User:Eleanorg/2.1/gradProposal1

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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 will be exploring the possibilities of networked publishing to create porous documents, responsive and vulnerable to the input of others, as an exercise in actively embracing the internet's challenge to the idea of autonomous authorship.

Relation to previous practice

I am interested in what happens to individual agency or authorship when people encounter others, especially where the aim is to collaborate. For this reason I have situated past projects in the context of political organizing: a setting in which the tension between individual agency and collective solidarity is often pronounced. While considering myself a supportive 'insider' within UK leftist/feminist activism, my work takes a critical approach which invites project participants to reflect upon how these groups organize in practice, and how they might avoid replicating the structures they claim to oppose.

In 2010 I begun the online publishing platform <a href="">'Radical X'<a/>, whose aim was to critically explore an emerging "sex-positive" feminism within UK radical groups [1]. The intention was to treat sexual politics as part of a broader activist concern with re-thinking interpersonal relations, including this primary tension between the autonomous individual and the solidarity-based collective. In designing Radical X projects, my intention is not only to facilitate publishing /about/ the politics of interpersonal relations, but to explore these relations in the process of the projects themselves.

The first Radical X project was <a href="">'Play!Fight!'</a> (2010), bringing two overlapping but hostile political communities into dialogue. Conversations, interviews and stories were generated and gathered into a print publication. The question of how to curate the resulting documents was a dilemma in this approach, with me as facilitator having the 'final say' on what was published seeming to contradict the ethics/aesthetics of this dialogue-based practice.

With <a href="">'Open Sauce'</a> (2011), a collaborative wiki-based writing project, 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. A developing fascination 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 <a href="">'The Dissolute Image'</a> (2012), 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 document 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 invited erasure/re-writing.

The above projects, while experimenting with a more horizontal curatorial process, leave the need for a central point of control unaddressed. In a practice which is concerned with self-reflexively challenging the way that leftist groups organize, this needs addressing. There is therefore a need to develop a publishing model which responds to both:

  • The need for feminist publishing to model its ends with its means
  • The current context of online publishing (what London Indymedia have called "the need for curation from within the sea of content")

Relation to wider context

This research responds to a context in which online publishing has radically changed what it means to publish a cultural object, and what the nature of that object is. No longer singular and stable, networked documents are vulnerable to others with which they are linked. (For example: dynamic websites break when an API is changed; images embedded from other servers can disappear; news feeds fill personal sites with unpredictable external content.) This has brought with it an exciting uncertainty about the status of the singular, proprietorial author who creates and controls a discrete document. These qualities are decentralizing 'curation' in an unprecedented way (ref: Filter Bubble; Post Digital Print), but with an increasingly individualist focus which misses the opportunity to ask how we might "collectivize the individual outputs" (London Indymedia).

In contrast to this 'user as curator' approach, I will be embracing the possibility of disrupting authorship by looking at how networked documents, and people, can act as transmitters or hosts for the ideas of others. (Ie, publishing doing the opposite of its usual task of amplifying an author's singular voice). I propose this as an exercise in setting aside the individual ego, in an attempt at a more communal sociality. This exercise is informed by my previous work arguing for a productive embrace of the crisis over authorship (ref Open Wide & 1st yr essay), and in opposition to those discourses attempting to resist it by shoring up traditional discourses of author as autonomous producer.

Social context

Radical X has been inactive for the past year while I have explored and struggled with how its projects should be curated. This interest in the role of the curator to promote or erase others' work is deeply relevant to the dilemmas facing activist organizing more generally (how to consense in a democratic manner), as well as to the issues being tackled by sex-positive feminists more specifically: what 'consent' means, and what role it should play in articulating an alternative to sexual coercion.[ref 'opposite' blog]

I want to explore the ambivalent relationship between the discreet author, and the social body to which she is inevitably vulnerable.


This is a context in which I have personal experience, having witnessed the difficulty of reaching consensus in order to act together - and, indeed, debates about to what extent consensus is necessary for effective action. Grassroots activism is at once about disseminating one's own message, and also about showing solidarity. This is a paradox which recurs in in activist circles, although the dilemmas it poses seem rarely to be acknowledged.


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, in order to reconsider what 'consent' might mean.


  • 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

My project aims to create discussion between people, and discussion is a large part of my research process. I will begin by creating small-scale 'prototypes' inviting participation or dialogue, in which a collaborative process is tested on volunteers who then give feedback about the feelings and thoughts it provoked in them. These prototypes will test the possibilities/outcomes of both social systems (rules, agreements etc used to enable the process) and technical tools (e.g. different techniques for embedding, hosting & transmitting content).

At the same time as developing these processes I will begin to situate my project socially in a specific context, so that participants in the final project have a real investment in the content being circulated. This will involve setting up interviews and meetings with people involved in the fields mentioned above, finding out what issues are currently of most concern and where points of intervention in discourses surrounding 'consent' could be made.

References

Publishing

Consent

  • Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: war and democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin).
  • Wertheimer, Alan (2003) Consent to Sexual Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  • Miller, G. & Wertheimer, A. (eds.)(2010) The Ethics of Consent: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
  • Butler, J. (2004) 'Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy' in Undoing Gender (London: Routledge).


http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/A_Guide_to_Essay_Writing#The_Harvard_System_of_referencing


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andre's comments

  • identity inseparable from community
  • "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 editor role - to decide what to leave and what erase
  • pre works share the act of removing, to unveil something constructed commonly
  • will the prototypes develop into a larger scale project?
  • seems a broad scope, but you don't seem to be lost or overwhelmed by its wideness.
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