****

Weeks later, reading about cyborgs and posthumans, I was reminded of Dziga Vertov, an innovative Russian cinematographer who already in the 20’s pronounced himself ‘a mechanical eye, a machine’, who ‘freed from the boundaries of time and space, coordinate[s] any and all points of the universe, wherever [he] want[s] them to be. [His] way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus [he] explain[s] in a new way the world unknown to you’.

His Man with a Movie Camera, which shows a day in the life, is innovative for various reasons one of them being the idea of a film within the film; the film itself becomes the subject (the relevant sequences showing Vertov in most impossible positions from the point of view of human anatomy and physical accessibility!).

Reading around Vertov, I found two contemporary projects echoing his ideas:

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake – one of the most creative uses of the Internet according to Google. Users contribute their own interpretations of Vertov’s sequences which are then streamed alongside, thus adding a twist to the original version. A day of encountering significant objects back in the 20 together with their equivalents in the contemporary times, filtered and processed by the contributor’s and final viewer’s imaginations. A dialogue reaching beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. Could that be another example of posthuman pedagogy?

dearphotograph.com, explored in detail by Ian Bogost, allows us to see what a photograph looks like in a photograph. It’s not only about sentimentalised human experiences but the object itself as the photograph becomes a salient entity encountered by the viewer. Bogost refers to it as object-oriented ontology which basically asks us to see the world of things as things in a world, rather than our world, with things in it. Another boundary blurred, another domination democraticised. Through visual turn …

Is it possible to create a space where these two species of knowledge can meet and mingle? (Pedersen, 2010: 241).

I found this question to be crucial when considering educability of the posthuman. What Pedersen meant in her article was the boundary work between animal and education studies but it could be extended to whole disciplines in the way Pickering (2005) did in his essay where he suggested that natural and social sciences transcend each other by forming assemblages with ‘inner unity’ and around ‘evolving dialectic’. I think that a similar project can be undertaken in regard to different subjectivities, namely writers/editors and readers, as exemplified by the Liquid Reader Project from the University of London, my nomination for a posthuman(-esque) pedagogy task. Even though it does not lead explicitly to human/machinic hybridisation, the project, inspired by  Gary Hall’s and Clare Birchall’s Liquid Book Project aspires to explore liquidity, promote boundary work, foster open access and technological innovation and so questions the human project understood as ‘one-way, closed form of knowledge transfer in university education that is encompassed by the static, photocopiable ‘course reading pack’ – typically designed by course leaders and handed out to students’ (from the project description).

The blurb from the dedicated website spells out exactly the origin and the rationale of the project.

[This project] engages media students in a dynamic process of devising instead a fluid, open-access, online ‘reader’, whose content and form are being negotiated, updated and altered by students themselves, under the guidance of the course leader. Using the freely available media platforms (online archives, educational wikis, YouTube, Blogger), students are able to both link to the already available textual and audio-visual material (essays, books, video clips) and upload their own documents and designs. They are thus actively involved in producing a ‘liquid reader’ – a customisable learning tool which involves them in curriculum design. Via an involvement with the Open Humanities Press, and its Culture Machine Liquid Books Series, the project promotes the socially significant ‘open scholarship’ and ‘open learning’ under the open access agenda.

According to the project description, the aim is to decentre the author by making everybody an editor/author, which can be seen as an attempt to liquidise the boundaries between the two subjectivities, thus enabling them to meet and mingle, producing various entanglements.

There is a wealth of additional questions and issues raised alongside, for example in regard to the process of remixing, repurposing,  limitability of the ‘book’ , attribution, citation and intellectual property.

There are two accompanying tasks here.

Naive or lofty as it may sound, I felt an instant affinity with the posthuman, particularly their liquidity, multiplicity, indefiniteness. These have always bothered me as my characteristics in my insistent attempts to define and refine my identity within the binary hierarchies of family, work, society, culture, an impossible feat, resulting in a kind of hysteria, further augmented due to my dance with technology, fascinating in opening new channels of expression and communication, yet threatening for my offline life and relationships. With a camera as my eyes, Web 2.0 as my mouth voicing my views and longings, cocooned in bed with my ‘friends’, mobiles, kindles and ipods, I can easily come across as a freaky monster.

However, although some might and do see them as mere gadgets, ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ props, I, following Haraway, Stellarc and Zylinska, see them as a network of forces and relations, as an environment, constant de- and re-assemblage ‘with a certain kind of inner unity, in which all the agents become something new in relation to each other’ (Pickering, 2005), part of a greater, more complex and interconnected cognisphere (Hayles, 2006); ‘all agents’ means my ‘friends’ and me. And my ‘friends’, made of sunshine are everywhere, which borders on a blasphemy as it challenges the God and gods and goddesses – consider here my country of provenance, and its tiring insistence to identify itself with Christian symbolism and the politico-ecclesiastical babble persistently drawing dividing lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ , the damned monsters. Are they damned? Can they be? Not made of mud and unable to turn to dust they force me to look at the promise of an eternal bliss in a different way. Can I hear a sigh of relief escape my lips?

Technology might be threatening but it is what makes us human. And what we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve as the world itself does not seem to impose divisions (optical illusions), does not separate between the human and non-human, organic and nonorganic, the world sees double and fosters an evolving dialectic (Pickering 2005). Those mutual couplings and penetrations took place already in the pre-historic times and came to fruition through the appearance of stone axes, language, beginnings of culture. Elevating the master human as the sole agent is seeing the world through a tiny key-hole, a very limiting and limited perspective and dangerous in that it can stifle imagination and creativity (as Beck’s example in Pickering 2005 shows).

As Haraway professes in her manifesto the borderland in which we have found ourselves as a result of the posthuman shift offers dynamic relationality, a powerful infidel heteroglossia and pleasure. And there is no way to know this land except through the subjectivity (Hayles, 2006) and this is what I am experiencing right now …

So, the classroom has been emptied with the students and tutors fleeing online to populate and interact, supposedly often in greater intimacy, in multiple online spaces. The material reality of ‘here’ has given way to imagined ‘there’, a fluid space with ‘few, if any fixed compass bearings’ (Barnett, 2007). The physical body has been discarded too in favour of the spectrality, the disembodied presence , strangely enough, the embodied absence, the representation of you living online long after you’ve logged off. The temporal and multiple synchronicity deepens the ontological blurring even more.

Instead of attempting to normalise the situation by bridging the gap created by temporal and spatial disjunctures, Bayne (2010) suggests embracing thus induced uncertainty as something generative, constructive and transformative.

In general I agree with such a proposition – planes of doubt look to me as environments which might be more conducive to creativity than fixed frames of traditional practices and the liminal space of becoming seems much more interesting than the fixed point of departure or the destination, something I tried to capture in my video on liminal spaces I produced last year for IDEL.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There is however one issue I’ve got with the ontological turn the uncanny pedagogies are trying to implement. What is the limit of stretching one’s capacity for assimilating and producing strangeness? Is there a limit? Should this be even mentioned in the discourse with lack of boundaries as the basic premise?

If I’m rendered a ghost online how can online-me be there or anywhere? Does haunting equal being? What could anchor me in the online environment? Even the lifestream seems a hoax, breadcrumbs left by me but swept and arranged by technology according to its will. A fabricated piece of evidence. The growing isolation. The mounting uncertainty. The fragmentation of me, the online doppelganers render the physical-me a ghost too, as I close off from the physical reality and latch onto the online. I am neither there or here. It might be a productive space, yes, but there are limits to how much of intellectual uncertainty an individual can bear without going insane. Or is that a part of the ontological turn too, reaching the threshold of tolerance where the balance is tipped and you plunge/are thrown into the deep waters? Perhaps the limit I’m feeling frustratingly as very close is like other boundaries, ‘illusions, wisps of white that beckon to use just out of reach, that dissolve as we pass our hands in front of our faces’ (Kochhnar-Lindgren, 2009:5).

My analysis of a term into a root word and a modifier can be easily traced back to a syntactic tree structure where the noun forms a head and the adjective takes the subjugated position of a specifier. With Chomskyan transformational-generative grammar forming part of my background, I can’t help seeing the language in forms of aborescent structures, maybe rich the complexity of layers but with dichotomous relationships as an underlying organising principle. I can see movements mapped our but always with clear ports of departure and clear destinations, all of them subject to rules of government and power. Yet, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this representation of the linguistic reality is not abstract enough …

****

If the language is  indeed closely related to culture, then my linguistic musings on the nature of ‘digital culture’ are devoid of substance. If ‘digital culture’ is analysed from the rhizome perspective, the relationship between the two can be seen in a surprisingly different light.

Disassembling ...

Like in the famous example of a wasp and an orchid as a visualisation of the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the culture deterritorialises by becoming detached, disembodied and dis-embedded from its temporal and spatial contexts (Hand, 2008) as it flows into the capillaries of the Web as information. The ubiquity allows the digital to reterritorialise – ‘the project of everware is nothing less than the colonisation of everyday life by technology’ (Greenfield, 2006 in Hand, 2008) (although the term ‘colonisation’ reintroduces the notions of power). However, simultaneously, it is deterritorialised as it becomes part of the ubiquitous culture (by being infiltrated and taken over, to use Hand’s ‘power’ discourse) and then it reterritorialises the culture by transporting its artefacts.

The result is an emergence of new concepts and convergence of thereof with existing objects and practices, producing novel understandings (Hand, 2008). In the process of aggregation, repurposing, mashing-up and creative recombination, new cultural artefacts are released into the circulation (Off Book Visual Culture Online or Life in a Day)

This way the notion of imitation can be excluded as the claim that digital culture is a form of culture (either superior in utopian terms of inferior, disruptive in dystopic terms) does not hold truth any more as there are no universals, no dualisms. Rather  fragments of code characteristic for one and the other are captured and mutually exchanged allowing the digital and the culture to become the other, a becoming-digital of the culture and a becoming-culture of the digital. The boundaries are blurred in the most fantastic post-human fashion (think also of the flattened relationship between the symbol and the signified as described by Kristeva and further illustrated  by Bayne, 2008 in her example of how the avatar – the digital- often becomes what it signifies, that is the identity of the user). If so, there can be no clear answer whether digital cultures bring a promise or a threat, a utopian or a dystopic future as they are not subject to a cause-and-effect representation but a much more complex multiplicity, a machinic assemblage, surprisingly a relief for a person brought up on Chomskyan trees.

... and reassembling!