Lecture 7 - Cheney-Lippold Flashcards
What is postmodernism
submerged subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself (Chun)
Physical connection to system is mostly replaced by something decentered, capital becomes without location
What is neoliberalism
based on inequality and financialized human capital: when we are figured as human capital in all that we do and in every venue, equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one another
Measured with so many more measures, that equality is difficult
A new algorithmic identity (cheney-lippold):
- Shift from technologies and media towards digital cultures !!!
- Inferring categories of identity through mathematical algorithms on otherwise anonymous being (you are not implying categories)
- It determines and defines categories of identity at the same time double process of sense-making
Effect of new identity: shifting the empirical:
- It does not rely on empirical information to categorize identity
- Code (seeks out information to group together), category, beyond foulcauldian biopower and biopolitics, algorithmic inference as a mode of control (that what is presented to you by algorithm determines what you become next)
Code by Cheney-lippold:
- Code structures boundaries and regulates flows of internet traffic
- Key part: creating, ordering and giving meaning to digital artifacts. Forces us to think about mundane processes of data differentiation
- Constitutional functioning of code:
o How it uses certain representations of the world to produce new value
o Can also construct meaning
o Potential value in abstraction: categories are not as rigid - Complex set of relationships
Modulation:
- Control over society that speaks to individuals in a coded language of creating not individuals but endlessly subdividable dividuals
- Dividuals can be seen as data that are aggregated to form unified subjects, of connecting dividual parts through arbitrary closures
- Contrast: seemingly open and frictionless but actually rigid field of database
- Deleuze: control is a sieve that can modulate, rigid field of database is actually created by this form of control: dividual is axiom of control (dividual/divided/breakdown(division) of all sites of confinement)
Cybernetic identity
Identifying [gender] in a non-essentialized functional framework in order to be of function to a marketer.
Biopower and biopolitics
- Foucault
- Biopower: power over life, through management of subjects at population-level
- Algorithm is not interested in you, but in your categories (link with population-level)
- Biopolitics: supplementing disciplinary power by introducing forms of regulatory power as a control of populations
- Foucault calls control society governmentality
Soft biopower and biopolitics
- Making of populations and their control through categorizations
- Form of elastic power through cybernetic definition and redefinition of categories
- History of technology and social change is a history of power and power over others
Consequences soft biopower and biopolitics
- Ontologies are imbedded in a set of power relations
- Categories exercise impact on how we encounter world
- Impacts our conceptions of subject identities through code and algorithm
- Hard biopower: regulate life through categorization
- Soft biopower: categories themselves are being defined, as well as user
Control – Cheney-Lippold:
- Operating through conditional access to circuits of consumption and civility
- Opens and closes particular conditions of possibility (think youtube)
- Feedback through process of suggestion (link with closed system/cybernetics), and also corrects itself
How does this type of control relate to the individual?
Individual is only seen as member of categories is not discipline but control because it is without proximity and indirectly
