[iDC] Just Say Adorno

Thu Nov 19 04:03:57 UTC 2009

Hi Martin,
My presentation was actually on the orientalist imaginations inscribed in
the conceptions of the human machine assemblages. I used a media
archaeological analysis to demonstrate the role of the oriental other in the
18th century automata that incorporated the mechanical animation of Muslim
bodies for mediation of the key philosophical discussions on Cartesian
mind/body duality. Within the long history of human workers kept hidden
behind the machines, or as specters that animated the industrial machine,
Amazon's utilization of Kempelen's Mechanical Turk automaton as its metaphor
for branding and the model for exploitation in the age of cognitive labor
looks like a corporate Turret syndrome.

The cultural as you suggested is not a mere superstructure but it is at the
center of the evolution of these technologies. Before the actualization of
many technologies we see the efforts of imaginations and conceptualizations
through various devices that act as the cultural apparatus for later
reconfigurations. 18th century automata was among such apparatus and many of
the notions we discuss today were explored through their proxies of that
time, the chess playing Turk being one of them. It was a safe proxy for
exploring the uncanny possibilities of the idea of autonomous machines.
Interestingly today, it is still relevant to such an extent that its vivid
image is almost transparent or outside of our field of vision as a factor in
our analysis of the alterity in the cognitive labor.
Thank you for bringing this issue up.  I also wanted to thank Trebor for
organizing this conference, it was a great experience for me and I learned a
lot.

Ayhan Aytes

Ph.D. Candidate
University of California San Diego
Department of Communication

Ayhan Aytes

Ph.D. Candidate
University of California San Diego
Department of Communication

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Martin Roberts <RobertsM at newschool.edu>wrote:

> Once again, many thanks to Trebor for making this happen - Stuart Brand
> would be proud of you! Below are a few comments, intended as a somewhat
> devil's advocate account of what I saw as some of the aporias of the event,
> which was otherwise deeply thought-provoking, intellectually challenging,
> and, inevitably, Fun.
>
> What I found most immediately striking was the reluctance of most
> presenters - including, myself, I must acknowledge - to stray beyond the
> comfort zone of certain theoretical platforms, most obviously Marxism. While
> many of the issues relating to digital labor explored at the conference are
> transnational in nature, the theoretical frameworks deployed to analyze them
> remained centered on European and Anglo-American models, in spite of the
> growing availability of translated work by Latin American, South Asian, and
> East Asian media theorists.
>
> I was also troubled by the programmatic nature of certain statements,
> notably Christian Fuchs' call for a communist internet - as if one could
> somehow magically conjure it into existence merely by calling for it; as if
> it was something we all wanted - or should want - anyway. While such models
> seem overly normative, I'm interested in the emergent possibilities of the
> internet as a space for anarchist practices and organized resistance to
> capitalism. Unfortunately, anarchism - whether as an explanatory model or a
> political ideal - was entirely eclipsed by Marxist orthodoxy, in spite of
> the evident continuities between historical anarchist communities and
> contemporary piracy networks, both in terms of ideology and social
> organization. Siva Vaidhyanathan's works Copyrights and Copywrongs and The
> Anarchist in the Library explicitly characterize the contemporary struggle
> over digital property as one between anarchists and oligarchs, yet the role
> the internet has played as a medium for anarchist communities, and of
> anarchism itself as an alternative model to relations of capitalist
> production, were not explored. (If this sounds utopian to communists, to
> paraphrase Brecht, I would ask those who see it as such to explain why it is
> utopian.)
>
> A second concern was the apparent displacement - once again - of the
> cultural by political-economic perspectives, at least at the panels I
> attended. While the cultural was a phantom presence at most of these, from
> references to Chinese gold "farmers" (a term which the young men in question
> repudiate) to Amazon's Mechanical "Turk," it remained incidental, and the
> cultural politics of such terms, and the Orientalist mythologies inscribed
> and reproduced in some of them, remained unexamined. (I wonder, for example,
> what my Turkish media-theorist friend Aras Ozgun might have to say about
> Amazon's "Mechanical Turk.") While I do understand that the focus of the
> conference was primarily on (im)material political economies, the assumption
> that the cultural is merely a superstructural epiphenomenon of these is - or
> so I thought - by now an antiquated notion.
>
> In the latter context, a particular concern of mine has been the
> Japanization of the discourse on digital media, perhaps best exemplified in
> the Mac vs. PC commercial in which the two male protagonists encounter a
> mini-skirted Japanese "digital camera," with which the Mac, predictably, is
> magically able to communicate in fluent Japanese. Ludicrous as the ad is, it
> exemplifies the pervasiveness of gendered techno-Orientalist cultural
> mythologies in Western media, equally apparent in the cult of "Zen" on
> productivity blogs and the fetishization of Japanese culture by influential
> Western business "gurus" such as Gar Reynolds. But perhaps this is another
> paper (or conference).
>
> --------
> Martin Roberts
> Assistant Professor of Media Studies
> Eugene Lang College / BA Program in Liberal Arts
> The New School
> 66 West 12th Street
> New York, NY 10011
> 212.229.5119
> robertsm at newschool.edu
> http://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty.aspx?id=1738
>
>
>
> --------
> Martin Roberts
> Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies
> Bachelors Program in Liberal Arts / Eugene Lang College
> The New School
> 66 West 12th Street
> New York, NY 10011
> 212.229.5119 (voice)
> 212.229.2588 (fax)
> robertsm at newschool.edu
> http://www.newschool.edu
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