Author Topic: Technoculture  (Read 2641 times)

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Technoculture
« on: February 13, 2017, 09:41:06 pm »
Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Editors of Technoculture

INTERVIEWS BY ROBIN MOORE

I talked with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross separately, in the virtual
space of the telephone. It was decidedly low-tech, recorded with a $3
suction-cup microphone from Radio Shack; transcribed longhand; Macintoshed;
edited via transcontinental fax.

Penley was charming and soft-spoken. Read her with a southern accent.
Widely known for her many books on film and feminism, including Close
Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, she is an editor of Camera
Obscura, the nation's snappiest film/feminism journal. Her favorite TV
shows are Roseanne, and Northern Lights, and she dreams of one day having a
show about university cultural critics, to be titled Ivory Towers. She
currently teaches at UC Santa Barbara.

Andrew Ross looks totally cute on his hip-pomo book covers (No Respect:
Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Universal Abandon?: The Politics of
Postmodernism). In virtue reality, though disembodied, he was equally
attractive. Read him with a slightly hoarse, sickly Scottish accent (he had
the flu). I had techno-difficulties (gotta move up to the $20 suction mike)
with Andrew. "I'm going back to bed now," he said after our interview. He
teaches at Princeton.

Being a bit skiddish about interviewing "cultural critics"," they both
assured me that Technoculture was aimed at a general audience (sub-PhD
slobs like me), and that they got interviewed by "all kinds of people"
(leaving me to wonder which kind I was.). To thank them for the interviews,
I sent them each one of my signature T-shirts: "Postmodernism? Couldn't
Care Less!"

Robin Moore

SCIENCE IS A PRIZE IN A CEREAL BOX

Penley and I started by discussing her visit to the Biosphere II project,
the subject of a chapter in her forthcoming book on how American culture
and institutions tend to turn into science fiction or use ideas and images
from science fiction to gain cultural legitimacy.

CONSTANCE PENLEY: Canned cultures like Biosphere II are interesting because
they are just one place where the ideology is more important than actual
information. Real science projects have to be project themselves like this
to be popular. For example, NASA has modelled itself on Star Trek. All
along they're had a hard time getting people to support the manned space
program, because all the scientists know you get so much more information
from the unmanned flights. So they've tried to change that by tapping into
people's love of Star Trek. They named the first shuttle the Enterprise, by
popular acclaim. They hired Nichelle Nichols - Lieutenant Uhuru - to run a
recruiting program for women and minorities in the astronaut program. The
Challenger crew was modelled on a kind of Star Trek crew: a mixed race,
mixed sex crew. It all kind of blew up in their faces - literally. But
enough about me. Now, what do you think about me?

Mondo2000 : What's your take on Mondo 2000 and the whole sexification, of
technological culture? Do you think Mondo's made high tech ideas more
accessible? Or, do you think it goes too far in glamorizing technology?

CP: I like projects that go too far. I think it's time to froth at the
mouth. I find myself liking things these days that I normally hate... like
Oliver Stone films - ugh, he just takes important American political events
and turns them into male myths. But I loved "JFK". This time the insanity
went the right way. Right when people are feeling Iran-Contra is never
going to move and no one's ever going to take the rap for it, here comes
someone making a film and putting movement on conspiracy, coverup, etc. Now
that kind of frothing at the mouth and being a little too shrill - I love
the way it breaks the smug complacency of what's supposed to pass for
political discourse in this country. So I see some strategic and tactical
advantages to going a little too crazy, a little too far.

M2: Do you feel Mondo achieves some of what Donna Haraway wants in terms of
visualizing ourselves in a technological future, especially with regard to
women? Does Mondo help us to open up to a playful, oblique, more real
future?

CP: Yes, although it's not for nothing that the chapters in Technoculture
are very case-study oriented - almost anthropological analysis of each
group - ACT UP, the slash fans, hackers,... We do it case by case, to try
to understand and make arguments for how we might make new imaginaries of
technology, new imaginaries of body and of social formation. Just because
it's different doesn't mean it's better. We also tried in these examples to
give a sense of agency, not to celebrate the movements in and of
themselves.

M2: Yes, I think you achieved that: it's clear that each group is affecting
the technology that they are also reacting to. It's not a set of passive
relationships. It's about people changing their world of and with
technological tools and ideas. Creating rather than just absorbing culture.

M2: I loved it that you included the Processed World people in
Technoculture. They really have such a great spirit - the humor and
graphics. They're really underappreciated and under- known.

CP: Oh yes, and the context was perfect.

M2: Did you know that they're doing a project on Sex and Work? It will be
any and all intersections of sex activity, labor issues, the workplace:
people who have sex for a living, people who use work time to have sex,
etc. It will involve video and other interviews of people all around the
country.

CP: We always find issues of sexuality and sexual difference around
technology.

M2: Is that because of traditional cultural positions, or is it a natural
opposition because technology is felt to be cold... a sort of fetishism
about machines?

CP: No, it's not at all a natural opposition. I teach a science fiction
film course where right from the beginning, all kinds of anxiety about
technology gets projected onto women's bodies. In the class we go from
Melies' Trip to the Moon, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet, Godard's
Alphaville, and through Bladerunner. Just take Metropolis: all these fears
about emerging technology get projected onto the body of the woman becoming
a robot. And the number of exploding or radioactive women in science
fiction film is phenomenal! When I was doing all this Challenger explosion
and Christa MacAuliffe research, one of the things I was doing was
collecting all the kids' sick jokes about it. What was the very first one I
heard? "What were Christa MacAuliffe's last words?....'Hey guys, what's
this button?'"

M2: It's too consistent to just be a pattern of scapegoating women...

CP: Right when technology was very much on the rise, and when women's
political power was increasing, I think was fear of technology being out of
control and fear of women being out of control - the two get conflated.

M2: It clearly fits into Christian ideas of sin - the apple as
techno-knowledge. There's this difficult body and it's the woman's body:
it's weird, it bleeds, it does all these illogical things. And then you can
blame anything about a machine that turns out to be illogical - or even
unpredictable by someone's faulty calculations - on the woman's
intervention. I'm interested in what you say about women's power increasing
simultaneously, because a lot of the way technology seems to have been
conceived of is as an equalizer, physically. That strength had been one of
the things that had kept women down.

CP: Well, of course, that has been shown to be absolute nonsense.

M2: Yes, but it was what people's idea was - that people with weak muscles
would have the same abilities in society, and be able to do work which was
formerly back breaking. Therefore there was this idea that industrialized
labor offered humans more opportunity, and was somehow morally better.

CP: Household technology was certainly developed for that reason. But now
all these studies have shown that it just makes it possible for women to do
more housework!

M2: And jobs now too!

CP: And high-tech jobs, too! When women were given a chance to compete in
that arena - when women were tested in the early phases of the astronaut
program in the 60's, they were better in every single skill! There was a
famous article in MS. magazine in 1973 about this study which was just
suppressed for years. Women had more stamina, more dexterity, more
psychological stability... every single criterion for being an astronaut,
women did better.

M2: Well you know, that's funny because everything I remember hearing about
why women weren't astronauts - "although they helped in every other way, on
the ground, etc." - was some weird thing about menstruation! They weren't
sure what impelled the flow - if gravity was necessary. And I thought - I
was 12 years old - they can send a man to the moon, but they don't
understand tampons? Wouldn't it be worth it, on the verge of a new age, to
find OUT??

(Footnote: (Jude - I was unable to check up on the Ms. article. But...)
Aroused by this, I called OB/GYN at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Dr.
Richard Jennings was kind enough, and frank enough, to answer my questions.
(1) He said the reason women were excluded from the early space program was
that after the basic search and tests had been conducted, President
Eisenhower decided that 1500 hours of training at the Test Pilot school
would also be required - and the academy at that time excluded women. Of
course, no one forced the academy to start accepting women in the name of
science and opportunity - although there were Congressional hearings in the
early 60s on the subject. (2) About menstruation in space, he said "Even if
there were a problem - and there isn't - there still wouldn't be a
problem." Not only can flow be arrested with pills or endometrial
fibulation (extraction), but the imagined problems of retrograde
(backflowing) menstruation has never been found to have any consequences.
"So do they just bring tampons along on the space flights?" I asked.
"Basically, yes," he said. (He referred me to an article he wrote on the
reproductive functions of men and women in the space environment in
Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, vol 45, #1, p. 7. (1989) Also, for
info about the hearings, Jeri Cobb's autobiography - Women into Space,
Prentice Hall , 1963) (3) He also gave me a very interesting history of the
prejudices in aviation against women - which doubtless were inherited by
NASA. There was a series of accidents in the 1920's involving menstruating
women pilots - things like the wings of the plane coming off. Which
obviously could not have been the pilot's fault - nevertheless these events
were exploited by journalists and led to widespread negative feelings about
women in flying machines - an irrational fear of the hex. (references:
Journal of Aviation Medicine, vol 5, June 1934; Also same journal, December
1941, vol 12, p. 300) (Jude - I would be happy to check up on all these
references but was unable to for various stupid reasons yet - like that the
Reader's guide to periodical lit starts with Ms only after 1974! just say
the word, I can do it all Monday - after the women's march. Or would this
subject be a good sidebar for something in a later issue?)

CP: Men should think that they might have had to pee some time - there are
fluids in their bodies, too.

M2: But I remember thinking, well it's science, it must be true. Of course,
if the study was suppressed... that's amazing. We haven't come that far
after all.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Andrew Ross

M2: What do you think about Mondo?

Andrew Ross : Well I have some comments that are more or less critical in
Strange Weather, and they're mostly around the question of humanism - a
tradition that is pretty corrupted at this point. What Mondo preaches about
are unfettered limitless possibilites of the species, and to me that's not
what I call a very socialized idea. That kind of radical humanism is more
likely to benefit a small minority rather than the majority of the species.
But I am interested especially in Mondo's contribution to the New Age of
smartness - a New Age which is signified by the displacement of smartness
onto objects - not just smart drugs, but smart buildings, smart bombs,
smart bars, smart yellow pages, smart highways, and so on.

M2: What were your political goals in writing Technoculture?

AR: Well we were tired of hearing, especially from the left, that
technology is hard domination. It's important that we're not under the
illusion that that's the whole story. There's a need to tell other stories,
too. There's this one story about disempowerment, which tends to perpetuate
existing power relations. It gives the powerful more power, because it
leaves the powerless feeling helpless. And that story becomes dominant very
easily. But we also felt the need to avoid the open celebratory tone that
Mondo has. We imagined most peoples' stories were somewhat in between, and
would give it a balance. Certainly another goal was breaking open access to
technologies. That was the basic idea, and to expand the definition of
technology itself - into social and cultural practices.

M2: What kind of questions would you like to see people asking themselves
in regard to their place in technoculture? I know for myself I always
compare to human scale: does this technology help me do something I want to
do? What effect does it have on human relationships? For example, how would
you evaluate VR? Would you use a standard measure or testing stone?

AR: Virtual Reality is a good example because at the moment it has not been
decided what it's going to be used for and so there's a lot of flak and
buzz around about it. The situation is not unlike the early development of
TV technology. No one knew exactly what TV was going to be used for either.
VR has already had something of a half life in the world of research and
military development and it's currently feeding into the special effects
boom in Hollywood entertainment. The Lawnmover Man is a good example of how
humans who don't have access to smart technology are seen as morons who can
then be transformed into omnipotent deities by having their intelligence
boosted (special warning for Mondo 2000 readers!).

AR: One other thing that seems interesting is that if machines are getting
smarter then it's also true that they look a lot dumber. All smart machines
these days come in dumb boxes- uncommunicative containers that say nothing
about their content or their function. The golden age of industrial design,
at least from a fine art perspective, is long gone!

M2: At least older machines, like typewriters or ovens, had "faces" in a
human sense. Look at the old radios! There was an attempt to base the
interface on visual human analogies. In architecture, much of it now seems
to be designed in flagrant disregard of human scale - either for expedience
or for the intimidation factor.

AR: Well I think both of those are very much at work. [a short series of
beeps] Oh, my phone's running out of energy. Could you call me back in,
say, 2 minutes? [I do] Military- industrial design has long outstripped
human scale - since most information technology now is produced for the
purpose of surveillance which takes place at the same time that it's being
used. So humanism or human scale is not always the best response to that
situation. So we have to give up the idea that the human body is the
measure of all things. In addition the scale factor is further false
because our intelligence bears little relation to that artificial
intelligence installed in that smart machine. What has happened is that the
smart machinery has coopted the function of the intellegentsia or the
knowledge class in the same way that industrial technology once coopted the
know-how of artisans and laborers. Smart, after all, is not the same as
intellectual. Smartness is cost-effective intelligence. It is
planner-responsive, user- friendly, and unerringly obedient to its
programmers' design.

M2: Whereas I think what's useful about human intelligence is the mistakes
we make on the way to finding a "solution," and the ability to use illogic
or humor or offer other questions. How will we remind ourselves of what
technology lacks if we abandon the criteria of humanism?

AR: Let's put it this way -I'm not suggesting abandoning the human scale
entirely, because that way lies eco-fascism and the GAIA hypothesis - a
hypothesis under which humans are no more important as a species, and a lot
more worthy as objects of genocide, than fruit flies. On the other hand,
the new measure of appropriate technology has to involve agents other than
humans. If we're going to think about a smart world, in ways other than the
definitions offered by the designers of smart technology, then it has to be
along the lines of a model of environmental coexistence. And politically
speaking that is what the earth summit in Rio this summer is all about.

Other books by Andrew Ross include Strange Weather and Microphone Fiends .


https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computer_culture/techno.kulture.txt