The Posthuman
::information::bodies::cyborgs::virtual labor::commodity
fetishism::manufactured landscapes::
• What happens before and after we engage the computer as an
object of consumption?
When Computers were Women, by Jennifer
S. Light
• Jennifer Light traces the story of female “computers” working on the
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)
• “examines how the job of programmer, perceived in recent years as
masculine work, originated as feminized clerical labor.”
• why were women hidden from the history of computer?
When Computers were Women, by Jennifer
S. Light
• before WW2, women with math degrees taught school, during the
war, opportunities opened for them to help the war effort using math
and science.
• but sexual divisions persisted:
• separate ads ran for men and women.
• employed at the assistant level
• work was considered clerical
• ballistics computer
• operator/ programmer
• never gets to display her knowledge, publish, or advance
When Computers were Women, by Jennifer
S. Light
• Computers were originally women conducting calculations for
ballistics
• The 40s trace a shift to women as computers to women as
programmers automating algorithmic processes with machine
computers.
• A “‘computer’ was a human being until 1945.”
• As women shifted to programming the ENIAC, a gender distinction
emerged -- men built the hardware, women programmed the
software
• again, here the women’s work was associated with clerical
work
• in reality not that easy to distinguish
When Computers were Women, by Jennifer
S. Light
• Men tell the story of the ENIAC (see pg 20 - 23)
• After the war, women encouraged to teach. Some stay on with
ENIAC, BRL, etc.
The Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna Haraway
•“I’d rather be a cyborg
than a goddess”
The Cyborg Manifesto
• new world wide working class
• women are the new homeworkers of the new economy
• electronics assembly (done mainly by women overseas) but
also the "feminizing" of labor in general
• to be made extremely vulnerable." Haraway elaborates on
workplace feminization, noting that it can also be interpreted
as an of the following: to be exploited as a reserve labour
force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to
arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of
a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders
on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.
The Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna Haraway
• Cyborg is:
• cybernetic organism
• a hybrid of machine and organism
• a creature of lived social reality
• creature of fiction
• -- we are all cyborgs, whethere we know it or not...
The Cyborg Manifesto
• the cyborg is not born of a nuclear family, no Freudian origin
• is outside gender
• is born of the military
• differs from other socialist feminists, radical feminists
• the cyborg does not see dualities of animal machine, mind and
body, physical non-physical
The Cyborg Manifesto
• Haraway tracks rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to
science and technology."
• She details the "Informatics of Domination," a movement in which
biotechnologies become indistinguishable from communications
technologies, in part because both are structured like networks, and
both rely on "the transmission of code" for their functioning.
• This refashioning of the biological world takes in the social science
world as well.
The Cyborg Manifesto
• women on the integrated circuit
• Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital,
and Church
• To cite just one example, when Haraway considers "home" as part
of an integrated circuit she sees the following connections: Home
as women-headed household; home as site of serial monogamy;
home as flight of men; home as old women alone; home as
technology of domestic work; home as paid homework; home as
re-emergence of home sweat-shops, home-based businesses and
telecommuting; home as electronic cottage; home as index of
urban homelessness; home as site of migration; home as module
architecture; home as reinforced (simulated) nuclear family;
home as site of intense domestic violence
The Cyborg Manifesto
• Cyborg imagery suggests "a way out of the maze of dualisms in
which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves."
• She'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
• Once again, Haraway emphasizes that hers is not a dream of a
universal feminist language for all, but rather of a "powerful infidel
heteroglossia." For Haraway, a cyborg politics will be both pleasant
and dangerous, and will require both a building and a destroying of
"machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories."
• Finally, she admits that though both creation and destruction are
bound to be part of this "spiral dance" of a cyborg future, she would
still "rather be a cyborg than a goddess."
• politics of affinity rather than identity
Commodity Fetishism
• “In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as
the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective
form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing,
there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to
another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical
relation between physical things. But it is different with
commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities,
and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps
them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their
physical properties and with the material relations arising
therefrom.”
• the fetishism of the consumer object obscures the social relations
that created it
• subjective aspects of economic value vs its objective aspects.
Edward Burtynsky - Manufactured
Landscapes
• TED talk
FINAL EXAM!
• Wednesday June 8th, 8:00am
• 2 hours
• 2nd 1/2 of quarter -- not cumulative
• see you there!