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Articles

Confronting connectivity: feminist challenges to the metropolis

Pages 166-183 | Received 12 Dec 2013, Accepted 20 Sep 2015, Published online: 30 Nov 2015
 

ABSTRACT

Google suggests that connectivity is the new paradigm for politics in the digital age. I argue that the effect of connectivity is a shift in the operation of power from the centralized institutions of the state to the decentralized logistics of inclusion of the digital metropolis. Explaining this power's features, I elaborate a media theory of inclusive disjunction and a feminist theory of pornographic exposure. Locating cultural resistance to connectivity, I look to feminist artistic responses to the city, from which I explore the feminist imagining of connectivity through the metaphor of the storm to reclaim their bodies as sites of contestation.

Notes

1. Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 13.

2. Ibid., 6.

3. The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015), 82.

4. joshua kurz, “(Dis)locating Control: Transmigration, Precarity, and the Governmentality of Control,” Behemoth 5, no. 1 (2012): 30–51; Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, eds. Api Ophir, Michal Givoni, and Sari Hanafi (New York: Zone Books, 2009).

5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 250. For an earlier notion of the Metropolis, see Manfredo Tafuri, Giorgio Piccinato, and Vieri Quilici's “La Città Territorio—Verso una Nuova Dimensione,” Casabella Continuà (December 1962).

6. Ibid., 99–129; Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics, and the Communist Project,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 172–201; Alberto Toscano, “Burning, Dwelling, Thinking,” Mute, 2015, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/burning-dwelling-thinking (accessed August 1, 2015).

7. Beatriz Preciado (Paul Preciado), “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology,” parallax 14, no. 1 (2008): 105–17; Cohen and Schmidt, New Digital Age, 98.

8. Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, 87.

9. Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992); Toru Ishia and Katherine Isbister, Digital Cities: Technologies, Experiences, and Future Perspectives (Berlin: Springer, 2000); Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (New York: Routledge, 2001).

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11. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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15. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978).

16. Hardt and Negri argue that Empire is constituted on two levels, the formal and the material, which work together. See Empire, xiv.

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24. Terranova, Network Culture, 70.

25. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 45–48; Abraham Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, trans. Donald C Hodges (New York: Morrow, 1973).

26. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 8; Wolfgang Ernst, “Between Real Time and Memory on Demand: Reflections on/of Television,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 3 (2002): 627–28.

27. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, ed. Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 55–73.

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30. Chun, “On Software,” 43.

31. Louis Althusser, quoted in Chun, “On Software,” 43.

32. Alexander R. Galloway, “Language Wants to be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2006), 328–29.

33. Ibid., 330.

34. Jussi Parikka, “Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Media Diagrammatics,” Theory, Culture & Society 28 (2011): 52–74, especially 61–67.

35. Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software,” Ctheory, 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=74 (accessed October 15, 2013); Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Chun, “On Software,” 26–51; and N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

36. Terranova, Network Culture; Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009).

37. Lomme Devriendt, Ben Derudder, and Frank Witlox, “Conceptualizing Digital and Physical Connectivity: The Position of European Cities in Internet Backbone and Air Traffic Flows,” Telecommunications Policy 34, no. 8 (2010): 417–29.

38. David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 4.

39. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” trans. Leslie Sawyer, in Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–26.

40. Ibid.; Terranova, “New Economy, Financialization, and Social Production in the Web 2.0.”

41. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R Lane (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

42. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 136–37.

43. Ibid., 130–31.

44. François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event together with The Vocabulary of Desire, trans. Kieren Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 168.

45. Ibid., 121.

46. Ibid., 121.

47. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia, SC: Columbia University Press, 1994), 12.

48. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” trans. Martin Joughlin, Negotiations 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 174.

49. Ibid., 175.

50. Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 2000); Patricia Wise, “Australia's Gold Coast: A City Producing Itself,” in Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, ed. Christoph Lindner (New York: Routledge, 2006), 95–120.

51. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (New York: Verso, 1990), 16.

52. Esther Dyson, “End of the Official Story,” Executive Excellence 175 (2000), 20.

53. Manovich, Language of New Media; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

54. Dean, Blog Theory.

55. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 213, 275–80.

56. Homi Bhabha, “Location, Intervention, Incommensurability: A Conversation with Homi Bhabha,” Emergences 1 (1993), 63–88; Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

57. Sassen, Global Cities; John Friedmann and Goetz Wolff, “World City Formation: An Agenda for Research and Action,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Studies 6, no. 3 (1982): 309–43.

58. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 14.

59. Ibid., 14.

60. Ibid., 14.

61. Red Army Faction, “The Black September Action in Munich,” in The Red Army Faction: A Documentary History, Volume 1: Projectiles for the People, ed. André Moncourt and J. Smith (Oakland: PM Press, 2009), 223.

62. Ibid., 223.

63. Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 69.

64. Ibid., 250.

65. Preciado, “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics,” 110.

66. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 251–52.

67. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 8.

68. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Sociological Perspectives, ed. Kenneth Thompson and Jeremy Tunstall (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974), 9.

69. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 257.

70. Ibid., 257.

71. Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotexte(e), 2010), 171.

72. Suzanne Mackenzie, “Restructuring the Relations of Work and Life: Women as Environmental Actors, Feminism as Geographic Analysis,” Gender, Place and Culture 6 (1999): 417–30; Steve Pile, The Body and the City (London: Routledge, 1996); Linda McDowell, Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); and Ann Mehta, “Embodied Discourse: Gender and Fear of Violence,” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 6, no. 1 (1999): 67–84.

73. Said by Charles Dudley Warner, repeated by Mark Twain, and documented in The Book Buyer: A Monthly Review of Foreign Literature 6, no. 3 (1889): 57.

74. Johan Galtung, Peace: Research, Education, Action: Essays in Peace Research (Bucuresti, Romania: CIPEXIM, 1975); Mary K Anglin, “Feminist Perspectives on Structuralism Violence,” Identities 5, no. 2 (1998): 145–51.

75. Precarias a la Deriva, “Adrift Through the Circuits of Feminized Precarious Work,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0704/precarias1/en (accessed October 15, 2013).

76. SubRosa, “In Their Own Words,” NYFA Arts News, http://www.nyfa.org/level3.asp?id=296&fid=6&sid=17 (accessed October 15, 2013).

77. Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 459–68.

78. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

79. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 27.

80. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

81. Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings.”

82. Ibid., 460.

83. Rebecca Zorach, “Make It Stop,” Journal of Aesthetics & Protest 6 (2008), http://www.joaap.org/6/another/zorach.html (accessed August 15, 2014).

84. Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006).

85. Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 462.

86. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 145–81.

87. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013).

88. Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

89. Gean Moreno, “Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations,” e-flux 31 (2012), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/notes-on-the-inorganic-part-i-accelerations/ (access August 15, 2014); #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014).

90. Beatriz Preciado (Paul Preciado), Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and the Biopolitics of the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2010), 22; Ibid., 12.

91. Ibid., 290.

92. Ibid., 290.

93. Lovink, Networks Without a Cause, 29–31.

94. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (Toronto, ON: McClelland and Steward, 1985), 8.

95. Pathogeographies, “FAQ,” http://www.pathogeographies.net (accessed October 15, 2013).

96. Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, “Psychological Prosthetics,” interviewed by Yaelle Amir, /seconds.2, 2006, http://deehibbert-jones.ucsc.edu/Assets/Text/3-slashseconds_amir.pdf (accessed October 15, 2013).

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. Marshall McLuhan and Wilfred Watson, From Cliché to Archetype (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 59.

101. Marshall McLuhan and David Carson, The Book of Probes, ed. Eric McLuhan and William Kuhns (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 110–11.

102. Graham Little, The Public Emotions: From Mourning to Hope (Sydney, NSW: ABC Books, 1999), 4.

103. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 90.

104. Ibid., 91.

105. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 59.

106. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990); Slavoj Žižek, “From ‘Passionate Attachments’ to Dis-Identification,” Umbr(a) 1 (1998): 3–17.

107. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 213.

108. Ibid., 20, 218.

109. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41–44.

110. Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 2.

111. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 108.

112. Cohen and Schmidt, New Digital Age, 13.

 

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