Ontotheology of the Democracy of Objects

Don’t ask: what must Mind be like in order for the world to appear as it does? Ask: what must objects be like in order for our engagement with the world to make sense?


The Other Journal - Church and Postmodernism

Workers Defense Project

For the next month I will writing a series of posts documenting and critically analyzing the works of the Workers Defense Project; here's an intro. This group provides a backbone to an otherwise vulnerable, and thus expendable workforce in Austin, as well as the state of Texas at large. The WDP adopts a hybrid approach, engaging in both advocacy and the provision of services.

 Some of the past and current activities the WDP has engaged in include providing legal services (either providing counsel in individual compensation cases or mobilizing and organizing for class action lawsuits), vocational training (from teaching basic job skills to providing ESL courses for free to new immigrants), labor movement and union organization, mobilization and advocacy (helping to create a network of interested parties to raise issue awareness surrounding work conditions, business malpractice, inequality in compensation and/or benefits, discrimination, and corporate irresponsibility), lobbying efforts at the local, county and state level, information and knowledge production documenting the conditions of the status quo, and both traditional and novel acts of protest (from picketing to rallies and even flash mobs).

 The WDP offers a promising object of research for communication studies scholars for reasons three-fold:

 1) Timing: Out of the historical and material conditions of our present moment have emerged new publics specifically targeting the totality of the economic system. While labor organizations have always existed the decreased participation rate among workers has paralleled but also exceeded the rate of decline in manufacturing and production based jobs. Labor ought to be of utmost interest for communication studies scholars because discourses are derived from and in our media saturated environment often become part of the material conditions of society itself.
 2) Communicative Labor: Investigating the intersections of labor and communication opens up the constitutive grounds upon which both communication and labor are possible. As the determining principle of society, the transformations in material conditions of labor demonstrate the importance of placing specific communicative acts, structures and situations firmly within their ideological and historical contexts. The flesh and blood relations of bondage, alienation and exploitation determine the coordinates and limits of who can speak, the conditions of possibility for varying means of communication and the currency of different discourses in relation to larger structures of knowledge production. All too often one’s material location is conflated with the worth or value of their discourse when seen under the guise of economic rationality; but the question of whose voice matters is being reopened in response to three simultaneous trends; the rise of flexible labor, the increasing resonance and intensity of the productive yet disenfranchised multitude and the proliferation of increasingly interconnected forms of new media. Understanding communication as an immaterial yet concrete form of labor has the potential to inaugurate new paradigms for thinking about the stuff of what social movements are doing; and how social movements might appeal to potential participants beyond means of guilt, despair or the politics of pity.
 3) Contradiction: The Worker’s Defense Project is a local organization but upon reflection quickly realized its tactics, goals and ends could not be limited to its immediate environment. While Austin does have a sizeable labor force being a metropolitan area, its economic conditions are relatively well off in comparison to many parts of the nation and drastically so in relation to the global south. Yet at the same time Austin’s cultural dispositions make it relatively open, encouraging even, to movements surrounding economic justice. Yet at the same time that Austin is a politically motivated city and at the heart of Texas politics the legislators under the dome are for most part unreceptive to its demands. Yet even if actions locally or on a state level were taken, complicity in the totality of the system is all but impossible to escape. Even if meaningful reforms were enacted it would simply represent a paving over of a still fundamentally unfair system; yet this should not lead to despair but a continual sense of urgency for action at all potential points of power traversal.

Eternally Amusing

Rumi or Sue Me

The nafs is a sea of calm until it roars. The nafs is a Hell that radiates little heat. The nafs is an ankle-deep river you drown in. Better to be ignorant of worldly concerns, better to be mad and flee from self-interest, better to drink poison and spill the water of life, better to revile those who praise you, and lend both the capital and the interest to the poor, forgo safety and make a home in danger. Sacrifice your reputation and become notorious. I have tried caution and forethought; from now on I will make myself mad.

-Rumi


The nafs is to be understood in a similar light as Cartesian ego cogito, the transcendental subject of reason,  or the immature, bounded subject of the Enlightenment. For Rumi the uncanny contradictions of faith in concepts rendered mythical breeds a forgotten and forlorn mood; externalizing self-reflexivity onto the certainty of identity of the self with its conceptual apparatus deflates and depletes being of its creative capacity for poesis.

Yet, the situation isn't completely overdetermined by the drudges of despair; one may always flee from the imposed order of an alien selfhood, take a topsy-turvy turn, deciding without judgment between madness disclosed as melancholy or the mayhem delivered as a melody. A melody completely unknown to the Athenian flute player of Aristotelian teleology, or the Corp of Drums when the sun refused to set on the British Empire and composed of barely beyond boyhood drummers, learning and giving the orders of warfare, where comprehension of the threshold of play, when the drum beat's dance between wooden member and raw hide head ceases to play but becomes an unthought extension of a heart stuck in the violent oscillations of a warrior resonance.

A Surplus of Pathos

Pathos Final Presentation on Prezi

Praxis & Online Politics

Danah Boyd’s 2009 article “The Not So Hidden Politics of Online-Class” analyzes the new divisions that are plaguing the cyber public sphere(s). While great leaps have been made to increase online participation among the disenfranchised groups, this view has lent itself to many who are of the opinion that the problem simply ends there. Boyd writes, “There's a terrible tendency in this country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an advancement as a solution” (Boyd). Her article goes on to stress the fact that while the materials and tools are available for cross-cultural interactions and a flourishing of diverse discourses people simply have not used them in such an ideal fashion. Rather, the stark reality of the situation is that online networks are just as, if not more, insular and interest oriented as the traditional networks that preceded the age of the Internet.

In some ways, Boyd argues, the Internet has even exacerbated certain hierarchies or divisions between groups along multiple axes from class and race to gender and sexual identity. “Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible.” Some of her argument seems directed at people who confuse the relationship between social change and technological change. Rather than espousing a Messianic vision of technological determinism, Boyd sees culture as the driving force behind changes online. While certain forms of oppression have been eroded by the possibilities opened up by the Internet, one should not confuse the direction of causality. Or moreover one ought not conflate correlation with causation. The Internet as a means of production merely represents an aspect of a larger trend that’s persisted since the 1970’s. Power no longer operates in a traditional top down approach. Rather it exists diffusely and on multiple levels. Each aspect of the social is aimed at producing certain forms of subjectivity that are more amenable to reproducing society at large. Power can no longer be located solely within the theoretical narrative of the nation-state, gender, or capital. Instead, each of these forces must cooperate with one another and act within networks.

While many theorists have analyzed this aspect of our contemporary condition of late capitalism, I’m thinking here of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially Commonwealth. I think it’s interesting to read Boyd’s article in relation to this work, because while I admire Boyd’s interest in ensuring that we do not lose focus of the material reality that the Internet is built upon and protects, I think one should also keep in mind the types of new possibilities the Internet is opening up. For example if one were to contend, as I do, that the regime of private property is ultimately the first form of alienation and the largest proximal determining factor than the challenge the Internet wages on traditional modes of thinking could be more powerful than originally imagined. Commonwealth is an attempt to reassert the role the commons play in the modern imaginary and material reality. While it’s easy to see the commons as increasingly sparse and limited as a result of the series of enclosures conducted by modern Capital, it’s also hard to ignore the ways in which they incessantly sprout up. Hardt and Negri write in the Preface, “Innovation in Internet technologies, for example, depends directly on access to common code and information resources as well as the ability to connect and interact with others in unrestricted networks. And more generally, all forms of production in decentralized networks, whether or not computer technologies are involved, demand freedom and access to the common” (x). I think that in certain respects this is true or can be. While social networking sites are still highly stratified according to the typical racial or class based creeds, I think that the Internet networks dedicated to knowledge production or creation are typically more of meritocracies. Often people can conceal their identity and the people on the other end of the computer screen do not care. I think this is especially true for people who are collaborating across seas.

 Boyd’s problem seems to be that Social Networking sites do not facilitate enough conversation beyond pre-established ties. But for the cases where people are collaborating for productive activities it seems that these barriers pose less of a problem. Boyd however warns against the lull of complacency she sees setting in, “While we've made tremendous strides in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened. Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification” (Boyd).

While I agree perhaps the question is that society was not yet ready for the Internet’s potential. Perhaps a realignment of freedom and necessity would elucidate the situation. One cannot simply will into motion an entire new set of rhythms for society to move within. Only once the material aspects of production themselves are altered will people be able to realize their capacity for engagement with the collectivity in a different light. Yet on the other hand, it seems equally true that the process of consciousness-raising cannot occur through outmoded forms of communication. In a mutually transformative relationship I think that the ways the Internet blends consumption with production, communication with practical activity, the physical with the virtual evinces one that a dogmatism of any strain will fail to undue the current blockages of thought. The problems of today will never be fixed in a Cinderella approach to critical theory or activism, but rather only by employing the full force of our productive potentials and acting across multiple registers.

Related articles

• At SXSW, Danah Boyd Says Social Media Makes the World More Fearful (allthingsd.com)
• The digital divide, not what is used to be (ilog-rhetoric.blogspot.com)
• The Internet and Self-Segregation (afitch89.blogspot.com)
• Gregory Nelson. Report on Michael Hardt Lecture (social-epistemology.com)
• Re-revisiting the Story So Far (csmt12.wordpress.com)
• Boyd Takeaway Number 4 (jli330c.blogspot.com)
• SNS - How we interact (kkahlke510.blogspot.com)
• 'Radical transparency'? Danah Boyd: Why we need not to know everything in a networked society (nextlevelofnews.com)