level. Regarding one’s personal history is a way to gain a fluid political autonomy. Haraway states:
…a Chicana, or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano… unlike the ‘woman’ of the white women’s movement in the U.S., there is no naturalization of the matrix” (quoted in Bell and Kennedy, 296).
This is again where the technosubject intervenes: In the moment of the identity crisis, speaking is no longer about identification as a social persona, speaking is no longer identification with a specified social project – therefore naturalization does occur, it is inherent in history itself.
Gibson’s novels can help shed like on these type of abstract identities that feel a deep connection to personal history. Like a good majority of SF, his narratives are part mythological parody – he describes the traditional story of the epic and tragic character, most often defined by their political nihilism. These characters speak volumes in the 21st century.
For example, Kumiko, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, becomes fascinated with ghosts and spirits, but cannot express herself in the social scientific world which dismisses these ideas. According to Bhabha’s description of the post-colonial subject, when the subject is culturally displaced, “the borders between home and the world become confused” (13). This is the same case within the concept of “culture shock” and can be mapped on to emergent technosubjectivities as well. Kumiko constantly thinks about her past experiences, most of which involve interactions with the spirit-world. This can be read as the initial attempt for globalized individual to come to terms with the loss of solid cultural identity. The global individual, looking for a way to appease the very real clashing and contradictory nature of political reality, must reconfigure his or her environment in one way or another. For Kumiko, spirituality and the construction of the spirit-world gives her a sense of ‘home’ and peace in a chaotic political environment. In other words, Kumiko’s spirituality is constructed as an attempt to appease the chaotic reality she finds herself in. the Kumiko’s thoughts of her past go back to her ancient Japanese history – she begins to make connects between this ancient world and the new global world she lives in through as many visual and acoustic signs possible – the identity crisis returns to a historic nostalgia. In one scene, she is listening to her caretaker, named Sally, talk to her business partner. As she listens to them converse, she can only think of her past:
As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history… she felt herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen in a traditional romantic video… While she found Sally’s matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn’t know, it was easy to imagine her… winning victories expected of bishonen… But no – it was a mistake to cast this woman in Japanese terms. There were no ronin, no wandering samurai; Sally [was just] talking business (168).
Again, technosubjectivity is explored by reflections of a historical crisis resulting in nostalgia and disillusionment. However, as the novel progresses, Kumiko’s fascination with the spirit world wanes as she grows accustomed to the world of technology. At first, technology almost can be said to threaten the reality of her spirituality. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, the “real” space between Kumiko and society is filled by one friend. Her friend is a small technological contraption that, at her command, will display a hologram of itself that talks and speaks to her intelligently. This contraption even has a name; Colin. The more and more Kumiko thinks about her holographic friend, the more she becomes confused about her own memories. In a scene where Kumiko’s paranoia reaches its peak, her A.I. friend says:
I’ve remembered what I am. Found the bits they’ve tucked away in slots for Shakespeare and Thackeray and Blake. I’ve been modified to advise and protect Kumiko in situations rather more drastic than any envisioned by my original designers (267)
Colin’s remembrance of who he is has an uncanny similarity to imperialist discourse. Colin can be read as a signifier of imperialist discourse, where the colonizer is reinstated as technology, or, in Kumiko’s case, a technological holographic contraption which aims to improve, in Gibson’s words to “advise and protect” the subject. However, imperialist discourse is not looked at here as an evil force – it instead seen as a catalyst for certain psychological and physical conditions that arise within the technosubject – namely a conscious awareness of difference, of something other than itself.
In many science fiction works, the ruling class is often seen as a technological apparatus. The film Stargate (1994) is another expresses this as well. As explained previously, the film starts off in the modern world. When members of the obviously Western military figure out how to access the code of the magical time portal named Stargate, they are led into an ancient Eastern land that, to their delight, is completely untouched. Here, the military, or the colonizers, come into contact with native people. Throughout the film, the natives are fascinated by the colonizers. Curiosity and inquisitiveness takes over the natives as they come face to face with the military and their technology, such as their firearms, and even their attire and formalities. It is almost as if the natives had discovered the colonizers, rather than the other way around. By the end of the movie, the members of the military, with the help of natives, kill the corrupt spiritual leader of the land. The military colonizers then lead the natives to salvation in the modern world. This story no doubt has an infinite amount of contradictions and painful repercussions in the real world. Before I delve into an exploration of the problems that arise from these narratives, it is important to look at these stories, both Stargate and Kumiko’s, as expressions of the desire for a technosubject to relate to and even construct technology as a sign of some different identity. In this case, the colonizer IS the futuristic fantastical end – the colonizer is the human-machine. This technological other is romanticized, or objectified, if you like, in an attempt to reaffirm and recreate cultural and historical meaning for the subject.
This is a phenomena probably best described by Gilles DeLeuze:
It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening up to the multiplicities everywhere within them.
And so, technosubjectivities are those who encourage a change from common ideologies to more abstract systems of consciousness.
Part III
On the Crisis of Community
During the process of globalization, as we have seen, there are two moments. One moment is that of the historical crisis, and the other is the moment of the identity crisis. Post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha’s idea of the ‘worlding’ of literature is described by Bhabha as an “in-between reality” that “inhabits a stillness of time”. In his words, there is “terrain of world literature” that “provides a narrative with a double edge” (19). William Gibson’s texts describe this type of narrative with a double edge.
Gibson’s texts are representative of the technological geography within advanced industrial societies. Gibson’s novels, like a good majority of SF, is part mythological parody – he describes the traditional story of the epic and tragic character, most often defined by their political nihilism. These characters speak volumes in the 21st century precisely because the technological and urban contexts described in his work indicate the political edge of global society. Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard has written about this as certain type of postmodern moment. For Baudrillard, this is what would be called a “hyperreal”. In his words:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality (3)
The hyperreal can be seen as a condition in which the technosubject is unable to articulate personal experiences objectively. As we have seen, historical origin is destabilized and is mapped onto a more personal history. In Count Zero, Gibson writes a good description of this phenomenon:
Machine dreams hold a special vertigo… gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a king of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternatives in paradigm and symbol system… it was like waking from a nightmare … (30)
The text here is not grounded in historical context, social context, or economic context. What is it then grounded in? And how do we begin to analyze this kind of text from a critical perspective? Gibson seems to be describing a certain mental and physical, or simultaneously both, state of the individual body, in which symbols and signs are pieced together in a very chaotic, rapid succession. Gibson seems to be commenting on the Information Age and the development of new modes of interpreting and experiencing social reality. The “pulse of nothingness” he describes is a reflection on the problems of space and representation. The problem of space and representation with the discourse of globalization is that on one hand social problems manifest in local spaces – such as we have seen with media in the Philippines. Although these problems are shown at a local level, the context is much larger – a context that reflects on the global economy, the convergent histories, and the migratory populations the world over (Appadurai 6). Inquiry into these processes as a whole develops into discourses of international civilization, or internationalization. Internationalization refers to the theoretical processes that occur between states and institutions. The community suggested, by internationalists, is a community that works based on the idea of difference – a heterogeneous community rather than a homogenized community (Mooney and Evans, 142).
This picture of the globalized society is much different than that of pre-20th century society. Today’s new social world is progressively more ambiguous, more fragmented and increasingly more virtual. What I mean by the virtualization of the world here is simply the growing dependence and reliance and notions of practicality in all realms of social life: political, cultural economic, scientific, emotional, and intellectual. Practicality refers directly to social behavior – social behavior based on spontaneous action and reaction, rather than a sociology or anthropology of human behavior based on systems of norms. Old ideologies based in ideas of common sense or a general view of “decent and civilized” behavior, in other words, what we have known as etiquette and what has been considered “conventional” is currently declining, and our world is now opening up to a society of diverse senses related to simultaneous connections between the mind and body.
The argument against this system, made particularly by antiglobalists, is based off of the idea that these types of communities serve a small and elite minority of the world and that they do not take into account the detriment of the rest of humanity, especially in the Third World. The issue is that, as globalization continues, nations begin to lose their self-determination, i.e. their national identity and cultural tradition, in order to keep up with the global economy. Immigrants are also usually pinpointed as the people to blame for the deterioration of these identities (Mooney and Evans, 7-8). These identities work in terms of past histories and past traditions that seem to reduce the notion of a community to a locale of set morals, values, and practices. The argument in opposition to this is that there are also communities where set morals, values, and practices become adaptive and flexible, depending on environment. At our historical conjuncture, a period of advanced capitalism, the voices of globalization are voices of identities that have already been disintegrated from, or have arrived at a disjuncture from the self-determination of identity at the national and cultural level, and are located somewhere in-between
Again, Gibson’s work reflects this location when he writes, “the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternatives in paradigm and symbol system… it was like waking from a nightmare”. Theorist Katherine Hayles, writing on Information Theory reflects on phenomena such as this:
How then to account for these ecstatic pronouncements and delirious dreams? I believe they should be taken as evidence, not that the body has disappeared, but that a certain kind of postmodern subjectivity has emerged. This subjectivity is constituted by the crossing of the materiality of informatics with the immateriality of information. By ‘informatics’ I mean the material, technological, economic, and social structures that make the information age possible (160).
Katherine Hayles’ description of a certain kind of postmodern subjectivity is precisely a moment of technosubjectivity. However, although she addresses the ideas of informatics as a system of materials, technology, economic and social factors, she never mentions what these factors are specifically, much like Gibson’s science fiction. This might be the reason why everything seems, in Gibson’s words, “random”, “impossible”, “rapid”… a “pulse of nothingness”. And so, technosubjectivities are those who encourage a change from common ideologies to more abstract systems of consciousness. Katherine Hayles calls this phenomenon incorporation:
[incorporation is the] collaboration between the body and embodiment, between the abstract model and the specific contexts in which it is instantiated… to look at thought in this way is to turn Descartes upside down … the body exists in space and time and through its interaction with the environment defines its parameters within which the cogitating mind can arrive at its ‘certainties’ (160)
Like Haraway, Hayles attempts to provide a new model for thinking about reality – a model which expresses fluidity and scientificity, rather than politics and ideology. Hayles’ expression is similar to that of technosubjectivity. Technosubjectivities, as gloablized subjects, define themselves by a flood of sensory perceptions brought on by images, history, and cultural artifacts that almost appear at random. Technology itself represents the means by which to express reappropriation of supposedly ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ Western texts – conceptually, culturally, and historically. However, what is missing in her theory is a proper engagement of the very historical context of the new model she provides.
The architectural work of Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is a good example of how a technosubject copes with this paranoia and lack of conceptual coherence. His building titled L’United’Habitation (The United Habitation) was erected in Marseille in the year 1946 (interestingly the same year the Cold War was declared by both Stalin and Churchill). Corbusier’s building L’United’Habitation was erected to provide a housing space for large numbers of people in response to an urban housing disaster in France. Many of his works, found in India, Russia, and Central Europe were attempts to provide better housing for people in extremely crowded urban spaces. It seems that his work was also a response to the larger global political crisis of warring power-hungry nations. L’United’Habitation was a creative project that successfully combined a shopping center, a pool, an area for gymnastics, a theatre, other artistic spaces, and 337 apartments in one building. Reflecting on his work, historian Sigfried Gideon has said that Corbusier has fulfilled the ultimate task of the architect which is to:
anticipate needs and to solve [social] problems that exist only half consciously in the crowd… [by embodying] a particular sensitivity [of] social imagination… [he] liberated the mind … from the conception of housing as a simple addition of single units and expanded it to the wider frame of human habitat (186-189).
Technosubjectivities attempt to project conceptual ideas like Corbuiser’s on the level of everyday conscious reality. Like Gideon said of the architect, the technosubject’s task is also an attempt to address social problems that exist only half-consciously in the crowd. What are these social problems? The main social problem today is the difficulty in finding a collective and even an individual identity, or selfhood in a world that is explicitly and constantly exploiting capitalism, industry, community, and science. This was the atmosphere of the world during the Cold War. Corbusier’s attempt to solve this - and his sensitivity to this difficulty - is shown in his architectural works. Seeing the lack of conceptual and social unity in the urban spaces of France, he approached his project The United Humanity with the goal of creating a smaller, more approachable urban building – representative of the outside human habitat. Yet he simplified the idea of urban space by constructing buildings that he hoped would help to develop more lasting and diverse social interactions within the larger scheme of a chaotic social world. LeCorbusier’s architecture exemplifies the attempt to provide a community for technosubjects in urban spaces.
Conclusion
The three crises/formations indicate the technosubjects complex psychology. In its most premature state, these elements of technosubjectivity can be traced back to discourses around the concept of Humanism. Ancient Greek thought defined Humanism as a system of thought, or ideology, which promoted free democratic thinking. During the Enlightenment period, these humanist ideas were reintroduced within the study of philosophy and from there the concept was broken down into conflicting viewpoints. Today, Humanism basically delineates a study of the classics within the educational system as well as a general study of humankind, as opposed to theological knowledge, i.e. the humanities.
Both affected by these Enlightenment revivalist ideas, Russia and the United States, by the year 1890, both began to envision their own societies as geographical spaces for the coexistence of diverse peoples brought together by a common system of ethics and rationality. And so, both the United States and Russia embarked on a global, “humanitarian” project. By 1917, communist Russia was driven by the utopian ideology of a “grand continental empire” – the vision of a classless and stateless society driven by scientific methods (Laffeber 1-6). Through this political and ideological project, many diverse peoples from the world over have become integrated into a developing global sphere that I have discussed earlier. The emergence of the three crises and formations of technosubjects today, its present form, can be analyzed from its post Cold-War context.
At the end of the 19th century, the assimilation of new peoples, mainly immigrants or the colonized, into the globalized industrial infrastructure was catalyzed by the United States’ “Open Door” policy promoting capitalism and industry, especially in the context of the Cold War. The Cold War plays a major role in this historical moment. During the processes of the Cold War, those geographies and peoples colonized by Russia along with the assimilation of peoples into the United States, as well as the fall of the Colonial Empire in the Middle East have constructed the type of “global society” which prevails today. As has been shown, during this process of globalization, the idea of the nation as a factor of identity formation becomes less important for technosubjectivities. Instead, as individuals and communities begin to access globally dispersed cultures and systems of information, technosubjectivities emerge that are not bound by ideologies of the state. (Although Americanization is the dominant tendency at this historical moment, this is not exclude the fact that other societies are undergoing processes such as Russianization - such as in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine and Japanization - such as in Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, and Oceania – are also undergoing crises and formations differently).
In the face of such broad and grandiose theoretical frameworks – i.e. the historical, the identity, and the community crisis of the technosubject – in general – it is becomes difficult to explore and express any sort pragmatic, empirical framework by which to understand the world. Many times technosubjectivities are reduced to psychological phenomena. I hope that this attempt to provide a historical theory of the technosubject has revealed the multi-faceted and multi-dimensional nature of the technosubject. There are two steps to overcome the difficulty of diffuse theoretical frameworks of internationalization and reductive psychoanalytic frameworks. The first step is to understand that the processes of globalization and the crises of technosubjectivity result in imagined communities not bound to one particular region, whether geographical, historical, or cultural. The second step is to understand technosubectivities in the United States and much of the Western world is still caught in the politics of the Cold War. Looking for places in culture where these issues manifest (as in William Gibson’s novels) is key to mapping out what the globalized world looks like and feels like. The political issues and struggles that are happening within the individual immersed in a globalized society must be understood in order to illuminate the various degrees and areas of difference in a seemingly “homogenized” world.
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