Author Archives: Cati Kalinoski

Cati Kalinoski

Paul Starr’s review of Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, he mentions the possibility of a “for-profit-city.” Here, the city is run by a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, and the citizens are relentlessly monitored with the eventual goal to “obviously over time track them through things like beacons and location services as well as their browsing activity” (Emphasis mine). Yet, Starr reiterates that Zuboff uses this example not to display totalitarianism, which implies violence into conformity, but to highlight “instrumentalism.” This instrumentalism is an outgrowth of Brian Edwards’ world that we are living in now: “That Twitter would become the preferred venue for someone in the position of the most powerful individual in the world will be after all important. That the selfie is a globally ubiquitous form of representation is crucial.”

While Starr via Zuboff and Edwards warn us of the dangers of the digital, Poster and the Critical Art Ensemble give us ways to wield the power of these tools. Poster engages with the Netizen, a citizen of the web that emerges when both human and citizenship rights fail us. Poster stresses the possibilities of the internet’s non-analog methods where “vast stores of information” become accessible and editable “in digital form, may also be altered in its reception and retransmitted” (78). Therefore, plagiarism and repetition become standard but also, as Poster highlights, a political one. Critical Arts Ensemble gives us a glimpse into recombinant theater through the use of information and communication technology (ICT). Their piece Flesh Machine as described integrates ICT and biotechnology. They emphasize their performance as not just theater but as an “information organizer.” I caution both writers to lean too far into the digital, the consistent production of information with seemingly no end. CAE even emphasizes that they were teaching computer literacy in their presentations, and that “computer literacy translates perfectly into bioliteracy since it is just another form of informatics/cybernetics” (164). As we learn to think more like computers, perhaps the question should be asked as to whether computers are the right method by which to process information. In other words, computers work in aggregates and data processing but rarely ask us to sit with the information in a personal way. Who do we stand to lose in these aggregates, and historically who have been left out or cut out of these systems? What happens if we refocus our politics from profit to thoughtful production? If we think of all systems from cybernetics to human relations as political, I urge a reintegration of care and thought in the production.

The creation of the image is an attempt at the creation of movement. One can see this in contemporary political marketing of causes. Take the example of the pro-life poster created and showcased by protesters that displays the remains of a first trimester abortion (please be aware if you follow the link to the article there is graphic content) in Chicago in 2018: remnants of fetuses were scattered in a circle alongside coins that provided size reference. The images were meant to shock and provoke, and were described as “disturbing and violence.” While there were reports arguments and the protesters wore GoPro cameras presumably in case of an incident, the protest was described as “peaceful.” The “intolerable image,” to use Ranciére’s term, provided no rush to response as intended (and anticipated) by the organizers. As he goes on to point out, while an image may be “difficult to tolerate” it subsequently failed to succeed in prompting us to struggle against it” (86). Art, then, fails to create the movement that it was created to spur, so what, then, is the purpose of art? Ranciére attempts to liberate art from the constraint of potential action and instead posits that “The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently, a new landscape of the possible. But they do so on the condition that their meaning or effect is not anticipated” (103). Yet, Azoulay see a different kind of potential in the image (specifically the photographic image) in its naturalization of all subjects in its citizenry, but in it citizenry creates its own demands. The kinds of violent images seen in the pro-life protest are an example of “horror” photography that Azoulay speaks to which warrants its own repetition:

“The concept of “insensitivity,” which a number of critics employ today, participates in the acceleration of the horror. If we are not to be reconciled with death, so as not to be insensitive to it, the photo must be more and more shocking each time. As if horror itself were not enough, it is called upon to assumed a new form each time” (155-156).

Within this endless consumption, we fall into the same paralyzation that Ranciére speaks to: the intolerable image that becomes a pitfall to resistive action. Azoulay adds that this isn’t a simple cause and effect pattern, but is, in fact, a cycle that citizens repeat, as “photography exposed the performative content of his [Agassiz’s] claim and documented the cyclic manner in which it produced the required results [proof the inferiority of the photographed]” (173).

Looking to Beltrán, then, we have presented to us a particularly grounded route of liberation through the image. Within the proliferation of self-made images that you subject others to, one is able to self-realize as well as shape politics. Taking the lessons of Ranciére and Azoulay, Beltrán shows the ability to create new words for DREAMers within the social media image which reverts the “acceleration of horror” into an “acceleration of humanity” in the new worlds created.  The online image – mostly characterized by an attitude of regulation through algorithms and government surveillance – then creates the world and provides steps for action whose force was shown in the political work created. The image, then, is extended as not only a spur for action but is action itself, and therefore creates new political possibilities.

Differences in Political Action Between Arendt and Butler

This weeks readings focused around action and the role of the performative in the political sphere. Arendt focuses on the polis as a site of action, which is an independent change in the political sphere. For Arendt’s conception of politics, I took it to be understood that real possibilities of change were possible only within the realm of politics that already exist. I see Butler as disagreeing, saying that the edges of the political realm inform and thus redefine through their performative actions the definitions of the political and the non political, the human and the nonhuman, and the parameters of the right to have rights. Thus, Butler rightfully notes that Arendt’s conceptualizations fall into the categorizing traps such as the masculine public versus feminine private spheres while also defining political action within those confines. Butler, then, in expanding the definition to include those on the margins and those who perform often outside of those categorizations or ascribe to those categorizations at great cost, is able to see action in a broader view in the assembly. Assembly in Butler’s view redefines these categories, making new political realities for subjects possible towards a similar goal of Arendt of equality among “humans”.