Talk:Exe0.1 Lea Olsen Lea
Comments from Molly:
In terms of humans being deprived of status as human beings in the Holocaust: what about creation of art in concentration camps? There are documented cases of concentration camp prinsoners and people in the ghettoes preceding the concentration camps practicing art, some would argue as a form of resistance / declaration of agency? Can people have their self-actualization removed by others?
Can you clarify what you mean by "a way for the subject to become subject for its own desubjectivation"? I think this is a really interesting thesis, I'm just not sure that I entirely understand. I also think you should specify who is demanding agency here, and for whom. It is significant, as you say, that code is easily copied and transferable through formulaic execution. Does this connection to others and reproduction return power to the subject or further dilute it?
It is important to note that the events around Ferguson are hotly contested, with evidence from a Department of Justice report showing that Brown probably never said "hands up don't shoot." Obviously this phrase was appropriated in the ways that you describe, but it is interesting that this language, and whether or not it is true, is hotly contested. It shows similarities to the contestation of who said what in the case where George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin. This suggests that language is not necessarily neutral or shared -- it matters very much which subjects are using the language and why. It is also interesting that activists are using language and hashtags to give retrospective power to individuals who were among abused, unheard populations. I think it can be seen as an acknowledgement of Brown's individuality and agency in an environment where these were threatened or taken away.
I would argue that the distributing algorithm is not common to us all — we are equally treated by it, but we don't all know how it works. It is information asymmetry.
I really like this point: "in so far as it equates letting oneself evaporate in language plus code, this “nobodyness” becomes the mobilizing tool."
The concept of hashtag graveyards is really interesting. Hashtags also seem to be acting as memorials here. There are good parallels to the death of Aaron Swartz, which was very publicly grieved online. This concepts also complicates the general critique of hashtag activism. Using hashtags is like subverting the flattening tendencies of language and code to give it transcendent power through it's ability to be reproduced and connected.
Death of the referent: I see many connections to Baudrillard's "The Masses: the Implosion of the Social in the Media." When you discuss the use of language as a path toward death, is this merely because we get subsumed into / replaced by language, or is it also the unceasing forward march of time? Can you bring concepts of temporal performance or ephemerality in here?
Some additional questions your essay made me think of: Do you gain subjectness / agency by being discoverable? By wielding influence? How can we measure influence? Are you positing that we can be dehumanized by others through desubjectification? How does being a subject relate to our humanity? Language is a form of standardization : what does this say about technological / code standards? does standardization dehumanize or allow for amplification through connection to others?
does the dramatization of language = standardization? codification? simplification? universalism?
Thanks for a great read!
Lea, your paper is timely and important as it draws relations between the ways in which computational execution configures texts and writers/readers/users in iterative ways. Your paper draws out as you describe the "forceful" wave, of killing that was in part experienced on Twitter through hashtagged tweets, in order to consider the question of authorship/usership associated with the #ICan'tBreathe tags.
To write of the "death of the subject" or "user" in this very sensitive, deeply violent and traumatising context, is very difficult. In order to extend your argument, you could extend your theoretical references, so that they might do more work for you ( as I will discuss more below). You might also want to guard against simply reducing the death of Eric Garner into a literary figure, as these deaths are understandably, still very much a difficult and sensitive topic for many readers.
You open your paper with a historical introduction to the 'death of the user'. It would be useful here to bring in discussions from Race and Feminist theory, for whom it is well acknowledged that the death of the subject - refers to the death of the bourgeois or modern subject. Therefore for black writers, what does it mean to be brought into a literary figuration, such as the death of the user, when you have never had access to the presupposed subjecthood, referred to by Barthes. Here writers such as Audre Lorde and Sara Ahmed,(amongst others in the fields) could be useful to engage with, as they do not seek to return to the reinstating of a modern subject, but instead develop other ways to conceptualise, the shatterings and splittings of writing subjects. It would also be useful to discuss the ways in which people became constructed as figures through their deaths, here Jasbir K. Puar's work could be useful.
I find your description of the texts 'neutrality' and 'freedoms' difficult, in this context. In what ways is/can these texts ever be free (and how might you define free here), whilst black people are being incarcerated and executed on the street in the US? Perhaps further developing your argument drawing in thoughts of subjecthood from Ahmed, Lourde and others could complicate this argument in interesting ways. Similarly the notion that the text becomes neutral in social media space is also problematic. Neutral in which ways? As writers such as Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow- White (2012), Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura and Gilbert Rodman (2000); Wendy Chun, (2006) have noted online texts have been revealed to be far from race-neutral. As Sanjay Sharma (2013) points out in their excellent paper 'Black Twitter? Racial Hastags, Networks and Contagion' "ethno-racial collective behaviours on the Twitter social media platform are emergent aggregations, materialized through the contagious social relations produced by the networked propagation of Blacktags".
Finally you mention the conditions of life/death in relation to technology - this would be good to expand in detail. Perhaps drawing on Blanchot's 'The Instant of my Death' - would be useful, in which Blanchot, reveals the conditions of his life after he survives death - how might we consider the conditions that emerge from social media that continue after in the scenes you describe?
Helen
Hi Lea, Great paper! I like the way you take concepts of language and discuss them in relation to code, interfaces and execution – I think this is highly useful, including the discussion of desubjectivation.
Two questions: 1) your understanding of language becomes – especially with Blanchot – somewhat tragic in its doubling of death and absence. I wonder if a more ‘realistic’ understanding would serve you, which could for instance argue, that language is also part of a modern reality and part of the way that we become part of it – not in a naïve way, but as a way to understand its performative dimension, or the way we combine signs, signals and materials, e.g. through computing and interfaces? In Roland Barthes,perhaps look at S/Z or perhaps Empire of Signs or other of his late work. Or the concept of mythologies. Or perhaps Phil Agre’s idea on capture and the grammar of capture to go in another direction. 2) Language vs code/interface. What is the difference? Does a #revolution really mean, that we take control over Twitter’s distributing algorithm, or does it mean that we conform to it, including the way it generates our profiles and uses our consumption as production? Cf Twitter-revolutions and weak links (Geert Lovink). Isn’t the hashtag just a function in the interface – a button so-to-speak – and thereby a feature that is designed for us as users and not something we fully control? - vs Erica Scourti that shows how our “I”’s becomes profiles that is constantly written around us by our behaviour and by how online companies try to capitalise this?
/Søren