this week's readings:
Olu Oguibe, “Part III: Brave ‘New World’” from The Culture Game (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 149-158 and 169-177.Excerpts.
Anna Munster, "Digitality: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm for Information" from Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England and Dartmouth Press, 2006), 150-177.
Olu Oguibe is incredibly gifted at one incredibly crucial rhetorical maneuver: he offers the reader an opportunity to see that which is normally invisible to him/her. Namely, for white, first-world readers, the reader's own privileges. Those privileges generally form the unexamined (indeed un-stated) assumptions that are the groundwork of commonsensical ideology in late capitalism. Oguibe's ability to force folks to examine those assumptions is not based simply in hearing the audible, articulate voice of Otherness (in this case the otherness of 'African') within the hallowed halls of academia, but also in his poetic knack for helping the reader inhabit the experience of, in this case, the other side of the “digital divide”. Undermining privilege in this way is more significant than “speaking truth to power” or whatever cliché the penny-ante left has come up with this season: it is the first step in destroying capitalist ideology, and is thus of vital importance on constructing a world we can all live and thrive in.
“...(N)ature and its structures and demands still constitute the concrete contours of reality for the majority of humanity...This nature is a reality that manifest itself in the concrete form of hunger and thirst, in the absence of appropriate language, in the desperation of a child gesticulating for drinking water. This nature is not a mere category. This nature is a truth.” (152)
Oguibe here and elsewhere wants to snatch “nature” and “truth” from the jaws of critical postmodernism. He attempts by setting up a dichotomy that alligns the subjects of Underdeveloped nations, who have little access to the technologies of the internet, with “nature” and “truth” as opposed to first-world subjects who he alligns with technologies and relativism. I don't see why he would want to try to preserve the supposed ontological status of “nature” or “truth”. Can anyone explain to me how these are important to his argument? I would point out, first of all, that even Oguibe's grammar of “this nature is a truth” violates the claim that he is trying to make: a truth amongst many means that truth IS a category, and not an ontology, and that truths are relative to one another and to falsehoods. Cultural relativism is thus integral, it seems to me, to understanding the grammar of this sentence.
Oguibe's recommendations for activism and art include:
1.“a combination of cultural and political work, and a negotiable modicum of statutory regulation, is needed to contain the predatory proclivities of the network” (177). Twelve years after this was published, we might be able to reflect critically on the whether such “regulation” has been a good idea. Seems to me that “regulation” has facilitated commodification/ comercialization, and more than anything, contributed to the deprivation that Oguibe aims to combat.
2.“...bring a greater proportion of humanity into the new, global community of the networked” (177). This suggestion is completely on-point, and Oguibe notalbly highlights two important facts: a) that the rural U.S. has yet to reap any substantive benefits from the WWW (although that has changed a bit in the last decade) and b) that addressing the gaps in connectivity must go hand-in-hand with addressing the gaps in basic human needs (food, water, shelter, education, healthcare).
Anna Munster's chapter on “Digitality” claims to pick up where Oguibe's essay leaves off; his suggestions for ethical activism regarding connectivity (above) are the backdrop of her “ethico-aesthetic paradigm for information”.
Munster does an excellent job of introducing us to a wide range of new media artists who use digital mediums to voice critical perspectives regarding information technologies. I am especially intruigued by the sentiment express project by Shilpa Gupta and the flash/web works of Mark Amerika that Munster describes. These projects, and the range of sophisticated theoretical tools that Munster brings to bear on them, are an excellent way to close our investigations this quarter.
What I end up wondering in reading them is whether these projects result in the ethical effects that Oguibe suggests. To me it seems as though these projects are actually best understood in terms not of effect but of affect; these are all artworks that modify the epistemological ground that privilege rests on. Despite Oguibe's claims to the contrary, and his desire to register art/activism in terms of the “real”, I would guess that such epistemological shift is actually Oguibe's biggest strength as well.
Regardless, there is one lasting, daunting question for our class to grapple with: what do we do now? That is, given the critical discourse that we've begun to develop in this course, how do we begin to act and play? And how can that play be simultaneously responsible and transgressive?
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