The Banana Peel Project

I think I may have finally come up with a single-sentence summary of Marx’s theory of history.  I wonder how many thoughts, calories, and stress-units I’ve invested in producing this sentence.  In neural firings per line, I bet this is one of the most valuable sentences I’ve ever seen.

Modes of production derived from earlier forms (i.e., capital) give rise to new social relations (i.e., bourgeois society) and new kinds of social consciousness (i.e., class) which reveal the contradictions (i.e., inequality) inherent in those new social relations and produce a new synthetic whole (i.e., a global proletarian revolution). Ha!

And yes, I left the last word in my paper.

So, do I have any challengers?  Is anyone dorkier than I?  Can anyone else do it better in one sentence?  No colons, semicolons, dashes, or run-ons allowed.

Kind of a different slew of papers this time around. Mostly short response papers, one or two longer ones. Let’s see if the titles tell us anything about where this train is going.

Mapping biopolitics: Assisted reproduction and genomics as technologies of the self

Concentric choreographies: Poststructuralism and identity (link)

What is force?

How economic sociology squished the social

Individual:Group

Out of control: Individuals and institutions in (post)modernity

Political economy and communication

Nope - fewer papers this quarter. Somehow it felt like more work.

Futurologists and technophiles are excited that we will soon enter (or have already arrived in) the brave new world of cyborgs, artificial life, and technological redemption.

What’s the best metaphor for the future?  Singularity?  Event horizon?  Black hole?  Asymptote?  Evolution?  Entropy?

You decide.

[xkcd]

The process of modernization, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982)

history is out of control
increasing fragmentation and complexity of modern society
radicalization of earlier forms
careering juggernaut, ecological catastrophe, liquefaction
modernity
danger, risk, and fluidity, nihilism or gloom
existential despair, postmodernism, critical theory…
what control might mean in a world that is (by all appearances)
so completely uncontrollable
our institutions must be fundamentally reimagined

deep contradictions and unprecedented potentials
positivist ideals are no longer privileged
Enlightenment thought
Post-modernity—we are beginning to hear its footsteps
representation and rationalization…disembedding…reflexivity
a social world that, for all its self-monitoring and self-consciousness,
cannot ever fully know itself

trust
faith in the reliability of symbolic systems
danger, threat, risk—cognitive and social constructs
contradictory discourses of the self
a new kind of society

The political breaks open and erupts
beyond formal hierarchies and responsibilities
a set of solutions
orderings must be created, forged and formed
demonopolized expertise, informal management, radical democratization
new syntheses—emotion and reason, art and artifice

redefinition of the meaning of order itself
fluidity, the permanent feature of modernity
gap between individuality as fate, individuality as self-assertion
emancipation, an entirely new meaning
into a tumultuous whirl of disorder
working within spaces of profound uncertainty
the world is now—and always has been—out of our control

…to say the least.

Common side effects include, but are not limited to: numbness, confusion, paralysis, warts, glowing meniscus syndrome (GMS), better grades, inconsistent sex, aural hemoglobin drainage, worse grades, spontaneous combustion, dementia, and one or more varieties of heterogeneous interpretive disorder.

Buy our drugs, and be as happy as everyone else.

The commodification of personality; personhood; identity; self:::

How do we come to know ourselves through personal technologies? Objectification. Discourse is always material; what discourses do individuals participate in, internalize? Swirling, multifaceted, contradictory cultural meanings congeal into narratives that are not necessarily coherent; technologies fragment narratives and unify them. The self is the negotiation, the movement between. Generalized subjectivities are power structures, ubiquitous, incomplete, and material. The inside of neurosis, the outside of psychosis. When people speak, they speak the language of cultural stereotypes, assumptions, genres, tropes. “That’s me!”

Economies, markets: the circulation of materiality:::

Embeddedness, networks, action and structure. Markets are collective improvisations, and spaces. Alienation, commodification, objectification. Production, distribution and circulation, exchange, consumption of identity. Technology, the space where all the action takes place, the space where politics is played out, politics itself. Technology structures relations, technology is relations. Consistency and dynamism, structure and agency, script and improvisation, community and identity. Mediation, of course.

Technology disciplines, but inconsistently and formlessly:::

Inconsistent information, improvised networks. Rational movement through irrational space. Technology, order, and organized chaos. Scarcity, identity is an unlimited resource. Identity, a materialized orientation. Identity, an anti-ideal. Technology productive of identity, the commodity, alienated subjectivity. Actors, calculating agencies, agency, the producers and consumers, embodied subjectivity.

Agent negotiates purchase of identity.
Agent becomes a new orientation, narrative, situation.
Agent negotiates purchase of identity.

Colliding subjectivities?

(Image credit: Current.com)

A particular technology is always a map, a representation, a model of the power relationships of which it is a part.

Technologies are simultaneously material and ideal, practical and discursive, structural and phenomenological.  Technologies are at once the tools with which people do things and the context in which things are done.

Technology does not merely occupy a central space in cultural narratives; it is the space in which all the action takes place—that is, it is the space where politics is played out.  Yet it also remains a tool, a prosthesis that enables some actions while preventing others.  It is a map, a space that always already contains within it the tools necessary for navigating it.

Medical, psychiatric, and networking technologies are making the dividing line between bodies and communities harder and harder to discern.  For now, there is no easy way to move back and forth between structure and praxis, between communities and selves.  But if certain cultural narratives are any indication, it seems that there are ways to tell stories about technology that do not rely on binaries.  In these stories, as objectivity gives way to diverse and shifting subjectivities, abstraction gives way to concrete corporeality.