Tag: CS

BOW/CS: To-do-list

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment
  • Do BOW A3 coursework
  • Add peer feedback comments and response to relevant page CS A2
  • Make adjustments to draft where necessary
  • Update where I’m at with BOW A3 planning and ideas
  • Begin writing (in note form if necessary) CS A3

It’s busy here (pre Xmas/school/work etc.) and I am feeling a little overwhelmed with everything that needs doing in order to keep on top of deadlines, as well as not losing touch with the unfolding thread. I think the hardest thing is about this – other than the difficulty of pulling apart thoughts relating to a tricky subject  – is doing two courses together. Managing time and thoughts is incredibly challenging.

Ordering of the above:

  1. Update where I am with BOW A3 planning/ideas
  2. Add peer feedback to CS A2
  3. Make adjustments to CS A2 where I can at this time
  4. Do BOW A3 coursework
  5. Begin writing CS A3 plan and 1000 word sample

 

CS & BOW: Research Critique of Barad

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

 

Looking for a critique of Barad’s work I have come across this which confirms some of my concerns and questions, although rather more acerbically than I might have done. It begins with the following which made me laugh – humour in an academic paper, good! I do wonder if there is an element of peevishness in the article – will wait and see:

‘In Artful, her collection of critical essays, Smith (2013: 41) reminds us of a childhood game designed to break the boredom of long car journeys – ‘Ten points to the person who can see the Forth Road bridge’ – and points to its direct suitability to the situation of the academic conference: ‘Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.’ In recent years, it has been possible to play a version of this game substituting ‘Karen Barad’ for ‘Walter Benjamin’. If we add in bonus points for a cluster of terms taken from her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) – especially ‘entanglement’, ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ – then a fine game of ‘Barad Bingo’ can be had far and wide across the humanities and social sciences: from conferences on ruins, animal ethics and informational infrastructures to journal articles on lifelong learning (Edwards, 2010), bullying in schools (S ̄ndergaarda, 2012) and feminist theories of fashion (Parkins, 2008).’ (Hollins, et al, 2017)

 

Hollin, G, Forysth, I, Giraud, G et al. (1 more author) (2017) (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47 (6). pp. 918-941. ISSN 0306-3127

Click to access Disentangling%20Barad%20-%20version%20for%20repositories.pdf

Will report back with further notes – but good to see some counterpoints

  • What is it about Barad’s work that appeals to ‘now’ – which the authors admit is pressing today. “What is more, and as evidenced below (Figure 1), the influence of Barad’s work continues to grow, with the above outputs receiving significant year-on-year increases in citation counts. And this brings us to an important point: While Barad’s project spans twenty years, it is evidently of this moment.” (3)
  • ‘Questions are raised, however, about the applicability of concepts originating in the quantum realm and what is lost when they ‘jump scales’ and are used in order to grasp macro-sociological concerns.’ Barad herself actually warns against this kind of simplistic scaling up and claims to avoid analogy (5)Re second-mentioned concern is scaleability  – again dealt with by Barad – rather than scaling up, it seems to me she is suggesting implications at micro-level affect out thinking and even though the macro world is govenred by different rules, knowledge about more flexibity and possibility can nevertheless affect us, so not sure about this but I have only read first two chapters so will wait and see: “It does, however, mean that the issue of scale is particularly pertinent for those seeking to draw upon Barad’s work, and worth dwelling on.” (8)
  • ‘Making matter matter, or, in search of lost realness‘ compare section heading to Foster Return fo the Real (6)

  • ‘We conclude the article by arguing that in much of the literature drawing upon Barad there is a focus upon diffraction and entanglement and that this has come at the expense of considerations of complementarity and necessary exclusion. We suggest, however, that it is the radical potential of an ethics of exclusion which is perhaps most vital to those continuing to use Barad’s work.’ (5)

  • ‘Re my own comments on peevishness: ‘Does the process by which ‘matter comes to matter’ in Barad’s thesis matter? When we call upon Barad to help secure an argument, how can we be sure that we are not suffering from a new case of physics envy – of the quantum variety?” (6)
  • ‘There are two entirely concordant consequences to this continuity between physics and social theory. First, Barad’s realism promises to firm up the ‘beneath’, to put it in Foucauldian terms, of knowledge (Lather, 2010) by offering ‘the weight of realism’ as ‘ballast’ against too much postmodernism (Barad, 2007: 43).”Objects, entities and phenomena are demonstrably instantiated in and by material practices, produced performatively in concrete situations and thus – crucially – can anchor political actions. This approach carries distinct ethical implications, on which we focus shortly.’ (8)
  • ‘Despite the obvious utility of diffraction, the section concludes with some thoughts on the possible merits of rescuing reflection.’ (11) see rest of section
  • I like this criticism:
    ‘In a recent article, Paxson and Helmreich (2013: 169) argued that:
    ‘[New materialism] is productive because it can shake thinking away from the certainties of social determinism, as exampled, canonically, in the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge – and because it can show that phenomena emerge in practice. But it is also risky, because new materialist tactics often veer towards universalizing metaphysical claims about the nature of ‘matter’ as such and also, at times, take scientific truth claims about the world at face value – a move that we consider a step backwards for STS.’ (13)
  • ‘The key terms within this passage – intra-action, agential separability, exteriority-within – all indicate that for Barad the separations between words, things, and knowers are real enough but these separations are effects of particular engagements with the world (p. 138). This is the crux of Barad’s agential realism.’ (16) Key for me too  – and can be applied to cameras and visual recording systems (some of which do not rely on sight or emulation of sight)
  • Barad’s understanding of the apparatus, then, is more expansive than in a ‘typical’ methods section, more-than-human in its composition, and emergent through practice. There are clear affinities here with actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987: 162) Something for me to investigate further (17)
  • ‘Perhaps, we might speculate, for theorists whose bread and butter it is to consider the nonhuman and their relations with humans and other nonhumans, Barad’s considerations are neither seismic nor entirely novel.’ (17)
  • re tools – and thinking about cameras/visualising tools: ‘The stick cannot usefully serve as an instrument of observation if one is intent on observing it. The line between subject and object is not fixed, but once a cut is made (i.e., a particular practice is being enacted), the identification is not arbitrary but in fact materially specified and determined (Barad, 2007: 154-155). (18)
  • NBNBNB: Not only is cutting a boundary-making practice (p. 148), it is a process over which there is a degree of control. Thus, for Barad, boundaries are not only real but there is a degree of responsibility for their creation, the worlds that are made, and those that are excluded (p. 243). (18)
  • This emphasis on separability, exteriority and constitutive exclusion is a significant part of what makes Barad’s work distinct and important. It is also the part of Barad’s scholarship that is most frequently lost in the re-telling. (18)
  • ‘The concept of complementarity makes clear that, for Barad, when one apparatus instantiates a particular world another is necessarily excluded.’ (18) (At the risk of sounding slightly belittling and not meaning to, in popular culture, this is explored by Phillip Pullman  – pulverized and aneathetised by the BBC)
  • ‘We argue that the ways with which Barad’s approach has been engaged have resulted in an over-emphasis on questions of entanglement. In contrast, we suggest that the ‘radical potential’ of agential realism is in drawing attention to what is excluded from particular entanglements.’ (19)
  • A useful list of more-than-human writers: ‘Barad’s intra-active conception of the world offers a specific understanding of relationality that goes beyond earlier conceptualizations of hybridity (Haraway, 1992; Latour, 1993), a term which suggests relations shape pre-existing entities (Lorimer, 2015: 24). Yet, aside from offering a neat neologism that makes its difference from interaction explicit, on a superficial level, intra-active conceptions of the world do not appear to be wholly novel. Approaches that have considered the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 2010) such as posthumanism (Castree and Nash, 2004; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2010), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Mol, 2003), non- representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010), vital-materialist approaches (Bennett, 2009), engagements with cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997, 2010, 2011; also Hinchcliffe et al., 2003), or object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2011; Harman, 2012), all stress the agency of more-than- human entities and make clear that the human is shaped through encounters with other agencies.’ And add Deborah Lupton to this re Data Selves (2019)
  • The clearest description of performative for me yet – ‘Barad’s understanding of reality as enacted rather than pre-given similarly troubles pre-defined ethical hierarchies such as human/animal, subject/object, and nature/culture, as a way of thinking about the world.’ (19)
  • ‘Barad could thus be situated as part of a longer lineage of work that has collapsed the ontological and epistemological and turned attention to the performative composition of reality (e.g. Mol, 2002; Star, 1992).’ (I thinkI still need to figure out why this is not constructivist  – see the sentence about performative being not entirely or much at all re volition-) (20)
  • ‘We question the ease with which Barad’s work has ‘jumped’ between diverse scales and urged that attention be paid to frictions between scales, and what may be lost precisely because it is not scalable’ (23) Hayles (1999) seems to answer this when she describes the way we instantiate our movements and actions while we use computers – the technology for these computers often emerge from a range of inte-related sciences and technologies where quantum mechanics plays a significant part – See loc 698 and then Chapter 3 on how information became so important to theorists and scientists via the Macy conferences – how this conversation which informed military and computer sciences and ‘infected’ reality

  • Hard not to disagree with the following or any other form of information which becomes a holy grail and therefore dogma spouted by dogmatic, excluding followers. ‘Despite seeing a number of potentials in agential realism, however, it is important to caution against uncritically extolling the value of this approach. As Willey (2016: 993) powerfully argues, it is dangerous to position new materialism as a radical break from feminist, postcolonial STS (see also Sundberg, 2014), and uncritically valorizing agential realism can lend strength to this trap.’

 

CS & BOW Book Notes & Quotations: Data Selves, Deborah Lupton 201C

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.

I am not sure when I started following Deborah Lupton’s blog or how I came across it but as we were preparing the installation for Pic London, I read her post about the forthcoming publication of her book Data Selves in my WordPress app. The word ‘assemblage’ stood out as one of the other artists, Josh Phillips had mentioned it several times. I wrote about it here and mentioned a discomfort with the word as it felt like an adjective that was being used as a noun. I have become used to the word now and it no longer jars every time I hear it. (I am not sure why I felt annoyed by the word – irrational irritation perhaps.)

Whatever the reasons, the work our group constructed, A rumour reached the village (2019) might be described as an assemblage of many smaller assemblages. There is something fractal about the ‘village’ of things we constructed. And so after reading Lupton’s blog, I ordered her book and am glad to have read it now, not only because it seems so relevant to my overall inquiry in which I am attempting to make sense of the way in which digital culture is changing the structural nature of existence, but because it led me to Karen Barad’s work. Actually, Barad had been mentioned to me before by another of my Pic London collaborators, Rowan Lear. But her name only sunk in while reading Data Selves.  

I expect I will need to investigate Barad further for CS and BOW but in the meantime here are some quotations from Lipton’s book with page numbers that could come in handy.

  • “Popular representations of these personal data and their futures often lean towards polar extremes.” (4)
  • “lively data” and “these data can continue to be lively even once the human they refer to is dead” (6)
  • “function creep”  – tech used in ways that go beyond their original purpose. (8)
  • Surveillance Capitalism (8)  – see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
  • “predictions that are made by data analytics can result in predictive privacy harms, in which people can be categorized against within certain social groups” (8) (See end of book where she talks about the limitations of data analytics – how our paranoia that too much is known about us prevents us from seeing how basic and limiting the categorisations can be (124)
  • (13 – NB pa) Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary Western societies.
  • Rather than user – exister Amanda Lagerkvist (2017)
  • “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn torwards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (15)
  • “Braidotti (2018) terms ‘critical posthumanities’, in which the concept of human exceptionalism is done away with. This more-than-human approach sees human bodies as extending beyond their fleshy envelopes into the physicalenvironmentt, while the environment likewise colonised human bodies” (15)
  • “If we view personal digital data as manifestations of vitality, as recording, monitoring and influencing human lives, generating biolvalue and indeed as essentially part of humans, then they become part fo the domain of biopolitics.” (15)
  • “Feminist new materialists celebrate the renewal and liveliness of the capacities that human-nonhuman assemblages generate at the same time as identifying the ways in which these capacities can be closed off or limit the freedoms and potentials of some people or social groups or generate harm for the more-than-human world, as in environmental degradation, global warming, species extinction, pollution and climate change.” (17)
  • “While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh (19)
  • See quote by Koro-Ljungber et al. 2017; Taylor et al. 2018) NB
  • Diffractive methodology  – making entanglements visible. Barad suggests a diffractive approach is “good to think with”. (21) I agree. (Also 29)
  • More-than-human rather than posthuman (22) good para over to 23 – “interconnected and trans-agential.” Life, or vitality is not seen as possessed by any individual actor, but rather as constantly generated” (24)
  • Line about Caterisan dualism between mind and body (but see Alan Jasanoff (2018) for this too)
  • Animism – (25) quotes Haraway ” human ontologies must be understood as multiple and dynamic rather than fixed and essential (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994)
  • Haraway’s ‘composite’ theory (26) See my own comments in BOW A2. (tentacular thinking)
  • Barad – “humans don’t know about the world because they are observing from outside it. They know about the world because they are inseparably part of it” (27)
  • Re agential cuts (29) And “Photographs make agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. “It is a way of giving form to matter” (Kember and Sylinska 2012:84) See 45 Years in lit review. more about agential cuts here: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agential-cut.html – “Any attempt to impose meaning and order” […] “inevitably part of the matter it seeks to preserve or document” . Link this to Flusser and apparatus  – what he says about photographers (funny!)
  • Thing power and enchantment (30) “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” Quoting Jane Bennett (2001 and 2009) – compare this to OOO Graham Harmen
  • Page 31 – assemblage “function of grouping of different things in an assemblage, each operating in conjunction with the others (including humans)” (Bennett 2004: 354)
  • 32 – Bennett recognises “mass-produced commodities as possible sites of enchantment” NB para
  • 33 – others working in technological design …recognise “humans invest digital devices with animistic or magical properties” See Marx and use-value.
  • 39 “death is more of a continuum” see page 40 too (Re mummies text)
  • 42/43 Summary about human and non-human entanglement inc. data and machine.
  • Liquid metaphor “data sweat” (Melissa Gregg 2015) ; data leaking, emerging from within the body to outside  – reveal ambivalence to data as it moves between “high value and useless – or even disgusting – waste product” (Abjection) 46
  • 53 uncanny valley, not quite right, see Mario Klingman – my blog S&O
  • 57 – Good Kristeva quote re creepiness, abjection.
  • 59 – Dirty data, “What matter is considered dirty or clean?” – attitudes can be related to underlying fears and anxieties about loss of control. Rowan Lear suggested the following after I posted a picture of the mould produced by her yeast started in the collective work and a picture of this section of the book – https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity?fbclid=IwAR1W0EQEaOOzd4jWd1Knp2iBmyse8bB22tN6sM0GayAg7o33KF1KyVo-Yj0
  • 63 – emphasis on all senses, not just visual “data physicalisations” See http://dataphys.org. Plenty of artists listed who are making alternative to visual art drawn from data
  • 68 NB – bias/visual data materialisations  – instead list artists making “multisensory, unconventional and surprising” materialisations
  • Doing Data chapter – less than critical of some of the neoliberal ways in which data is enmeshed with people’s lives, potentially making them more rather less neurotic. Little critical analysis, more reporting of her data about how this affects people who use the data.
  • Sharing and exploiting data  – caring/intimate surveillance concerns 103

The first section of the book is probably the most useful to me as it expresses ideas that I have found while reading about systems, a move away from mind-body dualism and digitisation’s impact on our perception of a less fragmented world. It is one of many books and articles which follow on from Kathryn Hayle’s posthuman book which has been so influential for me. I am inundated by such essays on Academia since reading a number of them. I like the sensible and pragmatic relationship Lupton has with data and technology even though she doesn’t seem all that critical of some aspects of data monitoring which strike me as nuts/unhealthy/hellish such as the constant surveillance of babies breathing – this kind of thing is very telling about our society and I could probably write a thesis on it alone.