[-empyre-] The Disembodied Eye

[Cortez, Beatriz]

Hi everyone. Thank you very much Christina for this invitation. It is a pleasure to join this conversation, I have truly enjoyed and learned a lot reading all the threads throughout the previous three weeks and I hope that I will continue to do so.

I am interested in the idea of Feminist Data Visualization as a way to approach the issue of humanism as a male and Eurocentric understanding of reason that excludes the perspectives of women, people of color, Indigenous cultures, as well as other creatures. It is with this in mind that I approached post-human perspectives. However, my concern is that a feminist position is not enough to separate itself from humanist perspectives. It needs to be combined with other positions of exclusion related to class, race, culture in order to not repeat, in Deleuzian terms, more of the same. Or maybe, it needs to strive to be other than human.

I must say that I am very excited about this conversation about visualization. Making something visible is empowering in ways that representing something might not be, as we have learned throughout a history of colonialism, of silenced communities, or first world intellectuals that speak for the oppressed, etc.

I am also excited about discussing vision. I share Catherine D'Ignazio's interest in considering the humanist perspective of the eyes, following Donna Haraway, as she does, and also considering the perspectives on the embodied eye that Claire Colebrook presents in Death of the PostHuman, her first volume of a collection titled Essays on Extinction. In fact, for Colebrook, it is not only that the eye enjoys a privilege over the body as much as it is that the perspective of the human eye, or the embodied eye, reproduces humanism. This critique allows us not only to consider the perspectives that are excluded by liberalism and Western reason, but also to consider the ways in which the embodied eye reconstructs us (even as women, even as women of color, even as alternative perspectives) as an embodied human subject, as a way to reintitutionalize humanism. She argues that one way to escape this is to "think of the eye as a machine" (15). She states:

"The human eye organizes the world into conceptualized units, mastering the world by reducing difference. This intellectual process allows for increasing technologices and the furtherance of systems of order: the intellect is at home with technology and matter, or that which remains the same through time and can be mastered through repetition. What is abandoned is intensity--the infinitesimally small difference sand fluxes that the eye edits out" (16).

In fact, for Colebrook, "[t]he very eye that has open up a world to the human species, has also allowed the human species to fold the world around its own, increasingly myopic point of view" (22).

For Colebrook, what remains there is "a reliance on a normative notion of the human" (22), and instead invites us to imagine what would inhuman perception be like. In other writings, particularly in her introduction to Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man, on Benjamin, she invites us to deconstruct not like Derridá, toward specific context, but like De Mann, away from context, as if the humans who were meant to read this text don't exist yet. And she moves further, to let go of that hopeful "yet" when in the Introduction to Death of the Posthuman she asks: "What happens if one thinks of the vision of no one, of the human world without humans that is still there to be seen? What remains might still take the form of 'a' vision or referring eye--the scene of a human world as if viewed without any body" (28).

With regards to our own conversation as part of the Feminist Data Visualization, what perspective might we take, from what sort of eye might we make visible the data away from the reconstitution of humanism that the embodied eye brings about? What might Feminist Data Visualization mean in a world where a machinic eye observes the remnants of a world populated by humans at a time and in a world where there are no humans? This exercise in perspective excites me as a scholar and as a writer...

Colebrook's Death of the Posthuman can be in Open Humanities Press here:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/death-of-the-posthuman/




Beatriz Cortez, Ph.D.
Professor, Central American Studies
California State University, Northridge
(818) 677-3585
Http://www.beatrizcortez.com

http://www.csun.edu/humanities/central-american-studies/beatriz-cortez
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