iMedia

The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials

Sarah Kember

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137374844
• eBook ISBN: 9781137374851
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What can queer feminist writing strategies such as parody and irony do to outsmart the sexism of smart objects, environments and materials and open out the new dialecticism of structure and scale, critique and creativity?Drawing on science and technology studies and feminist theory, this book examines the gendering of current and future media technologies such as smart phones, Google glass, robot nurses, tablets and face recognition. Kember argues that there is a tendency to affirm and celebrate the existence of smart and often sexist objects, environments and materials in themselves; to elide writing and other forms of mediation; and to engage in disembodied knowledge practices. Disembodied knowledge practices tend towards a scientism that currently includes physics envy and are also masculinist. Where there is some degree of convergence between masculinist and feminist thinking about objects, environments and materials, there is also divergence, conflict and the possibleopening towards a politics of imedia.Presenting a lively manifesto for refiguring imedia, this book forms an often neglected gender critique of developments in smart technologies and will be essential reading for scholars in Communication Studies, Cultural and Media, Science and Technology and Feminism.

1

introduction: Objects, Environments and Materials

Abstract: The imedia industry is making up stories about the world that theorists of imedia (or what is left of what Jodi Dean refers to as the ‘academic and typing left’ [2009: 4]) are in danger of being complicit with. How so? I argue that there is currently too much emphasis on what is, or is to come and on the failure or irrelevance of critique as something negative, uncreative and unworldly. In place of critique, there is a tendency to affirm and celebrate the existence of objects, environments and materials in themselves; to elide writing and other forms of mediation and to engage in disembodied knowledge practices. Disembodied knowledge practices tend toward both scientism (including physics envy) and masculinism. It transpires that there is no ‘we’ in t(he)ory¹. Where there is some degree of convergence, some compatibility between masculinist and feminist thinking about objects, environments and materials, there is also divergence, conflict and the possible opening toward a politics of imedia. For me, this possibility hinges on the antagonism between a Harmanesque speculative realism and Harawayesque speculative fabulation/fiction/feminism and also on the non-dialectical relation of structure and scale, objects and relations, epistemology and ontology (2010; 2011).

Keywords: masculinism; materiality; materials; object oriented ontology; scientism; sf; speculative realism

Kember, Sarah. iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, Environments and Smart Materials. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137374851.0003.

What’s the story – or, when is a list not not a story?

smartphone, smart watch, smart bra, translucent glass, driverless car, drone, robot, avatar, algorithm, database, data, data mining, BIG data, augmented reality mirror, smart toilet, speech recognition technology, face recognition technology, sensor, actuator, networked distributed intelligent computing, artificial intelligence, ambient intelligence, ambient media, infrastructure, smart environments, autonomous weapons, Willow Glass,^TM Gorilla Glass, smart home, smart city, Siri, Google Glass (RIP), A Day Made of Glass, hologram, motion detector ...

Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. You head to the kitchen for breakfast and the translucent news display follows, as a projected hologram hovering just in front of you, using motion detection, as you walk down the hallway. You grab a mug of coffee and a fresh pastry, cooked to perfection in your humidity-controlled oven – and skim new emails on a holographic ‘tablet’ projected in front of you. Your central computer system suggests a list of chores your house-keeping robots should tackle today, all of which you approve. It further suggests that, since your coffee supply is projected to run out next Wednesday, you consider purchasing a certain larger-size container that it noticed currently on sale online. Alternatively, it offers a few recent reviews of other coffee blends your friends enjoy.

(Schmidt and Cohen 2013: 29)

What is a list? (What) is it of? (What) does it do? To what extent does it describe a world or perform it? Is it a genre, a kind of writing or, as Ian Bogost claims, a ‘flat ontology’ of multi-scalar things that are (2012: 18). For Bogost, writing is at odds with worldliness: the list; the inventory; the catalogue evincing ‘the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favour of worldly detail’ (41). For him, a song or a photograph that lists, does not mediate, and a book of lists, by extension would constitute an ‘ontographic machine’ (52). For me, listing is a literary tradition, one that reaches an apotheosis in Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (2003). In as far as this gestures beyond narrative and representation, it does so, and can only do so deconstructively, from within. Perec’s list does anti-literary work, performing an act of narrative creation and destruction. Bogost’s list pertains to be of the world, to pull off the metaphysical trick of realism without representation. It is not authored, but existing: not language, but things. What about my list? My list is authored and incomplete. It picks up on the current cataloguing of smart objects, environments and materials that, like driverless cars and smart toilets, just are/coming soon. My list intersects an industry story set in the very near future and brought to us on translucent screens. It fills the gaps in a story that relies on sensors, speech-recognition and home ambient intelligence systems whose existence is not yet complete.

The story Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen – the executive chairman and director of ideas at Google – tell, of a day in the work-life of a neutralized citizen, is casually sexed (breezing by the historied, feminine connotations of kitchens, chores, consumption and coffee mornings), while Bogost’s disavowal of writing and storytelling (including his own) is casually sexist, concerned with listing as metaphysical man-talk² and content with the world and all of its inequities just as it is. Bogost tells the story of what happened when his conference website or ‘image toy’ generated a sexist image:

The trouble started when ... one of the symposium speakers, related to me that a (female) colleague had showed the site to her (female) dean – at a women’s college, no less. The image that apparently popped up was a woman in a bunny suit.

(Bogost 2012: 98)

His language is disparaging, dismissive and jokey. His use of parentheses indicates with whom the joke is supposed to be shared. There is some irony in the telling – ‘a sexist “toy” on a website about an ontology conference organized by and featuring 89 per cent white men’ – as well as a grudging account of how he eventually conceded in destroying ‘the gadget’s ontographical power’ by rewriting its algorithm. The alteration ‘solved the problem’ and stayed the trouble, but:

The change also risks excluding a whole category of units from the realm of being! Are women or girls or sexiness to have no ontological place alongside chipmunks, lighthouses and galoshes?

(Bogost 2012: 99)

Women, girls and sexiness alongside chipmunks, lighthouses and galoshes? So much for the neutrality, the in-significance of lists and so much for ‘flat’ ontology.

Objects and OOPs theory

Bogost aspires to be among a loose association of male metaphysicians who expound Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), also known as Object Oriented Philosophy (OOP). What is Object Oriented Philosophy – or as I shall refer to it, OOPs theory – and in what sense is it³ masculine as well as male-dominated? Claiming to relinquish the philosophical dichotomies of naturalism and relativism, realism and idealism, Bogost’s OOPs theory flips the hierarchical binary of epistemology and ontology, humanism and post-humanism on the basis that (paraphrasing Graham Harman paraphrasing Martin Heidegger): ‘objects do not relate merely through human use but through any use, including all relations between one object and any other’ (5). He is more invested in objects as things-in-themselves than in relations that might reduce objects to processes.⁴ All things count as objects and ‘all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally’ (11). Bogost, not unlike Schmidt and Cohen, is precluded from attending to structural inequality by virtue of his emphasis on scale and by his association of politics and critique with solipsistic, humanistic knowledge or epistemology as ‘the sieve of humanity’ (3). While, with some justification, he criticizes the back-door humanism of post-humanist perspectives on ecology (I will return to the human-ist endgames of the anthropocene shortly), he disavows the inevitable anthropomorphism of his own so-called ‘alien’ phenomenology that asks not ‘what does my body know of Photography’ – as Roland Barthes did – but rather ‘what’s it like to be a computer?’ (Barthes 1982: 9; Bogost 2012: 9). In order to answer the question, he turns to the ontography of listing, the fantasy of things that write themselves, and it is here, in his recourse to an i-less mediation replete with objects but devoid of subjects that the absent imedia theorist surfaces as the return of the repressed – the masculine subject of disembodied knowledge. Bogost’s alien phenomenology is both a calling card and a point of departure from Harman’s object-oriented ontology, recognizing, as it does, the inevitable dialectic of object and subject as well as of material and immaterial things and becoming fatally attracted to a ‘what’s it like’ approach to all things at all scales, including, especially, inanimate ‘non-things, properties and symbols’ (23).

Harman is the founding father and principal historiographer of Object Oriented Philosophy. His OOPs theory is an egocentric account of how he came to account for objects ‘in their own right’ (2010: 14). The objects that exist as ethical imperatives, ‘commanding one another by way of the reality of their forms,’ are the apples of his unseen, all-seeing I (21). Remaining distinct from them and enchanted by them, he is free to implicate himself in a history of great object oriented philosophers. It is to the philosophers, rather than their ethical objects that he relates. It is to them that he holds himself accountable, above any other animate or inanimate things. Like Haraway, he draws on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of ‘actual entities’ (that are relational, processual), but unlike her, he does so without reference to Michel Foucault’s critique of Enlightenment epistemology or to structures of power/knowledge that she figures as hierarchical, highly differentiated relations between knowing subjects and co-constitutive objects. Where Haraway draws an epistem-ontology from the diffraction of Whitehead and Foucault,⁵ Harman pursues an ontology of entities that affect other entities, inspired by Whitehead’s physics-inspired metaphysics (32). He wants to speak – although he does not – of ‘wood itself,’ not wood as a symbol, metaphor, trope or literary figure. The linguistic, anti-realist turn against which he turns prevented philosophers from accessing inanimate worlds. These were left to the physicists, but now, Harman declares, it’s time to get them back:

When rocks collide with wood, when fire melts glass, when cosmic rays cause protons to disintegrate, we are asked to leave all of this to the physicists alone. Philosophy has gradually renounced its claim to have anything to do with the world itself. Fixated on the perilous leap between subject and object, it tells us nothing about the chasm that separates tree from root or ligament from bone. Forfeiting all comment on the realm of objects, it sets itself up as a master of a single gap between self and world ...

(Harman 2010: 94)

Harman’s dismissal of a philosophy that has been minding the wrong gap – the epistemological, not the ontological gap – is necessarily a counter-reactionary one. By aligning deconstruction with anti-realism, he obliges himself, as a realist, to elide it, to decry it as dogma and to reinforce the very dialectic – of ideal/real, self/world – that his philosophy cannot effectively critique. His philosophy comes to be an OOPs theory not only by means of his own all-too-present absence as a philosophical subject, but in the elision of critique in favor of the endless circularity of philosophical in-action and counter-reaction. Even internally, within the trade-off between object, and relations oriented ontologies (Whitehead is ultimately too relational for Harman), there is only an oscillation between poles – such as things and processes – and nowhere near enough momentum to reach out to the world that this philosophy claims to reach out to, no attempt to speak of wood itself rather than how philosophy might be reoriented to doing so.

Environments as ‘derangements of scale’⁶

The fetishization of objects serves to align markets and metaphysics. It makes imedia OOPs theory compatible, if not necessarily complicit with, industry goals oriented to novelty and innovation – iPhonesⁿ – rather than invention and intervention. Intervention is precluded in the shift from knowledge to things, and environments of things-in-themselves. Environments of imedia incorporate and exceed human subjects, operating,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Preface: A Tale of Smoke and Mirrors or Where is the i in iMedia?
• 1  introduction: Objects, Environments and Materials
• 2  iMedia Manifesto Part I: Remember Cinderella: Glass as a Fantasy Figure of Feminine and Feminized Labor
• 3  Ubiquitous Women: Everywhere, Everyware and Everywear
• 4  interlude 1: Excerpt from A Day in the Life of Janet Smart
• 5  iMedia Manifesto Part II: Tell a Her Story: On Writing as Queer Feminist Praxis
• 6  interlude 2: Excerpt from A Day in the Life of Janet Smart
• 7  Conclusion: iMedia Otherwise
• Bibliography
• Index