[-empyre-] Post #1: Background frameworks

Sat Jul 16 06:47:05 AEST 2016

Hi Joanna, thank you for this brilliant introduction. A few days ago, wbhen
I posted that data (statistics) itself is malleable (not objective), I was
pointing exactly to what you state here-- that statistics, by its very
structure and claim to objectivity, is authoritarian and tends to reinforce
patriarchal (i.e. authoritarian) institutions, regardless of who generates
it. As you write, "Feminism is structural and systematic, not thematic or
topical."

One little aside about sexual ambiguity across cultural line: Turkish
pronouns have no gender or human-non-human distinction. "He," "she" or "it"
are the same. In my translations of Turkish poetry into English I reinforce
these ambiguities (rather than "clarifying" them). That way the translation
becomes an implicity critique of the target language.

I am glad someone from literature, particularly poetry with intense
consciousness of words, is entering this discussion.

Ciao,
Murat

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 12:07 PM, Johanna Drucker <drucker at gseis.ucla.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Feminist Data Practices:  Post #1 Background frameworks
>
> I have been enjoying the rich conversation over the last two weeks, and
> the constellation of positions and activities described and referenced:
> critical artworks, activism, contemporary theory, anthropology, and
> substantive engagement  with the ways data pratices are used to reinforce
> power relations along traditional gender lines. Rather than comment on
> these directly, I going to sketch a few  general points, to see how they
> resonate with or otherwise illuminate some of this work. I work within a
> feminist subject position (strategies, values), rather than an explicitly
> feminist practice ( topics, themes).
>
> When I think of feminist data practice, I think first of the specific,
> focused, activist work called for, for instance, in a Gates Foundation post
> in the NY Times this week
>  that pointed to the fact that absence of data about women contributes
> to disparities in resource allocation for education, health care, basic
> human services. This work is crucial.
> But just as we have long been aware of the distinction between gendered
> practices/identities and biologically sexed bodies (not to
> mention categorical distinctions about girl/woman
> distinctions in different cultures), we are also aware that such
> directed activism, by its very instrumentalism, can work to reinforce the
> very imbalances of patriarchy it may intend to
> redress. So, collection of data about real women's lived lives has to be
> supported, but critical caveats have to be used to extend the work and its
> assumptions. Laura Mandell's
> recent critique of work being done through computational analysis of
> biologically gendered writing practices in the literary corpus shows how
> complicated gender becomes within linguistic and narratological
> expressions, as well as their social/cultural underpinnings in the
> identities of authors writing as men, women, in assumed voices, identities,
> conventions. At the core of her argument is the recognition that data is
> not self-evident in language than it is in the phenomena of  the social,
> natural, physical, or cultural worlds. The constructed-ness of data, much
> commented upon already in this thread, is a feminist issue because the
> claims to authority that derive from positivist, absolute,
> observer-independent constructions of knowledge are authoritarian,
> patriarchal in their structure and operation, even if not always aligned
> with or articulated by men. Feminism, as we know, is not (just) a women's
> issue. The undoing of structures and dynamics of oppression cuts
> across  the hierarchies and positions locked into its enactment. Feminism
> is structural and systematic, not thematic or topical.
>
>  These preliminary remarks are meant to make clear how I see the projects
> I am involved in as critical data practices from a  feminist point of view:
> Temporal Modelling, begun in 2000, at the University of Virginia (created
> with a team that included Bethany  Nowviskie, Andrea Laue, Jim Allman, and
> Maura Tarnoff, at different times) was conceived as a graphical platform in
> which  interpretative work could be enacted directly through visual means,
> creating structured output (XML) from an authored,  subjective, point of
> view. Many other concepts and issues weave through this project, which,
> thanks largely to Allman and Nowviskie, reached a functional
> proof-of-concept stage. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/time/project/
> The fundamental critique of hegemonic approaches to temporality,
> particularly, coming up with alternatives to the timelines of empirical
> sciences and replacing them with temporal models rooted in
> hermeneutic ones, carried over into the design of the Ivanhoe Game between
> 2002 and about 2007. Incorporating point of view within the display
> environment was one crucial move, already present in Temporal Modelling,
> that was meant to make any single, coherent,
> http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/jjm2f/old/IGamehtm.html
> external approach to the content of the game impossible. The situated-ness
> of production and reception were entangled with each other.
> Subjective Meteorology, 2004, was a study for a project in which the
> metaphors and templates of conventional fluid dynamics of the atmosphere
> could be used to express psychic states  and conditions as a complex
> dynamic system. http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/works/subj.xml
> These earlier  projects feed into the work I have been engaged in with the
> 3DH project in Hamburg this spring, with CHris Meister, Geoffrey Rockwell,
> Evelyn Guis, Jana Berens, Rabea Kleymann, and Marco Petris.
> http://threedh.net/3dh/
> Obviously, just because a project is hermeneutic it is not necessarily
> feminist in its assumptions or values, and I would not claim a feminist
> stance for 3DH or Ivanhoe, instead, I would suggest their formulation is
> informed by feminist values because of how these are instantiated in my
> thinking. That could be a dubious claim, open to dispute, to be sure.
> Temporal Modelling, Ivanhoe, and Subjective Meteorology are all documented
> in Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2008), and 3DH has a blog site
> publically accessible on which I will
> soon post a report, but from which many documents are already linked. All
> are projects focused on data modelling from a point of view of
> subjectivities, partial knowledge, and situatedness within cultural,
> historical, and enunciative systems.
>
> In the next week I will make two more "statement" posts: Post #2 Data
> enunciation and Other subjectivities; Post #3 After critique: politics of
> capta
>
> Johanna Drucker: I was writing from a body-based awareness in the early
> 1970s, (*Fragile*), several years before Cixous coined the term écriture
> feminine (*Laugh of the Medusa*, 1975); I wrote a
> sci-fi novel about the construction of cyborg female subjectivity from
> literary tropes and language, (*Simulant Portrait,* 1990), a year before
> Donna Haraway published
> her *Manifesto *(1991); I published a book about a sentient planet and a
> female scientist (*Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography*, 1994),  more than a
> decade before Karen Barad
> published *Meeting the Universe Halfway* (2007); and I was describing
> humanistic approaches to epistemology as situated a decade and a half ago,
> for *Temporal Modelling* (2001-04), when the word had not been
> trademarked by Bruno Latour. I mention these chronologies not to claim
> authority based on priority, but to demonstrate that critical thinking
> emerges across practices and locations, and  that the academic mainstream
> has its own amnesia in the present produced by critical attention to
> certain dominant  nodes that sometimes blind us to the diversity of poetic
> articulations and conceptions. Links to all of this  work can be found at:
> http://www.johannadrucker.net/ or
> https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/drucker/
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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