[-empyre-] Post #3 After critique and the politics of capta

[Johanna Drucker]

Post #3 After critique: politics of capta

Capta is the term I took up as an alternative to data, (see: "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display" in DHQ, 2011; http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html) when I was calling attention to the constructed-ness of entities whose existence is the result of a process of parameterization and production. Anyone who works with data knows they are constructed. Teaching "data" production, I always begin with an experiential situation and work through a simple exercise in which, sitting in a classroom, we work analyze what can be turned into data. The same exercise is a start-point for many of the analytics through which we turn humanistic research work into computationally tractable information. The students "get it" but remain mistrustful. They think this is a kind of trick, and they keep waiting for the data to show up, prepackaged, from some inventory in remote storage. They still imagine "the data" for whatever they want to study or research exists somewhere, they just haven't found it. They distinguish the making of data from the acquisition of "real" data. Very funny. Very hard to undo their stealth allegiance to positivist models. 

But adopting the term "capta" does not solve the problem of the epistemological assumptions about representationalistic knowledge structures. If the difference between the "given" status of data, as if it exists in the world, and the "captured" characterization of capta is to carry intellectual weight, it has to push the agenda of constructivist knowledge and knowing into clearer view. Merely to "capture" information through a structuring act, unless understood as a codependent encounter of perceiving subject and world-able-to-be-known (and thus limited, defined, and constrained by that relational condition), is not sufficient. A hideous, hybrid, neologism, like "constructa", might make people trip over it enough to provoke thought processes… and the ways our makings of categories of things in the world bear the imprint of our scale, size, profiles. The ordering of the built environment bears that imprint in a visible way, but so does the structure of the intellectual world. As surely as butchering a slaughtered animal turns a carcass into pieces that are manageable for cooking and food preparation, so the violence of interpretation (as the French theorists used to say), fractures the phenomenal, cultural, social universes into consumable forms and formats. 

The politics of capta, therefore, are the cultural politics of all semiosis, in which the fundamental processes of sense-making and sign systems come into being so that they pass themselves off as "what is" rather than "what has been represented to appear to be what is". Such a politics is always freighted with the baggage of any and every hegemony at work, and the "nothing is ever/never natural" assertion has to be taken literally here as a way to undo the easy habit of familiar thought. For though we "know" that data is constructed, we do not always know how that knowing encodes the blindness that keeps unfamiliarity at bay, keeps the "otherness" of the world at a distance in all of its true profundity.

Our "of course" we know statements are almost all framed within the terms of our social world, an acknowledgement of the instrumental and operationalized terms on which structuring occurs. We turn nature into a fantastic term, "otherness" into a political category through which to guide apparently ethical actions, but we have few ways to undo the ways that knowing has already been produced to create knowledge according to terms programmed in advance. My argument does not resolve into a set of discursive metaphors in which geographies of "beyondness" or "limits" can be invoked. The unfamiliar is in the normative, the immediate, and the habitual, not what lies "outside" these realms. What is most "known" is what is most "unknown" because we do not think about the ways in which we know. Hard to see ontological blindness.  

The challenge for visualization is to simultaneously intensify the representationalism of its methods--call them to attention in a graphical, critical, way while undoing the belief system that representationalism supports--that a world can be known in some stable way. For the convenience of finding a route from one place to another, that may be true (and by extension, any other pragmatics may be similarly served), but for undoing the structuring principles on which power relations are enacted and sustained, we may have to go back to the imprinting, to see how the initial differentiations on which representation comes to signify are themselves produced and producing--the effect and the effecting means of how we know what we think we know.

If feminist theory brings a commitment to analyzing/exposing/altering the politics of culture, its conceptual frameworks need, I think, to go beyond reaction formations and into fundamentals. Not because topical works, thematic projects, or activist interventions are not important, but because they can't alter the systemic operations they are meant to protest unless they analyze how these are produced within a representationalist strategy of knowledge legitimation. Why and now is this feminist? Because it troubles the grounds on which authority can claim rights to knowing and knowledge a priori. How is this about visualization? Because it addresses the basic terms on which the representational strategies of world making (abstraction, extraction, data production and presentation) are constructed. How is this a blueprint for practices? Because all theoretical formulations have to find their way into the stuff and matter of activity and action. And why "after critique"? Because critique assumed distance, separation between a critical subject and a to-be-critiqued object, an outside-ness, a separation, that seems impossible to reconcile with the complicity and connectedness of ourselves with the world. After critique comes engagement, but not on terms of moral superiority and distance, rather, from within the conditions of our own complicity and ignorance. 

Thoughts? Responses?

Johanna