í Assignments

Marisa Chung
Hybrid Assignment 8
11/03/15

In Jodi Dean’s essay she elaborates on the notion of “whatever being” as a new form of personality which is described as an individual without a sense of belonging towards a specific category. The term “whatever being” was formed from the word “whatever” which is an extremely common word used today among Americans. The word “whatever” is said as a response to express indifference, such as not willing to accept nor refuse. From my understanding of Dean’s essay, she expands this concept and the form of communicativity by explaining the comparison of the different ways digital media plays a role in our experiences

Dean uses an example from the response of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, (which I have previously read for a different class) when the scrivener calmly responds “I’d rather not” when the lawyer asks him to complete a task. The lawyer is so startled by his response that he doesn’t know how to react to the scrivener’s response. According to Dean, “whatever” resembles the response of the scrivener. Although “I’d rather not” is an unacceptable answer from a worker to a “boss”, the lawyer does not let the scrivener go and tries to get answers to his strange behaviors. That itself could have been a good reason for the lawyer to let him go, however he does not. Bartleby continues to answer saying “I would prefer not to”, but the lawyer wishes that Bartleby would tell him anything. According to Dean, “His answer affirms the intelligibility of the request even as it challenges the normative expectations informing it.” Bartleby is a subject with preferences, and these preferences must be attended to.

The essay by Jodi Dean, “Whatever Blogging” explains how we interpret the term “whatever” in society. “Whatever” it is often assumed as a sign of indifference. It is assumed or interpreted from one’s point of view. On the other hand, As Jodi explores how “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging”, could be that it refers the “whatever being” as the information that turns into “ communicative capitalism”. As an example, Jodi states that “ Communicative capitalism facilitates and incites these attempts, employing ever-innovative upgrades to ensure not just the attempts continue but that they accelerate”(180), meaning that they are the main commodities being exchanged. On the other hand, another point that Jodi exposes in her essay is when she says that same way in which blogs serves as a way to informs us it is a way of communicative capitalism. This is referring to the same way that Buck-Mors argues about the imaginary space that cinemas are supposed to create. Jodi states that “ blogs- standing in for the networked information and entertainment media of communicative capitalism- not only do not create such a space for a mass but dissolve any sense it”. We are often caught up with the idea that we are only sharing with close acquaintances and friends or others, who share similar interests. We tend to share, like, and try to access blogs that interest ones desire. Obviously, things have evolved ever since, attention was once centered on mass media radio, cinema where messages were delivered through this sources, but now focus is mainly exposed to social media, it is here where the “whatever being” is centered at.

The “whatever”, the internet’s capacity of giving a person, every person, a sense of individuality and anonymity through the same, or very similar, social media platforms is what Jodi Dean is talking about in her essay “Whatever Blogging”. Specifically, being part of the social media whole by participating in surveys, clicking on ads, posting our personal information on our Facebook pages but believing the myth that the individual is not being traced or monitored, that the individual choices of one person won’t make a change is simply not true. This “whatever” attitude, the new personality, the new marker of belonging, through communicativity is people’s use of social media to connect with one another and to belong, not so much to have a meaning interaction but to have and collect connections and promote ourselves to inflate our sense of self worth and have the feeling of individuality while having the same experiences as the masses.
Dean uses two examples in American history to explain this notion of “whatever being” and forms of communicativity. First, she uses Buck-Morss’ discussion of the role of film’s influence in the relationship Americans had with work in the Industrial Era. American’s endured the “drudgery” of factory life for the freedoms of consumption, in which many sought out the escapism of Hollywood films. The time spent in the theater was time in which the viewer did not have to be himself and could be whoever they fantasized about on screen. The collective action of watching a film of a crowded theater of other people having the identical experience does not diminish the individual experience mirrors the communicativity of current internet use.
On another note, Dean connects the fall of idealized domesticity in the United States and the consequential rise of feminism and television as another example of communicativity. The combination of the two movements made personal issues public issues as Dean explained it “eras(ed) the fragile and imaginary boundaries between personal and private, a line that made little sense after the rise of the social.” As the idealized nuclear family was no longer regarded as the norm, and the responsibilities of those traditional roles disappeared it created more room for individual freedoms and creativity, creating new individual identity for personal satisfaction. Countless American families experienced this same transformation, believing their own experience to be unique, during the same era.

One example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is Liam Lynch’s song “Whatever.” In the song he has a George W. Bush impersonator yell, “I’m George W. Bush, leader of the free world. I want to bomb Iraq. And when the world says, ‘no’! I say, ‘whatever!’  Sadam has started to meet our demands. Yeah, whatever.” The term “whatever” in the American culture is used as a passive-aggressive conversational blocking tool. In Dean’s article she discusses how this “whatever being” has no preferences. In this impersonation in the song “Whatever” we see that this form of communicating does little to help whoever is receiving this message. It goes with Dean’s overall theme of the new form of communication that has permeated this culture. There are more voices in today’s digital media in the form of blogs, social media sites, etc. but these voices seem to offer exposure and anonymity which in some ways the receiver of this message is left saying “whatever” on move on to the next one.

A second example used by Jodi Dean in her essay “Whatever Blogging” to elaborate on the notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to is the word cloud. A word cloud is “a graphic representation of the content of a text understood in terms of frequency of word use.” With word clouds people have now taken context out of words and how they are said and by whom and why. It displaces the meaning and creates a very different story then the person who said it may have initially intended.

The “whatever being,” in my opinion, could be anyone and everyone. There are millions and millions of “whatever bloggers” out there who post their likes and dislikes and may or may not care about how many hits or views they get. It’s all about getting their content out there no matter who may or may not see it. I am torn a bit on this one as we all have the freedom to say whatever we want wherever we want, but if the content is not up to par in your opinion what does it really matter?

In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean discusses the “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.”  The way that I was able to enter into/access this idea, was by understanding that what she was referring to is the multitude of ways society has had to self-identify traditionally, rather than the ways that self-identification is thought of today.  She used the illustration of the ways in which we identified during the Cold War, between the US and the Soviet Union.  There was a definite “us and them” mentality, that was a collective identity we shared as a collective body.  In American cinema, the Americans were always portrayed as the ones working for the greater good, against the evil Russians.  Our collective social way of life was extolled as being the ideal for the American way of life and the standard that we all are measured by.  This diversity of freedoms, inversely is was formed a unifying identity for the masses within the American culture.  However, the homogenized culture of the Soviet Union is exactly what made them so different and a potential threat to our way of life.

The blogisphere that has become to be a contemporary expression of individuality, has eroded the collective sense of identity provided for society previously.  The measures by which we judged ourselves and in turn, connected with others to embody a like-minded communal self-identity, has been undermined and made a 180 degree change – that now thiese things are exactly what makes our self-identity and experience unique and individual.  We now have the idea that “we are with them, but we’re not really with them.”  The concept has moved to say, “whatever happens to me matters – in and of itself.”

In the essay “Whatever Blogging”, Jodi Dean talks about “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity”. What this means is that eventually we will all have a different community and personality that is no longer tied to what previously defined us. In one example, Dean says that ” if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking to the masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multiple addressees- addresses known and unknown, friends and strangers.” In this assessment, Dean is making the point that traditional mass media previously influenced the collective “us” while the influence of networked technology reaches people in different ways. This made me think of the Vietnam war and how U.S. citizens only knew what was reported to them by the media, whereas in today’s society information is received in a number of different ways, through friends and strangers. Often times, Facebook becomes the means by which we hear breaking news because information has the ability to go viral in a matter of seconds. In the “whatever” society, there is no deep thought process before hitting the send button, no thoughts of the consequences that could potentially be faced. Another example Dean uses is the cinema, which she says ” changed the nature of the crowd by providing an imaginary mass body.” In this section she discusses how ethnic groups, religious, political organizations and racist law worked against the image and goal of a unified political identity. One way that these forces were countered was through the use of film, because it was understood as a collective experience. In this way, the unified political identity was able to get their message across to a large group of people, reinforce their beliefs and set the culturally accepted standards for society. Still, she makes the point that there were forces that attempted to fight against these unified political identities. However, the “whatever being” is portrayed as a passive entity, a being that doesn’t really stand for much, it just passes the same information around to its network without deep thought and reflection.

Due by midnight Tuesday, November 3rd (300-350 words).

In her essay “Whatever Blogging,” Jodi Dean (2013:169) articulates the “new modes of community and new forms of personality anticipated by the dissolution of inscriptions of identity through citizenship, ethnicity, and other modern markers of belonging.” Choose at least two examples used by Dean to elaborate on this notion of “whatever being” and the form of communicativity that it points to.

The similarity between Von Kempelen’s machine and Amazon’s new platform is that there’s a human power behind it. Von Kempelen’s machine didn’t perform magic by playing chess on its own, his assistant was inside the machine making the moves. Amazon’s platform also has a human power behind it, it’s by the humans, Turks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was developed due to the failure of the artificial intelligence. Technology is great, it helps with everyday life move faster,though I believe it often creates more problems than solving it, but at most the technology does help. It doesn’t run on its own neither it was created on its own, there’s a millions of hours of human brain power behind it; to creat it, run it and fix it.

The connection between Automaton chess player and Amazon’s platform, Ayets was making, I believe, is that no matter how much technology advances, it will always need some sort of human work behind it. It may be possible in the future to have/create technology that will no longer need human brain power, but as of now, it can’t be possible and frankly speaking, I don’t think I want to live in that time where the world is run by machines and not humans.

Ayhan Aytes basically draws a connection between Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Player Automaton and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system in order to create a historical base from which he can implicate AMT as carrying out neoliberalism via the shared commonality of this cloaked cognitive labor performed in both models of comparison. The Chess Player presents the illusion of artificial intelligence and is a metaphor for the illusory quality of AMT’s system, the fact that the cognitive labor being performed is alluded to by referring to those cognitive worker’s as “mechanized turks” or “turkers” is a sly and problematic ping back to the orientalist roots of the Chess Player Automaton. Ironic or perhaps not (as is the way Neoliberalism works) that AMT is in name a continuation of the “Oriental” automaton that of current employs the cognitive labor of people from the Global South, most notably, Indian workers. The work is piecemeal and is similar in comparison to the chess player automaton due to the micro and macro elements at play in both systems; as chess is an intellectual and strategic game (originally from India too) and reliant on individual moves in order to achieve capture of the other player’s pieces. AMT is a system that relies on singular tasks being completed and does not involve the same worker in a unified or ongoing relationship to the work – I mean to say, it’s almost like an assembly line (using a factory metaphor here even though that is not totally relative) in that the worker is performing one task that goes towards a whole but that is not aware or connected to that whole process. This system differs from our ideas of Chess, as that game infers a level of awareness of all the potential roles or ways a piece could potentially affect the desired outcome of the game on a large scale – that is why the “Mechanical Turk” of the Chess Player Automaton was so intriguing and romanticized, even after it was discovered to be a hoax. This idea of mechanized intelligence represented infinite possibilities to the West, to be able to reap all the benefits of human intelligence, without the human. But the bottom line is that, technologically speaking, we are not there yet, and there is still a reliance on the human and their human intelligence, there is a person inside both systems that make them function, this is the crux of the analogy and also important to consider when thinking about what this kind of reductive labor practice as a trope (vis a vis a major corporate entity, Amazon) has on the cognitive worker’s it employs.

By presenting this labor being performed as automatized, and emanating from a machine or machines somewhere (in the case of AMT many of it’s Turker’s are outsourced from far outside of the Western Sociocultural environment) the labor and the considerations towards workers performing it are made invisible. Not only does the cognitive labor take place outside of the mechanization, but also takes places outside of the society it usually serves (this is an estimation, as I imagine that the main target is the American West.) What does this mean for the cognitive workers within the AMT system? What does it mean for the actual pieces of work that they perform? Aytes does a great job of breaking down how these cognitive workers fall into a “state of exception” as disembodied laborers within a neoliberal framework.