Re-Visioning the Unified Subject; Or, _We_ Have Never Been Whole

Abe and I approached our schema in a way that I now see as limiting. We started by building an outline of our readings for the semester and summarizing each reading so that we could identify patterns across the texts. This process ultimately led us to form the five questions that we presented on our schema and to organize relevant texts beneath those questions. What now seems to me to have limited what we might have been able to do is the fact that we started with the texts preceding this week's reading. In other words, we revisited the older texts before reading and discussing Baudrillard, Vasaly, and Miller. Because of this, I think that we missed the opportunity to make sense of Baudrillard, Vasaly, and Miller on their own terms and to use those texts to make sense of the previous texts.

So, as I began thinking about how to approach this critical blog post, I found myself needing to review this week's texts, and I started with Baudrillard. As I reread his text and my initial notes on it, I began to notice ways in which his text pushes against (or is pushed against by) Haraway's "situated knowledges." Because I feel as though our schema did not force me to reconsider earlier texts in light of the new ones, I'll focus the remainder of this entry on putting Baudrillard in conversation with Haraway (with a little Clay Shirky thrown in as a challenge to Baudrillard's claims).

Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication" traces a paradigm shift that has occurred since the publication of System of Objects. Whereas the mid-to-late 20th century saw an intense interest in psychoanalytic theory, the spectacle, the Other, difference, etc., we've now moved to a stage when concepts, such as subject/object, public/private, and so on, are no longer relevant. Lacan gave us the mirror stage and objet petite a, but now "there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold--the smooth operational surface of communication" (Baudrillard 127). Further, we no longer have "a scene where the dramatic interiority of the subject, engaged with its object as with its image, is played out" (128). In other words, psychoanalytic understanding of subject formation, object relations, and social interaction is played out: we need a new model for understanding society and the real.

Baudrillard's answer is the network: he writes that "we are the terminal of multiple networks," a repositioning that displaces our bodily movement (and, therefore, knowledge) (128). Because our "bodily movements and efforts" have become "electric or electronic commands" (128), "the real itself appears as a large, useless body" (129). Baudrillard concludes by returning to the end of identification as conceived by 20th century theorists: "it [our proximity to all things] is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world who transverses him [sic.] without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror" (132).

Because there was a time when I felt great fondness for Baudrillard's work, I wanted to be on board with his discussion, but I felt myself resisting what he wrote. I kept thinking, what does this mean for "situated knowledges"? for "bodily knowledge" (though Bourdieu clearly falls into that mid-to-late 20th c category that Baudrillard is disavowing)? And then I realized that the sort of subject-death that Baudrillard seems to be lamenting, or at least avowing, is accounted for in Haraway; she even calls for it as a way of making knowledge objectively rather than universally. Haraway writes, "The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge" (193). Her emphasis here on splitting, rather than unification (which is what I take her to mean by "being"), shows that a heterogenous subject (is that even the right word? cyborg, perhaps?) is capable of inquiries that the unified subject is not. In regard to the unified subject, she explains, "Only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical, unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again...knowledge from the point of view of the unmarked is truly fantastic, distorted, and so irrational. The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practised and honoured is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God, whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference" (193).* When I read this description, I can't help but think that it's an apt way of responding to Baudrillard. In that he sees the death of the unified subject as the cause for a (negative) shift in human communication and knowledge-making practices, he seems to be taking up the self-identical subject positioning that Haraway describes: What Baudrillard views as schizophrenia, Haraway sees as productive for knowledge-making practices.

I both am and am not persuaded by my own argument. On the one hand, I do think that viewing Baudrillard's text through this Haraway passage reveals something very problematic in his argument, but on the other, I'm not ready to say that Baudrillard definitely views our present schizophrenic condition, as he calls it, negatively. Though I do not see his discussing this positioning as a way of making (or not making) knowledge, I do see his claim that "we can no longer produce our own boundaries" as having implications for knowledge-making practices--and perhaps similar implications to Haraway's notion, in that she pushes us to reimagine the "limits" of the body and technological appendages.

But, to take this in a slightly different direction, I do see Baudrillard critiquing our activities when he writes, "What can be said about the immense amounts of free time we are left with, a dimension henceforth useless in its unfolding, as soon as the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants?" (129). My response to this question draws from Clay Shirky's notion of "cognitive surplus." According to Shirky, major changes in working and living patterns that occurred after WWII left people with more free time than they had previously enjoyed. For many years, this free time was spent in front of the television (which seems connected to Baudrillard's argument), but now social networking and other technological innovations have provided us with the means to do more than passively consume media. Inherent in Shirky's argument is the idea that "people want to do something to make the world a better place" (17), and this is where I'm no longer on board. Though I don't necessarily agree with Shirky's theory of why people are actively participating in cultural, social, and political processes in greater numbers, I do agree that cognitive surplus enables some people to actively initiate and contribute to cultural and political changes. In this way, I think that we could respond to Baudrillard by saying that people are doing all kinds of things with the immense amounts of free time we are left with. Perhaps, though, the proliferation of social networking and the actions it enables were unimaginable when Baudrillard was writing. Perhaps he was describing the passive consumption of media. Either way, Haraway recuperates the split subject/cyborg, envisioning her knowledge-making capabilities in a way that strikes me as far less utopic than Shirky's vision.

*As an aside, Baudrillard's use of the masculine pronoun also leads me to believe that Haraway's critique is applicable to him--insofar as the masculine seems to be equated with the universal.