Do I have to talk to you through that thing?”
This rather profound question was directed at me by my wife this weekend, whilst I was compiling notes for my blog. The “thing” she refers to is my laptop, a technological object that nowadays forms part of my “embodiment”. To fill you in on the domestic scene, it was Saturday morning, mid November. My wife commutes to work five days a week whilst I now work from home. Since I use my laptop for both work and study, it has become an object that is very attached to me daily. My wife hates technology and holds a very functional standpoint to its application. But now it was the weekend and we were sat in the same room together, here was a perfect situation for a domestic chat. She saw an ideal opportunity to discuss Christmas and a family party. However, what now appears to be my natural state of embodiment, she found me with my head already buried in my laptop.
The relevance to digital culture continued to develop with the conversation. When challenged to make a contribution to my ideas of menus, wine, activities, etc. I did have brief discussion with my wine – but then proceeded to surf the web for 20 minutes looking at food and wine sites. Conclusion – is all my knowledge now situated in online environments? Can I no longer function in life without referring to digital sources of information? Or worse, would my poor wife find it easier to Twitter me or respond to my blog???
This quote seems to help explain my situation –
“If embodiment is an existential condition in which the body is the subjective source or intersubjective ground of experience, then studies under the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily being-in-the-world.”
Thomas Csordas in Perspectives on Embodiment
by Weiss, G. and Haber, H., (eds.). Routledge; March, 1999 p. 143
This little domestic scene of mine occurred whilst I tried to summarise my understanding of situated knowledge, embodiment and cyborg metaphors. Haraway and Hayes can only be absorbed within my own situation. I can identify situated knowledge as knowledge specific to a particular situation. Some methods of generating knowledge, such as trial and error, or experiential learning tend to create highly situational knowledge. The knowledge prior to any experience means that there are certain “assumptions” that one takes for granted. In most realistic cases, it is not possible to have a comprehensive understanding, therefore we have to accept the fact that our knowledge is always incomplete and partial. Most real problems have to be solved by taking advantage of a partial understanding of the problem context and problem data.
Situated knowledge can be a challenege to the truth claims of disembodied, detached observation, and instead, advocate a more located, partial and embodied understanding. For Haraway this view rejects a masterful, all-seeing gaze from a distant vantage point, blind to its own specificity and location in its claims for objective, all-seeing authority. Situated knowledge depends on its dislocation and distance not only from what is being observed, but also from where such observation is located. By recognizing that all knowledge is partial and located, attempts to situate knowledge makes partiality and location an explicit and critical focus for both researchers and the subjects of their research. Situated knowledge seeks to disrupt the authority and impartiality that is empowered, in part, by denying its own situation. It does so by locating, and often embodying, the production of knowledge in terms of proximity rather than distance and reflexivity rather than detachment.
I found the two core texts by Hayles and Shields more accessible to read than Week 8 readings (although I can see the course needed to challenge us to discover Haraway for ourselves before offering us an analysis of her.) Block 3’s study of Cyborg metaphors has certainly offered some thought provoking analysis of the present and the future. It has taken me sometime to identify the relevance of Haraway and Hayles to e-learning, but now I believe I have learned rather than take everything literally, I analyse the relevance to human interaction with technology. So here, in Week 9 of the course, I find myself pausing to evaluate my own domestic social and mechanical behaviour. Have I morphed into a cyborg, with the ‘informatics of domination’ shaping how my own body – especially my mind – is being modified with technology? I can relate my personal situation – and the contrasting position of my wife – to Hayles’ text.
I regard the posthuman, like the ‘human’, as a historically specific and contingent term rather than a stable ontology. Whereas the ‘human’ has since the Enlightenment been associated with rationality, free will, autonomy and a celebration of consciousness as the seat of identity, the posthuman in its more nefarious forms is construed as an informational pattern that happens to be instantiated in a biological substrate.
Hayles 2006, p160
We propose that there are two-way or reciprocal relationships between neural events and conscious activity. An attractive feature of this proposal is that it allows consciousness to be a causally efficacious participant in the cycles of operation constituting the agent’s life…… We also propose that the processes crucial for
consciousness cut across the brain–body–world divisions rather than being located simply in the head.
To sum up these complex interactions between means and metaphor, I offer in My Mother Was a Computer (2005) the following formulation, which has become central for me in understanding the contemporary situation as well as historical precedents: ‘What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together.’
Hayles 2006, p164
What I find more disturbing and confusing is this Haraway quote from the Shields text.
Women-headed households, serial monogamy . . . home-based business
reinforced (simulated nuclear family, intense domestic violence). (Haraway,
1990: 170)
Quoteed in Shields 2006, p212
As I see it, the evolution of society has created masculine and feminine positions. The relevance of Haraway is to utilise our understanding of these positions to analyse how society evolves with technology. It is not the gender perspectives that will necessary be eroded through time, but the roles and functions of gender may change. In my opinion, technology will enable greater gender equality and a decline in sexual division of labour. However, I feel I am only able to make such a proclamation through my personal situated learning – how I perceive life, my situation and the changes that are occurring around me.
My gender may be less relevant, but am I posthuman now? Am I a PC?
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#1 by Silvana on November 23rd, 2009
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Hi Andy,
It is the same in my household except I am the one who works mainly from home. My husband feels the same way about computers as your wife and gets annoyed when I am at my pc too long.
I think a large amount of my knowledge is situated online. I think that people are more or less connected to their computers/the web based on their needs and circumstances. And this can be differential within families. (interesting that this aspect has not appeared in any of the literature we have read so far.) I couldn’t have started my own business back in 1997 without the internet – for marketing myself – both in the UK and the USA. So it has been an important feature of my life since then. And I have become more and more proficient with computers and the web.
My husband’s work started to use computers later and in a more limited way. So his needs for computers has been less and while over the years he has started to use them, he does not use them to the extent that I do. And he has a very utilitarian use for them whereas I like to play and explore what I can do. And sometimes he gets annoyed when I ‘work’ too much when I am really playing and enjoying what I am doing.
But I am in danger of becoming a pc and he keeps me grounded in RL.