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Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission
Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage
By Deborah M. Withers Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Deborah Withers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-352-5
CHAPTER 1
Feminism's Already-There?
This book is concerned with feminism's already-there and explores how these resources can be accessed, preserved and cared for through practices of selection, organisation and transmission. As stated in the introduction, the already-there is our key concept that will orient thinking actions as we move through the book. The already-there enables us to think through and account for the role exteriorised, technical memory resources perform in the formation of knowledge, identities and culture. Considering feminism's already-there enables us to respond to feminism as an epistemic, cultural and political field defined by generations yet simultaneously inattentive to the technical processes through which memory resources are transmitted across generations. It is these processes that must be thought through, and attendant practices developed, as we elaborate a feminist politics of transmission.
How then are we to recognise the already-there? The already-there operates as a technical compost, an arena of composition and decomposition from which ideas, practices, knowledges and techniques emerge and diverge through dynamic processes of transformation, becoming, disintegration and solidification. The already-there is a stratified constellation of technical memory matter, composed of resources that shape political and cultural imaginaries. This stratification should not be thought of merely as across, but also in terms of depth, height, scale, extensiveness and duration. Entities within the already-there are capable of moving in different directions, and can sometimes move through materials such as concrete, bodies and metal. Sometimes what is already-there makes material vibrate or change consistency or temperature corresponding to the terms of its operability. Its forms may change and content migrate, accruing or shedding textures in the process. To access what is already-there is to operationalise it, to put it into use and action. Such activations cannot be valued as inherently positive or negative — all kinds of ideas and actions can be mobilised from within the already-there. The already-there includes material artifacts such as books, monuments, pamphlets, paintings, photographs, film and music. The already-there can also be embodied and gestural, comprising techniques that are kept alive deliberately or by chance — contingency, accidents and planning shape its existence, and relational access to it.
The already-there is spatial, temporal, fibrous, liquid, resonant, electronic, mechanical, inscribed, geophysical, deep, aquatic, shallow, mineral, metal, wooden, computational, inauthentic, modifying and plastic. In varied forms it transmits, forgets and disintegrates, betraying resilience and vulnerability. There are cultural, economic and governmental strategies that aim to control what is already-there and monitor the effects of encounters that emerge from within it. There are always contingencies at play in its operation, and therefore the possibility of transformation as well as reaction to its contents. The mnemonic technical organs that compose the already-there are collected and sometimes catalogued for ease of reference and coherency, but they can equally be dispersed, hidden or displaced and not form part of any recognisable story or collection. Such 'unofficial' annals of the already-there are not necessarily lost forever — they can be reclaimed by individuals, communities, institutions and governments who may care enough to reinvigorate access to them at a historical time amenable to their articulation. Furthermore, such dynamics of disappearance and reappearance cannot always be anticipated in advance, or always appear as the result of intentional reclamation.
Even as we acknowledge the pliable contingency of the already-there, what we find already-there can be rigid, established and organised in deliberate ways. It is not an amorphous mass that is indeterminable; it is technical although it may seem intangible. The already-there composes the ground through which actions, social lives, relationships and identities emerge across different historical contexts; it is the locus from which transgenerational responsibility is supported and practiced. What is already-there acts as the very condition for thinking itself: exteriorised technical inscriptions that support and compose the movement of thought, resources from which ideas, lives, politics, desire and culture are woven. Yet what is already-there is not straightforwardly cumulative. It does not automatically become richer as traditions are created, recorded or documented; it belies progression and is oriented in the everywhere. Such a deep archive may exist in the already-there in terms of material volume, as years pass and collections swell — but it may not always be accessible, either in content or in form. What emerges through the already-there in one historical moment may disappear in another. This may be for a variety of reasons including active suppression, accident, technological obsolescence or neglect. The already-there functions across varied layers of access conditioned by technical systems that filter what can be already-there; by the cultural, economic and political context in which what is already-there is valued, dismissed, represented, interpreted, modified or policed; and finally by people struggling to compose themselves within the already-there's cavernous infinitude. Residing within the already-there's compositional role, shaping social worlds and imaginations, is to elaborate a politics of tradition and heritage, and 'the theme of "heritage" ... cannot be thought apart from an already-there.'
Elaborating a Politics of Tradition and Heritage in Digital Culture
There has been widespread debate as to whether 'the digital' marks a significant historical rupture or substantial reorganisation of technical and symbolic life. For Stiegler, the appearance of the internet, and subsequent widespread, 'connective' digitisation, amounts to an undeniable 'mutation ... unified by the TCP-IP protocol [that] has manifestly changed the organizational set up of the program industries. And there is no doubt that this transformation of industrial technology, via the digital, renders new perspectives conceivable.' Furthermore, there are significant political stakes in these transformations. He writes:
With the advent of very advanced control technologies emerging from digitalization, and converging in a computational system of globally integrated production and consumption, new cultural, editing and programming industries appeared. What is new is that they are technologically linked by universal digital equivalence (the binary system) to telecommunications systems and to computers. [This] ... constitutes the hyper-industrial epoch strictly speaking, dominated by the categorization of hyper-segmented 'targets' ('surgically' precise marketing organizing consumption) and by functioning in real time (production) through lean production and just in time (logistics). ... The upheavals induced by digitalization [are] often compared to a 'third industrial revolution' (also called the 'information society' or, more recently, the 'knowledge society'— the digital system permitting, on the side of industrial conception, the systematic mobilization of all knowledge in the service of innovation).
For Stiegler, the hyper-industrial synchronisation of diverse memory communities into precise, targeted constituents of consumption is symptomatic of a very serious and extensive crisis. At an everyday level it produces banal homogeneity, 'the de-composition of the I and the we (or the collapse of the I and the we),' which in turn results in widespread pseudo-individualism and 'herdish' behaviour. For Stiegler, we are currently embroiled in nothing less than a 'war without rules,' resulting in the 'alienation of desire and of affects, where the weaponry is organized by marketing.' The hyper-industrial digital, manipulated by the programming industries, has reorganised 'epigenetic memory of individual experience, which becomes transmissible through technical objects,' the tertiary retentions (i.e., exteriorised mnemo-technical resources such as books, films and websites) that 'condition [the] bond between I and the we.' In the context of this book, we could say that such transformations have qualitatively altered the access to the already-there, and its operating capacities, rendering them anticipatory and synchronised.
The hyper-industrial digital is also marked by a profound dis-adjustment in the compositional grafting of human and technics, amplifying the 'fragility ... of those who are born to prostheticity.' As technologies acquire increasing computational sophistication, they require less technical skill and knowledge on behalf of the human operator to make them work. Increased automatism deprives humanity of technical and social knowledge, as the exteriorised alterity within the human — digital technics, if you like — operate human life in the service of capitalist accumulation. The human, as composed technical being, is pulled out of place and time, continually adapting to accelerating technological innovations that render them perpetually de-skilled and disoriented. If all this sounds rather bleak and deterministic, it is important to remember that Stiegler's diagnosis of the contemporary technical condition is a means to elaborate a pharmacological politics — that is, a political programme attentive to the deeply poisonous aspects of digital technics and their curative potential.
Long-Circuits and Short-Circuits
Transmission and generational exchange are central themes in Stiegler's diagnosis of the problems created by the 'extensive, more intensive and more complex' forms of calculation that define the hyper-industrial digital environment. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010) Stiegler argues that 'psychotechnological' devices such as mobile phones, video games and the internet, as well as older media forms such as television, have 'ravaged the mental and physical health of the entire population,' shortening capacities for attention. For Stiegler, a robust and healthy population is one capable of paying sustained attention to an object or practice (the ability to 'take care' of knowledge), thus keeping techniques and knowledge (heritage and tradition) alive through practices of exchange. Such practices are demonstrative of generational responsibility, a process of caring for the action of transmission. Psychotechnologies, on the other hand, are compromising collective and individual capacities for care by short-circuiting networks of inheritance across generations, eroding basic critical faculties and social knowledge. Deprivation of such skills, Stiegler writes, evacuates 'the responsibility that defines human existence, [and] also short-circuits the psychic links between the generations. ... Psychopower destroys the transmission and education of philia, the intimate connection among the generations.'
The question of heritage and transmission as 'the intimate connection among the generations,' then, becomes extremely political within a digital environment where powers of circuitry are radically truncated. Here is a world where short-term satisfaction not only is the norm but also operates as the technical infrastructure composing reality. To challenge this viewpoint we might agree with Peter Gratton, who argues that neither 'the culture industry nor its consumers are as homogeneous as Stiegler suggests.' Gratton also contends that Stiegler, ironically, excludes the voices of younger generations in Taking Care and speaks in their place, therefore undermining his arguments about generational exchange and responsibility. Additionally, and this will be key as we seek to elaborate a politics of transmission that can respond to the challenge of generational exchange and responsibility within feminism, there is the problem that Stiegler offers us a general critique. He does not do enough to differentiate how knowledge is transmitted among different social groups and communities before he writes of their erosion by the 'psycho technical apparatus that controls attention.' Stiegler offers a very persuasive general theory of how a politics of generational transmission can be a serious political question, but he does not pay enough attention to how heritage and knowledge are always already differentiated across communities and identities (be they spatial, temporal, gendered, ethnic, of interest, age or class). It is important to emphasise that not everyone accesses the already-there in the same way. Furthermore, everyone's already-there is different, even if the threat posed by hyper-industrial synchronisation — the synchronisation of the already-there — is palpable.
There are brief moments when Stiegler acknowledges the limitations of his general approach. In Acting Out he writes, 'These memories I share with others — more or less. ... There are conflicts over sharing, over heritage. There are localizations in the capacities for appropriating the preindividual potential that open common scenes of individuation forming precisely the we.' Yet such a claim is rare within Stiegler's oeuvre, which remains largely localised within scenes common to the particular demographic he inhabits. This is reflected when he writes about the loss of ethnic particularities connected to the rapid evolution of the technical system, discussed at length in Technics and Time, 2, in which he is arguably talking about the loss of a particular heritage, and a particular kind of world — the ethnic communities, knowledge and heritage of the white, majoritarian Western man. Moreover, Sophie Fuggle points out that the kinds of generational transmission Stiegler favours in Taking Care of the Youth and Generations are those distributed within the hierarchical structures of the (presumably heterosexual) family. It is then familial structures, governed by an authoritative, deferential patriarchal logic, that Stiegler describes as breaking down in the face of emergent psychotechnological attention capture.
These are predictable feminist critiques to make of a writer who makes no attempt whatsoever to engage in feminist political thought across his significant corpus of writing. Yet they are important criticisms because Stiegler associates tradition, or the loss of it, within a limited compass. The challenge he opens up, but arguably does not fully realise, is to think tradition and generational transmission without necessary recourse to, or recuperation by, a single idea of tradition situated within the general project. We cannot assume that the traditions meant for us are always those we immediately inherit. There are always Other traditions, as feminist, black, queer and anti-colonial struggles indicate, and these traditions help us to think differently, know differently and act differently in the world — they open up other spatial and temporal orientations, and harbour potential to communicate alternative forms of historical experience. Such traditions often emerge après-coup (after the fact), as 'untimely,' reinserted materials of the already-there, because there is usually not enough technical infrastructure to secure their consistent transmission across time, spaces and communities of practice wherein traditions co-evolve with and through technics.
It is also possible to read an assumption within Stielger's thought that the transmission of knowledge across generations was once whole but is now dangerously fragmented. Yet such a claim does not apply easily to alternative traditions such as feminism. Within feminist worlds there has never been a continual transmission of knowledge across generations. There have always been breakdowns in the circuits, dispersal, disappearance, destruction and loss due to the peripheral nature of these traditions, and the lack of technical support for the transmission of feminist cultural heritages. Significantly, at historical moments when continuity and security is sought after within feminism, it is often articulated in generational terms. Furthermore, establishing repositories and circuits where feminism's already-there can be transmitted, such as libraries, archives and websites, is central to the elaboration of feminist worlds. I use the term 'feminist worlds' here to gesture towards the power of feminism to enact different political imaginaries through the use of creative strategies that articulate claims, actions and ways of living that can place women's lives, and political concerns, at the centre; it is to engender further 'respect for feminism as a maker of community.' Feminist worlds cannot be wholly assimilated to any dominant tradition, even though normative aspects do, of course, appear within feminism, often in the form of the discourse of constitutional reform, the fight for equality or incorporated rhetorics of 'choice' and 'empowerment' that Rosalind Gill names as the 'postfeminist sensibility.' I want to assert throughout this work that feminist worlds establish their own trajectories, forms of belonging, identity, relationality and desire, as well as specific modes of transmission, that are for the most part unrecognisable by the terms laid out by any general idea of tradition. The aim of this book is to elaborate tools so that recognitions of feminist traditions can become possible, and emergent forms of knowledge reclaimed, through carving out orientations within feminism's already-there.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission by Deborah M. Withers. Copyright © 2015 Deborah Withers. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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