Zhenia's blog

There are three groups of remote digital workers as defined by a crowd worker community manager at Turker Nation Kristy Milland: “the leisurely”, those who have means and use online gigs as an extra source of income, “the desperate” - workers who use online work as their main source of income, and “the excluded”, individuals who have difficulty of working in the office jobs or are socially ostracised (Kristy Milland in Scholz, 2017:31). The third group are people who the digital labour ideology wouldn’t necessarily point to as such - current or past offenders, or those confined to hospitals, the ones who cannot leave their homes because they take care of others, or those who suffer from developmental disorders.

While spending varying amount of time on the platforms, digital labourers from any of those three groups would not necessarily identify as belonging to digital working class, due not only to the fact of extreme precarity of their employment, but because of the flexible nature of their self-identification. Indeed, if I run my business as an entrepreneur, I would not readily admit to be an online worker, but rather a “graphic designer“, “video editor“ or ”copywriter“. Moreover, the worker identity gets interweaved with the one, or many other, dictated by their lifestyle and local social and cultural contexts. Opening up the meaning that the worker identification acquires on the platform would require to look into the C.S. Pierce’s idea of the object-sign-interpreteer triad.

In Peirce’s semiotics, the world is represented as a network where the importance of the interpretation lies not only in the relationship between the signifier and the signified, but also in the receiving end, the side that interprets the sign (Boltanski,Chiapello, 1999:146). In order to gain meaning, the argument goes, it needs to be interpreted. Thus the interpretant acts as a mediator making a distinction whether particular nodes are leaning more towards architecture, the ‘crystallised form’, where meanings are stable, and software a ‘non-form’, made chaotic by the contingent user behaviours.

There is an argument to be made that the more we try to reach common ground on terminology, the more meanings for this terminology we actually create. Any new context creates new meanings.

This post focuses one aspect of The Open: a view of life as raw matter upon which the sovereign reproduces itself via "anthropological machine" - a mechanism of distinguishing between human and inhuman.

Key is negation between human/animal inside the domain of bipolitics and on the outside of it. E.g. as it is put in The Open, “because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside” (Agamben: 37).

Further, Agamben sees two such machines, ancient and modern. The latter isolates the nonhuman within the human (in the example of the Jew, the non-man produced within man). The machine of the past mirrors this dynamic, producing the non-man by humanizign the animal. “If the outside” - Agamben says - “is produced through the exclusion of an inside and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, here the inside is obtained through the inclusion of an outside, and the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal” (Agamben: 37).

Looking at the following diagram:

Becomes visible that: 1) there is no clear distinction between human and animal 2) Life here is raw matter upon which the sovereign reproduces itself via "anthropological machine”, which distinguishes between human and inhuman; 3) there is a human/animal exchange outside of biopolitics that creates space for exploration and creation of other worlds (I here see the potentiality of extending the argument into the digital realm via the allegory between the internet and geography - exploration/creation as a way of going beyond the making of "anthropological machine" and how the machine is catching up). 4) “to remain open to the closedness of the animal" (Agamben: 73) is human property.

The bottom part of the diagram would present what Agamben calls “bare life” - “neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life“ (Agamben: 38).

The section concludes with a proposition to understand how both machines work in order to stop them. It links to the idea of "oikonomia of salvation" [oikonomia literally meaning “the management of a household”] expressed elsewhere in The Open, - a promise to “reconcile the animal with the human beyond history and any biopolitical hierarchy”(Seri). This promise creates a territory of posthistory: “if animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then neither man nor animal— and, perhaps, not even the divine—would any longer be thinkable” (Agamben: 21).

Louis Althusser proposed both spiritual and materialistic conception of ideology. (Althusser 2014:75) In order to theorise the state, Althusser theories the notion of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), which sits alongside of state power-state apparatus relation, but is not directly conflated with it. The traditional Marxist idea of the state apparatus which includes government, administration, army, police, courts and prisons is defined by Althusser, alternatively, as Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). Althusser looks at a variety of ISA’s such as scholastic, familial, religious, political (trade unions), associative (professional associations, might be close to my focus, because looks at middle and big employers), information and news and cultural apparatus. He notes the important difference between ISA and RSA, besides repression and ideologization, is that while there are numerous ISA, there can be only one RSA. (Althusser 2014:135) State apparatus identifies itself as an organic whole, across the lines of nationalism, liberalism, economism and humanism (Althusser 2014:138) .

For Althusser, mode of production is characterised by the social relations of production. ISA ensures reproduction of these social relations (Althusser 2014:xxiv). “No class, he says - can hold state power over a long period without at the same tirne exercising its hegemony over and in the Ideological State Apparatuses”. The reproduction of the relations of production ensured by two superstructures, legal-political and ideological (Althusser 2014:140). More about those two. In remote labour, workplace is the site where reproduction of ideology happens, because this is where social relations of production are situated at the moment of the labourer being in the context of performing labour.

Hereby Althusser’s two theses regarding the subject in ideology are: 1) ideology has a material, rather that idealistic existence and 2) the function of ideology is to “constitute concrete individuals as subjects”(Althusser 2014:xxvi). Material existence in Althusser’s definition means that ideology is not only realized in material practices, but also that these “material practices are ‘anchored’ in non-ideological realities” (Althusser 2014:76). In example of remote labour, which is ideologically seen as creative and enterpreneural development, exists outside of ideology as a source of subsistence (find examples, or keep the following example of the family:) In example of the family which is ideologically seen as reproduction of labour power, exists on the biological level as reproduction, rearing and training new members of ‘human race’.

While Althusser looks at ISA’s as protocols of ideology in the government, ideology Research on online freelancers, however is primarily focused on ideology within private institutions, because by its nature digital labour transverses governmental boundaries. Althusser’s theorisation is nevertheless of great importance, because according to his thinking private institutions are necessarily a part of Ideological apparatus. Private institutions, Althusser says, “whether owned by this or that individual or the state, function willy-nilly as component parts of determinate ISA, under the State Ideology, in the service of the state's politics, the politics of the dominant class”. (Althusser 2014:81) It must be added though that in context of digital labour we are not talking about ISA as such as a mode of relationship between the subject and the state but “general” Ideological Apparatus where the relationship between the subject and private business is more important.

Came across an interesting breakdown of speculative realists as a group where the members disagree with one another over fundamentals, but share the resistance to breaking the world into subjects and predicates - a "correlationist" logic of Kantian strand of thought whereby thinking is always correlated with being, with no possibility of considering these two terms apart from one another.

The book itself, it is noted, while sharing the point of departure with the aforementioned, is engaging with a different speculative tradition, coming from W. James and H. Bergson, A.N. Whitehead and I. Stengers.

Source: A hands-on guide to doing content analysis, C. Erlingsson and Petra Brysiewicz (sciencedirect.com)

Source: researchgate.net

Wynter's project is to uncouple the concept of Man from the one of Human, in order to show that this concept is full with an imperial will to objectivity and truth, while in fact, 'human', and 'truth' for that matter - do not exist.

Katherine McKittrick (from the introduction):

[W. Mignolo sees that] Sylvia Wynter’s project itself is situated outside our present order of knowledge. Wynter’s perspective and therefore her reading practices, he suggests, are decolonial scientia in that she situates herself beyond the crass body politics of colonial knowledge in order to foster adjoined human needs. (P.4)

Wynter's intellectual disobedience emerges on the intersection of decoloniality (C.L.R.James) and neurobiological cognition (H.Maturana).

Wynter is 'decolonial' because she

is not looking to change or supersede epistemic categories and established knowledge, but rather seeks to undo the systems through which knowledge and knowing are constituted.

she engages in epistemic disobedience. Decolonial option for Mignolo is

a practice of rethinking and unraveling dominant worldviews that have been opened up by Indigenous and black and Caribbean thinkers since the sixteenth century in América (with accent) and the Caribbean.

she draws on the insights on autopiesis of H.Maturana, who sees interconnection between 'seeing' the world and 'knowing' the world - the idea that what living organism 'sees' are in fact images fabricated by its neurological processing of information.

  To study "humanities" means to explore the narratives using the instruments they have been created with - which is in essence, mere reproduction, acceptance of the rules in which therory should be studies, that wouldn't lead us to understanding how else it would be seen otherwise.

Wynter's work unveils this belief system that naturalizes

the principles and rules of knowing - that calcify a commitment to an epistemological tract that profits from replicating itself. (P. 108)

The epistemologies of les damnes do not seek to arrive at any 'true' definition of Human for there is no 'Human' apart from the Western Imperial 'Man'.

Vitruvian Man was build based on the Greco-Roman concept of the human figure, and served as an ideal  instrument to exclude Indians and Africans from being Human.

We all are born equal, however, 

The discourse that “we are all born equal” is inflected with practices of inequity that shape how we live in the world differentially. (P.109)

1492 - the arrival of Columbus to America - was a key moment for unifying concepts of Man and Human, and also for their understanding in realtion to Race and racism.

At that moment, each separately existing civilisation had their own way to write history. Western history included the Bible, and this mix of sacred and secular pronounced by Hegel helped to set the stage for the belief that facts narrated are ontologically independent from history itself. (I don't understand this, p.110).

In 1492, there is a bifurcation of history - Indians and blacks are cast as inferiors, and at the same time 'global linear thinking' links to the creation of international law.

1492 is a turning point in history of Europe vs the South, Central America and the Caribbean - expulsion from Paradise, beginning of colonial world order, invention of modern/colonial Other.

  P.113 - pieza as a Portuguese measure in slave trace (a man of 25 yo)

Wynter suggests that in the “Jamesian system, the pieza becomes an ever- more general category of value, establishing equivalences between a wider variety of oppressed labor power.”

what you see and feel from different and differential colonial places is the colonial matrix of power of which the economy is only one component: domination precedes accumulation, and domination needs a cultural model or a colonial matrix that legitimizes and naturalizes exploitation. (P.115)

Thus Wynter says that while economic organisation that the Marxist analysis explores, there is a pieza frame, the colonial matrix in the game, that employs the European cultural model to override the perspective of those it marginalises.

F. Fanon's sociogenesis

“Beside phylogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny”— F.Fanon (P.115). You are only as white as your command of French language.

Fanon's decolonial scientia (a Renaissance term for science):

the sociogenic principle reveals what the ontogenesis principle hides: that race is not in the body but rather is built in the social imaginary grounded on colonial differences.

Wynter follows this thinking to say that sociogenesis

introduces the perspective of the subject that ontogenesis classifies as object

Mignolo imagines decolonia scientia in the following ways:

1) Spatially. expanding globally in connection with English language

2) Chronologically. Non-linear, in contrast to imperial scientia that would see conenctions through time in linear fashion.

3) Subjectively. Detach themselves from imperial knowledge -  being categorized as racially subordinate by imperial subject.

Tasks of decolonial scientia:

1) reimagines rather than denies the links between geo- history and knowledge and between biography and knowledge

2) explores the consequences that Western expansion (today called “globalization”) had and continues to have for the population and the environment (exploitation of natural resources)

3) generates knowledge to build communities in which life (in general) has priority over economic gains, economic growth, and economic development

  To Wynter, there are two types of histories: one is biological - the history of emergence and spread of living organisms and the other is social - creation of "Man-as-Human". Importantly, Wynter shifts the perspective of looking at history and rehistoricizes what it means to be human from within sociogenesis.

Wynter's truth-for connect these two types of histories:

“every form of life, every living species would now be able to know its reality only in terms of its specific truth- for.” (p. 121)

From her standpoint, the imperial concept of Man/Human is no longer sustainable. It is the stance taken globally in the academia and schools, and thus we are led to imagine ourselves as Man and live through its history as if it was a history-for the human itself.

She sees Columbus, Copernicus and Darwin as key figures in colonization of geography, astronomy and biology (before them, they were ethno-knowledges).

  “Towards the Human, after Man.” (S. Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being, 257–337).

  Source: Walter Mignolo. What it is to be human? in Sylvia Wynter: on being human as praxis Ed. Katherine McKittrick, P. 106

Source: (G. Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects, Introduction).

Culture ignores a human reality within technical reality - in order to fully play its role culture needs to include technical beings in the form of knowledge and in the form of a sense of values.

There are three level of technical objects (TO's): elements, individuals, ensembles. The confused rapport with technology arises in consumers, manufacturers and workers. In order to maintain a healthy relationship with technical objects, we need to become aware of their mode of existence which takes place in three stages: genesis, ensemble and becoming aware.

True nature of human is not to compete with machines but invent "technical and living objects capable of resolving problems of compatibility between machines within ensemble".

When the primitive magical relation between human and the world ruptures, it goes into either technical (figural) direction or to religious (ground functions).

While Simondon argues that “the opposition drawn between human and machine is false and has no foundation” (P.9), I cannot as yet see how is it an urgent matter, since it is quite obvious that by default culture includes technical objects too (old computers, cars, etc.)

To Simondon there are two contradictory views in culture:

TO are pure assemblages of matter, presenting utility;

TO are animated by hostile intentions towards humans.

Operating a machine is different from a master-slave position: “[hu]man is the permanent organizer of a society of TO” that need the human in the same way musicians in an orchestra need the conductor.

What I found interesting here is that he sees technical education as a necessary part of basic education for all humans the same way as basic scientific education. I can argue this, that in the Global South the idea of tech education always bears a bizzare air of potential exploitation of the workers in future as cheap remote workforce. “A child should know what regulation is, or what a positive reaction is, the same way as they know mathematical theorems” (here I may want to look up technical education in the Global South, and any existing policies attached to it, additionally to Jamaican container project, maybe I cuold find more successful projects).

Genesis has three levels (P.21):

1) Element: Climate of XVIII century optimism, the idea of infinite progress, constant improvement of human life.

2) Individual. Anxiety here rises from the idea that machine disempowers humans because it now does their job. Answer to this anxiety is technophile and technocratic excesses of the thermodynamic era - rape of nature.

3) Ensemble. the information theory of 20th century is regulative and stabilizing. “Once technical reality has become regulative it can be integrated into culture, which is regulative in its essence” (P.21)

Thus technicity can be added into culture at different stages in the following ways:

Foundational era of cybernetics started after the World War II. According to Katherine Hayles, what made it different from the two succeeding waves of cybernetic thought, is that it aimed at extending liberal humanism, rather subverting it. It didn’t see human like a machine, but on the contrary, that a machine could be like a human.

The four key thinkers of the first wave were: Claude Shannon (theory of information), Warren McCulloch (model of neural functioning that showed how neurons worked in information-processing systems), John von Neumann (computers are analogous to biological systems in the way they reproduce themselves) and Norbert Wiener (cybernetics paradigm that has cosmic significance).

Shannon’s theory ignored the idea that information is linked to meaning. For him, there were messages and signals - the message is encoded into the signal for transmission, so in a nutshell, no message is ever sent - what is sent is a signal (Hayles has an example of ink printed on paper when electric impulses are sent via wires).

Why this view that information should be seen separately from its meaning gained prominence? There is an evidence that Shannon’s view was not the only one at the time - Donald MacKay argued a different definition, suggesting that information could indeed be linked with meaning, through change of the receiver’s mindset. 

Given the context of post-World War II years, Shannon’s proposition was better positioned, since there were no tools available at the time to measure brain’s psychological states, such as positron-emission tomography, to prove MacKay’s point. 

Plus, technology at the time needed that degree of generalisation - however even Shannon himself warned that his idea was meant to apply to only certain technical situations, not to communication in general. There were numerous other critics at the time, ranging from those arguing that separating information from its content pays lip service to Anglo-American ethnocentrism, to simply being too narrowly formalized.

http://www.journal18.org/nq/artists-robots-a-review-by-susan-taylor-leduc/

Susan Taylor Leduc, “Artists & Robots: A Review,” Journal18 (July 2018), http://www.journal18.org/2759.

Artists & Robots, an exhibition currently on view at the Grand Palais, is designed to be a crowd pleaser. The exhibition is billed as the first ever dedicated to “artificial imagination” defined as a “generic term used to group together robotic, generative and algorithmic art.” [1] One can easily imagine the desire of the curators, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac et Jérôme Neutres, to appeal to a broad audience eager to learn about robotics in an increasingly digitized modern art world. A smaller selection of works first appeared at the Astana Expo 2017, the World Fair at Kazakhstan, where Bertrand Dorléac and Neutres explored the theme in a vast exhibition space destined for a very diverse public. In Paris, they expanded the number of artists and edited a series of videos, strategically placed in the exhibition, that encouraged visitors to question artistic creativity at a time when robots increasingly co-exist and interact with human agency.

We can only create the AI that would be a tool to solve a certain problem, for example self-driving car or a chess-winning robot - we cannot create “general AI” because we don’t know what we need it for.

The claim often pronounced by creative technologists today that “the larger issues of what it means to be a human” is what technology needs to confront (G.Hertz, Disobedient Electronics: Protest, P.2). But is this issue larger or more important than the traditional social arguments surrounding gender and race?

I’m going to find out that gender and race are not only crucial in understanding where humans stand with relation to technology, but also defining categories for identification of the AI.

Gender studies looks like a promising subject to expand on in relation to technology, because it could constitute a strong biology/body/nature related argument in my discussion of a cyborg. However, I need to see where performativity fits in here - likely through K.Barad conceptualisation of posthumanist performativity. On the other hand, I wrote on cyber-proletariat and real software abstraction before, and would be a shame not to make some use of that in this thesis.

By placing gender next to technology, we shift the idea of gender out of purely biological or cultural domain, and start seeing the human in terms of technological mediation, as a mix of science, art and culture (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race, P.8). What is the political tension between race, gender and machine? Haraway’s claim (Cyborg Manifesto, P. 292) that the cyborg “gives us our politics” should now be understood in xenofeminist terms – that science is inevitably a tool of capitalism? (Xenofeminism. Helen Hester. Polity Press. 2018, in Long Read Review: ‘Repurpose your Desire: Xenofeminism and Millennial Politics’ by Mareile Pfannebecker)

Problems with queering the cyborg: It is remarkable that while techno-queer theory is talking extensively about the cyborg, it still remains largely human-centric (as in, for example, the Open Source Gender Codes project (http://opensourcegendercodes.com/projects/osg/) This theoretical field seems to focus on the body and politics of humans, and not the algorithmical and networked/distributed parameters of the machine (find facts to disprove this?). So it is more about the human-machine alliance, not machine-human, and thus inevitably ends up in activism and human rights discourse wherever it shoots.

Problems with Critical Making: Terranova (Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common, EuroNomade) and Critical Making (CM) protagonists are quite optimistic about the alternative use of technologies. CM movement, however tends to fall, on the one hand, into a localist view (e.g. inability to tackle world’s larger issues via local solutions) and on the other hand, look at those makers who they agree with. When Matt Ratto says “open design can be employed to... reconnect materiality and morality” (http://opendesignnow.org/index.html%3Fp=434.html), is it the maker who decides what is moral, and what kind of wider impact the product of their making is going to be (e.g. if that’s a virus or a deadly weapon which operates on its own and doesn’t have an exit protocol). This leads me to think that most of CM discourse resides in a clear-cut/implied ‘protest’ paradigm – which means makers are viewed as a group that shares a common ideology (examples that disprove this point?). However, this goes contrary to the idea that CM theorists like Garnet Hertz advocate – as an ‘open design’ accessible to all, including ones who do not share Hertz’ views.

Problems with being human (this is the summary of my original PhD proposal): New ‘online media’ class is created through different types of exchange happening through human sense of vision and the interface and is a political process. Art in this context is seen as technology’s aesthetic, existential, social and ethical (AESE) values that lie outside of traditional capitalist exchange-production cycle. The new digital class is an ‘aesthetic’ class, because it produces AESE values and resists traditional capitalism in a novel way due to the non-commercial nature of knowledge sharing on digital networks. Human actors in such communication are ‘distributed beings’ - organisms whose genetic code or behaviour is modified by digital networks. New mode of production on digital networks does not belong within capitalism, where you have production-exchange cycle, because it places value in the process rather than outcome. Examples of non-human agents: Stuxnet virus, search agents, chatbots (don not produce AESE value). Being human in this context would mean to be able to produce AESE values (non-human agents are designed to either analyse or destroy them).

Literature review

Search terms: computational aesthetics, cyborg gender, queer software, posthumanist performativity

Manuel DeLanda suggests that if history was to be written by a robot historian, it would be a different kind of history, focused around the impact of technology on humans. The military application of AI expressed in his book is interesting, however I cannot see yet how it would relate to performativity of gender in media art - the link I see now is either sci-fi or video games, e.g. media trajectories that explore warfare as their subjects. (War in the Age of Intelligent Machines by Manuel De Landa, P.3)

Mediation “gives us insight into the lifeness, or vitality, of media“. We need to shift our attention from media objects such as smartphones, to mediation, understood here as the interlocking of technical, social and biological processes. (Book Review: Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska by Kim Toffoletti, in: LSE Review of Books, P.1 and 6)

Kittler’s notion that “technology and media co-exist with organic life-forms” would serve as a useful link between media and cyborg gender (Niall Flynn, Book Review: Kittler Now: Current Perspectives in Kittler Studies).

Mechanised thought is a form of reason. Algorithms do not replicate human autonomy – they have one of their own, the one that pertains to the final aim of executing rules (completion) (Beatrice Fazi, Luciana Parizi, Do Algorithms Have Fun?, P. 125 in Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing by Olga Goriunova)

Computational aesthetics: "Computing and its aesthetics are no longer 'owned' by the disciplines and fields that grew up closely in and around it." (Computational Aesthetics, M. Fuller, B. Fazi, P. 281, 294)

Xenofeminists claim that science is inevitably a tool of capitalism, however there is a way of repurposing it, rather than refusing it outright. Xenofeminism is defined here as “queer- and trans-inclusive communist feminism that begins with our bodies’ inextricable relationship to technology”. In resistance to technoscientific neoliberalism,”‘absolute caution’, as the manifesto puts it, is impossible, but instead of surrendering, we can begin resistance by taking possession” - by directly challenging the ownership and control of technological infrastructures of everyday life. This is thought of along the lines of sharing medical resources among women in the 70s (example from nowadays could be the Open Source Gender Codes project). For Hester, like for Haraway, ”gender, class and race as historical categories of oppression ripe for abolition”. Xenofeminist answer to repurposing neoliberal ideals is then ”to stay on the side of what you want without moralism or obligatory consciousness-raising, but to do so in the spirit of a solidarity that aims for systemic political change” (Xenofeminism. Helen Hester. Polity Press. 2018, in Long Read Review: ‘Repurpose your Desire: Xenofeminism and Millennial Politics’ by Mareile Pfannebecker).

In summary notes to Barad’s Posthumanist performativity, S.A. Colclough summarizes that “Agential realism is an alternative to representationalist ontologies that split “semiotic” from “material” reality.

 Performativity is defined by K. Barad as “a contestation of the unexamined habits of the mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve” (K. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity:Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” p.802)

       matter is not a 'substance' but intra-activity

from Colour Separation (Mongrel, 1997).

This special issue (Camera Obscura #70) traces how race has been constituted via media technologies and how media texts have been constituted via arrangements of race.