Is (cyber) space the place

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Gray, H. (2005) "Is (cyber) space the place?" In Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, pp. 133-142. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press. Retrieved from: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uscisd/Doc?id=10074093&ppg=142

"Can black cultural production function as a critical counterknowledge?" (133)
  • Music plays crucial role in dev critical counterknowledge (133)
  • "The new cultural politics of difference" (133)

Contents

Happy pastorals of progress and grim narratives of domination

  • Internet disperses culture, makes it "no longer legible" in everyday life? (133-4)
  • Two tales: (Carey calls them "happy pastorals")
    • All exploitation and domination?
    • Or all neoliberal utopia enabled by tech?
  • "Both fragmentation and homogenization are the defining logic of global capitalism" (135)
    • "encrusted binaries" break
  • But tech is still "understood" locally and culturally (135)
    • Fiske on databases, they may categorize but they do so according to cultural logics (136)
    • Without sustained analysis, these categories may seem inevitable, natural (137)
"Culture, then, is the experiential and representational - in a word the discursive - apparatus through which technologically mediated information, experience, and perception circulate, are regulated and contested, and made both knowable and meaningful." (136-7)

Different forms of "diversity"

  • Socially-formed, conservative
  • Market-based

The cultural politics of difference and new technologies

  • Cornel West, 1990, argued that scholarship could "move beyond" issues of representation, stereotyping (138)
  • Stuart Hall, 1992, "move beyond" access to media technologies and toward a theory that would show how culture might be a basis for emergent social formations that could challenge power (138)

Internet proliferation: threat of the "hyperghetto"?

  • Inequal distribution in terms of access, infrastructure (139)
  • Outside and within Western society

Possibility for critique?

  • Can a critique be made within and through the technological infrastructures of global capitalism? (140)
    • Is free software a way out?

Reference to new pastorals?

  • Is this from Media Lab people? (140)
  • Beth Kolko? (142)
  • Allucquere R. Stone (146)

Problem with "access"-based framing

  • Persistent look at "access" in terms of race, sex, class, etc. (141)
  • Gray says that there is liberatory potential in a subjectivity divorced from material bodies
    • I agree re: access but I disagree about the anti-materialist utopianism

Linking black cultural politics and new media tech

  • Blackness still carries significant political + historical meaning (143)
  • Some new media discourse works to "depoliticize difference" as just market segments, niche identity categories (144)
  • How to bring these convos together?
  • New tech establishes possibilities for the practice of identity, politics of difference is central (144)
"Culture and media have always been inextricably entwined" (145)
  • "The terrain of the commercial and the popular is still potentially vibrant as the political site for exposing and building upon the contradictions of this new global logic" (145)

Difference like "so much software"

  • New media depends on cultural representations developed in hegemonic circumstances (146)
  • Possibility for inquiry, intervention?
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