being that I feel like I'm a preschooler in the school of political theory as such, the discussions today were great and it's all slowly sinking in... so now I have a question, the answer to which may be obvious, but I am curious what others think and how both Deleuze and Foucault might think about it...
being that in the control society there is a chaotic realm of data which is presumably a-moral, does that then mean that the filters through which data passes on its way to becoming information and/or knowledge are imbued with morality/judgment and if so, does this point of filtration become one of THE critical points of control and/or resistance?
I hope others will jump in on this question, as I think it is crucial for thinking about efficacious strategies and tactics of resistance.
ReplyDeletePart of me wants to say that the data itself is gathered, produced, and analyzed with a certain lens, which might be tantamount to saying from within a particular dispositif, but morality for Deleuze, if I understand it correctly, is dynamically relative. Post-Nietzsche, the world is truly beyond good and evil, but representational constructs certainly do much to make "an ethics" seem transcendent, universal, etc. Deleuze is against all of this crap (technical term), and I would have to find the reference for it, but the quote that is coming to mind is something like, "a norm must exist before something can be abnormal," which is a direct quote from the Gospel according to Shapiro! :)
To be clear that is a direct quote from Georges Canguilhem Foucault's dissertation advisor. However I agree this an important question. I would like to think about this in two ways. First judgement and morality are not synonymous even if intimate. Two and I think this is the really interesting part of Aurbrey's question does the 'judgement' which would could also call an algorithm that is a mathematical boundary for what is and isn't data (Interesting to think about algorithms as judgements I think) represent a critical site for control/resistance. I think the answer is yes. In so far as there are points of intersection just like traffic stops that if poorly designed or interrupted cause hours of traffic as opposed to others which don't matter than the interchange for the selection of datum is 'critical'. Think about what happens when you do a Google search one search word to few and 1,000,000,000 results. One search term too many and "Your search has yielded no results'. So how we cull data has a direct effect on what can be made of it. Now what do search terms have to do with norms or morality. Search terms or object specification functions like a norm. If a norm is too restrictive it fails as it is so widely disregarded as to no longer be a norm. It is only those norms which resonates with a number of people (even if they don't quite fit in it) that can produce say the normative violence of racism or gender. So in this sense how we select datum whether perceptual i.e. someone make a certain kind of meaning out of skin color or whether it is digitally algorithmic like selecting everyone that traveled to Pakistan, how we cull or select datum is a matrix of power/knowledge. Or put more simple what we perceive and don't perceive, what we turn into information and leave as date matters and is never neutral it is political.
ReplyDelete"Think about what happens when you do a Google search one search word to few and 1,000,000,000 results. One search term too many and "Your search has yielded no results'. So how we cull data has a direct effect on what can be made of it." - Agreed, but I guess I was thinking of Google itself as the data filter. Thinking about things like how it pulls up sites based on my search terms, paid ads on the sides, pay-per-click, etc. This to me seems to be the point of control which is privileging certain data over other data...
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