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Notes

Pinar (2021) Indexical traces of the real: Teaching in the techno-nation state

Header image: KF in Dall-E

AAACS 2021 Keynote Address William Pinar and Ying Ma (@7:22)

“If historical colonialism was an appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources,” Couldry and Mejias (2019, 85) explain, “data colonialism can be understood as an appropriation of social resources … [that] operates in ways that replicate relations re-create a colonizing form of power.” [KF – see PDF]

  • techno-nation-state (nation-state fusion in software; the obscurities of globalization)
    • Online and connected, the privileged still suffer subjection
    • Soulless citizens of nowhere, as humanity flees the plunderer earth for the cloud
    • The eschatological confidence of Christians is secularized as techno-utopianism

With the omniscient screen, its camera and recording capability, technological visuality insinuates itself inside the intimacy of interiority.

  • Now development denotes technologization, infrastructure designed to connect markets, globalizing not only trade and capital but cyberculture as well. The very concept of globalization obscures the nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism embedded within it.
  • Despite blowback (right wing populism and other forms of reactionary nationalism) globalization continues, especially as technologization evident in the datafication of education

READ: Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/30/psychopolitics-neolberalism-new-technologies-byung-chul-han-review

Without that empty subjective space within us and between us and the world – the space of non-coincidence (Pinar 2019, 17, 99) – we can only coincide with what is

  • “The self gets broken down into data until no sense remains.”
    • The motto of Quantified Self is ‘Self Knowledge through Numbers’. But no insight into the self can result from data and numbers alone, no matter how exhaustive they are. Numbers do not recount anything about the self. Counting is not recounting. A sense of self derives from giving an account. It is not counting, but recounting that leads to self-discovery or self-knowledge.

Online learning creates (supra)national citizens, instilling (supra)national literacies and loyalties, submerged in software, spellbound by the Medusa-like stare of the screen. These could be called the techno-dynamics of nation-building, interpellating a (supra)national identity structured by software, accented by avatars, passports now
usernames and passcodes, soulless citizens of nowhere, as humanity flees the plundered earth for the Cloud.

  • [16:00] code is not “innocent” – derives from the worldviews of its originators and that are projected onto its recipients.
    • There is no “potentially” about it, “private technology companies” usurp “public interests” and in doing so constitute themselves as de facto officials of the techno-nation-state, structuring governing and directing “citizenry,” a concept is no longer virtual no longer exclusively geographical or ethnic or mythological  
    • [19:25] Goffman’s concept of the “total institution” [= prison] {KF ~ The Matrix}
    • Once associated with emancipation, education becomes exclusively technical, sealed within software, the architecture of which constitutes one worldwide panopticon the techno-nation-state
    • [22:15] Pathology-proof citizens, capable of coping with the stresses and anxieties themselves caused by government policies and capitalist culture combined  
    • Emotionally maximized
    • Is subjective presence possible online

One is reminded of Goffman’s (1961) concept of the total institution, the “possibility of turning, or being turned, from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, an automaton, without persona autonomy of action, an it without subjectivity” (Cohen and Taylor, 1972, 109).

  • [25:39] being online (non-coincidence; “there is life in prison”: subjective presence remains)
    • Non-coincidence = open inner space // An inner empty space wherein one comes to form as an individual through relationships with self and others (including non-human animals and objects) {KF = the soul?}
    • The importance of privacy to autonomy
    • [28:30] data colonialism

“By installing automated surveillance into the space of the self, we risk losing the very thing – the open-ended space in which we continually monitor and transform ourselves over time – that constitute us as selves at all.”

BP: “Non-coincidence – open inner space”

““[n]o resistance to the system can emerge in the first place, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression”

Han (2017, 6-7)
  •  Now everyone is his or her own panopticon (Han, 2017)
  • We have become our data (Koopman, 2019)
    • BP: there may be no escape, but there is life in prison [confinement; involuntary citizenship in the TNS]
    • “We do not lack communication, on the contrary we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” Deleuze Guattari
    • Koopman: “What is resistance in a present saturated by data?…We live within a data episteme and under a power of information. We are informational persons.” How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person
      • Infopower: fight this by “repurposing and releveraging information”
    • [33:25] ~ Radio brought immediacy in Hitler’s voice to our living room; airplanes brought Hitler’s body in a ubiquitous visibility ~ Zoom does both….{more here}

While “all values, such as privacy, are socially negotiated,” Couldry and Mejias (2019, 183) allow, “there is something distinctively complex about privacy and, specifically, the importance of privacy to autonomy (understood as the capacity to ‘find one’s own good in one’s own way’).”

  • [34:44] conclusion (indexical traces of the real)
    • Our challenge is to make the subject central online, even if in simulated form, traces of the real. This seems to me to be our only move to make.
    • [37:1] FIN

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  • Couldry, Nick and Mejias, Ulises A. (2019). The Costs of Connection. How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Han, Byung-Chul. (2017). Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London: Verso.
  • Koopman, Colin. (2019). How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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“In physical and virtual classrooms there can be absent any sense of an “outside” that the painting (in my study now studio) and the couch and cat (in the student’s living room) registers. That appearance of parole – overstated as the prison analogy must seem – reminds that there is material natural reality outside.

To BP:

  •  Your use of parole here, and again later, caught my eye. Many of us have been, in effect, under a form of house arrest since March 2020; in a half-way house between prison and free society, with our freedoms somewhat curtailed and our online engagements with others subject to surveillance and regulations [through, for example, software end user license agreements] and what limited in-person engagement we had was controlled and controlled compromised through social distancing and the wearing of masks.
  • Keeping with the parole theme, one might say that restraining orders were issued to everyone early on in the pandemic, preventing many of us from getting close to our loved ones while at the same time, under limited conditions, we were often able to get physically closer to complete strangers (e.g. public transport). Our abilities to cross boarders (in Canada, both international and provincial) was also curtailed, as if we could no longer be trusted to not “skip town”. Through contact tracing apps and information requested at certain businesses, our locations were tracked as though we were wearing an electronic ankle bracelet [in addition to the tracker almost all of us as part of our cellphone] – felons to be tracked and monitored, our movements and engagements curtailed and regulated.
  • Now, many of us can slowly reintegrate into society. Each of us having been rehabilitated, we have met the conditions of our parole, been vaccinated, and are free to leave our caves/bunkers – where we sheltered in place – and reenter free society, though many will choose not to.