Building Identity with Evocative Objects and Cyborg Manifestos
While much of the literature I've read concentrates on self as performance (Erving Goffman), that is, identity as a public self or persona, there is another sense of identity (a dichotomy, if you will) as an individual, inner, or unconscious self (Carl Jung). I wish to direct the focus to this latter inner self or identity, and in particular to that which plays an integral role in defining it, the evocative object (Sherry Turkle), as I discussed in an earlier blog post (2/28).
The following is a mishmash of quotations and paraphrases from Turkle's evocative work, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Readers may find interesting her concluding chapter from the book, "What Makes an Object Evocative?" Here are some of the more salient points from the opening chapter of the book (pp. 3-10, much of the emphasis mine):
objects connect us to the world . . . (p. 3)
objects may act as bricolage (Claude Levi-Strauss): a closed set of material things we combine and recombine to come up with new ideas. (p. 4) (This isn't so far off from Laurence Lessig's theorizing on Remix culture, is it?)
objects are companions to our emotional lives and provocations to thought, that is, they bring together intellect and emotion. (p. 5)
because life is not lived in discrete stages, neither are our relationships to the objects during its journey. Objects have a life roles that are multiple and fluid. (p. 6)
objects are concrete paths to knowledge; they make the abstract or theoretical concrete. They are/can be literally concrete thinking. (p. 6)
objects bring philosophy down to earth. The allow common ground in everyday experience. (p. 8)
objects are richly connected to daily life as well as intellectual practice. They are experienced as part of the self (identity) as early as childhood. (p. 7)
objects evoke the uncanny: things "known of old yet unfamiliar" (Freud). They mark a complex boundary that repels yet attracts. (p. 8) (Do I detect in this repel/attract dichotomy hints of Heidegger's revealing/unrevealing from "The Question Concerning Technology"?)
objects are liminal, that is, they accompany us in times of transition (AKA threshold periods -- Victor Turner). (p. 8)
"There is the power of boundary objects and the general principle that objects are active life presences." (p. 9)
"Objects are able to catalyze self-creation." (p. 9)
"Objects bring together thought and feeling." (p. 9)
... we often feel at one with our our objects. (p. 9)
persons and things are tellingly objects. "When objects are lost, subjects are found." (p. 10)
in the world of things, through our connections with things both animate and inanimate, "we confront the other and shape the self." (p. 10)
Further into the book where Turkle makes her concluding remarks ("What Makes an Object Evocative?"), we shift from "ordinary"/non-digital physical objects to digital technology, such as computers and online objects, two things/objects which are not excluded from identity formation:
"... in [X]'s description of her laptop computer, the flickering screen does not appear cold and abstract, but integrated into her sense of herself." . . . "Her self-understanding depends on analyzing the flows and rhythms that pass between herself and the machine." (p. 325)
After this point, Turkle turns her gaze to the intimate integration of technology and body/person -- the cyborg:
we might characterize the intimate couplings of persons with their objects as cyborg. "In the cyborg, we move beyond objects as tools or prosthetics. We are one with our artifacts." (p. 325)
"No object, space, or body is sacred in itself ... " (p. 326) which simply quotes Haraway's statement, "No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language." (p. 22 of "A Manifesto for Cyborgs")
Through the "prism" of the "cyborg," no longer is it a question of becoming one with the machine (becoming one with our evocative object), but one of improving the interface with and proper operation ("running") of the machine and, by association, us. (p. 326)
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(Possible, major off-topic time?)
On these final points, Turkle clearly references Donna Haraway and her pivotal essay, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." While Haraway points out a breakdown of boundaries (e.g., animal/human, animal-human/machine) and rightly states " . . . machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines" (p. 11 of anthologized version), I wonder if the anxiety expressed is alarmist if not overstated. To an extent, Turkle embraces technology (be it physical object, but I would say her viewpoint extends to the purely digital as well), the cyborg, as another object to welcome or embrace, because it is evocative, it inspires, it is an essential component of self. Objects play an established role in identity building, and, yes, they too change as well. Objects are not static, unchanging things. They are after all fluid and multiple.
If I am reading Haraway correctly, it seems the fear is that as digital technology (communication technologies) becomes one with us, not just identity-wise, but in body as well, there arises the problem of control. Digital/communication technology tends to "... translate the world into a problem of coding" (Haraway, p. 23). This coding - the language that permits the interfacing of machine and person - could easily backfire and become a means of control, of "enforcing meanings" on the person/cyborg. If indeed the world is becoming reducible ("translatable") to information alone, I see this concern as justified. However, if we were to view language outside the prism of information/cybernetic theory as a surrogate for coding, while language has the capacity to control, it hasn't devolved or transformed into a nightmare-scenario means for doing so. I think if someone or something could have taken over bodies and minds with language, it would have happened already. (A perhaps overly simplistic way of viewing the power of language, but I think it still valid.) The same could be said of coding/information. Why can't those things - machines - that run on coding just as easily be reprogrammed by the bodies in which they are implanted? Don't humans have a role to play in world of information exchange, or is it purely a top-down system of control, where feedback and counter-input of information by the receiving subjects is impotent and non-transformational? Perhaps Haraway isn't wed to a doomsday interpretation of the cyborg, the merging of person and object (machine): "The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information ... which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power ... The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication." (p. 23) Can we not be agents in this interruption of communication? Evocative object being a machine or digital/communication technology or not, do we not still have some amount of power over it, over the meaning derived from it? Are we not coders/language makers/information makers ourselves, if not wholly at least in part? The means of interfacing with objects is just as "fluid" and "multiple" (again, Turkle's words) as the objects themselves, as the identities we juggle, or have we lost any semblance of agency? I think not.
(Discovered much later and confirming my thoughts above ... )
"[The manifesto] is neither technophobic, nor technophilic, but about trying to inquire critically into the worldliness of technoscience. It is about exploring where real people are in the material-semiotic systems of technoscience and what kinds of accountability, responsibility, pleaure, work, play, are engaged, and should be engaged."
(Haraway, "Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations," p. 326)
