User:Eleanorg/2.1/gradProposal1

General Introduction

"If I am struggling for autonomy, do I not need to be struggling for something else as well, a conception of myself as invariably in community, impressed upon by others[?]" (Butler 2004, p.21).

I am interested in posing a challenge to the idea of autonomous individual authorship, by looking at how people can act as transmitters or hosts for the ideas of others.

This project is informed by the feminist proposal of 'consent' as a positive alternative to a culture based on coercion (i.e. one subject overruling another). While aligning myself with this movement, I wish to contribute to it by problematizing its implicit assumption of an autonomous consenting subject. I will do this by experimenting with how people react when attempting to transmit or host others' ideas. In these experiments I will be searching for the point at which the desire to act in concert conflicts with the desire to assert our individual values. The aim is to highlight the difficulty of defining the outline of an distinct subject.

Relation to previous practice

With Open Sauce I began experimenting with handing over curation to the projects' participants. In fact, observing the way in which they edited each other's work was my primary source of interest in this collaborative writing project. A developing interest here was in the power of the editor/curator either to promote or to erase the words of others. I was fascinated by observing how this power is exercised. My interest in the conflicting desires to echo and to erase others' views was continued in The Dissolute Image, which confronted participants more directly with the question of whether they would enable the distribution of other people's (possibly objectionable) content. Here, the vulnerability of the artefact in question is highlighted (an image divided into individual pixels), and it presents itself as a request for adoption - as opposed to the artefact of Open Sauce, a wiki text, which by its nature invites erasure/re-writing.

Relation to a larger context

• feminist movement for consent
• consensus-based activism
• filter bubble/user curation
• 2.0 - politics of hosting user-generated content
• net neutrality/ ISPs held accountable for infringement

Practical steps

Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important to have some idea of how your project might come together as a whole.

References

A list of references (Remember that dictionaries, encyclopedias and wikipedia are not references to be listed. These are starting points which should lead to more substantial texts and practices.) As with your previous essays, the references need to be formatted according to the Harvard method.) See: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing

Feel free to include any visual material to substantiate, illustrate or elucidate your proposal. For example use images to reference your work or that of others.