Donna Haraway 1

On January 28th at UCSC’s College 9/10, I attended “Messing with Haraway,” a surprise goodbye to Donna Haraway, who is retiring at the end of the spring quarter after a long and successful career. The event was very much in the spirit of Donna’s work: eclectic, funny, serious, international. Scholar friends of Donna’s from all over the world Skyped in to a huge screen; there were musical numbers, testimonials, short presentations and mashups, and even a pagan style ritual with animal sounds, a cast circle, and cool masks.

My friend and colleague Chris Gray and I did a short bit for Donna using Wordle, to ask questions about what it might mean to talk about “machine reading.” Chris talked about the DARPA attempt to use machines to “read” the huge amount of intelligence information and make decisions about what is important; I showed large Wordle graphs of Donna’s key works (including her Manifesto for Cyborgs, The Promise of Monsters, and Situated Knowledge) and attempted a Donna-like reading of a Ford advertisement featuring King Kong and son.

Originally Chris had a joke to tell: that I was “one of the few people to leave Histcon voluntarily.” Both of us are Donna’s students; Chris’s witticism is that Donna helped Crystal transition from street activist to academic, and helped Rabbit transition from academic to street activist (though I was more or less on that road already; it is partly what prevented me from spending enough time on my HistCon work, to be honest).

Our performance/talk was called “Humans and Machines Read the Cyborg Manifesto. Here is how we described out project:

Perhaps there are no misreadings of a text, but there are strange readings, and strange appropriations. A text is a technology and its reception can be quite complex. We will consider various machinic interpretations, that is readings of the Cyborg Manifesto that are generated by digital technologies. Of course, these readings are framed by the humans that program the bots/engines/algorithms involved, so they actually are a manifestation of “cyborg reception”-- a new and special case of audience reception studies. We want to go beyond pure human analysis and beyond the classic version of the discussion (who agrees and why; who disagrees and why) and ask how do human-machine systems experience something like the Cyborg Manifesto now? When you search for it what do you find? What do its different organs look like distributed across the Internet, and does this much larger map of the manifesto and its iterations tell us anything interesting or useful?

To explore these questions we will use “Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" to generate a number of hits and images for analysis.. We hope to make manifest one kind of cyborg reception: how an author and her work are cut up and distributed through cyberspace, and that the algorithms for “reading” her are mostly machinic, although also partly human.

The performance was only 5 minutes, so we cut a good deal of the original proposal. That meant focusing on Wordle and not on two other machine reading sites: our friend Andruid Kerne’s dynamic collage software, CombinFormation, (http://ecologylab.net/combinFormation/), and the site Gap Minder [http://www.gapminder.org], with its visual representation of data, in particular, the spatial and colorful representation of world health and wealth since 1810, and also a representation of CO2 emissions since 1820.

The idea was to begin asking questions about human readings, machine readings (or “readings” if you will), and of course, combinations of the two.

In preparing the presentation (and an article we hope to develop), I showed Chris a quotation by Jarod Lanier from his book You Are Not A Gadget:

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote often secret locations around the world. They will be copies millions of times by algorithms…They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Ix

Lanier calls this “vast fanning out” of his words the “lifeless world of pure information.” And he contrasts this with the tiny number of “real human eyes” which will not only decode the words, but intersect with people who have identities: “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”

I think it is interesting that he looks at the ways machines “read” instrumentally (for example, the Google “reading’ of my email that triggers the algorithms that link my words with a possible advertisement), AND he looks at ways humans don’t “read” like a human, but rather like mobs who thrive on anonymous insults; meanwhile these people themselves are being “read” as their interaction with Lanier’s words allow data aggregating technologies to “find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes.” Again, the verb “to read” is undergoing some radical morphing, and understanding this will be a key part of our coming analysis.

So we then wanted to ask: does a Wordle representation of the most important words in a text (here, two of Donna’s important essays) count as reading in any sense of the word? Does this help us read the essay differently? BTW, Wordle is “ a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Here are a couple of the Wordle images, the first Donna’s essay Situated Knowledges, and the second her Cyborg Manifesto:

During the presentation, we asked the assembly to guess which of Donna’s essays we were representing. It was interesting to see how wrong the first few guesses were, and how quickly people caught on (of course you’d have to have actually read the essays in order to make educated guesses!). You can see also that the cyborg essay was crucially about women, more so even than cyborgs; and you can see that her other essay is much less about women per se, though it is crucially about feminist practice. Also the layouts both prevent a more “rigorous” comparison of terms (for example we could simply order them from large to small and provide numbers for the occurrence of each word) and allow for a spatialization of terms that offer different kinds of conjunction and proximity.

One thing I found fascinating was that after the event, I spoke with Donna about her 1997 interview with Wired. In I think 2009, well after the article was published, the author Hari Kunzru posted the entire interview online [http://www.harikunzru.com/archive/donna-haraway-interview-transcript-1996]. When I told Donna this, she predicted that the Wired interview and the entire interview would be significantly different. In particular, she imagined the latter interview would include much of the feminism that the Wired interview seemed to erase. But when I went back and ran the two articles, neither emphasized woman, women, etc. I haven’t told Donna this yet, but the upshot seems to be that the image of Wired as editing out the feminist bits seems wrong, at least on a first (machinic) reading! I think in the interests of space, I’ll post these two Wordle bits on a separate blog page!

There’s much more to say here, both on machinic reading and on Donna herself. In my next post, I hope to give an overview of Donna’s work, and why it is important to me, drawing on the extended interview in the book How Like a Leaf.