FIELD NOTES :: Tech Pending Revolution :: POWER ON, Part 4
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. — Elæ Moss
Download POWER ON app for Android
My project may have sites of happiness in its use, allowing users to impart their own perspectives into the media of the work, while at the same time move readers/users to unhappiness with the violent and disturbing content of the work. My hope is that the work causes discomfort to some degree, a discomfort derived from the reader’s sense of alienation at scenes being described through an automated being’s lens. The delivery of my book through a collaborative app works with the phenomenon of alienation in two ways. The project recognizes that marginalized individuals experience alienation when reading works that either misrepresent or forget their existence, and in response to this, the app provides readers with an opportunity to impart their own perspectives into the manuscript in the hopes of breaking open models of author-text-reader relationships. The project also recognizes the fact that alienation can actually result from the capacity for empathy. Because it is possible for a reader to empathize when reading a perspective that is different from theirs, it is perhaps even more likely in those who are marginalized and forced to be aware of their differences from normative identity factors. Those who are marginalized know their differences because they must first be trained in hegemonic identity constructions in order to recognize their differences.
Reader empathy, and the capacity for empathy in general, cannot be considered purely positive when empathy results in the reader’s incorporation of frameworks that oppress certain identity positions. Those whose identities have been rendered marginal by the lens of an imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy have been made to see ourselves through this lens. When hegemonic society stares at us, we see who is looking at us, and in our mind’s eye we also see how we must appear to the hegemonic gaze. In Kristin Zeiler’s work on bodily alienation, she notes that the process cannot start “without an initial step where the subject as a lived body becomes a thing under the gaze of another.” Bodily alienation can be enforced through all venues of socialization besides reading, but it is the specific process of immersing oneself in the words of another, accessing the detailed descriptions and value-judgments of a worldview that reading can provide, that I feel can provide someone with the most access to the experience of “a subject [coming] to see her- or himself in duplicate (or triplicate),” the extra copies being the subjugated Other, the sexualized or racialized or otherwise degraded Other. Zeiler writes:
Indeed, if the subject continuously lives the disruptive movement that breaks the lived body apart, it means that she or he cannot but attend continuously to her or his body as an object. This is the case partly because of the way self and others interact, or fail to interact, and it will have far-reaching detrimental effects on the subject’s being-in-the-world.
Zeiler describes the double (or triple) consciousness of othering as both a multiplying of self and as a breakage of self, a disruption. Zeiler does not explain her reasoning behind this dual description of bodily alienation involving both multiple selves and a broken self, but I can relate Zeiler’s description to the observable effects of identity-based injury. The multiplying of an othered subject involves recreations of the self as an object via the lens of the objectifier, but this multiplying is also a breaking up of the lived body, splitting it into the subject and the object. The multiplying is not through replication but fission, and the fission is a violent experience. To know oneself as human, and whole, while at the same time knowing that one is dehumanized in the eyes of another, is not living two complete selves. The ability to utilize a dehumanizing gaze upon oneself involves a certain death to one’s wholeness, it involves the violent breaking of oneself into someone who deserves to live, and someone who does not.
While I, of course, do not wish to engage in othering marginalized identities with my work, I do hope that readers can find productive discomfort with my extrapolation of our current technological programming. If readers find themselves saddened or upset with the hyperbolic extension of our current codes of conduct toward ourselves, other species, and the natural world, then I hope that unhappy reader experience is jarring enough to alienate the reader from our current codes of conduct. The poems in my manuscript waver between different modes of organization and ownership, alternating between “they,” “we,” “I,” and “us” when relaying missives from our automated futures. If readers cannot place the exact boundary between automaton and creator, or onlooker and participant, then there is no safe place to land in the distinctions between ourselves, our ancestors, our future selves, and our technological tools. My wish is that readers will, at times in the reading of the text, forcibly rupture themselves away from the voices in the manuscript. If the reader finds that they cannot empathize with the automaton, then perhaps they will find themselves moved to begin empathizing with the automaton’s others — the habitat, animals, and people who still populate the world.
My digital supplement to the manuscript also aims to blur the boundaries between my poetry and readers. The project is a mix of happy and unhappy activities, making use of a digital device that most of us persist in using despite the great unhappiness that it often brings us. I see this blurring of identity and enjoyment to act as what Donna Haraway names permanent partiality, which yields productive interventions. Further, the project finds unhappiness to be productive in the vein of Sara Ahmed’s “Killjoy Survival Kit.” In outlining the survival kit in Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed writes, “We must stay unhappy with this world…Happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods.” In examining what we associate with happiness and unhappiness, we can reveal the social values that lead us to joy, distress, and complacency.
The poems in my manuscript conduct an unhappy extrapolation (as opposed to a speculation), as defined by Simona Micali in her organization of science fiction, that attempts to project a near-future that is conducted by automata who reflect a pre-revolutionary continuance of colonizing technology. The figures in my manuscript are automated figures who carry out our current values-systems towards others and the natural world, making observations and taking actions that are influenced by our code of ethics. It is a world which is pre-revolutionary, meaning that we have not yet incorporated into our technology design the xenofeminist call to configure tools and structures of power that were designed for equal liberation for all. This type of world-building is an extrapolation of our current condition. Micali’s characterization of science fiction divides its concerns into two types of world-building that ask either: “What would happen/would have happened if this particular condition were different or if this particular event had had a different outcome?”, or “What will happen if nothing changes and things go on as they are now?”, with the first question prompting speculative writing, and the second extrapolative. The techno-pessimistic extrapolation takes the form of brief, unresolved poems as a nod to Instagram poetry, which poses the poetry reading experience as constituted by brief encounters with discrete missives contained within the small space of smartphone screens. In order to power through the story of our automated futures, the stories will come to us through disjointed narratives that construct their own context. Rather than implying that readers ingest the encounters as a form of conformity, however, the presentation of my manuscript through an interactive app attempts to make prominent the possibility of agency. A part of the agency is our own feelings of compassion and empathy towards the material that we read.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is 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
