Matt Davis's Profile

tention described in chapter 1. Art’s center of gravity henceforth would lie not

tention described in chapter 1. Art’s center of gravity henceforth would lie not

Art is an act of attention the artist wishes to invoke in the

in objects that artists create but in the attention that the beholder brings to them

a series of attention games with the art-loving public

Inquiry of all sorts has to be serious. That is its organizing premise. But if you subtract the object of that seriousness by putting a urinal in its place, that seriousness is turned into a game. To understand it, you must then write a serious treatise on games and play, wondering all the while what you are about. The critic, like a bull bemused by the toreador’s flashing cape, starts pawing the ground, angry and confused. Such confusion has made Duchamp famous.

to make us oscillate back and forth between the physical world, stuff, and how we think about stuff.

our own patterns of attention and the varieties of “seriousness” we construct atop them

a serious lesson about seriousness

if you are willing to put him into an attention economy rather than a goods economy, let him work in attention, not in stuff, then things look different.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Peter Drucker’s conviction that information is the new property, the new stuff

Assume that, in an information economy, the real scarce commodity will always be human attention and that attracting that attention will be the necessary precondition of social change

onventional printed typography aims to create a particular economy of attention, but, since this economy is so ubiquitous, the basic reality of reading, we have long ago ceased to notice it

single font and a single size

it filters out visual distraction

Typographical design

o seem not to be seen

Print, that is, constructs a particular economy of attention, an economy of sensory denial. It economizes on most of the things we use to orient ourselves in the world we’ve evolved in—three-dimensional spatial signals, sounds, colors, movement—in order to spend all our attention on abstract thinking

economists of expression

The print economy of attention has been destabilized. It is still there, but it toggles back and forth with a new one.

Andy Warhol

It was his life’s work to illustrate the paradoxical relationship of stuff and attention.

But you couldn’t paint attention, at least not directly. So he went about it indirectly.

pop explosion

the style that took the attention economy as its central subject

an alien attention structure.

You could repeat the mantra of “art for art’s sake” but no critic can actually accept this as truth because it leaves the critic no function

a powerful yet economical attention trap

The meaning, since this was an attention trap, would be supplied by all the interpreters waiting out there to make sense of such artifacts

Interpretive Bureaucracy of Attention Economists

And so what if Andy did say one thing one day and contradict himself the next? More grist for the mill. That’s how an attention artist works.

Once the attention-trap formula was worked out, it was easy to apply it elsewhere,

Extend the franchise

Thus was attention converted into money by instantiating the attention in physical objects, stuff.

Information, digital or otherwise, is not like stuff.

Homo sapiens’ fondness for the centripetal gaze

The centripetal gaze, the flow of energy from the margins of a society to its center of attention, creates by its nature the winner-take-all society.

The question of a “real” Andy, like the question of meaning in his painting, simply didn’t arise.

all package

There had to be one, just as there had to be soup in the can

take the economics of attention seriously. That seriousness, however, differed from the kind the “intellectuals” operated under.

The stuff you dig out of the earth’s crust becomes, in an information economy, less important than the information that informs it,

Yet the more you ponder that information, the more you understand about that stuff, the more real the stuff becomes

twin hungers: for the spotlight and for collecting stuff, knowing that each needs the other to make it real.

Judo,

centripetal gaze

audience

Draw your inspiration from your audienc

art upside down

Objects do matter

in the present

Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness

modern war is a cyborg orgy

I am making an argument
for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as
an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings

The cyborg
is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined
centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation

a post-gender world

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and
perversity

a revolution of social relations in
the oikos, the household

three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the
following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible

the boundary
between human and animal is thoroughly breached

connection across the discredited breach
of nature and culture

There is much room
for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine

The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between
physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us

The silicon chip is a surface for writing

Miniaturization

consciousness - or its simulation

So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and
dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part
of needed political work.

most American socialists
and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine,
idealism and materialism

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of
a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in
a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation
of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another
perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities
in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines,
not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.

Consciousness
of exclusion through naming

There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally
binds women.

Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement
forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social
realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism

affinity, not identity

identity marks out a self-consciously
constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of
natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of
affinity, of political kinship

how to craft a poetic/political
unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorpora-tion, and taxonomic
identification.

the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points,
epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world,
has been part of the process showing the limits of identification

the non-innocence
of the category

Marxian socialism

socialist-feminism

The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological
structure of'labour'.

MacKinnon

However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product,
but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject,
since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation

the status of a partial explanation

Kristeva

It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so
the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection
among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex

the end of man is at stake

a picture of possible unity

a politics rooted in claims about
fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging
system of world order

Sexual reproduction

in terms of frequencies of parameters

t human diversity

cyborg semiologies

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

The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled,
postmodern collective and personal self.

solution
to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key
operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow
of a quantity called information

differentially permeable

the metaphor C31

ethical perplexity

simulacra

copies without originals

women in the integrated
circuit

Gordon intends 'homework economy' to name a restructuring
of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female
jobs

To be
feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable

Work is being redefined as both
literally female and feminized

The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is
made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies

also related to the
collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women
to sustain daily life

feminization of poverty

Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/
early industrial, monopoly, multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism,
and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic
periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I would argue that specific
forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political
and cultural concomitants

(1) the patriarchal
nuclear family

(2) the modern family mediated (or enforced)
by the welfare state

(3) the
'family' of the homework economy

. It is no longer
a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven
with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated
the situations of white and black women

militarization

A major social and political
danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the
masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour,
confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general
redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses
ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance.

What kind of constitutive role in the production
of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have?

network ideological image

trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit

Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State,
School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church

ever, there is no 'place' for women in these networks,
only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg
identities

dispersion

Home:

Market:

Paid Work Place:

State:

School:

Clinic-hospital:

Church:

The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive
intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment

Perhaps,
ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how
not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos

'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborg
idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities
and in the complex political-historical layerings

Sister Outsider

Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups.
Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between
oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities

Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original
innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that
marked them as other

Feminist cyborg
stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert
command and control.

Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not
because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries,
to write without the founding myth of original wholeness

Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs

to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the
need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.

Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return
to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation,
the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation

Chief among
these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/
made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man

The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice of
the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by
the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the
self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be
One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse
with the other

There is no fundamental, ontological
separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical
and organic

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations

We are responsible for
boundaries

Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory
of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory

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