My first inclination this week was to discuss Rita Raley’s
article and our current historical moment in terms of fear and
distrust of the new, especially where machines and technology are concerned.
‘Just because we can, that doesn’t mean we should’ and ‘how do we articulate
and enforce ethics in this new environment’—these omnipresent problems of
techno-paranoia simmer under the surface of Raley’s discussion of
dataveillance, and they certainly exemplify some of the concerns about the dangers
of scientific materialisms that many people read into Frankenstein. [Raley’s mention of
“zombie cookies,” which “respawn” upon deletion and cannot be contained by the
usual methods, also seemed a promising in-road (122).]
I’m more interested, however, in what all of this paranoia
can tell us about the anxiety that surrounds boundaries in a broader sense.
Techno-fear (many thanks to Eddie Izzard for that term) often seems to relate
to an issue of possible boundary-crossing: Raley’s article touches on the lines
between public vs. private, identity vs. behavior; Frankenstein raises questions about the lines between nature and
technology, human tissue and humanity, life and animation, understanding the
laws of nature and violating them. Innovative technologies, and even new
knowledge in general, necessarily introduce the danger of boundaries being
crossed and beloved taxonomies crumbling. Mutable boundaries present a
challenge to static notions of selfhood. They are monstrous. Visible changes in
the ways that we as humans interact with and manipulate our environments shake
up the comforting sense of structure and logic we project onto the world.
This brings us to “The English Apparatus.” Scholes maps out
the discipline of English in terms of discrete categories and approaches,
according to a number of binary pairs: literature/non-literature;
production/consumption; real world/academy (8-9). Within this matrix, Scholes
argues, some categories enjoy a privileged status over their counterparts, and
the discipline’s typical approach to each varies according to these
assumptions. Scholes prescribes a combination of changes to this approach,
including a restructuring of the categories according to a different hierarchy.
However, he gestures toward something more radically boundary-challenging when
he notes, “seeing these oppositions as problems to be resolved, rather than as
an unassailable assumption, is a step in the direction of a new practice” (10).
Certainly now, thirty years after this was published, many scholars have
trodden heavily over the boundaries Scholes discusses here, but while a
recognition of the textuality of non-literary works seems now to be a
commonplace of literary criticism, the language of “non-canonical” and “secondary materials”
still pervades the discourse. (And, as Desiree pointed out during our first class, people still hesitate over where to shelve Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands.)
To bring Scholes’ binaries into dialogue with Raley’s
article, it might be an interesting thought exercise to try to work out where,
in the matrix of consumption/production/interpretation, we might position all
those petabytes of dataveillance. Surely that’s a text. In this model, we are
neither true producers nor consumers; we are reduced to nothing but text. We
are the consumed. And the datavore is, naturally, a monster of our own creation.
Your post was very interesting, and I like the concept of the datavore and the idea of dataveillance as creating endless amounts of text/info about people. I've often thought about the massive amounts of information and text that we generate via the internet. How might this information, read as a text, be utilized in the future? Obviously one of the big setbacks of studying literature from antiquity is that we simply lack the information to contextualize it, or that we have information about the text but we lack the text itself. But what might happen when this problem is reversed, and we have too much information and texts instead of not enough? What might literary criticism look like in an era in which critics are overwhelmed with texts and information?: not only do you have access to the final edition of the text, but also every single draft of the text and the Starbucks receipts to every single coffee the author ordered while working on the text? Is there ever a point at which we have too many texts? What would this crisis even look like?
ReplyDeleteOh, I love this! You are so right. We ARE the consumed; we are texts. Still more fascinating, and reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster, we are aware of our own production/consumption by way of our "data doubles," and this knowledge doubles back in our anxious attempt to grasp agency through narcissistic engagement with our own data. See the iphone's increasing ability to track us, and our purchasing of apps that will break down and collect this data for our delectation. Or see facebook and the untagging/editing of photos, or the ritual practice of self googling, in which we seek a voyeurs'-eye-view upon the experience of being voyeurs of our own lives. Whew!
ReplyDeleteI also love the idea that you elaborate (partially) up top: to read Frankenstein as a moment in the history of technology is one of my absolute favorites, especially in light of how it suggests Frankenstein's (female) author is one of the first (or the first, if you believe certain marxist critics of SF) science fiction authors.