Animated and Disturbed by Katie Stephenson

Animated and Disturbed: Narratives of Immaterial Labor Practices

Abstract Immaterial labor practices have been theorized in a number of ways, but this thesis begins to fill a hole in this body of research by investigating the material implications of doing immaterial labor. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s quote, “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert,” the author analyzes two narratives—a comedy sketch from the television show Portlandia, and a digital poem titled, “Separation” by Annie Abrahams—to distinguish how immaterial labor practices are portrayed, and what these depictions can tell about the embodied consequences of carrying out immaterial labor practices. The author experiments with a diffractive methodology, and in doing so she uses the concept disturbing to navigate through the two narratives. To address the first narrative Portlandia, the author uses disturbing as a negative feeling to determine to what degree the comedy sketch frames the movements of immaterial labor as such. In the second chapter, the author addresses disturbing as a verb, that which unsettles, as a way of understanding how a digital poem can express material consequences through behavioral mechanisms, and in doing so convey the movements of immaterial labor by reading-using the poem.

Kathleen Stephenson University of Amsterdam 5911125 rMA Thesis Cultural Analysis Laura Schuster (Supervisor), Tara MacDonald (Second Reader) July 4, 2012

Acknowledgements The acknowledgement section is always my favorite part of any book. This is because by paying close attention to the way it’s written and who is thanked, a reader can craft a whole narrative of an author in a way that makes them more present in the text as a human who had help from countless others to create incredible ideas. Even a secluded author cannot skip this short section because writing is never a lone practice. As for my narrative, let’s see how well you do in crafting it. First and foremost, I am incredibly grateful to my supervisor, Laura Schuster, and second reader, Tara MacDonald, for taking on my project. Due to the world unfolding with a few obstacles in the way, these two incredibly insightful and motivating scholars came on board to my project with a lot less time to give guidance than most supervisors are given. These two women put in so much of their energy into my project in a ways that gave it a momentum that made it easier for me to sit at my computer everyday and write. While Laura and Tara’s energy gave me the academic momentum to write, there are some people I must thank that made it possible to get the chance to sit down and write this thesis. First and foremost is my roommate, teammate, friend, and partner Elgin. Without his support, surprise Ben and Jerry’s ice cream breaks, and insight, the momentum that began with my supervisors would be lost. I would also like to thank Professor Joseph Schneider who opened up worlds of interest to me through his teaching, and supported me even after I was no longer his student. In addition I would like to thank the people who have made my studies possible financially. I’d like to thank my parents, Barb and Doug, who always supported me in all I do. To Alice and Robert who helped me get my feet on the ground in Holland. To Julie and Mark who gave me an opportunity to let me support myself financially, and took me in as part of their family in the meantime. And finally, to the HSP committee, whoever they are. The financial support from HSP is a critical and excellent program for young international students in Holland, one that will be incredibly missed. Finally there are the people whose energies cannot be overlooked in the writing of this thesis: the Bunch—Jaclyn, Kirsten, and Shannon—these strong women inspire me the most, and know me the best. Thus they can always provide a perspective I miss. Mara, for explaining the UvA to me and providing incredible support and feedback in all I do. Emile and Celine, the children who give me a break from my thesis (and actually enjoy my renditions of children’s songs). And finally my teams the NUTS and the Rusty Bikes who let me work out my frustrations on the field.

Table of Contents Introduction: What is to become of me?

Immaterial Labor 7 Disturbing 9 Disturbingly Animate, Animations that Disturb, and Scientific Practices that Disturb 10

1: Disturbingly Animate

2: Animations that Disturb

3: Diffraction: Scientific Practices that Disturb

Conclusion: The Materiality of Immaterial Labor Works Cited

64 66

Introduction 12 Animated Workers 14 The Uncanny: as a feeling, as an aesthetic 19 The Material Turn: Material-Semiotic Things 22 A Force in What Occurs: Movement as Agency 25 Slapstick Comedy 28 Conclusion 30 Introduction 32 Reading-Using â&#x20AC;&#x153;Separationâ&#x20AC;? June 4, 2012 33 Digital Devices and Electronic Literature 40 Traffic between Materiality and Content 42 Material-Semiotic Apparatuses 44 Active Reader-Users and Posthuman Subjectivity 45 Conclusion 51 Introduction 53 Representational Idiom 54 Performative Idiom 54 A Discussion of Strategies 56 Diffraction 58 Diffraction as a Reading Practice 59 Diffraction as a Writing Practice 60 Diffraction for Cultural Analysis 61 Diffraction: A Useful Practice? 63

Introduction: What is to become of me? Despite the hopeful tune of the possibilities that can come to be in the “post” and feminist theories I have been steeped in, when I think of submitting this very text I cannot help but wonder what is to become of me?1 This thesis stems from my anxiety. The type of labor that I will most likely participate in after graduation, if so lucky to be employed, is something different than the types of labors I have done before. The type of labor that I am talking about is immaterial labor. Immaterial labor is a concept that was developed during the late 1980s and 1990s through both the discussions and the writings of the editors of Futura Antérieur, a journal started by Antonio Negri in Paris that addressed “the problems that were to characterise the global era of neo-liberalism,” and “expressed and highlighted the new characteristics of living labour.”2 These theorist crafted new terminology that attends to what Negri calls a paradigm shift in which Fordism became postfordism and modernity became post-modernity.3 Immaterial labor is described as a transformation in which people produce “the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”4 Although I will outline the particularities of immaterial labor in this introduction, in my analyses I will be focusing on the movements that people make when doing immaterial labor. In my preliminary readings on immaterial labor, I became increasingly interested in the way in which people move when carrying out immaterial labor practices. I found this to be missing in writings about immaterial labor. In this thesis I consider the everyday experiences of performing this type of labor, and the material realities of doing immaterial labor. This is because I want answers to questions such as: will I have pain in carrying out this form of labor, if so what will hurt? How focused do I need to be when doing this type of labor? What does it feel like to do this type of labor? Is this labor boring, fun, creative; is it social? To answer these questions, I do not take kinesthetic approach where I would study the particular measurements of movements, or a field research approach in which I observe and interview people on the way they move when doing immaterial labor, instead I convey the material realities of doing immaterial labor by analyzing two narratives that interrogate immaterial labor practices. These narratives—one a comedy sketch called “MindFi” from the television show Portlandia, and the other an electronic poem titled Separation—express feelings, attitudes, aesthetics, ways of reading, movements and other particularities attached to immaterial labor practices. Besides being described as a form of labor that produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity, immaterial labor is marked by the usage of cybernetic devices. Since laborers’ movements are dependent upon the machines they use to do 1 This certainly sounds like a self-involved question, but really it can be expanded to what is to become of us, since immaterial labor is a prevalent form of labor today. 2 Negri. 3 Ibid. 4 Lazzarato 133.

work, the way in which immaterial laborers move differs from the Fordist paradigm. Donna Haraway was one of the first authors to write about the transformation in how people move when doing immaterial labor (although she never uses the term).5 In her famous essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” she writes, “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”6 This sentence can be read in countless ways, which is exactly what Haraway wants: to resist the meaning and give meanings. In a 2006 interview with Nicholas Gane, Haraway was asked if this sentence was intended to “provoke thinkers who continue to treat human agency as something sacred,” or if it is intended to be a “serious declaration about the emergence of intelligent technologies that possess creative powers and agencies that rival those of so-called ‘human’ beings.”7 Haraway explains that it is “both and;” it is both intended to treat human agency as sacred and be sarcastic about this perspective.8 In this thesis, I latch on to the word disturbing, and follow it in various directions to try and open up ways of thinking about movement and immaterial labor. In order to do this I ask: to what degree do the two narratives suggest that human movements— as extended by digital devices—are disturbing, and by framing these movements as disturbing what do these narratives express about doing immaterial labor?

Immaterial Labor Before examining the movements attached to immaterial labor as represented in narratives, it is useful to first outline it as a concept. Immaterial labor refers to the way in which labor practices have transformed with the advent of digital devices, and the prevalence of information and cultural content as commodities. In his article, “Affective Labor,” Michael Hardt explains the historical transformations of labor: whereas modernization was marked by the migration of labor from agriculture and mining to industry, since the 1970s the migration of labor has been from industry to service jobs.9 This shift, explains Hardt, refers to a change in economic paradigms from an industrial economy to an informational economy.10 In order to point out some of the particularities of immaterial labor, it is useful to turn to Michel Foucault’s description of labor during the 18th and 19th centuries, during the industrial paradigm, to highlight the alterations in how laborers experience time, space, training for new skills, and management. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault outlines particularities of the industrial paradigm, specifically to craft his argument of how these practices were enforced. He called it a discipline society, referring to the way power was experienced during that period. Foucault argues that through enclosure, workers (school children, soldiers, etc.) experience a panopticon—a metaphor that captures what 5 Haraway uses the notion of homework economy rather than immaterial labor. 6 Haraway, “A Manifesto” 11. 7 Gane 141. 8 Furthermore, she explains it is a complaint about the passivity of herself and her political friends in addition to herself and her “intellectual buddies.” Gane 141. 9 Hardt 91. 10 Ibid. 93.

he calls a technology of power—in which workers regulate themselves because they feel unverifiably observable. In the informational paradigm, however, things have dramatically changed.11Instead of a steady cycle in which the workday ends and laborers go home, workers today are expected (depending on their employer) to be reachable at any time in any place.12 The workday no longer needs to be 9-5, and what is considered leisure might also be labor such as blogging, listening to music, or reviewing new art pieces.13 This is all possible because workspaces are no longer enclosed as Foucault framed it (referring to factories), but rather workspaces are extended via electronic devices and the Internet. The pressures on workers today also require flexibility, not just in supplemental work such as working at home, but also with endless training for new skills and freelance work.14 Ultimately, the whole cycle of production varies than that of the factory. Maurizio Lazzarato explains that the cycle of production today in the informational paradigm is made of small “productive units,” that can be comprised of just one person, who works on projects until completed. When completed the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacity.”15 This makes a worker’s experience precarious. Precarity, argues Vassilis Tsianos and Ditmitris Papadopolus, “is the embodied experience of the ambivalences of immaterial productivity in advanced post-Fordism.”16 They explain that this means that workers are vulnerable for a number of reasons: they need to be flexible without any form of protection, they are hyperactive in that they always need to accommodate and always need to be available, they are restless due to the fact that they are continually coping with the exposure to an over abundance of communication, and they are unsettled because of their constant experience of mobility across different spaces and timelines. 17 In addition, unlike the industrial paradigm in which the worker is always starting over—from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory— Deleuze claims in a short essay called “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” that in the post-industrial society a worker is never done: one is in perpetual training.18 The prevalence of perpetual training is particularly crafted by the management strategy of post-Fordism. During the industrial paradigm, people were placed in space in a way that made it easy to produce and enforce hierarchy. Workers were motivated by the desire to move up in the chain of command through promotions. Deleuze explains that today, where the corporation has replaced the factory, workers are motivated through 11 My intention is not to say that this is the only form of labor today, but rather a prevalent form of labor. 12 Deleuze 5.

13 Terranova 78. 14 Terranova 74, and Deleuze 5. 15 Lazzarato 137. 16 Tsianos & Papadopoulos. 17 Tsianos Papadopoulos 18 Deleuze 5.

challenges, bonuses, and rivalry.19 The notion of “salary according to merit,” argues Deleuze, requires workers to be in perpetual training, reworking the way in which one is educated. In addition, a manager in the information paradigm is not managing workers’ practices, but rather their social relations, subjectivity, and personality in order to make the worker’s soul “become part of the factory.”20 All of these elements contribute to immaterial labor as being something disturbing, but let me now explain what it is I mean by disturbing.

Disturbing As I mentioned, there are a lot of ways in which Haraway’s sentence can be read. Packed into it are questions of agency (can non-living things be capable of acting?), movement (how are movement and agency related?), materiality (is dead matter’s capacity to move eerie?), politics (are we too busy or too tired to be political as immaterial laborers?), reading practices (do we have a new way of reading that is distracted due to the multiplicity of devices around us?), and even literary techniques (how do different narratives of immaterial labor describe our contemporary situation?). Part of the reason why this sentence can be read in so many ways has to do with the various connotations attached to the word disturbing, and that is my intention to take this sentence and read it with two (material)cultural artifacts that address movements of immaterial labor. Even though the words Haraway uses, disturbingly and frighteningly, are synonyms, I find the word disturbing more productive as a concept to investigate the ways humans and machines move and how we think about their movements. I do recognize that in her exact quote she describes machines’ liveliness as disturbing. Despite this fact, I think that because frightening and disturbing are so closely related and because machines movement and human’s lack of movement are so dependent upon one another, that disturbing suffices in analyzing both human and machines’ movements. That being said, disturbing can be read as something that “discomposes the peace of mind or calmness of (any one),” or something that moves “anything from its settled condition or position.”21 Therefore, disturbing is not something that should just be qualified as a negative feeling, but rather it can have productive elements to it. In order for something new to emerge (be it systems, networks, materiality, genetic codes, or ideas) what is there before must be disturbed. In this thesis, I draw on a number of concepts in order to flesh out some of the idiosyncrasies of the word disturbing. These concepts are animation, the uncanny, and diffraction. The first concept, animation, became important to my project from the beginning because of my association of Haraway’s distinction of machine being lively and human being’s acting inert with animation. Both of these words drew me to the notion of animation because to be animate is to be alive and with movement, but to be animated is to be moved by another agent so that the illusion of movement is made to 19 Ibid. 20 Lazzarato 134. 21 Definitions from Oxford English Dictionary.

a viewer. Haraway is one of many theorists who suggest that we complicate the way we have conventionally conceived of animate things and animated things. Animate things are supposed to be living beings that have the capacity to move because they are alive, and animated things are dead matter that are moved by living beings. Instead, with the advent of digital devices we have metal matter (electronic devices) that can move (disturbingly animate), and human beings have become moved by electronic devices in particular ways (animations that disturb). These two ways of thinking about movement and matter shape my first two chapters. I also address the notion of the uncanny, a sensation and aesthetic that means familiarly unfamiliar, which was made famous in the early 20th century by Ernst Jentsch, and later Sigmund Freud. When reading Haraway’s quote, the concept of the uncanny— although inexplicitly—seems to jump out of the page at me. Not only does Haraway address the movements of dead matter as being disturbing, one of the key examples of what is uncanny in Jentsch’s writing, but she also claims that this relationship is disturbing and frightening, which are negative feelings. By thinking of disturbing as uncanny, I will be able to determine what feelings are attached to the movements of doing immaterial labor. The last chapter diverges from the previous two chapters in that it is a chapter where I think about my methodology which was shaped by the metaphor of diffraction. Diffraction is a visual metaphor that is widespread in feminist materialisms at this moment. It refers to the way in which light particles act when passing through a prism. When passing through a prism light particles scatter in different and unpredictable patters. By looking at the concept of disturbing in two very different readings of the word (one as an adjective and one as a verb), and with two very different objects in mind, I hope to provide a piece of knowledge that is diffractive, specifically in that it is different, adding to the world rather than just critiquing, and a partial yet rigorous perspective. Thus, I argue that diffraction as a methodology is disturbing in that it attempts to unsettle previous ways of thinking and traditions of making knowledge.

Disturbingly Animate, Animations that Disturb, and Scientific Practices that Disturb The first chapter of this thesis is titled “Disturbingly Animate.” In this chapter, I think about disturbing as an adjective, particularly as a negative feeling. In order to explore disturbing as a feeling, I give the term a context with a short comedy sketch from the television show Portlandia, titled “MindFi.” Some of the conceptual connections to disturbing that I discuss in this chapter are animatedness and the uncanny. By reading animatedness and the uncanny through Brian Massumi’s writings on movement, I provide a framework of thinking about humans’ movements when extended by computers in a way that is not saturated with notions of enlightenment. Finally, I turn to Henri Bergson’s theory on why particular movements are comedic, and I argue that this clip makes a political statement. The political statement disturbs the notion that progress is only progress because we tend to forget about our materiality, and in doing so progress does not function as such.

The second chapter is titled, “Animations that Disturb.” In this chapter I think about disturbing as a verb, as something that disrupts that which is settled. To think about disturbing as a verb, I put it in the context of a digital poem titled “Separation,” which is beneficial because in order to read the poem, one must carry out movements that correspond to those of doing immaterial labor making the process self-reflexive. After pointing out some characteristics about electronic literature, I look closely at “Separation,” and how it portrays the movements of immaterial labor. In particular, I argue that the animations that are key to the poetic nature of “Separation” are capable of capturing the tensions and contradictions of doing immaterial labor. In addition, I argue that “Separation” conveys how the object of discipline has transformed from bodies in a discipline society to data about people in a control society, and what this means to the workers who do immaterial labor. Finally, by drawing on how the author, Abrahams, conveys her movements of doing immaterial labor in her poem with animations that disturb a reader from actually reading the poem, I argue that the movement of workers in an informational paradigm is not speed as many have argued, but rather—by drawing on a concept from music—it is syncopation. The final chapter serves as a meeting point for the previous two chapters, not as a space for comparison or to put the content of my analysis in dialog, but rather to discuss in what ways the methodology of my thesis is productive. In this chapter, which is titled “Diffraction: Disturbing Scientific Practice,” I outline a short history of feminist science studies critique of modern Western knowledge making, and suggest taking on a methodology of diffraction. As a metaphor, it calls for an affirmative methodology by which a researcher tries to follow difference patterns. In this chapter, I discuss how I took up some of the experimented methodologies in this thesis to write with a diffracted methodology, and some of the practices that I did not. I explain how diffraction is useful for cultural analysis, and how productive I found it to be in writing this thesis. Now, however, it is time to start following one of these partial, colorful, diffractive rays of light, and that brings me to “MindFi,” and the notion of disturbing.

1: Disturbingly Animate Introduction Since the late 1800s there has been a drive to analyze how workers move, and engineer more “effective” ways for them to move to increase labor efficiency and ultimately profits for factory owners. Frederick Winslow Taylor developed a theory of management in the late 19th century, and argued that if one uses analysis, logic, rationality, and empiricism he or she can determine the most efficient way for workers to carry out their labor.1 He called this theory scientific management. Even though scientific management is beyond its heyday, engineering ways in which workers should move has not. There is even a discipline today devoted to engineering equipment, studying movement, and environments when carrying out labor practices (and other practices for that matter): ergonomics. Although in this project I set out to investigate the movements that are attached to immaterial labor, it is not to determine which movements are most efficient in a Tayloristic sense, but rather what these movements do, how they make us feel, and how they shape the way we experience the world. To do this I look at a narrative of immaterial labor, a comedy sketch called “MindFi” from the television show Portlandia. This narrative functions as only a partial perspective, a case study, that puts forth a fictional—yet significant—description of the movements that are made when doing immaterial labor. I argue that this fictional account is important because it captures and highlights elements of immaterial labor that can sometimes be lost when thinking about it from other perspectives. The short comedy sketch, “MindFi” plays with the movements of doing immaterial labor mostly by exaggerating them. “Mindfi” tries to capture some aspects of immaterial labor that I explained in the introduction. It is set in the living room of a house in which the main character Fred is using various technological devices that surround him namely, his iPad, iPhone, MacBook, Netflix DVDs, and television equipped with a digital video recorder. The first image the viewer sees is a medium shot accompanied by the sound of Fred mumbling to himself saying “check my email really quick” while he is sitting behind his computer. Almost immediately after he states this he receives an identifiable notification sound (one associated with Apple devices). After checking his email, the shot becomes a closeup of his computer in which the viewer can see Fred is looking at the website Puffington Host, which has a list of “the top 10 cutest puppies.”2 In the middle of looking at the website the camera comes back to a medium shot of Fred in which he looks at his cell phone to send a text. Following this the view becomes a close-up of an iPad in which Fred mutters, “software update,” and the shot quickly transfers to his pile of Netflix DVDs. We hear another notification sound, and Fred calls for help from Carrie. Carrie is in the kitchen doing the dishes and putting them away. Music begins 1 Taylor 1. 2 The website title, “Puffington Host,” is a parody of the actual website, “Huffington Post.”

to play with increasing tempo as Carrie briskly walks into the living room where Fred is sitting. From an angle that implies Carrie’s perspective, the viewer observes Fred sending another email on his computer, a text message from his iPhone, and hears additional notifications. The camera goes back and forth between a confused Carrie, and all of the websites that Fred is looking at, specifically his Netflix queue, his Tumblr, his YouTube account, and Puffington Host. During a shot where Fred is setting his DVR (Digital Video Recorder), Carrie begins to try and break him from this technology loop. To do this Carrie exclaims, “Fred, wait. Please! You know what’s happening right? You’re just spiraling; you’re out of control. No, there’s [sic] too many things going on. You’re out right?” We then see a close-up of Fred’s face in which his lips are not moving, but we can hear his voice say, “Please! Please help me!” as he looks at Carrie. Fred continues to move back and forth to each device around him, and the viewer sees Carrie run into the other room. While the music tempo continues to increase as notifications almost take over the soundtrack, Carrie runs back with something in her hands. Carrie shoves a photo of Fred from high school in between him and his devices. Warm music begins to play and Carrie exclaims, “Fred, that’s you in high school, that’s you before computers, and Internet and iPads, and YouTube, and Tumblr, before your fantasy baseball team, before your Netflix queue…Look how happy you look. You’re in a technology loop.” The camera then pans to a shot where you can see both Carrie and Fred where Fred asks aloud, “What should we do?” We hear a voice-over of Carrie’s voice implying that she is communicating to Fred via her thoughts. Her voice over indicates her telepathically saying to Fred “Welcome to MindFi.” Fred asks her what it is in his own voice over, and she explains that MindFi as something like WiFi but for thoughts in which “now you can let go of all your electronic devices and be free in your mind.” In the middle of asking how it works, the soothing music ends and we hear a commercial that tells Fred to think about the keyword gossip to get the latest information about celebrities. Fred states in the voice-over, which is his MindFi, that he is going to think about this and in doing so we hear a voice stating “now transferring to celeb—.” The voice goes haywire, and we see a close up of Fred’s face in which he’s frowning, his eyes flash red and white, and they roll into the back of his head accompanied by the sound of a machine powering down. We then see a computer in which an unknown person is looking at the screen in which Fred is featured on Puffington Host’s “Top 10 MindFi Fails.” The short sketch “MindFi” engages various feelings and aesthetics linked to the bodily consequences of doing immaterial labor. The main character Fred not only experiences labor in the sense of the collapse of leisure and labor, or the extension of the workspace, but also in how his body moves in ways that are distinctively connected to this form of labor. In this chapter, I look at how “MindFi” as a case study represents the movements of doing immaterial labor. I draw on Haraway’s quote that I introduced earlier, “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert,” to see to what degree this early description of working closely with electronic devices is still accurate. Ultimately these movements craft a narrative that draws on literary techniques

of comedy, but they also draw on other feelings and aesthetics such as uncanny, and animatedness. To do this, however, I want to turn back to Haraway’s quote. Upon first reading, her quote seems to perpetuate one of the anxieties when it comes to the usage of electronic devices. This anxiety is of dead matter’s capacity to act—or to move for that matter—as threatening to human beings. This theme has been prevalent in literature, and is often marked by Mary Shelley’s 1818 book, Frankenstein, in which “the first whispers of techno-resistance” were conveyed and have intensified in narratives through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, specifically in science fiction.3 But does “MindFi perpetuate this anxiety? And does Haraway intend to affirm it? By looking at this popular culture narrative of the movements attached to immaterial labor with Haraway’s quote in mind, I ask in what ways are the movements attached to immaterial labor as portrayed in “MindFi” disturbing? To begin my discussion of how “MindFi” portrays the way we move when doing immaterial labor, I first turn to the notion of animation and docile bodies, a prevalent conceptualization of workers’ movements. Questions of the animation of workers bring to the forefront questions of agency, and the disturbing associations attached to it. From here I turn to the feeling of the uncanny, which has historically been attached to dead matter moving and lively beings correspondingly lack of movement, from both Ernst Jentsch’s writings on intellectual uncertainty, and Sigmund Freud’s conceptions of disruptions of the “rational self.” With the suggestion of feminist materialists to remember materiality, I reread Jentsch and Freud with Massumi in mind, and I argue that “MindFi” is disturbing, but not in the uncanny sense of the word. To get to this point, however, I begin with the notion of animation.

Animated Workers In my research, the way in which workers’ movements have been described keeps

bringing me back to the practice of animation. Taylor, in his 1895 book, The Practices of Scientific Management, proposed that managers should walk around timing and taking notes of workers’ movements. Taylor states that he wanted to “remove ‘all possible brainwork’ from the shop floor, handing all action, as far as possible, over to machines.”4 Even when Foucault describes how workers moved in the industrial paradigm, he seems to point to workers’ movements as animated when he writes: By the late eighteenth century, the soldier has become something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and given him ‘the air of a soldier.’ 5

3 Dinello 9. 4 Hindle. 5 Foucault 136.

For me, the imagery that Foucault describes refers to the tedious and calculated process of moving clay figures when constructing Claymation films in which a person’s bodily practices become ones they are molded into: animated by calculated design. I want to look closer at this notion of animation to determine to what degree immaterial laborers are animated as Foucault depicts workers during the industrial paradigm. To do this I first trace the history of the word animation. Animation is a word with a long history that shifts meaning in each century yet does not completely shed its former definitions. Originally, animation was used to signify when someone was close to the divine, and later in the 17th century as the immeasurable vital principle or soul.6 By the 1800s it loosened from the religious connotation in which life itself is deemed as being animated.7 Vivian Sobchack points to the example of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which the notion of animation loses its link to the divine because a person can bestow “animation upon lifeless matter.”8 Animation went one step further in the 20th century in which it became commonly known as a technique in which not only movement is given to a series of drawings, but even the whole production of moving pictures.9 Foucault’s description of workers in the factory supports his figure of the docile body, which he argues is how bodies have been conceptualized since the classical period, as objects of power.10 A docile body refers to the dissolve of a person’s individually specific movements because a worker is trained in ways where her movements become habitually automatic, and her movements are used to serve capitalist demands. Workers are not just animated by themselves, but by a system of discipline that always implies a worker is constantly observed by managers, factory owners, or other overseers. To be docile is to move in ways that are not entirely one’s own. Similarly, drawing on the most recent definitions of animation, Sianne Ngai writes about animatedness a concept of her own construction. She describes animatedness as a negative feeling that is attached to what she calls obstructed agency.11 This feeling explains Ngai, refers to an experience where something outside of someone (be it an object or a feeling) moves him or her in a particular way that is undesirable because it is connected to political and economic disenfranchisement. She writes, “The exaggerated expressiveness and hyperactivity associated with animatedness… draws our attention to the politically charged predicament of suspended agency... As the translation, into affect, of a state of being “puppeteered” that points to a specific history of systemic political and economic

6 Sobchack 381. 7 Ibid. 8 Shelley 52. 9 Sobchack 381 10 Foucault 135. 11 Ngai 32.

disenfranchisement.”12 As I mentioned, Ngai and Foucault’s descriptions are closely connected to the most recent definitions of animation, but they alter the notion in a way. Instead of a person animating an inanimate object through the “horror” of giving it life, or the cinematic practice of making the illusion of an image or object moving, Foucault and Ngai use animation in a way that describes how a human is moved by something outside of them, begging the question, what is it to be animated as a human by something else? Foucault’s description of docile bodies comes from his research of how workers (students and soldiers) were disciplined during the industrial era. By using the word docile, or teachable, Foucault is drawing on the notion that bodies were seen as malleable, transformable, in order to be “improved.”13 Foucault argues that people in positions to discipline others focused on bodily movements not so that a person did what they wished, but operated as they wished with the techniques, speed and efficiency that discipliners determined.14 For Foucault, this form of discipline increased the forces of a body in terms of economic utility, while simultaneously diminishing these forces in a political manner in which workers became more obedient.15 The increase and decrease of these forces in a worker by this form of discipline seems to be a form of animation in that the worker is moved in a way not decided by himself, but by someone else. Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times, captures some of the elements connected to the docile body in which workers’ movements are supposed to be controlled. One of the most iconic scenes of the film is when Chaplin is in the factory, trying to keep up with the pace of the conveyor belt when tightening screws. (See Figure 1.1). Chaplin, a factory worker, not only messes up the assembly line because he cannot keep up with the speed, but also he disrupts the workers’ break because he develops a twitch, and spills his co-worker’s food. Chaplin’s body resists the movements of how he is supposed to operate, and thus he is unemployable. In “MindFi” we see this image of Chaplin resonating in Fred who cannot cope with the bodily movements attached to doing immaterial labor, but instead of an overseer who demands him to work faster—as in Modern Times—Fred himself tries to keep up with the bodily movements necessary to carry out his immaterial labor practices. While these 12 Particularly, Ngai argues that this animatedness is a racialized feeling. She argues this by drawing on multiple literary texts from the abolitionist era to today in which African Americans are represented as animated. She draws on a contemporary cartoon, The PJs, to argue that various cultural products have crafted an imagined racialized subject that is “an excessively emotional and expressive subject” (7). In this paper I am trying to move away from identity politics and towards the politics of imperceptablity as suggested by Elizabeth Grosz. With this type of politics in mind I would not argue that any identity category is the only one that feels this feeling of animatedness, but rather about the spatial temporal moment of feeling the disenfranchisement due to a decrease in the capacity to move. 13 Foucault 136. 14 Ibid. 138. 15 Foucault 138.

Figure 1.1 Charlie Chaplin in the assembly line Modern Times movements for Chaplin regard the speed needed to carry out the demands of building commodities, Armison’s movements refer to the speed and overload of information that he is both consuming and producing at the same time. What is similar about these clips is that both Armison and Chaplin are portrayed as not being able to cope with the technologies that they must work with. They are both unable to carry out the tasks because they cannot adapt to the speed and directions required when moving with the technologies used in their jobs. A way in which they differ, however, is that Armison’s movements are not calculated by a factory owner; his movements are not encompassed by a disciplinary society, but rather they are individually manufactured for personal efficiency. He is governing himself to work faster, and this is an element that comes particularly with this paradigmatic shift of the type of labor carried out, and the type of discipline used in this paradigm. It is not the movement of an immaterial laborer that is monitored, but rather how much information he can create. Thus, the demands on Fred are still related to moving with a device with a certain quickness, but his movements are no longer calculated. Fred is animated in another way: by the device itself. To be animated by the actual device when carrying out labor practices is not a surprise or shocking if we think about it in terms of Ngai’s concept of animatedness. Ngai argues that animatedness—the feeling of being animated—can be executed by anything from objects to feelings. To be animated for Ngai is a negative feeling because

Figure 1.2 Fred Armison and Carrie Brownstein “MindFi” it refers to the suspension of agency.16 Ngai’s concept of animatedness is useful in its connection to the cinematic practice of animation. It helps point out how “Mindfi” is disturbing. Fred is animated in two ways in this clip: figuratively by the ways he moves when using his devices, and literally when his eyes flash red. Fred seems to be animated in a number of ways in the sketch, most notably

Figure 1.3 “MindFi” Fail 16 Ngai 12.

his inability to stop using his devices. His yell for help juxtaposed to his continuation to work crafts a tension of what he wants to do (intention), and what his body is doing (automatic response). Fred even conjures an imagery of ventriloquism at a point where he asks Carrie to help, but he does not move his mouth, as though his voice is disembodied, ruptured from his body. This schism, between Fred’s voice and Fred’s movements allows the feeling of animatedness to be recognized by the viewers. It also perpetuates the idea of a body mind split in which a body can be hijacked from a rational mind. In addition to the figurative animation of Fred in this piece, he is also literally animated when his eyes flash and roll back into his head. The imagery of someone’s eyes flashing and rolling into the back of his or her head is undoubtedly disturbing (and linked to the uncanny as I will show later), but this is not the feeling that the viewer gets. Because “Animation foregrounds its artificial character, openly admitting that its images are mere representations,” the viewers are aware that this imagery is playful rather than terrifying.17 But what are the feelings attached to human being’s animation? To answer this question I want to frame the concept of the Uncanny.

The Uncanny: as a feeling, as an aesthetic Ngai’s concept of animatedness is a feeling that Fred, a person doing immaterial labor, may experience, but since the clip “MindFi” involves watching him do immaterial labor, I further ask what feelings are attached to seeing a person move with electronic devices? To answer this question, I look closer at the concept of the uncanny that is inexplicitly connected to Haraway’s usage of the words frightening and disturbing when describing the movements of machines and humans. There are two reasons why Haraway’s quote is connected to the notion of the uncanny. The first is that uncanny is associated with negative feelings involving fright. It seems her choice to qualify specific movements as disturbing and frightening perpetuate these negative feelings. The second reason why Haraway’s quote is connected to the uncanny is her focus on movements of machines and people because it is a main example in of what is uncanny for Ernst Jenstch who coined the term, and Sigmund Freud who altered the term in a way that accounts for his theory of psychoanalysis. In his 1906 essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” Jentsch describes the uncanny as being not at home or not at ease with a situation.18 He describes a number of situations where an uncanny feeling may arise: at mask parties, when a sensory organ is disturbed (one cannot see, or hear), or a lack of orientation.19 Jentsch argues that one of the main ways this sensation comes to being is when one has “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be in fact animate.”20 This main focus has to do with when dead matter moves, and alive beings do not, drawing on examples such as wax figures, dolls, automatons, and what he considers to be the reverse, people who suffer from epilepsy. 17 Manovich. 18 Jentsch 2. 19 Ibid. 3-6. 20 Ibid. 8.

Jentsch main argument is that what is in common of all of these examples is that uncanny sensations stem from an intellectual uncertainty. For Jentsch, there are two ways of experiencing intellectual uncertainty one resulting in the drive to research and gain knowledge, and the other causes disorientation and an uncanny effect.21 Jentsch differentiates these two forms of intellectual uncertainty based on to what degree the thing of uncertainty or the “new/foreign/hostile” is related to something “old/known/ familiar.”22 The further this separation means that there is a larger pursuit of knowledge. The closer the uncertainty means a larger uncanny effect. With the example of the wax figure then, the relationship between these two categories are closer because it is a figure that resembles a body (something familiar), but because it is not moving, lacking a liveliness, the body as we know it is disrupted. This being said, how exactly does this the “MindFi,” sketch fit Jentsch’s version of uncanny? To answer this question I want to draw on a quote from Jentsch. When writing about a person who has epilepsy, he writes, The body that under normal conditions is so meaningful, expedient and unitary, functioning according to the directions of his consciousness – as an immensely complicated and delicate mechanism. This is an important cause of the epileptic fit’s ability to produce such a demonic effect on those who see it.23 An epileptic fit, from a Jentsch’s perspective, is uncanny because the “normal,” “unitary,” and “meaningful” body breaks down. The assumption that bodies are unitary and meaningful is embedded deeply into Enlightenment thought, and opens the door for many things to be uncanny. In “MindFi,” we see a body that is fractured between intention and automatic response. If we think of this from a Jentschian perspective this is a disturbance between body and mind, and it is uncanny because Fred functions as a body without a “rational self.” While Freud is one who also argues that the uncanny threatens the rational self, he argues that it is for different reasons. Freud departs from Jentsch in his research from the start where he declares that his analysis has to do with aesthetics rather than psychiatric experiences. He explains by aesthetic he is expanding the definition from “theory of beauty” to “theory of the qualities of feelings.”24 That is, rather than analyzing what triggers an uncanny feeling, or the embodied response to these feelings, Freud is more interested in representations (namely literature), and what could be considered uncanny. This aesthetic is useful when analyzing a television clip because it draws on the historically crafted standards that have been remediated in new forms, particularly film.25 When considering what conjures an uncanny aesthetic, Freud departs from Jentsch in arguing that intellectual uncertainty is not uncanny. Freud revisits the narrative that Jentsch drew on to develop his theory on the uncanny, and that is E.A Hoffman’s The Sandman. While Jentsch argues that Olympia, the automaton in the 21 Ibid. 4-5. 22 Ibid. 5. 23 Jentsch 14. 24 Freud 219. 25 Bolter and Grusin.

story, is uncanny because it is something familiar—a human body—and is at the same time not familiar—it is not a living being—Freud thinks that this is not the uncanniest element in the narrative. Freud argues that it is the Sandman because he threatens to take the eyes of children. The threat of blindness, according to Freud is “enough to substitute for the dread of being castrated.”26 The anxiety of being castrated is an infantile complex, which when returned to consciousness, creates an uncanny experience.27 Specifically Freud states, “an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”28 The Jentschian reading of the uncanny element of “MindFi” has to do with the disruption of Fred as a unitary and meaningful body that is portrayed in his inability to draw his body away from his electronic devices as he intends to. From a Freudian perspective, however, this is only a minor uncanny element. What is really uncanny from a Freudian viewpoint is the imagery of Fred’s eyes flashing and rolling into the back of his head. In the clip as I mentioned earlier, Fred tries to adapt to “MindFi” but instead of feeling free of the devices that Carrie promises, he is distracted by a bombardment of information. More than just a return of a repressed fear, the loss of vision for Fred is a loss of a power, being degraded, a loss of eye/I. Fred’s eyes flashing and rolling to the back of his head is supposed to be an exaggeration, and draws out the fact that failing at working with technological devices with the speed, direction, and capacity to stop when desired can be framed as an uncanny aesthetic. I want to quickly turn back to Freud’s essay again, to reiterate why exactly the loss of vision crafts an uncanny aesthetic. The return of the repressed and the confirmation of primitive beliefs are described in this essay as doubles, strange repetitions, coincidences, the loss of sight, dead bodies (and their liveliness), and castration.29 What these themes have in common, argues Terry Castle in her book, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, is that they threaten the rational self, a notion that was developed during Enlightenment. Castle argues that uncanny can be metaphorically read as a function and invention of Enlightenment.30 She quotes Freud who writes, “everything is uncanny which ought 26 Freud 231. 27 Castration anxiety is something imbedded in Freud’s Oedipus complex. Drawing on the Greek legend in which Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother, and after doing so blinds himself, Freud develops a whole theory of human development based upon this narrative. He argues that children have a sexual attraction to the parent of the opposite sex, and a jealousy of the parent of the same sex. In this complex a girl believes her jealous mother castrated her, and a boy fears his father because he thinks his father might castrate him. Eventually this complex dissolves (Macey 281). 28 Freud 249. 29 Freud also argues that the vagina is a secretly familiar which goes to show how incredibly male-centric the theory this concept comes from. I dismiss this from being connected to my arguments. 30 Castle 9.

to have remained hidden but has come to light.”31 Referencing what is reason or light, and anything else as what should be hidden, Freud’s uncanny must be a product of enlightenment. It is through the demand of reason where “a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse.” 32 Thus, Fred’s blindness marks the inability of being able to see, to reason, and thus the demise of a “rational self.” The uncanny, as framed by Freud, is linkable to Fred’s loss of vision. Freud writes from a position that is very much imbricated in the way we come to theory today, yet it is limited in a number of ways. In the next part of this section, I want to think about the movements attached to immaterial labor practices in a way that addresses the material turn in theory.

The Material Turn: Material-Semiotic Things In the previous sections materiality has been important to the description of what triggers an uncanny feeling or animatedness. Because of this, in the following sections I intermingle these theories with a feminist theoretical framework, which is most notable for its commitment to materiality. In addition, because this feminist materialist turn draws on some of Haraway’s writing that functions as a base of its theoretical structure, thinking about “MindFi,” with feminist materialisms might draw out some alternatives readings to “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” Before I begin with this analysis, I want to give some background to what the materialist turn is. The materialist turn was first called neo-materialisms and new materialisms by Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Bradotti in the second half of the 1990s.33 The coining of these theoretical schools was intended to bring attention to various authors who were working on bringing materiality back into the picture after it was neglected in poststructuralist writing. Thus, these authors are not privileging materiality, but they are giving it it’s due. Authors from both feminists’ genealogy and science and technology studies offered a different route to see the world and make knowledge with it. They have worked to construct strategies to think about things as being shaped by both matter and meaning at the same time.34 Some of the first authors to do this include: Haraway, Bruno Latour, Deleuze and Guattari, who point out with concepts such as natureculture and material-semiotic, the inseparability of matter and language. In order to think of material-semiotic things in the hyphenated sense of the word, materialist turn authors promote a generative understanding of ontology, and a posthuman framework of agency. My intention now is to bring two strands connected to Haraway’s quote together: disturbing and the materialist turn. I want to re-evaluate animation and the uncanny by thinking about materiality as generative. A generative understanding of the material turn is that not only is language unstable and changing, but so is materiality. The term generative ontology refers to 31 Ibid. 7. 32 Ibid. 8. 33 Dolphijn & van der Tuin, Forthcoming, 15. 34 Ibid. 7.

the notion that materiality is constantly being made. With the material turn in mind, Foucault’s concept of docile bodies becomes complicated. Although he framed bodies as being able to be trained and transformed, he does not discuss how bodies’ materiality transforms, and how bodies might resist these transformations. In “MindFi” Fred himself is supposed to be trainable, to use the new technologies, but his body resists, and transforms in a way that is unpredictable, and not intended to happen in which his eyes are now located in the back of his head. Instead of the figure of a docile body, Elizabeth Grosz suggests the figure of a volatile body, which considers bodies as, “discontinuous, non totalizable series of processes, organs, flows energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations.”35 This conceptualization of bodies accounts for the entanglements of material-semiotic things and the way in which they are forces for becomings. It is not about a body functioning only as an object moved by something else, but rather functioning outside of a subject object division. She writes, “Bodies are not inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new, surprising, and unpredictable.36 But just how are bodies matter transformed? Katherine Hayles describes the dynamism of bodies in her book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.37 One of her main arguments is that embodiment needs to be taken seriously as a nexus between bodies and discourse. In addition, she argues that there is no one body (white, male), but rather we can only think of bodies of a specific time, place, physiology, and culture.38 In addition (drawing on Grosz), she argues that bodies are not stable matter, but rather are constantly shaped and shaping. Hayles advocates Grosz’s model of the Mobius strip to describe bodies where the inside becomes outside, and the outside becomes inside.39 But what does this mean and how is this possible? The two terms that Hayles uses to describe embodied experiences are incorporation and inscription. She explains that these two terms are not in opposition to one another, but rather in contrast. To start with, she writes, inscription is the normalized and abstract system of signs, such as writing.40 Incorporation, however, is a movement that is encoded into a body’s memory by repeated performances, and is influenced by inscriptions.41 The distinction between inscription and incorporation is not a division of culture and nature, but rather a fusion in which “the body produces culture at the same time culture produces the body.”42 35 Grosz xi. 36 Ibid. 37 In this summary of Katherine Hayles work, I draw on ideas I was working on in an earlier written paper (2010) titled, “Movement as Play: How Embodiment Opens Unpredictable Possibilities for Ways to Live Differently.” 38 Hayles, Posthuman, 196. 39 Ibid. 40 Hayles, Posthuman, 198. 41 Ibid. 199-200. 42 Ibid. 200.

To show how culture and materiality are inseparable, Hayles discusses bodily postures. Instead of postures being carried out in homogeneous ways as culture dictates, Hayles argues that because of diversity of time, bodies, contexts, no incorporated performance is ever the same. The specifics of each embodied enactment of these postures feeds back into the cultural codes of these postures. Therefore while cultural codes sediment into the very materiality of a body, the same body shapes the cultural codes. Hayles also describes how the configuration of our bodies and how we use our bodies shape discourse referencing Mark Johnson’s book, The Body in the Mind. In his book, Johnson argues that because a common experience between humans is walking upright, metaphorical networks are affected by this manner of being.43 Words and metaphors are implicated with our bodily experience such as up/down, in/out, and front/back. Johnson’s example of the metaphors derived from our specific embodied experience includes hierarchical systems tied to our vertical stance.44 If we lived in different bodies, ones of exoskeletons or unilateral bodies, then our metaphorical networks would be altered too.45 From her experience with Johnson’s writing, Hayles points out, “when people begin using their bodies in significantly different ways, either because of technological innovations or other cultural shifts, changing experiences of embodiment bubble up into language, affecting the metaphoric networks at play within culture.”46 Discourse, then, can be transformed by dynamic embodied experiences. Now that it is clear that embodiment is crucial to understanding being in the world, and that embodied practices and discourse are constantly shaping one another, I want to turn to the important part of Hayles argument for this essay: that through technological development both our very materiality makeup and discursive systems shift. She writes, “embodiment mediates between technology and discourse by creating new experiential frameworks that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corresponding discursive systems.”47 For Hayles, this means that new ways of living emerge with the introduction of new devices because they extend a body in a way that requires it to improvise movements, and ultimately influence discourse. When watching “MindFi,” we see an example of a person whose movements and very materiality shifts with the introduction of technological devices. After failing with multiple attempts to get Fred out of the technology loop, Carrie introduces a new technology, “MindFi” a way of talking to each other through their minds. Although this is an unlikely technology, it shows something that does occur with the introduction of new technologies, which is that the incorporated practices of Fred and Carrie dramatically change. Instead of shuffling from device to device, Fred is disturbed from his previous ingrained movements, and can just sit and think in order to communicate. His movements are improvised and through repetitive actions his body is shaped in a 43 Ibid. 205. 44 Ibid. 45 Hayles, Posthuman, 206. 46 Ibid. 207. 47 Ibid. 205.

new way. Ultimately, his body resists this technology too, but this failure of adapting to the movements required when doing immaterial labor underscores that just because a new technology is introduced does not mean that the body adapts well to it. Fred’s failure is another example of how bodies are not static, and it brings another element to the forefront that humans are not only agents, but that other things (living or nonliving) can act too. The technologies that Fred uses requires him to move in particular ways that make his actions not only his own, but rather a conglomeration of actants. Ngai highlights how an assemblage of actants can shift the way a person move, whether it was her intention or not. When describing animatedness, Ngai tells a story of how puppets resisted being animated in the animated television show The PJs. Although Ngai argues that she is concerned with human agency when thinking about animatedness as a feeling, her example of slippery mouth syndrome seems to point to the capacity for nonhuman things to act. Ngai explains that slippery mouth syndrome is a name that animators came up with to describe the way in which puppets sometime look despite the fact that animators carefully move them. Slippery mouth syndrome refers to the effect when the mouth of a puppet produces the illusion of its mouth slipping off of its face, something that Ngai refers to as “a little too animated.”48 Ngai’s coupling of an inanimate object’s capacity to influence how something looks or moves to “a little too animated,” highlights her commitment to an understanding of agency as human centric because the animation goes amiss with the intervention of nonhuman things. This example, for me, however, points to the resistances the puppets have in being moved; how they are forces in the becomings of the puppet and its representation.49 While the show’s creators may have been animating the puppets in a certain way to be identified, the puppets too have a force in what occurs.

A Force in What Occurs: Movement as Agency The history of thinking of humans as the agents is considerably influential in western thought. In 1922, Max Weber argued that an act differentiates from a behavior because an act is made with a purpose, consciousness, and objective.50 Many authors have been critical of the notion of human agency, of the division (and historical debate of) individualism versus structure, and crafted a new way of thinking about agency. These authors—with genealogies connected to science studies, feminist studies, Foucault, and Deleuze—argue that non-human, non-living, things have agency too. As a strategy to shift away from the concept of agency, Latour offers the notion of an actant, “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action.”51 Actants act within heterogeneous networks that momentarily do something. 48 Ngai 124. 49 Ibid. 116. 50 Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner 2. 51 Latour 373.

In order to think about the relationship between Fred’s movements and agency, I turn to author Brian Massumi. Massumi addresses notions of agency in his book Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation in a way that does not attach particular emotions or feelings to agency and movement as both Ngai, Jentsch, and Freud do. By turning to Massumi, I hope to open up more ways to think about the movements that Fred carries out in “MindFi.” Massumi crafts a catchy line for his understanding of materiality: “concrete is as concrete doesn’t,” which refers to the dynamism of matter that I discussed earlier. It means that when something is in movement it is not fixed, and it is open to potential becomings. Therefore, something in movement cannot be signified. Within his analysis of the Cypriot-Australian performance artist Stelarc, Massumi invites a new way to think about agency, one that includes non-human actants, but resists thinking about who does what, and replaces it with the types of movements carried out. Massumi writes about Stelarc’s project “Ping Body.” “Ping Body” is described by Ashleigh Nankivell as Consisting of a series of muscle stimulating electrodes placed on various parts of Stelarc’s body that responded to remote users login on to the performance’s web interface and stimulating various body parts on the graphic representation of Stelarc’s body. Ping values were gathered from the users’ collective activity and caused areas of Stelarc’s body to be stimulated. Users also watched the resulting effects upon Stelarc over a live webcast. Video and sound also played in the background behind Stelarc.52 Massumi argues that Stelarc is extended in this operation. For Massumi extension occurs through moment where “the thing, the object, can be considered prosthesis of the body—provided that it is remembered that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing.”53 By prosthesis, he means the actual definition of the word rather than the common notion of the word in that something is added not something is replaced. Massumi sees bodies engaged with cybernetic devices as extended.54 A moment where a body can be made a network with all other things in the world is a moment of worlding, or opening of possibilities, for Massumi. The open possibilities sounds like a utopian dream to get us somewhere better than here, and although I think that this is a hope for many authors, the possibilities are not supposed to be a better future or a worse one, just different.55 Massumi’s description of doing things in the world, however, refers to movement rather than action to move away from any connotations of “needful or useful action.”56 To do this he draws on four movements that Stelarc describes in his writing: voluntary, involuntary, controlled, and programmed. Voluntary movement accounts for “reflexive thought/and or analysis 52 Nankivell. 53 Massumi 95. 54 Ibid. 127. 55 Although Massumi does not reference Actor Network Theory in his book, his description of an extended body ,a body as one of many actants in a network, a body that is and simultaneously has prosthetics seems to connect with Massumi’s writing. 56 Massumi 127.

inaction.”57 This is the only movement where human agency is present. With “MindFi” in mind, Fred shouting for help functions as a movement that is voluntary. Involuntary movement refers to the “organic functionings of the body’s automatic nervous system,” such as Fred’s breathing, blinking, or even his eyes rolling to the back of his head as a bodily resistance to Mindfi (the technology).58 Controlled movements are ones that are forced upon a body. In the “MindFi” clip, this could be Carrie shoving a photo in front of Fred’s face that he must look at, or having MindFi installed by Carrie an external agent. Finally, the last movement is programmed, which has to do with the movements as carried out by his devices such as the notification sounds that he hears (which are connected to the voluntary and involuntary movements of the person who sent a message). These movements and examples should not be seen as fixed because in the last situation we see it is impossible to mark the division between where the voluntary movement ends and the programmed movement begins. When moving as an extended-self one cannot decipher the divisions or the boundaries of each thing acting not only because they are in motion, but also because some movements lead to other movement.59 Thinking of movements rather than actants is useful because it resists marking, representing, and identifying something that is in the process of emerging. In addition, it does not put the human as the center, but still recognizes the asymmetry of influence various parts of the network has. Finally, it gives us terminology to think about human agency that is not separated from other agencies. Freud and Jentsch attempted to explain how things that people see (often related to movements) craft a feeling of uncanny that was on par with the perspective of the world at the time of writing in regards to human exceptionalism, but what about thinking about their work today with Massumi’s arguments in mind? The “MindFi” clip brings attention to the fact that movements are composed of numerous actants, ways of triggering, and ways of remembering (bodily, programmed), and consciousness. Unlike Modern Times where Chaplin cannot keep up, Fred is pointing to a tension between the various types of movements he’s carrying out. To be more specific, the programmed controlled and involuntary movements are working together in a way that resists or shuts down his voluntary movements. Rather than thinking of this fragmentation as uncanny as Jentsch might because the body is no longer meaningful and unitary, Fred becomes a spectacle—something I will look at more in depth in the next section—because when there is a failure for voluntary movements to embed with the other movements it becomes noticeable, disruptive, and thus raises various feelings and aesthetics. Again, from a Freudian perspective, it is Fred’s eyes rolling to the back of his head that creates an uncanny aesthetic. The loss of a sensory organ can indeed be terrifying, but with Massumi in mind, I would not link this to an infantile complex. Rather I would link the difficulties that are attached to a bodily change such as losing one’s sight. The imagery of Fred’s eyes flashing show the continual production of technology that requires us to constantly change how we perceive information, move 57 Massumi 129. 58 Massumi 129. 59 Ibid. 130.

with various devices, and think. These transformations are becomings that occur at a rapid rate due to technology. These rapid transformations can sometimes be too much. Although Fred is becoming, he is becoming in a way that would not be celebrated. It is not part of the utopian possibilities of the future, but rather it is about the failure and inability to adapt to the becomings. Failing to adapt to new technologies may be uncanny, but in “MindFi” it’s clearly comedic. Thus far I have analyzed Fred’s movements in a way that caters to the notion of disturbing by drawing on various authors such as Ngai who might qualify Fred’s movements as obstructed agency, and Jenstch and Freud who would might argue that Fred’s movements signify a disturbed rational and unitary subject. By writing about these theorists with Massumi’s description of agency as movement in mind, I opened a way of looking at this clip that shows what unfolds when voluntary movement is overtaken by other movements be it programmed, controlled, or involuntary. I argued that Fred’s eyes rolling to the back of his head is an example of this. Rather than framing it as a fear of being castrated, I argued that it showed a failure to adapt to new configurations of actants (namely technology). But why is “MindFi” comedic rather than terrifying? To answer this question, I think that clinging to the definition of disturbing as synonymous with the notion of frightening I am limited. Therefore, I want to think about disturbing in the sense of a verb, as that which disturbs. Thus, in the next section, I turn to Arthur Berge and Henri Bergson to think about how Fred’s movement are comedic rather than frightening.

Slapstick Comedy I have spent the bulk of this thesis considering how Fred’s movements in “MindFi” are disturbing in a way that is often theorized, but does not quite fit this clip. In my research on movement and humor, it was difficult to find work on why particular movements are comedic. Two authors who do write about why some movements are comedic are Henri Bergson, a French philosopher from the 19th century, and Arthur Asa Berger, a broadcast and electronic media scholar. Before I get to their argument of why Fred’s failure to disengage from technology is comedic, I want to describe the tradition of the visceral humor of slapstick. One of the reason’s why Chaplin’s film Modern Times is so easily pared with “MindFi” is that they both function as slapstick comedies. Slapstick comedy gets its name from an act in vaudeville shows in which an unsuspecting clown would be wacked by another with a device—a slapstick—creating a loud exaggerated sound of getting slapped.60 This act was perpetuated as a form of comedy in silent film because it was capable of making people laugh even without dialog. Even though sound was introduced to film in 1927, slapstick comedy is still a popular subgenre.61 One of the elements that is critical to slapstick comedy, according to Barry Salt, which is evident in both Modern Times and “MindFi,” is a “crazy machine.”62 Salt writes, “The slapstick, 60 Page 46. 61 Nelmes 77. 62 Salt 141.

then, presents a rather minimal form of a crazy machine, a seemingly purposeful device which in fact detours that purpose into spectacular but destructive or purposeless end, triggering laughter…But machines in slapstick comedy need not be so simplistic.”63 In “MindFi” these “crazy machines” are regular devices that viewers can identify because they are the most sold computers and cellphones on the market. Viewers can identify with the tasks that Fred carries out, but as the sequential tradition of slapstick goes, these “seemingly purposeful” devices do detour and make Fred a spectacle, reiterating this form of comedy. Although it is evident that this clip adheres to slapstick comedy conventions, I still have not explained why this is comedic. To answer why, I want to refer first to Bergson and his work on comedy. In 1900, Bergson published his book, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. In it he argues, “The attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.”64 His interpretation, of a human moving in mechanical way departs significantly from how I interpreted Haraway’s quote, “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert” because Bergson takes the movements paired with humans and machines and qualifies it as humorous. But why is it humorous? For Bergson, a human moving like a machine is comedic because a she is no longer elastic. Bergson sees the world in a way where everything is constantly changing, and when movements are so rigid that they do not accommodate this elasticity of they world they are comedic. Bergson provides an example about how rigidity is comedic by writing about a man who is walking down the street and falls. Bergson explains that this is funny not because the man voluntarily sits down, but because he involuntarily does so. A viewer that witnesses the walker’s fall laughs because of his clumsiness, and his clumsiness comes from his inability to adapt to the changes that are inherent in living.65 Another example that Bergson provides to portray the comedic has to do with repetition. Bergson draws on a quote from Pascal who argued when two people look alike people think it is funny. Bergson explains that this is because repetition goes against elasticity, against the openness of life. Specifically, Bergson states, “The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself.”66 If we think about this in regards to Fred, this seems to be so. Fred functions as a repetitive rigid character so much so that Carrie describes his behavior as functioning as a loop, where he continually moves from one thing to the next repeating over and over again. In the end, Fred’s incapacity to cope with the elasticity of emerging technologies is what makes him crash, but is it his lack of elasticity that makes this sketch comedic, or something else? To answer this question I move on to Berger’s writing on superiority theory, on of a handful of theories of why things are comedic. In his book, An Anatomy of Humor, Berger describes different forms of comedy, different theories of comedy, and he crafts an in depth analysis of jokes from 63 Salt 141. 64 Bergson 11b. 65 Bergson 6a. 66 Ibid. 13a.

various theories of comedy. One of the theories that he describes that I think is useful for analyzing “MindFi,” is superiority theory. To describe superiority theory, Berger begins with Aristotle. Aristotle argued that “an imitation of men who are worse than average,” are comedic.67 Berger furthers this theory by quoting Hobbes who explains that, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but the sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our won formerly.”68 If we think about superiority theory with the tradition of slapstick comedy, and Bergson’s writing in mind it may convey just why this clip is comedic. In “MindFi,” we see Fred working with identifiable, common, everyday devices that the audience is most likely familiar with using. The purposeful device, as Salt described, slowly makes Fred a spectacle due to his rigidness, and his inability to adapt to the pace of the technology. Although in this sense “MindFi” seems to confirm superiority theories, it does in some ways resist it too. An example of resistance to this theory is the fact that Portlandia is a show that references the stereotypical traits of the audience intended to watch the show. It is also self-referential because the characters use their own names, and because they exaggerate people and situations they encounter in Portland. The intermingling of self-referentiality and superiority theory is what I think is disturbing about this piece from a comedic perspective. This is because the creators of the show want to shed light on practices that are contextually specific to their own situation. Christopher Beach explains that this is possible because “comedy examines and critiques social structures – including those of class – and at certain points in history it has served as an important facilitator or mediator of society’s attempts at self-critique.”69 Thus the intermingling of superiority theory, self-referentiality, and exaggeration of movements is another more accurate way of approaching this clip as disturbing. Fred’s inability to adapt is also humorous to the audience, people who identify with the processes and the overwhelming qualities of these devices, but at the same time make a political statement that is almost always embedded into comedy sketches. By framing immaterial labor in a comedic manner, Fred acknowledges some of the ridiculous qualities of living and working in an era of incredible quantities of information. In Fred’s discussions with Carrie we learn that Fred takes part in too may applications, and ultimately crashes. This disturbs the notion that technology is only progress. Although this narrative is comedic, it does warn viewers about how the movements of immaterial labor have changed us for better or for worse.

Conclusion The combination of Haraway’s quote functioned as a starting point with the word disturbing, and the short comedy sketch “MindFi,” which provided me a specific case study to look at how the movements of immaterial labor can be narrativized has led me 67 Berger 2. 68 Ibid. 69 Beach 4.

to a different understanding of the word disturbing, and a broader understanding of the how movements can make us feel by observing them. By thinking about the feelings of uncanny and comedic, I showed just how circumstantial movements are to the feelings they craft. If perceived as a person being unable to carry out voluntary movement it may be interpreted as uncanny. At the same time, a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lack of elasticity makes them seem like a failure, and given the historical techniques of slapstick humor, this could be interpreted as comedic. In this instance, what is frightening and what is comedic are closely related particularly because they refer to a body that cannot keep up with technology. The technique by which a laborerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movements are portrayed, however, has more to do with the degree it is comedic or uncanny. That being said, the most disturbing element of this piece that I found in the end was the social commentary that Fred offers through his movements, and this is that progress is not always progress.

2: Animations that Disturb Introduction In the last chapter, the way I wrote about the concept disturbing began to shift from an adjective to a verb. With this shift, the way I approached Haraway’s statement “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert,” also changed. When thinking about disturbing as an adjective, I address the negative feelings that may emerge when machines take on more tasks of daily life. I explained that these negative feelings such as animatedness or the uncanny depend on an anthropocentric world view that was propagated by Enlightenment. Towards the end of the chapter, the concept of disturbing transformed due to what the television clip had to “say” about the relationships between people and machines. Particularly, the clip did not use visual imagery that was frightening, but rather the techniques used to represent immaterial labor in “MindFi” were comedic. This does not mean that the clip was no longer disturbing. In fact, I argued that the clip disturbs the totalizing narrative of technological advancement as purely progress. “MindFi” highlights some of the problems of information and communication moving at such intensified speeds that we cannot keep up with, and in our attempts to keep up with the intensified speeds, the “MindFi” clip shows that we can break down. To study this tension further, I analyze a narrative that also draws on this disturbance titled, “Separation.” “Separation” is a poem about the limitations of human bodies when engaged with the incredible speeds of communication today in the informational paradigm. “Separation” is productive in a different way than the “MindFi” television clip when researching the movements of immaterial labor because it involves utilizing the technological devices, automatic movements, and processes that are embedded in immaterial labor practices themselves, while television has historically be linked to a leisure activity. This poem engages the reader-user in self-reflexive ways because the reader-user must think about her own movements of working with computers just to read the poem. “Separation” is a digital poem based upon the creator’s, Annie Abrahams’s, own experience with an injury that is classified as a repetitive strain injury (RSI). RSI was classified as an occupational health problem by the Australian National Health and Medical Research council in June 1982. It is an umbrella term that refers to the acute pain, cramps, fatigue, or spasms that are associated with tasks that require repetitive movements, forceful movements, vibrations, or staying in uncomfortable positions for long durations.1 “Separation” utilizes animations that mimic RSI software, something Abrahams used after being hospitalized, which is a method created to prevent RSI symptoms. Abrahams designed the stretches in her poem based on the poses suggested by WorkPace software, the software that is installed on her computer, in order to tell a 1 Lucire xiv.

story of her experiences.2 By analyzing “Separation” as a case study, I ask, how does the poem “Separation” convey the practices of doing immaterial labor in a manner that is particular to digital literature, and what do the particularities of Abrahams’s poem based on her own experiences say about immaterial labor practices? To answer this question, I first describe my reading-using of the poem “Separation.” I look closely at one execution of the poem due to the capacity of the reading-using of the poem to vary. After I layout my reading-using of “Separation,” I discuss its historical specificity within electronic literature. Because a piece of electronic literature acts differently than in print, I collect and describe relevant approaches to studying “Separation.” By drawing on authors such as Katherine Hayles, Espen Aarseth, Adeline Morris, Astrid Ensslin, and Karen Littau, I address issues particular to electronic literature namely: the medium’s influence on the content of the poem, the act of “doing” electronic literature as a material-semiotic apparatus that is dependent upon a multiplicity of things and momentarily enacted rather than an object of study, the role of a reader as s a reader-user that requires a larger physical engagement in “reading,” and finally, I focus on one of the more complex elements of “Separation;” how bodily mechanisms as written into the poem require movements that complicate linguistical meaning. The bodily movements that are instigated with the programmed behavioral mechanisms of the poem portray a particular motion of immaterial labor. This motion, that still reiterates the importance of speed to industrial labor, requires disturbances because of human limitations. I describe this motion as syncopation.

Reading-Using “Separation” June 4, 2012 Digital literature has transformed the ways we can think about literature. No longer does a text stay on a page locked into its position forever. Instead, it is a process by which a reader-user has a hand in how the narrative can unfold. Because of this, I analyze my reading-using of Abrahams’s poem as an event rather than the poem as a literary object. Hayles argues in her essay, “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event” that because digital literature has a “distributed existence spread among data files and commands, software that executes the commands, and hardware on which the software runs,” a poem is no longer a “self-contained object,” but rather a poem becomes a process.3 To think of electronic literature as a process rather than an object, Hayles suggests that we should cite “the time of the performance…versus the time of production.”4 Hayles might be factious to some degree here, but she is pointing to the tremendous possibilities of reading paths when reading-using an electronic poem. In order to frame this poem as a process rather than an object accounting for all of the actions carried about by both human and nonhuman elements, I will follow Hayles’s advice and use my reading of “Separation” as an event to analyze the poem with the concept of disturbing.5 2 This was stated in the artist’s description of the poem. 3 Hayles, Time, 181-182. 4 Ibid. 5 This process occurred June 4, 2012.

My reading-using practice of Abrahams’s poem begins on the website of the Electronic Literature collection, the second edition. I find a thumbnail image of “Separation.” I click a button that states, “begin” to access Abrahams’s poem. I am then redirected to a new page that requires me to click on the title “Separation.” After clicking on the title, a new window opens up on my computer, and I realize that in order for each individual word of the poem to appear in the window I must click the mouse over and over again. After clicking my mouse five times only four words appear on my screen, a warning pops onto the window covering the words of the poem. It states:

Figure 2.1 Animation from “Separation” I try to click further, but the animation will not go away. It makes me pause. I wait for the warning to disappear, but it does not, so I decide to start reading process again, and I refresh the page. I assume this is not programmed in the poem, but rather an error of one of the actants executing the poem (It was most likely my internet connection). This time I click at a more relaxed pace, and read the words that appear on the screen painstakingly slowly. They state: lonely soul, not knowing how to differentiate between you and me, you don’t feel my pain As I click, presuming the next word in the poem would appear, an animation takes over the screen titled “Show the pain.” Within the animation there is an explanatory text that describes a stretch for the viewer to carry out accompanied by an image of a woman whose mouth is open wide and her face strains to push in different directions. It states:

Figure 2.2 Animation, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Separationâ&#x20AC;? At the bottom of the animation there is a red bar that becomes smaller in correspondence of how much time has passed. I wait for the red bar in the animation to slowly disappear when I determine that clicking will not speed up the process. It marks the time spent on the stretch that is 30 seconds in total. By now I have spent over one minute reading three lines of the poem. I return to clicking after the first animation disappears from the screen. The text of the poem that appears word after word is: Your body became mine you are interesting involving absorbing demanding Immediately after the word demanding, a new animation covers the poem. It is of a silhouetted woman whose shoulders are occasionally shrugged and occasionally relaxed. The text of the animation explains why this exercise is suggested, and that is because it is intended to counter the posture one holds when doing work on the computer. The animation states:

Figure 2.3 Animation, “Separation” After this animation disappears I click the text further to see how the poem progresses: We are exchanging constructing, developing to-get-her fusion, adaptation Your body became mine, but mine, mine muscles, nerves overused, abused, neglected You don’t feel my pain, The click after the word “pain” triggers another animation to fill the screen; an animation that is titled “Rest.” The image that is conveyed is of a silhouetted woman who is sitting in a chair with her arms resting on her legs and her head hanging from her neck. It is the first time I see an image of something that is a connected to immaterial labor. This visual image is of an adjustable desk chair with wheels on the bottom is commonly linked to computer work. In addition to the image, the text suggests taking rest in this way when doing work.

Figure 2.4 Animation, “Separation.” The poem carries on stating: You don’t feel my pain and I, I forget about them --absorbed in you My body starts hating you your limited ways of recieving [sic] input your imposing ways of need you don’t caress, Just after reading the word caress the next animation is titled “Caress your back.” It shows a woman holding her arm by the elbow above and behind her head in which she undulates her arm back and forth over her back. The animation telling me to caress my back after Abrahams’s complaint of a lack of caressing from what sounds like an inattentive lover (or computer), reminds me of my own materiality and what it feels like to be touching my computer while reading the poem.

Figure 2.5 Animation, “Separation” The pattern of animation-text-animation continues and the words of the poem that are enacted after the animation of caress state: you are speed You never need a break and when you are down it’s me who has to repair you you won’t repair me I have to leave you I need desintoxication I must fight The next image is the stretch titled “Take courage,” in which I see the figure of a woman whose hands are clasped behind her back. The instructions given are for the reader-user to stand up, get away from her computer, and engage in a shoulder stretch multiple times.

Figure 2.6 Animation, “Separation” The poem then reads: I must fight I need to cherish, take care off [sic] pay attention to all the parts of me you don’t Just as I click “don’t” I get the reminder pop-up that I “do not have the right attitude in front of the computer” again, and after thirty seconds of what seems like a punishment I am able to click onwards. I do so a bit more carefully modifying my own behavior so that this animation does not disturb me again. The poem continues on: recognize From now on I will use you and I won’t let you take me over again Another animation comes on the screen titled, “Pray the sky,” in which we see a silhouetted woman sitting in a typical desk chair, leaning backwards and opening her arms and then closing them. The text reminds the reader-user to relax and take pauses, something that is often forgotten by workers suffering from RSI.

Figure 2.7 Animation “Separation” After the reminder to relax in the animation called “Pray the sky,” the final text of the poem is accessible in which Abrahams asks: How to relax a computer? How to massage a computer? “Separation” as a process rather than an object, has the capacity to convey things through movements and actions that a text immobilized on a page cannot. The freeing of words and narrative structures from the page has a particular history that just like immaterial labor is connected to the advent of electronic devices. By tracing the history of computer’s disturbances to literature, I hope to describe elements of immaterial labor that are have not yet been written about. In addition, by considering the added possibilities that electronic devices provide for telling a story, I describe just how innovative “Separation” is in describing this labor.

Digital Devices and Electronic Literature Labor practices were not the only things that dramatically changed with the introduction of computers; literature was also affected. Literature, which we have traditionally assumed as being analog in the form of a printed book, has expanded to another medium, computers. The Committee of Electronic Literature defines electronic literature as, “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” The ways authors have engaged the “capabilities and contexts” of electronic devices when making literary works has instigated a shift in how we can conceptualize literature, how we make literature, how a reader functions, and how we research literature. In order to convey the significance of “Separation” as a narrative of immaterial labor practices, I want to set up the framework by which electronic literature came to be,

and how we can approach this narrative. The first form of electronic literature that emerged in the mid 1980s was hypertext. Hypertext as a narrative form was pioneered by North American literary and media scholars who wanted to “verify the central tenants of poststructuralism” such as “the death of the author, the decentralization of meaning and coherence, the rhizome metaphor, multilinearity, and the notion of the text, chunk, or lexia.”6 Hypertext is a form that is made up of “blocks of semi-autonomous text joined by hot links into variable user-driven configurations.”7 Although this narrative form is not strictly limited to digital inscription, authors making digital narratives experimented with it more frequently. I want to add here that it is not just the possibilities that computers have brought to crafting narratives that helped shape this form, but also the theories that were interesting to the makers at the time. In fact, Ensslin even points out that hypertext did not become popular on a popular cultural level because the authors exaggerated the meta-theoretical component of the work, “neglecting the aesthetic effects necessary to attract a non-academic readership.”8 In addition, Morris explains that the advocates of hypertext: “overestimate the agency of the electronic reader, underestimate the complexity of print texts, and occlude the genuinely revolutionary behavior of the digital image.”9 While many authors tinkered with this form, “Separation” falls under a different tradition of electronic literature called second-generation electronic literature. Second generation electronic literature is marked by the introduction of sophisticated programming languages in 1995, which infused narrative with sound, motion, animation and other software functionalities.10 Second generation electronic literature departs from hypertext because this type of literature generally does not depend on text blocks. Further, second generation electronic literature also departs from videogames because the pieces generally do not depend upon a series of rules or simulated worlds.11 Separation, among various other electronic literature pieces, highlights elements of reading that are often overlooked such as: the importance of the medium of a narrative, how a reader is part of a material-semiotic apparatus that engages a narrative as an operation of a conglomerate of things rather than an observer who views a narrative as an object from afar, that narratives are crafted with more than just the text in mind, and finally that narratives as material-semiotic apparatuses need to be researched in a way that considers how elements beyond signifiers shape meanings of narratives. These elements depart from traditional literary research, but because of electronic literature’s particularities I attend to these components in my analysis of “Separation” in the following pages. 6 Namely, Michael Joyce, Stuart Moulthrop, Deena Larsen and Jane Yellowlees Douglas (Ensslin147). 7 Morris 7. 8 Ensslin 147. 9 Morris 13. 10 Hayles 27. 11 Morris 7.

Traffic between Materiality and Content Electronic literature has brought materiality back into focus when it comes to doing literary research. This is not because materiality is less significant in analog literature, but because it is more noticeable with digital media as something that shapes the way a reader-user can experience narratives and poems. The absence of a narrative’s materiality in literary theory could have to do with the historical division of book making labor in which authors are supposed to be concerned only with writing the text, while publishers concentrate on the layout of the physical book.12 This division of labor has shaped the way literature has been researched in that there has been a demarcation between studying books as a manufactured object, and as conveyors of meaning.13 Karen Littau explains that traditionally people who studied the materiality of books were cultural historians who were interested in the technological innovations of books, while literary theorists were interested in the ways of reading and interpreting texts.14 Despite these strong traditions, electronic literature has collapsed the divisions of a book as an artifact and conveyor of meaning due to the intensification of bodily involvement, and correspondence of materiality and semiotics when reading. In her pamphlet, Writing Machines, Hayles argues that the materials that narratives are inscribed upon, the medium, influence the way a reader can experience a narrative. To make her argument, Hayles looks closely at various analog books that take materiality seriously in a playful manner. Hayles argues that the medium that a narrative is inscribed on functions as a material metaphor that influences the meaning of a narrative. According to Hayles, material metaphors refer to the traffic between verbal construction and a physical object that causes the elements and senses associated with one to be transferred to another.15 To convey the gravity of material metaphors, Hayles looks at various analog books and to show how important materiality is to the content of a narrative. One example that I found particularly intriguing from Hayles’s argument is Karen Chance’s book Parallax. This narrative is physically crafted like an accordion to tell story from two directions. That is, there is no “front” or “back.” This physical shape of the book allows a story to be told from two perspectives. One perspective is from a straight man that thinks gay men are unwanted intrusions in his life. The other perspective is from a gay man who feels threatened by straight people who refuse to acknowledge him.16 The physical shaping of this book allows an intermingling and tension of viewpoints to be exposed, tying these two perspectives closer together in a way that a linear craftsmanship of the book cannot.

12 Hayles, “Time,” 185. 13 Littau 1. 14 Ibid. 15 Hayles Writing Machines 23. 16 Ibid. 69.

Figure 2.8 Parallax, Karen Chance Hayles declares that the long accepted notion from literary critics that form is content and content is form should be reconfigured to “materiality is content, and content is materiality.”17 She argues, “To change the material artifact is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably changes the meanings of the words as well. This transformation of meaning is especially potent when the words reflexively interact with the inscription technologies that produce them.”18 The study of literature, therefore, requires some consideration of that which the narratives are inscribed upon, the material that stores the narrative. Although Hayles is highlighting the importance of materiality when it comes to narratives, she is not doing so in a McLuhanian manner in which “the medium is the message.” To say that Hayles thinks that the medium is the message or that materiality equals content would be a misreading of her work. Rather, Hayles argument is that content is shaped by a medium—the materiality of a narrative—and vice versa. These two elements are not the same, but at the same time not separable. Therefore, if a narrative is told through a different medium it transforms the narrative.19 The specificity of the computer as the medium of “Separation” has a significant influence on how the content of it can be understood. “Separation” is a poem that expresses Abrahams’s experiences in doing immaterial labor. The text of the poem describes Abrahams’s difficulties separating from her computer, even when she is pained in using it. The computer, as a material metaphor, allows for many connections that a reader-user can make between the text and the computer that would be lost if it were just printed in a book. For example, because the narrative unfolds in time and because one can only find out if Abrahams is capable of separating from her computer at the end of her poem, the reader-user must use the computer, the very thing Abrahams is advocating against in her text. The animations that interrupt the reader-user from reading the text cause a reflexivity in which the reader-user thinks about their own usage of the computer. When animations such as “Show the pain” come onto the screen, the 17 Ibid. 75 (her emphasis). 18 Hayles, Machines, 23-24. 19 This is also why she calls for a media specific analysis as a methodology. An analysis that takes in consideration the particular medium by which information is conveyed through.

reader-user cannot help but think about her own body as instructed by the animation, especially if they are feeling any pain as Abrahams did. This tension between the motivation to use the computer to access the poem, and the deterring disturbances from the animations that “prevent RSI,” mimic actual disturbances of immaterial labor (be it pain or a disruption from RSI software), and the physical annoyances of the disturbances and processes to get past them would be lost if the poem was printed on paper. There is traffic between the computer and the narrative as Hayles suggests. This being said, it is not only the meaning or experience of Abrahams’s poem that is affected by the materiality of a “Separation,” but the role of a reader in the performance of reading. To understand the reader’s role as different than a historical silent reader I will first highlight how some authors approach readers of electronic literature as part of a material-semiotic apparatus.

Material-Semiotic Apparatuses In order to help conceptualize how a person engages with literary works—especially since the advent of electronic literature—Hayles proposes thinking of electronic literature as a process composed of many actors, and she refers to these processes as material-semiotic apparatuses. This concept is connected to two different traditions: science studies and film studies. The notion of material-semiotic stems from both Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway’s writing. The hyphenation of the words material and semiotic is intended to signify that one cannot simply think of things as solely material or solely semiotic. Rather, as I argued in the last section, materiality and language are constantly shaping one another. The other part of Hayles concept is apparatus, which is for me linked to apparatus theory of film studies. Jean-Pierre Baudry instigated this theory in his 1970 essay, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Drawing on Louis Althusser’s notion of ideological state apparatuses, and Freudian notions of the mirror stage, Baudry argued, “the very technology of film—camera shutter, screen, light beam—manifested a bourgeois world view.”20 What is useful from Baudry’s argument when thinking about electronic literature is the way one can approach an art piece as a “configuration of technology and materiality, user positioning, unconscious desires, media text and context, and the production of meaning as interplay of these elements.”21 It is useful because it does not just focus on meaning, but the interactivity of semiotics, materiality, contexts, feelings, and a number of other things providing a much more nuanced and complex analysis. The combination of these concepts material-semiotic and apparatus refers to a way of approaching film, literature, and or art. It requires a researcher to look beyond just the meaning, beyond what is signified. It also highlights the importance of the momentary enactment of a film, narrative, or art piece. It suggests that a researcher considers her “object” as something more complex (an apparatus) that is not fixed and is made of various actors, both living and non-living. 20 Thompson and Bordwell 665. 21 Raessens 21-22.

While an apparatus perspective was useful for theorists of reception theory who study how viewers cognitively interacted with a piece, or audience studies theorists who study how fans “actively received revised and extended texts without…changing the text itself in real time,” I think that it is increasingly useful for analyzing digital poetry.22 This is because a reader-user “corporeally influences the body of a digital text itself—that is, a database of information and its manifestation as display of symbols— in real time.”23 To explore this further, I want to think about my enactment of “Separation” on June 4th from a material-semiotic apparatus perspective. In the beginning of my reading-using, I was stopped due to the speed by which I was clicking for words to appear. In response, an animation appeared on the screen that said I was clicking too quickly, and that I did not have the correct attitude in front of the computer. While I assumed this animation would disappear after a minute, it did not, and I had to refresh the page and start the process of reading the poem again, which was most likely due to the poor Internet connection I had at the university that day. The process of starting over again required me to interact with the beginning of the poem once again, and made me aggravated and less patient. Despite being aggravated and impatient, I remembered how long I had to wait for the animation to disappear, and so I slowed down my clicking. This allowed the text of the poem to appear on the screen in a way that was more efficient than clicking quickly. The animated responses to my input influenced me to slow down my movements, thus providing me a different experience of the poem than the first time I attempted it. This momentarily specific enactment of “Separation,” in which the poem froze and I had to start over, expresses a non-intended, but frequently experienced action: when the Internet connection fails. Although this was not a planned action in the poem, it was a possible one, and highlighted an element of doing immaterial labor that may not be experienced in other readings of Abraham’s poem. Not only did this enactment point to how it can be frustrating working with technology, but also it made me reflect and change my behavior when using the poem. In addition, it also expresses the complexity of digital poetry as material-semiotic apparatuses. Similarly to immaterial labor, digital poems are dependent upon human and non-human actors to be carried out. By addressing this poem as an apparatus, my experience becomes more than just reading of Abrahams’s frustrations, I experienced it beyond the texts, and that is in through my actions. This shows that the poem’s form is also dependent upon the reader-user’s choices and movements when reading it. The reader’s role has changed significantly as part of this material semiotic apparatus, and this is what I will explain next.

Active Reader-Users and Posthuman Subjectivity In my description of the process of reading “Separation” on June 4th, it is almost immediately evident that a person who engages in reading electronic literature is 22 Morse 18. 23 Ibid.

more than just a reader in the traditional sense of the word, as a person who perceives symbols.24 The description is filled with actions that I needed to do in order to even read the poem. To recognize these active elements of reading, I have been referring to readers as reader-users. This is particularly important to recognize because of the way if affects reading practices, most notably the physicality involved in reading. To begin, it is not my intention to say that when reading a print book there is no bodily involvement, in fact when reading analog literature we grasp and turn pages, focus our eyes, hold our head. Reading-using electronic literature, however, involves more work than print narratives. The necessity of reader-users to do more in order to read the text influenced Espen Aarseth to theorize this practice and ultimately name this type of literature ergodic. Ergodic is a term he borrows from physics, which means “work” and “path.” Aarseth argues that in ergodic literature one must work in order to transverse the text.25 The embodied practice of reading ergodic literature is much more physical than most narratives inscribed on a print medium. Ergodic literature, however, is not strictly limited to electronic literature. In fact, Aarseth argues that the I-Ching, or Book of Changes is ergodic because one can read 4,096 possible texts based on its binary combinations. Thus, this type of reading practice is not new, but more prevalent and executed in different ways due to computers. Before electronic literature emerged, the hegemonic reading practice was to individually and silently read. Littau explains that to individually and silently read is an entanglement dependent upon a multiplicity of things ranging from the introduction of inter word spacing in the eleventh century to notions of individualism from Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 This practice of reading, argues Hayles, helped create the liberal humanist subject in the 17th and 18th centuries, and electronic literature is, “both reflecting and enacting a new kind of subjectivity characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency… and fluid boundaries.27 Hayles argues that not only has a reader’s reading practice transformed, but also the way she experiences subjectivity. Subjectivity is an abstract principle that has been the concern of digital literary theorists and theorists of immaterial labor alike. While Hayles points to the way one read-uses electronic literature as enacting a new kind of posthuman subjectivity, Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus argue that the way labor is experienced influences subjectivity. Coté and Pybus refer to Deleuze and Foucault to argue that because discipline societies are about fixing people in space, it also composes bodies in fixed, stable subjectivities.28 Since the technology of a discipline society is to control a worker’s behavior, “his aptitudes, intensify his performance, multiply his capacities,” to “put him in his place where he will be most useful,” his subjectivity was considered individual and interiorized.29 24 Merriam-Webster dictionary. 25 Aarseth 1. 26 Littau 15,17. 27 Hayles, “What is Electronic Literature” 28 Coté and Pybus 8. 29 Translation of Foucault Coté and Pybus 8.

In a control society—one in which immaterial labor practices are enacted—a worker is no longer fixed in space. She is extended as part of a network, and is no longer an individual as opposed to a mass. Rather, Deleuze explains that people have become dividuals in control societies. Robert W. Williams explains that dividuals refer to the fact that data collected about us via any monitoring technology makes us into dividuals by which “we can be divided and subdivided endlessly. What starts as particular information about specific people—ourselves—can be separated from us and recombined in new ways outside of our control.”30 Data is the object of power in control societies by which we are easily divided into parts. For immaterial labor theorists it is an intermingling of technological devices and technologies of power that create a fractured, fluid, and networked subjectivity. Abrahams describes her experience of this form of subjectivity from the outset of her poem. In reference to her “soul”—that which is generally reserved to signify the incorporeal elements of a person being their psyche, self, or essence—Abrahams writes that she is, “not knowing how to differentiate between me and you.” From the beginning of her poem, Abrahams figures her subjectivity as something that is connected if not enacted through a computer. As the poem unfolds, we find that Abrahams’ body rejects being extended by a computer, thus Abrahams’s temporally based subjectivity is reconfigured, and disrupted. Abrahams struggles with the changes that fractured and fluid subjectivity brings to living. In addition to writing about her experience with a networked and distributed subjectivity, Abrahams crafts behavioral mechanisms in her poem for the audience to experience how a dividual is monitored in a control society, but to explain this further I will first outline behavioral mechanisms importance in digital poems. Animations that Disturb: Abrahams’s Usage of Behavioral Mechanisms One of the purposes for poets when writing poetry, argues Allucquè Rosanne Stone, is to restructure descriptive language in a way of making meaningful statements “at least partially outside the force field of phallogocentrism.”31 While poets of print media are able to experiment resisting phallogocentric meaning with words, punctuation, line breaks, spacing, font type, and white space, digital technology gives writers “more flexibility in how they can employ temporal dimensions as resources in their writing practices.”32 One of the first ways that I noticed that Abrahams’s utilizes expresses her experience with more than just meaning in her poem is with animations that suggest various stretches. In her poem, Abrahams not only tells a reader-user of her pain, but also, with the recommended stretches that are based upon an actual RSI prevention software, she provides an opportunity for a reader-user to see—if not feel—where the pain that is associated with computer users build up. In various animations, Abrahams suggests stretches that point to tensions that can build up in one’s face, shoulders, back legs, wrists and arms when doing immaterial labor. If a reader-user actually does these 30 Williams 31 Stone 379. 32 Hayles, Time, 181.

poses, she experiences the poem in a visceral way involving touch as a major sense that perceives it. Visual imagery that suggests a stretch, however, is not something that is exclusively specific to a digital medium. In fact, an analog poem could involve images of such stretches. That being said, I want to talk about behavioral mechanisms that Abrahams implements in her poem that is particular to digital literature. On more of a complex level, some of the temporal dimensions that Hayles is talking about that are taken advantage of by most digital literature authors are what Ensslin calls behavioral mechanisms, which are capable of shaping a reader-userâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reading practice through procedures of animation, sounds, and motions that change the way in which reader-users engage with narratives.33 Because an author has the capacity to affect the reading-practices of her audience, she is not only authoring a text, but also she scripts a performance for a reader-user. Abrahams utilizes behavioral mechanisms in a way that she can capture contradictory feelings that many of us experience today with the prevalence of digital devices. The particular contradictory feeling she captures is the want or need to be extended by a computer, and the simultaneous want or need to not be extended by a computer. I refer to this as a feeling because I do not want to necessarily qualify consciousness to this want or need (affect), nor do I want to exclude it (emotion).34 This want (or sometimes need) surfaces in many ways in daily life be it through automatic affectsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;such as when pain takes over ones wrists when writingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or conscious emotions such as our desire to be connected to others through the Internet. Abrahams captures this in her digital poem by crafting a text that is about her impossibility of detangling herself from her computer, and a behavioral mechanism that makes it incredibly difficult for a reader-user to be absorbed into the poem. Abrahams writes: Your body became mine you are interesting involving absorbing demanding We are exchanging, constructing, developing To-get-her fusion, adaptation Your body became mine, Here we see that Abrahams is conveying an experience with a computer in which she became extended by it, but the behavioral mechanisms perceived through movement of clicking and touch trigger an affect that through conscious thought conveys something different than the text of the poem. To read the text a reader user has to move, to click, at an incredibly slow pace. The pauses between words are long enough that it makes a reader-user focus on one word at a time, and they seem to stand alone due to these temporal pauses in which the words lose their context. The disrupting animations that make a reader-user wait thirty seconds before she can access the text again. These pauses can sometimes be so that a reader-user can forget the text she has already read. 33 Ensslin 149. 34 Massumi argues that affects are intensities and emotions are of subjective content.

In addition, although Abrahams is crafting a narrative of her experience, a reader-user is preoccupied with monitoring how quickly she moves. The slow pace of the text on the screen makes it difficult for a reader-user to focus on the narrative or meaning of the poem. With the implementations of behavioral mechanisms, Abrahams is capable of making an experience for a reader-user that captures her own frustrations of being extended by computers. She recreates a disturbance, mimicking the disturbances she experienced while doing immaterial labor by crafting animations that a reader-user has to do in order to access the poem. By implementing behavioral mechanisms— animations that disturb—into her poem, Abrahams is capable, yet again, of conveying meaning outside of signifiers. She crafts a poem that is about affects, but after conscious thought they become meaningful to the reader. What is particular about the meaning that is experienced and expressed from this poem is that is dependent upon each process of the poem. Thus, this analysis is contingent entirely upon my reading-using of “Separation” on June 4th. That being said, the event of reading “Separation” on June 4th pointed out some idiosyncrasies about immaterial labor that I will now look at closely. What Animations that Disturb say about Immaterial Labor Practices Despite the fact that bodies are no longer the object of discipline in a control society where the predominate form of labor is immaterial, does not mean that embodied experiences and bodily movements are less important even if they are less apparent. Hayles writes in her 1999 book How We Became Posthuman, My dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.35 While I have been delving into immaterial labor, I have focused tremendously on the material aspects of this labor. In Abrahams’s poem, she conveys two material consequences of immaterial labor, the first is the possibility of acquiring pain from the types of movements that immaterial labor requires, and the second is how movements are monitored—because they still are—today. Both of these things have something in common: they disturb a person from being extended by her computer. The pain that workers may experience from their labor practices intensify in the informational paradigm in the sense that they are extended beyond eight hours a day due to the dissolve of leisure and labor. A popular cartoon from the Internet titled “This is Modern Life,” captures this dissolve, showing a person at work, home and at play. People are often behind their computer doing the same movements almost all day.

35 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5.

Figure 2.9, Source Unknown The pain that some workers encounter when carrying out these tasks or leisure activities are ones that occur so frequently that they are often define as repetitive strain injuries. Since RSI inflicts over 3.2 million workers in the Netherlands alone, various scientists have studied these injuries ranging from occupational therapists, psychologists, and ergonomic engineers.36 Because this affects two fifths of the working population, products and methods have been developed to decrease the number of people who suffer from RSI ranging from hardware such as special keyboards and mice, to software that requires workers to take breaks. Abrahams’s poem, which focuses on the implications of using this software as a response to RSI, points out two particularities of how a worker experiences doing immaterial labor today, and that is who surveys a worker’s movements, and what purposes are behind surveying the movments. One of the most notable elements of a disciplinary society is the notion that one is always immersed in a panopticon, and thus one could always be surveyed by an overseer. The notion of being surveyed in a control society no longer fits today due to the lack of enclosure. Surveillance as we know it in terms of a panopticon is no longer a viable way of explaining how workers’ actions are controlled. Instead of a human monitor, today we have our very own computer to do this job. Abrahams conveys this in her poem. Although she declares in the poem, “I won’t let you take me over again,” the fact of the matter is that the computer won’t let the computer take her over again. To think about this even further, I am hesitant to even use the word surveillance. Surveillance, stemming from the French word surveiller or “to watch over,” is linked to notions of vision. The software that Abrahams is mimicking, on the other hand, is one in which bodies are a data double. They are not seen but coded. The data double, according to Kevin Haggarty and Richard Ericson, “serves as markers for access resources, services and power in ways that are often unknown to the referent.”37 RSI software, that which Abrahams imitates, is one that collects data on how many keystrokes and mouse clicks a person executes per minute, how diligent a worker 36 This data comes from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research and was found on the Dutch RSI Association website. 37 Haggarty and Ericson 109.

has been in taking her breaks, and finally by putting this data into a formula, it suggest stretches and reconfigures the pace at which she should move. Thus, surveillance has changed in that it is no longer a person doing it, and it is mostly about collecting data and comparing it to data that has been synthesized earlier. This being said, I want to remark on the way in which a person is supposed to move when they work closely with computers. One of the aspects that Hayles dreams for posthumanism is for authors to take care and consider human materiality and its limits. The recognition, development of research, and steps implemented to prevent RSI, shows that yes, indeed, people are concerned with human materiality in a posthuman era. The prevalence of RSI has shaped the overall movement of immaterial labor, at least as portrayed in this poem. Technology and speed seem to be almost natural pairings, and their relationship has been written in full detail from authors ranging from artist and futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to French theorist Paul Virilio who see technologies as accelerating the way in which any task can be carried out (particularly pointing to warfare). Abrahams, however, crafts a poem where efficiency for a task to get done (the task being to read her poem) is less dependent upon speed, and more dependent upon a readeruser doing the task at a pace that “will not injure her.” Although relative quickness is still demanded from workers, the possibility of acquiring a repetitive strain injury is taken into consideration, shifting the way in which workers experience the movement of labor. Speed and quickness are still the desired outcome from immaterial laborers, but because human bodies have limitations a new movement, one with breaks and pauses, emerges. To describe this movement I turn to music to describe it, in which the tempo of speed is executed with a rhythm of syncopation. According to Christoph Eschenbach, the music director of the (US) National Symphony Orchestra, syncopation is a “disturbance or interruption in the regular flow of rhythm. It’s the placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur.” Abrahams scripts this in the behavioral mechanisms for her poem. In my description of reading-using “Separation” I state, “As I click, assuming the next word in the poem would appear, an animation takes over the screen.” This animation functions as an accent or stress that is placed at a time that it normally would not occur. By implementing these animations that are based off of her very own experience of doing immaterial labor after her injury, Abrahams is telling an element of immaterial labor that is often overlooked, what the limitations of human bodies does to the movement of labor itself.

Conclusion The disturbing elements of immaterial labor in “Separation” comes across as something quite different than the disturbing elements of “MindFi.” By looking at a digital poem, which has more opportunities to express experiences to reader-users outside of language, I found an alternative way of thinking of the movements associated with technology than that of speed, and I called it syncopation. Syncopation is that which disturbs through accents at unexpected points, becomes something prevalent in immaterial

labor today due to the recognition and threat of workers acquiring this injury. By mimicking the software, which enforces syncopation as the movement of immaterial laborers, Abrahams brings attention to what it is to have a posthuman subjectivity in her poem in a material-semiotic way. Thus, disturbing has transformed from a feeling, the uncanny of how we perceive these workerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movements; to another way we perceive these movements as humorous that disturbs everyday conceptions of people who work with computers with political ends in sight; and finally to the movement of laborers who work with computers.

3: Diffraction: Scientific Practices that Disturb Introduction In the previous two sections, I examined the concept disturbing from various angles to see how the concept and objects shape different configurations in understanding embodied experiences of immaterial labor. I shaped this methodology based on my education in cultural analysis, and my commitment to feminism. During the construction and execution of my research I kept a quote from Haraway in the forefront of my mind, what kind of difference do you want to make? Her question is one I take seriously; I am concerned with the implications of the knowledge I make. If poststructuralism taught us anything it was that there is not truth, only truths. Even so, there are some truths that are favorable for a number of reasons, which means knowledge making—including this thesis—always comes back to politics. The question that I ask in this chapter is what difference does this thesis make, and how does it make this difference? Haraway and many other feminist scholars have looked for ways to address this question. One of the methodologies that have emerged through dialogs of interrogating knowledge making is called diffraction. Haraway uses diffraction as a visual metaphor for how researchers should conceptualize the process of making knowledge. Diffraction is a physical phenomenon that is best described by thinking of how light passes through a prism. When light passes through a prism the waves disperse to different directions, creating difference patterns. As a methodology, diffraction requests researchers to follow these difference patters to make innovative knowledge. Diffraction is a type of affirmative methodology that rather than producing the same, or applying a theory, it goes somewhere different.1 In this thesis, I have attempted to use this visual metaphor by drawing on various feminist authors who executed diffractive methodology in numerous ways. In order to answer my question, what difference does this thesis make, and how does it make this difference? I want to first explain the history of the critique of knowledge making in modern western science. The hegemonic understanding of knowledge making in modern science has been called the representational idiom because scientists have assumed that their job is to represent the world as it is. Both science and technology studies theorists and feminist technoscientific theorists have been critical of this view of the practice of science, and have suggested that science as a practice should be thought of and addressed as performative rather than representational. From here many theorists have offered different ways to make knowledge and share it with others. I will explore this process of how researchers suggested making and sharing knowledge ultimately leading to Haraway’s suggestion of diffraction. 1 For more on affirmative methodologies see Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual 12.

Representational Idiom One of the most important critiques when it comes to science for both science and technology studies and feminist technoscientific theorists is the critique of how knowledge is made in the sciences. Beginning with Durkheim and Mannheim from the classical sociology of knowledge, Steven Woolgar explains his book, Science, the Very Idea, that researchers were interested in how knowledge arouse, specifically how variations of knowledge are associated with different positionings in the world.2 Science, however, was seen as a discipline that was not affected by social contexts.3 The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) was one of the first groups to challenge the role of logic and reason in science, leading to various different genealogies of researchers concerned with how knowledge is made.4 One of the issues at the heart of the concern of how knowledge is made is science’s philosophical commitment to fixing boundaries.5 Andrew Pickering calls this way of understanding science as the representational idiom because scientists are seen as engaging in an activity where they can represent things in a way that mirrors the world as it is.6 Haraway calls the figure of the representational scientist a modest witness, someone who impartially unveils “the world as it is.”7 Imbedded into the representational idiom is an essentialist understanding of the world, which promotes the idea that, “discrete objects exist independent of our perception of them.”8 What is problematic for various technoscientific theorists in regards to the representational idiom is that it: requires theorists to assume that materiality is stable, assumes that it is possible to represent things in a realistic and objective manner,9 considers scientists as detached or separated from the objects they research, and promotes the notion that humans are thought of as the only things that have agency. As an alternative to the representational idiom, Pickering suggests that we should think of science in a way in which the world is not filled with facts and observations, but with agency.10

Performative Idiom In contrast to the representational idiom of science, various technoscientific theorists have suggested a performative idiom that regards science as “a field of powers, capacities, and performances situated in machinic captures of material agency.”11 The 2 Woolgar 22. 3 Ibid. 22. 4 Ibid. 50. 5 Ibid. 15. 6 Pickering 5. 7 Haraway, Modest, 223, 339. 8 Woolgar 30. 9 Steven Woolgar goes even further in his investigation of the representational idiom in his book, Science the Very Idea. He crafts a clear argument of what scientists do to get around these pitfalls, and prescribes another way of approaching knowledge making. 10 Pickering 6. 11 Ibid. 7.

performative understanding of science came as a response to the intense stronghold of social constructionism from both feminism and science studies. The concept of performativity has a long history stemming from J.L. Austin’s writings on speech acts where some sentences say things and some sentences do things, to Jacques Derrida who writes about how speech acts are performed to bring particular people to power, to Judith Butler’s writing on how gender is not set, but rather performed through actions.12 Although these theorists were writing from perspectives of literary and theater studies to critique representations, authors in science studies were also growing critical of representation in the sciences.13 Barad explains the shift from the representational idiom to a performative one changes the focus in science from the correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices/doings/actions. The performative idiom has a long history and has been developed by a number of theorists namely: Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering, Joseph Rouse, and Steven Woolgar.14 Pickering, who is known for taking ownership of the performative idiom, crafts his argument in connection to actor-network theory.15 His main focus is how to include “human and non human (material) agency,” when thinking about how knowledge is made. Pickering tries to convey this process with his concept of “the dance of agency.” The dance of agency refers to the scientific process of making knowledge in which scientists, “make machines and passively wait to capture whatever material agency takes effect.”16 Based upon the effects, scientists reconfigure their plans and goals accordingly, which highlights just how performed this process is. Pickering provides an example of this dance from Bruno Latour’s writing on Louis Pasteur. Latour argues in his research on Pasteur that Pasteur is not the only one acting but also his yeast.17 Pasteur would set up an experiment and wait for the yeast to do something, and based upon the response of the yeast he would set up his experiments in new ways. Pickering explains, The dance of agency, seen asymmetrically from the human end thus takes the form of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation, where resistance denotes the failure to achieve an intended capture of agency in practice, and accommodation an active human strategy of response to resistance which can include revisions to goals and intentions as well as to the material form of the machine in question and to the human frame of gestures and social relations surrounding it. To reiterate, he is saying is that a scientist responds to how his experiment, machines, and other nonhuman agents involved act until an answer can come to be. 12 This is one of the largest critiques of Barad and Haraway on Pickering’s work; that he ignores the queer history of the performative idiom in addition to taking credit for it. Barad 806-7. 13 Barad refers to Ian Hacking’s 1983 book Representing and Intervening in which Hacking points out the limitations of representationalist thinking about the nature of science. 14 Barad 807. 15 Barad argues that Pickering is one of the few science studies scholars to take ownership of this term 807. 16 Pickering 21. 17 Ibid. 21 fn 35.

The performative idiom from a feminist technoscientific perspective is a little bit different from Pickering’s because it is written in a way that recognizes the concept’s queer history.18 The feminist technoscientific perspective is focused a bit more on addressing the notion that “there are assumed to be two distinct independent kids of entities—representations and entities to be represented.”19 In particular, Barad puts forth her own philosophical account that addresses the inseparability of representations and things in the world; she calls it agential realism. An agential realist account is one that advocates a “relationality between specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties and meanings are differentially enacted…and specific material phenomena.”20 Barad is arguing that through enactment (performatively), boundaries are temporarily made to mark and describe the world, in order to make knowledge. This requires a new understanding of metaphysics (onto-ethico-epistmemology), agency, causality. This metaphysics requires one to consider representations and things interlinked shaping one another and not pre-existing their relations, it requires an understanding of agency in which not only humans act, and finally it requires an understanding of causality where things are constantly being arranged differentially in the “ebb and flow of agency.”21 In the second chapter of my thesis I approach the “object” of my analysis in a performative way, in that I focus on my own particular reading-using of “Separation” as an event. By approaching “Separation” as an event, in which I record the time of reading-using, I do address my role and other materials’ role in the becoming of the poem, adjust representations from their pedestal as the most important element of a narrative, make space for a material-semiotic reading of the poem, and provide a partial non-totalizable reading of the poem. This means that I convey a perspective that was relevant for my reading-using of the poem which is highly influenced by the questions I asked in my thesis. The various ways in which theorists have come to critique the representational idiom shows just the beginning of a dialog of how knowledge is made. In the next section, I summarize the various strategies and their critiques of how to make knowledge while avoiding the pitfalls of representation.

A Discussion of Strategies One of the first strategies to cope with the representational idiom is suggested by Woolgar, who argues that authors should be reflexive in their work. To do this he suggests using two techniques: inversion and feedbacking. He describes inversion as considering a representation as preceding its object. This is reflexive because it recognizes that a representation constitutes an object.22 The other strategy that he suggests is feedbacking, which emphasizes the rebounding connections between science as an object in our 18 Barad 808. 19 Ibid. 804. 20 Ibid. 139, (her emphasis). 21 Ibid. 817. 22 Woolgar 57.

attempts to produce a study “of ” science.23 Haraway argues that although reflexivity points out the invisible modest witness, Woolgar’s “relentless insistence on reflexivity… seems not to be able to get beyond self-vision as the cure for self-invisibility.”24 That is, Woolgar thinks that by pointing out specificities in his representing practices he is being “more objective.” From here, Sandra Harding tries to make an account that departs from valuefree objectivity and relativism. She argues for strong objectivity, which draws on tenants of the strong programme and feminist standpoint theory.25 Harding explains that this feminist standpoint epistemology requires a strengthening in standards of objectivity. This is possible for Harding by considering scientists as socially situated human beings. By taking an approach that is connected to the strong programme, Harding argues that this can be accomplished by looking at both the formation of “good” and the “bad” knowledge considering both the lab, as the strong programme suggested, and as Harding adds the social context because cultural beliefs are swept up into scientific processes and knowledges.26 One of the main ideas of standpoint theory is that politically and socially marginalized people have epistemic privilege because—and drawing on Marx—they have an “outsider’s” position, a different way of engaging knowledge.27 In 1987, in her essay, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Haraway engages the things that she likes from Harding’s strong objectivity, and suggests other avenues of thinking in regards to the elements that she finds problematic. What is problematic for Haraway is Harding’s perpetuation of identity politics. While Haraway wants to bring out the positionings of dominated and marginalized viewpoints, she does not want to perpetuate the selfother dichotomy that is a part of identity politics. As a starting point, Haraway suggests addressing vision, something that is built into the framework of modern science and is thought of in a way that encourages a binary relationship in which a (male) seer/ gazer/knower looks at separate things around him and has the potentiality of “infinite vision.”28 By fastening a new framework of vision, Haraway hopes to reclaim the sense in order to “find our way though all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern science and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates.”29 Her suggestion for a new visual metaphor in “Situated Knowledges” is one of partial perspectives. Partial perspective is an alternative for the all seeing knowledge maker and the totalizing relativist because it fosters a “practice of objectivity which privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections and hope for transformation of systems 23 Ibid. 36. 24 Haraway, Modest, 234. 25 Harding 141. 26 Ibid. 149. 27 Harding 124. 28 Haraway, Situated, 189. 29 Ibid.

of knowledge and ways of seeing.”30 In the last two paragraphs, I have outlined some of the useful elements that have come out of Haraway’s dialog with other theorists: her contesting the selfother framework of identity politics, her negotiation of a epistemology that is neither relativist nor objective in the traditional modern science sense of the word, and her reappropriation of vision as a metaphor for making knowledge. Despite these very important suggestions, there are some troubling aspects to the essay as well. Kirsten Campbell argues that Haraway’s situated knowledges is problematic for three reasons. The first is that a tension arises because Haraway does not distinguish between the standpoint of the feminist knower and the standpoint of the subjugated positions of women.31 The second problem is that while Haraway argues that people are oppressed, she doesn’t offer an account of the sociality that produces these subjugated positions, thus making an essentialist account of the subjugated.32 And finally, she assumes that subjugated knowledge posses particular knowledge that is “more truthful” than the knowledge that is derived from positions of domination, permitting feminist science studies, “ to provided a more accurate and critical account for science.”33 While all of these elements are problematic, the most detrimental to the project is Haraway’s assumption that while subjugated positions are not exempt from deconstruction and decoding they are, “preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world.”34 Despite these conceptual struggles, this essay and the visual metaphor according to Allessandra Tanesini, functions as a transitional paper in which Haraway frees herself from the representational idiom of science studies reflexivity.35 Haraway then develops a visual metaphor that serves as one of the most accepted frameworks in creating knowledge in feminist technoscientific theory today: diffraction.

Diffraction Haraway first introduces her metaphor of diffraction in her 1992 essay, “The Promises of Monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” This visual metaphor functions as a step away from the representational idiom to the performative idiom. Diffraction is a physical phenomenon that occurs when light passes through a prism. When light passes through it creates difference patterns where the rays disperse into various directions and move elsewhere.36 Haraway explains that this optical metaphor is useful for making knowledge because, Diffraction does not produce “the same” displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. 30 Ibid. 191. 31 Campbell 171. 32 Ibid. 172. 33 Ibid. 172. 34 Haraway, Situated, 190. 35 Tanesini 180. 36 Schneider 19.

A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear. Diffraction, then, fulfills her intentions of promoting partial and differential perspectives, yet avoids promoting one viewpoint as more objective as another. My intention is to point out what diffraction as a visual metaphor for critical knowledge does, how diffraction as a visual metaphor is carried out, how it is useful for cultural analysis, and finally how I use it. Diffraction as an optical metaphor does a number of things when it comes to approaching making knowledge. First of all, the temporal patterns that are given off when light passes through a prism refers to the différantial relations between words and the things they signify in that they are both fluid and they are separations enacted from within.37 This means that things in the world resist a totalizing taxonomy, and positions like subject and object are enacted. This is important because other agents are recognized as having the capacity to do things, and these agents are not just human.38 Because positions are enacted, and not pre-existing, diffraction avoids identity politics, and departs from Haraway’s hang up from the visual metaphor of partial perspective. Although there is not a “more truthful” difference pattern made in diffraction, there is a politically driven choice in the patterns one follows. In the practice of mapping these interferences, theorists have a responsibility in how the world is made, and Haraway argues that we should follow the ones that bring us to new places. Since Haraway argues that diffraction is about mapping the effects of where differences appear, she is promoting a way of thinking that disrupts linearity and fixed causality. Diffraction, argues Barad, is also about transgressing disciplinary boundaries and theoretical schools to get to new places.

Diffraction as a Reading Practice Diffraction has been experimented with by a number of theorists as a methodology. The visual metaphor has had a tremendous effect not just on the writing practices of authors (who move away from a representational idiom), but also in reading practices. According to Barad, diffraction as a reading practice is supposed to “record the history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference. Diffraction is about heterogeneous history, not about originals.”39 One thing that is important about diffraction as a reading strategy is to read various texts through one another. This “reading through” allows a reworking of concepts that appear attached to a particular tradition of thought.40 Iris van der Tuin argues that diffraction can be a strategy for new concepts, traditions and philosophies.41 Diffraction, as a metaphor itself, does this. Originally used in classical physics, it is utilized in a way that is beneficial for feminist technoscientific theorists. A diffractive reading practice for Barad requires one to read attentively and carefully in 37 Clough, 162 38 Ibid., 162 39 Van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, Forthcoming, 140. 40 Van der Tuin, “Diffractively,” 27. 41 Ibid. 27.

order to get the fine details.42 In addition, a diffractive reading strategy involves realizing the ethics of one’s analysis because an author is always entangled within it. For Haraway a diffractive reading practice is about having different reading skills that intersect diffractively in a way that interrupts one another productively.43 One of the strategies that I wanted to try to see just how diffractive my thesis could be is to find a concept that would lead me to various authors because it was either under theorized, or the word had multiple meanings. Since I was interested in the movements that immaterial laborers make I first searched for a quote or reference to the movements of immaterial labor that shocked, surprised, or inspired me. I found this in Haraway’s quote, the focal quote of this thesis, “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” Upon my first reading of Haraway’s quote I was shocked. I could not believe that she would attach negative feeling to the world unfolding so easily. She is not the type to be utopic or dystopic when it comes to things emerging as practices or materialsemiotic things. I was then surprised to see the various ways of I could interpret the sentence. After reading some interviews about this very quote, I became inspired to follow at least two flightlines, and see if it was a starting point that would be fruitful to investigate the way narratives frame immaterial labor practices. I thought it would be a useful place to begin because Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto has had a significant influence on collective attitudes towards technologies in the late twentieth century. In addition, I read texts anachronistically to see what elements of great thinkers resonated with these objects, and with the concept of disturbing. Although it seemed a little risky to take writings of a particular tradition and intermingle them with objects of popular culture, Marxian authors of labor, and psychoanalysts, the connections that came through were something that could not be found if I stuck to one discipline, to one tradition. One example of this in my thesis is my rereading of Jentsch with Massumi’s writing in mind. When Jentsch wrote his article, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” he noticed a certain oddity, a particular feeling that he had when observing an epileptic patient have a seizure. To look closely at this feeling he used the knowledge, theoretical frameworks, and research capacities that he had available at the time. When I read his work over a century later, and infused it with writings from another author who is also curious about movements yet differs in context, genealogy, and disciplines, a new and exciting explanation emerged through the connections that I could draw between Jentsch and Massumi. For me, this was incredibly productive because it is avoids discrediting ideas that are flawed in some ways, and looks for more ways of seeing, and more knowledge.

Diffraction as a Writing Practice That being said, a diffractive reading practice quickly becomes a diffractive writing practice. Haraway’s writing adds another element to a diffractive methodology, and 42 Van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, Forthcoming, 139. 43 Schneider 149.

that is by writing in a way that is partially understood, critically positioned, critically visioned, power sensitive, not pluralistic, vulnerable, and resists fixation.44 Haraway is able to do this in her writing by using metaphors, figures, and ironies, which complexify and resist meaning in a way that fosters more diffractive readings. Haraway explains why she uses these literary devices in her work in an interview with Nina Lykke, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen, I like layered meanings, and I like to write a sentence in such a way that—by the time you get to the end of it—it has some level questioned itself. There are some ways of blocking the closure of a sentence, or of a whole piece, so that it becomes hard to fix its meanings. I like that, and I am committed politically and epistemologically to stylistic work that makes it relatively harder to fix the bottom line.”45

Diffraction as a writing practice is something much more difficult for me to negotiate in my research. Although I am inspired by the way many authors have experimented with literary language in their scientific writings, when I write I attempt to convey my experiences in a way that does not stump my audience. Part of this could be partially from the fact that I see myself as a writer who needs more experience, and the other could be my commitment to a non-academic audience being able to read my writing. Despite these complications in diffractive writing, I do make one attempt to write in a way that sends readers in different directions to read my writing. I do this by writing with a metaphor, syncopation. By drawing on a musical term I try and convey movements of immaterial labor with rhythm. Syncopation is something that even varies in music, and when the reader of my researcher comes across this term I hope that they think of immaterial labor, my concept disturbing, and the objects that I analyze in a different way. By writing in a way that resists meaning, Haraway avoids the fixation that is at the goal of scientific knowledge making. Her writing requires readers to use multiple literacies and read her text in different ways. I will now explain how diffraction is a useful visual metaphor for doing cultural analysis.

Diffraction for Cultural Analysis The next question I wanted to address with the concept of diffraction in mind is in what ways is it useful in doing cultural analysis. Cultural analysis is described by Mieke Bal, the founder of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), as a critical practice that can be summarized as “cultural memory in the present.”46 Bal explains in her introduction to the book she edited The Practice of Cultural Analysis, that there are three issues at the core of cultural analysis, namely the standpoint in the present and subsequent relationship to history, close reading, and methodological self-reflection.47 44 Haraway, Simians, 195. 45 Lykke 333. 46 Bal, Practice, 1. 47 Ibid.13.

The first core issue, the standpoint of the present and subsequent relationship to history, is a way of reconfiguring time in a way that is not linear, but rather collapses linearity. The call for close reading is similar to Barad’s argument for the care and attention one should use when reading diffractively. Before I move onto the last core issue of cultural analysis, (self) reflection, I want to first mention the way cultural analysis is suggested to be done because it has had a major influence over how I read and write in addition to how the master degree of cultural analysis is shaped. In the preface for her reader, Bal writes, The shift in methodology I am arguing for here is founded on a particular relationship between subject and object, one that is not predicated on a vertical and binary opposition between the two. Instead the model for this relationship is interaction, as in “interactivity.” This is because of this potential interactivity—not because of an obsession with “proper” usage—that every academic field, but especially one like the humanities that has so little in the way of binding traditions, can gain from taking concepts seriously.48 Here Bal is confirming a performative model of making knowledge, one where an object and concept—as chosen by an author—are read through one another to craft something new. Particularly, when approaching concepts, Bal argues that they are not fixed, that they travel “between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities,” and through their movement their “meaning, reach and operational value differ.”49 Although Barad and Haraway might be cautious in using words such as between and interaction because they constitute a relationship of things that already exist before the relation, Bal’s interdisciplinary call to use concepts of various discipline’s origins to critique any cultural object or artifact allows a diffractive reading and writing to come through. From this juncture, there are only three red flags that I want to address. The first is the interest in cultural artifacts. Why is it necessary to distinguish cultural analysis’s object as a cultural artifact? Does this designation perpetuate an artificial nature-culture boundary that isn’t useful in the first place, or by calling the object cultural does it function as a locative tactic by which we know we can find the cultural analysis students in the department of the humanities? The second element that I want to address is the designation between the object and concept. Concepts for Bal are not fixed, they change based upon the dialog that they have with objects. Objects, which Bal argues should be seen as cultural processes rather than stagnate objects, are things that according to Bal “speak back.”50 Bal writes, Even though, obviously, objects cannot speak, they can be treated with enough respect for their irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness—but not a mystery—to allow them to check the thrust of interpretation, and to divert and complicate it…Thus, the objects we analyze enrich both interpretation and theory. This is how theory can change 48 Bal, Reader, xxiii. 49 Ibid. 50 Bal, Traveling, 44, and Bal, Reader, xxiii

from a ridged matter discourse into a live cultural object in its own right.51 In this quote Bal points out how itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s difficult to differentiate the difference between objects and concepts because they shape and become one another. In addition she suggests a type of agency in which material artifacts have an influence on discourse, bringing nonhuman actants to the scene. The last element that I want to address is the notion of (self) reflection. In a conference in Copenhagen called Feminist Materialisms, Barad noted that reflection and refraction are elements that are part of diffraction. The self-reflection that cultural analysts do seems to be useful in that they consider in what ways their project of analyzing certain objects with certain concepts are useful. Of course I would argue that this is not a way to be more objective, it is inherent in cultural analysis to always be looking for better ways of doing things, and (self) reflection is one way that people can do this.

Diffraction: A Useful Practice? Diffraction for a student, reader, writer, or academic who does not quite fit in to any one discipline is a way of having guidelines that allows exploration. It is a facilitating practice rather than one of closed doors. Diffraction for a student, reader, writer, or academic from a feminist background, who sees the importance of engaging with knowledge and viewpoints that are different than any hegemonic system of thought, by giving voices to those who engage in other ways of thinking, makes this practice politically crucial. By taking up this methodology, I was able to carry out my ambitions to think about movements, something generally saved for the kinesthesiologist, and write about it from a perspective that looks to narratives to frame this knowledge. The knowledge that I produced is not an attempt to be more accurate than what a kinesthesiologist could come up with, but it is just different. Diffraction encourages this type of knowledge making; one that does not save particular objects, theories, or traditions for any one discipline, and in doing so opens up routes where innovative knowledge can be made. Diffraction as a methodology has opened up a possibility to explore my curiosity, and in doing so has shown some elements of immaterial labor that may have been missed in other research. That being said, it is only a small portion of what narratives have to say about the movements of immaterial labor because it is limited in that it is only a case study of two narratives, but adheres to the non-totalizing difference patterns that diffraction propagates. Based upon my curiosities and the knowledge I wanted to make, diffraction is a useful visual metaphor as a methodology that is still being shaped by many authors today.

51 Bal, Traveling, 45

Conclusion: The Materiality of Immaterial Labor As I sit and write the closing portion of this thesis, my legs and arms are throbbing in pain. It is the night before my deadline, and there is still much to do. I push on. I have chosen for no silhouetted woman to interrupt my typing, and the breaks I take are becoming fewer and fewer. It is at this point that I want to confess that in the introduction I was not completely honest with you. I do know some of the bodily consequences attached to immaterial labor, but I only know them from my experiences in studying. During the last thesis that I wrote, I lost sight in one eye that took a month to recover, and today I write with sharp pins shooting through my wrists. Nonetheless the deadline remains the same, and attached to missing the deadline is a hefty “fine” of paying an extra month of tuition. After a paragraph like that, it may seem like the way I approach immaterial labor is that it is some big demon that we need to fight off, but in fact industrial labor practices have large demons looming over them too. In addition, this type of labor is something that many have been fighting for. Joost De Bloois stated in a lecture at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that Precario bello was in fact coined as an emancipatory notion: precarity was seen as a means of emancipating oneself from the sheer boredom of a working life; being precarious meant that you would no longer be working for the same boss for the rest of your life, but that you could chose to work for a couple of months, than travel for a bit or look elsewhere for a job.1

What De Bloois shows is that with every sort of labor practice has a catch alongside it. The factory demanded physical labor, from 9-5, in the same building everyday, with a very structured pay scale, with time off, and the same boss. The freelance worker, on the other hand, takes the jobs she pleases, works the hours she pleases, and has more autonomy. With this autonomy comes what De Bloois calls “an uncertainty of livelihood, vulnerability (both financial and emotional).” Precarity requires workers to constantly prove that they are productive. In a time of economic downturn with austerity measures in play, this can mean working grueling hours for little or no money. These taxing hours, as I have shown, can have an impact on the health and well being of immaterial laborers that I can only imagine as getting worse as unemployment benefits decline and the age of retirement increases. This thesis is an attempt to bring to attention that although the way many experience work today is different (that is if a worker is within the informational paradigm), and seems to be attached to minimal bodily consequences, there are indeed still bodily consequences of doing immaterial labor. The concept immaterial labor itself seems to state otherwise, but this was one of the intentions of writing this thesis, to 1 De Bloois

highlight the material, the bodily consequences of immaterial labor. I have gone through a diffractive path to show that immaterial labor can be conveyed as frightening and comedic. When portrayed as comedic it is a critique in how we use computers. I have shown that computers have provided new ways to tell narratives, and have instigated a new kind of subjectivity. I have shown that who monitors bodily movements in the informational paradigm has shifted from overseer watching bodies to computers that analyze our data double, and finally I argued the force of immaterial labor is syncopation. Thinking about immaterial labor as syncopation is absolutely crucial for those of us in the hiring pool to remember. This is absolutely crucial for members of government who determine the social safety nets and labor laws to take into consideration. We do not have an economy based upon the equilibrium force of the industrial paradigm, and consequently we need to be prepared for giving our bodies the interruptions and disturbances they need.2

2 Deleuze 3.

Works Cited Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print. Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner. “Act.” The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology. London: Penguin, 2000. 2. Print. Abrahams, Annie, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Stefans. “Separation.” Electronic Literature Collection. Ed. Laura Borràs. Vol. 2. College Park, Maryland: Electronic Literature Organization, 2011. Accessed, 4 June 2012. Armisen, Fred, Carrie Brownstein, and Jonathan Krisel. “Farm.” Portlandia. Independent Film Channel. Portland, Oregon, 21 Jan. 2011. Web. Bal, Mieke. A Mieke Bal Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006. Print. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2002. Print. Bal, Mieke, and Bryan Gonzales. The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Print. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print. Beach, Christopher. Class, Language, and American Film Comedy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Berger, Arthur Asa. An Anatomy of Humor. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A.: Transaction, 1993. Print. Bergson, Henri, Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred Rothwell. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Print. Bolter, J. David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1998. Print. Campbell, Kirsten. “The Promise of Feminist Reflexivities: Developing Donna Haraway’s Project for Feminist Science Studies.” Hypatia 19.1 (2004): 162-82. Print. Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000. Print. Coté, Mark. “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks.”Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor. By Jennifer Pybus. Ed. Michael Peters and Ergin Bulut. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 169- 94. Print. De Bloois, Joost. “Making Ends Meet: Precarity, Art and Political Activism.” Project 1975. Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, Amsterdam. 31 Aug. 2011.

Lecture. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscripts on Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7. Web. Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas, 2005. Print. “Disturbing.” Oxford English Dictionary. Web. Ensslin, Astrid. “From Revisi(tati)on to Retro-Intentionalization: Hermeneutics, Multimodality and Corporeality in Hypertext, Hypermedia and Cybertext.” Reading Moving Letters: Digital Literature in Research and Teaching : A Handbook. Ed. Roberto Simanowski, Jo%u0308rgen Scha%u0308fer, and Peter Gendolla. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010. 145-62. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print. Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards. “The ‘Uncanny’” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth, 1986. Print. Gane, Nicholas. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to Be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.7-8 (2006): 135-58. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth A. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Print. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology 51.4 (2000): 605-22. Web. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 7-45. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. “The Promise for Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 63-124. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008. Print. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89-100. Web. Hayles, Katherine. “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” (2007). Web. <http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999. Print. Hayles, N. Katherine. Edt. Morris, Adalaide Kirby, and Thomas Swiss. “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event.” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. 181-209. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002. Print. Harding, Sandra G. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991. Print. Hindle, Tim. “Scientific Management.” The Economist 9 Feb. 2009. Web. 7 June 2012. <http://www.economist.com/node/13092819>. Hoffman, Miles. The NPR Classical Music Companion: Terms and Concepts from A to Z. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Jentsch, Ernst. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906).” Angelaki 2.1 (1995): 7-16. Print. Latour, Bruno, “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.” Soziale Welt 47 (1996) 360-381. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Radical Thought in Italy. Ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota, 1996. 133- 50. Print. Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006. Print. Lucire, Yolande. Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire. Sydney: UNSW, 2003. Print. Lykke, Nina, Randi Markussen, and Finn Olesen. “Cyborgs, Coyotes, and Dogs: A Kinship of Feminist Figurations and There Are Always More Things Going on than You Thought! Methodologies as Thinking Technologies.” The Haraway Reader. By Donna Jeanne. Haraway. New York: Routledge, 2004. 321-42. Print. Macey, David. “Oedipus Complex.” The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. London: Penguin, 2001. 280-81. Print. Manovich, Lev. What Is Digital Cinema? Cinema, the Art of the Index. Web. <http:// www.manovich.net/TEXT/digital-cinema.html#fn0>. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002. Print. Modern Times. Dir. Charlie Chaplin. United Artists, 1936. DVD. Morris, Adalaide Kirby, and Thomas Swiss. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. Print. Morse, Margaret. “The Poetics of Interactivity.” Women, Art, and Technology. Ed. Judy Malloy. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. 16-33. Print. Nankivell, Ashleigh. “Ping Body.” Ping Body. New Media Timeline. Web. 07 June 2012. <http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/history/timeline/pingbody.html>. Negri, Antonio. “Postface to the Complete Text of the Journal Futur Antérieur.” Multitudes Web (2004). Multitudes Web. Web. Nelmes, Jill. An Introduction to Film Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004. Print. Page, Brett. Writing for Vaudeville. [S.l.]: General, 2010. Print.

Paulus, Tom, Rob King, and Barry Salt. Slapstick Comedy. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print. Papadopoulos, Dimitris, and Vassilis Tsianos. “Precarity: A Savage Journey to the Heart of Embodied Capitalism.” Transversal: Multilingual Web Journal (2006).European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Web. Pickering, Andrew. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago [u.a.: Univ. of Chicago, 1995. Print. Raessens, Joost. “Serious Games from an Apparatus Perspective.” Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology. Ed. Marianne Van Den. Boomen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2009. Print. “RSI-vereniging.” RSI-vereniging. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 July 2012. <http://www.rsi- vereniging.nl>. Schneider, Joseph W. Donna Haraway: Live Theory. New York: Continuum, 2005. Print. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and J. Paul Hunter. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-century Responses, Modern Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. “Animation and Automation, Or, the Incredible Effortfulness of Being.” Screen 50.4 (2009): 375-91. JSTOR. Web. 7 June 2012. Stone, Allucquere Rosanne. “Your Words, My Silent Mouth: Trying To Make Narrative Sense Out of Nonnarrative Work.” Women, Art, and Technology. Ed. Judy Malloy. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003. 376-87. Print. Tanesini, Alessandra. An Introduction to Feminist Epistemologies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Print. Taylor, Frederick Winslow. Scientific Management. New York, N.Y., [etc.: Harper and Brothers, 1947. Print. Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto, 2004. Print. Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Print. Van der Tuinan Der Tuin, Iris, and Rick Dolphijn. “The Transversality of New Materialism.” Women: A Cultural Review 21.2 (2010): 153-71. Print. Van der Tuin, Iris, and Rick Dolphijn New Materialisms. Open Source Press. Forthcoming. Van der Tuin, Iris “A Different Starting Point, A Different Metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad Diffractively’. Hypatia, 26(1) (2011): 22-42. Williams, Robert W. “Fast Capitalism.” Fast Capitalism 1.1 (2005): n. pag. Web. 04 July 2012. <http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/williams.html>. Woolgar, Steve. Science, the Very Idea. Chichester, Sussex: Ellis Horwood, 1988. Print.