Fall 2006 • HUM 596A/ENGL 556B • SLN 18547

Cyborg Democracy

Monday and Wednesday 1:30-3:20 pm • Commnications 202

Instructor: Tom Foster (English)

Syllabus

The goals of this seminar are to assess the political claims made for new media and technologies and to define possible points of articulation and/or conflict and critique between Marxist traditions and theories of radical democracy, on the one hand, and new technocultural formations, on the other hand. Our objects of study will include both popular reflections on new technologies and social movements organized around them. The course will bring together three strands of inquiry: 1) the ongoing structural transformation of the democratic public sphere and the mass mediation of social relations and models of citizenship; 2) the emergence of new models of cultural belonging out of debates on intellectual property, including copyleft, the creative commons, and open source cultures; 3) debates about the political meanings of new forms of technological self-transformation, including post- and transhumanism, as well as biotechnology and cognitive theories of the expanded mind or the "natural-born cyborg."

Public Lectures:

Monday, November 13, 2006 • 4:00 pm • Communcations 120
Mixedfolks.com: 'E.A.,' Racial Passing, and the Internet
Lisa Nakamura (Speech Communication and Asian American Studies, University of Illinois)

Multicultural or "multiculti" actors have been enjoying a recent vogue. According to a January 2003 New York Times article entitled, "Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous" racially mixed actors are now "perceived as good, desirable, successful" because they possess "a face whose heritage is hard to pin down." However, while it might seem a blessing to the multitudes of "exotic" mixed-race actors looking for work, it creates an ironic and painful situation, one in which mixed-race actors who succeed in getting cast as "white" may lack the iconic "mixed" look and thus pass all too well, thus failing to be "read" as mixed and to benefit from the trend.

Websites like Mixedfolks.com attempt to resolve this dilemma by listing actors, musicians, and other mixed-race celebrities and connecting them to their "hidden" racial backgrounds, thus "outing" many actors such as comedian Rob Schneider (Asian), Jennifer Beals and Vin Diesel (African American) and Mercedes Ruehl, Madeleine Stowe, and Lynda Carter (Latina) who are thought to be white by many viewers. Rather than exposing the hidden facticity of race in order to shame or embarrass the actors, this site instead identifies them as hidden sources of inspiration and identification who must be made to "represent" on the Internet despite their disavowal of (or failure to acknowledge) a non-white racial identity in film and television. Nakamura will analyze the interplay between the site’s construction of a "mixedfolks" identity community within its bulletin boards and areas for user participation, the visual culture of celebrity mixed-race outing, and the intermedial connections between the celebrity website and filmic and televisual media.

Lisa Nakamura is Associate Professor of Speech Communication and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles on race and the new media in The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Women's Review of Books, Unspun: Key Terms for the World Wide Web, The Cybercultures Reader, Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices, and the Visual Culture Reader 2.0. Her book Visual Cultures of the Internet is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.

Monday, October 23, 2006 • 4:00 pm • Communcations 120
The Chain of Triumph and the Web of Ruin: A Political Critique of the Network Form
Alexander Galloway (Culture and Communication, New York University)

For the last decade or more, discourse on networks has proliferated with a kind of epidemic intensity: peer-to-peer networks, wireless community networks, terrorist networks, contagion networks of biowarfare agents, political swarming and mass demonstration, and online role-playing games and text messaging are just some of the many examples. The network form is so highly privileged in today’s societies that it is becoming more and more difficult to locate places or objects which do not, in some way, fit into a networking rubric.

Additionally, there is also a political and topological dimension to the discourse on networks. Networks are often pitted against hierarchical structures whose modes of organization and control are lambasted as politically dubious, not to mention anachronistic. Thus the rhizome circumvents the tree; the network is the solution to the hierarchy.

Or do they? This lecture, derived from close collaborations with author Eugene Thacker, begins from the assumption that networks are not fetters to power, but that there exists a new mode of organization and control entirely native to the network form. Galloway will aim in this discussion to explore a political critique of the network form of organization, with reference to two tropes of networked power: the “chain of triumph” and the “web of ruin.”

Alexander Galloway is assistant professor in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG, and maker of the data surveillance engine Carnivore. His publications include Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004) and Gaming (2006), a series of essays on the aesthetics and politics of video games.