Thesis Day!

I will be turning in my thesis at some point before 5 p.m. today.  It's been a year in the making...and in honor of this milestone, I'm posting my abstract for your reading pleasure:

Title: "Citizens of the Future: Affect, Postmodern Citizenship and Prosthesis in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents"

Abstract:

This project explores representations of subjectivity, technology, and citizenship in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.  These novels portray a not-so-distant future in which current social trends like privatization and increasing drug abuse have led to apocalyptic conditions.  Accelerating these changes is the fact that the more advanced society becomes technologically, the more technology affects the characters’ biology, and the more it mediates their personal experiences and relationships.  These conditions lead to questions of how subjectivity and citizenship are deeply transformed by technology in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic America.  

I examine technology as a form of prosthesis because it both integrates into the self and extends the self in these works. Theorists of culture have given an increasing amount of attention to tropes and metaphors of prosthesis that explore the general relationships between the body and technology in modernity and postmodernity, and I pursue this trend by framing the question of subjectivity and citizenship through the lens of prosthesis because it captures the material and metaphorical aspects of one's position within the state in the future.   In order to examine this relationship, I use a combination of affect theory in tandem with concepts of “prosthetic emotions” and “necro citizenship” in order to extrapolate Butler’s portrayal of how life is fundamentally changed by technological advances.  I interpret this type citizenship as what I call prosthetic citizenship because it acknowledges a form of interconnectedness in which people reflexively affect and are affected by each other both conceptually and materially through relationships and biological conditions such as hyperempathy.  Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, represents a rare type of person who adapts and thrives in the chaos and uncertainty of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse and thus, represents a radical new way of being and serves as a model for how we can understand the postmodern subject and the question of citizenship.

My Very Own Doppelgänger

So, today I think I encountered by my very own doppelgänger.  In fact, I think I woke up as her and couldn't become myself at all today no matter how much I tried.  It was strange.

I woke up at my usual hour, which lately is 7:27 am.  On the dot.  But when I got up, I didn't feel like myself.  I ate potato chips for breakfast instead of an omelet.  I didn't want coffee until 11 a.m. even though I usually want it right away.  Then, I spent the day taking pleasure in doing super mundane activities like opening my mail that hasn't been opened since February and vacuuming my rugs.  I even obsessed over creating files and started posting a bunch of my belongings on Craigs List without giving a second thought to my attachments to my lamps and bookcases.  If you don't know me well enough to know that this is out of character, let me assure you, none of these are activities that I would usually engage in of my own volition.

Then, I had to go to work today for an event from 2-8 p.m.  And things, from the get go, did not start out normally.  I was calm rather than agitated.  I laughed at my personal misery.  And then, shit hit the fan.  I couldn't stop myself.  I made inappropriate comments all evening long about how being a good bureaucrat meant that I couldn't order a drink for a participant, he/she would have to get it him/herself.  I made friends with the least likely people to have money.  I offered to make t-shirts for people who felt uncomfortable wearing suits and laughed in my boss's face as he asked for my help and I simply said "I'm sorry; I can't take responsibility for that."  It was very strange.  It felt amazing.  And yet, I don't feel like it was me at all.

Now that I'm home, I feel a certain sense of dread about my behavior.  I feel like although everything I did is perfectly within the bounds of protocol at the university, I acted precisely within those bounds and thus, not as myself.  And yet, I am thoroughly amused by it.  I am so surprised by this because even just yesterday I was so enraged/outraged by my workplace.  And yet, so suddenly, I've shifted and become apathetic.  

This feeling was compounded by the fact that as I cleaned out my files earlier this morning, I came across two significant creative writing pieces that I wrote in 2009 -- a year that was highly creative for me.  I was surprised at my wit in the two dramatic stories I wrote and had actually forgotten that I had written them...I mean, I remembered writing two stories, but I had totally forgotten the depth of the pieces.  I didn't recognize myself as an author.  Today that creative, ironic person re-emerged with a vengeance.  Wreaking havoc on the precarious formalities of my current life.  And it felt amazing.  

Being a Human Being

Yesterday someone stopped by my desk to say thank you for something...and as he was struggling to explain what he was thanking me for he finally said "what I'm trying to say is thank you for being a human being."  What a strange thing to be thanked for.  I was kind of flattered and kind of shocked. I'm honored to be recognized for something that comes so easy to me...and yet, it made me extremely sad because it confirmed the inhumanity of my workplace. I divide my time between the library (which has its quirks but is relatively normal), and a department whose only business--really, our ONLY business--is managing human relationships. And yet, I stand out because I level with people on a human level. Always.

Today I got a phone call from the one person in this department who I've developed a close bond with to tell me that she is no longer working here. It turns out that after riding to work with her yesterday for the first time ever, she was told that her position was eliminated a mere 30 minutes after we arrived in the office. I'm so glad we actually exchanged phone numbers to coordinate the ride because otherwise I never would have seen her again.  She was told that it had nothing to do with her performance and that she wasn't being fired or anything like that, but then she was supervised as she put her things together and was escorted out of the building as if she had been fired. Nor was she ever told that her position was being reconsidered or anything like that. So, she is out of a job and as an older person is concerned about her ability to find another one.

I think--and have thought since about day one--that this place is crazy. And yet, it makes me so sad to be confirmed in this day after day. People complain about jobs being taken over by machines and robots, but what happens when jobs are taken over by real human beings who don't act like human beings? They aren't robots or machines, but they don't always act human...and what I mean by that is that they impose structural, bureaucratic, corporate rules over the human beings that work for them and make up the bureaucracy, corporation, etc. at the expense of their humanity.

My job is in tact today, but I really have no idea if I will really be able to leave it on my own terms at the end of the summer or if I will be let go sooner than that. I survived one attempt to fire me, which consisted of extremely ridiculous accusations of things I myself had not actually done...they were things done by other people that negatively affected me, but which should have made me a victim not a perpetrator, right? And I'm quite sure the ridiculousness of it is the only reason I survived the attack.

What's so disheartening to me about this whole situation is that this is a really mundane sort of abuse that the workplace engages in. It isn't egregious or perhaps material enough to be given much attention by Human Resources or to be called a crisis of any sort because it isn't bodily violence and there isn't material evidence like making people work obscene hours or something like that which can be tracked and evaluated. Instead, I've seen at least eight people disappear out of our office in the past 16 months since I've been in this position. From what I know from my own experience and from others, these people did good work and just didn't fit in and became an obstacle for agendas of people with more power.

Now You See It...

I ran into one of my favorite professors on the shuttle from Tenleytown to campus today, which is always a great way to start the day.  I get to chat with someone whose company I enjoy and get up to speed on what's going on right from the get go.  Since I work in the library and all, we got to talking about this article about how Harvard has declared academic journal subscriptions "financially untenable."  What a time it is indeed to be going into academia!  Publishing -- you know the saying "publish or perish" -- remains true today, and now publishing is getting harder and harder.   In fact, the biggest piece of advice I've received about using my time wisely in my PhD program (woot woot!!) is to focus on getting 2-3 articles published while I'm in the program before I enter the job market.

Then, said professor tells me that the best book on this topic and the impact of the digital age on academia is this book by Cathy Davidson called Now You See It.  I took a look at it and from the introduction, it looks pretty good.  She addresses an issue she calls attention blindness.   In the introduction she claims that "Because of attention blindness, we often arrive at a standstill when it comes to tackling important issues, not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are right in what they see but neither can see what the other does.  Each side becomes more and more urgent in one direction, oblivious to what is causing such consternation in another"...and she uses the reactions to the Deepwater Horizon spill as an example of this.  Nice example, thank you.

It also looks into how our brains need to evolve to adapt to the digital age, which requires our brains to multitask...but not multitasking in the sense of doing multiple different tasks at the same time, but instead adapting to seeing multiple viewpoints on any given issue at the same time.  This idea certainly maps well onto postmodern thinking that talks about how postmodernity is characterized as rhizomatic (hat tip to Deleuze and Guattari).

The good news is that this challenge seems to be a creative one rather than a deterministic one.  The book itself claims to be a "field guide and survival manual for the digital age."   I still have the book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life on my bookshelf, which I never finished reading years ago...mostly I think because it focuses too much on psychology and not enough on science and because it is written by a journalist.  I guess it's still a topic that intrigues me.

Body Area Network

In pulling the many threads I've had going on in my thesis together into a cohesive argument, I've come to realize that I am far more interested in technology than I thought I was.  I'm not into it in the sense of like getting giddy over gadgets, but basically, I am extremely curious about the way that technology changes how we perceive ourselves, relate to other people, and even interpret our spirituality.  This has led me into the depths of prosthesis as both a material and metaphorical concept because prosthesis integrates technology into the body while the body accepts technology as an extension of itself, which means I'm also thinking about how pharmaceutical drugs, for example, act as an immaterial prosthetic that changes chemical balances in the brian and ultimately affect one's biology.

So that means that my research has taken an interesting direction to include books like The Prosthetic Impulse, Prosthesis, etc.  I've been fascinated with the reading on many levels, and one of the most surprising things I've learned this week is related to patents for developing technology that uses human skin as a source for transmitting data.  Woah!  I had no idea that Microsoft was awarded a patent -- no. 6,754,472 -- in 2004 for such a development!  After trying to learn more about this through a variety of Google searches, I'm finding that not a whole lot has been talked about since the patent was awarded in 2004.  Now that eight years has passed, I'm wondering if they are any closer to developing this technology and if so, how in the world would they even begin to conduct such experiments?  I guess through synthetic skin first...?  The reality, at least as far as I have access to on the internet, seems to be that only the most boring aspects of this are playing out in the real world with law suits galore regarding patent infringement.  

I'm not really a techno-enthusiast or a technophobe, but when I read this article about this type of technology being used for medicine, it kind of made me cringe.  I mean, I feel like this kind of technology lets doctors continue on the trajectory of being less concerned with overall healthcare and personal attention to patients by addressing symptoms rather than holistic problems...for example, frequent scenarios in which doctors quickly prescribe high blood pressure drugs without first prescribing a mandatory diet as a prescription.  

I guess the other thing this patent and the article in The Guardian made me think about is the boundaries of our skin and what new technology means for boundaries that were previously never really in question.  The article ends with a quote about how body parts shouldn't be patentable.  Well, if the verdict is still out on patenting body parts, they are certainly already being sold in ever more complicated markets.  I saw something earlier this year in Hobart, Tasmania that I never expected to see in a museum: Tattoo Tim.  Tattoo Tim is a living work of art who has sold his skin to be tattooed and exhibited.  He is on display at the MONA with his back to the museum-goers, and I believe he has given up his skin for museum display not only while he is living, but once he is dead.

io9

One of my favorite weekend activities is drinking my coffee and listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on NPR with my man friend.  In this week's episode they referenced a most hilarious article on Victorian LOLcats from a site called io9, which I had never heard of.  I visited and am so happy to find a site that includes all female editors and "is a daily publication that covers science, science fiction, and the future.  Time to get ready for tomorrow."  This is the kind of bombshell discovery that someone wrapping up her master's thesis on science fiction needs!  Thank you universe!

You can not only learn about the weird history of Victorian LOLcats, but also about robotic prostitution, liminal people, unicorns, 10 ultra-weird sci fi novels that became required reading, and even tax breaks related to having your ashes shot into space.  I am entertained.

I'm obviously woefully out of date on websites to entertain, challenge my mind, and inform me on things other than the 2012 presidential election and North Korea's failed rocket attempts.  What are your favorite sites that I'm probably missing  out on?

And for the record, this is my favorite LOLcat photo so far:

First World Problems

I've got 'em, and I've got 'em bad.  I keep waking up around 3 a.m. most nights stressed about all of the things going on right now...responding to the IRS's questions about my 2010 tax return (which yes, I did fill out after a few glasses of wine, and yes, had some problems, but not nearly as many problems as they purported), completing my thesis by April 30th and writing my final paper for class by May 5 while managing the end of the fiscal year at work, a place that cannot seem to accurately report numbers and requires me to be an accountant at times...something I am most certainly not fit to be.  Did I mention that I'm also planning my best friend from childhood's bachelorette party, which is happening next week and I have no idea what I'm doing since I've never even participated in a bachelorette party much less planned one?!  (yes, shocking as it may be, this is a true statement).  

I do know that these are all bourgeois problems and that makes me even more annoyed that they stress me out so much that it affects my sleep!  So, I found this website -- http://first-world-problems.com/ -- dedicated to first world problems.  Perhaps not already knowing about this website is yet another one of my problems.  The second one listed already speaks to me and my situation, "I have an essay to write, and Microsoft spell check doesn't think "heteronormativity" is a word."  Let me go ahead and add liminality, originarily, binarism, and transgressive to that list.  No, these things are not about life and death...but they are perhaps like slow torture, like a continuous drip that has the potential to finally drive you mad at some unpredictable point in the future.

The website allows you to submit your own problem...so, I'm saving this knowledge as a potential get of jail free card that I can cash in if I start getting crazier over the next three weeks as I finish this degree.  I'm thinking that lashing out about rule followers and other annoyances on a public website that isn't my own blog might be just the thing I need.