FIELD NOTES :: Tech Pending Revolution :: POWER ON, Part 2
Editor’s Note — This special 5-part, bi-weekly Field Notes mini-series from Ginger Ko invites our community / audience / future readers & users of the POWER ON book and app into the framework, influences, and socio-cultural context that inspired the poet to go on this particular journey into a project marrying speculative world building, poetics, and technology. Entries will be offered here on the OS’s online platform leading up to the project’s release — in the meantime, discounted preorders of the POWER ON book are available directly through our website, here. Stay tuned for more information about the book, app release dates (for both iPhone and Android), and event announcements! — Elæ Moss
Part 1 of POWER ON Field Notes can be found here.
My project is entitled POWER ON because of its central concern of power and its legacy within the bodies of individuals. Structures of power have been turned on and have constructed value-system institutions of imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, and they are encoded into our bodies through social environment and the genetic outcomes of race, gender, disability status, etc. that impose us rather firmly within the structures of power. These positions are not without agency, and while survival is ensured for many, flourishing is not accorded to most. The technology that manipulates us and our environment are tools that further our ethics of interaction with others, and both poetry and machines can be aimed towards an ethics of mutual avowal. In technology the phrase “power on” indicates that certain processes have been switched on; it is a description of a state of being. The power is on because it has been turned on. The turning on of power is typically accompanied by a “power off” so that the technological state of continuance is not indefinite. Without the off switch, the machine’s consumption of energy is relentless until the energy supply is depleted or removed. “Power on,” however, is also a description of having done or a will to do; to say “I will power on” means the person speaking will persist and overcome. To tell someone to “power on” is to urge them to continue, to overcome stopping.
At the same time, powering on can also indicate a certain style of proceeding, perhaps even implying that to power on is to resist stopping at any point until the end goal is reached. Powering on can involve powering through, breaking down any impediments with force and/or speed, allowing obstacles to effect only the briefest possible pauses. Powering on can involve a process of disavowal if someone myopically commits to a single end point in their social justice activism and ethics, failing to pause in order to consider overlaps with other justice concerns. Powering on may also be necessitated by the way that our social justice concerns present themselves amidst the flood of information and politics in our current world; to get a good grasp of “what’s out there” in the field of news and ideas means powering on with our scrolling activity. Logging on to social media involves powering through as much as possible, as quickly as possible, in a perpetual state of catch-up with the constantly evolving arena of news articles, editorials, hot takes, comment conversations, and memes.
The type of powering on that I advocate for in my project is one that encourages respite from urgency and disorder; it is an accommodated empowerment. Accommodated empowerment is one in which personal power is turned on while the social power that community and institutions possess can provide an arena for individuals to develop their political consciousnesses. Within the arena for individuals to develop ideologically is a space for growth and wellness, a space in which the immediate stressors of survival are mitigated so that personal power can focus beyond survival. Focus beyond survival can also facilitate greater multi-optic vision, since there is no need to power through the chaos of intersecting oppressions in order to focus on (and, thus, the need to make choices about what constitutes) one’s immediate concerns. An accommodated empowerment in how we receive information and ideas in our current milieu requires intervention in the presentation of the information and ideas.
The reasoning behind a digital supplement to my poetry manuscript concerning multi-optic vision is that I find technology provides avenues for accommodated empowerment in reading. The digital component of my project aims to provide users with a pause in their reading of text in order to engage in activities of media creation, changing the design and outcome of a multimedia manuscript. Our lived experiences, meaning our past histories and the present-time implications for a projected future, impact reader’s/user’s relationship with a work of writing. Not only is there a tactile and optic relationship with writing, through physical interaction with page or screen or any other surface, there is reader agency within the ways that we have been trained to read. Taking a hard-copy book as an example, while Western readers have been trained to read a book by opening the pages to the left, then reading the text from left to right, readers can also bend or break the spine of the book, crease the pages, write notes on the pages, pass the book onto others, or store the book for keeping on a shelf. And how we incorporate the content of the book into our lives is also dependent on an entire matrix of identity factors that first allow readers to arrive at the book, facing the book and its content.
I believe that these possibilities in my project provide users with a space of accommodated empowerment in which to think through their own perspectives and outcomes, much in the way that Huey P. Newton figured the Black Panther ideas of social and community aid programs that constituted “survival pending revolution” interventions. What I call accommodated empowerment is my poetic project of “survival pending revolution” in the much smaller scale of poetry reading, though with Newton’s ideas on the revolutionary potential of communication technology in mind. In the examination of contemporary protest and resistance movements, it has certainly been demonstrated that digital communication technology has been vital to protestors’ organization, strategizing, and strengthening of ideological discourse, but how will this impact seep into the realm of poetry? I believe that “survival pending revolution” in the future of poetry writing and reading must acknowledge the directions that developing technology has oriented us toward, while also maintaining agency for poets, and, most importantly, for poetry readers. The directions we are oriented toward in present time can feature “survival programs” for readerly agency within power structures that are presented to us as inexorable, but in fact contain the structures for their future demise.
Newton saw survival programs as supporting the truly revolutionary work of buying people the time and energy to develop their perspectives. In John Narayan’s article “Huey P. Newton’s Intercommunalism: An Unacknowledged Theory of Empire,” Narayan notes that Newton’s descriptions of existing power structures anticipated the work of later scholars who described the global empire of neoliberalism. Newton identified the global interconnectedness of economic empire as “reactionary intercommunalism,” in which “nations could no longer decolonize and pursue forms of sovereignty in order to practice nationalism, or even internationalism,” necessitating a pursuance of global justice rather than national justice in order to achieve revolution. Newton believed that “revolutionary intercommunalism” was made possible by the very structuring of reactionary intercommunalism, which has created a “distorted” collectivity directed by Wall Street and exploiting global communities of labor. The Black Panther party social programs, more than self-determination and community aid programs, were what Newton saw as “survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution.” The survival programs were consciousness-raising praxis, a promotion of an analytical understanding of ideology alongside practice:
Newton’s orientating of the Panthers towards survival programs is best seen as an attempt to secure the material and ideological survival of the very communities that could achieve revolutionary intercommunalism in the face of processes that he believed would materially and ideologically eviscerate such revolutionary potential. Newton thus presents a theorization of the war of position in the context of global capitalist empire that insists that such a strategy must focus on ‘survival pending revolution’ if revolution is to ever become a reality.
Narayan’s analysis of Newton’s “survival pending revolution” concept utilizes Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the “war of movement,” the physical resistance strategies of insurrectional revolution, and the “war of position,” which entails counter-hegemonic strategies within cultural and political spheres in the form of alternative institutions and paradigms for civil order. Newton believed that the structure of the empire could enable its own destruction, and the intermediary space, the pre-revolutionary space, needs to help community members in practical, material ways, while also allowing for community members’ ideological growth. This approach of both ideological and structural intervention would be a war of position that would enable the coming revolution. Newton himself began to move away from ideas of active insurrection, the armed struggle for which the Black Panthers are more well-known, towards social programming as a preparatory space for community empowerment in the revolutionary struggle. Newton also believed that communication technology “held the key for oppressed people across the world to communicate and collaborate and embark upon the path towards revolutionary intercommunalism.” In Newton’s thinking, the possibilities of global communications, combined with the domination of the American empire, “has created the global village.”
While I am regularly terrified of technology’s powers of suppression and subjugation, I must remind myself of the way that rhetoric around smartphones turning us all into zombies of addiction, stripped of context or individuality, actually strips users of agency. The handheld device’s ubiquity also enables lightning-speed communication and mass-based political conversations which can work to dismantle the technological and scientific systems that support the consumption of handheld devices. POWER ON is my small attempt at changing the rules of the game, whether it is the rules for the experiencing of poetry, or the rules for reader/user intervention on text.
I follow the xenofeminist approach to my politics towards technology, in that, of course, the ultimate aim of technology “should be to transform political systems and disciplinary structures themselves, so that autonomy does not always have to be craftily, covertly, and repeatedly seized.” This means a technology that does not require us to “always have to start from the need to appropriate things — because they were in fact designed with a more accommodating set of affordances in mind.” iPhones, for instance, were probably not designed with an accommodating set of affordances in mind — Apple’s expansion of their products’ capabilities continues to increase along with Apple’s aim to sell to more and more people, but we are also continuously being trained to use Apple’s products. What if, however, I assume that my poetry is destined to be read on an iPhone, more than in a traditional hardcopy book format? And what if that poetry was designed with some affordances that a traditional hardcopy book could not provide? My project cannot change iPhones, but it can change the collaborative quality of digital poetry that is accessed through iPhones.
By allowing readers/users to insert their own artistic vision into POWER ON, I hope to make apparent, in a rather simplistic way, that the politics of the project upholds each individual’s lived experience and networked embodiment in the realm of race, gender, class, and disability status. The project aims to promote fluency with multimedia poetry as well as accommodating each user’s preference for the specific way that they receive poetry. The project’s attention to inclusive design elements also references technology’s contribution to providing greater accessibility to the experience of literature and media. This project takes seriously xenofeminism’s inspiration from Huey P. Newton’s description of Black Panther social programs as encouraging “survival pending revolution.” If readers and users of POWER ON can impart themselves in the collaborative experience of my poetry, thereby affirming their marginalized identities in a technology that seeks to erase them, then I hope that it is a contribution to hacking systems for pleasure and self-authorization pending a more equitable future.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She recently released POWER ON as both a book and interactive poetry app, produced with The Operating System. She is also the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com Follow @poweronpoetry at Instagram for updates and other media.
