Wednesday, March 27, 2013

© 2000 Katie King-- draft for book on Feminism and Writing Technologies


© 2000 Katie King-- draft for book on Feminism and Writing Technologies
DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION! katking@umd.edu

preliminary drafts current:1. INTRODUCTION:
Why Feminism and Writing Technologies?
    • Why not talk instead about the history of the book, or about oral and print cultures, or perhaps especially about cyberfeminism?
    • Why should literature be called technology?
    • Doesn't using the word "feminism" and focusing on women narrow the field of writing technologies?
    • But doesn't this decenter the Humanities?
    • This book is truly an "introduction."
2. LITERALLY, WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
How are writing technologies "frozen social relations"?
    • How do the ways we talk about technologies help us see and understand them differently?
    • How do feminists think and talk about technologies?
    • Why is the analysis of work so important in these feminist technoscience approaches to technology?
    • What role do classification schemes play in telling stories about technology?
    • What about Donna Haraway? and what about Cyborgs, Cyberfeminism and other feminist approaches to technology?
3. CLASSIFYING WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
Isn't this what Marshall McLuhan talked about?
    • How do we think about the stories of technologies in the history of the book and research about orality and literacy?
    • Why start in the 1930s with Milman Parry's collection of data about oral composition in places like Bosnia-Hercegovina?
    • How do we use writing technologies to tell stories about the past?
    • What biases do we bring to the ways we write technologies of the past?
    • Why is it useful to think of the divide across orality / literacy as a great classification infrastructure? what other stories could feminism and writing technologies tell?
4. ECOLOGIES OF WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
What role do globalization processes play?
    • What do today's globalization processes have to do with feminism and writing technologies?
    • How can we examine contemporary TV technologies as concrete instantiations of globalization processes?
    • How can we begin to recognize in globalization processes themselves and in our inextricably linked analyses of them, new methods coming-into-being?
    • To what use can we put the notion and practices of distributed systems in layers of locals and globals, recognizing their implication in globalization processes, working to engage any political possibilities?
yet to be drafted:Afterword: Linking to the Web Site of Writing Technology Ecology Projects
Possible Epigraph?We seek to understand classification systems according to the work that they are doing and the networks within which they are embedded....When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent....
One: INTRODUCTION:
Why Feminism and Writing Technologies?
Why not talk instead about cyberculture and the history of the book, or about oral and print cultures, or perhaps especially about cyberfeminism?What are the intellectual consequences when a feminist investigation takes "writing technologies" as the broader historical and cross-cultural category into which "new technologies and media" fall as particular contemporary instances? First, it becomes obvious that both "writing" and "technologies" today have expansive meanings that bespeak rapidly changing historical interrelationships. For example, publication in a wide variety of communication forms today, including the internet, converge with television, telephone and their broadcast, satellite and cable systems of delivery. Words, images, sounds altogether create this understanding of "writing"; the descriptions of divisions between oral, handwritten, print, and electronic communication that appeared useful once turn out to obscure such convergences. A focus on feminism and writing technologies suggests that such convergences and other overlayerings are pivotal today and indeed have been pivotal in the past. This focus opens up cultural technological production to new inspections, to enlivened realities of practice. When we alter what counts as technology, what counts as cultural technological production, we open up realities in which the contributions of women become visibly more numerous, more valuable and increasingly complex. Opening these realities, we also see changing ranges of power, in varying salient forms of which gender is only one. Others include nationality, language, race and ethnicity, ability and more. Then we have to search for models of a dynamic mode of writing history that speaks to how our new understandings of contemporary technologies and of gender relations within fields of power vary what we see of writing technologies and women in the past. The examples I use in this book are meant to illustrate richly and model both why one would want to engage technologies in this way, and also how to do so.
The department and professional field I work within--Women's Studies--is interdisciplinary, and this book is indebted to and engages directly Women's Studies together with (at least) three other large interdisciplinary formations:
• To Women' Studies-- this book contributes a feminist historical analysis of cultural technological production by analyzing what is often naturalized as literary practice as technological process. Doing this requires interchanging and interrelating the kinds of objects of analysis usually addressed by feminist technoscience theories and methods, and those of feminist literary historians.
• To Cyberculture Studies-- this book contributes to building the nascent historical methodologies of Cyberculture Studies, positioning this new field as a contemporary instance within the history of the book. Doing so means engaging its yet slender theories of gender and society by demonstrating that too narrow understandings of what counts as technology undervalue the processes of women's cultural technological production.
• To The History of the Book-- this book calls for and begins the process of conceiving a more dynamic historiography, one that includes in a gendered analysis our grasp of objects of study in the past within and because of the politics of our own changing historical and technological circumstances.
• To Studies in Orality and Literacy-- this book offers an alternate rationalization of the intellectual structure of the widely varying multidisciplinary analyses of orality and literacy. Doing so requires examining the politics of producing the distinction between the oral and written as well as analyzing the consequences of gender presumptions in these studies.
So, why not talk in turn about the history of the book, or about oral and print cultures, beginning perhaps especially with cyberculture and cyberfeminism? Instead, thinking in terms of "feminism and writing technologies" allows us to animate each of these areas of intellectual activity and everyday life in dynamic interrelationship. The word "dynamic" is essential here: my point is to consider how to talk about these interconnections as moving, changing, shifting and transforming across locations and through time, in what I call "layers of locals and globals." Contemporary feminist activist interests in Web culture, research and everyday life are then intertwined with long-standing multidisciplinary critiques and examinations of cultural work through the lenses of orality and literacy. Understandings of the book as a product of history and technology are also contextualized within contemporary feminist analyses of power. It is the examinations of epistemologies--ways of knowing, ways of producing knowledge, all inflected by power--that are at the heart of feminism and writing technologies. These literary materialities and the human sciences themselves are thus historicized.
Studies and practices of new cybercultures unfold out into histories of the book with their archival concerns, which in turn unfold out into multidisciplinary studies in orality and literacy–and it becomes evident that all these require the methods and passions of feminist analysts of technology. Indeed these interdisciplinary formations are perspectives each upon the other, are practices each producing the others, are modes of critique and forms of everyday life. Changes in our contemporary meanings and uses of technologies of communication and their rearrangements of body experience, of social inequalities, and of perceptions of the past, violate our assumptions about "writing technologies." For example, "the Book" multiplies in complexities of circulations: renewed are intuitions about pasts of manuscript and print, scroll and codex, in the light of today's newly competing commodities: on the Web in database and coded in XML, as text on electronic hand-held device, as instant publication, and more. Such proliferating technologies under the sign of the Book, remind us, indeed require us to notice that such proliferations existed locally in these other inspectable pasts as well.
Feminism and writing technologies is full of questions and questioning, in layers of locals and globals. What are the politics of making distinctions between the oral and the written? As if orality were one thing? As if such distinctions were self-evident? As if there were a pivotal historical divide? As if these ideal categories existed in the world? Whose "revolutions" are the alphabet, literacy, printing or the internet? Global conceptual categories are interrogated by local material practices, but what counts as local? What counts as the material? the practical? the global? Assumption after assumption is necessarily excavated in feminism and writing technologies, each such assumption pointing to alternative pasts, alternative materialities, alternative contemporary possibilities. We remember what might have been, in order to really look to see what is in the process of happening today. We inspect the technologies that make such new sightings possible, in order to re-inspect our pasts, and newly imagine how they become usable today, and under what regimes of power.
The field of writing technologies includes histories of specific technologies. Consider internet, satellite TV and other interpenetrating communications infrastructures; printing, xeroxing and other forms of reproduction; computers, book wheels, codex and other linking devices; alphabets, chirographs, sound and video recording and other forms of inscription; pencils, typewriters, needles and other marking implements; paper, screen, sand and other surfaces of display; epic poetry, telenovelas and other formalized oralities; pictographs, web sites and other artifacts of visual culture. It also includes the methods by which such technologies are studied in the academy and understood in everyday life, formal and popular technologies of knowledge-making, if you will. "Writing" in this sense comprehends its largest meaning; it participates in oralities, rather than becoming their opposite. It stresses meaning-making in many cultural forms; it stresses social processes that are momentarily stabilized in human devices. And "technologies" here are not just the latest machines for sale, or the instruments and infrastructures of science, but the cultural refinements of skills and tools, extensions of human bodies and minds with which the world is continually reshaping in complex interconnecting agencies. "Writing technologies" are the objects of study, but "writing" technologies is also the process of engaging these objects.
Specific momentary skills and devices--for example, the hand-held e-book today--are conflations of local materialities on the one hand, and global relations protected and connected to other skills and devices under global signs, such as "the Book," on the other. Taking apart these global signs in order to examine local materialities and other global (including historical) relationships is one task of feminism and writing technologies. Literature is a powerful global sign under which writing technologies are conflated, universalized, and decontextualized. Inspecting literary materialities is a method for taking apart literature as such a global sign and understanding its protected relationships to other skills, devices and signs. Thus, understanding literature as technology, as cultural refinements of skills and tools in historical flux, is the first method in feminism and writing technologies.
Why should literature be called technology?Thinking about the technologies of literary practice opens up cultural production to new inspections of various contemporary uses and meanings. Public alarms about education generally and the status of its culturally hallowed symbol, the Book, are powerful forms of public engagement today. ("End book worship" was a slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution for concrete reasons, if out of a very specific history of literacy, bureaucracy and power elitism, and if leading to excesses not to be valorized now. In the U.S. of the early twenty first century perhaps an added slogan might be "end test worship"--an alternate vision calling into question today's coalescing Education Management Organization, through which the corporatized state produces its accountancies.) Cultural products understood traditionally as literature or the arts (such as poetry, novel, essay, drama, sermon, letter, memoir, biography, painting, sculpture, dance) are joined by other cultural products, overlappingly understood as popular culture, as high art, and as commodities delivered technologically (such as documentary film, video game, TV miniseries, magazine ad, guerrilla theater, graffiti, environmental installation, public mural, internet discussion group and web site). Contemporary forms of cultural production create interference patterns upon the symbolic resonance field of author-text-reader (producer-object-consumer; production-distribution-consumption; production-reproduction-transformation). Such idealized a priori categories break down with the examination of new cultural products, are revealed as historically and culturally specific forms of protected relationship, and turn out to obscure as well as illuminate usable pasts and presents. Literary and intellectual properties are in unsettling flux. While a future of "content-providers" rather than authors is one bleak vision mobilized by the relentless commodification of every new writing technology, the very instabilities of productive agencies that multinational capital is attempting to manage and exploit, may be more interesting than it yet appears. That is, may be so if feminism engages with such writing technologies of these possible presents, as well as with altering our shaping of usable pasts.
For example, the field of women's writing has generally focused upon the literary works of the last three centuries, with exceptional authors and texts surfacing only occasionally in earlier periods. This is because literacy has been understood as the limiting horizon of writing by women, and authors to be the necessary originators of visible works, cultural processes, and literary intelligibility. But shift the terms of value and the kinds of cultural productions that count, and far richer worlds of relationship among women and culture become intelligible and important. Feminism and writing technologies is a lens into those richer worlds. Readers and collectors of books emerge as gatekeepers, facilitators and patrons of literary culture. Ballad hawkers and retellers' acts of sedition and improvisation are recognized, documented in court records. Women printers and preachers participate in political and religious public life. Consider commonplace books and cookbooks: women as collators and copyists...prayers, visions and songs: women as visionaries and Trobairitz or troubadours...manuscript publication and circulation: women as intellectuals and colleagues...signatures and personal marks on public petitions: women as citizens and historical agents. Thus multiple objects and multiple agencies characterize feminism and writing technologies. Here, where authorship is not understood as the only or even the most important productive agency, but one of many in material systems of writing technologies, enlivened realities are made visible. These are writing technology ecologies of interdependent parts, under specific historical regimes of power. My point is not to produce a new functionalist history using the notion of ecologies, but rather to open up our understanding of how writing technology ecologies are dynamically interconnected, revealing materializing social change and cultural forms in flux.
Doesn't using the word "feminism" and focusing on women narrow the field of writing technologies?Locating "feminism" as social and intellectual method, as privileged approach to writing technologies, both insists upon and extends beyond a focus on women in cultural technological production. Feminist intellectual and activist methods continually draw attention to hierarchies of power, to historical consolidations of authority, to racializations, to cultural resistances in everyday life, and to agencies of social change. When feminists focus on women such a focus does not narrow categories of human agency, but instead attempts to unsettle and to call to account specious universalisms and unmarked categories of thought that leave unnamed and unexamined power and its hierarchies. Feminism and writing technologies is actually a more extensive field than writing technologies "alone."
To imagine otherwise is to inhabit and animate only unmarked categories, those categories that purport to stand for all humans by instantiating and centering humanity in themselves. Although feminism is certainly not immune from such fantasies, and the figure of Woman can be and has been mobilized as such an unmarked category, feminism in internal and external critique continues to call itself to account on this basis and to examine these processes of marking and unmarking, however imperfectly. Thus feminism inhabits and animates layers of marked and unmarked categories, which shift and change as power shifts and changes. It is self-conscious if not innocent of consolidations and reconsolidations of power, and works toward intellectual and political accountability by examining a range of social inequalities and their histories and cultural forms. While no feminist theorists or activists are immune from the practices of illegitimate power, as feminists they expose themselves to accountability on this basis. Thus feminism and writing technologies understands writing technologies as constituted within fields of shifting powers. Writing technology ecologies are ways of describing knowledge / power relations. Specific to locations, times and social arrangements, they require us to think of technologies as feminist theorist Donna Haraway analyzes them, that is, as "frozen social relations."
Feminists today ambivalently engage with technologies. Technologies are sites of contestation among feminists and feminisms. Agreeing that technologies are about power, what to do about power divides feminists. Thus feminism and writing technologies is also about the technology question in feminism. Feminism and writing technologies works to ask questions about so-called digital divides: not only to analyze patterns of inequality continued, exacerbated or created by new technologies, but also to ask who engages in what kinds of discourse about digital divides and for what purposes? For example, how is media public speech about digital divides hijacked by multinational capital for its own benefit? Under what regimes of power does it makes sense that www.digitaldivide.gov was produced by the U.S. Department of Commerce during the Clinton Administration? And that information on the digital divide under the Bush Administration today is embedded deeply in an alternate DOC site? What sort of information about social inequalities is the DOC likely to valorize? How has this information been used to increase market penetration under the rubric of ameliorating social inequality? What policies for addressing social inequalities and new technologies ought to be practiced? International cyberfeminists imagine new forms of activism, new works of art and culture, new body / machine interconnections, new ways of telling stories, new acts of conceptualization and sexualization. What forms of feminist accountability do such enthusiasms call upon? To what degree will these imaginations enlarge feminist agencies and to what ends? Whose worlds will be enriched and whose impoverished? What roles will feminisms play in multiple locals and globals?
It is a trick of unmarked categories to represent as narrowing the field of discourse our focusing on marked categories--that is to say, on the unnamed relations of power and the varieties of humans shaped by and shaping them, protected by and made vulnerable by them. This trick requires those with their modest privileges to wonder worriedly if those too are about to be lost, as they newly or repeatedly have to ask, Will I (still) be included? What will I lose if these others are acknowledged? Will I be rightly acknowledged? This trick masks specious universalisms anxiously tended, set into opposition with other tentative emerging "universals" constructed in layers of locals and globals. Think for example of those emerging universals tentatively grounding labor intensive global interventions into human rights abuses. Addressing the processes of marking and unmarking, of the making of new and the passing of old universals, of the human work of shifting power and altering social inequalities, feminism in its multiple relationships to writing technologies enlarges our fields of discourse about technology, names social processes otherwise unnamable, and calls attention to our ways of thinking about thinking about technology.
But doesn't this decenter the humanities ?Ironically those in the humanities find themselves represented today by senior scientists--in the hierarchies of research universities and speaking to legislatures funding state institutions; by journalists--in public debates about education moderated by media; and by foundation officers--in grants and fellowships and in public appropriations. Trying to appeal to their centrality in the education of citizens, in the structure of the academy, in the ideals of liberal arts, those in the humanities anxiously labor to keep from having their share in various allocations of resources continually reduced under the "management" of these varying representatives. The instabilities of the institutionalizations and meanings of the humanities reveal sites of social contestation over time. In the 1940s and 50s the ideals of a "classical" education were dramatically reshaped in limited but real democratizations of the U.S. academy and in construction of the great state research institutions following World War II; each respectively set into motion by the GI Bill and the military-industrial-educational complex produced by the Cold War; and historically contextualized by international movements of decolonization and U.S. movements for Civil Rights. (Cold War collaborations, for example, were instantiated in the ARPANET, the precursor to today's Internet.) Today's humanities in the U.S., as ideals, curricula, and organizing educational socializations are also reconfiguring under the pressures of globalization and neoliberal (and increasingly neoconservative) economic and political policies, now represented by media public opinion as producing "knowledge workers" for the so-called New Economy. Demographic changes and political understandings are shifting the patterns of racialization, immigration and participation in U.S. political and economic life, while revivals of old orthodoxies compete with movements for social justice. The humanities are inevitably caught up in all these social changes. Feminism and writing technologies is a sign of such changes and tools for progressive engagement with them.
Feminism and Writing Technologies highlights particular threads of interconnection among the natural and social sciences and the humanities. It interrogates and has interests and histories in threads through all of them, through their academic instantiations, objects of knowledge and methods, and also threading through their uses and meanings in everyday life as writing technologies. Caught up in the struggles for resources and authority in academic and state institutions, those in the humanities have been constrained to emphasize their separations and distinctiveness from the natural and social sciences, an ideological tradition shot through historically with meanings of class and privilege, and appeals to character, religion, morality and nation. The attempts by those in the humanities to hold themselves and their institutions and curricula accountable to movements for social justice and for changes in multiple U.S. cultures have been caricatured by media and neoconservatives in the so-called "culture wars." Any progressive social changes occurring through the agencies of the humanities have been held up to ridicule. Increasingly in media debate and in the management of universities as corporations --as if it were their only realistic and laudable alternative, as if making up for those "excesses"--those in the humanities are urged to name themselves anew in the terms of corporate policies, as producers of knowledge workers and content providers, even urged to give "money back guarantees" for an education that results in economic success. The shifting powers of marked and unmarked categories matter here. What kinds of institutional and social powers are available to a humanities in the U.S. distinctively naming itself against the natural and social sciences, indeed as the very opposite of science and its contemporary cultural meanings and powers? Another intellectual tradition also exists, with its own ideological dangers, in which the humanities share with the social sciences the so-called "human sciences." Paired with the natural sciences, this intellectual mapping etymologically emphasizes the term "science" as the great universal "knowledge," its original Greek meaning. Will this be a specious or a reemerging progressive "universal"?
Feminism and Writing Technologies suggests that the "writings" of the humanities, are always already "technologies." That the competition for resources that current institutional arrangements foster obscures the equally real interconnectionsamong the natural and social sciences and the humanities (or within and between the natural and human "sciences"). It suggests that it is these interconnections that are what matter today in reconfigurations of knowledge and knowledge institutions. Indeed, it suggests that what are needed are new educational institutionalizations that foster our apprehension of these interconnections and that limit the kinds of competition for resources that misleadingly overemphasize their separations in the course of urging status hierarchies among them (and consolidations of corporate power). And finally, Feminism and Writing Technologies requires that such global disciplinary and interdisciplinary categories be interrogated by the kinds of interventions in knowledge construction feminism has undertaken in the academy, interventions that emphasize accountability in the making of knowledge, rather than efficiency in the production of knowledge workers. Writing technologies defined expansively can be the heartening entry way into the technologies / technics of knowledge production in the natural and human sciences. Feminism and Writing Technologies enlivens understanding and participation in such knowledge production through historical and cultural perspectives that center human and other natural agencies complexly intertwined. Humanism, humanistic inquiry, the humanities and human agency are culturally and historically contextualized, engaged and interrogated. These are the stakes that a reconfiguring humanities has in Feminism and Writing Technologies: for scientists, social scientists and humanists all to be educated to grasp current technological and social change in perspective, to learn comparisons, cultural and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us.
This book is truly an "introduction."Once I imagined writing an omnibus book that both set out the kinds of arguments I will talk about here, but also engaged in primary research in two deliberately divergent intellectual areas of cultural technological production. I thought that book could provide illustrations for the abstract argument I make here, but also would demonstrate directly how different kinds of research in feminism and writing technologies could be conducted. However the realities of limited resources, especially time, have compelled me to rethink this initial form in which to share my materials.
Instead this book is a very small introduction to the very large intellectual questions and connections that feminism and writing technologies entail. I have done my best to make it as lively and engaging as possible, to explain issues rather than assume them, and to offer suggestions about how to forge connections to these materials and the "ecologies" of which they are part. It is inevitable that such synthesis will create oversimplifications, that the book's eclecticism will prove to decontexualize materials, although it should also recontextualize them, that its argument will be abstract, and that its practices of defamiliarization will at some times be more irritating than others. This book could have been many very different other books, some of which I (and perhaps you-all, as varying readers) might well have liked more. It is not an investigation of primary materials itself, even when it refers to the case studies I am working on today. It depends upon secondary sources for what are largely illustrations of principles, not in themselves specific claims about the past or present.
The intention of this introduction to feminism and writing technologies then is to defamiliarize various intellectual territories. Accomplishing this task without also assuming familiarity with all the territories through which I wander, is daunting. It can only happen if many readers are willing to do much of the work. Parts will be only too familiar, other parts either strange or (I hope only at first glance) just boring. My hope is that the very work I am asking you-all to do will initiate new curiosities, offering alternate connections that come to matter as you engage the book. In the spirit of the seventeenth century Quaker women, whose writing technologies anchor one of my case studies, I offer here some "advices and queries" for reading this book. I hope you can hear me laughing ruefully as you read them, although I take them quite seriously: serious, ironic, self-conscious "jokes."
ADVICES AND QUERIES FOR THOSE IN (INTER)INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAVEL:
  1. Do not just skip the parts that are not about your field or detailed interests. Cultivate a curiosity in these "other" details, so that you can consider actively what analogues this material and these approaches have for your own fields and your own projects. (You can skim them quickly the first time if you truly will come back and reread them later. And of course, you can read the book in any order you like.)
  2. When examples of larger points are illustrated by materials outside your experience and concerns, take your longing for examples from your own forms of expertise, and create them for the text yourself. Notice what conceptual changes you have to perform to create such examples. Use this very defamiliarization to explore the epistemologies you have noticed before and not noticed before.
  3. Do not allow the "boring" element of projects in which you have not yet cultivated an interest to stop your engagements here. If you find them "boring," figure out why. In whose interest is it that you find such things boring? Activate your curiosity. Create connections from your projects to these other projects. Consider which of your assumptions about these communities of practice are violated by this new information. Labor to build rich, appreciative understandings of alternate projects and practices. What does it take to get you to do this work? What new pleasures do you discover in it? What reciprocal work do you think you could ask others to do to value your projects?
  4. Notice which materials seem obvious and perhaps trivial to you. For whom are they not obvious and trivial? Which ideas have traveled from your communities of practice here, and how do they look now? How altered have they become? Do they seem "wrong" or too simple to you and why? What standards of evidence and argument do and do not mesh across these travels? How do your forms of expertise constrain the connections that matter to you? What would it take to enlarge them? What sociologies of knowledge could be created about the intellectual communities of practice you inhabit, and how does getting a taste of them as explained to outsiders reveal features of which you were unaware?
Two: LITERALLY, WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
How are writing technologies "frozen social relations"?
How do the ways we talk about technologies help us see and understand them differently?The stories we tell about technologies highlight or elide how they are made and why, their outcomes and calculations, and they urge or assume how we might best encounter them. These stories can be dramatic or low-key, urgent or thoughtful, inviting or estranging, analytic or active, critical or admiring. As a result of these stories we can value technologies as opaque, multiple, and difficult; or as singular, transparent and seamless. These stories are very powerful; indeed four different types of such stories seem to take up all the story-telling space. Each one creates its own universe of legibility; yet even so they can paradoxically overlap and reinforce each other. Here I am going to call them "technological determinism," "symptomatic technology," "neutral technology," and "technologies as frozen social relations." Some of these stories are better than others; indeed I want to argue that "technologies as frozen social relations" is the least misleading narrative with the most possibilities. I want myself to use this technological narrative throughout this book. But I also need to point out how compelling these other stories are, and that talking about technologies within only one of these narratives is quite difficult and perhaps not always most important. Consciously and unconsciously I simply will not be able to use only one narrative, even when that is what I intend. Each of these narratives has its virtues (that is, powers) and each is persuasive and useful. Learning which of these narratives one is using, habitually uses, matters more than producing a single critique.
Why do you want to know about these stories? If your interests are in Cyberculture, say, your stakes in such stories might be obvious, but then, the materials presented here might seem only too familiar, at least initially. (As I go along my argument may turn out to be less familiar after all.) If your interests are in other areas of cultural production, technologies and their stories might embody the very areas of culture that you define your interests against. In such a case, they might be merely "boring," they might be anxiety-provoking, or they might even raise your ire. The reason I engage and tell and retell the stories of technologies at this point is in order to create with you-all, various readers with varying interests, one of the pidgin languages we can use to communicate across the ranges of power and discipline this book and its productions and receptions inhabit. For those for whom the stories of technologies are familiar, I begin to make connections that may be current and currently interesting, as well as highlighting the contributions of feminist analysts. But for those for whom technologies are part of the everyday furniture of contemporary life, not to be taken too seriously perhaps, you will now be asked to do exactly that. If your interests are in the history of the book, say, you will be asked to do more than touch base with contemporary technologies as a way to enliven your arguments about the past. And if your interests are primarily in women as agents and actors, you will have to enlarge your ideas of how to examine women's agency. The examinations of power here are formed within feminist principles, and yet, however counterintuitively to some, they assume that gender or other identity politics are not the only salient lenses through which power is analyzed, even though these are lenses I do myself privilege.
I am going to describe each of these narratives of technology in terms of television. TV is the global sign for a fascinating set of technologies that complicates a range of assumptions people bring to the phrase "writing technologies." At first glance it may even seem rather silly to call the various TV technologies writing technologies, especially to those who privilege inscription as "writing" and for whom writing is the very opposite of the aural and the photographic. But even for those who resist the largest meanings of writing technologies, as particular formalized processes of meaning-making embodied in specific cultural skills and devices, a second look in this age of WebTV may give them pause. Satellite and cable television are converging with telephone, computer and internet technologies in ways that only this largest meaning of writing can apprehend. These convergences are explicitly commercial, political and technological in ways that are highly visible right now. This makes TV an extremely interesting example for description and analysis, one that calls upon and creates new intuitions about writing technologies.
There are other reasons to use TV for my examples as well. TV is a technology in which many interested in cultural production already have some investments. Those interested in new media have reasons to know more about the old media elements of TV (and its interrelations with film), as well as its convergences with and as new media. Of course contemporary TV carries with it a range of cultural attitudes too, some of them about the values of elite and popular culture; or commercial and artistic production. TV in these ranges is utterly "dirty": it occupies no purities and has no single idealized author. When we attempt to examine, say, the Book, and objects under its sign, we have to work very hard to recover these hybridic confusions, these instabilities, these corporate and collaborative productions. (Think for example, of Chartier's work in the history of reading.) But TV is very obvious in its confusing materialities and its disturbing statuses, and we have a complicated set of literatures that describe and analyze them, if not always adequately. Finally, TV is a site for feminist work with women as producers and users of para- and intra-TV cultures: as fans and as consumers, employing a range of writing technologies. Indeed, one of my case studies is about such female fandoms, producing, using and circulating sexualized images in global TV "networks." So, think of these women playing with and speaking these TV technologies, and think counterintuitively of objects under the sign of the Book, as I describe the stories of technologies in the terms of TV.
The narrative of technological determinism is possibly the most pervasive story about technology. This is the narrative in which we elaborate the social consequences that follow inevitably upon "the seemingly accidental invention" (as Richard Ohmann puts it) of TV. For example, telling this kind of story we might say: "The TV caused middle-class families of the 50s to retreat from community life and concentrate their nuclear focus, huddling together around the warm glow of the living room TV set." A journalist considering the convergence of TV, telephone and internet opines more generally, "Technologies acquire historical weight by reshaping the human condition." Ohmann focuses on what is misleading about such technological determinist stories: they suggest that these consequences are inevitable, that the technologies were invented without specific intentions, and that the technologies are singular, in themselves social forces. Agreeing with Ohmann I want to add that stories of technological determinism convey a dramatic sense of significance, sometimes of discontinuity ("revolution") that is exciting and enticing. My examples are intended to highlight how attractive these stories are, how progressive people might use them, deliberately or unconsciously, and to what purpose. I am deliberately not giving examples that I think are easy to dismiss. I do not intend to dismiss these stories at all. I point myself ambivalently to the sublime stories of technological determinism told by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, theorists to whom I am deeply indebted for arresting stories, although of whom I can also be very critical. To the extent that some writing technologies belong to more and less distant pasts, recovering information about specific agencies and intentions is at times unlikely (and for that reason may misleadingly appear less salient). Histories of the Book and print cultures, and studies in orality and literacy are only too intertwined with narratives of technological determinism, and many of the pleasures of defamiliarization in these fields are tied up and together with these dramas of discontinuity and revolution.
Symptomatic technology names the narrative in which TV, invented on the margins of the social, is used by central forces informing society. Telling this story we might say, "Our children have become ravenous consumers of junk watching TV commercial after TV commercial." Or we might declare, "Digital hype about the AOL-Time Warner merger is a symptom of rapacious late capitalism's death grip on every new market." What is deceptive about the narrative of symptomatic technology is the idea that technological invention is marginal to other great social forces which exploit such invention. On the other hand, such stories convey urgency and sometimes imply manifestos for social change. While we can critique these critiques, we do not have to renounce them. They contrast importantly with the third narrative, that of neutral technology. This is the narrative in which TV can be put to an amazing multitude of uses, oppressive and democratic, sexist and feminist, altruistic and profit-making. Inside this narrative we might say, "TV could either contribute to or work against teenage drinking; for every ad for drinking visible during the broadcast of athletic events, there is also some anti-drinking homily delivered by national and local stations and advertisers." (Yeah, sure, after much social protest, and as if that is a sufficient response.) Or in addressing the so-called digital divide we might assert, "Computers are not the problem, it is everyone not having access to them that is the concern." Such stories simply do not recognize technologies as created and deployed within, indeed embodying relations of power. Still, these stories can allow for the de-escalation of rhetorical passion, thus making room for uncommon collaborative engagements with technology.
But the problem is that each of these kinds of stories elides the processes of production of technologies and their agents and intentions. Ohmann clarifies, "technology...is itself a social process, saturated by the power relations around it, continually reshaped according to some people's intentions." (681) Ohmann points out three tell-tale signals that one of these mystifying narratives is in play. The first is using phrases like "the computer" "as if it were one single stable device." The second is deploying such a phrase as a grammatical agent (for example, making it the subject of a sentence), and the third is using phrases like "man," "the mind," and "the human condition." The great theorist of orality and literacy Walter Ong does all three as Ohmann quotes him saying, "...the alphabet or print or the computer enters the mind, producing new states of awareness there." (How often have you told or heard a similar story?) Ohmann observes, "[i]mplying that the technology somehow came before someone's intention to enable some minds to do some things" and making it appear "that technologies interact with people or with 'culture' in global, undifferentiated ways, rather than serving as an arena of interaction among classes, races, and other groups of unequal power." (681) It is to this clarification and correction that I attach Donna Haraway's term, naming the fourth narrative technologies as frozen social relations.
But giving you an example of a sentence within this narrative requires some explanation. That is because this narrative isn't simply parallel to the others, but intended as their correction and clarification (if we follow and elaborate upon Ohmann, who doesn't actually offer an alternative narrative but only a critique of mystifications). Such a demystification, in Marxist terms, has a dynamic, visionary element: it is the narrative just in the process of coming-into-being as fields of power shift and reveal relationships previously difficult to apprehend. It is also the narrative within which such shiftings are examined in particular pasts, momentarily connected to this present when recent apprehensions shed new light on earlier configurations of technology and power. So working within this narrative requires us to actively consider which demystifications to elaborate and how; Ohmann's telltale signals are instructive here. How do we describe technologies without using phrases like "the computer" and making them grammatical agents, and without using other phrases like "man," "the mind," and "the human condition" and mobilizing the assumptions they embody? Do we want to do this? Will this sufficiently emphasize the processes of production of technologies and speak to their agents and intentions? How do we illuminate the saturation of social processes by power relations? How do we describe technologies without implying that they interact with people and culture in global, undifferentiated ways? The "virtue" of such narrative is the creation and scrutiny of newly usable pasts and alternative presents. What about the drama and urgency of these other narratives? Or their de-escalations and engagements? What sorts of contradictions are revealed here? What kinds of animated engagements are envisionable and enactable?
Indeed, how about trying to do without phrases like "the computer"? What happens when you do this? Is a critique of mystifications properly addressed by an act of renunciation? Well, consider for a moment the phrase "the VCR" (referring to the video cassette recorder, sometimes just called "video"). For whom (and when) is the VCR a single stable device, and for whom is it multiple, fluidly shifting, differentially stratified by nation, region, television encodings, expense, professional and folk uses, and users raced and gendered? Let us emphasize the word "use" here and consider it too as various, not global, not undifferentiated. For the last eight odd years I have been hanging around with media fans, folks who come together to play with and to discuss television in its many possible enjoyments and intellectual engagements. Participating in and studying female media fandoms of global television is one of the case studies in feminism and writing technologies I work in. And it is while inhabiting worlds of media fans that I personally learned how much the VCR is not single or stable. Some of you too may find yourselves remembering the time when you had to specify whether you meant JVC's [Victor Corporation of Japan] VHS [Video Home System] or Sony Corporation's Betamax when referring to a VCR. Betamax persisted in some countries and among some professionals for a while, but today pretty much around the world the standard VCR is VHS.
But that does not mean that the video wars that Sony lost and JVC won resulted in a single stable device everywhere. As these women media fans I study know in very material ways, if you intend to share VHS tapes with other international fans you have to take into account whether your television signal format uses the U.S. standard NTSC [National Television Standards Committee] or the European standard PAL [Phase Alternating Line] and note that in France, Greece, parts of the Middle-East, and the former Soviet Union, TV is in Secam [Societe Electronique pour Couleur Avec Memoire]. A few very fancy very expensive, so-called "multi-system" players will play all these versions (Samsung puts out a "world-wide" player currently), but most VCRs will only play one of these variations, the local variety. Multi-system recorders and players are especially difficult to find and expensive in the U.S. European media fans find them more easily and less expensively. This is because the U.S., as dominant economic power and one of the great entertainment production centers of the world, consumes mostly its own products, while other countries, while wanting U.S. products, also want other international products, especially their own.
Female media fans might want to view, copy and exchange television shows made in countries other than their own, and / or to make their own alternatively same-sex erotic music videos (a genre called "slash") from video clips copied from broadcast, cable, or satellite TV (more than one "the TV"). These folks sometimes have such fancy VCRs to facilitate their use of copies made by fan friends internationally; but most do not. They know, because they have to work around it, that the phrase "the VCR" could mean at least Betamax (historically anyway), VHS NTSC, VHS PAL, and VHS SECAM, and only appears to be "singular" in one's own little local spot (which of these possibilities is "the VCR" is the result of winners and losers in various economic struggles in layers of locals and globals). The phrase "the VCR" (or "the TV" or "video") hides this play of possibility and the fields of power in which all these many objects are created and used. Notice too that naming it as a single stable device also obscures the varying gendered uses of this technology, especially its annexation as another domestic task. However, even if you are a media fan (dominantly but not exclusively female), when you practice home video taping in the U.S. in order to see your favorite program which is inconveniently showing on that evening when you have to go to your friend's birthday party, "the VCR" is a useful phrase when you tell your partner that yes, you've just programmed the VCR. Replacing the phrase "the VCR" does not result in a sentence, it results in several paragraphs, paragraphs which include information that is not always in local circulation (or is only in very local circulation; note locals and globals in layers).
Of course, as my friend Bill says, the VCR's days seem numbered with the rise of DVD (Digital Video Disk). Under its sign we continue to experience a range of competitive struggles. When I began writing this book, in 2000 CE, two were embodied in the name DIVX, which actually named two different devices. The first one was a failed pay-per-view scheme fostered by Circuit City, creating special DIVX enhanced DVD players; while the second DivX refers to a video equivalent of MP3 audio players' software, which compresses video files off of the web and plays them on your computer, using a media player. (Some versions can play protected or encrypted content). DVD has also referred to DVD-ROM, a player intended not to be freestanding or connected to your TV, but part of your multimedia computer system. The software development for that has included variations that allowed for internet interactive DVD, referred to by its Intel evangelist as "infinite DVD." Meanwhile the standards for DVD are in construction, so-called "standards" which actually appear to refer to company promulgated standards developed by Microsoft and which may depend upon its continued economic domination. (Instructive to think of Sony and Sony consumers who lost the Betamax wars.) Wisecracks about DVD include joking that it stands for Digital Vapor Disk, emphasizing that lots of people have DVD stars in their eyes, imagining a range of DVD-based and DVD-type technologies, many of which will either never come to market or will not remain there long. Imaginable software or hardware that does not pan out is called "vaporware" in similar witticisms. The cartoon PICKLES by Brian Crane, summer 2002, encapsulates the story of succession from VCR to DVD: Grandfather Earle says to very young grandson: "Come here, Nelson. I want to show you something." He continues as he manipulates VCR: "Look at this. I finally figured out how to program the VCR. Aren't you proud of me?" Grandson says, looking up at Grandfather: "People don't use VCR's anymore. They use DVD players." Grandson continues, "Poor Grampa!" as grandfather hits his head against the wall, "Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!"
Media fans increasingly view DVDs rather than videotape, especially as television franchises realize that there is a market for entire seasons of past shows on DVD. But media fans who want to view international DVDs, or exchange them with international friends, find new complications. Not only do the various TV formats in which you watch the DVD still differ (NTSC, PAL and SECAM) but often DVDs are "regionally-coded" precisely so that they cannot be viewed outside the region of the world in which they were sold. This allows their manufacturers to control both prices and release dates, which differ from region to region. Again, there are multi-region DVD players, easier to find in Europe which did not really jump onto the DVD bandwagon until they became available. These are players in which regional coding has been deactivated in what was at first a semi-official menu option made available by Samsung, but which is now usually produced by hacking, or unofficially learning how to deactivate the code manually. But for media fans who informally copy, reuse, and recreate TV, DVD currently makes their "poaching" much more difficult, as corporations and professionals attempt to increase their share of revenues by charging for every possible use of their product, even these non-commercial ones. (Or believe that every instance of use beyond that of the franchise itself will infringe their copyright, or compromise "virtual" profits: those perhaps possible in some future.) So those fans are often still using videotape. As my neighbor Kit says: "There are still vids being made with two tape decks, a tape recorder and Scotch tape, from what I've seen."
And not only VCRs and DVDs but now PVRs or DVRs make the scene. TiVo and ReplayTV are current examples of these "personal" or "digital" video recorders. PVRs are networked recorders that make home taping easier for so-called "time-shifting." The first versions prevented "librarying" or creating personal home collections for multiple re-viewings (a necessity if cultivating the kind of knowledges important to media fans), but the latest versions allow for users to send copies of shows to others over the internet. Broadcasters are fearful that they will lose control over "primetime": the viewing time they charge advertisers the most money for. They are fearful that viewers will stop watching commercials altogether, as PVRs make fast forwarding through them a breeze. On the other hand, PVRs can collect data on viewers through its network with greater precision than any previous ratings system, and may make it possible to design ads for specific viewers who will want to watch them. As broadcasters loose control, they may nevertheless reap greater profits, a counter-intuitive possibility that the VCR seems to have instantiated. It was the so-called Betamax Case that defined the current parameters of fair use in video copying, another reason media fans remember Betamax even today as PVRs reconfigure copying possibilities. Copyright and fair use are of special importance to vidders, those using two tape decks and scotch tape and those who "rip" DVDs.
Notice that issues of technological access here are not either/or: you have it or you do not, you can afford pricey equipment or not. There are many more complicated possibilities, involving substitutions of hardware, software, folk knowledges, international communications--substitutions each for the other, with implications for who knows and can do what, where and for how much. Access is too unidimensional a term to describe what is really about accumulation and assemblage: workarounds, borrowing, sharing, using what someone else is throwing away, patching old stuff together. Users are inventive: "access" does not capture what are in fact multiple forms of agency, individual and collective. Knowledges of such workarounds in the U.S. are not confined to media fans either: in fact, some of the best places to get multi-system players, as well as international and regional DVDs and Video tapes, CDs and audio tapes, and international phone cards, is in sites that cater to recent immigrants: South Asian Indian grocery stores or sari shops, Asian restaurants, Ethiopian food and music stores. These are cultural locations in which skills, devices and the resources for their multiple cultural productions and interconnections are shared.
It is relatively easy to "see" multiple technologies, even under a single sign, during the very period of intense economic struggle, although knowing about their agents and intentions may be much more difficult, information available to insiders or astute observers with specialized knowledges. Knowing and discovering women's roles as agents in relation to such technologies is complicated and often requires new research agendas. Without sophisticated research and research strategies, much of this information can be lost, or is rendered invisible by dominant presumptions. After the fact histories may make available more of that sometimes proprietary information, but the appearance of an unmarked, ungendered "single stable device" becomes the very indication that popular knowledge of these struggles is now virtually invisible, or "transparent." Operating within a local sphere in which that invisibility is never challenged, as when in the U.S. you pop your videocassette into your VCR without reference to which standard is in operation, makes the technology "seamless"; that is, device, software, skills, access and so on are all mutually reinforcing, enhancing that very invisibility with every use. The creation of a single, stable device is precisely what corporations often mean when they speak of "user-friendly" technology, and what most users want; indeed, the economic domination that creates the appearance and the material reality of a single, stable device is precisely the object of the argument Microsoft has been making for its own practices in its suit with the Justice Department. Gender, class, race and nation are among the varying ranges of unequal powers shifting and refigured over time as "markets" within such arenas of interaction, and also mobilized by users as sites of identity, engagement and appropriation.
How do feminists think and talk about technologies?When I teach my class on Feminism and Writing Technologies I often begin the course with Ohmann's essay. Years ago I couldn't find my original copy, so I xeroxed the version I found on microfilm, a bad copy with bits of debris littering the microfilm plate. Handing it out I started to apologize, when I realized instead that those bits of debris altered the "transparency" we were used to: they alerted us to the various technologies through which the so-called "text" had passed. So on that first day of class we all traced back as many of these technological instruments as we could collectively imagine and the bits of information about them we only vaguely possessed. Back from xerox to microfilm to Linotype.... Or was it now (in the late 80s) photocomposition? Today, probably filmsetting...anyway, the journal processes, and earlier, the author, was he yet using a computer and word-processor in 1984? or still typing it himself, or arranging for someone else to type it? And how are these instrumentalities also a hierarchy of jobs and genders? A series of "black boxes" of technologies and technological infrastructures and the people with whom they are animated, about which we as a class knew bits and pieces, but no one, not even the teacher, knew it all (or especially the teacher? students sometimes have craft knowledges and experiences teachers do not have, and such craft knowledges are also classed, raced and gendered). I had been describing the materiality of the text in other contexts, but had not literalized it in these ways for myself or my students before. Around that same time period Roger E. Stoddard was writing: "Whatever they may do, authors do not write books. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines."
I was relearning over and over the insights that had set my investigations into feminism and writing technologies into motion. In my dissertation I had used the writings of various technoscience theorists, or social studies of science folks, to rethink, defamiliarize, and recontextualize the editorial instabilities of poets Emily Dickinson and Audre Lorde. This was very helpful if a bit ironic: some of the social science work I was using was very much influenced by French deconstruction and by explicitly textual theories, indeed was describing technoscientific production as many apparatuses of inscription, of writing protocols, of communities of practice and interpretation. Writing technologies, literally and theoretically, are a material circuit among literary, historical, social science and scientific worlds. The stories I just told about the VCR are really simplified analogues to the even more complex and fascinating stories of early modern print culture and "science" in the making, told by Adrian Johns. Or a different set of stories also destabilizing authors, artists and agencies, told by Svetlana Alpers about Rembrandt's studio practices. It turns out that this literalization of the materialities of Ohmann's essay is another way to critique the notion of a single stable device. The essay is not one stable material device either, nor, as Stoddard insists, is its essential element its "text" or its essential originator its "author." I had come to understand this while completing my dissertation under the direction of feminist technoscience theorist, Donna Haraway (and, for that matter, being read by Shakespearean editor, Michael Warren and feminist literary critical pioneer Priscilla Shaw) and had learned that technologies, including those under the sign of the Book, are rather "frozen social relations."
I use Donna Haraway's term "frozen social relations" deliberately to point to a body of feminist scholarship in which she participates as a principle actor and sometimes as a point of reference, and which addresses these concerns in methodologically and disciplinarily various ways. One might call this body of feminist scholarship "feminist technoscience studies," and point to its overlapping and contrastive relations to other feminist approaches to technology, including but not limited to cyberfeminism and to what I have already called the technology question in feminism. When I say that one of the narratives of technology is technology as frozen social relations , that indeed it is the narrative I wish myself to use in this book, I am also referring to a range of research projects in feminist technoscience studies and the collaborating social visions they embody complexly, overlappingly, in layers of locals and globals. How does this feminist work alter ways we tell stories about technologies? How does it emphasize processes of production of technologies and speak to their agents and intentions? How does it urge us to describe technologies without implying that they interact with people and culture in global, undifferentiated ways? What kinds of animated engagements does it make envisionable and enactable?
Emphasizing the narrative of technology as frozen social relations has the potential to enliven technologies, to restore drama and story to their histories of process and production, to enlarge the categories of material life to which we attach these terms. When feminist information systems theorist Susan Leigh Star, for example, urges us "to study boring things," she means to study those elements of technological infrastructure that have become so taken for granted, so invisible, that liveliness is deleted. She insists that "we need good concepts to recognize the shortcomings of language," concepts that will enable us to tell stories recapturing that liveliness. But we also have to be willing to do the unfamiliar work that that recapture requires, and generously to tell and listen to the tales we create together and separately. Part of the narrative of technology as frozen social relations is thus about our searches, searches for such concepts, for our creation of language that unfreezes what is frozen, that surfaces what is invisible, that recognizes what is animated, that makes fascinating what at first glance may seem only too boring. Star offers "tricks" for unfreezing the features of infrastructure. In the spirit of anthropologist and cybernetics theorist Gregory Bateson's claim that "What can be studied is always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships. Never a ‘thing.'" Star points out that technological infrastructures are "relational and ecological." It was Bateson who taught me too to think in what I now call "layers of locals and globals" when I studied with him as an undergraduate. Think of the layers of technological infrastructure involved in my TV, VCR, DVD and Ohmann examples earlier. Star offers us "tricks" for thinking and talking about them. She calls this practice "ethnography of infrastructure."
Star speaks of nine properties of infrastructure that require examination, need to be "unfrozen," or give us clues about how to "read" it. In pointing them out I will refer briefly to my female media fan stories, but various readers could use this bare listing as the occasion for your own thought experiments: how are these properties pertinent for your own objects and projects, conceived within writing technology ecologies? The relationality of these properties should begin to give you-all a sense of what the term "ecologies" could cover. The first property, Embeddedness --or ways infrastructure is inside and part of social life and other technologies, and the second, Transparency --such that the infrastructure does not have to be reinvented over and over, are illustrated in the VHS NTSC standard for the VCR in the U.S. I mentioned earlier. It is not having to know about that infrastructure while using it that demonstrates how it seemlessly links VCR, TV and video tape every time we use them. (Or, for that matter, how essentially "textual" the essay by Ohmann appears in our very ignorance of its processes of production.) Indeed, another property Star points to is Embodiment of Standards , the ways linked technologies connect in a standardized fashion. Such standards are affected by three other properties. Reach or scope , shows the range of the infrastructure. Learned as part of membership , and Links with conventions of practice , suggest that technological infrastructures are part of, shape and are shaped by communities of practice, that the infrastructure becomes familiar precisely as one becomes a member of its community of practice, learning and enacting its conventions. Jokes about VCRs that compare adults who have trouble using them to children who use them effortlessly depend upon these properties, humorously inverting generational memberships and their powers. The politics of access to and the domestication of a wide range of technologies and technological infrastructures, struggles for power and resources, and gender and generational shifts are palpable here. The different social worlds with different principle objects of literary theorist and printing engineer are examples. Becomes visible upon breakdown is precisely the experience of the groups of female media fans who attempt to use VCR technological infrastructure beyond its scope, discovering then only too confusingly how visible, how fragmented, and how unlearned are the conventions of a trans-local set of practices. They then have to enlarge their knowledge of infrastructure, of standards in the plural, and learn new conventions thus entering new memberships, in order to assemble the devices, skills and knowledge that enlarge their range and make it possible to create their alternative videos and share them with each other. Because infrastructure is also Built upon an installed basethey have to deal with the effects of these different technological histories; for example, when exchanging videos with French fans of the TV show Highlander, U.S. and Canadian fans also have to take into account that French TV is in Secam. Learning, or attending to such infrastructure breakdown, Is Fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally . As Star says, "Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation, and adjustments with other aspects of the systems are involved." The female media fans must share information. On list-serves, newsgroups and web pages, orally at cons or media conventions, and through informal friendly apprenticeships and clubs, they manage their relationships with technological infrastructures and writing technologies. They enlarge their skills not only for making videos or viewing international shows, but also for writing, circulating and reading their fan fictions, and communicating with producers and writers what they want in plots and characters. The very layers of infrastructure and the complexities of skills and equipment needed, both require and produce the friendly linkages among fans, in layers of locals, neighborhoods, regions; trans-locally in cons, newsletters or zines, and internationally through web sites, list-serves and travels, in a complex writing technology ecology.
Star offers two "tricks" for "reading" infrastructure and for "unfreezing" its features, tricks that work for other technological layerings and cultural processes as well. She suggests we identify master narratives and the "others" created by them, and that we surface invisible work. Identifying master narratives means that we have to locate the central assumptions and their interrelationships in the various stories about a technological infrastructure or a technology. Indeed, when we think we are examining a "technology" we are often addressing an entire technological infrastructure, another of the ways in which the representation of "a single stable device" is misleading. But this controlling center or master narrative is hard to locate precisely because it is transparently assumed by some, perhaps by us, perhaps unconsciously. So Star suggests that "[l]istening for the master narrative and identifying it as such means identifying first with that which has been made other...." Identifying the "other" or identifying with an "other" surprises or violates controlling assumptions; it also allows us to imagine new forms of access, and better to reflect multiple constituencies. Notice the interdisciplinary multiply cultural feminisms Star draws upon here. Both postcolonial literary feminisms and their analyses of "othering' within master narratives, and women of color writers' identity politics are resources as Star considers how to unfreeze infrastructure. The forms of analysis and the objects of analysis between feminist literary practitioners and feminist technoscience analysts are interchanged. Social science feminisms examining women's work and raced and gendered labor processes are intertwined with cultural production and constructions of science and technology. Star plays here with multiple audiences and varying constituencies of accountability and inspiration. The term "work" in her and other feminist technoscience examinations is a term of productive inclusion, emphasizing practices, processes and translations that interconnect communities of practice without reducing their particularities,
Using Star's tricks, we might "read" some of the infrastructure differences revealed in, say, the addresses of an academic web page of Leigh Star in the U.S. and of an academic web page of another feminist technoscience theorist, sociologist Lucy Suchman, in the U.K. Using a Leigh Star "trick" we notice what has been "othered" in the infrastructure in which they are embedded. These are the two addresses:
  • http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_star.html (Star in U.S.)
  • http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/lsuchman.html (Suchman in U.K.)
The "http://" part refers to the rules, called "Hyper Text Transfer Protocol," under which a web browser reads documents in "html" or "Hyper Text Markup Language." The "www" part stands for World Wide Web, and servers (computers specified for this use) with documents specifically meant to be read in http often have names that begin with "www," but not all. Especially today when the Web is perhaps the dominant form of access to internet documents it is often unnecessary to specify which servers have web files; above, one address uses www, and one does not. The whole address used to be called a URL (uniform resource locator) and often still is informally, but the current technical term is URI (uniform resource indicator). One can use other protocols to access files on servers intended for other particular kinds of documents, for example, "ftp://" for "file transfer protocol" documents on an ftp server. One can use particular applications such as Fetch to access files with an ftp uri, or, properly configured, may be able to use a web browser to view them.
The colon followed by two right slashes ("://") indicates that what follows is the network name standing in for the IP (Internet Protocol) address numbers of the particular machine on which are located the directories and files that follow the later slashes. All such machines have been assigned a specific set of numbers (these IP addresses) that identify them to other machines, and that set of numbers has been given a unique registered name (although it is possible for a machine to have more than one address). In the first case, "communication.ucsd.edu" names the machine on its network and "people/f_star.html" names the directory and file in which the web page's text and associated graphics are located. "Dot html (.html)" at the end of a file name indicates that the file is written in hypertext markup language, what one might call the "grammar" of the web page. It codes, or one might suggest in analogy, "punctuates," the file with terms that indicate to the web browser how to make the document appear visually and facilitates how it performs various interactions.
Now, what I want to emphasize here are what are called the second and top-level domain names that help to locate the machine. In the first case "communication" is the name of the machine on its network, while "ucsd" names the networked institution, in this case the University of California, San Diego. The top-level domain name, "dot edu (.edu)," is, in this case, a "gTLD" or "generic top-level domain" and indicates that this is an educational institution in the U.S., either a university or four year college. In the second case the location of the directory and file "sociology/lsuchman.html" are on the networked machine "comp.lancs.ac.uk" located at "lancs" or Lancaster University in the U.K. The top-level domain name, in this case a "ccTLD" or "country-code top-level domain," is "dot uk (.uk)" and the second level domain is "dot ac" which in the U.K. specifies an academic institution, a university or polytechnic. Why is it that "dot edu" is not followed by "dot us" parallel to the U.K. address? Or why is it that "dot ac" is not sufficient to name a U.K. academic domain without a country-code as "dot edu" does? In other words, why is "dot edu" a top-level domain, but not "dot ac"? Instead the non-U.S. address in this case specifies the ccTLD "dot uk." As Star suggests, we notice this "othering" within the structure of the narrative produced by the domain names and their differences.
The master narrative embodied in the domain name system centers the U.S., both historically and in contemporary debates over domain names, their systemization and the governance structures they materialize, especially when they are most "generic," or unmarked. The Domain Name System (DNS), as Star's properties of infrastructure reminds us to notice, was built upon an installed base. The first domain names emerged in 1985, on top of what was already a long history bringing into being the internet. The ARPANET, the largest of the early infrastructures that eventually were brought together as "the Internet," was an element in the U.S. military-research university alliance during the Cold War. The ARPANET represented a difficult negotiation between the military and the research university, with the government playing an important mediating role. It connected sites internationally that produced and benefited from the strategic research which developed its distinctive decentralized but hierarchical communications infrastructure. Its organizational structure assumed an international focus that was U.S. communications centered, while its packet switching innovations made possible a decentralized (and variously militarized) survivability and flexibility.
Against the backdrop of this history, in reading their master narrative the gTLDs and the U.S. are the centers against which we can identify the ccTLDs, "othered" on this historical base which assumed U.S. military, scientific and strategic dominance, together with various international scientific alliances. Now, during our current period of privatization of the internet, a period of U.S. economic dominance, there is pressure to increase the number of TLDs, or top-level domains, as short, easy-to-remember commercial names become valuable, nationally and internationally, and as new sites for electronic commerce become visible or imaginable. The whole structure of the Domain Name System and the governance of the internet it has come to embody are contested under the shifting powers of privatization. Should the number of generic top-level domains be expanded to accommodate the commercial desire for short names with trademark potential? And under that system will "dot com" and its registrars be financially advantaged? Or should the domain structure be deepened geographically and "nationalized"? Is it possible still to intervene into the commercial mapping of trademarks onto domain names? Whose interests are advanced in these alternative materializations? Will the U.S. remain centered economically and organizationally in one or all? Are there other alternatives?
Until 1998 a single organization, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA (some insist a single man, Jon Postel) assigned the numbers machines needed to locate other machines on the internet, while a single commercial company, Network Solutions, Inc. or NSI, under contract with the U.S. Department of Defense, was responsible for matching those numbers and registering four generic top-level domain names: "dot com (.com)" (which has become a synonym for e-commerce or commercial activities over the internet), dot net , dot org, and dot edu. (Other gTLDs are restricted to and/or administered by the U.S. government, including "dot mil," "dot int," and "dot gov." NSI is now owned by VeriSign, which will be required to give up registration of dot org in 2002, partly because it has new TLDs to register. See below.) In October 1998 the U.S. government created a new not-for-profit corporation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN, to administer both numbers and names under the Domain Name System and to create competition in the now privatized, money-making registration of this set of domain names (and possible and now created new others) by a variety of ICANN-accredited registrars. While ICANN has international members and cedes to them registration authority in countries other than the U.S., it also has the power to name and accredit those ccTLD (country-code) registrars as well as the competitive gTLD (generic) registrars. Country registrars may set their own rules (subject to legalities in their country) for administration of ccTLDs, and while many registered domain names under ccTLDs are located in that country, they need not be, just as gTLDs like "dot com" can be used by companies or corporations located in any country (thus the term "generic"). ICANN is new and the range of its authority is being tested. A coalition called the Council of European National Top-level Domain Registries or CENTR (despite the name not limited to European ccTLD registrars) refused one of ICANN's first acts of authority: the levy of fees to ccTLDs to fund its organization. While they refused the invoices they received from ICANN, CENTR's point was that they had not ceded any authority to ICANN, that any such authority, including provisions for funding contributions, had yet to be agreed upon in consultation with ccTLD registrars. This was reported in the U.S. business press as "European Domain Operators Refuse to Pay Bills." In other words, the very negotiation CENTR claimed was fundamental was ignored by the U.S. business press, which, knowingly or unknowingly, assumed and promoted ICANN's powers unilaterally.
In April 2000 the European Commission proposed to CENTR the establishment of a new "dot EU" TLD which CENTR enthusiastically endorsed. Would this be a ccTLD, or could it be a gTLD since the European Union is not a single country but a collection of them? It complicates a simple location within the narrative of U.S. dominations embodied in the distinction between and materialized in the governance of gTLDs and ccTLDs, just as does the selling of ccTLDs by impoverished nations. Tuvalu, a Pacific Island nation, sold the now privatized registration rights to its ccTLD "dot tv" to the Canadian Dot tv Corporation. The Dot tv Corporation began selling the registration of web addresses ending in "dot tv", thus by fiat creating a new TLD that traded in on the narrative complexities of distinctions between gTLDs and ccTLDs. (The Dot tv Corporation is now a "wholly owned subsidiary" of VeriSign, the corporation that took over NSI.) Meanwhile Tuvalu both exploits and is exploited by the very status of "other" in the master narrative. Remember Star's earlier point: ""Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation, and adjustments with other aspects of the systems are involved." Dot EU is still in process this summer 2002, not one of the seven new TLDs chosen by ICANN in November of 2000. These new TLDs are all generic: the conspicuously "European-styled" dot aero , sponsored by the air-transport industry; dot biz, unsponsored for businesses; dot coop, sponsored by cooperatives; dot info, unsponsored with unrestricted use;dot museum, sponsored by museums; dot name, unsponsored for registration by individuals; and dot pro, unsponsored for accountants, lawyers, physicians, and other professionals. In July of 2000, just four months before "dot name" became available, a wonderful cartoon by SIX CHIXS artist Kathryn Lemieux appeared: Two business women are standing in the reception area of some office. One seemingly unpregnant one puts her hand lovingly on the belly of the other extremely pregnant one carrying a large briefcase, and says: "Have you decided on a domain name yet?"
Notice some difficulties with telling a story about a master narrative however. One difficulty is to do so without, as Star says is a characteristic of master narratives themselves, "turning a diverse set of activities and interests into one actor with a presumably monolithic agenda." (Thus creating a very version of the master narrative; possibly all too much the case in the story I have just outlined.) It is very difficult to emphasize the long term effects of, say, the ARPANET defense backbone, or the current powers of ICANN, without implying (as I may have done more than I wish here) that there was some monolithic agenda involved, rather than a set of contingent circumstances that nonetheless are utterly shaped by relationships of power. It is especially difficult not to position global capitalism as the great social force of which technological changes are symptomatic. To speak to these particular sets of non-global actors and their diverse interests requires even more explanation; perhaps I have managed to convey a broader range of interests today. Such a trajectory, from monolithic beginnings to contemporary diversity of interests is also only too much a characteristic of a kind of master narrative, an origin story, and only too difficult to break apart even while analyzing.
This master narrative here leaves out alternative origins of the Internet: at the very least the stories of CERN in Switzerland and the beginnings of the World Wide Web, other U.S. possible alternative infrastructures that are absorbed into the story such as BITNET and the USENET, and the alternative origins of the U.K.'s research and educational network infrastructure JANET. It leaves out the alternate "roots" that contest with ICANN for the DNS and for other structures of internet organization and governance. It just barely alludes to a wide range of stories of connection to and creation of the internet in many countries around the world. By describing U.S. dominance in this way, it actually perpetuates this dominance at the expense of stories that would emphasize the importance of other actors, that is, other people, collections of people, and the devices, skills and infrastructures they animate. Identifying a master narrative often means coming to grips with the need for new research agendas and methodologies, for new sources of information and ways of collecting data, for greater resources of time and more numbers of researchers. It means telling much longer stories. And it may require a kind of narrative self-consciousness that at worst can be paralyzing, at best productive of new methods, but always discomforting in the necessity to talk about talking about technology as well as addressing issues about technologies. You may well ask why I did not use the materials I have cited in this paragraph to tell a better, alternate story. These materials, laboriously collected, alert me to these absences, but they do not yet enable me to construct from them another story; although that does not mean that someone else might not be able to do so, either from these materials or with others. And it is also important to point out that the work of conceptualizing absences is itself difficult, valuable work, if incomplete. I cite these materials to support my point that new research agendas are required, but also to provide avenues of entrance into projects already begun. Thus conceptualizing these absences is another way of identifying "others," in order to consider how to "identify with" them.
Star's second "trick," surfacing invisible work, offers one way to reconceive and research non-global actors and their diversity of activities and interests once you have identified some "others" in the master narrative. Let me offer now a thought experiment concerning the internet Domain Name System. This set of stories about power, about corporate and national interests, and about engineering protocols, without naming specific female actors, might well be assumed to be gendered "male." This is another indication that the unmarked category does not really stand for all humans: if it did we would assume that both women and men were involved in these stories, especially when they are not named as such. How does one intervene into such assumptions and indeed, realities, and how does one complicate these stories? Where does one look for other agents and agencies? Star's trick suggests starting with communities of work, and especially with surfacing the work that seems "invisible" in the stories. "Work" here is that inclusive meta-term that signals interlocking material processes in intra-acting agencies, human and non-human. In this case we might consider taking a second look at those who worked with Jon Postel assigning IP numbers, in IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) or at ISI (Information Sciences Institute, the California think tank he worked for). The point would be to intervene into the story of a single heroic male figure responsible for the pivotal activity, replacing that story with more complicated stories of additional agents and agencies, emphasizing layered processes. For example, when Jon Postel died in October 1998, IANA was moving to restructure itself as a new non-profit corporation, ICANN. Upon his death his colleague, Zita Wenzel, who had been working with Postel for many years, became acting director of IANA.
When ICANN was incorporated that same month, Zita Wenzel was elected Interim Vice President, Interim Chief Financial Officer and Interim Secretary. The following year, with two others, she co-authored The History of the Internet in Thailand, based on work supported by an NSF grant. In 2000 she became an alternate on the Initial ccTLD Administration Committee, representing the ccTLD (country-code top-level domains) Constituency of the DNSO (Domain Name Supporting Organization, policy advisors to ICANN. The ccTLD Constituency is made up of the regional organizations: AFTLD, Africa; APTLD, Asia and Pacific; CENTR, Europe; LACTLD, Latin America and Caribbean; NATLD, North America; and other associated organizations: IATLD [International Association of Top-level Domains]; and AfriDNS - African Domain Names). And in 2002, when Zita Wenzel was appointed to the position of Associate Vice-president for Education of the Internet Society, the following bio was conveyed in the press release:
Dr. Zita Wenzel is the coordinator of APRUNet activities for the Association of Pacific Rim Universities at the University of Southern California (USC). She was Project Director at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) for the transition of services provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) which resulted in the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She was also director of the administration and transition of the US domain (.us). She represented the United States (.us) in the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) constituency of ICANN where she regularly argued for the needs of low bandwidth countries and economies. Wenzel is also a NATO networking consultant, primarily responsible for the Republic of Georgia and the Caucasus. In addition, she is a member of the NATO Silk Task Force which is a satellite project to provide cost-effective connectivity to five countries of Central Asia and three countries of the Caucasus. The NSRC [Network Startup Resource Center] collaborates with Wenzel on international networking activities; she provides assistance to network engineers and ccTLD administrators that contact the NSRC for information. Under the auspices of the NSRC, Wenzel produced a document entitled, 'Guide to Administrative Procedures of the Internet Infrastructure' which has been translated into French and Spanish and is used in networking workshops worldwide. This document has been approved by the Internet Engineering Steering Group and published as Informational RFC 2901. She has also been involved with the IETF [Internet Engineering Task Force] Internationalized Domain Names working group and was co-editor of the requirements document.Notice all the interconnecting threads to our exemplary stories (indeed, if I had not told these stories this bio might not have made sense), and Wenzel's association in various cases with the less powerful member of a powerful duality: for example, with the ccTLDs rather than the gTLDs, or Associate Vice-president, Alternate and Interim officer in various powerful organizations. Interestingly enough, the story that Wenzel and her co-authors Sirin Palasri and Steven Huter tell about the internet in Thailand is one in which a Thai woman professor, Dr. Kanchana Kanchanasut, plays a pivotal initiating role. Note that Wenzel has been an advocate for "low bandwidth countries and economies." Notice too the continuing influence of military alliances in the construction of internet connectivity, as in the NATO Silk Project. Some of the pivotal activities Wenzel engages are involved with universities and technology transfer (especially with the Association of Pacific Rim Universities): economic globalization projects in academic capitalism. Above all note the layered and interlocking activities, the levels of creativity required to engage their interconnections. Consider the savvy tactics such interactions require as well as the smart use of contingent circumstance. We do not practice this thought experiment in order to celebrate a (relatively speaking) uncelebrated woman, or even to demonstrate that these activities are not necessarily engaged in only by men. Rather this is an example of how to begin a process of understanding the systems, the ecologies, revealed in retelling these stories from another (an Other) angle. Is doing so a key to considering how these stories are gendered? In what ways might that matter, or not? Does Zita Wenzel act consciously as a female or feminist agent, and is that important? If so, how or why? Are such consciously female or feminist agents the actors women's studies and feminism are or should be most concerned with? What about non-human agencies? (And what does that even mean?)
Continuing this thought experiment: how might surfacing the work of this woman make visible a range of unmarked categories? For example, how can we think about the complexes of meaning, identity and agency which, in 2002, the word "race" attempts to engage in U.S. identity politics? How does surfacing invisible work surprise or violate controlling assumptions there? One of the writing technologies named in Wenzel's biography are standards for internationalizing domain names. There are some competing possibilities for how non-English characters will be represented in domain names, and Wenzel's working group is responsible for analyzing these and their impact on the domain name system. Strangely enough, the acronym for one of these possibilities is RACE: Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding. [ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange.] The issue is two-fold: English is the dominant language of the Internet today but this is clearly in the process of changing, and we do not know yet what the various futures of other languages as Internet languages might look like. (And how the master narrative of English as "originary" language might affect what agencies are possible.) Secondly, Latin characters used in English are also the characters that the current domain name infrastructure uses, or rather a particular version of them, ASCII. A variety of possible standards could be used to somehow include non-English characters or map them onto ASCII, some are even now being used in an assertively entrepreneurial manner. Will the standards that end up being used be decided in a rationalized way, in a top-down decision process or more broadly negotiated, or the balance tipped by economic interests and who uses what? (And are these the only possibilities?)
The "others" of English and its Latin characters here are numerous: languages using a variety of written forms, nationality and nation-building processes, ethnicities reconstructing, religions in various interconnections of identity and writing, geography, economics, family and other groupings, travels from tourism to forced migration, reproductions, speech and even physiognomy. As long ago as the early modern period various of these were indices of the fluid conceptualizations in circulation and in production of what we come to call race. Today race, specifically as a liberatory formation in U.S. feminist identity politics, also is laboriously produced by bringing together and/or recognizing such elements in particular historic configurations. Meanwhile some of these indices are brought together today instead of, in addition to, or as alternate formations; that is, as other "identities" in identity politics: for example, speech and physiognomy may play large roles as elements in constructing "disability" as a feminist political identity in the U.S., especially with regard to computer use and internet access. The identities of U.S. feminist identity politics are relative and relational: what counts as "racial" politics, in and beyond feminism, shifts in layers of locals and globals: in some parts of the world connected by the internet as well as interconnected through numerous other processes of globalization. These are indices of power as well, dominations as well as agencies. Because these powers are also relative and relational, the mix of agencies and oppressions vary widely, as do the local and global namings of various collectivities, sometimes imposed, sometimes chosen, sometimes historically continuous. The relationships between "rationalities and racisms" is pivotal, as cultural critic Paul Gilroy points out, and it calls for, as he says, "a response to racism that doesn't reify the concept of race."
How does "race" figure in the domain name system? At every level and kind of materialization: from the raced, gendered and nationalized divisions of labor in the U.S. and in other countries' factories where the silicon chips of the computers are manufactured, to the people of Tuvalu selling their "property in themselves" as figured in the domain name of their country, nation, culture: dot tv. From the racially and economically stratified U.S. school system held inappropriately accountable as principle agent to democratize computer access in <school-name>.<district>.K12.<state-code>.US, to the racial and ethnic groups targeted as new telecommunications, entertainment and computer markets by transnational corporations in the 90s, reflected in trademarks mapped onto domain names (like Latino Professional Network or LPN.org). From the migrant computer professional in the U.S. on a H-IB visa sending email back "home," to the neo-nazi groups with racially abusive domain names permitted in economically imploding Argentina. From the Hawaiian, Catalan, Navajo and Gaelic language revitalization web sites in which diasporic languages and their speakers create collectivities for transmission, willing new linguistic futures, to the Cajun musicians who share, sell and protect their cultural traditions. From sweethoney.com, the domain name of the African-American activist female a cappella ensemble, to afrofuturism.net, exploring futurist themes in black cultural technological production. From the distinctly African origins of binary code, to Ernest Everett Just's contributions to what would later become General Systems Theory, in black cybernetic communities.
What Star is talking about in surfacing invisible work is a related sort of thinking process although Star's own methodologies are generally ethnographic, and similarly is an intervention into master narratives (in which phrase one can hear now only too clearly what Gilroy calls "the complicity of rationality with racial terror" /213). Star describes this kind of analysis: "[It] means going backstage...and recovering the mess obscured by the boring sameness of the information presented. It is often in such backstage work that important requirements are discovered....With any form of work, there are always people whose work goes unnoticed or is not formally recognized...leaving out what are locally perceived as 'nonpeople' can mean a nonworking system.... There is often a delicate balance of this sort between making things visible and leaving things tacit.... Make it explicit, and it will become a target...[It may require] making their work just visible enough for legitimation, but maintaining an area of discretion." Notice this strange term "nonpeople." These complex "Others" are not the non-human agents (of whom more later), but rather an index of more than one kind of salience in play. The analyst may have different values, perceptions and intentions as agent than do the local actors. The analyst has to inhibit more than one reality simultaneously in order to surface invisible work and to identify "Others": otherwise both would remain invisible. "More than one reality" may mean multiple local realities, and/or realities of both locals and globals. The ecologies of interconnection are understood in these "layers of locals and globals." Neither meta-terms of the analysis or local terms (perhaps multiple local terms) of the particular work system are sufficient. Their interlayerings are necessary to create this visibility. "Nonpeople" is a meta-term for a local attitude. It is not the analyst's attitude; naming it in fact demonstrates this. It is the naming of one kind of value system by another kind of value system, a naming which then interlayers them, creating new forms of accountability. It also suggests that some local attitudes can hinder understanding of the very local systems: that not valuing some agents may mean that changes based on such attitudes will create systems that no longer "work." In other words, social relations embody various powers.
I could give a very different kind of example of this same strategy of surfacing invisible work drawing upon another historical institution and specific work site, a 17th c. London print shop where some of the Quaker women's pamphlets I study were printed. This points to the other principle case study in feminism and writing technologies within which I currently work. Until recently the ubiquitous figure of the master printer was a man, and indeed, typically speaking master printers in England were men in the 17th c. It is all too easy for us today to assume, because of that, that such 17th c. print shops were the sites of men's work (a possible master narrative). Yet these print shops were part of a very different structure of work than what we assume today, a different ecology of agencies and materialities, if you will. Regulated by guilds, they formally and informally organized the labor of a whole household, comprised of journeymen, apprentices, and other household members, including servants. Some of the work done by women in the past is rendered invisible by our contemporary assumptions about the meanings of male domination of craft production, what counts as "work" now. Indeed, such work by women was probably visible and invisible at the time too, according to assumptions and institutionalizations of guild governance and social order locally, what counted as "work" then. Nonetheless, as Londa Schiebinger, feminist historian of women and science states, general patterns of women's participation in craft production were as: "[1] daughters and apprentices; [2] wives who assisted their husbands as paid or unpaid artisans; [3] independent artisans; or [4] widows who inherited the family business." Thus, both women and children were part of invisible work in 17th c. print shops, their invisibility complexly mediated by our own assumptions and institutionalizations and by their local assumptions and institutionalizations. Using this inclusive term "work" to interlayer these meanings allows for another visibility, another, indeed contemporary feminist understanding of what makes this local historical site "work."
This 17th c. London print shop that is one site for explorations into 17th c. Quaker women's writing and feminism and writing technologies is that of the Sowle family "near the meeting House in White-Hart-Court in Grace-Church-Street." Women figure in this family print shop in all the ways Schiebinger names for women's participation in craft production: Tace Sowle is her father's apprentice when he is master printer (indeed he had been apprenticed himself to a woman printer), and she becomes the master printer of the shop after his death, as an independent artisan, until her marriage. After her marriage the shop operates under her mother's name, J. Sowle, as widow owner of the family business, while her daughter Tace continued to head the shop. Tace's sister Elizabeth married a printer and together she and her husband became the first Quaker printers in the American colonies. The atypical visibility of the work of this woman in this print shop makes it possible to examine the relative invisibility and visibility of the work of women elsewhere. Feminist book trade historian Maureen Bell points out: "Behind the (usually male) names in title-page imprints lie domestic partnerships of husbands and wives engaged in complex networks of interest: commercial and economic certainly, but also familial, religious and political. Women were active at every level of the book trade, from the legal operation of presses and the running of bookshops to the risky underground organization of secret presses and the hawking of 'seditious' pamphlets. As individuals they were thus crucial agents, helping to shape the specific religious, political and cultural networks in which they themselves were engaged."
Surfacing invisible work in the consideration of printing as technological infrastructure and the print shop as but one element in an entire 17th c. writing technology ecology is another way to see clearly the inadequacies of the notion of "a single stable device." A print shop is the location for a range of devices and skills, as well as various relationships, technical and social, that make up printing as activity and technology. The press itself is only a metonym for all that printing encompasses: certainly the entire infrastructure of printing, but even at times for all the writing technology ecologies of which it is locally only one part. Overvaluing that metonymic reduction results in misdefining and misgendering technological processes. Work by women is made invisible in such metonymic reduction by definition. Thus "technology"--reduced to what women do not do--becomes tautologically "male" as it misrepresents the relational ecology of the work site and the technical devices and skills employed there. Describing without replicating local assumptions about those who are locally what Star analyzes as "nonpeople" in the work place is also necessary for adequate accounts of the technological ecology. Overvaluing local knowledge can be distorting. Overvaluing "typicality" has similar effects in historical representations. Emphasizing a typical male master printer makes invisible the 112 women printers, publishers and booksellers (categories that overlap in ecologically relational ways) documented so far in this period by feminist scholars. It is describing the "layers of locals and globals" that makes it possible to see the interconnections among all these forms of knowledge and practice, in intra-action between past and present.
I have also been looking at Quaker women's writings on women's public speech in the context of the twenty year period (approximately 1640-1660) in which for political and religious reasons controls on printing shifted, affecting guild and state control, access to presses and who was able to print, legally and illegally. Women printers were also part of this complicated writing technological ecology. After 1641 state and guild controls on printing were weakened and restrictions on the numbers of printers, apprentices and presses ended. In London illegal printing, piracies, and unregistered materials all increased. Maureen Bell says: "What is particularly striking is that a large proportion of...[women's] writing [after 1640] came from women of a lower social status than the predominately aristocratic and genteel writers of the preceding sixty years, and much of it was the product of women inspired by their commitment to the radical puritan movement." One way Quakers named themselves was "Publishers of Truth," and as Paula McDowell, a feminist literary historian, points out, "Quaker commitment to the use of the press may be inferred from the fact that in 1659 and 1660 this illegal Nonconformist sect, despite comprising less than 1 percent of the population, published about 10 percent of all the titles printed in England." Women prophets "publishing truth"--speaking, performing religious enactments, writing out and circulating in manuscript and also in print their prophesy within a complex writing technological ecology--were part of the shifts in leadership and power among religious groups in the period before and after Quakerism becomes a bounded sect.
New historical re-representations of pasts, of past writing technologies, cannot assume that what is typical is an adequate standard for representation. Representation may have to focus on the atypical in a defamiliarizing move in order to surface the invisible work of representative groups of people and with writing technologies otherwise lost to sight. In Colonial Williamsburg, an entertainment and archeological site in the U.S. depicting national dramas of colonial and revolutionary America and with its own local history of re-representations and performances, today's souvenir guide book highlights the work of woman printer and newspaper publisher Clementina Rind, although her tenure as printer was only a few years. A children's book published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and sold in the souvenir shop of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., imagines a girl child's work in the manuscript workshop of her father in 15th c. Paris, drawing upon art historical scholarship about women and manuscript illumination, and upon desires for new narratives for girls. These historical re-representations of women in writing technological ecologies are products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning. Changes in what we might call "infrastructures of historical representation" also echo Star's comments: "Because [infrastructures of representation are] big, layered, and complex, and because [they mean] different things locally, [they are] never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation, and adjustments with other aspects of the systems are involved." Understanding these representations as particular forms of information infrastructure we might turn to other comments by Star: "In information infrastructure, every conceivable form of variation in practice, culture, and norm is inscribed at the deepest levels of design. Some are malleable, changeable, and programmable--if you have the knowledge, time, and other resources to do so. Others...present barriers to users that may only be changed by a full-scale social movement."
Why is the analysis of work so important in these feminist technoscience approaches to technology?In feminist narratives of technology as frozen social relations ideas of invisible work, particularly "articulation work," are analytic elements in new practices of social accountability and scientific objectivity. These analytic elements allow for spaces to see and imagine along with other social possibilities women's creative engagements with technologies, as in the preceding examples. Lucy Suchman (whose academic home page in the U.K. I used as an example earlier) is a sociologist who worked for twenty years at Xerox's corporate think tank the Palo Alto Research Center, also known as Xerox PARC. There she collaborated with others in projects analyzing "working relations": "Working relations are understood as sociomaterial connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use." Suchman tells stories about what it takes to construct technologies. She quotes "knowledge infrastructure" theorist Mike Hales: "Users 'construct' technology; they do this both symbolically, in their 'reading' of artefacts, and literally, in the articulation work that is essential before a concrete configuration of artefacts (as distinct from the generic system-products that emerge from usability labs in Silicon Valley) can serve as an adequate day-to-day supporting structure for a live practice." Articulation work is required because work sites are characterized by, as Suchman says: "artifactual richness." "...a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired, in bits and pieces, over time." Think of the female media fans using the intricate writing technology ecologies of video making and fan fictions. Or perhaps of the Quaker women prophets, searching out illegal print shops to print their revelations, themselves distributing these published truths, perhaps even at the scene of a religious enactment with others. Such users provide the articulation work needed to construct technological processes out of the assemblage of devices and conditions of work. "...the coherence of artifacts is a contingent and ongoing achievement of practices of design-in-use, in ways and to an extent that is missing from professional talk about finished products." Or, one might add, missing from discussions of access in U.S. identity politics. Once again we demystify the idea of a technology as "a single stable device" and instead emphasize a range of processes of production, much of which is not done by socially recognized "producers" but also by others, some of whom may be locally "nonpeople," in a range of kinds of invisible work, including "use." Notice that the ranges of productions, including "uses," are "always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships" as Bateson says. Imaginatively call to mind here the living rooms of my female media fans, or the print shop of Tace Sowle, marking the ranges of articulation work that women do in these locations, points in large relational ecologies.
Suchman describes some of her insights while working with others on projects at Xerox PARC: "As members of a very large enterprise engaged in the production of new technologies, I and my colleagues found ourselves enmeshed in an overwhelmingly complex network of relations, for the most part made up of others we had never met and of whose work we are only dimly aware. The simple dichotomy of technology production and use masks (or indexes as we begin to respecify it) what is in actuality an increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people and activities, each operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others." This movement from perceiving the masking to respecifying and indexing is crucial to the narrative of technology as frozen social relations and one of the ways it differs from the demystification process that Ohmann presupposes. While it includes or begins with demystifications, unmasking is not enough; new practices of social accountability and scientific objectivity are also called upon. Indexing "dense and differentiated layers of people and activities," indexing numerous "limited spheres of knowing and acting," and indexing "variously crude or sophisticated conceptualizations" translated between layers of peoples and their understandings of activities and others, all are called upon in a practice of technoscientific accountability and objectivity that pays attention to "working relations."
Drawing upon Donna Haraway's work on situated knowledges, Suchman expresses these concerns by saying: "My starting place is recent moves to reframe objectivity from an established body of knowledge to knowledge in dynamic production, reproduction and transformation....The movement is from a single, asituated, master perspective that bases its claims to objectivity in the closure of debate, to multiple, located, partial perspectives that find their objective character through ongoing dialogue. The premise is that the latter is not only a better route to objectivity, but that it is in actuality the only way in which claims to objectivity are or ever could be grounded, however much the lived work of knowledge production is deleted from traditional scientific discourse. The feminist move in particular reframes the locus of objectivity from an established body of knowledge not produced or owned by anyone, to knowledges in dynamic production for which we are all responsible." Knowledges understood in this way and technologies are linked: "The agenda in the case of design becomes working for the presence of multiple voices not only in knowledge production but in the production of technologies as knowledges objectified [read "frozen"] in a particular way." Suchman suggests two forms such objectification or freezing or stabilization of technologies as knowledges can take: [1] "handing-off of technologies across multiple, discontinuous worlds each of which stands as a black box for the others," thus relying upon invisible articulation work at each boundary crossing, without challenging crude conceptualizations of others' work; and [2] "awareness of and orientation to the work required to achieve technology stabilization and one's location" within working relations understood in layered, complex terms, possibly with active attempts at translations across boundaries. Notice that technology stabilization or freezing is not necessarily undesirable. (Using the phrase "the VCR" is simpler than telling a long story about its history.) What are problematic are the forms of accountability the process does and does not permit. In other words, we like "user-friendly" technology, we need at times to "black box" the processual history of the VCR and just call it that; but what is at stake is what we have to pay for these totally necessary conveniences. Who benefits most from "black boxing" and who pays most for it?
Translation work may be an element of articulation work, relatively visible and invisible. Suchman describes reactions to her and her fellow multidisciplinary ethnographers' reluctance to undertake such translation work for a corporate contract: "The first proposal was that, as ethnographers, we might mediate relations between designers and users. Increasingly, however, our reluctance to translate our practice directly into design terms was met with frustrations from the design community. Our hesitation to produce such translations led to our characterization as recalcitrant social scientists, unwilling to roll up our sleeves and engage in the real work of design. For a time I at least was confused by this, feeling that to deliver design implications was indeed my responsibility but that I was unable to do so. I dwelled uncomfortably for several years within this gap between my practice and that of my design co-workers, seeing it not as a systemic discontinuity but as a personal shortcoming." Nonetheless this very reluctance and the inability to explain it or overcome it in time produces insights into these working relations: "Gradually, however, we came to see that the problem lay neither in ourselves nor in our colleagues, but in the division of professional labor and the assumptions about knowledge production that lay behind it. The discontinuities across our intellectual and professional traditions and associated discursive practices meant that we could not simply produce 'results' that could be handed off to our colleagues. What we were learning was inextricably tied to the ongoing development of our own theorizing and practice, such that it could not be cut loose and exported elsewhere....we began to resist those demands...by rejecting assumptions on the basis of which the demands for our knowledge were being made...we began to argue the need for mutual learning and partial translations. This in turn required new working relations not then in place."
Notice how the "reluctance to translate" becomes a clue to the existence of systematic discontinuities to be analyzed. Dwelling in the gap between practices and thus surfacing one's own invisible work, is a process uncomfortable enough that the very reluctance to do it feels like a personal shortcoming endangering the job getting done. Surfacing this invisible work however is a prelude to transforming working relations, while the analysis of the reluctance to do it is the ground upon which such changes can take place. The otherwise transparent divisions of professional labor and the boundaries between their multiple, discontinuous worlds become painfully opaque, although at first the pain is personalized. The reluctance is respecified as both the difficulty of and in this case the undesirability of maintaining the series of black boxes that devalues articulation work and renders it invisible, that misrepresents the very processes of production that supposedly are to be explained, and that keeps intact crude understandings of others' spheres of work even while supposedly explaining them. Actual explanations required not translations that keep black boxes intact, but reconstructions of working relations that share more of the articulation work, making elements of it explicit rather than tacit.
The concept of articulation work also allows us to analyze technology as frozen social relations as a two part process, in which human activities are frozen and also in which technical artifacts are animated and given subjectivity. (Some of the indications of which are those tell tale signs of Ohmann's in which specific technologies are figured as global actors and as grammatical agents.) "The assimilations of lived experience to technique goes both ways, which only makes the project of re-imaging technologies the more urgent." Suchman learns from the work of science, literature and rhetoric scholar Richard Doyle, who "has proposed that the vitality and autonomy of computational artifacts emerge through the camouflaging of the networks that support them. By 'camouflage' he means encoding in ways that depend crucially on obscuring the embodied activities that are the conditions of possibility for artificial life; that is, 'machines, bodies, desires, and other practices on all sides of the screen.' In contrast, Doyle argues that the vitality of artifacts comes from a massive assemblage of machines, users and rhetorics that semiotically and materially distribute their 'vitality effect.'"
Notice the massive assemblage here. Denying nonhuman agency is not what Suchman means by describing how some human agencies are enacted by imagining technical artifacts with subjectivity. A complexly intertwined world is not moved only by human agency, and even human agencies are not only effected by individuals. Other agencies exist, and many agencies are collaborative, contesting, diffused, aggregated, ecologically relational. Indeed, the concept of articulation work helps us to understand ways in which lines drawn between devices, humans, other organisms and worldly elements and their agencies are lines drawn for a variety of reasons, some of them crucially misleading. Contesting these lines drawn and offering alternative metaphors with fittingly evocative analytic richness is the common project of both feminist technoscience studies and cyberfeminism. Cyborg sightings figure here, out of colored bands of light, diffractions through the grained work of Donna Haraway, used to shift the horizon of thought in both feminist technoscience projects and in cyberfeminist projects. Envisioning metaphors for many agencies is diffracted for feminists in fringed parallels through the edges of actor/actant theory and the work of Bruno Latour and others, feminist and not, in Science Studies. Quoting Australian historian and philosopher of science Monica Mulcahy, Suchman says: "Agency on this view is rather 'a relational effect that is generated in different configurations of [human and nonhuman] materials.'" Suchman explains: "The problem is less that we attribute agency to computational artifacts, than that our language for talking about agency, whether for persons or artifacts, presupposes a field of discrete, self-standing individuals." Recall Bateson's concern that we think we are addressing "things" when instead we are examining relationships. Suchman clarifies: "...the price of recognizing the agency of artifacts need not be the denial of our own. Agency...resides neither in us nor in our artifacts, but in our intra-actions....we can intra-act responsibly and productively with and through them."
Suchman's study of human and machine intra-action and agency takes up Bruno's Latour's challenge to "direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization...." Practices of purification keep artifacts and humans ontologically separated; practices of hybridization use translations to create new hybrids of nature and culture, like the Cyborg. Latour contends that modernism defines itself by keeping these two practices distinct, as the very condition of practicing both. Instead, attending to these kinds of work simultaneously allows us to become "retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work....Our past begins to change." (11) "This retrospective attitude...deploys instead of unveiling, adds instead of subtracting, fraternizes instead of denouncing, sorts out instead of debunking...." (47) "When we see them as networks, Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune." (49) Demystification is a practice of purification; as I said before, while narratives of technology as frozen social relations begin with demystifications, unmasking gives way to indexing and respecifying, requiring and creating new practices of social accountability and scientific objectivity. Suchman says: "[such writings on human/nonhuman boundaries in humanities and social sciences work] provide the reconceptualizations needed to move outside the frame of purification and opposition on which modernist theorizing and disciplinary boundaries depend. My engagement with these concerns, however, came first in the context not of the humanities but of technology and engineering, where the situation is in important respects reversed. Far from being excluded, nature and technology in the regimes of research and development are centered, while ‘the social' is separated out and relegated to the margins...The way forward, clearly, is not simply to recenter the social as the proper subject matter of the natural sciences and engineering, as yet one more step in a kind of pendulum swing across the disciplines. Rather, the problem lies in the very constitution of the sciences as either human or natural, social or technological." (Of the "sciences" as knowledges, one might add.) As I stated in my introduction, this process of defining against, as when the humanities defines itself against the natural and/or the social sciences (and vice versa), obscures valuable interconnections among disciplines and interdisciplines, but Suchman shows that it also obscures the intra-action among people and artifacts (even those artifacts under the sign of the Book).
What role do classification schemes play in telling stories about technology?In their new book, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences Leigh Star and Geoff Bowker discuss what they call "categorical work and boundary infrastructures." The analysis of categorical work proceeds too from the analysis of articulation work. Some of the examples of classification the book documents historically and ethnographically include the International Classification of Diseases, the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis, race classification under apartheid, and the Nursing Interventions Classification. Classifications and classification infrastructures are information technologies. "Classifications as technologies are powerful artifacts that may link thousands of communities and span highly complex boundaries." (285) Certainly this is clear with the example in their book of the International Classification of Diseases. Or consider our earlier discussions of the Domain Name System, or of international TV signal formats. (In the next chapter I will add the classifications of "oral" and "written".) "A classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A 'classification system' is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work--bureaucratic or knowledge production." (10)
To lesser or greater degrees such boxes may be so-called "black boxes." "Black boxes" in particular bracket what is occurring at that location, for example the skills, the apparatus, the time, the resources necessary for that set of tasks to occur or that data to be collected. Instead only what exists before and after those processes is made visible. Recall the kinds of "black boxes" Suchman describes, through which a technology is handed from one community of practice to another over the course of its production (including "use"). Suchman is concerned that knowing other communities of practice only as "black boxes" in a division of production may mean that only one group of people is held responsible for articulation or translation work. That kind of "translation" work cannot really make clear what is actually occurring if each division of labor remains a black box. Only the sharing of the work of partial translation and articulation would do that in the site she was analyzing. But Bowker and Star make a different point. Generally speaking in classification systems "[b]lack boxes are necessary, and not necessarily evil. The moral questions arise when...policy decisions are layered into inaccessible technological structures; when one group's visibility [and the visibility of their work] comes at the expense of another's suffering." (320; my inserted amplification) Bowker and Star are also concerned to highlight the kinds of skilled work involved in categories: "categories--our own and that of others--come from action and in turn from relationships...continually remade and refreshed, with a lot of skilled work." (285) Categorical work is "the work that people do to juggle both...multiple memberships [in communities of practice] and the multiple naturalizations of objects...[understanding] how objects are used differently across communities." (286) Think again of the VCR as an object with different meanings, indeed different concrete realizations across communities and nations, and the categorical work required when using the VCR across multiple communities of practice, not to mention over time. I also think of the objects of knowledge privileged in particular disciplinary formations, and of the professional apprenticeships required to enter their memberships. In the interdisciplinary practices of women's studies the translation work required to speak across these communities of practice is considerable.
Categorical work is about both things and people, intertwining simultaneous memberships in a variety of communities of practice or social worlds with the objects-concepts-things-technologies that appear natural, taken for granted, invisible, frozen in those worlds. Understanding those objects-concepts-things-technologies and thus taking them for granted is a condition of membership in each community of practice. Thus the naturalization of things and membership in communities of practice are inseparable. I remember a bit painfully years ago explaining to an interdisciplinary work-in-progress group of feminists that I was investigating what counts as "oral" or "written." One historian said with evident disdain and exasperation, "Why something just is oral or written!" The naturalization of these categories could not have been made more plain. That the naturalization of things and membership in communities of practice are inseparable is precisely the information that is deleted in the black boxes of conceptual technology "handed off" from one point of labor to another that Suchman describes. Bowker and Star's analysis recovers that work by examining these dual elements of categorical work--gaining membership in communities of practice is intertwined with the naturalization of objects that is the very condition of membership. (Inter)interdisciplinary communication is often derailed by differences in the naturalization of various intellectual objects, both those analyzed and those used to produce analysis. My denaturalization of the categories "oral" and "written" as a member of one community of practice left me looking quite crazy to those inhabiting others.
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them...plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints...yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become strongly structured in individual-site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete.... The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting communities.... [they] arise over time from durable cooperation among communities of practice...[they] resolve anomalies of naturalization [in other words they resolve issues that arise when, for example, people have a range of familiarity with particular objects-technologies]...." (297; my inserts and emphasis) In the next chapter I will consider the categories "oral" and "written" as precisely these kinds of boundary objects: managing coherence across intersecting disciplinary communities of practice. And in a moment I will discuss the notion of the Cyborg and indeed the very figure of Donna Haraway as also boundary objects, across feminisms and across other approaches and politics of technological explanation.
What Ohmann calls "a single stable device" (think: "the VCR" or "the Book") may be precisely such a boundary object, a global sign. Thus boundary objects mediate among communities of practice, for individuals and groups, as they are used to account for and manage the intra-action of people and machines-objects-things-technologies along a trajectory of naturalization, or taking things for granted, or freezing technologies. Notice that objects and technologies may be abstract and concrete as well as symbolic and material. Classification systems, such as race classification under South African apartheid, are striking examples of technologies that are simultaneously symbolic and vigorously material, the very embodiments of social relations. Examining apartheid as classification system allows one, in Gilroy's language, to protest the linkages of "rationalities and racisms " without reifying race. Similarly classification systems that become standards for, say, production and use, as in the VHS NTSC standard, are dramatically concrete. And the differences in the Domain Name System between country-code top-level domain names or ccTLDs and generic top-level domain names or gTLDs are both abstract and concrete simultaneously. All embody relations of power.
The very fact that apartheid in South Africa is being dismantled today, that the VHS NTSC standard is taken for granted only in particular places and times (spatio-temporal, say, in the U.S.), that the Domain Name System is in the process of being renegotiated today as embedded in systems of international commerce, technical standardization, and struggles over internet democracy and governance, and that the perception of women as active agents in histories of technology is newly visible; all these examples underscore the point Star and Bowker make that "both membership and naturalization are relations along a trajectory." (300; their emphasis) "Objects exist, with respect to a community, along a trajectory of naturalization. This trajectory has elements of both ambiguity and duration. It is not predetermined whether an object will ever become naturalized, or how long it will remain so; rather, practice-activity is required to make it so and keep it so...the more invisible the contingent and historical circumstances of its birth, the more it sinks into the community's routinely forgotten memory." (299) Consider the social effects, practice-activity of children's books with girls in pivotal historical writing technological roles, or guide books taking for granted while also explaining women's technological labors; as well as the social movements of which they are the result. "We seek to understand classification systems according to the work that they are doing and the networks within which they are embedded....When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archaeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent." (42) Think of the various futures and dirges projected upon "the Book," as well as recovered histories of its variation. When objects are "frozen" they are frozen in duration too. Enlivening objects and classification systems in particular strategically emphasizes process, duration, and ambiguity of naturalization. That is, whether and when naturalization may occur, and if it does how long it will last. Think of the fervent contestations and renegotiations of the very ontology of "facts" engaged in the so-called Culture Wars or Science Wars.
Notice some of the work that this analysis of classifications does. Like other theoretical descriptions of the very specific details of data-intensive scholarly practice, here archival and ethnographic, it abstracts from that material in order to make it useful across sites of investigation, either within a community of practice or between communities of practice, or both. I have abstracted even further from the book version of this analysis, with its intensive details of specific classification systems followed by extensive systematic modeling out of that material, myself then reordering, recontextualizing, interconnecting to quite other data-specific sites of analysis. The power of theory used this way is to share methods of reordering data and thus highlighting new features within that data that might not have been valued otherwise; that is, to sort and value them differently. But knowing how to use abstractions of this sort, with what kinds of data, sites of investigation, or materials of life, and to what purpose, is itself more and less specified within and across communities of practice and in a specific trajectory of naturalization.
In other words, in some communities of practice such abstraction will be more useful than in others. Its applications will be more apparent for some because it has been abstracted and less so for others also because it has been abstracted. This too is a kind of articulation work, variously visible and invisible in specific communities of practice. It is the very process of so-called "interdisciplinary" labor. The phrase "writing technologies" speaks to this kind of technological labor as well, and its inevitably entangled categorical work. Such categorical work is the subject of the next chapter, and in it I will consider one material history of the production of a vast interdisciplinary classification system using the categories "oral" and "written." Writing technologies are objects, some of them sometimes boundary objects as described by Star and Bowker, and writing technologies is also a meaning-making process--that is, "writing" or patterning, sorting, valuing, naturalizing and denaturalizing--technologies. Thus "writing technologies" encompasses both objects and the labor associated with those objects. Successful, partial, failed and envisioned movements across memberships in communities of practice are inevitable in this intra-action of "writing technologies."
Star and Suchman both move among various communities of practice--Science Studies academics and activists, librarians, sociological theorists, ethnographers, industry analysts and designers, feminist poets and theorists--abstracting from the work of some communities to speak to the concerns about work in others. In this sense they are "writing technologies." They move in and out of indexing simultaneously the work of translation and the work of purification, as when Suchman described the particular need for reconstructions of working relations that shared the articulation work all around. In a different example, in an article published in a special issue of a professional journal for librarians on Classification, Star compares two methodologies specific to two particular disciplinary communities of practice: academic librarians concerned with "faceted classification," and sociologists concerned with "grounded theory." In doing so she addresses the reasons for making such comparisons: linking previously unlinked research allows for producing languages of analysis that start off as specific to one or the other methodology, but which become useful for both. Abstraction makes these local terms and methods useful translocally. In other words, "[c]omparing the apparently non-comparable" allows for the building of analytic languages that are ethnographically faithful to their sites of origin, while simultaneously illuminating sites of analysis translocally or even globally. This creation of "compound subjects" allows for understanding logical relationships in new ways, and for understanding new logical relationships created in this comparison process. Comparing the seemingly incomparable, using local analytic terms faithfully but also translocally or even globally, and the creation of compound subjects and thus new logical relationships, these too are features of the action of "writing technologies."
Star and Bowker's analysis of classification systems, boundary objects, information infrastructure, categorical work and particular historical trajectories and uses of classification systems helps us to view what they call "the path of re-representation" ecologically. Here we have to engage in layers of abstraction, layers of the concrete, layers of locals and globals, in order to have a sense of the ecological complexities, precisely how such objects are simultaneously symbolic and material. The intra-action of people-things-technologies instantiated in the interwoven trajectories of the naturalization of objects and memberships in communities of practice, is implicit here. Bowker and Star name four major requirements for "such an ecological understanding of the path of re-representation":
  • "How objects can inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning.
  • "How people, who live in one community and draw their meanings from people and objects situated there, may communicate with those inhabiting another.
  • "How relationships form between (1) and (2) above--how can we model the information ecology of people and things across multiple communities?
  • "What range of solutions to these three questions is possible and what moral and political consequences attend each of them?"
Bowker and Star point out that standardization "has been one of the common solutions to this class of problems," but that "standards do not remain standard for very long, and that one person's standard is another's confusion and mess." They insist: "We need a richer vocabulary than that of standardization or formalization with which to characterize the heterogeneity and the processual nature of information ecologies." (293) I want to again emphasize how both standardization and formalization, as kinds of "freezing" of information technologies, delete especially this processual element, that is, duration and especially ambiguity in the trajectory of the naturalization of objects (whether they will become naturalized). Both the objects we look at, and the ones we look with, are approached ecologically: "always a relationship or an infinite regress of relationships" as Bateson said.
What about Donna Haraway? and what about Cyborgs, Cyberfeminism and other feminist approaches to technology?Star's and Suchman's tools for crafting narratives of technology as frozen social relations emphasize complex agencies of people-things in intra-action. Far from implying that technologies interact with people and culture in global, undifferentiated ways, they emphasize ecological relationships in layers of locals and globals, within and between communities of practice. These approaches are not feminist because they center women as their objects of study, but rather they are feminist because they center feminist methods and practices that attend to various relations of power including those of gender. They extend and elaborate upon those methods and their logics. Feminist methods and practices are shared with and ways of sharing their other communities of practice. Both Star and Suchman were trained as sociologists, but others who contribute to feminist technoscience studies come from or end up in a range of disciplinary, interdisciplinary and (inter)interdisciplinary locations: anthropology, political theory, communications, biology, cultural studies, women's studies, studies of literature and science, feminist social studies of science, medicine and technology, STS or science, technology and society programs, history and/or philosophy of science, and so on. Some of these (inter)interdisciplines have non-standard names, such as Donna Haraway's institutional location in the History of Consciousness, Sharon Traweek's affiliation with the Center for the Cultural Studies of Science, Technology and Medicine, or Zoë Sofoulis (Sofia)'s association with the new School of Cultural Histories and Futures (it was her institutional location until academic capitalism's influence on her Australian university required mainstreaming the name). Star and Suchman, like others engaging in feminist technoscience studies, often position themselves in relation to the work of Donna Haraway and/or to that boundary object the Cyborg, with whom Haraway, among others, has become associated. Haraway's "word-loving" statements of theory and history are points of inspiration and insight, and her language and metaphors are taken up as tools for departure, for self-reflexive method, for the pleasures of story-telling and activist engagements with the world, and for the kind of humor that attends ardent feminist practices of denaturalization and renaturalization. "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play."
"...the point is to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be...." (171) The narrative of technology as frozen social relations is about that kind of memory and vision connected together through complex agencies, human and nonhuman. The Cyborg is about pasts and futures, machines, peoples and companion organisms, natures and cultures, inextricably interconnected, messy, contradictory, not innocent, and generative. As Haraway uses it, the Cyborg (cybernetic organism) is a figure for a set of specific entities that "became historically possible around World War II and just after. The Cyborg is intimately involved in specific histories of militarization, of specific research projects with ties to psychiatry and communications theory, behavioral research and psychopharmacological research, theories of information and information processing....What interests me most about the cyborg is that it does unexpected things and accounts forcontradictory histories while allowing for some kind of working in and of the world." (128-129; my emphasis) "Diffraction" is the term Haraway uses to describe such a "worldly" historical analysis: "I'm interested in the way diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. In this sense, 'diffraction' is a narrative, graphic, psychological, spiritual, and political technology for making consequential meanings." (102) "...when light passes through slits, the light rays that pass through are broken up. And if you have a screen at one end to register what happens, what you get is a record of the passage of the light rays onto the screen. This 'record' shows the history of their passage through the slits. So what you get is not a reflection; it's the record of a passage....As a metaphor it drops the metaphysics of identity and the metaphysics of representation and says optics is full of a whole other potent way of thinking about light, which is about history." (103) "You have to register the 'interference.' So I feel like that is the way I work, and the way I enjoy working. It's simply to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement." (105) "Understanding the world is about living inside stories. There's no place to be in the world outside of stories. And those stories are literalized in these objects. Or better, objects are frozen stories. Our own bodies are a metaphor in the most literal sense. This is the oxymoronic quality of physicality that is the result of the permanent coexistence of stories embedded in physical semiotic fleshy bloody existence. None of this is an abstraction...." (107)
Haraway's gnomic, ironic, and thickly described stories of naturecultures ("as one word--implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture." /105) are performative, whether written or enacted. "...a lot of people get my stuff through the public performances first and only then find the writing more accessible....in public speaking all kinds of issues are possible to perform physically. It is such an intermedia event where voice, gesture, slides, enthusiasm all shape the density of the words. Oddly, I think people can handle the density better in a performance than on the page." (108) This performative element is perhaps especially bewitching to those cyberfeminists who also position themselves in relation to Haraway and to the figure of the Cyborg. By way of Haraway and the Cyborg cyberfeminism and feminist technoscience studies overlap. Cyberfeminism has been especially lively in European and in non-U.S. English-speaking locations around the globe, and is inextricably connected with arts of all kinds but especially avant-garde performance and computer art in a range of new media. The Cyborg in this context is more and more clearly a boundary object, sometimes less the post-WWII entity Haraway herself finds worth scrutinizing, and more a wild amalgam of goddess imagery and technophilia performing a range of new historical and artistic connections across centuries and across generations. In this context the Cyborg performs the work of connecting women and technology through and within many pasts. The narrative of frozen social relations is not the narrative in construction here. Rather all the narratives of technology are overlayered and engaged, each for its virtues and each bringing along its baggage. Cyberfeminism shares enthusiastically Haraway's poetic passions and evocative analytic and performative language, while feminist technoscience studies shares Haraway's fascination with concrete historical specificity and theories of complex agencies of materialization. The Cyborg performs boundary work across various communities of practice embodied in ranges of either technoscience or cyberfeminism, "weakly structured in common use" and "strongly structured in individual-site use."
It is the past and future aspects of the Cyborg having to do especially with female identity and materialities of embodiment that create an early set of linkages with and among cyberfeminisms. Note that for cyberfeminisms embodiment and the body as central meanings are positioned as interventions into analyses, including feminist ones, that assume new technologies are sites of dis-embodiment. Around 1991, Sadie Plant in the UK and the art activist group VNS Matrix in Australia simultaneously began using the term "cyberfeminist," as did others soon following, or perhaps imagining it simultaneously as well. VNS Matrix proclaimed in their Cyberfeminist Manifesto: "...we are the virus of the new world disorder / rupturing the symbolic from within / saboteurs of big daddy mainframe / the clitoris is the direct line to the matrix / VNS Matrix...." And even before her 1997 book, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture, Sadie Plant was speaking a "new mythology," one in which the practice of weaving stands for women's deeply historical relationships with rather than against technology. In this transformative mythology the teenage girl, Ada Lady Lovelace, mathematically mutates activities of weaving, the automations of the Jacquard loom in particular, into the codes that work the newly invented computer, here understood as the multitasking machine that mirrors women's multiple worlds of necessity, creation and "ordered disorder." Valorizing such metamorphosis is intended as an intervention into essentialisms of "male" technology, essentialisms constitutive of modern industrial U.S. and European cultures, and elements even in some feminist critiques of technology and its globalizations. Zeros + Ones presents an alternative picture meant to enhearten women and motivate them to delight in female possibility actualized within new technocultures. Strategically and unabashedly optimistic, Zeros + Ones is intended to challenge women in a "positive anarchic" nonlinear poetic performance piece of alternate useable pasts and futures. "Hardware, software, wetware--before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines."
Also in 1997 "the First Cyberfeminist International (CI) met at Documenta X, an international exhibition of contemporary art" and progressive politics in Kassel, Germany. Feminist artist and theorist Faith Wilding (one of the founders of the 70s women's arts movement in the U.S. and a member of the Old Boys Network, an international group organizing the conference, and including former VNS Matrix member Julianne Pierce) in her analysis of generational attitudes she encountered at the conference, urged cyberfeminists both to define cyberfeminism and to develop theory to enhance these insurgent art activisms. Playing upon the last line of Donna Haraway's 1985 "Manifesto for Cyborgs" ("Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg, than a goddess.") Wilding goads: "If I’d rather be a cyberfeminist than a goddess, I’d damned well better know why, and be willing to say so." She questioned what she saw as a feminist political generational "ambivalence in many wired women’s relationship to what they perceive to be a monumental past feminist history, theory, and practice." The three manifestations of this ambivalence she described as "1. Repudiation of 'old style' (1970s) feminism"; "2. Cybergrrl-ism," by which she indicated an anti-theoretical practice of passionate netart; and "3. Net utopianism." She urged instead: "While affirming new possibilities for women in cyberspace, cyberfeminists must critique utopic and mythic constructions of the Net, and strive to work with other resistant netgroups in activist coalitions. Cyberfeminists need to declare solidarity with transnational feminist and postcolonial initiatives, and work to use their access to communications technologies and electronic networks to support such initiatives." By 1999 cyberfeminism was a ranging term that passed among a variety of feminisms, generations, visualizations of embodiment, while at the same time most often centering art activist strategies rehistoricizing connections among women and technologies. Women are at the center of this vision of cyberfeminism, while its methodologies so far have been anarchically moving and artistically postmodern. In 1999 in Rotterdam the Next Cyberfeminist International met. Speaking for the collective and allied groups that put it together, TechWomen of Rotterdam, the Old Boys Network and more, Yvonne Volkart and Cornelia Sollfrank of OBN, called for "A New Cyberfeminism," noting in the editorial preface to the catalog of the event that "the subtitle of the conference was 'Strategies for a New Cyberfeminism' or 'Discourses of the New Cyberfeminism'. The proposal for a 'new' Cyberfeminism sprang from our need to distinguish ourselves from the first generation of cyberfeminists who coined the term in a way we found too narrow."
In the mid-90s Australian culture and technology theorist Zoë Sofoulis (Sofia), and one of the VNS Matrix artists, Virginia Barratt, had found while conducting interviews with Australian female digital media artists, that virtually all had been inspired by Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Sofoulis analyzes the "Manifesto's" key ideas, its academic and feminist receptions, and its influences in cyberculture itself as well as on studies of cyberculture in her essay "Cyberquake." Feminists and other progressives have valorized, critiqued, argued with and for the "Manifesto," in various understandings and appropriations of its meanings. Thick, sticky, rich and wily in its language, the "Manifesto's" poetic utterances, like other ample literary works, are easy to misunderstand, easy to decontextualize, and liable to promiscuous travel. Technophiles and technophobes have assumed it valorizes the technologies it describes, picking and choosing among the variety. Imaginatively unable to engage its simultaneous and ironic discussions of terrors and pleasures deeply interwoven, they miss its argument that this very intermixing is the pivotal dilemma of feminist technoscience activisms.
This dilemma can be addressed by neither technophobic nor technophilic purifications, but rather requires our creation of political strategies and meanings quite other. The metaphors and images Haraway draws upon to open up our political imaginations, to prod us humorously and evocatively to engage this lived reality, one we utterly know and utterly mis-figure, are assumed to be wholly celebratory rather than profoundly analytical. Remember Haraway's point I quoted earlier: "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play." Cyberfeminist and other appropriations of the Cyborg are misleadingly read back into the "Manifesto," with little regard for its "strongly structured" meanings in that specific context, historical, political, analytic. Rather the Cyborg's meanings "weakly structured in common use" are imputed to Haraway, rather than understood as linked from elsewhere to her. At worst this results in a sloppy sort of techophobia, such as that exemplified in the so-called "parody" Cyborg Manifesto circulated by Adbusters. Strangely enough, yet evidence of the boundary object status of the "Manifesto," this so-called "parody" has so little relation to Haraway's essay as to give no evidence that its authors have ever read it. It might not have been worth mention were it not for the so-called "feminist" but woman-hating "jokes" it promoted, one particularly nasty at Haraway's expense, which, most to the point perhaps, erased her long activist history and her actual political views. These kinds of misjudgments and projections also are a consequence of this boundary object status.
Also in 1999 publications situating cyberfeminism more clearly in relation to globalization processes, postcolonial analyses and women and development projects appeared. Multimedia and new technologies professor Radhika Gajjala critically reviewed one of these and the rhetoric of development as applied to women and new technologies, while in her own pivotal work she also elaborated such critiques and offered alternative collaborations mobilizing the term "cyberfeminist." The book she reviewed was a complex collection of essays by international activists, professionals including academics and policy analysts, NGO operatives, and grassroots workers of various sorts; a book which includes case studies of projects: Wendy Harcourt's Women @ Internet: creating new cultures in cyberspace. While undoubtedly one of the most practice-oriented examinations of women's global uses of the internet and electronic media so far, Gajjala's point was that even its critical rhetoric of development and its goals of "empowering" women assume a top-down epistemology. She asks, "how are we to confuse and blur analytic categories and boundaries as we attempt to 'revive' indigenous knowledges and ecology-friendly rural modes of production within a (global) framing that implicitly suggests that indigenous and ancient traditions and knowledges are frozen and mummified within 'the local' while modernity, urbanity and digitality are making a fluid, linear 'progression' to further Enlightenment?" Although such cautions seem to presume that a cyberpolitics friendly to indigenous knowledges can be purified of Enlightenment modernisms, Gajjala's own practice models a complexly collaborative and risk-taking politics, one interrogating the ranges of power and presupposition within which it too operates.
Harcourt notes that the project Women on the Net (WoN) communicates among its members on a "cyborg list" serve, where the term Cyborg itself loosely exemplifies tensions and contradictions in its members' political visions, drawing inspiration from their understandings of Haraway's "Manifesto" and its complexities, defining themselves in critique, translating to each other, and changing each others' minds. She calls the whole process in which each activist attempts to share their visions, critiques, inspirations and reservations, a "Cyborg Melody." Gajjala's own biting analytic warns: "As we perform cyborg melodies online, are we in fact being surveilled, disciplined and our voices being re-appropriated within a digital matrix/panopticon?" I feel sympathetic to this frustrated critical commentary, which I think many of us feel as we attempt to engage in critiques that are not simply debunkings, but rather doorways into new epistemologies. With all these others I too wonder how to shape our critical inquiries so that they do not take their main force from the shortcomings of other feminist visions, how to find clues to whatever is an opening that we ourselves are not yet in a position to quite see. What sorts of critical generosities stretching out must we learn to practice in order to recognize new liberatory possibilities when they are spoken, performed, enacted, analyzed or evoked, even as we do not discharge the hard work to recognize their very relations of power? Such indexing and specifying, as first steps toward discerning liberatory possibilities as they begin to manifest, can be more difficult than debunking, and must not be confused with technophilic celebration. I prefer Haraway's "strongly structured" figuration of the Cyborg as that position never harmlessly impure, and Haraway's analytic as it nevertheless eschews purification and models cautionary but curious "worldly" engagements with possibilities not yet decidably liberatory, decidably oppressive, but difficultly and dangerously intermixed in a trajectory of ambiguity and duration.
Unlike these cyberfeminisms, some self-identified cyberfeminists define themselves strictly against the Cyborg and Donna Haraway, as they fantasize each as emblems of "post-modern ideology" and "eroticised technobodies." Susan Hawthorne and Renate Kline among them, argue instead for feminist holisms claiming "CyberFeminism can be the answer to both cyborg fantasies and cybergoddess yearning...[d]isregarding the 'high' disembodied theories that current plague the minds...of post-modern cybernerds...." Another but different example of an approach to technology defines itself against feminist technoscience studies and cyberfeminism, and includes both approaches under a large umbrella of cyberfeminism, postmodernism and the Cyborg. This is the gender discourse analysis of Melanie Stewart Millar, a Canadian political scientist. She looks at the rhetoric of Wired magazine for a rich example of gendered digital ideology in her book Cracking the Gender Code: Who Rules the Wired World? Stewart Millar defines her politics against the technophilia and "technovangelism" she finds in each of what she concludes are the two most popular feminist approaches to technology: "a more traditional liberal feminist view and an emerging cyberfeminist perspective." She concludes that each are overwhelmed by digital ideology mobilized through popular culture and its forms of consumption, embedded in global divisions of labor. While "recommended by the pragmatism and common-sense logic of their approach" she faults liberal feminists for their narratives of neutral technology which cannot account for "the extent to which digital technologies are embedded in socioeconomic practice" and "how these technologies are experienced very differently by different women," "implicated in larger processes of class, race and gender exploitation." (57-8) While she points out how "seductive" is its optimism about technologies and its promotion of women who are not victims, she questions cyberfeminism for representing the effects of digital technologies as "novel and unprecedented," pointing out that, for example, "playing with gender is nothing new." (61) She suggests that cyberfeminism ignores the actual experiences of harassment of women online and other reasons for women's absences online, such as "huge obstacles of access and literacy." (62)
Stewart Millar is especially concerned that both liberal feminists and cyberfeminists will buy, in all the senses of that term, the systems of commodification that new technologies embody and make possible. New technological infrastructures, she points out, advantage their producers, multinational corporations. Instead she proposes what she calls "a feminist politics of anticipation." (67) Such anticipation is cued by discourse analysis since "[e]merging discourses offer clues about how our society is developing--they let us see how knowledge is constructed, how truths are deployed and identities altered. They also offer us a way to see how power is being circulated and how different social interests would like to organize our society in the future...[presenting] feminists and other social justice activists with a unique opportunity to anticipate and critically respond to the emerging digital culture before it becomes widely accepted." (67)
These and other feminist approaches to technology thus predate, define themselves against, or collaborate with albeit by very different methodological routes, either feminist technoscience studies or cyberfeminisms. Playing off of Sandra Harding's book title The Science Question in Feminism these contestations, alliances, parallel and intersecting paths interweave what one might call "the technology question in feminism." Sandra Harding has herself in various texts attempted not only to map these feminist questions in philosophical terms, but also to map political questions of science and technology globally in ethno-specific institutional and cultural formations. She points out: "...the political problem is how to encourage and energize the democratic tendencies and desires arising in social life. In our writing, teaching, and politics, how can we hail the most progressive tendencies in one another and in our students and colleagues? In particular, the question for those of us already engaged in liberatory efforts is how to create continuities and encourage progressive relationships between our projects. The old-style politics of unity -- "either you're with us or you're against us" -- is no longer effective or appropriate, if it ever was." Other feminists have focused on the access of women, girls and people of color to scientific education and to the fruits of scientific research in health care and technological innovation; on the exclusions of women and other marked groups in research protocols, scientific imagery and enabling metaphors; as well as charting the abuses of women, girls and people of color in the histories of scientific investigation, laboratory practices, and administration. Other feminists have specifically worked on a range of histories of women in relation to technologies of many kinds, most emphasizing the last two centuries and specifying modern industrial societies, but some have worked in earlier periods or even across periods.
An example of a feminist approach to technology that ethnographically examines children's play, also disputes feminist research methods which assume gender differences and thus ensure "finding" them. Arguing for methods that interconnect what Suchman would call working relations in the production of objects of popular culture such as girls' games, this analysis notes also the accountabilities of this feminist research in the marketing of such commodities. Trained in critical studies in USC's School of Cinema-Television and now a researcher of emergent media at EC2, the Annenberg Center Incubator Project at USC, Karen Orr Vered models an analysis of children's use of gendered computer software, or what she calls "the girl question in gaming." (Vered 98 in Inness) "I analyze the concept of computer games for girls by looking at how the market and its products have been shaped by research from academic and industrial orientations...interpretations of the findings from both positions have been influential in determining what we now find on store shelves as 'games for girls.'" (171) She uses an ethnographic approach to observe a public elementary classroom of sixty children over a period of two years. "A localized and context-based perspective suggests there are potentially many girls' computing cultures rather than a single culture" thus questioning research and industry studies that dualistically examine boy vs. girl computer experiences, and especially questioning the current market model that is based upon those studies. (171) "I suggest that a broad interpretation of 'play,' one that accounts for play without 'games,' will yield more insight into girls' computer cultures by exposing what they have already instead of what they lack. Identifying girl-generated play in a computer-saturated environment is one way to find out what girls have, not what they want [ie. not what research orientations have created the lack of such that market forces can produce both the object and the desire for it]." (174) In other words, gendered commercial products only coerce children into enacting gender roles, and the academic and industry research has inadvertently bought into re-producing such reenactments through research design with predetermined gendered outcomes. For example, in research that examines girls' and boys' different levels of engagement with computers, she suggests that the scarcity of computer resources in the classroom is critical. When resources are scarce and boys and girls must compete for them, what girls are doing is "walking away from the boys, not from the computer." (180) "Observing children in a computer-rich environment, I have seen boys and girls perform equally well and happily use a broad range of software for assignments in all the elementary school subject areas. Although it took some encouragement for the girls to play games with their classmates, their reluctance had nothing to do with computers in general. When the computer is presented to children as more than just a game platform, hardware and software can serve children's play desires and habits as they generate their own games. The girls I spoke with and observed spent their school days moving fluidly between computer-assisted work and traditional schoolwork. They made up games to play with and without computers, and the computer was simply another part of their everyday environment." (188)
[transition left out here for the moment. Biddick materials?]
Three: CLASSIFYING WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
Isn't this what Marshall McLuhan talked about?
How do we think about the stories of technologies in the history of the book and research about orality and literacy?What does thinking about how we understand the stories about technologies tell us? Well, trying not to use a phrase like "the computer," for example, turns out to be extremely difficult. Think of trying to discuss the history of the book, without using the phrase "the book." Why would this ever be worth doing? Well, strategically avoiding its use in order to emphasize the local variability hidden under the global sign "the Book" is valuable. The very difficulties of not using the phrase "the book" may be what is most instructive, suggesting what kinds of information are hidden, lost, unrecovered if recoverable. Whole agendas for research may proceed from confronting this difficulty, that of naming layers of locals under the global sign, naming marked categories speciously incorporated by unmarked categories. But feminist technoscience approaches would suggest that while indeed one might very well begin by examining the defamiliarizations and discomforts of avoiding phrases like "the book" or "the computer," that indexing their layers of locals and globals in various narratives also supplies valuable material. Such material opens upon a range of processes of production and productive agencies, of many material objects "Book," but also of many symbolic and material objects with which, through which "the Book" is seen, understood, diffracted . This is because the global sign "the Book" is itself a powerfulboundary object , "weakly structured in common use" and "strongly structured in individual-site use," moving across various communities of practice, indicating differently in each the community's ranges of membership. That the book is a technology is becoming a commonplace of scholarship in the history of the book (although not a commonplace, or even acknowledged in many other histories of technology, feminist or otherwise). But notice that "the Book," this global sign and boundary object, is also a technology. Engaging with the history of the book requires understanding both sorts of technologies , "writing" both sorts of technologies. Locating historically both the relatively recent consolidation of the field "the history of the book," and the related but even more entangled scholarship across many fields of research into orality and literacy, locating them at this moment in time, within and diffracted through contemporary writing technologies, is another kind of indexing, another form of "writing" technology. Marshall McLuhan's name, itself a boundary object, stands for connections between these areas of inquiry, and stands in for a multitude of scholars and scholarly approaches, but especially for their popularization in and about media.
The stories of writing technologies are dauntingly numerous and in many registers: scholarly, literary, popular media, commercial, current affairs, policy making, internationally political. It is no wonder that large global claims are made over the many fields through which either the history of the book or the studies of orality and literacy travel. Taking root in one of the many possible specializations within these ranging fields is also understandable, even necessary. Nevertheless, inventive and tendentious impulses in all these specializations and across many fields continue to work comparatively. Both the history of the book and studies in orality and literacy are fundamentally comparative. The interconnections among locals, translocals and globals in materials and meanings are especially entangling, vibrant, passionate. The word "ecologies" takes on some of these resonances in this context. In these overlapping fields, it is disciplines, subdisciplines, interdisciplines and (inter)interdisciplines that are continually disassembled and reassembled. As one burrows more and more deeply into a specialization, say the social history of English commonplace books, one ends up--like the fantasy of a 1950s U.S. kid "tunneling to China"--popping out in a whole other discipline's subdiscipline, maybe the sociology of knowledge and the history of science. Or from Serbian sociolinguistics, ends up in ancient Greek epic poetry. Vast historical and geographical terrain may be traversed: perhaps from Sumerian cuneiform to Meso-American knot-writing to Chinese ideograms to Edison's sound recording equipment to binary computer code, all with say, reference to histories of writing and inscription and conflicts over which of these do and do not count as "inscription" and why; conflicts that mirror desires to increase the range but simultaneously also to delimit it. One way to deal with these overwhelmingly proliferative possibilities is rigorously to attend to the local and the translocal; for example, rigorously to examine oral tradition through the linguistic and paralinguistic analysis of oral formula in specific epic texts, even if they do also happen to be 20th c. Serbo-Croatian, 8th c. BCE Homeric Greek, and 8th c. CE Anglo-Saxon. Because of these fundamentally comparative impulses, all the overlapping fields of the history of the book and studies in orality and literacy necessarily work in and through ecological layers of locals and globals, ecological layers of relative and relational concreteness and abstraction . There are impulses to simplify, perhaps by either narrowing and deepening the range or by moving up another level in abstraction in classifying; and impulses to proliferate, for example, by collecting and cataloging in detailed accumulation, or by moving up another level by comparing with other such data-intensive collections.
And there are impulses to large global proclamations, if only to manage all these layers of locals and globals. For example, take a look at this small sample of the paradoxical determinist aphorisms of Marshall McLuhan's 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy: "The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world" (18); or "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (31); or "Literacy affects the physiology as well as the psychic life of the African" (33); or "Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training" (36); or "The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within" (45); or perhaps the most famous one from Understanding Media: "The Medium is the Message." Such aphorisms are precisely not traditional, not habituated, not interiorized. Although "The medium is the message" and the term "global village" are both now commonplaces and have thus lost this quality of astonishment, nevertheless, these aphorisms were intended insolently to violate expectations, not confirm them. Precisely not timeless, they are only too place-able in time, space and aesthetic and imperial history: some may even make one cringe. The modernist aesthetic that plays ancient against modern, and especially borrows, appropriates and defamiliarizes with and against the figure of Africa, is mobilized in The Gutenberg GalaxyGalaxy is only too obviously a product of the late 50s and early 60s and their eventual appropriations of international decolonialization as revolution and the slipping epistemologies of bodily experience (sexual, pharmacological, religious, neurological), intertwined with media representations of gendered and raced forms of cultural, political, class and generational change. While intended to astonish, McLuhan's aphorisms nevertheless participate in a range of differently motivated writing technologies: the paradoxical utterances of esoteric religions, the sententious proverbs of so-called traditional cultures, and the evangelizing slogans of commercial advertising.
Marshall McLuhan's name stands in for a range of scholarly projects, less popularly known, but critical to scholars such as McLuhan himself. Pivotal, as McLuhan points out in the Prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy, is Albert B. Lord's bookThe Singer of Tales, in which Lord analyzes the work he did as classicist Milman Parry's assistant in the former Yugoslavia in the 30s and his own later work there in the 50s. McLuhan conceptualized his own work as an extension of Lord and Parry's studies in South Slavic epic: "The enterprise which Milman Parry undertook with reference to the contrasted forms of oral and written poetry is here extended to the forms of thought and the organization of experience in society and politics....the job could only be done when the two conflicting forms of written and oral experience were once again co-existent as they are today." It is with this Great Divide, "the two conflicting forms of written and oral experience," that the powerful classification structures that make up studies in orality and literacy appear to begin. Classification technologies and the technologies of recording are fundamental to these scholarly projects for which McLuhan's name operates as boundary object.
Why start in the 1930s looking at Milman Parry's collection of data about oral composition in places like Bosnia-Hercegovina?Following Leigh Star, we begin engaging the story of Milman Parry in order to identify a master narrative of a technological infrastructure and to surface invisible work, the invisible work of people and devices in complicated agencies. The scholarly story of Milman Parry is told again in the year 2000 CE in a new fortieth anniversary edition of the book The Singer of Tales , in the audio and video CD that accompany the book, and in the web site which mirrors and supplements them both. The book The Singer of Tales is by Albert B. Lord, Parry's graduate student, fieldwork assistant and collaborator, as well as his intellectual successor. Newly edited and with a fresh introduction by folklorist Stephen Mitchell and classicist Gregory Nagy, the current curators of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature in the Widener Library at Harvard (Lord was its first curator), the book is itself thus a complicated artifact folding together several comparative impulses and a variety of technologies--new and not so new--for making comparisons. These comparative impulses and their technologies structure the book on every level, beginning with Lord's opening forward: "This book is about Homer. He is our Singer of Tales. Yet, in a larger sense, he represents all singers of tales from time immemorial and unrecorded to the present....Among the singers of modern times there is none to equal Homer, but he who approaches the master most closely in our experience of epic song is Avdo Mededovi´c of Bijelo Polje, Yugoslavia. He is our present-day Balkan Singer of Tales." (xxxv) It is guslar (singer) Avdo Mededovi´c whose performance is found in video and in transcription on the CD, along with Lord's photo collections of people from the region during the 30s, and the audio recordings and transcriptions of conversations and songs from a variety of singers and storytellers keyed to points in the book. Thus the CD and web site make it possible to hear and see people and songs from the 30s in the former Yugoslavia. Of course the book itself does this too, although not in photos or in audio, but in its musical and verbal transcriptions.
The book as a consolidation of and recounting of various technologies opens itself up to an unusual range of audiences. It is a book often read in pieces, as well as in whole. It can be engaged with various degrees of interest in its highly detailed local materials, and in its ambitious range of interconnections made and speculated upon. It performs itself many forms of expertise, by no means all embodied in the single author, but coordinated, or curated if you will, by the author Lord. Indeed, the relative visibility of Lord himself in relation to Parry shifts over time. As Lord's opening lines suggest, it can be read in large global terms, virtually universal, and in very local terms, highly ethnographic. The book can be reordered to produce several kinds of such readings, for example, highlighting the Homeric speculations for Classicists and de-emphasizing the Balkan materials except as "examples" (how I learned to read it in the early 70s studying ancient Greek epic); or instead offering specific data for linguists, ethnomusicologists, and others interested in those very details of regional life, cultural practices and art forms--for some in an "ethnographic present," for others in a highly delimited moment, inscribed within histories of national and ethnic dominations and medieval and modern imperialisms. When intellectual trends value large universal claims or speculations, they can be found here. When instead they aspire to ethnographically faithful detail, that aspiration also can be found here. The book can be critiqued for universalism or defended against such charges; such readings are all possible, and different audiences, communities of practice, and disciplines and disciplinary generations will read it accordingly. This very complexity of reading possibilities is one reason reprinting an anniversary edition makes sense.
The other reason is the extent of the influence of the work of Parry and Lord and of the so-called "Parry-Lord Hypothesis" or "the oral theory" in a range of disciplines. This influence would be difficult to exaggerate, although many influenced by it will know it only in more generalized forms, both scholarly and popular, in the work of others such as Marshall McLuhan or Walter Ong. These more generalized speculations about oral traditions are likely to focus on the dramatic narrative of the Great Divide I mentioned before, that is, a claim of essentially divergent forms of human consciousness and culture, either "oral" or "literate." The Great Divide is the master narrative against which all variants produce themselves, and against which the Perry-Lord hypothesis is understood, constructed, valued and even mobilized in critique. Those scholars (Lord and Parry's work is mostly used and usable by scholars, if a great variety of them), those scholars that employ the so-called "Parry-Lord hypothesis" or "the oral theory" may subscribe, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to variants on the Great Divide; or alternately may be quite critical of it.
The Parry-Lord hypothesis itself is more specifically technical. It speculates that what is perhaps the most significant form of oral poetry is created in a composition-performance process in which the singer assembles formulas at several levels of structure in the very moment of performance, thus also the moment of composition. The core concept is that of the linguistic oral formula, one of a repertoire of set metrical and multi-dialectical phrases (some not elements of ordinary language, but rather archaic or translocally dialectical). Singers learn a rich vocabulary of these, of some varying length and purpose, as a kind of art-language which they assemble during composition-performance. But, these formulas are not learned as pieces, despite my assembly metaphor, but rather within a grammar of associations, as elements in simultaneously larger possible constructions at other levels of structure. Within this process, much longer poems can be constructed on the spot than could possibly be memorized by a singer. The analogy here is not memorization, but rather language acquisition, for using the oral formulas, both on the linguistic level, and on other levels of theme and structure, is closer to speaking in a particular language with corresponding flexibility, than like memorizing, even with rhythmic support, long poems. This is the dramatic paradigm shift in understanding oral tradition that hinges upon the Parry-Lord hypothesis. For some following Parry and Lord, the presence of such formulas constitute empirical evidence of elements of "orality," making it possible to identify specific texts as "oral"; while beyond that for some including McLuhan, Ong and others, the presence of such formulas identifies forms of consciousness or of culture.
Singer is divided into two parts. In the first, "The Theory," Lord analyzes the South Slavic regional materials used to derive this oral formula apparatus, materials Parry termed "the accumulation from a living poetry of a body of experimental texts." (ix) In the second, "The Application," Lord applies this apparatus to the Odyssey and Iliad, as well as to Beowulf La Chanson de Roland , and the Byzantine epic Digenis Akritas, as a "test" to determine to what degree these epics might too be understood as "oral." As the web site puts it: "....what particularly set Parry apart from other researchers was his formulation of a test capable of moving the debate from the content of oral songs to the process by which such songs are produced...." (my emphasis) Certainly Parry subscribed to some version of the Great Divide. Certainly Lord does in the form and argument of the book. Essential divisions between "the oral" and "the written" (notice they are become technologies under global signs here) are presupposed in Parry's method of data collection, even while the interconnections among them are hidden by the methodological bracketing operations Parry and others performed in collecting, understanding and using their data. Parry's intention was to make visible a range of productive processes hidden historically in this technology, "the epic poem." He used a series of contemporary technologies to do so, and necessarily engaged in a series of bracketing operations that constituted his method. His work was largely the work of purification, setting "oral poetry against written poetry." (viii) This work was accomplished with a "massive assemblage" of devices, skills, people and a great deal of articulation work done in labors both visible and relatively invisible.
But while Parry gets the credit for conceiving of the project, locating it in a particular place, and coming up with the various methods for gathering the data-- after his accidental early death in 1935, Lord gets the credit for cataloging the data and making it usable, writing it up, translating it for various communities of practice, curating the Collection it becomes, and mentoring others who do similar fieldwork, or who engage in similar speculation. Even in the early 70s, ten years after the publication of Lord's book and in a period of his mature professional authority, when I first encountered "the oral theory" in The Singer of Tales we then called it "the Parry hypothesis." Lord's productive agencies were still minimized in such communities of practice, certainly in tribute to a prematurely dead teacher, but also as the teacher's name stood for the work of both the student and teacher, as the person conceiving of the project stood for the whole work of bringing the project to fruition, as the person with status who negotiated the funding and hired others to assist was the author of it.
Years later, not only is Lord's name very firmly attached to the now Parry-Lord hypothesis, but in the Introduction to the Second Edition also (if still minimally) are others who collected or processed data: "Nikola Vujnovi´c (a guslar from Stolac, Hercegovina), Ibro Beùca (also a guslar from Hercegovina), Hamdija ùSakovi´c and Ibrahim Hrustanovi´c ('two young Moslems' who collected many of the women's songs), Ilija Kutozov (a Russian émigré teaching in the gymnasium in Dubrovnik, who moved to Belgrade in September 1934), and a number of typists [named by function rather than person. Perhaps women? Perhaps their names are unrecoverable, or still yet not salient?]." (xi) A range of invisible work is made visible over time, and in a particular context or set of contexts. Not only have standards for the description of workers in the field changed, with limited but still increased sensitivity to the pivotal work of translators, informants and support people, if also usually gendered; but also the current visibility of conflict in the former Yugoslavia amid war crimes trials in the international media, and hopes by the present curators of the Collection that its existence might offer something positive to that conflict, are contexts in which some invisible work becomes visible. (Some might ridicule these efforts, as limited as they are, as "politically correct.")
Which objects matter, or matter most, is pivotal, contextual, as Star terms it "ambiguous." In other words, these objects are more and less naturalized over duration and space for particular communities of practice. In some communities of practice naming one such "object" either "the Parry hypothesis" or "the Parry-Lord hypothesis" might mark one as belonging to a specific intellectual generation. So too, in some intellectual communities, having noted the contributions of Vujnovi´c and others in the projects set into motion by Parry, might make one's intellectual activity more valuable, including information that was pivotal to others and indicate methods and objects of study and ethical practice. In others, the marginalization of the women's songs by an assumption of heroic epic as "male" amid overwhelmingly male sites of data collection, would be immediately significant. Over time too in some communities of practice Lord's name might become the shorthand, the "black box," standing in for all the ways this material might be used. My very description of these differences might be overwhelmingly belabored for some, too schematic for others, and usable for still others, as communities of practice differently value the disclosure of or commentary upon such bracketed materials (what Bateson called meta-communication, what for some counts as "meta-theory"). The very complexities of accumulation in Lord's book and in the Parry-Lord projects, allow for diverse communities of practice to make it and them differently usable, bracketing or foregrounding various sorts of materials and speculations, seeing them in relative and relational ecologies of abstraction and concreteness.
Each community of practice will literally define itself in its naturalization of such "objects," including the Great Divide itself. Studies in orality and literacy are especially complex as membership in multiple disciplinary, subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary communities is likely, as are various relationships within and between international and national identity politics--such multiple memberships the very condition of comparative analysis. One's credentials, authority, membership in each such community are respected differently in others. For example, in reviewing the many literatures of these ranging fields, say, under the rubric "oral tradition"; it is quite common to come upon reviews of the same book from those from divergent communities of practice, who literally see wholly different materials discussed and who make arguments and use evidence in ways that are diametrically opposed. (One can see this happening in women's studies and other large interdisciplines too, or in large disciplines with many subdisciplines and specializations. Indeed this is one condition of interdisciplinarity.) One reviewer may value the technical languages of formalization and abstraction (as "theory" perhaps, or even as "methodology") and elaborate some, to them, critical conceptualization, refining and applying it; while to another reviewer this is mere "jargon" which obscures rather than reveals the very ethnographic or literary detail they value most. For one, an on-going familiarity with, rather than specialization in, one of the ranging possible comparative data-locations is sufficient for authoritative statements, for another, only specialization (perhaps multiple) will authorize intellectual work. For one a missing detail, misspelling, or transcription error will be lamentable but not catastrophic, while for the other that transcription error will break the ethical bonds created with an informant, undermine key practices, and de-authorize the conclusions.
But in keeping with its status as "master text" any of these practitioners might assume the Great Divide between "orality" and "literacy," while others might also attempt to "prove" or "disprove" it with, perhaps the theoretical, or perhaps the ethnographic materials at hand (often valuing one over the other). For some the Great Divide has been empirically verified, for others it remains a set of speculations to be proven, for others it is already empirically refuted, for others it is not verifiable but nevertheless useful to forefront certain features of data and theory. This is also what Star means by an "ambiguous" object. These various degrees of "stability" of "fact" or "theory" or "speculation" are what is meant by "naturalizing" an object. The object here is this master narrative, creating and valuing distinctions between "orality" and "literacy" and these permutations are its various degrees, in duration and in place (geographical, disciplinary, abstract/concrete), of naturalization. As naturalization is the condition of membership in particular communities of practice, these objects of naturalization are passionately viewed by members, often with virtually religious fervor, as are the particular processes of naturalization in a community of practice, ethnographic say, or perhaps technically textual in studies in orality and literacy, or empirical, say; these locally pivotal forms of evidence in large contests for authority and social meaning. Even to point to this range of ambiguity and process in naturalization marks one as not in a community of practice that considers the Great Divide as taken for granted or already verified. For a few such communities the very foregrounding of the Great Divide as open for analysis is literally incomprehensible, it just "is." But all these communities of practice have some degree of naturalization of this object, the Great Divide, whatever its meaning there, and that is why it is the master text for these ranging fields.
Mitchell and Nagy's new introduction is fascinating for its highlighting of the technological infrastructure of Parry's data collection process, especially the "massive assemblage" represented by the sound recording equipment, and the complex articulation work required to contrive this assemblage of devices, skills and people. To call this assemblage by the single stable term "recording equipment" is utterly misleading for we bring to that term a range of historical assumptions that are belied in the then uniquely local devices strategically assembled translocally by Parry and his team. This apparatus operated with aluminum discs that held about four minutes of sound each. The Parry Collection houses over 3500 of these discs today. When Parry ordered 3000 of them for his project, they weighed approximately half a ton. To record continuously for longer than four minutes at a time "Parry commissioned Sound Specialties Company of Waterbury, Connecticut, to prepare a recording device for him consisting of two turntables connected by a toggle switch. The careful back-and-forth alternation of the turntables allowed the normal time limit of several minutes of recording on a twelve-inch disk to be expanded virtually infinitely." The recording device was originally powered by "a motor-generator operated by a six volt automobile battery" (x) and the noise produced by the motor was sometimes transferred to the cutting head of the recorder, increasingly affecting the sound quality. So Parry turned to "the technician of the Bell Edison phonograph works" in Zagreb, and replaced the motor-generators with a 300 volt battery. (xi)
These technical manipulations and travels underpin the sound recordings now available (with much more work added) on the CD with the book, and on the web site. This description recovers articulation work Parry and others had to do to assemble and use these devices, and some of the skills applied, while it simultaneously values the very invisibility of devices and work in Parry's data: "...it quite remarkably allowed the singers Parry met to continue their songs as fit their designs as composers rather than the necessities of the sound-recording medium. Suddenly there was available something very close to epic in its natural environment with respect to such important facets of performance as length, rests, and the character of composition." (x; my emphasis) The mediation of the sound recording equipment needed to be as invisible as possible in order to produce the data as "a living poetry of a body of experimental texts," as "something very close to epic in its natural environment...." This quality of the "naturalness" of the data was fundamental to Parry's method. It was ensured in other ways as well. Parry's project report states: "I found the Jugoslavian poetry ideal for the collection of such experimental texts. In certain regions more open to occidental influences the poetry has been largely lost, e.g. in Dalmatia and in the northern regions about Belgrade and Zagreb; but in Hercegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro, southern Serbia, and particularly in the border region where the Serbo-Croatian dialects shade off into Bulgarian, the old ways of life and with it the poetry have been affected very little. [...] The greater number of older men do not read; the younger men have been taught the barest elements and read and write only by ear; there were no books sold in the three towns which I visited and few newspapers. The influence of the printed texts has been slight and sporadic, and it is easily recognized when there has been any." (ix; editors' ellipsis in brackets) Producing the oral formula depended upon already assigned attributions of orality in the data collection process. The work of purification required several kinds of bracketing operations that removed "influences" of writing and reading.
For example, the sound recording was classified as "not reading and writing"--as natural sound. (We count as "natural" that which has been culturally purified of "culture.") Many of McLuhan's media formulations also depend upon this kind of classification of sound and sound recordings as "not reading and writing." For many this is an intuitively friendly classification today; indeed, for some people any alternatives are virtually incomprehensible; it just "is." But Lisa Gitelman's book Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era makes a point of analyzing how Edison conceptualized sound recording as a kind of writing--grooves made into a rigid medium--in accordance with other contemporary understandings of writing and writing machines in the 19th c. Parry's team's very articulation work to alter the writing of sound on these aluminum discs has to be bracketed in order to do the classification work that assembles that sound outside of reading and writing practices, indeed, the data recorded there as its very opposite, nature to culture. What is notable here is that written transcriptions of "oral" poems had been called into question as always already too mediated by writing, writing which represented that contamination of "orality" by "literacy," and that Parry's undertaking was to "test" such mediated texts for their essential "orality." The use of sound recording equipment derived some of its authority from the appearance of less mediation, less contamination by this "writing." But this was a complex appearance, if one fundamental to the collection and production of this pivotal data.
For those with intrinsic interests in these Ottoman heroic or Serbian national poems these particular purifications might be less purposive. But for those for whom this accumulation of experimental texts was intended as evidence in global understandings of oral tradition, these bracketing operations were key. Having set the context as experimentally "free" of literacy, and Avdo Mededovi´c, the "Jugoslav Homer" certified as illiterate, then the intrusions of literacy on the experimental scene were also managed as variables to be tracked. One of Avdo Mededovi´c's long poems was one he had composed after hearing that song from "a printed song book" read to him by a literate neighbor. Lord analyzes the differences between Avdo Mededovi´c's version and the printed version to demonstrate that Avdo Mededovi´c treated the version he heard read in exactly the same way he treated versions of songs he heard sung by other singers. Lord tracks the possibilities and degree of contamination which lead to pivotal generalizations about fixed texts: "A general principle is here involved that is of significance when we are dealing with a tradition being invaded by printed song books: namely, that if the printed text is read to an already accomplished oral poet, its effect is the same as if the poet were listening to another singer. The song books spoil the oral character of the tradition only when the singer believes that they arethe way in which the song should be presented...they can spoil a tradition only when the singers themselves have already been spoiled by a concept of a fixed text." (79) Other work of purification is done lovingly by Mitchell and Nagy as they anticipate criticisms of Parry's methodology: "As in any experiment looking to hew to the scientific principle, the quality of the results will vary greatly depending on the quality of the evidence and the manner in which it is collected...the question arises: What were the effects of Parry's arranging the circumstances of the singing, or even paying singers for their work? [In other words, was the setting sufficiently "natural"?] In the first instance Parry, with his confidence in his knowledge of the culture and of fieldwork techniques growing daily, was well aware of what he was doing and why he was doing it. Moreover, he had the indispensable help of Nikola Vujnovi´c, a man who was not only from the Balkans but was himself a singer." In other words, all the variables were taken into consideration in the design and execution of the data collection, which was facilitated by a local informant capable of insuring sufficient "naturalness." (xxi)
Notice that tracking the work of purification and classification is not about debunking. Star is very good at being politically purposeful in her descriptions, not neutral and also not debunking even when in analysis making invisible work visible. This indexing and specifying the work of purification and the work of translation or hybridization as simultaneous processes (which Suchman draws attention to out of Latour's formulations) makes it possible to recover invisible work while concurrently acknowledging the necessity and importance of the work of purification and classification during production/use of this technical apparatus. It does not work unless these processes occur. The ironies of say, classifying sound recording as "not writing" when it was conceived as exactly writing at an earlier time, work to surface invisible work, not to de-authorize the objects created or naturalized in these processes. That some communities of practice find it difficult or impossible to authorize objects still in the process of naturalization, that for them pointing out such ironies is always only debunking, is something to index and specify as well. What I am trying to show here is the complex ecology of devices and agencies that I mean by the term "writing technologies" and begin to address and demonstrate why this ecology of devices and agencies matter.
"Writing technologies" is a vast intellectual infrastructure, partially understood and investigated within these overlapping fields of the history of the book and studies in orality and literacy, as well as in the studies into areas only provisionally named today. Some of those provisional names are: cyberculture studies, informatics, cyberfeminism, cybernetics, new media and technologies, digital culture and others. Given the vast range these all cover it may seem preposterous to insist upon connecting them as "writing technologies," rather than dividing them up into specific intellectual projects. But that is precisely what I am arguing. Connecting them is actually crucial, if entirely too daunting. Global proclamations, exciting as they are, are not the only method for making such connections and critical comparisons, but instead also elements of the ecology to be investigated. Such global proclamations have only too often stood in for historical and cross-cultural perspectives, just as faithful loyalties to very specific details have seemed self-evidently important.
How do we use writing technologies to tell stories about the past?Star and Bowker point out "There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another.... [Understanding] the indeterminacy of the past...means understanding how standard narratives that appear universal have been constructed...[that is,] looking to classification schemes as ways of ordering the past." "In the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then." (326) The master narrative of the Great Divide which rather tightly organizes the vast terrain of the studies into orality and literacy, and less tightly but still significantly organizes the history of the book and the multiple cyberculture namings, is thus a classification infrastructure crucial to the kinds of access to the past possible in these fields. So we turn to examine the Great Divide in more detail, noting that it provides justifications for making comparisons between "present" and "past" that underpin the Parry-Lord hypothesis.
The names "McLuhan" and "Parry" might represent alternate ways of using the Great Divide in order to access pasts. Some would name them as representative of schools of thought or intellectual lineages from divergent classifications within the interdisciplinary studies of orality and literacy. McLuhan could represent the so-called "Toronto school of Communications," which would include such famous others as economist Harold Innis, classicist Eric Havelock, to some extent theologian and rhetorician Walter Ong, and more recently medieval historian Brian Stock. Parry, on the other hand, would represent a so-called "Harvard tradition of scholarship on oral literature," which in him would see the fruition of the work of the great collectors of oral materials, Francis James Child and George Lyman Kittredge, but with Parry's work specifically valorizing the thread of fieldwork methods in folklore studies. One way one might simplify the differences here (with all the errors of such simplification) would be to say that the Toronto school has most often been interested in the details of both oral and written traditions, usually (but not wholly) in order to understand the impact of the Great Divide itself, its relations to culture and mind; while the Harvard line of influence has increasingly (but not exclusively) been interested in specific oral traditions, using the Great Divide as the master mechanism for increasing the range of significance of those traditions. In one the dynamic ecology of layers of locals and globals is weighted toward globals; while in the other the dynamic ecology of layers of locals and globals is weighted toward locals. Note that in each this dynamic ecology of layers of locals and globals includes both specific "writing technologies" as well as the processes of "writing" technologies. Most of each, lineage and school, might well object to my use of "writing technologies" to extend with oral traditions rather than dichotomize against them (although this too may be changing). That very differential naming would be pivotal to most in each variation, although many with ethnographic and historical work weighted within the local would today claim that orality and literacy connect across a continuum, themselves critiquing earlier "strong" versions of the Great Divide. In that sense I value a more global use of "writing technologies" and would want to index the relative specificity/abstraction, or maybe frozen objects/processes of the term "writing"; and they would strenuously value relatively local meanings for the term "writing"; while indeed some would likely consider its more global uses indications of contamination by literacy.
Often the most exciting historical uses of the Great Divide are to produce estrangement effects: that is, heightening and elaborating incommensurabilities between "orality" and "literacy," thus violating assumptions about pasts and reframing stories of presents, while simultaneously producing unexpected equivalencies. Both McLuhan and Lord do this, to different purposes. McLuhan's use of these estrangement effects is largely focused on a series of historical ruptures or revolutions, in which the present is also a successive element, a new revolution. Thus, for McLuhan contemporary oralities are revealed as (strangely) revolutionary successors to past oralities, formally related, marking the present as a transitional time in which dichotomies between the traditional and the modern are replayed and invigorated with new ranges of meaning. Lord's use of the estrangement effects of the Great Divide instead violate assumptions about craft, expertise, knowledge-making and -storing capabilities in so-called traditional cultures, either those in the past or contemporary ones. This makes it possible to revalue traditional cultures in the systematic appraisal of their art forms and practices in themselves, and also by comparing them formally across time and space to each other under the rubric "oral tradition." In other words, the Great Divide and its incommensurabilities justify the comparisons within the term "orality." Orality is created over and over again against and yet always through its opposite, literacy. This dynamic is aesthetically modernist in careful uses of the category "the traditional" to invigorate new hybridic modernisms; it is part of the contract of modernity in that the work of purification (restating ever more taxonomically complexly the Great Divide) and the work of hybridization (proliferating mixed entities within the category "orality") are effective as distinct activities.
McLuhan, Ong, Donald Lowe and others, taxonomically double "oralities" and "literacies": we have "primary" and "secondary" (or "electronic") oralities; the primary ones always before that activity "writing" and the secondary ones, within and outside, indeed "after" literacy somehow all simultaneously. And literacies can be "chirographic"--hand-inscriptions of some kind, including pictographs and ideographs, but most powerfully with an alphabet--but are at some point revolutionized by even more powerful technologies of "fixing" text, the great one being print, most powerfully with movable type of alphabets. As Ong puts it: "It is useful to approach orality and literacy synchronically, by comparing oral cultures and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures that coexist at a given period of time. But it is absolutely essential to approach them also diachronically or historically, by comparing successive periods with one another. Human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history, and at first only in certain groups. Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago. Diachronic study of orality and literacy and of the various stages in the evolution from one to the other sets up a frame of reference in which it is possible to understand better not only pristine oral culture and subsequent writing culture, but also the print culture that brings writing to a new peak and the electronic culture which builds on both writing and print. In this diachronic framework, past and present, Homer and television, can illuminate one another. " Sophistications concerning the Great Divide generate several overlapping taxonomies of correction and synthesis: of communications media, or forms of consciousness and culture, or extensions of the body produced within bourgeois systems of perception. Flickering across and within each other are such overlaid taxonomies:
  • the defamiliarizing doubled divide "orality -- literacy"
  • a modernist appropriation of the traditional in the three-part "primary orality -- literacy -- secondary orality"
  • a historicist phenomenological four-part taxonomy of culture-consciousness/perception "oral -- chirographic -- print -- electronic"
  • a communications technological history of progress"Oral: signal communication -> symbolic communication -- Literate: writing (pictographic signs -> phonographic systems -> logographic system -> fully alphabetic system) -> print (block printing -> mass-produced movable type alphabetic fonts) -- Electronic: first telecommunication 1844 with telegraph -> motion picture camera 1889 -> wireless telegraph patented 1897 -> radio system 1877 -> sound recording 1925 -> TV designed 1922 but first commercial broadcast 1939 -> first electronic computer 1946"
Some theorists of orality and literacy may use all of these, seeing them only as variations each upon the other, expanding and collapsing one or another taxonomic element. Walter Ong, for example, moves seamlessly among them, using them all in a great synthesis of otherwise divergent materials and theories, ranging both diachronically and synchronically. Others use each in correction, usually as successively better taxonomies with more subtlety in variation, better able to account for phenomena in increasing complexity and with greater historical specificity. These taxonomies both raise and beg many questions and thus generate different sorts of investments in the Great Divide in elaboration and in critique. For example, when does "literacy" begin? with any kind of writing (chirographic or script or inscription? what about Meso-American knot-writing? is it chirographic since it uses both hand--chiro--and visual memory--is that graphic)? or does it begin with alphabets, and the links (albeit arbitrary) between phonemic sound and pictorial elements? should literate elites or craft-literacy count as "literacy" in a culture? and how to compare that with mass literacy? as measured by what elements, reading, writing, signatures? are reading and writing understood as combined or separated activities? how is a culture literate versus individuals literate? how is moveable type a different kind of "print" than block printing, and with what kinds of cultural meanings? is electronic communication oral, literate or both in mixture, or each in a new form, or something altogether different? is orality always prior to literacy, and is literacy always successive to orality? can one have cycles of orality/literacy rather than a linear progression? how does one describe mixed forms of orality/literacy? in literatures? in cultures?
Donald Lowe (1982) uses the third taxonomy in correction, with some of these questions in mind, de-emphasizing its diachronic aspect in order to specify historically and socio-economically possible perceptual arrangements and their meanings for the body in culture. The diachronic aspect is politically historicized in Lowe's taxonomy in order to minimize the colonizing stories of "progress" often unselfconsciously mobilized by others using this or similar taxonomies. For example, Ong quite depends upon metaphors of succession such as "building upon" in his quotation above. In these stories of progress, orality tends to be romanticized (Ong calls it here "pristine"), as the lost object of a sometimes nostalgic longing, while electronic culture (sometimes named as secondary "orality," sometimes as a new kind of literacy of media and communications forms broadly, sometimes as a hybrid orality/literacy) is valorized as a last profound revolution. Depending on how one answers some of the questions raised and begged by these taxonomies, they can refer to very different times and places. For example, assuming or deciding that writing practices mark the profound divide of literacy, and defining writing as alphabetic writing will specify a different set of "literate cultures" than would assuming or deciding that any form of inscription would count as writing, or instead, that writing begins with tokens. Or differentiating literacy into forms chirographic and print similarly allows for specifying very different times and places for comparison. That these taxonomies overlay one another, that they can be moved between seamlessly, or used against each other in contestation, allows for a great deal of permutation in classification. As boundary objects, they can be weakly structured in common use in a single taxonomy with variant forms, allowing for maximum agreement or at least seeming agreement, or they can be strongly structured as contesting taxonomies, with high investments in historical and cultural specificities, with very specific agreements in particular communities of practice about the meanings of their elements. The mutual exclusivity of the categories can be emphasized, or they can overlap substantially, they can be held to mix, or they can be seen in continuum.
For some communities of practice this very variability de-authorizes one or more of these taxonomies. Just naming this variability as I have done, might in some communities of practice constitute debunking (appreciated or denied). Certainly indexing and specifying this range of variability does, to different degrees, denaturalize these taxonomies and their categorical elements, and I certainly do intend such denaturalization through my discussion. I value examining the meanings generated through naturalizing and denaturalizing these taxonomies and their categorical elements, meanings generated as aspects of "writing" technologies. With Star and Bowker I also consider how "[i]n the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then." (326) I value the permutations possible within and in critique of the Great Divide as master narrative, in order to recognize and also generate "others" in relation to that narrative and to create new affinities across communities of practice. In such reorderings of pasts and presents so as to "better reflect multiple constituencies now and then," I see this process as sometimes tentative and ephemeral, as sometimes vigorously contestatory, or as sometimes gaining solidity and status as "universal," along the possible processual trajectories of "ambiguous" naturalization Star and Bowker name. "We seek to understand classification systems according to the work that they are doing and the networks within which they are embedded....When we ask historical questions about the deeply and heterogeneously structured space of classification systems and standards, we are dealing with a four-dimensional archaeology. The systems move in space, time, and process. Some of the archeological structures we uncover are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying. They are not consistent...." (42)
What biases do we bring to the ways we write technologies of the past?Understanding the work of these orality/literacy classification infrastructures is specific to the networks in which they are embedded: the communities of practice they are naturalized and denaturalized within, the investments in pasts and presents they make possible and alter, the ecologies of writing technologies they describe, use, embody, contest, shift, engage. The Great Divide simultaneously embodies and contests three writing technological "biases." These are also ways of naming master narratives of epistemology or ways of knowing, and they overlap with and share meanings with the Great Divide of orality/literacy. We could think of them as three great centrisms: graphocentrism, phonocentrism and logocentrism. (I am indebted to communications and media theorist David Chandler's essay, "Biases of the Ear and Eye" here, and bits of my discussion follow his). Graphocentrism (or scriptism) is the bias that McLuhan's and Parry's cohorts, each differently, attempt to correct, with the Great Divide as their master mechanism. Graphocentrism overvalues writing, literature, literacy, abstract forms of thought, usually as forms of national identity, progress, evolution, or development. In its most objectionable forms it overvalues them all as "civilization" over "savagery," or "modernization" over "outmoded tradition." In graphocentrisms these evaluations may appear self-evident, obvious, what just "is." But graphocentrisms can also be authorized in particular instrumentalities: through research projects, via cultural or psychological data obtained clinically, ethnographically or empirically, and within large systematic intellectual and socioeconomic apparatus, thus deliberately and inadvertantly justifying foundational nationalisms and/or colonialisms. The Toronto school and the Harvard lineages each differently challenged graphocentrism by creating, elaborating, empirically researching, and speculating about oralities, and their interactions with literacy. They took graphocentrism as the foundational ground against which all their work had meaning as intervention. The Toronto school historicized graphocentrism: describing its origins, its powers, its mechanisms, its effects, and perhaps especially, its pleasures. The pleasures of graphocentrism were elaborated and even delighted in by McLuhan, all in order to demonstrate its power as historical force, as well as its contemporary disruptions and reconfigurations. The cultural shaping of body pleasures and perceptions were central in this theoretical apparatus, epitomized in the privileging of the eye over the ear, the very cultural captivations of visual pleasure and their commodifications, in, about and through media. Parry and Lord on the other hand, offered divergent alternatives to graphocentrism: engaging the craft, the creativity, the complex cultural operations, the essence of art, all demonstrated in the rigorous detail and process of oral-formulaic composition. The very term "tradition" is elevated, ordered, connected with the deepest meanings of human activity, and with the most valued form of literature, poetry itself, both at the origins and in the margins of the Western tradition. Only in the context of their interventions into graphocentrism can the classification work of the Toronto school and this Harvard lineage be understood. Elaborating oralities, purifying them (from literacy) in order to multiply them, characterizing them, producing unexpected equivalencies via them, even romanticizing them nostalgically; all these activities operate to value orality/oralities, as an intervention into graphocentrism.
The forms of graphocentrism vary according to time and place, and the threads of graphocentrism can be traced historically through a range of periods and cultures, with greater and lesser degrees of dominance. Parallel to graphocentrism, with similar variabilities of period, culture and dominance threads its sibling, sometime opposite, phonocentrism . Phonocentrist biases privilege the ear over the eye, create and name orality as the metaphysical essence of sound and speech, and with greater and lesser degrees of self-consciousness equate orality, sound, and speech with the natural, with reality, and with wholeness, individual and cultural. The work of elaborating oralities in order to counter graphocentrism often inadvertently or perhaps vigorously, even religiously, engages phonocentrisms. If graphocentrism privileges writing over oralities, phonocentrism privileges sound and speech over writing, sometimes claiming that the essence of language is naturally and really inherent in speech, of which writing is but the pale reflection, or perhaps that the essence of communication itself is in language. Chandler points out that "[p]honocentric writers may also tend to stress that writing is a technology but speech is not, and may be implicitly anti-technological." Walter Ong can be cited over and over again to exemplify various ranges of meaning of the term phonocentrism, as he attempts to enliven and elevate oralities (Chandler quotes him): "Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects despite the fact that it is also more evanescent. Sound itself is related to present activity rather than to past or future." Or "By contrast with natural, oral speech, writing is completely artificial. There is no way to write 'naturally.' Oral speech is fully natural to human beings in the sense that every human being in every culture who is not physiologically or psychologically impaired learns to talk." And finally: "Voice is alive...."
Indeed with Ong and some others, the Great Divide is phonocentric, called to account on that basis by some of its strongest critics. Phonocentrisms, as self-evidently and naturally true, or perhaps carried inadvertently, are mobilized by a range of collectors and creators of traditional materials. Justifications or appreciations of traditional practices, cultures and art forms, today or in the past, may hope to and do take weight from various phonocentrisms. Anti-colonialisms may mobilize phonocentrisms, often as interventions against colonizing and/or modernizing graphocentrisms. Such tactical phonocentrisms may take form as elevations of traditional or oral cultures, valorizing their integrity, their social commonalities, communalisms, equalities, privilege their access to nature, may romanticize their gender arrangements, divisions of labor, sexualities; interconnecting all these through this relation of speech, sound and the voice to nature and wholeness. Feminisms and other social movements may engage with phonocentrisms also as interventions into a range of dominations: valorizing the voice (and/or critiquing visual pleasure), valorizing authenticity, indigenous cultures, anti-technologies as evidences of past equalities and possible presents in creation. Feminisms may associate women with oralities against literacies, knowingly within histories of denial of literacy to women, and knowingly or unwittingly associating women with the natural, with the voice, with the authentic and real. Thus many of these forms of classification work are intended as interventions into dominations, intended to value devalued social systems, to make visible more egalitarian social forms from pasts as guides to possible presents, to support indigenous peoples and women in many times and places. Yet these very attempts to intervene in colonialisms and other dominations may be open to critique as imperialist and as sexist, racist and classist. The very inversions intended to challenge the primacy of literacy over orality, may instead reinscribe old and new relations of power.
Chandler points out that some of these phonocentrisms and related binaries are foundational in the work of the great structuralists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work is blended with theory and ethnography mobilized as "oral tradition" in the interventions with and after Lord's Singer of Tales. Indeed in his discussion of phonocentrism and the third great centrism, logocentrism, Jacques Derrida analyzes Lévi-Strauss' system of binaries producing and illustrating phonocentrism in Of Grammatology. In the 30s Lévi-Strauss taught at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and his book about his fieldwork there, Tristes Tropiques is one object of Derrida's analysis of phonocentrism and its binary speech/writing. Derrida demonstrates that the biases of phonocentrism are linked also to what he calls logocentrism, that is, the focus on origins, on the origin of the Word, on the metaphysics of presence, on the privileging of causation. In phonocentrism the voice and sound are understood as the cause, origin, essence or presence of language itself, purified communication. Phonocentrism then is a form of logocentrism. Derrida uses the term "writing" in a global sense, including but not only referring to inscription. Rather writing in this context, as a global term, refuses to dichotomize speech and writing. Instead of the work of purification, it performs the work of hybridization or translation. It deliberately makes it impossible to purify either writing or speech as entities in themselves, to purify them of bias or their political meanings, they are always already mixed together as the not innocent power term writing. I take my own use of the term writing from this deconstruction of Derrida's. I intend my term writing to always emphasize the dynamic processes, powerfully political, in which layers of locals under the sign "writing" and layers of globals under the sign "writing" are always already interconnected, both as "writing technologies" which include, value and question a range of technologies of meaning-making, but also as "writing" technologies, that is as the dynamic processes across fields of power in which we attempt to describe, use, create, alter these "writing technologies." I understand this doubled meaning to be related to, or perhaps better, to literalize Derrida's term "grammatology."
It is from critics such as Chandler that I take the term the Great Divide to refer to what I analyze as the great master classification infrastructure of "orality -- literacy." Chandler is interested in debunking what he calls "'Great Divide' theories," as always already reinscriptions of relations of domination. As critiques the activities of deconstruction disassemble the great assemblages of master narratives or master theories. Such disassembly may be used by some to debunk intellectual practices, those academic and those of everyday life. Such debunking may itself serve as an exciting practice of defamiliarization, turning understanding inside out while performing the urgency of this kind of analysis. In their most rigorous form these debunking defamiliarizations may be what some mean by the term "critique." Great divide theories, debunkings including critique, and the clear articulations of contesting paradigms are all intellectually urgent forms of defamiliarization. They all may involve denaturalizing the objects within and boundary objects across particular communities of practice. Since membership in these communities of practice is intertwined with the naturalization of these objects, these practices of defamiliarization are often received with hostility, sometimes with incomprehension (since these naturalized objects "just are " in these communities), and other times received as deep misunderstandings, even betrayals, of the communities, their practices, their intentions and their histories.
And it is the case that misunderstandings are not just inevitable across communities of practice, that these and all translations across ranges of power will be marked by them, by illegitimate uses of power while also accountable for such mistranslations and partial translations, their meanings, consequences and problems. Donna Haraway's essay "Situated Knowledges" is cited by Star, Suchman, and others studying feminist technoscience and feminist theory when they reflect on this work of translation, and reflect on the possibilities of objective knowledge, on the agencies of knowledge-making. Others use the term postmodern or poststructuralist to refer to a range of denaturalizations, in derision or as self-description. Latour uses the term postmodern along with the idea of the contract of modernity in order to claim that while the work of translation and the work of purification are kept separated in modernity, in postmodernism, this separation assumes the form of debunking. His point is that such debunking still allows the contract of modernity (and illusions of political purity) to remain in place. But shifting our understanding of the agencies of humans and what Latour calls nonhumans--including what I call "writing technologies," among them those oralities devalued under graphocentrisms, hybrids of naturecultures--understanding such agencies requires, Latour says, "the parliament of things" or what Haraway calls "worldly practice." What Latour calls to account as debunking here, a work of purification, Haraway calls "a fear of embracing something with all of its messiness and dirtiness and imperfection."
Why is it useful to think of the divide across orality/literacy as a great classification infrastructure? what other stories could feminism and writing technologies tell?McLuhan and Lord in their respective cohorts and histories attempt to make visible the articulation work that hybrid oralities of many chronologies and cultures do, in their interventions into graphocentrisms. Similarly, the history of the book and many of the cyberculture and media studies (including some of McLuhan's explorations here as well) operate to surface the articulation work of hybrid literacies in various media, including mixtures of the visual and aural. Using the Great Divide as the master mechanism keeps separate the work of purification and the work of hybridization or translation, as the contract under which each kind of work is valued, if differently in varying communities of practice. Latour proposes webreak our contract, this contract of modernity and of enlightenment reason, of what some have called humanism and what some anxiously tend as the very essence of the "humanities." He claims that breaking that contract requires moving farther than a postmodern "critique." Indeed, he gleefully points out: "....So long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern--that is, we willingly subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferations of hybrids down below [that is, we misrecognize the mixed entities we have created and devalue and de-animate them and our own intra-action]. As soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. At the same time we stop having been modern, because we become retrospectively aware that the two sets of practices have always already been at work in the historical period that is ending. Our past begins to change. Finally, if we have never been modern--at least in the way criticism tells the story--the tortuous relations that we have maintained with the other nature-cultures would also be transformed." (11; my emphasis) The phonocentrisms that are marshaled through the Great Divide to challenge graphocentrisms are based in a radical difference between speech and writing, as if that difference were the origin and essential meaning of material technologies within varying oralities and literacies, and of the technologies "orality" and "literacy. This is a variant on a great divide Latour and feminist technoscience studies explicitly address, that of nature and culture. ""How can one not establish a radical difference between universal Nature and relative culture? But the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures--different or universal--do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only nature-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison." (104; Latour's emphasis) Such naturecultures, as Haraway names them, are what I attempt to address as ecologies (in layers of locals and globals) of writing technologies, oralityliteracies.
This time let us return to studies in orality and literacy in their aspect as a great technological infrastructure (both about and using technologies), indexing the nine properties of infrastructure that Star names. Four of them we connect to their communities of practice: studies in orality and literacy are linked to conventions of practice in specific communities, and learned as part of membership in those communities. Indeed the very transparency of the infrastructure, its naturalization, is an element in the conditions of membership. That it becomes visible on breakdown, may be a result of denaturalization processes over time; in particular communities of practice elements of the infrastructure or its integrity, lose or do not achieve stability, they are still in motion, sometimes evolving, sometimes decaying. Think of the four overlapping taxonomies, for example. As I said before, the Great Divide tightly structures the studies of orality and literacy, and significantly but less tightly structures the history of the book and the cybercultural studies. In their academic forms all these kinds of study are comparative, and in these academic versions often cross-disciplinary, although not always. Some disciplines historically define themselves by their specific comparative methods, such as anthropology and history. There the studies of orality and literacy may instead constitute or engage specific subdisciplines, say the history of the book, or the sociology of literature; or, as in some versions of anthropology and history, may classify materials and data, via the Great Divide, as material and intellectual infrastructure--likely to be most transparent and embedded, most just "what is." But when comparative, such studies may center around a boundary object used across disciplines, what I would call a writing technology. For example, the study of epic poetry as a writing technology may cross such disciplines as anthropology, literature and classics. Literature, for example, is institutionalized in a range of forms, also understood as fields or areas, disciplines or interdisciplines; some defined by nation or period or language--such that the epic poemBeowulf would be studied in English, La Chanson de Roland in French, and The Iliad in classics; some defined by comparative method or objects--such that "the epic poem" including Beowulf and Roland and The Iliad might be studied in comparative literature. That the boundary object "the epic poem" is instantiated as different materialities (these layers of locals and globals) in different literary disciplines and subdisciplines is one reason for producing interdisciplinary communities of practice.
For example, the journal Oral Tradition speaks to this concern in its self-description: "This periodical was founded in order to address a clear need in the area of studies in oral tradition: although pathbreaking research was taking place in many different traditions, and although each tradition or classically defined discipline had more or less sufficient avenues for publication within its own purview, there existed no comparative, interdisciplinary journal devoted specifically to this area. The result was that scholars in one field were seldom aware of important scholarship in other fields, and progress over the larger spectrum of traditions was haphazard; studies in oral tradition lurched this way and that, often reinventing the wheel, without a central organ for summarizing research in a given field and presenting new findings to a suitably heterogeneous audience....The history of Oral Tradition may be effectively read in its contents from 1986 onward. Even a casual glance, however, will ascertain that OT has published articles on, among other areas, folklore, Biblical studies, ancient (and medieval and Modern) Greek, English, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, Yugoslav, Chinese, French, German, African, African American, Persian, Norse, Italian, Welsh, Romanian, Mayan, (Asian) Indian, Arabic, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, Tibetan, central Asian (Kirgiz), and numerous South Pacific traditions. Other issues have included special issues on Native American, the epics of the Euro-Asian Silk Road, and South Asian Women's Traditions." So the journal Oral Tradition here brings together a range of disciplines and nationally defined "traditions," which could be studied as literatures, area studies or specializations in anthropology. Let me give a different kind of list of writing technologies, pairing boundary objects and some possible associated disciplines, interdisciplines and other communities of practice: epic poetry and anthropology/literature/classics; print culture and history/sociology/economics; the book and history/art/literature/women's studies; oral consciousness and religion/philosophy/rhetoric; oral literature and anthropology/women's studies/ethnic studies; literacy and history/education/psychology; television and media-communication studies/cultural studies; the computer-in-cyberculture and cultural studies/technoscience/computer science/communications; the computer-as-technology and women's studies/computer science/history; internet-in-civil society and political science/policy studies. These listings of just one way of talking about communities of practice, in terms of academic disciplines and interdisciplines (not even addressing at this point practices in everyday life), gives an idea of only one of the ways to express the extraordinary range or scope of this technological infrastructure.
Implicit in this disciplinary mapping are other mappings of range: across time and across space, or as Ong indexes it, diachronic and synchronic. For some communities of practice the greater this range the more significant the objects of naturalization; for others, a restricted range establishes significance. Usually however, a combination of broad range in some areas and restriction in others is optimal. For various communities of practice which is which is different and differently matters, possibly with generational or methodological inflections. For example, in some subdisciplines of anthropology or history the more local the material, the more significant. Such communities of practice are often fairly small in numbers of practitioners with strong methodological consensus. Such communities may have self-defining critiques of earlier or other, say, anthropological approaches; for example, they might devalue the kind of decontextualized data gathered in the Human Relations files, and may associate so-called "comparative" approaches with the methodology and historical circumstances under which that data was collected (some by the great comparative ethnologists of the early twentieth century), perhaps as part of their self-defining critique. Some area studies or period studies, inside or outside of history and literature, say, may share these characteristics of establishing significance and self-definition with more local materials. Meanwhile in other communities of practice more global appeals for significance (along such registers as abstraction, chronology, geography) may be necessary because of the breadth of the community. Such communities might work with less methodological consensus, be larger and more heterogeneous. Thus their attempts to create a community of practice across multiple institutionalizations, as with the scholars of the journal Oral Tradition . In such cases each scholar will have to implicitly assume the significance of their local materials and/or explicitly argue for it to others for whom those local materials are initially perceived as outside their concerns (their community of practice and its ranges of significance), cajoling them to increase their range by appealing to various forms of global significance. Thus the massive technological infrastructure of "orality -- literacy" may represent tightly held, consensual apparatus, or may work as a loosely structured apparatus that functions to place disparate materials into new configurations of significance, perhaps even creating new communities of practice (which can then create other tightly held consensual concerns). In other words,the embodiment of standards Star describes, may be strong, in flux, stable, decaying, and so on, with varying ranges of significance.
And the vast technological infrastructure of studies in orality and literacy are built on an installed base . That base grounds the infrastructure in many ways, for good and ill; explains some uses of the infrastructure in various communities of practice and the objects with which it is associated in each, revealing built-in biases, politics, structures of power; elements of which are stable, in flux, decaying and so on. For example, the Harvard lineage might be pushed back and beyond Harvard, to studies in folklore that valorize the Volk in Europe, exemplified in, say, the Brothers Grimm collecting Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812-22). Jacob Grimm simultaneously pursued comparative philological study of Germanic languages and etymology, helping to demonstrate genetic relationships among European languages. Such genetic relationships were used in the great 19th c. project to posit and reconstruct a single common source language for a range of European and (South Asian) Indian languages, Proto-Indo-European, through the development of the great 19th c. linguistic methodology, the comparative method. Among other projects, Jacob Grimm also wrote a Serbian grammar, and studied ancient law practices and pre-Christian German beliefs. Nationalisms (and romanticisms) throughout Europe were expressed in and through the projects which valorized the Volk and folklife (even socialist nationalism or Nazism), and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European was in its historical significance perhaps something approaching the Human Genome Project today. Not unconnected to that 19th c. project reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, were the 20th c. structuralist projects, in which Lévi-Strauss was one actor; as was also Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody, who studied orality and literacy across historical cultures. Each in their own way made efforts to systematize large quantities of data about cultures through their formal elements, influenced by mathematics and structural linguistics, and by post-WWII cybernetics and information theory. These are but brief allusions to the installed base upon which the technological infrastructure of studies in orality and literacy are built.
As a property of technological infrastructure, embeddedness is part of the institutionalizations of the communities of practice in which the objects of the infrastructure are naturalized. But embeddedness also refers to the complexity of interconnection among all the parts of the infrastructure, which in the case of writing technologies includes what I have called ecologies in layers of locals and globals , along the registers (at least) of abstraction, chronology, geography. In theregisters of abstraction are the layers across concrete/abstract or perhaps better territory/map, as materialities of "territory" are formalized, and then those formalizations are themselves materialized, that is, carry material weight and power. Star and Bowker's historizations of the classification systems such as race under apartheid are examples. In the registers of chronology, are periodizations, which are contextual; shifting deliberately and inadvertently according to the objects they contextualize, producing narratives of association, direction and completion, as well as ranges of significance. The variant ranges of the term "modernity" in different communities of practice is an example. In the registers of geography are regions and hemispheres and globes by different scales of wholeness, of translocals newly associated, by contiguity and by theme, nation, lines of power, lines of trade. Today such remappings (with our contemporary writing technologies) of the "globe" are gorgeously (perhaps chillingly) multiple, from internationally famous Life magazine photos taken from outer space, to neighbors in local communities tracking old toxic waste sites, to circumnavigations of satellites for TV, to differing regionalizations by cell phone operator, to translocal communities produced via the internet, to new regionalizations of the former Soviet Union. Such registers of layers of locals and globals are ways of describing the specifics of embeddedness, and their ranges of interconnections, their ecologies. They overlay one another, one or another seeming especially salient at particular moments and places, or shifting in their own ranges and processes of naturalization; or happening and dynamic all at once.
Star points out that breakdowns in technological infrastructure are fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally. Communities of practice use boundary objects to create alliances and associations of meaning, as when the journalOral Tradition creates materialities of association in their journal, with institutionalized processes and mechanisms for associating already existing communities of practice and creating new ones. This happens in pieces, in locals and translocals, with attempts to create new layers of globals, new imaginations of globals. A theoretical critique might identify breakdowns, but only some communities of practice will know about that critique, only some will see its application to their local circumstances and objects, only some will give it authority. It travels, but slowly, with changes and translations, with new objects associated with it, with varying ranges of naturalization. New writing technologies may alter the range of objects to be naturalized in given communities of practice; and such naturalization may be highly differential; just as are the ranges of access to internet technologies, across classes, genders, races, nations, educational levels, in particular institutional settings (workplaces or schools perhaps) and so on. Cellular phone service may make internet connection possible on a Native American Indian reservation where other technologies would have been dependent hitherto on (non-existent) wires and cables. Star points out that such "fixings" in modular increments require the collaboration and contestation of communities, agreements and negotiations, the production of commonalities and so on.
My own rearrangements of the Great Divide as technological infrastructure attempt to index simultaneously the work of purification and the work of hybridization or translation. I want to draw attention to contexts of meaning and articulation work of communities of practice, in layers of locals, even through we sometimes hand off reified technologies across their differences, in layers of globals. I locate the heart of the terrain of feminism and writing technologies in the stories we tell about the shifting, problematic, and always multiple boundaries between those only seeming stabilities, "the oral" and "the written." I want to surface the very work of making, transforming, dissolving distinctions between "the oral" and "the written," variant as these processes are by community of practice, processes highly politicized. I understand these stories within narratives that access different pasts, "reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then." I think in terms of four large bundles of stories. These are not the only such stories, but ones that seem salient now, within the last decade or so in feminism and writing technologies. They are tendentiously political stories, political as in "technologies as sites of struggles for power," and so are my feminist descriptions of them:
  • First, stories about origins continuously retell "the" difference between "the" oral and "the" written," in layers of globals, and we note that these differences turn out not to be the same in various stories, in layers of locals. Stories about origins similarly continuously renarrate "the" printing revolution, and we note that it too is multiple and differing. These stories describe histories and social relations instantiated in such writing technologies as tokens, threads, alphabets, kinds of type, copying machines, displaying surfaces, instruments of inscription, linking devices and so on; this approach is curious about the different communities of practice that tell these stories and the meanings they mobilize using them. Feminist stories point out that current technologies are situated within the international integrated circuit of women, within multinational sexual, racial, ethnic divisions of labor. And that past technologies and the history of the book are situated within systems of power too, national, religious, colonial, as well as gendered, raced and classed. Deconstruction supports feminism and writing technologies in addressing logocentrism rather than devaluing or overvaluing oralities, erasing them or romanticizing them. "Writing" in this context emphasizes that oralities and literacies are always already mixed in naturecultures; this approach both looks at boundary objects "writing technologies" and at dynamic processes of understanding, that is "writing" technologies. Haraway's story-telling is pivotal here too as "diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. ...to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object...."
  • Stories about crisis are the stories of loss and opportunity: on the one hand the Gutenberg Galaxy made room for by the loss of the harmonious sociality of spoken memory; on the other hand, the invasion of new "oralities" creating new pleasures of mind and body. They include the stories of terror and romance told from all political vantage points about revolutionary new technologies and media, including "the end of the book" or "the end of the body." It is here that we might question "digital divides" and ask who profits from which stories about crisis? We can create and examine feminist critiques of McLuhan's, Ong's and others' orthodoxies of orality and literacy, exposing especially their colonial and neocolonial assumptions, their narratives of progress, their implication in development policy, their centering of a West with its heart in the Homeric hero. Stories of crisis would also include and examine the leftover colonialisms of development and modernization theory and international monetary policy, where literacy is held to be the harbinger of logical thought, healthy and economical family life, cost-accounting, and threshold levels of national industry and democracy. Such stories are now intertwined with neoliberal attempts at management of globalization processes as well as with the stories told by those attempting to intervene in these processes and in their exploitations and dominations.
  • Stories about identity examine the politics of decolonization and the investments of US feminisms in specific ethnic/racial/sexual literacies. They include an examination of the politics of English in a world in which English is increasingly the language of science and the web, of global film and television, of multinational capital and banking (promoting new economic regionalisms). Some stories highlight English as a map of colonial histories, while others might emphasize English as a bridge between tribal and regional languages in the construction of new nationalisms and national literatures and arts. English First is the rubric under which new traditionalisms are engaged in the US, attempts to contain insurgent and traveling culturalisms. Competing stories suggest alternately that English and other official languages are breaking apart or are supplemented as linguistic resistance communities in regionalisms or mini-nationalisms are spoken in revived dialects or written on the web as virtual ethnic communities. Within US identity politics, feminist oralityliteracies (one word) speak the "Spanglish" of the Chicana or envision broad and narrow utopias of "women's language," "women's culture," "women's writing." Song and poetry and storytelling are all the elements of these new sets of narratives--not simply their forms, but their contents as well. The narratives and theories of performance in a range of meanings and objects, the technologies of the oral-formula and other production and memory devices, and the articulation work of their practitioners and theorists to value naturecultures across writing technologies figure here as well. New forms of association on the internet and their emergent activisms, their reconfigurations for good and ill of human rights imaginations, treaties, and universalisms intertwine with the writing technologies that make possible new historicizing of identities, including sexual identities, in their layers of locals and globals, pasts and presents.
  • Finally, stories about the production of stories require feminists and progressives of all kinds to situate their own engagements within these story-making practices. This is the meaning of feminist theory in this context, a reconceiving of "working relations." There are no innocent positions from which one can only look on, no ways to be outside all this "messiness and dirtiness and imperfection" and, of course, excitements, hopes and valorizations as well. Speaking to the intra-actions of people and writing technologies are ways of addressing agency, change, and knowledge-making. In the 1950s French literary sociologist Robert Escarpit's "literary fact" was measured by the amount of paper consumed in a country, rather than by the numbers of so-called books published. In the year 2000 CE, where in Silver Spring MD (my current residence) one goes to the public library as much to listen to story-tellers, to take out video tapes and DVDs, audio books and CDs, to learn English or borrow a variety of materials in a range of languages, to copy or download tax forms and job ads, or just to surf the web, as to borrow paperbacks, taking literally the materiality of "the literary fact" has to be strategized beyond paper. "What counts as the material?" is an important political and theoretical question in "layers of locals and globals." The systems of publication, vertically integrated transnational multimedia productions and copyright in new forms of intellectual property, the valuations of the academy and the market, all this and more must be taken into account in an examination of relative and relational global and local layered apparatus of cultural production.
My emphasis on stories parallels Haraway's who says: "Understanding the world is about living inside stories. There's no place to be in the world outside of stories. And those stories are literalized in these objects. Or better, objects are frozen stories. Our own bodies are a metaphor in the most literal sense. This is the oxymoronic quality of physicality that is the result of the permanent coexistence of stories embedded in physical semiotic fleshy bloody existence. None of this is an abstraction...." Stories are situated in communities of practice and travel between and among them; they have to be understood as interventions within them, creating alliances and contests, and boundary objects between them, having local and global meanings. While I do not renounce critique I do situate my own stories and those of others inside the work they do as particular kinds of intervention, curious about critique as an element of narratives in layers of locals and globals. With Star I am interested in surfacing invisible work. I look to deliberate and unexpected ironies as one of the ways assumptions are defamiliarized and articulation work is surfaced, one way in which the work of purification and the work of hybridization can be practiced and recognized simultaneously. I agree with Haraway that: "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectally, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play." The bundles of stories I have narrated here and the kinds of work they do can be contextualized by the questions Star and Bowker raise respecting classification infrastructures:
  • "How objects can inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning.
  • "How people, who live in one community and draw their meanings from people and objects situated there, may communicate with those inhabiting another.
  • "How relationships form between (1) and (2) above--how can we model the information ecology of people and things across multiple communities?
  • "What range of solutions to these three questions is possible and what moral and political consequences attend each of them?"
These bundles of stories are meant to reconfigure "black boxes": not to eliminate them but to mix up the objects and narratives of communities of practice, resorting them, denaturalizing them and renaturalizing them; understanding them within what Suchman calls "working relations," what Star and Bowker call an "information ecology," some of them and their elements specifically feminist. Such stories are meant to show curiosity about rather than eliding what Suchman calls "an overwhelmingly complex network of relations, for the most part made up of others we had never met and of whose work we are only dimly aware." To be curious about what is both masked and indexed by a "simple dichotomy of technology" which is "in actuality an increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people and activities, each operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others." This curiosity is about "knowledge in dynamic production, reproduction and transformation....The movement is from a single, asituated, master perspective that bases its claims to objectivity in the closure of debate, to [curiosity about] multiple, located, partial perspectives that find their objective character through ongoing dialogue." Such a curiosity is better engaged by diffracting rather than deleting the lived work of knowledge production "across multiple, discontinuous worlds each of which stand as a block box for the others." Considering this great classification infrastructure reframes all the stories and the skilled categorical work they do: remaking and refreshing the categories, and juggling multiple memberships in communities of practice and multiple naturalizations of objects, by the creation and management of boundary objects. I want these stories to create what Star calls "compound subjects." Such compound subjects allow for understanding logical relationships in new ways and for creating new relationships: comparing the seemingly incomparable, using local analytic terms faithfully but also translocally or even globally, in order to understand writing technologies within ecologies of locals and globals. The point here is to begin to create "a richer vocabulary than that of standardization" since "standards do not remain standard for very long, and ...one person's standard is another's confusion and mess."
Four: ECOLOGIES OF WRITING TECHNOLOGIES:
What role do globalization processes play?
What do today's globalization processes have to do with feminism and writing technologies?
Comparing the incomparable and thinking in what I call "layers of locals and globals" I consider newly engaged feminist methodologies (among others), elements in what U.S. third world Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval calls differential consciousness. Sandoval suggests that globalization processes today are producing simultaneously both a new "democratization of oppression" (what others have called "hyperoppression") and a new "Global Citizen" with emergent forms of subjectivity, that is, agency created within and by new forms of subjection and resistance. Sandoval's politics is about engaging liberatory possibility; neither wholly celebratory or wholly condemnatory, it is about wringing out possibilities out of the terrors of new subjectivities under globalization. For some feminists and progressives such hybridity of critique and visionary longing is considered "celebratory" or utopian, no matter its criticality and despite its distinct divergence from commercial utopianisms of technology, capitalism, and progress. For many progressives, any politics not engaged entirely in critical rejection of globalization processes is politically suspect as another form of neoliberalism, complexly implicated in new capital formations, and in the systems of hyperoppression that accompany them. Nonetheless, Sandoval's phrase "democratization of oppression" intends a "third path" that her description of "Third World Feminism" also points to: one that assumes that such purity of political statement and renunciation cannot capture the realities of the lives of unprivileged peoples, whose abilities to maneuver through the terrain of globalizations are the very condition of their survival. Purity and renunciation in these contexts may at times only be possible as forms of unexamined privilege. I would argue, drawing upon Latour, that here Sandoval also questions who is it that can be "modern" (modernized?) in Latour's terms and who it is that has never been modern (perhaps, lives in resistance to, is made a subject within, and moves among and without modernizations?)
Instead, Sandoval claims that it is these hybridic maneuverings, complex mixtures of collaboration, refusal, imagination, resistance, analysis of power, and the translations of power, that are the resources from which the liberatory skills of translating power in the future will come, indeed have already come in various social movements, among them U.S. Third World Feminism. That more and more people in the world are drawn under the web of oppression through globalization marks this strangely "democratizing" shift she names so frighteningly, meaning that to survive more and more people will have to learn this methodology of the oppressed, these skills of analyzing power and translating it that bring into being this new "Global Citizen" out of great and lessor terrors. Such global citizenship is painfully problematic, but examines and enacts possibilities in order to learn whether and how they hold any liberatory promise. Its failures are also continual and dangerous but changing. What Sandoval calls "differential consciousness" maps out possible positions of power within a particular field of action and moves among them, shifting in emphasis and direction in opposition to dominant exploitative forces, exploring each position of power as also a site of resistance, and laboring with difficulty to recognize and act upon its liberatory potentials.
Mapping out layers of locals and globals is necessary then in a liberatory politics that understands itself as working within, constituted by and in resistance to processes of globalization. Thinking about and moving among layers of locals and globals--that is, in a revision of the so-called "local and global," instead understood as non-dyadic and multiple, relative and relational--is an element of the differential consciousness of Sandoval's new Global Citizen. I would add that these are also the resources out of which today we create our shifting engagements with the past as well. Globalization processes, while intensified today in specific ways, are not unique to our time periods; rather, globalization marks both discontinuities of intensity and new economic strategies of accumulation, and also marks mutating continuities of colonialisms, neocolonialisms and postcolonialisms that exist in long historic time frames. This "past," mediated within such processes, is inevitably always also located in our "present." Such dynamic "presentism" is not a failure--of a belief in and use of empirical evidence or objectivity--but rather a condition of production. Mapping out layers of locals and globals is now necessary in all connections with the various pasts we now engage as we tactically emphasize sometimes continuities and other times discontinuities, as we examine our own uses of the past in their political ambiguities, as well as exploring (in all its colonizing associations) the past as a foreign country.
Feminisms are complexly agents too in such global regimes of subjection and resistance, agents in layers of locals and globals, that is, in local movements and global travels, in particular meanings and in generalized ones, in theories that translate well and ill across fields of power. Feminist methodology, such as thinking in layers of locals and globals, and theory, such as Sandoval's exploration of differential consciousness, such method and theory are just coming-into-being from acts of translation across fields of power. Often one learns to politically engage via newly emerging methods and ways of thinking about thinking--that is, learns to know them when one sees them, finding oneself and others using them--only in the midst of misunderstandings and struggles, when previously held assumptions are ruptured by micro and macro movements of power. Describing feminist theory in these terms, with such details, is the object of my first book, Theory in Its Feminist Travels. Communities of struggle can be torn apart by such consequences even when they have birthed such methods and thinking. It is as passionate prophecy that Sandoval's scholarship and activism are animated. For myself as a theorist, for my students learning to theorize, Sandoval is able to produce those pivotal reframings of reality that shock us, shake us, enliven us. Indeed, provoke us to commit ourselves to participate in new orders of consciousness and with, through and beyond them, to create new social worlds. Sandoval takes us through and beyond what we have ever meant by critique, expanding the horizon of meaning and possibility of theory as a form of social change, of theory as the direct action of social movements, of theory as that method through which we transform our relationships to reality.
To pay attention to and use such theory and methodology coming-into-focus requires a high tolerance for conflict and for beginning again, tasks with emotional, intellectual and political costs. Misunderstandings and mistakes and unrecognized privilege are the paradoxical "common ground" upon which such methodology is made, and they all have their own consequences, sometimes separate from the coming-into-being of such methodology, and not at all necessarily mended by it. It is as similar acts of translation that Sandoval discusses the work of Fanon, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault; as well as that of Jameson, White, Haraway, and de Lauretis in Methodology of the Oppressed. Communities of struggle can be torn apart by the consequences of such conflict even when they have birthed such methods and thinking. Noel Sturgeon's Ecofeminist Natures gives detailed political ethnographies of communities of struggle creating the political category "Ecofeminism." Examples of other such conflicts among US feminisms and their generations bringing theory and methodology into being today might circulate around the so-called "Science Wars" and feminist technoscience studies, as examples of various attacks on postmodernism or valorizations of empiricism; or perhaps around rejections, reconceptualizations, renamings of many politics of identity, such as those coalescing around the term "Queer."
In this vision such conflicts as these within and outside US feminisms--shaped through political generations and cohorts and differing geopolitics, and even through the "identity politics" of (inter)interdisciplinarities in the US academy and other national academies or sites of feminist intellectual and activist life--such conflicts are pivotal in producing interdisciplinary international feminist theory and methodology. At this time I consider the most important task to be, first, the never simple recognition of these methods when we see them, just as recognizing the skills honed through the democratizing of oppression is not obvious, although essential to survival and to producing liberatory possibility out of hyperoppression. In this spirit I emphasize in this book writing out "layers of locals and globals" as one such method I have come to recognize and to wish to envision and practice with others. I believe in eclectic methods that emerge in different local politics out of political and institutional struggles, that require always problematically powerful translations across communities of practice, acts of translation and hybridization which themselves never innocently shape these methods. No generation of political activists can claim mastery or ownership of such methods, nor can any academic disciplines or political theories, nor can any national liberation movements. Such new methods enable new translations, new visionary reframings of contemporary geopolitical realities.
I understand feminism and writing technologies as a new field that participates in the recognition and production of new methods and theories coming-into-being, moving among and between disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites--such as studies of orality and literacy, the history of the book, and "informatics" or various cybercultural studies--to analyze why writing technologies are pivotal in our understandings of cultural literacies, contemporary technosciences, economic globalizations, and reconstructions of the past. The history of the book and histories of print capitalism, the colonialisms, neocolonialisms and anti-colonialisms of studies in orality and literacy, the transnationalisms of media and the internet, all of these are entangled with globalization processes of pasts and presents. The orality -- literacy taxonomies can be understood to engage by classification all of these, as the history of the book spans across (in Lowe's perceptual and communications apparatus) chirographic -- print -- electronic modes, with print capitalism as a specific form in the last two, print -- electronic . Transnationalized media and new media including the internet, could either be limited to the last,electronic , or to the last two, print -- electronic ; or with handwriting recognition featured, the last three, chirographic -- print -- electronic ; or finally all four forms, when the first, oral , is not limited to that imagination "primary orality " (an imagination which we only posit without knowing in primacy, immediacy, purity, state of nature). It is not surprising that transnationalized media and the internet can be spread across all four modes, for indeed such a classification is embedded within contemporary technologies: telling their story in every other story they speak, filling up the universe of discourse with themselves. They strangely thus also make possible pasts recreated in recognition of bits of now, new pasts reordered for shifting constituencies and the meanings they value and recognize and create.
For an introductory example of this intertwining of pasts and contemporary traditions, recognized in bits of now through transnationalized technologies and media in all the messiness, danger and ironic opportunity of global capital and its infrastructures, one might turn to the largely grassroots ARTO (ARchivage de la Tradition Orale-- oral tradition archiving) technology project in Sub-Saharan Africa and the connected, but thoroughly transnationalized WorldSpace Digital Satellite Radio project. Each concern radio oralities, but with different inflections. The first one is "the Réseau des Radios rurales locales (RER) (Local rural radio network), made up of approximately forty radio stations in Sub-Saharan Africa, including a certain number which are already equipped with digital CD sound and recording equipment, [working] with a view to safeguarding the oral tradition of [local: within an 80 km15 radius] communities served." As ARTO they have sponsored a series of translocal training workshops in Guinea, Senegal and Niger that demonstrate particular agencies, oral traditions, recording media, and methods of collection, from griot (singer) to computer screen. "Themes that have already been the subject of a collection, in part on request from the communities are: founding stories of villages, human rights, political institutions (particularly the Constitution of the Mali Empire, drawn up in 1236), pleasant social interaction with kin. The creation of a website is planned; the site will be based in Sub-Saharan Africa with mirror sites in Europe and the United States, to allow data to be accessed and saved on an international basis." Thus this grassroots effort is created in layers of locals, translocals and globals.
The second one is "digital broadcasting by satellite, initiated by West Beam WorldSpace, based in Accra, Ghana and starting in September 1999. For this purpose, the successful launching of Afristar, a geostationary orbiting satellite was held on October 28, 1998 in Kourou, French Guiana. The WorldSpace receivers were manufactured by major firms such as Sanyo, Panasonic, JVC and Hitachi and are currently being tested; in this way, Africa will be provided with 14 million km2 of digital radio coverage and subsequently, other parts of the world will be serviced with the launching of three more satellites." The Africa Learning Channel is a radio broadcast beamed from WorldSpace Corporation's AfriStar satellite. The special (proprietary) radio receivers needed to hear the broadcasts are shared in local communities (as they are expensive). WorldSpace Foundation (a non-profit foundation separated from the now-named WorldSpace Corporation that launched the satellite) CEO and president Gracia Hillman explains: "Our strategy right now is to work with NGOs so that receivers will be placed in situations where groups of people will be able to benefit from the information....Listening groups are certainly nothing new in Africa. One example is the Federation of African Media Women in Zimbabwe, which has [an] effective record organizing active women's radio listening clubs, particularly in rural areas. We will benefit from their experience. This collective listening and sharing will be what we call informal education."
WorldSpace Foundation intends to sell receivers to NGOs at cost. Note the complex interconnections among transnational corporations and capital, technological infrastructures in all layerings of locals to globals, political activisms from grassroots to state and internationally managed NGOs, conflated markets and audiences and cultural constituencies. Is this hybrid what is now denoted by "civil society" or its antithesis? Increasingly mediations of oral traditions and oralities of all kinds are intensified, indeed "written" in new densities by contemporary technologies, from collecting processes, archiving, sharing them translocally, and layered globally in transmission, infrastructure and commodity formation. And such oral traditions and oralities have also always been embedded as, within and between writing technologies in layers of locals and often layers of globals as well. Oralities "have never been modern," that is to say, only in modernity have they ever been translated as pure orality separated away by a division of nature and culture, authenticity and estrangement. That does not mean however that past and present mediations are not historically singular in those very layers of locals and globals, in the very ranges of technologies hybridizing and translating, and in the very ranges of place and time.
Another example of layers of locals and globals among contemporary oralities and transnationalisms is described by Gregory Saxton in his discussion of what he calls "the Catalan-Speaking Cyberspace." He describes dispersed and repressed resistance movements which, in their nation-building processes, create new decentralized densities: cultural infrastructures online; one such is Vilaweb, a hyperlinked interface which indexes cultural services in Catalan and promotes Catalan nationalisms. Its links, he says, "indicate a broadening or widening of the social movement sector both geographically and conceptually (i.e., both across territory and across movements)." He speculates that "declining, dispersed ethnic communities" can, by online nation-building, become "viable, 'virtual' ethnic communities." Following David Laitin he notes the new forms nationalisms are taking, in Europe at least, layered in localisms, regionalisms, nations and new visions of federalism, such that multilingualisms come to mirror these embedded cultural identities of individuals in layers. A multicultural model of postindustrial supranational state consolidation will manage regional mini-nationalisms in linguistic layers: English promoted or accepted as an international lingua franca, while central state languages are culturally protected, and formerly repressed regional languages reclaimed by culturalist groups, whose otherwise limited resources are effectively used in cyberspace.
Such oralities are saturated by writing technologies that never "counted as writing" in modernization. Orality -- literacy divides hide writing technologies across media and periods, from "talking story" and "storyknifing" to the intricate technologies of linkage available once the codex is possible. Literary historian Leah Price summarizes new book scholarship: "The codex may look low-tech, but its adoption by early Christians made possible an entirely new repertoire of what we'd now call 'navigational aids'. Pagination allowed readers to cite, cross-reference and index; the discontinuity of pages allowed non-linear forms of retrieval (looking up isolated passages, skipping forwards and backwards); and unlike the scroll, too unwieldy to read without both hands, the codex freed the reader to write. The 'book' in the sense of folded pages, then, is both prior to and distinguishable from print...." All these globalizations are the context in which the strands of the history of the book have coalesced into a discipline. Price remarks: "Book history doesn't just cross disciplines, it mixes media." Along side of yet inappropriately separated from book history are writing technology projects in language and culture revitalization which foreground traditional "writing technologies" in the context of new media. For example, the revitalization of Hawaiian language in immersion school projects led to the development of the Leokï computer system. "The 'talking story' and multimedia traditions are well captured in Pähana Haku Mele (Compose a Song Project), the first interclass project being organized via Leokï." Another traditional "multimedia" technology revived in recent ethnomathematics school projects, I originally learned about from a native student in the first class I taught in Feminism and Writing Technologies in 1986. "Storyknifing is a way of telling a story to an audience while using a storyknife--a tool not unlike a butter knife--to etch symbols in the mud to illustrate and enhance the presentation. As the story proceeds, each scene is wiped away and the mud is smoothed over to allow another scene to be etched. The scenes incorporate the actions and movements of the symbolic characters and are transformed fairly quickly....Each scene etched by a storyknifer creates a map, describing interior spaces and natural landscapes. Stories and etchings typically begin with a grandmother and her granddaughter in their house.... Storyknifing was seen as a way of creating, designing, and practicing the geometrical patterns that can decorate and mark women's clothing."
How can we examine contemporary TV technologies as concrete instantiations of globalization processes?My research on TV technologies centers around two television shows chosen to forefront globalization processes, in their international economic engagements, and in their meanings and instantiations in everyday life. I offer my arguments from this research as concrete details to illustrate some of the specific operations involved in globalization today, and to imagine some quite mundane ways in which we can witness and work for liberatory possibilities emerging, if always inadequately, uneasily, messily, and dangerously, from these historical shifts. Limited, difficult to recognize, always interlaced with problematic politics, such possibilities require our struggles, pleasures, fears, privileges; they require our abilities to translate power and our abilities to live, sometimes only for moments, in the liminal spaces before and beyond critique, the spaces from which something different can be opened, if only momentarily, if highly context-specific.
1992 was the countdown year for the formation of the European Single Market, the regional economic entity--utopian for some, dystopian for others--now intended to recenter Europe in a global politics fragmented in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union (although the plans for "European Community" actually considerably predated "the fall of communism"). This new "European Union" would necessarily refigure what counted as Europe--that is to say, literally which countries now would be in this redesigned entity "Europe" and which not--but would also reconceive the meanings of nationalisms, regionalisms and localisms backdropped by the Global Economy. I992 also marked the 500th anniversary of the so-called "discovery of the new world": the invasion of the Americas by European conquerors. The contest to represent that moment in this one was part of a new "war" of "image superpowers": engaging national desires to valorize old colonialisms in the face of new ones, and oppositional political movements attempting to address the face of new racisms in Europe and elsewhere only too often traveling as national and ethnic identities.
1992 was also the year the action adventure TV series Highlander first premiered--"the first European co-produced weekly hour to be sold into the U.S. syndication market--" based on a fantasy world of immortal sword fighters. My own pleasure in Highlander began with the principal actor Adrian Paul’s eroticised image. I immediately (and somewhat idiosyncratically) "recognized" it as Gay (the image, not necessarily the main story character Duncan MacLeod, or the actor Adrian Paul). It was in this "recognition" that I discovered my pleasure in the show. As a lesbian I was surprised: this was really the first TV show since my adolescence in which an eroticised male image seemed so powerfully attractive to me. Perhaps that is why I assumed it was somehow Gay. Other signs appeared to heighten my pleasure in what seemed to me to be a circulation of gay meanings: first, the use of Paris’ Shakespeare and Company as a location and story site--the bookstore run by lesbian lovers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in the Rue de l’Odéon in the twenties, but known on the show simply as "the American bookstore." Second was the powerful emotional engagement of the show’s theme music, "Princes of the Universe," composed and performed by Queen and sung by the late Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS in November 1991.
It was not that I assumed that there was a latent homosexual subtext, a topic repeatedly raised on the international internet newsgroup alt.tv.highlander but usually treated with scorn by those fans; no, I assumed it was something else. I puzzled over it. On impulse at the supermarket I picked up a special issue of Entertainment Weekly. This issue shouted on its cover "The Gay ‘90s: Entertainment Comes Out of the Closet." In the cover article by Jess Cagle, "America Sees Shades of Gay," I found words to describe the impression I had received from the show: "...mutual inclusiveness--the give and take back--of gay and straight audiences. Its sex appeal bids for the attention of all sexual persuasions; so do its jokes, and the screen winks broadly in all directions." Or, "The most striking and omnipresent outgrowth of that awakening has been in the mass marketing of erotic male images." "...they’re all things to all persuasions." Or, "Not gay per se but something. 'It’s all become one bright pop blur....'" And finally, "In short, this revolution is the only kind Hollywood can trust--one driven by the marketplace...."
Entertainment Weekly’s politics differ markedly from the cautionary story told by Rosemary Hennessy when she discusses "Queer visibility in commodity culture"; she says, "...capitalism’s need for expanding markets has in its own way promoted the integration of art and life...continuously working and reworking desires by inviting them to take the forms dictated by the commodity market....The aestheticization of daily life encourages the pursuit of new tastes and sensations as pleasures in themselves while concealing or backgrounding the labor that has gone into making them possible....We need a way of understanding [Queer] visibility that acknowledges both the local situations in which sexuality is made intelligible as well as the ties that bind knowledge and power to commodity production, consumption, and exchange."
It was in 1995 that I first encountered Highlander and read Cagle's essay. Two years later I could watch the final episodes of the U.S. TV comedy Ellen, after being captivated and depressed both by the Ellen Watch, the countdown to its coming out episode. I recall with a similar ambivalent mixture my interested speculations concerning the commercial success of what I call "Xena feminism," and the politics of the producers of the globally successful action show of the late 90s, Xena. I and others especially speculated about their playful encouragement of multiple readings of the sexual lives of main characters Xena and Gabrielle, who adventured through a postmodern world vaguely modeled on ancient Greece. I consider these TV events examples, in layers of locals and globals, of what I call Global Gay Formations and Local Homosexualities, intersecting with what David Morley and Kevin Robins have called "Spaces of Identity: global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries." I discuss these large political and ideological issues in the concrete terms of the Canada/France TV show Highlander, and also with reference to the U.S. show shot in New Zealand, Xena. I have studiedXena as a counterpoint to Highlander, aided in examining each one by its ranging internet media fandom, a subculture of fans that is largely female and at the beginning of my research a rare site of women's concentration on the World Wide Web. While importantly international, these media fandoms still tend to be dominated by English speaking fans from all over the world, and by fans within the TV shows' principal market, the U.S. Part of the point of this argument is to demonstrate the complex patternings of globals and locals in layers that constitute the processes of globalization in "spaces of identity," intersections of nationality, sexuality and gender.
Certainly my purpose is not to celebrate female media fandoms, TV shows, identity politics, or globalization. I am complexly critical of and influenced by (and sometimes take necessary pleasures in) all, indeed, am inextricably embedded in all, on the one hand in ways deliberate, political, even perhaps visionary; but also in other ways structural and inevitable, in unintended but certainly not innocent complicity. I consider them each sites of and for political contestation and that is the contradictory act in which I engage here. I do not consider brave single-hearted stances of negative critique remotely adequate for the kinds of social and cultural analysis necessary under the regimes of globalized capital. This is how I would distinguish the politics and method I offer students from the politics offered by either Entertainment Weekly or Rosemary Hennessy, although I depend upon and value (differently) both of these forms of analytic engagement. But, in addition to Sandoval's visions potentially liberatory but ever dangerous, I also look to Donna Haraway's non-innocent historical diffractions, as well as to Bruno Latour's call for a "parliament of things," for new feminist and progressive politics of technology under globalization.
To describe concretely some of the ways in which globalization operates I turn to the economic arrangements surrounding the coming-into-being of the TV show Highlander in 1992, this year of formation of the European Single Market.Highlander's principal production partner was the French company Gaumont which has been called "the world's oldest film company." That first year Highlander's financing was a money mix from France, Germany, Italy and Japan. In the second year Gaumont found another partner, Canadian Filmline International. Highlander thus became a co-production filmed entirely in France and Canada and shot in English for a world market. It has been seen in 70 countries in Europe, North and South American, Asia, Africa and Australia, where it has competed with syndicated series produced in the U.S. In distinctly French and Canadian cultural strategies Highlander has been another of those culture products intended to combat U.S. media hegemony. Its quotas on European content were insured during several seasons by shooting half the time each season in Vancouver and half the time in Paris under a Franco-Canadian agreement in which "segments shot in Canada qualify as European, and segments shot in Europe qualify as Canadian." (Note the European Single Market's strategically shifting economic geographies!) 1997 was Highlander's last season; indeed, the U.S. distributor ordered only 13 episodes (rather than the usual 22), all of which were shot in Paris. So far (2002) one feature film starring the TV series actors has been released (another is being talked about). Contrasting with the previous three feature films, the cast of this last one combined actors and premises from both previous films and from the TV series. A TV spinoff series lasted one season--Highlander: The Raven. It starred the principal female recurring character, intended to capitalize on Xena's commercial success and demographic appeal, attempting, if unsuccessfully, to mobilize the interests of female media fandoms among others.
Gaumont had in 1991 just opened its new television division. This marked a shift in economic strategies by the company that might be understood to have pioneered overwhelming vertical integration as the winning strategy among global media corporations. Gaumont's empire, begun in 1895 with manufacturing and selling photographic equipment, quickly became first "the world's largest film studio" with the first woman producer-director-editor and soon after "the world's largest movie theater." Today media corporations are a complicated mix of parent companies and subsidiaries with multinational lineages. For example, the U.S. company MCA, the principal partner with Sam Raimi's Renaissance Pictures first creating the TV show Xena, became a private subsidiary of the Canadian multinational Seagram, who bought it in 1995 from the Japanese multinational Matsushita. MCA then had divisions and subsidiaries involved in: movies, TV, video tapes, publishing, music, concerts, audio tapes, cable TV, etc. Seagram renamed the company Universal Studios, but was sold in 2000 to Vivendi in France (now Vivendi Universal). Vertical integration is about being altogether in control of production sites, materials and talent; distribution, sales and promotion, and places of exhibition and retailing or technologies of delivery. National boundaries may only get in the way of such decentralized but interconnected systems, and in their turn, they require new forms of coordination and servicing, now centralized in new global cities.
As Gaumont's president Nicolas Seydoux has said: "Gaumont began life as an integrated company....A screen has no reason to exist without a movie to show on it, and a movie doesn't exist without a screen to show it on." But although Gaumont may have pioneered integration, it had ceased being a winning player in the global market: its attempts to parley its many decade long management of film production, distribution and theatrical exhibition into new chains of theaters throughout Europe in the 80s had failed. Entering into economic retrenchment Gaumont had become very vocal about French film culture, announced its plans to concentrate on making films in French only, and clearly intended now to take advantage of state protection of culture industries. Supporting limits on U.S. films and TV programs abroad, Seydoux insists, "This is not a trade war. It is an identity statement. All we want is to preserve a world in which grandchildren have the same national identity as their grandparents."
On the one hand, that is. Film would be Gaumont's site of cultural nationalism. But TV would be Gaumont's entry into global media. At the end of the first three years of its existence Gaumont's TV division accounted for 1/5 of its profits. Gaumont's first French production partner in this Highlander venture, channel TF1, had had to end its partnership after the first year, because it was no longer allowed to count English-language TV products, like Highlander, as "French." French channel M6, however, "had the right to produce non-French European programs," but was a smaller channel, with less money to invest. So, in order to continue production on this English-language TV show, Gaumont had to find its Canadian partner, Filmline.
As a joint venture between Canada and France, Highlander's production elements were carefully quota-ed. Indeed, the quotas on European content are the reason that for several seasons Highlander was shot on location in both Canada and France. Highlander's narrative elements are a clever "recombinant subgenre" as well: part traditionally masculine martial arts action adventure, part traditionally feminine historical romance costume melodrama. These elements travel well and widely, engaging multiple global audiences. The audiences for Highlander are "split pretty equally between men and women, which is something kind of unique for an action show," says Ira Bernstein, head of domestic syndication for Rysher,Highlander's distributor, which means that more women are viewers than is usual. Each episode contains both highly ritualized sword fights between Immortals and historical flashbacks recreating past events in their long lives and loves. Narrative action takes place in historical time and apparent contemporary time in specific spots on a clearly colonized globe; this global map has literally been drawn and chronologized by fans. Now fancily reproduced it has been sold in the U.S. and Canada out of the Highlander catalog along with other merchandise. The map (and some of the other merchandise) emerges from and is itself a resource in the production of fan writing, criticism and culture. As are other media fandoms, Highlander fandom is largely female, white and middle aged. I use the present tense here because Highlander and Xena fandom continues even after each TV show's cancellation; and the shows themselves are still seen, in reruns and/or on video tape and DVD. Although the immediacy of a series in production is over, the pleasure in synchronic engagement with each entire series' oeuvre is now even heightened for fans.
Both Highlander and Xena paradoxically depend on both the wide currency of genre elements and an appeal to gendered interests in the niche markets of media and electronic fandoms, on both broad narratives that do not rely on dialog and on complex systems of self-referentiality that layer audiences, markets, styles and forms of viewing and consumption. Both Highlander and Xena are examples of strategies of economic response to new global conditions of accumulation.Xena's executive producers, Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert, known for "chic-horror" movies like Darkman, or pomo "pop-apocalyptic" westerns like The Quick and the Dead "off-shored" their twin TV shows Hercules and Xena; indeed preemptively mobilized New Zealand's own film and TV resources into an elaborate localized "cultural industrial district." Highlander's previous Canadian location, Vancouver, is also a similar cultural industrial district, where Hollywood products like The X-Files are also made. Speaking of the first season of Hercules but true of its off-shoot Xena too, as reported in the Auckland Sunday News: "Contributing to its appeal here will be the local locations and actors. Shooting in Auckland not only kept the budget low but provided the heroics with an exotic backdrop that hasn't been seen on U.S. television." And the Wellington Dominion says "The series has a distinctly New Zealand flavor with Kiwi slang creeping in to the dialogue." MCA enthusiastically boasted of the sudden spurt of international markets Xena was sold into for its second season, a surprise they say, having been "developed almost exclusively with the domestic market in mind." (They meant the U.S. market.) Highlander represents European attempts to counter Hollywood in joint ventures with other beleaguered cultural sites, while on the other hand Xena represents Hollywood's attempts to "externalize" its economic risks and to "maximize a variety of creative resources."
But in the movements of globals and locals among "image superpowers," Highlander and Xena complexly combine ideological strategies, economic and representational, that media theorists David Morley and Kevin Robins have explicated as "enterprise culture" and "heritage culture." These terms, used in a specifically British context, refer on the one hand--enterprise culture--to Thatcher-like political promotions of national capital and local labor in pursuit of strategic alliances and joint ventures, the price of admission to a global club of flexible transnationals; and on the other hand--heritage culture--to Prince Charles-like exploitations of nostalgia and invented traditions intended to make places attractive locations for global investment and tourism. Highlander's dual locations have been only too resonant with these notions: Vancouver as enterprise culture, an up and coming new global city recreated by shifting capital, now lampooned in economic racist terms as Hong-couver, the inheritor of fleeing capital from Hong-Kong. Or Paris as heritage culture, long a global city and today concentrating "larger shares of most financial sectors than it did ten years ago...," with its "place-specific differences" parleyed as "tools in competition over positional advantages."
Such linked cities in global networks are the subject of extensive analysis by feminist economist Saskia Sassen. Although some are built upon and within the sites of cities historically powerful, such as Paris, they are nevertheless "new" in "formation of [a] new urban economic core of financial and service activities that comes to replace the older...core." "The growth of producer service firms based in New York or London or Paris can be fed by manufacturing [here read "production"] located anywhere in the world as long as it is part of a multinational corporate network." (17) The "off-shoring" of media industries, like the economic arrangements creating Xena, require these producer service firms services, which manage the complex network that such dispersal of labor processes is embedded within. Sassen points to the ambiguous "locations" of production--decentralized--paradoxically requiring highly localized "centers" of services, these new global cities. In such concrete interconnecting infrastructures are locals and globals pluralized, layered, made relative and relational.
Alternatively, consider such location shots in Highlander as Vancouver cityscapes, which stand in for cities all over America-in-quotes, and not just used by the TV show Highlander but also used by Hollywood products as well. As cultural industrial district for the film and TV industries, Vancouver's cityscapes are recognized all over the world as various and non-specific North American cities. Highlander fans writing stories that take off from and go beyond the TV show call the Vancouver location "Seacouver"--a combination of Seattle and Vancouver, delighting in the ambiguous national possession of the pivotal sites of Highlander narratives. And borrowing from such fan usage, the writers and directors ofHighlander also came to use the term Seacouver themselves in their screenplays to refer to a fictional city in which contemporary Highlander stories take place. Or consider the location shots from Paris. The barge the mail character Duncan MacLeod lives on when in Paris is parked conveniently along the Seine: right behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Almost every shot of Duncan and the barge is backgrounded by a rear view of Notre Dame. When, during the fourth season, for one episode the producers were unable to rent that exact, now taken for granted site, their alternative dock for the barge was backgrounded by the Eiffel Tower instead. The place-specific is being sold as heritage culture Paris, not the place-ambiguous.
In these terms "Seacouver" becomes an emblem for that very U.S. cultural hegemony that the show's economic arrangements are intended to foil. Is Highlander really a kind of U.S. cultural economic off-shoring like Xena, but in disguise? Suddenly the fact that British citizen, also half-Italian, principal actor Adrian Paul has a home in Hollywood makes a particular kind of professional sense. Or rather does this mean something more complicated about the meanings of globalization? "Seacouver" mingles locals, in a fictional regional entity which simultaneously crosses and repositions national, economic and cultural boundaries. Both relational and relative, it simultaneously exploits similarities and differences. Consider the term "American" (in quotes). In general usage all over the world, "America," which describes almost half a hemisphere, Northern and Southern continents together, is used as a synonym specifically for the United States. American-in-quotes is one of those specious generics that are emblems of unequal power relations, like the word Man or the word White. In Mexico the term "North America" might name an English-language historically colonized but now colonizing cultural power, in which Canada and the U.S. are seen as a cultural unity, and might also obfuscate the "Canadian experience of subservience" to U.S. cultural interests. Richard Collins refers to the "Canadianisation of European television," by which he means an extension Europe-wide of the experience Canada has suffered in relation to the U.S. Such "Canadianisation" undergirds the economic alliance between Canada and France that Highlander embodies, and the fear of one kind of future in which it attempts to intervene. Yet to be "North American" or indeed "American" and be incorporated by the body of the U.S. is not always to Canada's disadvantage; the unity imagined from Mexico also emphasizes Canada's relative economic and cultural advantages vis-a-vis Mexico. "From where do you see what?" Such a question is perhaps even more appropriate under the terms of globalized power than another question such specious generics also suggest within U.S. feminist identity politics, the question, "Am I included?"
From British Columbia, Canada, where the Highlander locations are distinctively Vancouver--from there it is no place-ambiguous city. It is full of city landmarks and neighborhoods, distinctive buildings, sky- and sea-lines, mountain backdrops. Internet fans of Highlander learn from Canadian counterparts and touring U.S. fans that Duncan's dojo is located in Vancouver's Gastown district, walking tours provided on-line, while neighborhood viewing groups huddle over someone's vacation photos. However, although folks from Vancouver see their own city quite recognizably the location of Highlander, still the set has been dressed with U.S. postal workers' uniforms and U.S. car license plates. But even these can be read ambiguously: U.S. cars are certainly to be found in Vancouver and postal workers are similarly capable of travel. Globalization also depends upon a new kind of horizontal integration; that is, markets identified as demographic groups beyond rather than within geographical boundaries, as Morley and Robins suggest; one example would globalize sexuality as ethnicity, naming and exploiting an international "Gay" market, especially one traveling, migrating, and moved around. We practice such "demography" by engaging with online materials which create commercial and political identities, but also morphed identities like that of "the fan." Morley and Robins emphatically emphasize that under the regime of globalization, the local is both "relational and relative."
The mega-international rock group Queen, which composed and performed the music for the first Highlander movie, offers another concrete example, here of the kinds of shifts in social and personal identities produced under globalization processes. Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury embodies the Global Market's physical, cultural and economic migrations--for some possible, for others compulsory. Born in Zanzibar of Zoroastrian parents of Persian decent, Mercury was educated in Bombay, India from ages 10-16. Following the 1964 Revolution in Zanzibar he and his family fled to Britain where he studied art and in 1970 hooked up with the other folks who made up the "British" group Queen, which he named. Over the twenty years of Mercury's association with Queen before his death, his image morphed in self-consciously parodic shifts of cultural association, at time accentuating and at times deaccentuating his own multi-cultural travels, always parodying and exploiting contemporary images of masculinity. As he died of AIDS, Mercury denied that he was homosexual, although every element of Queen's self-presentation in each decade parodied the then-current subcultural image of the gay or bisexual man. Indeed, bisexuality, in both international rock image and cultural manifestations, and as a morphed and mixed global sexuality, were exploited by Queen and particularly by Mercury.
The music for the first Highlander movie appeared in Queen's album "A Kind of Magic," the lead song of which was #1 on the charts of 35 countries in 1986. Mercury's song "Princes of the Universe" is heard in the opening and closing sequences of every episode of Highlander: The TV Series. In the music video of "Princes of the Universe" Mercury struts through the song with Christopher Lambert (star of the first Highlander film), on a concert stage built to echo and monumentalize the site of the climax of the movie, the final sword fight. The homoerotic energy of the rock music and staged and parodied dance between Mercury and Lambert have explicit undercurrents in both movie and TV show. (Cuts from the movie darkly flash by in swift succession, many of them surreally "historical.") Fans pointedly pronounce the name "Lambert" as "lam-BEAR," intended as a mark of familiarity with Lambert's national origins, which are Belgian, and fans tell stories that his language coach for the film Greystoke attempted to create for him an accented English that would be recognized as "European" generally, but be impossible to pin down as belonging to a particular European nation. Lambert's, Mercury's and half-British, half-Italian TV show star Adrian Paul's images can be read as multi-ethnic: as locally "like-us" in a large number of markets globally. They are profoundly attractive in a global market that also creates images like the Benneton ads' computer-morphed ethnics, parodied in gay political posters. Thus the generic and the particular are shifted back and forth in layers of locals and globals under globalization, ethnic and also sexual mixtures--the morphed--have special salience, necessarily both relative and relational. Despite Seydoux's avowed desire to preserve and even generationally stabilize national identity in the era of the European Union, Highlander culture demonstrates "how the cultural construction of national identity, as articulated in both official policies and informal popular practices, is a precarious project that can never be isolated from the global, transnational relations in which it takes shape." Highlanderand Xena participate in morphed identities of various intentions and commercial realities, sometimes ambi-sexual, sometimes ambi-cultural, sometimes ambi-ethnic.
When I first subscribed to the listserve that is one site of Highlander international media fandom, I found to my dismay that homosexuality was a "forbidden topic." After all, my own attraction to Highlander was very much founded in my "recognition" of a circulation of Gay images. Indeed I had sought out Highlander fandom in order to make community with others I thought must have similar attractions. On the list, though, homosexuality as a topic had been forbidden as "flame-bait," that is, as a topic that was assumed to inevitably incite "flame-wars", or long, exhausting vituperative attacks. Still I also soon discovered that some fans occasionally made fun of and attempted to subvert the ban by posing mock questions using a blank instead of words like gay, homosexual, etc. For example someone might say, "Surely we know that Duncan isn't BLANK." If reprimanded by another post, the trickster might claim, "Oh, I wasn't raising a forbidden topic, I was referring to CANADIANS." This became the joking equation, the word "Canadian" was invoked instead of the word "Gay," to the delight of some Canadians on the list and to the horror of others. Placing the word "Canadian" in this context, always cute, a bit trivializing, and always edged with connotations of abnormality or subordination, was only too close to "colonizing" assumptions on the parts of U.S. fans about Canada anyway, and also very close to complacencies on the part of "tolerant" fans in what was also a running joke about homosexuality. Many pleasures, some sadistic, some campy, some subversive, some smug were encapsulated in this running joke, which also did allow for some very limited encouragement to those of us who wanted to discuss things Gay and possibly Gay on Highlander. Here the sexual and the national stood in for each other, highlighting and trivializing the relations of power that made such a substitution possible.
Somewhat later a new character was introduced to the series, the oldest known immie (what fans call Immortals), the 5,000 year old Methos, who was hiding out as a Watcher, one of the mortals who keeps track of immies. He was an immediate hit: list members went crazy over the character and the actor, who shortly thereafter came to the Highlander convention in Denver, in October 1995. The actor, Peter Wingfield, told us during his Question and Answer session how he had heard about his success with the fans from the production people, who got reports from their creative consultants on the reactions of fans on the various internet sites. He bubbled over with excitement about getting such immediate feedback on his performance and how it had encouraged the producers to use the new character in a series of story arcs (the term used by writers, actors, directors and fans). It was his appearance in the next story arc that provoked a final refusal by list members to continue the homosexuality-as-forbidden-topic policy.
A brief on-screen exchange between Methos and Duncan, in which, while helping him renovate a house, Methos teased Duncan in a playful, flirting kind of way, and then was painted on the nose in retaliation, provoked many fans; even those who were in principle against changing the forbidden topics policy. Many could not resist speculating about the charismatic charge generated between the two characters, was it erotic? and if so who was doing it? who was the object? who was the subject? Almost no one was willing to allow the principal character to have such erotic interests; but this new character, without a series history--he, they were willing to speculate about. Within about 48 hours the gay as forbidden topic policy had become moot. The list owner did not intervene into the discussion, which was almost entirely flame-free. Although from then on homosexuality was no longer a forbidden topic, it became instead a "marked" topic: one had to include in the subject line of posts with homosexual content the header: "Same Sex Sex." This would permit those who found the topic offensive to delete these posts unread, without banning the subject altogether. While later in that fourth season Methos briefly acquired a mortal woman lover, some fans had begun to write fan fiction in which instead Methos and Duncan were lovers.
Such fiction is known in the media fan world as "slash." Slash has a long and varied history originating in the female fandom surrounding the TV show Star Trek. The "slash" is a typographic cue to an eroticised relationship between characters of the same sex, usually men; in the original Star Trek between Kirk and Spock (Kirk/['slash'] Spock); in Highlander fandom, between, say, Methos and Duncan (Methos/Duncan). It is a kind of pornography written most often by heterosexual women. Slash is thus not equivalent to gay fiction, though as time has gone on, the two genres may be overlapping more, and writers and characters may be self-consciously bisexual, lesbian or gay. I speculate myself that slash is a site for the production of new bisexualities, of both characters and fan writers. It is one cultural site in which the constructions that produce heterosexuality and homosexuality as mutually exclusive, are denied, eroded, refused or simply not engaged. The term "Same Sex Sex," which has several registers of currency today, is important in this context too. Same Sex Sex separates, or maybe better, refuses to conflate behaviors and sexual identities. It is a useful term in global AIDS education and increasingly in AIDS activism, and in the anthropology of sexuality. It is less used in say, the history of sexuality. Slash is one site of its popular use, and, as in Mercury's denial of homosexuality, usually refuses social, cultural, and political meanings of homosexual identities.
Early slash explicitly depicted the eroticised relation between Kirk and Spock as situational, not homosexual, and as conflicted but romantic within narrative structures and pleasures stereotypically "female." Contemporary slash is more varied, sometimes utopian, sometimes romantic, sometimes brutal; and always intended to be erotic. Slash once was privately circulated in circles of female fans who were both writers and readers of it (in the U.S. and probably also in Britain, Canada and Australia). Today slash is shared in the fanzines (xerox anthologies) that emerged from such private circulation and that are sold at cons (fan media conventions in the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia) or through mail order, or most recently and most widely, displayed and exchanged on the Web and through email, with what international distribution one can imagine. I know of no studies or direct information about international reception of slash on the Web. Although I encountered early slash from women Trekker friends, my understanding of it today is in this Web displayed form and subculture. I have only seen or heard of slash in English myself.
How Xena fan fiction fits into the world of slash is perhaps more ambiguous; whether lesbian stories about Xena and Gabrielle are slash, enlarge the practice of slash, or are something else is perhaps in flux. The press has made much of the lesbian following among Xena fans. The producers of Xena, and Lucy Lawless, the actress who plays Xena, have said they are "aware and not afraid of" their lesbian audience, as the Xena: Warrior Princess FAQ proudly proclaims in the section entitled "The Sapphic Subtext." Indeed Lucy Lawless appeared in a short film, "Peach," in which she played the part of a bisexual woman. Media stories made much of her public relationship and now marriage with producer Tapert. On the fan list called "The XenaVerse" talk about lesbian narratives concerning Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle were a taken-for-granted thread of discussion. Both Xena and Gabrielle have had conspicuous male lovers; in the episode "Destiny," which I will discuss below, Xena is famously paired with Julius Caesar, for example. The Xena FAQ goes on to say: "[The writers] have done a great job of making it so viewers can see whatever they want in the show. XWP is a fantasy/action series with a riveting relationship between the two main characters, and so appeals to many people in many different ways." My impression is that the Highlander producers have never been at all sure exactly how they wanted to play the ambiguities possible within their own circulation of images, and questions of Adrian Paul at fan conventions suggest he is nothing like so blase as Lucy Lawless about such readings, nor were questions directed at him so open either. But fans with contacts with crew members claim that such interpretations are the stuff of jokes and talk on the Highlander set, while fans with contact with Peter Wingfield claim that he gets a kick out of hearing about the fan fiction which links Methos and Duncan. Fandom is filled with folks claiming insider information, and such seeming authority does subvert official and authorized readings. Xena producers seem to have decided to milk their ambiguities for all they are worth: and indeed multiple, complicatedly contradictory and non-contradictory stories, associations and allusions are the stuff out of which Xena is made. Such processes of storytelling also mark the pleasures of fan writing in general and of slash in particular.
Bringing fans, fan culture and issues about fans into the classroom turns out to be very complicated. When I first started teaching this material I assumed that students would often be fans, and if not, they would have friends who were and experiences with fandoms, even as outsiders. I found instead that my students, even those taking courses on TV, had rigid investments in high culture, were frankly frightened of fans because they had strong stereotypes about them, and were dismissive of the intellectual work and activities of fandoms. My students' investments in university education as intellectual capital eclipsed any alternative experiences they might even have engaged in themselves, for example as fans of musical groups. When I wore fan paraphernalia and brought in objects from cons for students to examine and analyze, I found discussion paralyzed, only later to learn from evaluations that students had from that time marked me as one of "them"--a fan--a stigmatized category. As an out lesbian teaching in women's studies classes, I was astonished. In some courses I have since been able to raise issues about the class values that are mobilized in such stereotypes about fans, fandom and television viewing itself, about the narrow constructions of intellectual activity that valorize only academic education, and about the definitions and assumptions of feminism that seem to legitimize such class values. Certainly I always hoped to engage in such analysis, but I found that getting into it through the "fun" aspects of fans and fandoms was only to allow them to be dismissed. Raising these issues has continued to be more difficult than I expect, has to be carefully prepared for beforehand, and raised not at the beginning of the course but later on. Starting off with economic and political issues, and carefully building in fandoms as subjects of analysis clearly theoretical seems to desensitize students' biases over time. Such reactions have alerted me to my own complicity with such academic values.
Let me return here to Morley and Robins' notion of heritage culture. They point out that in a new economic regionalism characterized by a "war of images," the question "Where will the pictures come from?" is crucial, and fuels some of the heat surrounding such issues as European content quotas on TV. Such concerns are seen by some as issues of national identity, as implied by Seydoux in his remarks on grandchildren having the same national identity as their grandparents. The European Single Market, at times called the European Community or now the European Union, can be seen both as an attempt to conserve such national identities and to protect European identity, and also as a threat to the national identities of some of the states that are located on the geographical entity, continental Europe, and within the ideological entity usually called European, or the West. Heritage culture is a symptom of and exploits such anxieties, as well as being the site of new forms of pleasure and invented traditions. Historical dramas today cannot help but be coopted by the painful pleasures of heritage culture, and recuperated histories are mixes; real, hyperreal, imagined and pastiche. Highlander and Xenarepresent two approaches to being such mixtures: Highlander on the one hand thinks of itself as committed to real history, that is, real history within low budgets. I think of Highlander history as reenactment history: the kind of history that war games folks put together in epic battle reenactments. One can distinguish it from other public histories: say, the kind of official history that Congress prefers when it castigates Smithsonian Air and Space Museum curators for their attempts to historicize the installation of the Enola Gay, the plane from which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I myself come from a tradition of marxist historicizing, in which the purpose of history is to subvert such official readings and to insist upon economic and ideological underpinnings as privileged realities. None of these or other historical strategies today is immune from the pressures of heritage culture. Xena prefers to self-consciously refer to its own mix, to make jokes about the contradictions produced, to focus on the simultaneous, the synchronic. Both Highlander and Xena take pleasure in the conflation of the mythic and the historic, the chronological and the anachronistic. The episodes of each I will turn to now are such elaborate fusions. Both Highlander and Xena depend on the use of multiple frames, the most conspicuous of which are flashbacks.
Historically multiple frames in TV specifically are the legacy of product placement, as TV historian Lynn Spigel points out. In early television the stage-within-a-stage structure, a "quagmire of meta-realities," was found in domestic comedies with heritages from vaudeville, shows like Burns & Allen, or I Love Lucy. The stage frame contained the domestic space; and the stage space, which viewers inhabited, the strangely more real space, was also inhabited by the product being sold. Such early TV framing conventions achieved the effect of making "the advertiser's discourse appear to be in a world closer to the viewer's real life." In Xena the final credits, which flash by more quickly than one can read, and which share the screen with upcoming episode trailers, are followed by disclaimers, one legal, one humorous. In the episode "Destiny," the production credits end with the following humorous disclaimer: "Julius Caesar was not harmed during the production of this motion picture. However, the Producers deny any responsibility for any unfortunate acts of betrayal causing some discomfort."
Rather than the product occupying the stage/frame space, we have the campy production comments, that parody the "legal" disclaimers. Unlike the early product placement, meant to be the clearest communication, if also often humorous, these comic disclaimers are so embedded as to be hidden: I cannot read them off the TV myself, and only can barely see them on "pause" or "slow" with my 2-headed VCR. To get this one I raided the store of such carefully, even compulsively-visioned sightings produced by fans at the Logomancy fan site on the Web. Most of these humorous disclaimers use the same format: something was not harmed in the making of this motion picture. The play between TV episode and "this motion picture" reminds us that this was Xena producers Raimi and Tapert's first TV venture in careers of movie production. Like the Highlander producers Davis and Panzer, Raimi and Tapert moved from low budget independent movies to independent, limited budget syndicated TV at a particular economic moment. What was not harmed here was "Julius Caesar," the chronologically specific character in a play of anachronism, the emblem of Western Culture who parodies himself for us as he says conversationally that "Gaul is divided into three parts." In first season episodes other such Western authorities mocked but in disclaimer not harmed were "Unrelenting or Severely Punishing Deities," "Fathers, Spiritual or Biological," or "Males, Centaurs or Amazons," each of these poking fun at the kind of feminism displayed both subversively and often commercially in Xena. I call this exuberantly commercial feminism "Xena feminism."
It is not just that the Producers make fun of possible objections to the violence of this episode of Xena when, after saying Caesar was not harmed, they also "deny any responsibility for any unfortunate acts of betrayal causing some discomfort." Here they also make fun of any fussy concerns about their recycled versions of myths, cultural traditions, and national histories. As the early TV framing devices included the advertiser's product (and thus the viewer) in the spectacle, so the humorous disclaimer on Xena includes as pleasures of reception the conditions of production, the credits and legalities (and also the viewer) inside the spectacle. Indeed the obvious joke of this episode's disclaimer is that Julius Caesar is never hurt in the story--only Xena is hurt. His betrayals of her are both emotional and violently physical. And Caesar's mode of killing Xena is to crucify her: the Western cultural betrayal by the producers then being to elevate Xena to Christ-like status, and indeed to construct a story in which she is resurrected not just once, but twice. Note how the humorous ironies accustom and habituate viewers to casual movements from one level of abstraction to another, to sorting out easily those relative and relational shifts among levels of locals and globals involved in getting all the jokes and in playing one's proper market roles in a globalized economy.
Let me formally compare "Destiny" to an episode of Highlander, "The Valkyrie." I want to point to the multiple framings which include the flashback/story-within-a-story that structures this episode in layers of political and historical association. In the opening teaser we first see a picture of St. Basil's in the Kremlin, the architectural element that stands for "Moscow," captioned in case we do not get it. (Highlander eschews subtleties). We are cut immediately to a TV picture, revealed to be so as the camera pulls back, then revealed to be a video tape as the viewer within the story reverses the tape momentarily and replays the speech we hear. (This is an especially pointed allusion within Highlander fan culture, since in many viewing areas Highlander is shown during the "fringe" viewing hours, say, late at night, and even when it is shown in prime time, fans are likely to videotape episodes. So in either case, videotape is an important ingredient inHighlander fan worlds. In the opening sequence of Highlander a Watcher is shown cut next to a shot of a videocam, thus conflating the group who investigates Immortals with the TV show viewers "watching" the show.) The first lines of dialog then set the terms of the narrative throughout this episode: the character Igor Stephenovitch, obviously an allusion to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, says: "Do they not love me? of course they love me. I fill their empty bellies with something more than food. I fill them with someone to hate. Someone to blame for their wretched lives. Jews, Muslims, Chetchnians, it really doesn't matter. There are glorious days ahead, Dimitri. Lousy TV, that's the first thing we'll have to fix." (Such TV-watching allusions make the viewer complicit in the morally dangerous world depicted in the episode.)
This episode is explicitly about pan-European racism in its neo-Nazi forms, but at every point this theme becomes explicit, it is quickly shifted, and then re-embedded, as also references to specific nationalities are raised and then delimited. It begins in Europe, or one might say, the EU's "margins," that is Russia, not in, say, Strasbourg, France, where shortly after this episode first aired demonstrations against the racism of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front occurred. Although in this highly colored and even stereotyped version the possible French allusions are displaced, in addition it quickly moves to its "American-in-quotes" location, to focus on another rather cartoon-style racist, the figure Wilkinson, about whom we are told, "At 16 he and his friends beat two gay men to death, at 20 burned three black churches in the south....Now all he does is give a speech and other people go out and burn churches for him." Of course, within the flashback, all these allusions are grafted onto the figure of arch-evil, Hitler himself. In such cultural shifts of register and allusions to chronological event, history is left behind and reframed as morality play. Historical event, present and past, is contained as morality play, indeed contained, as are all episodes of Highlander, within battles between good and evil, battles which take place in individual psyches, then also externalized in single combat. Methos and Duncan offer two versions of history in their interchanges throughout the episode, one a simplified and parodied version of Marxist determinism, as when Methos paraphrases Marx, saying: "History makes men, MacLeod, men don't make history"; and the other a simplified heroic capitalist-equals-democratic version, Duncan's emphasis on pivotal actions by specific individuals. But even these highly simplified versions of possible European political ideologies are trumped by the Interpol Inspector's banal moralisms: "...when I was a little boy everything was black and white, good and evil you see, then I grew up and discovered there was only gray."
From where do you see what? History become morality play is an effective method of defusing but also strangely including actual political content, and certainly any current politics in this episode is immediately defused, although also played up in a scattered pattern of allusions relevant to multiple audiences and markets. Thus they are similar to the commodified forms of queer visibility Hennessy talks about, or very like exuberant "Xena feminism," already depoliticized and only democratized within encrustations of capitalist commodity formations and individualism. Yet, one cannot help but notice that some of the betrayals on the part of the producers have some, though quite limited, subversive effects. On the one hand, the Interpol Inspector's banalities are only too reminiscent of the only kinds of resistance imaginable amid the apathy and deeply paralyzing depression that are understandable responses to economic shifts of catastrophic proportions. The Inspector's references to a life in Rumania are an allusion to these responses to history and politics in especially Eastern European countries in the wake of the break up of the Soviet Union. Nor on the other hand is an explicit if rather opportunistic stance against European racism unimportant. Its very defusion indicates how volatile such contemporary politics are.
In fact concerns about racism infuse Highlander as a series, being a recurrent if also always redirected theme. Anti-racisms in Highlander are almost always projected onto the screen of the history of slavery and/or segregation in the United States, and Duncan is almost always a heroic figure helping slaves to freedom in the underground railroad, or supporting African-Americans in desegregation. He always exacts a price however: he lectures them on the meanings of freedom and tells them how to be good democratic citizens. The propaganda value of such lectures and liberal encouragements, visions and simplified histories are the didactic heart of Highlander. Creative consultant and head writer David Abramowitz refers to the show as "a kind of romantic Talmudic discussion with action," while principal actor Adrian Paul refuses a fan club unless it is directed toward charity and peaceful community building. In the U.S. fan context and convention culture these obviously liberal American-in-quotes undertakings are substitutions for an occasionally almost-mentioned British labor agenda.
Morley and Robins point out that heritage culture, in the context of the European collectivist dreams for 1992 and the European Union, has possible racist implications, that national identities may be in a process of transformation into a "white continentalism." Highlander itself--within its recurrent interests in racism--is also conspicuously white, despite the inclusion of prominent and striking Immortals of color, for example, Roland Gift of the British Rock group, Fine Young Cannibals. Vancouver and Paris sets are also conspicuously white, despite these cities' own multicultural complexities. Heritage culture is based on these catered to and contradictory visions while European Union in 1992 was the result of uneasy bargains struck despite contradictory visions. For example, the bargain struck up among principals Germany and France, in which Germany pledged to eschew past imperial dreams while undergoing reunification, by reinforcing commitments to a federal Europe and pushing for political integration, while France pushed for monetary union giving it some degree of control over Germany. Such tensions over and economic and political attempts at resolution of Germany's past are even another level of allusion in "The Valkyrie" episode of Highlander and another appropriation by heritage culture.
A few years ago my mother persuaded me to take her to see the movie Disclosure, the film version of Michael Crichton's novel, starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. I was already sure, by its reputation without having seen it, that this was an "anti-feminist" film belittling sexual harassment in the workplace. I was unsurprised that Michael Douglas played the leading character after his work in the notorious film Fatal Attraction. Nonetheless, I was bowled over by the film, indeed I loved it. It addressed me as a feminist in its construction of sexual harassment as about power, in its sympathetic portrayals of a number of women, who were numerous enough to be victims and heroes and villains and just cast, and in its amazing gender reversal in which Douglas' authority to voice his sexual experience is questioned in double bind terms. One could read it as feminist, as I pleasurably experienced it on that first viewing, but even then I could see how one could also read it as anti-feminist, simultaneously and multiply. Each audience watching the same set of images on the screen was given simultaneously parallel or alternate or complex characters and words and elements of plot that together could produce a consistent narrative supporting very divergent political locations. I was stunned by the film and by its complex address of multiple audiences, but it was to be only the first one like this I came across. Indeed, such audience polyphony is more and more common in commercial narratives today, from ads to film dramas to TV comedies to genre literature and so on.
The term "niche markets" is usually used to describe commercial products made for specific local audiences, like rainbow jewelry for gay folks. But what we see in the film Disclosure and in the TV show Xena is something similar but also taken to the next level of complexity in layers of locals and globals: a single global product intended for a contradictory nest of niche markets, some of whom may derive their cultural pleasures from this very "contradictory nesting." Despite the common wisdom of Hollywood that valorizes the simplicity of genre formula as globally attractive, this complexity of address may also be attractive to specific audiences. Indeed such complexity of address may be the form of "consciousness" cultivated by such cultural products, a consciousness appropriate in a globalized world not only of world-wide divisions of labor and production, but also of migrating populations, of cultural mixings in a range of media, of newly invented traditionalisms, such as religious fundamentalism and ethnic identities, and of sexual and family arrangements altered by the shape of global capitalism. Individual producers and advertisers are not in control of, indeed barely grasp, the commercial implications of these tastes and forms of consciousness. Nor do cultural critics know what they will come to mean in the future, what their political effects will be however much we might suspect terrors, or however much we might long for possibilities.
As I suggested, some of the effects of global production itself are pleasurable: the backdrops of New Zealand and Kiwi slang enlivening the other anachronistic postmodernisms of Xena's appropriations of many cultures' mythologies and histories. Global production itself becomes a spectacle bundled with the TV show. Actors as "stars" have always been part of this bundled package sold along with the film or TV product, and "behind the scenes" elements of production that exploit the actors further have long been the stuff of fan interest. But today there exists an intensified interest that is also focused on box office sales, the buying and selling of multinational corporations and stories about their owners and CEOs, the quoting of producers and writers about their intentions with the product, speculations about the political effects of the contents of stories, and so on; all these are now "bundled" with the product as items to be sold, in TV venues likeEntertainment Tonight or supermarket magazines like Entertainment Weekly. Some such concerns were narrowly professional ones in the past, of importance largely to folks in the industry and not as consistently commodified and sold as they are today. And the fact that multinationals now encompass many forms of media makes for multiple Xena products: tie-in novels and paraphernalia like dolls, calendars, CDs, screensavers, and t-shirts, and alternate venues like web sites and conventions, and coffee table and companion documentary books telling the stories of production, listing episodes and their writers, and offering critical discussions, from fans, from journalists, and from academics. One might call such a proliferation of commercial products, especially those with an emphasis on the pleasures of commercial production itself "commercially exuberant."
Female friendship is the most valued theme in the TV show Xena, and is visually complicated and narratively explored in most episodes. Ways of expressing female friendship, love and the possibilities of sexuality among women are parallel threads of imagery, narrative, symbolism and humor, even while both Xena and her female companion Gabrielle have explicit male lovers in various episodes. Audience polyphony allows for those multiple interpretations of specific moments in pivotal episodes, as in "The Sapphic Subtext" mentioned before. "Commercial exuberance" allows fans who explicitly see audience polyphony in production intentions, to be empowered to argue for their audience interests with producers and writers, in web venues they all share. From the XenaVerse some argued with writers and producers to make "the subtext" more explicit. In the episode which follows "Destiny," called "The Quest," Xena and Gabrielle share a much hyped kiss, but one which simultaneously melds both the image of Xena and Gabrielle kissing and the image of Gabrielle and the man in whose body Xena's spirit has been sheltered, kissing. We see both possibilities on the TV screen, in swift parallel. Notice how this shapes new "bisexualities," and alters ways of "reading" the TV screen, now assimilated to a computer screen (where fans may play this shift over and over again.)
My favorite episode of Xena is elaborately allusive, even back to this episode internally. Some of the most complexly edited episodes of Xena are what are called "bottle episodes." Bottle episodes are created out of clips of previous shows, and originally intended to conserve production time and thus costs. Xena is now famous for its bottle episodes and for using this highly allusive episode form even in more expensive production intentions. My favorite episode is entitled "The Bitter Suite." The trailer for this episode calls it "the most talked about episode of the season....an all musical adventure." And indeed many musical genres, most with TV versions, are sewn together and parodied in this show. Musically alluded to are both specific productions and generic forms; for example, there are several specific allusions to the Judy Garland film version of The Wizard of Oz, while there are also more general allusions to Gilbert and Sullivan, to nursery rhyme songs, to Broadway musicals, to classic films in the Ziegfeld Follies tradition, to old episodes of I Love Lucy making fun of operas, to country music, and so on. In addition there are striking visual allusions to productions of Wagner's Ring cycle, to Busby Berkeley movies and to Las Vegas show productions.
Xena's recurrent enemy Callisto is both a figure and narrator in the complex dreamy Tarot game show structure of the episode, which is both very funny and surprisingly poignant and touching. A climax episode in a long story-arc, Xena and Gabrielle have become enemies in the course of Callisto's manipulations. Each one has had a child, and Callisto has manipulated their children's deaths in such a way that each is in some way responsible for the death of the other's child. In the previous episode Xena and Gabrielle's friendship and love has become murderous hatred, hatred which is reviewed at the beginning of this one when Xena brutally attempts to kill Gabrielle. Both plunge into a waterfall and the swirling visuals suggest naked bodies undulating in the waters. Xena is awakened by Callisto's kiss, which recalls the moment of her climatic kiss with Gabrielle in the past. Callisto's mocking voiceover ironizes both kiss and episode title when she sings, "You taste it, how evil and good coexist; the Bitter and Sweet of it, all on the lips that you kissed." The episode elaborates upon Xena and Gabrielle's painful reconciliation, on memory, betrayal and forgiveness in friendship and friendship's alterations of the self. Multiple ironies make it possible to interpret the episode emotionally, pop-psychologically, humorously, politically, mockingly, or in recombinant variations on all of these. The emotional climax fades to a final scene of Xena and Gabrielle lying in each other's arms, engulfed by waves on a beach, in a momentary allusion to the famous erotic cinematic moment in the film From Here to Eternity--an allusion which is immediately defused by Xena and Gabrielle leaning back into the sand in hilarious laughter. Journalist interviews of actors, writers and producers always emphasize this comic element of the shows and paint a picture of a production company having a great time making fun of it all. This "commercial exuberance" might be understood as the keynote of Xena, bundled together with its varying products, always creating and coloring its "Xena feminism."
How can we begin to recognize in globalization processes themselves and in our inextricably implicated analyses of them, new methods coming-into-being? What are their political potentials?Think again of the kind of consciousness cultivated by such global products, created out of commercial intentions but also out of conditions of global production, which create new skills out of such altering pleasures and tastes. I call ideologically shaped allusions to the conditions of production-distribution-consumption in their overlayerings, the "spectacle of production." Such global products bundled with this "spectacle of production" are able to engage world historical subjects now properly addressed in complex layerings of locals and globals. This in a globalized world not only of world-wide divisions of labor and production, but also of migrating populations, cultural mixings, newly invented traditionalisms, and of proliferating forms of sexuality and family arrangements, all altered by the shape of global capitalism. The forms of feminism created in layers of locals and globals are structural as well as intentional, are necessarily extraordinarily various when properly international, and their political futures are yet to be actualized. I take seriously the implication that it is within globalization processes themselves and our intra-action with them, as them, out of which we must wring liberatory possibility. How do we recognize the areas of fruitful possibility, even as we clearly analyze the very circumstances of heightened oppression they also implicate? I locate the forms of consciousness I have traced throughout my analysis of the multiple writing technology ecologies of the global TV shows Highlander and Xena as one possibly fruitful site for understanding who we are becoming, what we can make of ourselves and the ecologies of which we are a part--that is to say, our actual conditions of agency, as well as how we intervene into globalization processes for social justice projects. Critique is crucial but far from sufficient here. What forms of engagement with and beyond critique do we need? How does the notion of "layers of locals and globals" help?
I compare the intra-action between these global products and their bundled spectacle of production to two other complexly layered explanatory systems which I understand particularly in their positive political manifestations. In other words, they too embody complex mixtures never wholly liberatory, and although engaged in locally specific arguments--historically, geopolitically--are always striving for some forms of analysis simultaneously in layers of globals. First to early cyberneticist Gregory Bateson's formalizations of "meta-communication" and of the epistemology of a cybernetic system. He asks, where does the blind man's "self" begin? at his fingertips, or at the end of his stick? "These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a limiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man's locomotion." [The problem with] "[p]urposive consciousness [is that it] pulls out, from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole systemic structure." Later, in considering histories under globalization processes, I will again refer to Haraway's invocation of the metaphor of diffraction: "I'm interested in the way diffraction patterns record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference...what you get is not a reflection; it's the record of a passage....As a metaphor it drops the metaphysics of identity and the metaphysics of representation and says optics is full of a whole other potent way of thinking about light, which is about history."
I first started thinking about what I now call "layers of locals and globals" when I was an undergraduate student studying cybernetics and communication with Gregory Bateson in the early 70s. Bateson was a model of an eclectic scholar, not simply interdisciplinary, but what one might have to call "meta-disciplinary." While he valued the knowledges of specialists and was humble about his own broadly engaged researches, disciplines were not turf to him, the point of gate keeping was entry facilitation, not border checkpoints. He worked promiscuously with many worldly objects, or subject matter phenomenal and mental (the terms he might have used), and employed always together a range of rhetorics of formalization and of analytic methods, in a synthetic, explanatory practice. As he clarifies in Naven, he was scrupulously self-conscious about the "levels" of abstraction he worked upon: in layers ("types") from ethnographic data, to tentative arrangements of this data, to the explicit description and analysis of the procedures that make such orderings possible and meaningful. Rigor had more to do for him with this explication of "orders," "types," "levels" than with commitment to local disciplinary world views. He assumed the possibility and value of "general theory" at high levels of abstraction to illuminate non-trivial patterns across disciplinary forms and objects of analysis. His experiences across disciplines only worked to confirm such values: "general systems theory" was practical not only in his discipline of origin, anthropology, but in other disciplines of practice, such as psychiatry and ethology. "Learning to learn" (deutero-learning or meta-learning) was less professionally specific (about membership) and more about that very ability to move from one "set of alternatives from which choice is made" to another; here, to move from one context of objects and methods (disciplines) across others meaningfully. Far from devaluing the local however, this meta-disciplinary analytic centered "context." Such locals could never be taken for granted: they were layered, they were organized in patterns, they were changing, dynamic and interconnected in sub- and meta-systems. These dynamic patternings and worldly intra-actions among beings, people and other organisms, species, things, processes, events, in their variety of reifications, deconstructions, diffractions, time- and scale-making are what I refer to with the term "ecologies" as I use the notion of "layers of locals and globals," always inspired by Bateson's collected writings in Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Bateson's work was also messily political; he worked with the OSS during WWII, served on the UC Board of Regents during Jerry Brown's governorship of California, and spoke in different venues on many public and political topics--among them the arms race, ecological destruction, and the teaching of evolution in public schools--all of which he related to his epistemological concerns and research. For example, with such public (all male) figures of the time period as counter-culture psychologist R. D. Laing, black power activist Stokely Carmichael, socialist theorist Herbert Marcuse, gay poet and guru Allen Ginsberg, culture worker Paul Goodman, and anti-war activist and Vietnamese Zen priest Thich Nhat Hanh, he spoke on "Conscious Purpose versus Nature" at the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, London, July 1967. There he argued for a politics that was not narrowly instrumental, or even entirely self-conscious; rather he contended that an ecologically astute political epistemology had to knowledge the limits of "conscious purpose" in favor of the wisdom of entire systems in intricate interconnection, close I think to Barad's "intra-action" in Haraway's "worldly" politics. He argued that such an epistemology would require a reconceptualization and remaking of human "selves" as we understand them now, not bounded at the skin as if such limited selves were the proper "units" of survival, of evolution, of social change. He made it clear that he was not himself an example of someone yet able to think, act and be human in this way, but that historical, ecological and cognitive changes--what he called elsewhere "the cybernetic breakthrough"--all required such a reimagination of the human. Such changes also made these reimaginations of the human possible but not inevitable.
Bateson posited what he called "levels of learning," each in "meta" relationship to the one before." Such levels of learning were profoundly implicated in notions of the "self": "If I stop at the level of Learning II, 'I' am the aggregate of those characteristics which I call my 'character.' 'I' am my habits of acting in context and shaping and perceiving the contexts in which I act. Selfhood is a product or aggregate of Learning II. To the degree that a man achieves Learning III, and learns to perceive and act in terms of the contexts of contexts, his 'self' will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of 'self' will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctuation of experience." While he warned of the dangers that such remaking of selves entails, he also linked such Learning III to creativity and process, to ecological flexibilities among beings and environments. He also understood that something was missing from this analysis of levels: it was not able to capture how the relationships among the levels were patterned and those patterns learned. In her new book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles positions Bateson in an epistemological history of the cultural possibilities of the "posthuman." I cannot imagine Bateson being comfortable with the term "posthuman" although I can see how Hayles has captured in her history much of the visionary element of his research and analysis. I would imagine instead his being more comfortable with the rubric in which we "had never been 'selves'" in Latour's sense, which I think his blind man story implies; suggesting that these remakings of selves have always been possibilities for humans, if understandably costly and infrequent. Urgently today however, he understood them as the very human resources upon which planetary survival depends. Such apocalyptic urgencies actualized his sense of responsibility in their descriptive fusion of cold war schismogenesis and destructive ecological losses.
I understand Chela Sandoval's notion of differential consciousness to address some of these same issues, in an entirely different register of discourse and analysis. Sandoval's metaphor of the "differential"--the set of gears in, say, a car, that allows its wheels to be interconnected via the drive shaft but still free to revolve at different speeds--is used to figure the "meta" relationship that preserves dynamic intra-actions at all levels and simultaneously between levels. Sandoval specifies: "This method asks practitioners to collectively and strategically distinguish, evaluate, and select tactics, among which may include integrationism, revolutionary action, supremacism, separatism, anarchism, political defense or redefinition of the human, or complete defiance of that category. However different, each tactic is strategically accomplished in order to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers through identifying 'situated knowledges' that can understand and match globalizing psychic, cultural, and national sites. This methodology of emancipation functions as a place-based ecological activism--it works through self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies." [my emphasis points out a version here of "layers of locals and globals"] I compare this to Bateson's understanding of Level III learning, which is "a corrective change in the system of sets of alternatives from which choice is made, or...a change in how the sequence of experience is punctuated. (...to demand this level of performance of some men and some mammals is sometimes pathogenic.)"
Sandoval envisions "an apparatus comprised of five different applications, or technologies. These technologies connect and transmit through on another until they are recognizable as a singular method. This method provides cognitive and emotional maps necessary for guiding internal and collective action. Briefly put, the five technologies of this method are: (1) reading power as in radical semiotics, la facultad, or 'signifyin'; (2) deconstruction, or coatlicue; (3) meta-ideologizing; (4) differential perception, or nepantla; and (5) democratics, the ethical or moral technology that permits the previous four to be driven, mobilized, and organized into a singular methodology for emancipation." These are the 'situated knowledges' that Sandoval is describing, and which elsewhere she says are the evidences and tools literally of "survival." Bateson too understood survival as exactly the issue in question, and that what he called "this level of performance" may be demanded but not survived, may be survived but crippling, or may result in changes of great creativity and alterations of personal, social and planetary life.
"There has been an upheaval under neocolonializing postmodernism that has transferred a potentially revolutionary apparatus into the body of every citizen-subject, regardless of social caste. As previously legitimated centers unravel from within, cityscapes degenerate, consciousness and identity splinter, the revolutionary subject who rises from the rubble is mutant: citizen-subject of a new, postmodern colonialism--and de-colonialisms--active all at once....the first world is undergoing a democratization of oppression that none can escape." Here Sandoval understands globalization processes and their "democratization of oppression" to be the nearly unbearable conditions that require humans to ripen and use their differential consciousness to survive, if they survive. Although Bateson thought instead in terms of the interconnected social crises of arms races and ecological destruction, large imminent social pathologies as he understood them in the 60s, they surely figure in and are elements in the larger systems of globalization we today attempt to encounter as progressive activists, enacting "globalization from below." Sandoval assumes we already live in and survive, if differentially, apocalypse, now become plural, verbal, processual. A realized millennium in which eschatology is mundane, that is to say, worldly, strangely finite, not absolute, on-going.
As Bateson tried to recognize Level III learning when it appeared, he was drawn to the exemplars of extraordinary creative moments in human lives and also to the practices of Zen Buddhism, both of which he understood to literally remake the selves of the humans who thoroughly engaged them. Punctuated moments of psychological insight, creative illumination, satori were examples that he re/cognized, that is re-thought, without romanticizing and without emulating. Toward the end of his life Bateson moved into communities of practice that promised to connect with different ranges of these alterations of selves, examining what these communities appeared to offer: living at Esalen and working with psychologists there and with those drawn to the human potential movement, supporting the work of the Mount Madonna Center in Watsonville, California, which brought together both insights of the human potential movement and also those of the spiritual practices of India, teaching at various venues of seekers, political and spiritual, among them the Tibetan Buddhist center Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, and engagement with and finally actually dying at the Zen Center in San Francisco. Zen meditation, for example, offered one avenue through which everyday people might learn to perform at these levels otherwise quite dangerous, without having to enter into them via psychosis. Nevertheless Bateson was not a Buddhist nor a practitioner of meditation, although always a meditator. He was a theorist and scientist whose immersion in formalizations was in itself a meditation, a giving over to mindful experience as layered in locals and globals.
Here I use a story by Donna Haraway to capture both her understanding of worldly processes and otherworldly conversations as well as to shadow what I imagine Bateson to have been indicating too, while offering another sort of example of "layers of locals and globals." Haraway's graduate mentor became Evelyn Hutchinson, a contemporary of Bateson's and even a sometime collaborator. Haraway's "bag-lady practice of storytelling" here makes allusions both unavailable and inappropriate to Bateson's own powerful forms of story-telling, yet the semi-conscious, mindful experiences she describes I believe would have been very much like those Bateson labored to ripen. "...once upon a time, early in graduate school in biology in the mid-1960s, I was tremendously moved, intellectually and emotionally, by an ordinary lecture on the enzymes of the electron transport system (ETS).....Using new techniques, the process was being studied experimentally in vitro in structural-functional complexes of membrane sub-units prepared from the cellular organelles, called mitochondria....The result was a stunning narrative and visual imagery of structural-functional complexity of the type that has always made biology, including molecular biology, a beautiful science for me....After the lecture, on a walk around town, I felt a surging high. Trees, weeds, dogs, invisible gut parasites, people--we all seemed bound together in the ultra-structural tissues of our being. Far from feeling alienated by the reductionistic techniques of cell biology, I realized to my partial embarrassment, but mainly pleasure, that I was responding erotically to the connections made possible by the knowledge-making practices, and their constitutive narratives, of techno-science. So, who is surprised: when were love and knowledge not co-constitutive? I refused, then and now, to dismiss the specific pleasure experienced on that walk as epistemological sado-masochism, rotted in alienation and objectifying scientific reductionism or in ignorant denial of the terrible histories of domination built into what we politely call 'modern science.' I was not experiencing a moment of romantic postmodern rapture in the techno-sublime. Machine, organism and human embodiment all were articulated--brought into a particular co-constitutive relationship--in complex ways that forced me to recognize a historically specific, conjoined discipline of love, power and knowledge. Through its enabling constraints, that is, through lab practice in cell biology, this discipline was making possible--unequally--particular kinds of subjectivity and systematic artefactual embodiments, for which people in my worlds had to be responsible....this knowing love took shape in quite particular, historical-social intercourse, or 'conversation', among machines, people, other organisms and parts of organisms."
Notice how both similar and different Bateson's attempts at recognition and learning are from those of Haraway and Sandoval. Bateson was Sandoval's professor in the History of Consciousness in 1975, when, together with Herbert Marcuse, he co-taught the introductory course to her entering class. Haraway is one of her History of Consciousness teachers Sandoval indexes as a de-colonial theorist. Sandoval would not reject any of these Bateson examples as possibilities for learning oppositional consciousness, but rather than assuming the very individual conscious agency that Bateson himself understood as too limited (and which he unconsciously figures over and over as "a man"), she claims that the "democratization of oppression" is the condition under which all are made to "perform at these levels," to learn what she terms "survival skills." This "potentially revolutionary apparatus" is already transferred into our bodies as we intra-act with worldly processes as surviving citizen-subjects under globalization. Not in control, our work is not limited to "conscious purpose," but rather we are agents in layers of locals and globals, in intra-action among changing recombinant sub- and meta-systems which we understand only partially. Whether seeking satori or not, to survive we, only partially consciously, identify, index, sort and engage our and others' "'situated knowledges' that can understand and match globalizing psychic, cultural, and national sites."
As Sandoval has always claimed, these insights are the work of U.S. Third World Feminists among others, and the new book this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation, to which Sandoval's essay is one introduction, maps such geographies of influence, activisms, theorization, practice, creativity, passionate politics. It offers examples of such "situated knowledges" and of the political and spiritual quests, actions and visions they generate. Hayles, in a very different feminist register, argues for the "posthuman" (one of the political tactics Sandoval indexes as well) by deconstructing the anxieties of control in some understandings of agency: "Such an argument assumes a vision of the human in which conscious agency is the essence of human identity....In the posthuman view, by contrast, conscious agency has never been 'in control.' In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted....In this account, emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate and control nature. Of course, this is not necessarily what the posthuman will mean--only what it can mean...." "Posthuman" here is an explication of, a critique of and an alternative to foundational enlightenment humanisms and especially instrumental individualism: we have never been such humans.
To what use can we put the notion and practices of distributed systems in layers of locals and globals, recognizing their implication in globalization processes, working to engage any political possibilities?
Hayles continues: "No longer is human will seen as the source from which emanates the mastery to dominate and control the environment. Rather the distributed cognition of the emergent human subject correlates with--in [Mary Catherine] Bateson's phrase, becomes a metaphor for--the distributed cognitive system as a whole, in which 'thinking' is done by both human and nonhuman actors.... To conceptualize the human in these terms is not to imperil human survival but is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system.... when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to depend on the splice rather than being imperiled by it....The chaotic, unpredictable nature of complex dynamics implies that subjectivity is emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in consciousness, emerging from and integrated into a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it." [My emphasis] What is this notion of "distribution" that Hayles relies on here to counter the foundational humanisms of selves bounded by the skin, human agency essentialized as conscious instrumental individualism? Let us for the moment shift to thinking about distribution in terms of electronic spaces.
Arguing and/or critiquing early utopianisms of internet decentralization and its relation to globalization has been a pivotal task of scholarship on the structure, history, community, and regulation of the internet. The materialities of the internet function as both reality and metaphor of globalization processes, are embedded within them but are exceeded by them as Saskia Sassen urgently argues: "...we need to re-theorize electronic space and uncouple it analytically from the properties of the Internet which have shaped our thinking about electronic space. We tend to think of this space as one that is characterized by distributed power, by the absence of hierarchy. The Internet is probably the best known and most noted electronic space. Its particular attributes have engendered the notion of distributed power: decentralization, openness, possibility of expansion, no hierarchy, no center, no conditions for authoritarian or monopoly control." But, whatever the political possibilities of such "distributed power" (fruitful but contested; indeed not innocent, rather, complexly embodied in ways that cry out for political differentiation), Sassen makes it clear that for both the internet and other electronic spaces--especially those of global financial markets--processes of decentralization are bought at the cost of the new sites of centralization and concentration that service them. (For the internet, think ICANN; for the financial markets, think global cities.)
Sassen offers as reality and metaphor of these public goods servicing the corporate sector the building of private corporate intranets upon the base of a publicly funded internet. Such private corporate intranets in their firewalled isolation exemplify "the private appropriation of a public good to raise a firm's profits" as the web becomes more and more a vehicle for business interests. "[F]irms can use the Web to do what [previously corporate funded commercial] systems do at almost no cost and with little need for expert staffing. Firms can save enormous amounts of money by using the Web for their own internal corporate purposes." Thus the "public goods" of electronic spaces--their infrastructures financed by public moneys and their content often created with the "free" labor of civil society actors (for example, fans creating web pages on the internet, or many of the authors/workers reflected in the internet RFCs)--are increasingly at the service of global markets, such as those of the financial and multimedia industries. At the same time however, because "suddenly the two major actors in electronic space--the corporate sector and civil society--which until recently had little to do with one another in electronic space, are running into each other"; electronic space also "has further raised the importance of civil society as a site where a multiplicity of public interests can, wittingly or not, resist the overwhelming influence of the new corporate global actors. Civil society, from individuals to nongovernmental organizations, has engaged in a very energetic use of cyberspace from the bottom up."
In other words, distribution of and within various systems is not innocent, is not in itself liberatory. But it is one of the indexes that identify fruitful sites of and for political epistemologies of struggle (indeed, this is one of the arguments, if stated in rather different language, of Hayles' book). Sassen's comment here assumes that "civil society" and "the corporate sector" are alternate if increasingly overlapping areas (ie. "running into each other"). To what degree one can posit a "civil society" that is actually, even partially, "outside" transnational capital today is a large question with important implications for "globalization from below." Nevertheless, the realities and metaphors of distributed power energize activist efforts: "Sovereignty is being redefined not as the absolute right of states, but rather as a right of peoples at multiple levels. For example, a post-Seattle statement...called for 'the sovereignty of peoples and national and subnational democratic decision-making processes.' Such a usage redefines sovereignty as a relative rather than an absolute authority....In a global economy, international coordination and institutions are at times necessary to make it possible for local and national governments to effectively meet their obligations to their own people and exercise the rights to do so. Thus, the redefinition of the rights of states as rooted in their responsibilities leads back to and reinforces the concept of a multilevel world order....In reality, however, states are largely and increasingly subject to corruption and coercion by global corporations, so that they represent the latter far more than their own people....These concepts legitimate a withdrawal of consent of the kind that...provides the underlying power of social movements."
The multileveled processes of globalization in layers of locals and globals, relative and relational, dynamically both distributed and centralized are analyzed as financial networks by Sassen, but could also, she says, be analyzed as other similarly structured networks with different political valences: "illegal trafficking networks in people, drugs, stolen goods; immigrant personal and business networks; art biennales; the art market; tourism patterns (for instance, stops for major cruise lines); and activists' networks, from environmentalists and human rights efforts to poor people's advocacy organizations." Angela Stach, feminist sociological theorist examining the transnational activist networks that address genetically modified organisms (GMOs), describes her work: "The guiding hypothesis is that the 'politics of engagement' is principally based on centralized and formalized forms of decision-making and institutional advocacy, while the 'politics of resistance' is organized around decentralized and informal procedures for organizing joint actions and circulating information. Within each network, however, this modal form of network political practice shifts in response to extraordinary challenges. Such shifts are accompanied by shifts in the language used to describe GMOs, indicating the crucial role of discursive practices in the operation of transnational civil society networks. Such shifting practices of engagement and resistance, linked through a differential use of various local-global discourses, point to an emerging global social order as a system based on multi-layered relations between heterogeneous units, similar to the relationships that characterize ecosystems."
We might think of distributed cognition (Hayles) and distributed power (Becker) as metaphors and realities of political epistemologies under globalization, as the shifting practices and agencies (not all human, not all reified) relative and relational to other practices of centralization and convergence (Sassen and Stach), yet able to be engaged through Sandoval's differential movement imagined both inside and outside of a transforming transnational identity politics exemplified in the new anthology this bridge we call home (Anzaldúa). Anzaldúa begins the ending of her collection with what she calls an offering, telling a story of walking across Lighthouse Field in Santa Cruz, California, one place Bateson, Haraway, Sandoval, Anzaldúa (and myself) have in common. (As Haraway calls it, a "commonplace.") "As you walk across Lighthouse Field a glistening black ribbon undulates in the grass, crossing your path from right to left. You swallow air, your primal senses flare open. From the middle of your forehead, a reptilian eye blinks, surveys the terrain. This visual intuitive sense, like the intellect of heart and gut, reveals a discourse of signs, images, feelings, words that, once decoded, carry the power to startle you out of tunnel vision and habitual patterns of thought. The snake is a symbol of awakening consciousness--the potential of knowing within, an awareness and intelligence not grasped by logical thought. Often nature provokes an 'aja,' or 'conocimiento,' one that guides your feet along the path, give you el ánimo to dedicate yourself to transforming perceptions of reality, and thus the conditions of life. Llevas la presencia de éste conocimiento contigo. You experience nature as ensouled, as sacred. Éste saber, this knowledge, urges you to cast una ofrenda of images and words across the page como granos de maíz, like kernals of corn. By redeeming your most painful experiences you transform them into something valuable, algo para compartir or share with others so they too may be empowered. You stop in the middle of the field and, under your breath, ask the spirits--animals, plant, y tus muertos--to help you string together a bridge of words. What follows is your attempt to give back to nature, los espíritus, and others a gift wrested from the events in your life, a bridge home to the self."
WHAT SORT OF TRANSITION HERE?
(this bridge we call home: distributed identities?)
smart mobs and perpetual contact?
DDOD attacks
HOW TO USE SMART MOBS? how to illustrate convergence? created today at points of convergence: reifications of social processes. analyze in convergence as dynamic interactions, literal and processual. smart mobs as problematic ecologies.
converging writing technologies in ecological intra-action beyond divisions between oralities and literacies: texting etc.
the intra-action among and through distributed agencies producing histories under globalization, as well as their converging writing technology ecologies and servicing centralities--the forms of love/knowledge/power that congeal for brief moments, or harden into institutional strengths or rigidities.
layers moved through
not analogous
not mutually exclusive
or located on same level as if mutually exclusive taxonomies
incommensurate
Rhinegold: convergence devices pxix
" They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before." pxviii
pxix: "...the consumers are also the producers of what they consume"What are histories under globalization? How do they matter? How do histories under globalization address conditions of production of both distributed power and cognition as well as centralization and convergence?Recall the reenactment histories of Highlander and the pastiche anachronistic histories of Xena, both structured in flashbacks in the embedded layerings created for early television commercials. They, like other public histories today, are impressed by (stamped by, enlisted into) heritage culture and its appropriations of: national and personal identities, of multiple chronologies in layers of locals and globals, and of converging writing technologies in ecological intra-action beyond divisions between oralities and literacies. And think again of the kind of consciousness cultivated by such global products, created out of commercial intentions but also out of conditions of global production, which draw new skills out of such altering pleasures and tastes. The spectacle of production haunts all these public histories: not just their bundled commodifications but critical analyses of them too. For example, a particularly useful critique of the living history ethos is a chronicle of Colonial Williamsburg by anthropologists Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum. It uses ethnographic participation and observation as well as interview and archival materials to examine and produce what I am calling its spectacle of production. Its many critical pleasures emerge from its debunking narrative of corporate assumptions unintentionally derailing the social justice concerns explicit in the "new social history" espoused by enthusiastic historians turned corporate managers. One of its final footnotes acknowledges that "it would be easy to make the kind of criticism of university professors that we here level at scholars and administrators working in museums." In Academic Capitalism, an examination of universities under globalization and their restructuring today, such connections are only too necessary and too increasingly obvious.
While Handler and Gable's footnote acknowledges the connections, their main text's criticality depends upon implicit and explicit divisions between "the hybrid corporation" that is Colonial Williamsburg and "a serious educational institution." (234) Debunking assists in such purifications. But universities are more and more obviously not immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture. A range of purifications, among them debunking critique, haunts inadequate academic resistances to histories under globalization. Globalization processes create academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible forms of hybrid histories, all shadowed by commodifications of various sorts. Pointing to these contexts I use the term "public histories" very deliberately. As I use the term it describes the intra-action among and through distributed agencies producing histories under globalization, as well as their converging writing technology ecologies and servicing centralities--the forms of love/knowledge/power that congeal for brief moments, or harden into institutional strengths or rigidities. Multimedia sensoria and internet data displays are among the writing technologies exemplifying these processes, as are television documentaries, living history reenactments, historical fictions, museum exhibitions and a range of new (and old) forms of historiography.
The humorous anachronisms of Xena, which presume the "real" chronology against which the humor gestalts (and thus which "presume" either that you knowingly participate in or simply do not care about these layerings of time in locals and globals), and the more earnest enactment historicisms of Highlander, call upon mischievous movements between pasts, presents, futures. Flashbacked continuities and discontinuities across time and space are registered in joking ruptures, and also in appeals to human nature and sexuality and assumptions about a range of also connected presumed universals, especially human emotions and empathetic engagement. Such richly contaminated hybridities cannot be properly answered by appeals to the purifying critiques of "presentism" that haunt today's history classrooms and association speeches; political refutations of or support for social justice movements; and epistemologically, professionally and commercially embattled disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites for knowledge production; ie, the "culture wars," the "science wars," the "history wars." A moment's ironic reflection suggests that the critique of "presentism" is itself presentist: that is to say, it overvalues historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production. It may take the purifications of Rankian historiography as the truth about history. It may belabor its own understandable frustrations with instrumental and commodified uses of the past for transparent contemporary political ends. It may seek to preserve the Otherness of the past at the unacknowledged expense of many times and cultures whose own stories valued quite Other forms of history and meaning. It may buy this irreducible (and ironically singular and abstract) historical alterity with the coin of these innumerable ways to make, mean, value, and tell histories. Histories under globalization so jumble up in time and space such story-telling processes that Rankian purifications are literally impossible. And perhaps one could also say, we have never been such historians. Beyond a too simple critique of "presentism," we might work also to make clear not just these conditions of historical production, dissemination and reception (ie. "the spectacle of production") but their very dynamic ecological layerings of locals and globals; that is to say, their distributed agencies and their converging centralities in intra-action under globalization.
Histories under globalization are both bundled with the spectacle of production and also dynamically moving between and among pasts, presents, futures in problematic, richly contaminated and highly commercial intra-actions with which together we are agents in wringing liberatory possibility out of "democratizing" oppressions. Engaging us in historically specific and culturally significant ways, they move among writing technologies, converging and distributed, and these agencies. I intend to examine and contextualize a range of examples, beginning with ancient social and economic historian Keith Hopkins' experimental history A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire. "This book is an experiment in how to write religious history. It started with a research project on early Christianity at King's College, Cambridge, comprising five scholars of different nationalities, religious outlooks and academic specialisms....Unsuprisingly, seen in retrospect, we couldn't work together. We disagreed about almost everything, although (as we now claim) we all learnt a huge amount from each other....The structure of the book is like a triple helix of multi-coloured and interwoven strands. The three major strands, Judaism, paganism and Christianity, were each in themselves diverse, complex and changing. They continually interacted, both inside themselves and with their own variants, and externally with each other....[T]o re-experience the thoughts, feelings, practices and images of religious life in the Roman empire, in which orthodox Christianity emerged in all its vibrant variety, we have to combine ancient perceptions, however partial, with modern understandings, however misleading. That is the tension and excitement of recreating and reading a history of a vanished world, which was once full of harsh realities, dreams, demons and gods." [Emphasis mine.]
This "triple helix" names a pivotal set of material realities and metaphors of globalization processes in dynamic intra-action. Here it is used to enlist and imagine a range of sensations, not only the visual ones, all necessarily vigorously mobile to figure intra-actions among pasts, Jewish, pagan, Christian. This metaphor and reality associates itself with its spectacle of production: I am reminded by it of Etzkowitz' and Leydesdorff's edited collection entitled Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. The failed collaboration that begins Hopkins' book calls to mind both the opportunities and new industrialized requirements of, say, humanities scholars, now enlisted to work in teams in the styles of corporate industrial science. Fruitful and failed collaborations both figure in Hopkins' history, reminiscent of the epistemological consequences Suchman discusses when knowledge production is conflated with creating "products": "we came to see that the problem lay neither in ourselves nor in our colleagues, but in the division of professional labor and the assumptions about knowledge production that lay behind it. The discontinuities across our intellectual and professional traditions and associated discursive practices meant that we could not simply produce 'results' that could be handed off to our colleagues." To be fruitful Suchman's Xerox PARC industry collaborations require "new working relations." Such new working relations could open up collaborative possibilities, although similarly failed collaborations might signal healthy and vigorous diversity among scholars in terms of politics, training, specialization and reasons for synthesis.
"Academic capitalism" in the U.K., Australia, the U.S. and Canada according to Slaughter and Leslie, is the result of the emergence of global markets. "National competition for global market shares increased...[which] interacted with national and state/provincial spending priorities....In all four countries the block grant as a source of funding for higher education diminished as a share of higher education revenues, with the result that faculty and institutions began to compete or increased their competition for external funds. / We called institutional and professorial market or marketlike efforts to secure external funds academic capitalism....Although faculty in all fields can engage in academic capitalism, fields and academic disciplines best suited for academic capitalism are more likely to receive greater government funding and be better positioned to win business and industry funds as well....Competition for resources requires that [unit members] collaborate with each other." Fields "close to the market" require products; fields "peripheral to the market" are pushed to pedagogy and public service. All humanities fields are challenged to create their own entrepreneurial prospects, although how is very much up for grabs and an occasion both for recasting the fundamentals of research and for elaborate public relations "advertisements." At the very least, audiences for scholarship and markets for research products are increasingly conflated: what makes scholarship valuable, meaningful, worth buying and worth caring about to more and different folks? Impulses to democratize knowledge and to commodify it are sometimes virtually indistinguishable. As departments are required to pay for their own costs and sometimes salaries and to take on more and more formerly administrative responsibilities, central administrators become more powerful managers. Decentralization (eg. devolution of budgets) requires centralized servicing of distributed actors: more part-timers teaching, researchers hired on rolling contracts, content providers for classrooms and publications in various media. What kinds of new working relations can we wring out of these conditions of knowledge production, indeed to challenge and resist them with imaginative and lively activisms, globalizations from below?
Hopkins' book is not intended as a commentary on globalization processes or academic capitalism. But in intra-action with many locals and globals interconnected in sub- and meta-systems, it draws attention over and over to "context" in Bateson's sense of the term and to ecologies of writing technologies. Especially lively and complicated is the second chapter, "Jews and Christians, or How the Dead Sea Scrolls were found and lost (narrative and drama in three scenes about Jews, Christians, history and us)": "...how to evoke the flavour of an obsessional sect of fervently committed Jews from Qumran, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947....the Dead Sea Scrolls are repetitive and difficult to understand. So here I try to capture both the intensity of their religious passion and the difficulty of reporting it now, by using a quintessentially modern idiom, a TV drama, in which all that we see/read is mediated by a simplifying process, of (mis)interpretation. This TV play is set partly in ancient Rome, partly in the modern world. The Qumran myth is replayed, as all old myths should be, with ancient and modern players, and with authentic words. But in the modern medium, much is also changed; there are, for example, slippages of time and character. That too is unlikely to please my critical colleagues. So they too are given a voice, though only after the show is over. For me, the hero of this play is the TV camera itself, which, like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands."
Just as in the first section of this book I used TV as my exemplar of technologies, especially to counter inappropriate intuitions about writing technologies in particular; so Hopkins mobilizes the TV camera to illustrate history-making and to counter inappropriate intuitions about the meaning of (written) sources in historiography. Illustration by way of TV drama and documentary is a richly contaminated set of metaphors and realities. When unable to produce commercial products from research, humanities scholars today are encouraged and flattered into democratizing/commodifying their research in a range of public pedagogies and services. These are "real" democratizations often highly commercialized: "mediated by a simplifying process, of (mis)interpretation," but not unlike in kind (perhaps in degree) all the mediated work of scholarly interpretation for various audiences in classrooms, lecture halls and publications. In an essay written for history scholars and the Culture Watch column of the online History News Network Ronald Blumer of Middlemarch Films (the series writer for the PBS Benjamin Franklin mini-series, aired in 2002) assures readers: "I have worked, in one capacity or another, on twenty-five television documentaries having historical subjects. I worked on Bill Moyers's series, 'A Walk Through the 20th Century' and the PBS series on Lyndon B. Johnson. I have written a film in the PBS series 'The American Experience' on the Crash of 1929; I have written and co-produced a series on the history of American Photography, a program on the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and the PBS series 'Liberty! The American Revolution.' And I have just completed another PBS mini-series on Benjamin Franklin. / Who needs historians on TV? I certainly do."
TV and film production can be taken as exemplary illustrations of distributed agencies of commercial production-distribution-consumption and of their unstable, distributed or nonexistent author-functions. One shocking reality for scholars involved in forms of production with such layered and distributed agencies is how little impression their particular contribution may make in the overall event/product itself, as well as how decontextualized or recontextualized its appropriation may be. And then again TV becomes one material reality of as well as metaphor for scholarly labor itself in academic capitalism, the distributed and commercial production agencies of which are more and more uncomfortably visible today, belying stereotypes of solitary, disinterested practice. Within Hopkins' screenplay about the making of a TV documentary in chapter two, the coordinator of programmes finally wants to junk the documentary "Dialogues with the Dead" because it does not fit her ideas about what Christianity must have been like in the past, how it should evolve into her own form of Christianity today as its essential truth. She both enlists and misinterprets her "trusted academic specialists" to support her argument to the financial controller of the channel, who, disregarding her advice for reasons largely of finance and prestige, intends not only to air the programme, but even to have a sequel made. Thus Hopkins' fiction playfully exposes level after level in which the varying instruments of arbitrary selection never lie and never understand.
In a meta-fictional aside Hopkins jokes about producing chapter two's TV screenplay (about the making of that documentary) as one extramural funding possibility under academic capitalism in the U.K.: "I had hoped to send our two time-travelers, Martha and James, back to Qumran. But my application to the Leverhulme Trust for funding was rejected...I should have kept my nose clean, and not written critical reviews of grandees' books....Apparently, they don't approve of covert research carried out by people in disguise....I persevered. I sent the following sketch to a commercial TV producer interested in religious affairs. In Britain, TV stations have a statutory obligation to produce religious programmes....The words 'Dead Sea Scrolls' (like Alexander the Great, Nero or Napoleon) were enough in themselves to catch his populist eye for that micro-second, before he junked it." In the footnotes we find out that "This modern ending [to the screenplay, revealing what happens to those making the documentary] was devised by Tom Noad who cleverly directed a highly re-edited, live performance of these scenes for the Corpus Christi College Classical Society at Cambridge." The meta-fiction's unsuccessful attempts at TV funding and the screenplay's documentary's successful production for financial reasons, in "real life" deliver lively, democratized pedagogical value at Hopkins' own institution.
[be a little clearer about how such funding concerns converge with product democratizations in both the heritage culture and enterprise culture impressions on academic capitalism. Esp. Xtianity as heritage culture?]One of the fictional academic reports on "Dialogues with the Dead" complains about the anachronistic meeting of two of its ancient characters in the documentary since each of them actually lived in adjacent but different centuries, while yet praising the "wonderful" pictures from the TV camera. (75) Hopkins has the director reply: "I was quite aware that Justin lived later; that's half the fun with mixed-time TV--you can mix times. Besides, it's a bit naive to imagine that getting dates right is a guarantee of correctness. Time is only one dimension of truth." (77) Anachronism, or what Hopkins calls "slippages in time," within the past as well as between "us" and the past, can counter that whiggish desire for tales of progress that wind up with some particular "us" on top. It both mixes up who counts as "us," as well as refuses chronology as essential origin, evolution or fulfillment. "I thought the pictures were wonderful" speaks to the realist pleasures that sources appear to offer, the local details that animate generalizations, the archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy, the transparency of the material limitations of selection. That both globals and locals are brought into being matters.
It is to such counter-intuitive purposes that the crux of this chapter turns on the dual identities of the characters in the chapter's screenplay, those living in and arriving in ancient Rome and those in later post-production labors in our own time. While each is locatable in "their" time with their own histories, they nevertheless have meanings to others in other times. The TV crew turns up at the very moment when Isaac, a now elderly former member of the Qumran community, reluctantly is about to turn over to his Romanized nephew Hilary (the Greek equivalent for Isaac) a carefully cared for Qumran scroll. He prays for a miracle because he does not know how to explain the scroll's importance to his nephew, so culturally and generationally different, who he fears will value it only to sell. Hopkins footnotes: "The arrival of the TV crew is of course the miracle for which Isaac had been praying, but not expecting. It symbolizes the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which more people read or know about now, than ever did in antiquity." (343 n37) But it is Hilary, we discover, who has prearranged this arrival with the TV folks, and who does intend to sell the scroll. The "uses" of history here are alarmingly various in their political, epistemological, commercial, religious and scholarly imports. Nor does history serve only the purposes of the so-called present: also alarmingly the past and present are simultaneous in this screenplay, so intermixed that directions of causation and influence cannot be linear and progressive. Cast members play both a role in the making of the TV documentary and also a role in Isaac's mythology of Qumran, which historians such as Hopkins know about from the Dead Sea Scrolls. "N.B. The dialogue now moves on two interconnected levels, the ancient and the modern. It is a play, but also a replay of the Qumran charter myth, in which the main characters have their mythical doubles. They are both humans and mythical constructs...." (59-60)
Each member of the cast has disparate ideas of what this story/history/mythology is about and for, dispersed across their distributed agencies but converging in and serviced by Hopkins' text. They belong simultaneously in (at least?) two worlds, although none of them knows this about themselves, even in travel. Meanwhile Hopkins' own atheist historicisms consciously skew awareness toward our contemporary moment, about which the Qumran charter myth strangely claims to reveal "the essential truth." This is not relativism but knowledge/power. Everyone's sense of conscious purpose and their understandings of themselves/their 'selves' are too narrow to describe what is actually happening in layers of locals and globals, not even just the bit of it in the screenplay, let alone interactions with the meta-fictional asides of Hopkins, or with the historiography of the text as a whole. Nor is Hopkins in control of the contexts of his text, the sub-and meta-systems of its relationships to the spectacle of production under globalization.
"Cast: [of this screenplay about the making of a TV documentary to be entitled "Dialogues with the Dead"]
Isaac, [long ago a Qumran Covenanter now living in Rome, and] the new Teacher of Righteousness [the founder-hero of Qumran]
Justin, a Christian preacher, thinker and martyr (for Isaac, he is also the Wicked Priest [the anti-hero whose actions motivate the establishment of Qumran])
Hilary, Isaac's nephew and heir, [and in Isaac's mythology] a Spouter of Lies
Ben, director [of the TV documentary] and God
Meg, Co-ordinator of Religious Programmes, Channel 6 [the only one wearing a 'suit'], devout Christian and [although not part of crew in ancient Rome, in Isaac's mythology reaching into the 'present'] Devil
Mike, cameraman and Scoffer
Axeman, TV presenter [anchor] and Pharisaic Seeker after Smooth Things
Alison, assistant producer, token ingénue
Professor Pelikan, distinguished academic [not met by Isaac, but added in post-production as talking head; one of several interviewed academics. Pelikan's histories of Christianity are standard schooltexts.]
TV Camera, restlessly perceptive, but without understanding" (60)
What do we witness "viewing" (mentally remediating) the written screenplay in Hopkins' book? Striking alterities: some noticed by cast, some left up to readers, some rejected as unreal by cast members; some continuities, mostly transparent. Self-conscious confusions at multiple meanings or possibilities; emotional rejections to uncomfortable connections that belie assumptions; willful misunderstandings or appropriations. Flashes of insight; prayers answered; reframings to alter meaning and value; restatements of the obvious (but to whom?); covert alliances and secrecy. Recognition of abstractions in actual events and details; prophesy and instrumental recontextualization of scripture; allusions and metaphors with local meanings: some explained, some left standing without explanation, some misquoted. Speculations about the motivations of others; displays of assumptions about human differences within times and between times; display of apparent inconsistencies, but are they? Explanations of each other to each other; charges of insanity; both the inflaming of contradictory realities and attempts at making peace between them. Moments when statements caught on film of the "past" are (ironically) even more pertinent to the interactions among those viewing the film in the "present."...drama, anti-climax, perplexed confusion, boredom. These hybridities of narration, association, creation, reaction cannot be captured in critiques of presentism and cannot be purified from historical practice.
As one of the fictional academic reports about "Dialogues with the Dead" says: "The brightest viewers might get to realize that they too don't understand what the Dead Sea Scrolls mean." (64) Ben, the director and God opines: "...intercut with academics to explain it all?....Yeah. They're actually the same as Isaac. They squabble over minor details, and then claim that theirs is the only correct interpretation." (66) And as Hopkins' stage directions about the co-ordinator of programmes (the money woman) instruct: "(As MEG exits, dissolve her trim blacksuited figure into a devil with horns, laughing.)" (67) From ancient Rome Hilary lets the production assistant Alison know that Isaac died on the way home: "Hilary came back to ask me for some more money for Isaac's funeral. I offered to buy the scrolls, but the bastard had already sold them." (71) "Back in the real world," that is, the contemporary world of TV folks: Alison trades in Ben for Mike, the cameraman; Axeman "enters a strict settlement on the West Bank"; the devout Christian believer and Devil, Meg, gets together with Ben/God to reform him. (74)
How the layers of locals and globals are brought into being here involves what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls "scale-making": "scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted. Scales are claimed and contested in cultural and political projects." Chronology is one tool for scale-making and anachronism is another. Chronology allows for grained historical analyses of varying degrees, creating layers of "locals": the day, the year, the decade, the century; for example each describe a different grain for assessing continuities and discontinuities and at what level of detail, particularity, locality. Hopkins' is especially interested in the rich variations among Jews, pagans and Christians in A World Full of Gods. He is also particularly interested in the discontinuities between a small missionizing Christianity and a later Roman state justified by its establishment of Christianity: a variant on the narrative some have called "the Christianization of the Roman Empire." Scale-making and chronology are partners, if sometimes contrary ones: that Isaac Covenanter and Justin Martyr live on different sides of the first and second centuries may not matter so much if what one wants to contrast are the permeable boundaries between Judaism and Christianity in those two centuries to state justifying Christian theological unity in the third century following: degrees of the local matter differently. Hopkins mines historical sources for the actual words of his screenplay's ancient characters, concerned to let the local and material shine through the mixed-time meta-fictions. Christianity is the book's locus, its aim, although not its telos or valorized end-point.
Academic specializations and interdisciplinary and sub-disciplinary locations assume certain scales, or value and devalue each other with their claims about scale-making, contesting commitments and practices. For example, Jewish feminist theologian and scholar of religious studies Judith Plaskow excavates Christian obsessions with playing "First Century Bible-Land" and their unintended anti-Jewish consequences in feminist theology and religious counterhistory. She points out other time frames salient for centering study of Jewish women's religious history, while also suggesting ways of making even first century bible-land research friendly to Jewish feminist theology and scholarship. Yet for some feminist theologies with concerns about Christianity playing first century bible-land is a religious practice as well as a scholarly one, with a wide range of intentions not reducible to their consequences, if nonetheless accountable for them. Hopkins' own scale-making peripheralizes the space-time locals upon which some of these pivotal feminist controversies in early Christianity depend. For example, Karen Jo Torjesen's When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity--a popularization of her own and other's scholarly research --distributes, conflates and mixes time in its attention grabbing title. Toriesen conflates historically specific forms of women's leadership--for example as patrons in "household churches"--and those continuities with the leadership offices of Jewish women of similar status at the time, with later Christian institutions of public male priesthood. Such scale-making mixing is for political effect, intended to estrange today's religious institutions while offering a counterhistory for their evolution, and to speculate on continuities with offices of priest and priestess in Greek and Roman religions. It counters the architectural space distinctions that produce the later basilica as public and male church. "From the third century on, Christian writers increasingly see the church as constituting a space analogous to that of the state, concerned with government, justice, and war. The parallels are no longer drawn between the church and the household."
One of Hopkins' few footnotes to an extensive body of feminist scholarship cites an article by Elizabeth Castelli that, in responding to an interdisciplinary study's chapter on women's role in the so-called christianization of the Roman empire, deconstructs a range of key terms, reviews the feminist literature, and works to promote a particular set of scale-making tools (and their attendant commitments and practices) for early Christian historical projects. I assume Hopkins registers by this footnote (as he does other immanent critiques explicitly in his meta-fictional reports) the elements of Castelli's critique which might apply to Hopkins' book itself, as well as the elements to which his dramatic scenarios are responses. Castelli points out "a tendency...toward the generalizing use of monolithic interpretive categories: 'Christianity,' 'the Greco-Roman world,' 'paganism,' 'Judaism,' and so on, [which] operate as uninterrogated and unitary categories....Robert Markus has reminded us that...''Paganism' . . . existed only in the minds, and, increasingly, the speech-habits, of Christians'....'Christianity,' too, is in many ways a heuristic construction, especially in the early centuries of the movements that traveled under its name. Indeed, both 'Judaism' and 'Christianity' in antiquity have increasingly been rendered as plurals by historians of religion in an attempt to signal our expanded sense of variety in both of these traditions at this time. Moreover, the sharp distinctions...between 'pagan' and 'Christian' have been considerably blurred by historians in recent years. ...Which 'Christianity' is it that afforded which Christian women a higher status than that of which of their non-Christian peers? / Of course, in order to see the big picture, one must sacrifice some level of detail. However, some level of specificity is required lest one be reduced to making absurd and patently false claims. What does it mean to claim that Christian women (in general) possessed a higher status than their Graeco-Roman counterparts (in general)? At this level of generality, is it a historically meaningful claim? Once one starts increasing the level of specificity with respect to class, geographical location, marital status, and so on, the picture becomes infinitely more complex...."
Some of these shifts in scale-making (critiques of the text in question-- subtitled "a sociologist reconsiders history") reflect incommensurabilities between disciplinary and sub-disciplinary projects as well as varying political commitments (such as feminist intervention). Shifts in scale-making also reflect difficulties of interdisciplinary practice: "A non-specialist cannot be expected to have mastered all of the relevant primary and secondary sources...." (230) What counts as "the big picture" may differ in its range of possible globals among specialists, synthesists, and other agencies of disciplinary intra-action. Similarly what counts as and the values given to "greater clarity and higher levels of differentiation," (257) differ in their range of layered locals. Notice also how the distinctions between explanatory footnotes and main text discussion display scale-making decisions. Hopkins does not indicate this feminist work in his main text, it remains local and specific in the footnotes rather than rising to the level of interest in the main text. In my own discussion of Hopkins' book, I have elevated footnotes to the level of main text, as I shift values and scales in my own appropriations of his work to describe histories under globalization. Bundled with the spectacle of production and also dynamically moving between and among pasts, presents, futures in problematic, richly contaminated and sometimes commercial intra-actions, Hopkins'World Full of Gods engages us in historically specific and culturally significant ways, moving among writing technologies, converging and distributed, and their agencies.
How do the writing technology ecologies of television, its distributed agencies and servicing centralities, help us understand other public histories?As I said before, pushing through a critique of "presentism" in public histories, we might work beyond this critique to understand "the spectacle of production" and its associated skills and pleasures; we might work to engage a very dynamic ecological layering of locals and globals, that is to say, its distributed agencies and their converging centralities in intra-action under globalization. The kind of hybrid corporation Handler and Gable examine as Colonial Williamsburg, the pressures of corporate fund raising escalating at the Smithsonian Institution, and the impressions of both heritage and enterprise cultures on universities under academic capitalism are not so distinct as the division between "hybrid corporation" and "serious educational institution" makes them sound. The commercial productions of television are helpful in remediating (imaginatively modeling a range of media and sensory modes within and through writing technology ecologies) structural shifts that the word "globalization" short-hands: shifts that are not only economic, but cultural at levels of interaction in which agencies cannot be understood as instrumentally individual, but must be grasped as distributed in layers of locals and globals. This does not mean we are victims without agency but it does mean that we have to look everywhere to learn about how "we"--in distributed identities of various kinds--are already engaging in such agencies.
I referred before to series writer Ronald Blumer's comments on historians in TV documentary production. He continues: "The filmmaker and the historian are often seen and see themselves as adversaries. I have never felt that way. For one thing, I am not a historian and I rely on historical advisors to protect me from foolish mistakes. But I am also aware that we are working in extremely different media and addressing different publics. I love to shock historians by explaining to them that the script of a densely 'talky' television hour is only 18 typewritten pages long. In the Franklin series, for example, I had the daunting challenge of trying to describe the nuances of the Treaty of Paris of 1783 in 100 words. In addition, television is a very different medium from a book or an article, simply because programs are so expensive to make. The show must hold the attention of several million audience members, an audience which does not necessarily give a damn about history and has a remote control in its collective hands with access to 150 channels." Under academic capitalism the costs of institutional processes of knowledge making are not distributed among federal and state dollars in the ways they were after WWII, sometimes as part of Cold War military investments, sometimes with social justice objectives (and paradoxes and complications between these and beyond them). Today the expenses of knowledge making are being borne in new ways by different actors, some of them "privatized" in various forms, some of them imposed on individuals in ideological shifts over "the role of government." Knowledge is very expensive to make and just how expensive is newly visible as resources shift and burdens are reallocated, with changes in public justifications for and against social investments and for and against building private wealth. Scholars are pressured to take up as their "audiences" those masses of TV viewers, in the name of democratization and to justify use of public money, at a moment when such mass audiences become economically untenable for other culture industries, like television. How different are these "different publics"? How appropriate are assumptions of distinctiveness? Processes of knowledge production conflated as "products" make academic capitalism also another culture industry, partially privatized, partially funded by the state.
Hopkins positions the arrival of the TV crew as the answer to Isaac's prayer to be able to communicate with his nephew across their differences. A specious answer it appears since Hilary sells the scroll anyway. (Commentary on the seeming promises of academic capitalism?) But Hopkins also allows the TV documentary to symbolize the range of knowledge today about the Dead Sea Scrolls against that range about them in "their own" time. How does this difference make a difference? Objects such as these writing technologies of the past mean differently across times. Is this only a paradoxical joke, pointing out ruptures and discontinuities in such values? In television the democratization of knowledge and its commercialization have become one. As Ohmann points out, it did not have to be this way, and even as it is, different hybridities of this "one" exist too. Other materialities might have been realized with different intentions in intra-action among these technologies. What can examination of television histories, that is to say, television's own history inside its display of public histories in forms like the TV documentary, help us alter?
Outlining their distributed agencies, Blumer names "four elements of historical documentaries, the narration, a primary source (either on-camera, or voiceover), period re-creations and the scholarly commentary." He describes his own way of thinking about the structures involved: "I always compare producing a television program to producing a piece of music. Not only do both media exist and have to work in time, but film and television, like music, have the possibility of playing several notes simultaneously. On the obvious level, you have the picture elements and the many elements of the soundtrack; on a structural level, you can always approach a subject in several ways at once. Not having historians on-camera, to continue the music analogy, is playing a violin with one string missing." But these four elements may not be as distinctly polyphonic or as equivalent to academic roles and materials as Blumer communicates here. Who counts as a historian and what counts as a primary source, let alone their relationships to narration and period re-creations are especially various creatively and commercially. Imaginations and conventions of "living history"--practiced in academically recognized if peripheral forms in places like Colonial Williamsburg or by the National Park Service, sometimes with costumed history performers--are similarly and differently layered together in enactment with other public histories, such as the playful work of historical re-enactors, and, in comparison to Blumer, the lively identifications of historical "reality" shows on TV.
Such historical "reality" shows on TV are one part soap-opera, one part period re-creation--and with folks from our time who invite audience identification as "us," viewers mentally enacting too, playing at, re-enacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for, various understandings of the "past." Their chronological anachronisms interweave pasts and presents, rather like both the time travelers and the TV crew that Hopkins uses to figure scholarly historical labors. Indeed media and viewers often call the participants in these TV shows "time travelers." Consider the BBC's shows such as "Surviving the Iron Age," or "The Ship - Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage," shown in the U.S. on public television member stations, or in Canada on History Television, and compare them to signature producer Wall To Wall's '...House' format shows such as "1900 House" and "Frontier House," some created in production partnerships with PBS in the U.S. Compare them all to Nova's do-it-yourself ancient technologies shows, "Secrets of Lost Empires," also shown on PBS. Technologies indeed are lively players in the action in all of these, although defined, displayed, communicated with and emphasized differently. I want to consider what these public histories of technologies display about histories under globalization, what agencies we learn about from them and their conspicuously bundled spectacles of production, variously remediated in writing technology ecologies. First of all, they are mixed commercial products of various sorts: broadcast or cable TV shows, in the U.S. sold largely to public television stations, and sometimes recorded on video tape or DVD along with companion books sold to private viewers. Somewhat like the hybrid corporation of Colonial Williamsburg, they pay for themselves with a mixture of small profits from such products, corporate money and TV station money, private donations, small grants from federal, state or city cultural funding and/or in the U.K. from BBC licence fees, and supportive relationships with other public history sites and actors. Their web sites, interconnected to the BBC or History Television or PBS and/or Nova, are intended for educational use for schools and viewers, for internet entertainment in a range of forms, and to sell these products.
"Surviving the Iron Age" is a particularly laminated show from the BBC. Three of its "reality" participants in September and October 2000 were children of people who in 1977 were involved in a similar but year-long BBC Iron Age TV project "Living in the Past." This time all seventeen volunteers took up a seven week residence at Castell Henllys in West Wales, an Iron Age Hillfort sited in the Penbrokeshire Coast National Park, where they lived in archeologically reconstructed roundhouses, the largest of which was finished only a few months before filming began. The U.K. National Park people describe on their website how they "supplied the volunteers with materials, clothing and food similar to those of the Iron Age based on archaeological evidence." And the BBC's own companion website to the TV series demonstrates the mixture of education, entertainment and soap opera the show brings together, bundled as a spectacle of production on its homepage: "Welcome to the Iron Age/ Surviving the Iron Age was an experiment in living history. Seventeen volunteers, including three children spent seven weeks experiencing life as it might have been in an Iron Age hilfort in West Wales. The series has now finished. / The British Museum created a tour on Iron Age Britain to accompany the series, featuring some amazing objects from its collections. / The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites. / The Surviving the Iron Age book is published by BBC Worldwide and is available from the BBC Bookshop. / When it was all over, could the volunteers survive the modern age? / Anne, Bethan and Chris talk about the reality of life in the hillfort and a typical day. / Video - final thoughts. / Could you have survived the Iron Age? Get talking in the message board and send a postcard of the series. / Check out the transcript from the live chat with five of the villagers. / Read the biographies. / Peter Firstbrook, BBC series producer on making the programme. / Find out who won a prize in the competition." The BBC website is possibly the most thoroughly hybridized version of the series: reaching out in as many media, sensory and temporal modalities, educational/commercial mixtures as possible: remediating all the other forms in which the series also exists. The TV show itself probably most emphasizes the soap-opera melodrama of the events. The large, brightly colored and visually resplendent companion book, published and sold by the BBC, offers itself up as thoroughly historical, albeit admittedly introductory. It interweaves narratives of TV series production with historical contextualizations such as maps, timelines, pictures of ancient objects, short historical commentaries on various subjects, and bibliographies.
The TV show is arranged as a mini-series in four episodes, three with a common structure: in these episodes some unexpected catastrophe looms and the closed-world "authenticity" of the time-travel convention has to be breached. In episode one some of the volunteers become surprisingly sick as they try to settle into Iron Age living and a doctor has to be sent for. In episode two, the women in the two families with children come into conflict and two group members leave the project, one for a week because of illness, the other permanently. A motivation expert is sent in to facilitate group organization and morale. In episode three some illnesses are revealed to be food poisoning, and official public health regulations send in a Food Safety officer who insists that certain 21st c. sanitation measures are taken. One of the mothers and her two children leave (eventually her husband leaves as well). The structure of the final episode also pivots around outside people coming in: but in this last celebratory show these folks from the outside are Iron Age re-enactors from Kent, who come to show and share the skills they have learned and to enact an encounter between Iron Age tribal groups. The whole series is capped with an observance of Samhain, an ancient festival to which our own Halloween is loosely connected.
The BBC in house production team organized the activities of the volunteers through a series of what they called "time challenges"--messages written out from the production team with instructions for action. The first communication introduced the volunteers to the camp and gave instructions for setting up their settlement: "...By the afternoon you must learn how to look after your livestock, including how to milk your cows and goats....Before the sun sets in the west you must also select your chieftain. He or she can be of any age. This person will have an essential function: through them you will be informed of the tasks you are required to perform to survive in the Iron Age. You already have many skills between you. Share your talents well, work together and plan for the future....Between now and Samhain, you must all master the skills of the Iron Age people. Support and advice on how to survive will be passed to you through your Chieftain in messages such as this one...." Time challenges included making honey beer, making charcoal, preparing to feast the Cantiaci--the Iron Age re-enactors, preparing for the observance of Samhain, making tallow, firing pottery, and creating a wicker man--a symbolic effigy set ablaze during Samhain. A range of social and object technologies were interwoven in the time challenges which required the volunteers to: assess their groups' knowledges, share them and teach each other; encounter and engage various objects--some familiar, some unknown; and create new objects and processes as well as new identities and cooperative interactions. Along the way they learned and taught each other and themselves such skills as: grinding wheat, cooking over a fire, milking goats, organizing themselves as a group and practicing leadership, making jewelry, making pots, weaving and dyeing, "druidic"-style rituals, games and oralities, ploughing, forging a sword, beating a chalice, casting a bronze figure, firing a shaft furnace, and finally smelting iron. Skills and tasks were distributed and reassembled, not everyone did everything, nor were all the tasks completed as instructed, nor were all the attempts successful.
When I refer to these as social and object technologies it calls to mind the multiform meanings and histories of the marvelous word "thing"--its current, latent and obsolete definitions described in the OED. As a noun the word thing draws together some currently counter-intuitive meanings which emphasize interaction, deliberation, and process in fields of power; and the more common sense contemporary meanings indexing various entities. The interactive processual meanings follow because an ancient assembly or parliament was called a thing, therefore the word also comes to mean a legal case or process; and more loosely connects to that with which one is concerned, or that which is done, said, or thought. The second sense forefronts various entities: individuals, signifieds rather than signifiers, beings without consciousness or inanimate objects, but also living beings, creatures, persons. Indeed as applied to a person it may be in affective registers ranging from contempt and pity to affection or honor. As a verb thing may mean to plead a cause or to bring to reconciliation; or to represent by things. It is also an obsolete form of the verb think. When Bruno Latour calls for a "parliament of things," honoring the hybrid entities humans create and our intra-actions with and among them, ourselves and other beings and worldly processes, he and his translator are indulging in a bit of etymological punning. But we might consider these historical "reality" documentaries with and as parliaments of things: assemblages of entities and beings, living and not, conscious and not, individual and not, and their intra-actions among themselves and with worldly processes in what Haraway calls naturecultures, and what we could also call pastpresents.
A range of structures interlayered confound any possible infinitely deferred "authenticities." "The BBC takes on a moral and legal responsibility when people become involved in a filming project, so living in totally authentic Iron Age conditions was never an option." (21) Pastpresents as intra-actions are dynamically intertwined with such deliberate intentions as inviting the children of the earlier series "Living the Past" to volunteer for this project. "The BBC therefore decided that this new experiment in 'experiential history' should start by repeating the Iron Age period. Not only is this a fascinating period of British history, but there would be the additional interest of comparing the experiences of the volunteers in the late 1970s with those of the people selected for the new project." (15) "Mark and Jody Elphick, together with Tom Little, were invited to join the series because their parents had been involved with the original Iron Age project twenty-three years previously. Most of the 'Iron Age' families had stayed in touch over the years and the children who were born after the original television series was made were brought up almost like cousins, seeing each other once or twice as year. The 'Iron Age children,' as they came to be known, had often talked of repeating the experiment which had become such a big part of their parents' lives." (27) "We've always wanted to do it. All the kids have always nagged at mums and dads and said couldn't we do a children's Iron Age thing, ever since we were little." (28)
Although the role of the chieftain was intended to mediate between the volunteers and the TV crew, this division too was breached over and over, structurally intervolved. For example, one of the volunteers worked for the BBC: "Emma has since [after studying radio and television production and social anthropology] worked on many popular BBC series....In many ways, Emma had the most difficult job of all: she was not only expected to live in the Iron Age conditions, but she also had to film for the series when the main television crew was not on location." (35) Similarly, when Anne was collecting urine as mordant for dyeing "any passing male (film crew included) were invited to contribute." (127) And when Ron and Brenda were smelting iron "the bellows had to be worked constantly. Everyone got involved--the volunteers, the BBC team and the staff at Castell Henllys all took turns to pump air into the furnace." (159) "The BBC project was always intended to be about how twenty-first century people coped with living under prehistoric conditions and there was never any expectation that we would learn much about how the Iron Age people actually lived..." concludes the companion book to the series. One classicist friend joked to me when I mentioned this TV series to her--"We're still in the Iron Age!" --laughing at the indeterminacy of what counts as Iron Age cultures, peoples, timeframes. Indeed one of the volunteers referred to the event as "this Iron Age twenty-first century." That the production team officially communicated their time challenges in our own alphabetic writing in English marked these communications as both in our time, and out of time simultaneously. Writing technologies of various sorts taxonomize, conflate, mix in specific hybridities, and keep separated various meanings that allow for the playful intervolving across times to create "this Iron Age twenty-first century." We could call this a hybrid entity, a pastpresent constructed from actions and intra-actions, for example, the "time challenges" are practices producing such hybridities. As such they are connected but not limited to representations of artifacts, especially technologies as objects and artifacts. Writing technologies are both the objects and our intra-actions among them.
Critics of heritage culture publics and heritage culture hybrid corporations are cogent in their analyses of popular media representations of artifacts as if "timeless." Such artifacts may stand for ontological continuity and then easily appropriated as timelessness itself, even though for professional archaeologists (for example) the constitution of artifacts and the very marks upon them, marks in and of time and use, are construed as material evidence for time-inflected and time-nuanced interpretations. And even this seeming ontological continuity is highly contingent: that some artifacts continue and others do not also matters, and what the artifacts that did not survive might have "said" is unavailable now. Strong correlations between a material or archeological culture and the identities, boundaries, self-namings and such of peoples are made easily and mistakenly. How and why artifacts are preserved or unearthed and interpreted is perhaps always already mired in the interests of states and factions as well: "the state is concerned to finance excavations, designate and preserve 'national sites,' and sponsor museums and exhibits that display the 'national heritage.' Moreover, given that the state is the major owner of the means of production for archaeological research, it is hardly surprising that the pattern of support for archeological excavation and museum displays has been conditioned by national mythologies of identity...it is subtly operative in the demands placed on archeologists today as they seek to justify the significance of their sites in the competitive process of requesting grants for excavation or in attempting to protect the archeological record....The subtle demands that condition a nationalist archeology are likely to be shaped by complex, historically evolving, factional contests as much as by overarching state interests."
"Surviving the Iron Age" televisually draws upon what Celtic studies specialist and geographer Angela Piccini calls "a Celtic cultural package": "My present work involves exploring how people consume heritage representations in Wales. Go to any heritage site or 'living history' museum, such as the Museum of Welsh Life at St. Fagans outside Cardiff, Castell Henllys Iron Age Hillfort in north Pembrokshire, or Celticas in Machynlleth [Montgomeryshire], and you will find people filming. What they are filming is all about who they are in relation to their ideas about the past and who they may once have been....Their video productions, then, are about placing themselves in some relation to the past which bears on general notions of their own identities." Archaeological theorist Michael Dietler considers what is at stake in a Celtic cultural package today: "It is my contention that such appeals to an ancient Celtic past have played and continue to play a number of important and often paradoxical roles in the ideological naturalization of modern political communities at several contradictory levels, including: (1) pan-European unity in the context of the evolving European Community [and now the EU as an entity], (2) nationalism within member states of that community, and (3) regional resistance to nationalist hegemony. An understanding of this complex process requires exploration of the ways in which language, objects, places, and persons have been differentially emphasized to evoke antiquity and authenticity at each of these levels in the process of constructing and manipulating emotionally and symbolically charged traditions of Celtic identity. As an archaeologist specializing in the study of those societies of ancient Iron Age Europe that serve as a touchstone of authenticity in the invocation of Celtic identity, I have an interest in examining the ways that archaeology has been appropriated, or has collaborated, in these 'invented traditions' and its potential role in sorting out the competing claims of what Benedict Anderson has called 'imagined communities.'"
Piccini describes a range of documentaries, including BBC documentaries of the 80s and early 90s, that construct "the Celt as an appealing, market-friendly, and resoundingly apolitical object for public consumption, a pan-European entity ripe for marketing the European Union as it did during the 1991 The Celts: The Origins of Europe exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice." Mostly, "[t]hese Celts...belong to no specific time or place, as their associated reconstructed material culture is a pastiche of continental and British"--a pastiche appropriate to signify pan-European identity today. In the early 90s Piccini attempted to analyze her series of documentaries to isolate "the ways in which competing histories are constructed are made tangible, accessible to viewers, thus empowering them." But "[i]t is not a matter of whether viewers are active readers of televisual text; what is at stake is whether that activity is significant." But just including the spectacle of production turns out to be inadequate to insure significant empowering activity. Her analysis concludes: "The real problem is how we as academics approach the public presentation of archaeology. We have to question seriously why we want to televise our activities and their productions in the first place"; drawing the line that Handler and Gabler do between contaminated hybridities and academic aims. Dietler, in contrast, describes how academic work itself is appropriated and calls for archaeologists "to develop a critical awareness of their own situation in this process in order to understand how it informs their practice by conditioning research goals, interpretation, and evaluation of knowledge claims and in order to recognize their responsibilities in presenting the past in the midst of rival appeals to its use in authenticating modern collective identities."
Piccini appears to resign herself (perhaps momentarily) to a politics of renunciation; I think this is because she overvalues televisualizations at the expense of a range of other remediations occurring simultaneously, and because she is disappointed when she expects too much politically from the spectacle of production. Such a politics of renunciation has voluntarist aspects if compared to Dietler's quite different assumptions about the co-constitution of knowledges. He assumes that power/knowledge/love relationalities including a range of identity projects, are produced within an apparatus which cannot be purified of its state and factional interests and of the complexities of funding requirements, private, commercial, national and so on, however much he also cautions all to inspect their accountabilities in these very circumstances. "Surviving the Iron Age" I think teaches us to examine the remediations that Piccini has overlooked: it does not exist only as documentary on film, or even only as the set of events, things, people that create that product. It does not end with that product or even with its viewing on television by more and less active and sophisticated viewers. Its visuality is not its essential property, however powerful and important, since a range of sensoria are engaged in a variety of modalities not centered in the documentary film itself although certainly including it. The ecology of writing technologies that "Surviving the Iron Age" engages is layered in locals and globals. The "Celtic package" of a set of contemporary politics and their commodifications Piccini herself points to, is layered over a range of identity projects as Dietler accounts. To radically simplify, just enumerate very roughly some overlapping remediations of "Surviving the Iron Age" (specific media/object/sensoria/affect recombinations): the TV documentary version, the TV "reality" show version, the educational gift book version, the you-are-there experiment book version, the teacher's resource website version, the play Iron Age game website version, the historical re-enactors version, the living history at public park version, the publicly funded history version, the work of academics being publicly recognized version, the "look at us--we deserve funding" version...and one could go on.
Chela Sandoval teaches us to inspect the forms of consciousness created by movement through and among such remediations. The impulse to purify is disturbed. How long one moves, how long one stabilizes, these are contingent temporal agencies, at times forms of scale-making perhaps. Compare movement among these remediations to a movement among identity structures in Sandoval's account: "Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands." Piccini's disappointments with the inadequacy of the spectacle of production to produce empowered viewers requires us to examine our expectations for recognition of "liberatory possibility": how could we know it when we see it? Is such knowing what is necessary for "re-cognition"? Recognition cannot be guaranteed by some formula for an empowered viewer. The re-cognitions that Sandoval examines may be temporally, contextually specific, sometimes ephemeral, sometimes stabilized with difficulty. The generalizability of such recognition is limited, although the range varies and is itself active and changing. The skills for re-cognition need to be honed and valued rather than produced themselves as products to be handed off to other activists. Dietler's paradoxical roles and contradictory levels (in layers of locals and globals) of Celtic identity in a reconfiguring Europe cannot assume resolution, even as a political good to be struggled for. A political willingness to inhabit these and other uncertainties, volatilities, open up frames without resolution and with shifting generalizability but not without agencies.
Collaborating, indexing, being accountable for, engaging, familiarizing oneself (perhaps not even consciously) with one's own movements among layers of locals and globals is one kind of consciousness (or perhaps several) cultivated by such variously remediated products and processes as "Surviving the Iron Age." Although implicated in European identity politics, it also strangely offers communities of practice in addition to, or alternating with, communities of identity: what we are, what we name ourselves, shifts multiply as what we do variously with different each others intra-acts in layers of locals and globals among naturecultures and pastpresents. This kind of liberatory possibility is utopian in another way than that of telling us who we should be and what we should do; instead it attempts to re-cognize who we are becoming in intra-action. These do-it-yourself pastpresents invite forms of identification/dis-identification: communities brought together and also pushed apart as the "us" moves around. This is in distinction to some pastpresents where who you are and what you do are more and less conflated. Viewers play at being "there": on set, on site, in that past, in a past: mentally enacting, re-enacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to find evidence for various pastpresents. Witnessing as a root of the experimental life is given a literality here, but also a participatory anti-elitism that confirms more than silences its "parliament of things." Nothing guarantees liberatory possibility here, but then neither are such possibilities categorically absent.
Spacetime is remediated variously. "Surviving the Iron Age" offers three remediated literalizations of spacetime, two of them in its book variation, and a third distributed among all its variations. The first is a table in the companion book entitled "Chronology." (44-5) Across the top of the table extends "time" in the sequence 800BC to AD300 in 100 year increments, and along the side we have "space" from top to bottom: Ireland, Britain, France (Gaul), Southern Germany, Central Italy. Britain is colored differently, as the focus of "space" for the TV show. The textual discussion of Chronology begins with the lack of written language of "the Iron Age people" and that thus "not one single Briton was known by name before ["the Romans first arrived"]," in comparison to "the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians and other early civilizations, all of which pre-date Iron Age Britain...." (44) Other writing technologies substitute today however, and discussed are "radiocarbon analysis," "[t]ree ring analysis, or dendrochronology," and especially "stratigraphic sequence" and "distinct periods" based upon "typesites." (44-5) The table draws periods across spaces: for Ireland--Late Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman Iron Age. For Britain--Late Bronze Age, Early Iron Age, Middle Iron Age, Late Iron Age, and Roman Iron Age. Lines temporalize specific excavated sites and associated names: Hengistbury harbour, Arras culture and East Yorkshire cemeteries, Lindow Man, Snettisham Hoards, Maiden Castle hillfort, Danebury hillfort, Deal Warrior, Castell Henllys hillfort to farmstead; while dots punctuate historical reference moments: Cantiaci tribe migrate to Kent, Caesar's raid on Britain, Roman attack on Anglesey, Boudica's revolt, Hadrian's wall built. For France and Southern Germany we get periods based on typesite levels at Hallstatt in Austria, and La Tène at Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. For France--Final Bronze Age, Hallstatt I, Hallstatt II, La Tène I, La Tène II, La Tène III, Romans; while a dot marks Caesar's Gallic War. For Southern Germany--Hallstatt B, Hallstatt D (1,2,3), La Tène A, La Tène B (1,2), La Tène C (1,2), La Tène D (1,2), Romans. For Central Italy--Etruscans, Romans; while dots mark Gauls sack Rome, and Hannibal crosses the Alps. All the "Iron Age" space/times are colored pink and beige alternately, while the Roman space/times are colored purple, the British Late Bronze Age is green, and the French Final Bronze Age, the German Hallstatt B and the Italian Etruscans are colored lavender.
I go to some length to describe the table, deliberately remediating it in words, in order by defamiliarization to point out its scale-making technologies: of colors, of site level in a range of gradations, of time over lines and time punctuated by dots, of proportion within intersecting variables of space and time along two axes. Its considerable detail is more than adequate for its text discussion or for references from the companion book as a whole. In fact, it refers to details much beyond those used in the book, television series or website: instead pointing out referentially to various professional communities of practice which authorize the historical knowledge that all these remediations draw upon, while keeping the intersection of space and time relatively uncomplicated and clean. Anthropologist Kath Weston describes one aspect of this sort of space/time: "An additive understanding (space-plus-time) pictures time and space as two geometric planes that intersect, two streams or dimensions that flow together, with the eye trained on their confluence. The analyst brings the two together after the fact by first imagining them as separate but interdependent, then investigating the effect that one has on the other....[treating] time and space as two discrete entities...[which] creates the problem of bringing them back together again." But this version shows us that even such space/time is built from other meta-dimensions as well: the typesite names and references also intervolve the archeological layers at the excavation sites, named, ordered and otherwise rationalized to produce a system for dating artifacts by the use of other exemplary artifacts and layers. In other words, spacetime has been laboriously taken apart in excavation, then that new technology's separate but interdependent planes are intersected in order to compare space/times. This table compares space/time-s, after space/time has been carefully intersected.
The book offers another different sort of remediated spacetime too. Photos of the reconstructed park site are set back to back and side to side with computer-generated images "of how Castell Henllys would have looked around 300 BC." (57) The reconstructed site today has been denuded of trees ("for defensive reasons"), a wooden palisade has been imaged along with an elaborate entrance and double-entry stone gateway, and many more and larger roundhouses are imaged together within the computer-generated version of this compound. (57-59) The text itself offers additional, if intended as complementary, meta-versions. It describes the stages of construction and reconstruction of the hillfort over the long period of its continuous occupation from 600BC to 1AD. This narrative is interlaced with the narrative of the site's excavation, also in stages, from 1981 on. These interlaced descriptions draw in as another set of threads, recent reinterpretations of the site, which replace earlier understandings of the hillfort as primarily a defensive structure with new narratives of its importance as a storage site for grain, and thus its conspicuous displays of power and status. Spacetime in ecological layers is/are remediated here, not as some originary unity but rather as intra-actions; we are invited to re-cognize these intra-actions via the range of remediations. The path of re-representation is ecologically layered, both distributed and centralized at multiple points.
It is with these caveats in mind I turn to the third literalized remediation of spacetime, distributed among each variation of "Surviving the Iron Age"; that is to say, I turn to the re-enactments of the re-enactors of various kinds. The park site is a stage for the re-enactors of the BBC production, who simultaneously re-enact the whole period of continuous occupation of the hillfort, the punctuated moment of their own occupation for the cameras, and the earlier BBC production, elsewhere in an Iron Age when and for three of them recovered memories of family importance. They are visited by the Cantiaci, "one of several voluntary Iron Age 'living history' groups in Britain." A frisson between the two groups is set up since the BBC re-enactors are both "keen to see any new faces" while "unsure how they would match up against enthusiasts who had immersed themselves in the period for years." (139) The site of the park and its reconstruction of roundhouses, its professionals' gathering together of materials for the BBC re-enactors, all are elements of re-enactment upon which park personnel bring their professional expertise to bear.
Thus the "living" part of living history sites and epistemologies depends upon historical re-enactments of various sorts, many of them focused on or involving costumed history interpreters. Blumer's polyphonic four elements of television historical documentaries names one as "period re-creations." Handler and Gable are convincing in their analysis of the training of costumed interpreters in Colonial Williamsburg that the ethos of "people-ing" such sites is complexly contradictory and involves layers of bad faith as well as creativity and (often thwarted) aspirations to professional knowledges of various kinds. Re-enactors are amazingly various: in their relationships to such professional aspirations and trainings and in relation to periods, forms of enactment and people-ing, not to mention personal identifications. Professional actors are likely to people Blumer's documentaries, while national park employees take up people-ing historic sites, sometimes with the help of volunteers, former academic historians take up historical re-enactment as a new and rather marginalized profession, to be hired by museums, parks and schools, and weekend re-enactors travel to battle sites and fairs to entertain themselves and others, and to make, sell and trade technological artifacts and materials, including websites, with which to inhabit their pastpresents. Spacetimes are richly layered in such pastpresents, in examples where Iron Age European pastiche re-cultured meanings are played in various locations, historically sited or exemplary, or in examples where re-enactors shift which sides of strategic U.S.--German WWII battles they will fight on, while the specters of neo-Nazi survivalism and historical revisionism haunt their play-acting. "Time travel" is a term often used by all these various re-enactors to describe what I would call the kind of cultural work they do.
Re-enactors are themselves metaphors, for themselves and for others: bearing the burden of the transfer of certain meanings. Their layers of agency range along one axis from bearing official meanings they have no place in creating, to bearing idiosyncratic meanings they have created themselves yet carry also as large social and cultural narratives beyond themselves. Thus along other axes, their sense of instrumental individual agency may be misleading: from the coincidence of unconscious meanings, to the purveying of social mis- and dis-information, to misrecognitions of collective agencies, to misunderstandings of the limits of such conscious purpose. Consider the complex ecology of the path of re-representation they embody; reminded of its points of structural interest by Bowker and Star:
    • "How objects [in this case the re-enactors themselves] can inhabit multiple contexts at once, and have both local and shared meaning [individually and collectively generated, historically locally valued and historically nationally valued, meanings for fun and entertainment and meanings for commerce and barter, and so on].
    • "How people, who live in one community and draw their meanings from people and objects situated there, may communicate with those inhabiting another [for example, strategies used in pamphlets by academic historians and park historians to encourage the inclusion of women's narratives at national history sites by park officials and volunteers, some of each re-enactors].
    • "How relationships form between (1) and (2) above--how can we model the information ecology of people and things across multiple communities?
    • "What range of solutions to these three questions is possible and what moral and political consequences attend each of them?"
Handler and Gable give us a sense of how personalized such re-creations become for those enacting: their pride and creativity in their particular versions of character and/or display of artifacts in action. But Handler and Gable believe that "the training emphasized good vibes while eliding a critical social history." (198) "The trainees learned, for the most part, not by reading but by imitating." (196) They note that examination and questioning, relating past and present, were the ostensible goals of social history at Colonial Williamsburg, but since real questioning involves discomfort and conflict, that in fact questioning that produced such discomforts was in practice reduced to mere style. What mattered instead was people-ing the site: inviting visitors to identify with its people, while also getting visitors to interact with artifacts and characters on the site. Trivial questions with fixed responses are more valuable then than the kinds of questions that would display or create critical reflection: thus "questions should be used primarily for stylistic effect and to encourage an all-important sense of mutual and egalitarian involvement...." (201)
Handler and Gable note the continuities between these practices and other pedagogies today, but with intentions to distinguish them from better teaching practices: "to point out the similarities between training at Colonial Williamsburg and generic educational practices is not to invalidate the lessons we can draw from it. In this vignette there is an almost obsessive emphasis on 'comfort.' This is the pedagogic version of 'the customer is always right.'" (202) They report, for example, that parent complaints of interpreters' critical commentary were borne on the back of individual interpreters, one of whom remarked: "'you can't ask the questions that are really painful. You don't have the institutional, the structural support for that.'" (205) So Handler and Gabler conclude: "To us, this meant that a critical history--the kind the social historians claimed they were teaching on Colonial Williamsburg's congenial streets--was a virtual impossibility. / But when we presented such a view (in seminars, in conversations, in published papers), frontline employees, their managers, and the museum's professional historians were almost unanimous--in their public statements, at least--in disagreeing with us." (206) In the end though, they resolve their own discomforts with these questionings of others when they decide that these disagreements with them are made in bad faith by straitjacketed employees and corporate managers: "corporately managed and disciplined frontline employees are a poor conduit for complex historiographical narratives." (207) Indeed, when some employees go on strike, they pointedly question: "In becoming managers, in learning to speak the language of management, have the new social historians lost their ability to hear the lessons their own historiography is intended to teach?" (217) "Though Colonial Williamsburg officially embraced a new social history aiming, among other things, to recover the conflicts of the pasts, it never intended those past conflicts to seem continuous with present-day conflicts like labor disputes. To confuse the boundaries of past and present was 'anachronistic,' it was a sin against mimetic realism..." (219)
One reviewer, a museum curator, after commending their clear analysis of the tensions "inherent in the very structure of museums" which "create contentious dynamics among museum personnel," recommends the book for "the museum community at large" and especially for "students pursuing careers in history outside the academy." However she continues: "My appreciation for the comprehensive work done by Handler, an anthropologist and Gable, a sociologist and anthropologist does not mitigate one of the glaring limitations of this study. The authors never seem to articulate an understanding of how difficult it is to do public history. Some empathy would not have marred the quality of their observations or usefulness of their critique. This limitation is indeed unfortunate for an industry that is struggling to find its voice in the midst of attacks on multi-culturalism and social history. The struggles faced by museum personnel--curators, researchers, educators, docents, administrators, and trustees--do not have easy solutions. Bringing these diverse points of view into harmony remains part of the daily challenge of working in historical institutions. This is to say nothing of the responsibility of caring for the collections--artifacts, historic properties, and archival materials--that are the centerpiece of history museums. That so much of it comes out as well as it does is probably the greater surprise. And, the task is getting increasingly difficult as dollars become harder to raise, competition for audience increases, and a variety of museums beckon a public that insists on play with its learning experiences."
In other words, Handler and Gable have it right but also wrong. Those uncomfortable, questioning disagreements may not only have been made by straitjacketed employees or disingenuous corporate managers (although that too), but also by those whose agency is variously limited and ecological in range, who act not as instrumental individualists as the analysis of Handler and Gable seems to require of them, but who experiment with and push the edges of limitations, failing and succeeding within ranges of efficacy. What does such negative critique demand of museums, and frankly, of an increasingly managed corporate academy? It is easier to make such critiques than it is to inhabit responsibly and accountably the communities of practice analyzed; indeed the critique operates to sharpen the edges between communities analyzed and communities analyzing, delimiting responsibility. The very distinction that seems to ground the critique, that between the hybrid corporation and a serious educational institution, breaks down historically in academic capitalism. And to what extent is this critique now a virtually nostalgic appeal, and such serious education actually a phantasm of a never existing institution, if admittedly also a critique in which elements quite justly criticized are intensifying within the academy itself? Handler and Gable themselves misrecognize the very sphere of their critique: its applicability beyond its site of analysis to the very site in which they produce such analysis. They are themselves caught in the very processes they critique and for which they appear to those in museum communities to have so little sympathy. Like other academics they are in struggle, and that struggle over and over mis-locates its range, its agencies and its critical understandings.
Re-enactors indeed may be quite limited in their abilities as instrumental agents to pose critical social questions across communities of practice and engage profitably (especially) with all the attendant discomforts. As bearers of meaning across communities of practice the cultural work they do, to very different political purposes, is nonetheless often quite uncomfortable. Not always to themselves or their interlocking audience-markets, but more broadly, to larger and often unanticipated "audiences"--those in "hearing" distance, or those connected through other remediated versions: producing together, layered in myriad distributions, joined and disjoint across forms of consumption-citizenship. Such questioning discomfort, for example, is the very subject of a magazine piece in this year's Washington Post, entitled: "Attack of the Clones; They dress like Nazis and drive amphibious vehicles. And they wage their own Battle of the Bulge on a U.S. military base. Does the Pentagon know about this?" In other words, to begin to understand the cultural work that re-enactors do one has to look much more ecologically, across the layers of locals and globals, to begin to engage paths of re-representations. Re-enactors are themselves communication technologies or metaphors: --as objects "inhabiting multiple contexts at once," with both "local and shared" meanings; --as people communicating across communities of practice; --in relationship, how the relationships form between themselves as objects which mean multiply and themselves as people talking across communities; and finally --in paths of re-representation, how do we model such relationships? What kinds of models are possible, what ranges of technology do we use, and what moral and political consequences do we all--all these entities and beings here in intra-action--what consequences do "we" set into motion? How can we be accountable for them?
Just by choosing as their local leader, Anne, the BBC re-enactors shift the path of re-representation such that the companion book argues not only for women's leadership in Iron Age societies (yes, where? when? interconnections to this Iron Age twenty-first century pastpresents?), but also centers technologies that, because they have been associated with women in various gender divisions of labor, have dropped out of public discussion and history as technology. Calling the learning of and interactions between various technologies "time challenges" in a reality show game style, allowed all kinds of technologies to be displayed, shared, experimented with, altered, moved around and otherwise acted with, upon, through, and deconstructed. How little the re-enactors know and how much they know about practices in pastpresents are dramatically consequent as such knowledges and the lack of them, for example, make them ill and disrupt their relationships. Such knowledges and their lack are remediated in the companion book with such boxed-off discussions as "Medicine in the Iron Age," "Iron Age Crops" or "Storage Pits."
Here I might for a moment reconnect to the Highlander research I spoke of earlier, which engaged several kinds of re-enactments. First, the historical re-enactments on film that were a central part of each episode as the principle characters' lives over hundreds of years were narrated. Then there were the fanzine writers' re-enactments as they recast the official stories into their own versions, complexly and creatively interwoven into the television story lines. Then there were the costume contests at cons, where prizes were given for costumes, only some of which connected directly with the Highlander spacetimes. Mostly instead costumes were woven into communities of re-enactors of various sorts, principally folks of the Society for Creative Anachronism, but there were also costumed Star Trek re-enactors, speaking Klingon for example. All these folks belonged to overlapping communities of practice, and their skills and enthusiasms upon which all these remediated forms of re-enactment depended, were shared, displayed, studied, bought, taught, and pictured in various ways.
During the course of my research both gender and sexuality were recast unevenly in Highlander communities, altering the path of re-representation. I spoke earlier of how homosexuality went from forbidden topic to marked topic as Same Sex Sex. When I first engaged the Highlander listserve, although many representations within the television program were actively disputed and reworked there, most folks were dismissive of those of us who occasionally wondered in this particular local public sphere (which included international fans) about the women warriors of the Immortals. Some of the earliest television episodes, the ones least satisfying in production values and back story, had inadequately depicted women warriors, focusing mostly on displaying female rock stars with varying acting abilities. Women immortals were depicted during the first season in 1992-3 as surviving by wiles and deception rather than by sword fighting. Even those who fought did so with less skill. Nor did fan writing reflect much more in the way of other possibilities, despite the thoroughly imaginary worlds created. The great exception was the story arc that begin on television with the Immortal Amanda, who became a continuing character over and after the first two seasons. Although the first episodes depicted her as cunning rather than a skilled warrior, by the time at the end of the second season in 1994 her back story is filled in and we learn of her relationship with her slain mentor, Rebecca. Even though both actors' sword skills are patently small, their abilities are greater within the story itself, although mostly comic in depiction. However in fan writing their stories become richer.
When we first talked about women warriors on the Highlander listserve, fans were skeptical of the roles women could have played as warriors, claiming that the inadequate depictions in Highlander were reflections of how it was in the past for women. Some of us had already been influenced by such fantasy novels as those of Jessica Amanda Salmonson, depicting the female samurai Tomoe Gozen, and by her Encyclopedia of Amazons. But the late 80s and 90s exploded in new materials about women warriors. Those of us arguing differently pointed to new press and books about women who had successfully disguised themselves as men, in the U.S. civil war and elsewhen, or who had become leaders of pirates. Much of this material had probably been motivated by greater and more regular participation by women in U.S. and European militaries, and the recovery of women's past military history became increasingly important to justify such service in national ideology. Not until the end of the third season in 1995 did we get a depiction of a woman warrior with equivalent sword skills and a back story of power, the Immortal Ceirdwyn, in an episode interestingly entitled "Take Back the Night." What counted as a woman warrior in Highlander thus shifted up several notches, and fans and fan writing were altered by her appearance. I think fan writing elaborating the story of Amanda beyond what appeared on television made it possible for Ceirdwyn to exist on Highlander television; but certainly after she appears, fan writing becomes much more daring in its use of women warriors. But probably most important in remediated television representations was the eruption of Xena onto television also in 1995. Xena's deliberate anachronisms and patent fantasy orientation (which, although present in Highlander as well, were there flexed by simultaneous pleasures in low budget mimetic realisms) gave it much greater scope for elaborating historical and imaginary possibilities for women warriors. Remarkably enough, with Xena on television, with popular and academic books circulating histories of women warriors, and with women's increasing participation in the U.S. military, momentarily earlier but nonetheless deep skepticisms that women's roles could have been different in other spacetimes were countered in layers of locals and globals, and such re-representations normalized.
Such normalized or consensus histories are highly valued by re-enactors. As a historical conservatism investments in consensus histories by re-enactors are not intended to promote mimetic realism at the expense of anachronistic blendings of pastpresents, as Handler and Gabler locate the political conservatism of Colonial Williamsburg historians. Low budget mimetic realism is not incompatible with blended pastpresents in most re-enactments. And although "authenticity" is a keyword for many, perhaps most re-enactors, what counts as authenticity is extremely various. Rather what many re-enactors desire as consensus history is something generally agreed upon, precisely to offset the controversies that on list lead to flame wars, and in other public spheres lead to history wars. In many academic or politically progressive communities of practice controversy is the mark of cutting edge research or vibrant political critique and alliance building. (Although of course, there are academics and progressives, as well as other professions and conservatives among re-enactors.) Instead for re-enactors as re-enactors controversies are more generally the "noise" that has to be filtered out to create the momentary stabilities of enactment. Historical novelists often do the same thing (although some controversies might give them alternate narrative possibilities), and so do many historical television documentaries, although not all. Typicality and generalizability are highly valued too as marks of such consensus history, and they are often highly valued in academic communities as well. Normalized histories, consensus histories, authorized histories, normative histories and official histories overlap in layers of locals and globals. The strategies of some social change activists may instead emphasize speculative history, counterhistory, and even counterfactual history.
And all these forms of history can be ecologically interconnected within highly commercialized remediations, intervolved distributed productions and centralized ones, displaying academic capitalism interwoven with other culture industries. For example, Disney's The Discovery Channel takes up a controversial excavation of an unknown woman by the Museum of London in 2000, making a documentary entitled Gladiatrix, which aired in 2002,pointedly narrated by Xena's Lucy Lawless. The documentary was anticipated by a Discover magazine article on the same topic. Penguin Putman recruits anthropology graduate student and U. Penn IT staff person Amy Kroll to write a companion book, which, like the documentary is subtitled: "the true story of history's unknown woman warrior." Commercial education sites post materials on female gladiators. Meanwhile the Museum of London's archeological work itself complexly interweaves both enterprise and heritage cultures. Redevelopment and construction in London has to take its turn through the heritage industries first: "Applications for new building are scrutinised by the Greater London Archaeology and Advisory Service (a department of English Heritage) or by archaeological officers in borough planning departments. If the site is of archaeological interest, the developer will be required to pay for an archaeological evaluation. If archaeological remains are found during the evaluation, it may be necessary to re-plan the development so that they can be preserved in situ — or, failing that, to commission a full-scale excavation. / Evaluations, excavations and other forms of fieldwork are not normally carried out by government agencies but by commercial or semi-commercial archaeological contractors--of which the Museum of London’s Archaeology Service is the largest in Europe." The day after the documentary Gladatrix airs, theWashington Post reports "Rome Puts Modern-Day Gladiators (and Caesars) Under Its Thumb." Gladiator re-enactors in Rome, both male and female, will be required to be licensed and to conform to city rules for authenticity. Re-enactor groups, Roman Centurions Association and the Roman History Group with its Gladiator School, thus gain semi-professional status in a move "to protect Rome's tourist image."

© 2000 Katie King-- draft for book on Feminism and Writing Technologies
DO NOT CITE OR QUOTE WITHOUT PERMISSION! katking@umd.edu

No comments:

Post a Comment