Aitana's reading notes
Feminism confronts technology - Judy Wajcman
Bringin together under one theoretical framework a number of different sites of technology -> The technological determinism, rather than only looking at the effects of technology on society, it also looks at the effects of society on technology.
-> The "social shaping" of technology 1985 focus on advanced industrial societies and also technology in the third world.
Feminist critique on science cannot be translated into a feminist perspective on technology.
Ch. 3 human biological reproduction Ch. 4 malestrream in postindustrial home Ch.5 Built environment Ch. 6 Technology as a masculine culture
CHAPTER 1 -> FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
- Our icons of progress arre dron from science, technology and medicine,
- defined as RATIONAL,
- as distinct from
- which is EMOTIONAL
Sexual politics of science (Rosalind Franklin, Barrabarra McClintock by Anne Sayre) -> "victimizar", asking why women are not interested in science rather than asking WHY or HOW institutions would reshape to accommodate them.
A voice and nothing more - Mladen Dolar
First anectote -> failed interpellation, tacit chauvinism. Freudian word "uncanny" 17/8- an effect surpassing its explicable cause (Kempelen)
- Speech and voice present the hidden mechanism of voice (19)
- what singles out the voice is its inner relationship with meaning (23)
- The voice is the instrument, the vehicle, the medium and the meaning is the goal.
- VOICE AS MATERIALITY
- VS
- IDEALITY OF MEANING (25)
- The voice is the instrument, the vehicle, the medium and the meaning is the goal.
- what singles out the voice is its inner relationship with meaning (23)
"He has to increase, I have to diminish. Why? Because the voices are being effaced as the world grows" "voice as a cart-of of sense" (26)
Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema - Laura Mulvey
- A POLITICAL USE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
- psychoanalysis as a political weapon
- to discover the roots of our oppression
- women represent castration -> threat
- women give birth and then
- memory of lack
- memory of maternal plenitude
- women as bearers of meaning not makers of meaning
- DESTRUCTION OF PLEASURE AS A RADICAL WEAPON
- Mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.
- A break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.
PLEASURE IN LOOKING, FASCINATION WITH THE HUMAN FORM
- SCOPOPHILIA AS VOYEURISTIC SEPARATION
- scopophilia
- looking as a source of pleasure
- pleasure in being looked at
- scopophilia
- The instinct as the erotic basis ofr pleasure in looking at another person as objects. At extreme it can become fixated into a perversion (voyeurs and Pepping Toms)
- Cinema produces a sense of separation, playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.
- CONTRAST
- darkness auditorium
- brilliance of the screen -->> VOYEURISTIC SEPARATION
- CONTRAST
- Illusion of looking into a private world
- Cinema produces a sense of separation, playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.
- SCOPOPHILIA AS A NARCISSISTIC ASPECT
- Human form everywhere: scale, space, stories are anthropomorphic
- The mirror phase: Lacan
- The image is more perfect than the body
- Matrix of the imaginary -> "I"
el cine refuerza o debilita el ego:
- EGO
- LOST -> pre-subjective moment of recognition
- REINFORCEMENT -> glamour impersons the ordinary
The power of cute - Simon May
What if it expresses more than it seems?
The era of the cult of the child
- the new locus of the sacred
- So the place where as a society we must readily find desecration
He says cute is a teasing expression of the unclarity, the uncertainty, the uncanniness, the continuous flux of "becoming"
About nongroundedness of living with artifice and exaggeration
About the undetermined, engendered, "unaged"?
What if it is not a vrivoulus distraction of the zeitgeist but a full expression of it?
An anesthetization of "powerlessness" (Ngai)
- Shanon Kinsella -> "the pervasiveness of kawaii"
- Daniel Harris -> "the cute worldview is one of massive human chauvinism" which forces human qualities onto nonhuman things......so
- "the cute vision of the nature world is a world without nature, one that annihilates otherness"
- "is ultimately dehumanizing, paralyzing its victims into semi-conscious things"
The spirit of condemnation is increasingly all the rage in the west. His aim is to resist the urge to censure the craze of Cute but to seek a wider understanding.
- it is forthright indeterminacy
Cute is among other things, a new expression of an ancient sensibility, namely the monstruous
- but
is quite recent alongside
- "the Sublime"
- "Camp"
- "Kitsch"
- "Camp"
Talking about -> early pioneer of comercial cuteness Phineas Taylor Barnum: Baby shows 1855.
- Cuteness as "adoration of the commodity"
- The terms
- +- 1730 - ACUTE: Sharp, quick, witted
- 1830 - CUTE: innocent, attractive, charming
Cute reveals the impossibility of experience the innocence in a purist way
p.90 girls disguising themselves as harmless in a male dominated work world (Brian Mcleigh) . p.94 about Androgyny-> familiar and unfamiliar. "We are unnerved by such neighbourliness of the known and the unknown"
- also about cuteness on concepts.
120. Cute´s power to recognise and honour otherness.
Borders and ghosts: migratory hauntings in contemporary visual cultures - Nermin Saybasili
Visual Culture designates an entire arena of visual representations which circulate in the field of vision establishing visibilities (and policing invisibilities), stereotypes, pose relations, the ability to know and to verify: in fact they establish the very realm of the "known" (Rogoff 200:20). What I am interested in, therefore, is what is beyond the "known" and beyond the predictable.
This image reflects on an "imagined world" [...] " the lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes are blurred [...]
Border officials use this light against the "illegal" crossing of "immigrants". [...] In the advanced technological surveillance systems on European borders, the desire to make everything visible is also an imperative to make things legible and governable. [...]
Visibility ins a complex system of permission and prohibition, of presence and absence. [...]
[Lugagges] serve as compartments in which an immigrant carries his or her wishes, expectations, dreads and desires as well his or her anxieties or fears. [...]
Modern surveillance systems are based on the British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (Bentham 1843), which he invented in 1786 as the perfect prison, and which Michael Foucault saw as the major mechanism for the disciplining of society [...] each person in his or her cell or cage is alone, completely isolated and constantly visible under full lighting. She/he s the object of information, but never a subject of communication. [...] "visibility is a trap" (Foucault 1991 [1977]:200). [...]
"In a state of solitude, infantile superstitions, ghosts and specters, recur to the imagination" (cited by Mirzoeff 2022:241: Semple 1993:132)[...]
[...] people crossing borders [...] operate as "ghosts" mainly because "illegal" border-crossing is all about visibility and invisibility; about dissappearance as coming into presence. [...]
The image is a powerful reminder that materialist science cannot account for the textures of everyday experience of people crossing borders. "Ghost images" of the "illegal" immigrants empty all the realities an immigrant would firmly be tied to.[...]
Thus, we end up with an image that looks like a scene from a horror film. This image blind us.[...] It is spectral [...] and unable to refer to any life values or qualities. [...]
TO BE CONTINUED - PAGINA 306
Separate and dominate - Christine Delphy
Thesis that claim that human beings cannot stand difference is a thesis on human nature an essentialist thesis and therefore, an idealist one.
[...] the hierarchy in our society is due to the rejection of the other. Except when it comes to the opposition between "capitalists" and "workers". [...] Emphazise the similarity among the operations that give priority to one group and stigmatise the other. The problematic of the others presupposes the existence of these hierarchies. [...]
The object is to show that hatred of the "difference" is not a natural trait of the human species. [...]
"Weltanschauung" invisible, subterranean fundation of the world's view. Philosophy of the dominant.
"I"
Descartes didn't care about the others. Pienso, luego existo. [...] The other is abused right from the outset from the very moment of being, defined as "other".
Society meaning "I", meaning "us".
[...] When one group calls another "the other" it is already too late, it has already confiscated humanity, appropriating it as its own exclusive characteristic. [...]
The master group group, the group of Ones is not the same for all these three oppressions: for women it is men... etc. but the master group reproaches its own others for not being part of the Ones; it reproaches them for being different and exhorts them to be more "similar" if they want to obtain their rights,
!! p.16 -> "Nouvelles questions féministes" -> Construction of the otherness.
[...] Men, heterosexual and white are disproportionately -and unduly- sure of themselves, arrogant and talkative: their socialisation and experience have made like that, and their position allows it. [...]
How could the Others be like the Ones, when the Ones are only Ones because they press the others?
The ways (of talking, of standing, of walking, of eating, etc.) of the dominant group are not presented for what they are - as ways that can only exist through domination - but as the norm, as the universal. [...]
Bourdieu claimed in his "Masculine domination" that women were so alienated -precisely because they are dominated- that they could not even think in their situation. He, however, could do so. Why? Because he was, or saw himself as impartial , a neutral observer. May be he ought to have understood that since he is part of the group "men", he couldn't be impartial. [...]
The Ones reject of being confine within an identity. Dominant think they can choose whatever social position and change it however they please. [...]
It is privilege of the Ones to name individuals when the Others turn this process around, they shake up the rules of the game, symbolically at least.< > Naming the dominants means specifying them too. And it specifies them in a way that erases their superiority.
!!! Are all the categorizations necessarily and inevitably hierarchical? The identification of groups is not necessarily hierarchical, however it is different when this categorisation is dichotomous as well as comprehensive. >> If not belonging to a category is the same thing as belonging to the other, then the goal of this characterisation is indeed, to set them in a hierarchical order. One of the categories is necessarily superior and the other necessarily inferior to it. [...]
I was stupefied to her of people being addressed as "second-generation immigrants" as if the quality of being an immigrant could be inherited. [...]
About equality:
Parity suffers from problems in the objective it sets. Could be understood in a broader sense -> by affirmative action. Parity is essentialist -> division of humanity in two distinct sub-species; democracy is itself masculine. Affirmative action doesn't need to search for a true universalism.
TO BE CONTINUED - PAGINA ?
¿Es posible un mundo sin violencia? - Chantal Maillard
Lo que nos indigna nos indigna porque y cuando nos concierne. [...]
Recibimos los hechos convertidos en imagen como recibimos la ficción por el mismo conducto y con el mismo formato: la pantalla.
Las figuras son intercámbiales, se archivan en carpetas con etiquetas que dicen: "emigrantes", "terroristas", "maltratadas", etc. Mercancía serializada, ninguna singularidad, reducción a conceptos universales (p.22: continuar párrafo). [...]
Formalmente seducidos por los ardides del arte, responderemos a la forma pensando que responderemos al tema. En esto consiste la perversión del lenguaje artístico. [...]
La principal razón es que la violencia (que nuestros países ejercen) ocurre siempre en Otra Parte.[...]
[...] Averiguar el marco de nuestra indignación personal y colectiva y sus márgenes. Aunque las cifras son algo abstracto y difícilmente nos sentimos atraídos por abstracciones.
(Sprocket) Eslabón directo entre los aparatos que hacen más cómodas y sofisticadas nuestras vidas y la realidad de la violencia. [...]
No me parece lógico ni éticamente correcto pensar una crisis financiera sin pensar los engranajes de la sociedad de consumo, pensar la indignación local y sus causas inmediatas sin pensar las razones globales. [...]
¿Qué hace falta para que nos sintamos concerniros?
Los asuntos inmediatos no pueden hacernos perder de vista los demás, porque los "demás" son el contexto de los inmediatos. [...]
Puede ser que el desinterés se deba, como alguien escribía, a que la complejidad de las relaciones en el mundo globalizado haya producido una ruptura de la relación de nuestros actos y sus consecuencias. Cuando aumenta la complejidad, las cosas dejan de poder imaginarse. !!!!! LO INCOGNOSCIBLE ES EL DESPERTAR (DERRIDA) P.34
La risa es un arma defensiva, un reducto del acto de enseñar los dientes.
Desde la ética del semejante no hay crueldad ni criminalidad salvo con el próximo.
La afirmación del ser humano sobre los demás no es propia de todas las culturas, lo es ante todo del individuo tecnocrático que habiendo dejado de poner su teckné al servicio de la supervivencia la pone al servicio del beneficiario >>> sociedades basadas en el sentido de productividad. [...]
El concepto occidental y patriarcal de la naturaleza como recurso explotable productivo, inferior y dominable no puede desvincularse de la tradición judeo-cristiana. [...]
Si alguien se indigna defiende algo que de alguna manera siente que le pertenece, ¿cómo habrá de indignarse quien considera que nada le pertenece? P48-49 estoicismo