Mark Poster | Peter Fletcher

The following are my notes from reading:

Poster, M. (1995). Databases as discourse, or electronic interpellations. In The second media age (pp. 78-94). Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Descartes famously states: “I think therefore I am”. By these few words he articulates a dividual, a binary human-thinking divided within. I am nothing – I don’t exist – without my thoughts. My thoughts precede my being. There are thoughts and there is an Other. The two is established; in Descartes and later by Kant in the Enlightenment. The human subject is born. Now that I am separated from my thoughts, I am also born into a world of objects separate from the I.

The subject is interpellated or “hailed” thus reconstituting themselves as a subject. The teacher, when calling on a student to answer a classroom question, presupposes the student as an “autonomous rational agent” and the student, in answering the question, must “stand into” this position firstly to answer the question and secondly in declaration of their being a student. “Linguistic interpellation” operates through the subject complying with the configuration of their subjectivity without question and reflection (p. 80). Such a configuration can be at the level of race, sexuality, class, age, gender and presupposes the individual as a subject. The process of interpellation is conducted at the level of language.

The interpellation of the subject is always incomplete. One interpellation does not deny the existence of another. For example, I could be interpellated (invited to act) as a student, a husband, a male, as straight; each of which I am free to reject but each of which appear in their formation as a certain conclusion, as if already answered by me, the subject, in the affirmative. In each instance of interpellation the subject is fixed and frozen into the state of subjectivity, an end, a conclusion; the finished product so to speak. How quickly we lose our childhood.

It is important to understand the post-structuralist relationship of language to the development of the subject which helps to us understand the nature of databases as discourse. Foucault employed the term discourse to counter those who claimed writing as being a reflection of a human subject; we can’t hear or read words and deduce from those words a consciousness. Rather discourse is an exterior totality in which a subject is dispersed and formed. Discourse is not the manifestation of the unfolding of a thinking subject but rather it is a totality of the discontinuous planes through which the subject is variously enunciated. In other words the subject is created through discourse rather than the creator of discourse. (The blogger as subject is often created through legal and capitalist discourses). Discourse and power become imbricated upon one another.

Our culture creates, through discourse, a subject as a rational, autonomous individual. Foucault managed to point to the problematic of the assumption of a preexistent rationality; rationality is historically constructed. According to Foucault there never was a founding, universal, or sovereign subject but rather the subject is produced through “practices of subjection, or in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation…” (p. 83). Discourse then has a power effect on “…the subject even in movements of “liberation”” (p. 84).

The power effect of discourse is to bring the subject into a position in relation to the structure of power so as to then apply and exert influence; and this is done in a way that disguises the constitution of the subject as a subject until after the subject becomes such.

The panopticon “…is not simply the guard in the tower but the entire discourse/practice that bears down on the prisoner, one that constitutes him or her as a criminal” (p. 85). The panopticon subjectifies and normalises.

A database is a discourse because it constitutes subjects. Poster proposes that databases produce subjects who are to a lesser or greater extent willing participants in their own surveillance. The combination of infrastructure and commerce combine to produce a far lighter and easier maintained panopticon – the super-panopticon – which is a never ceasing machinery of surveillance. The super-panopticon works beyond the reach of individual agency and makes a mockery of concepts of rational autonomy and social action. The super-panopticon interpellates the subject through the discourse of databases. The database produces subjects that are multiple and decentred and in contradistinction to the hegemonic concept of the subject as a rational, autonomous, centred agent.

Databases are the perfect “grids of specification” in that they divide and contrast, group and classify; and they constitute objects of which they speak. (Worth noting here that most blogging software is database driven; and the possible relationship to RSS feeds, feed readers and archives).

Unlike the panopticon where the subjects became interiorised, conscious and aware of their own self-determination through an awareness of the presence of surveillance, subjects produced through databases are dispersed and diverse and often unknown to their embodied counterpart. How can we resist the development of these subjects? Our bodies no longer provide a refuge against the incursion of the discourse of the database.

CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

Poster claims that there has been more instances of human rights violations committed through the apparatus of US government than has been caused by terrorists. He states that terrorism is used as a propaganda exercise as a way to deflect attention away from the government abuse of a mainly imagined dangerous enemy. Possibilities for new forms of human empowerment are given up in order to retain existing power structures.

Commodification brings the questions of the possibility of democracy through the Internet down to already existing structures that do away with future possibilities. That is to say the interests of content providers and telecommunications companies become paramount rather than opening up possibilities of new forms of governance that might do away with existing structures.

Politics for this modern perspective is then the arduous extraction of an autonomous agent from the contingent obstacles imposed by the past. In its rush to ontologize freedom, the modern view of the subject hides the process of its historical construction.

What the fuck did that last sentence mean? Perhaps I’ll understand by the end of next decade.

The Internet is a decentralised communication system brought together by disparate and conflicting forces that now produce frictionless reproduction and dissemination of information. What will the effects of these be on society, Poster asks.

Wrong question he says. The Net dematerialises communication and transforms the position of the person engaging in the communication. The Internet is what Germany is to Germans – it makes them Germans. Unlike a hammer which doesn’t make people hammers but drives in nails.

Some people use the Internet like a hammer – as simply a way to get things done; to replace other forms of communication such as the post. Is there a new politics on the Internet, he asks. If there is a public sphere on the Internet who populates it and how? What interactions occur on this space that exists only in electrons (my word, not his).

The old public spaces, such as the Agora and the town hall have given away to TV which isolates people. Where then is the public space if television has become the medium of political influence? The public, he argues, has been replaced by publicity.

Quoting other scholars, Poster opines that the public space is everything which is not private. With the conception of private space now being confined to what is said inside the home, this poses problems.

For Poster, the Habermasian view of the public space where real people meet to have real dialogue and come to real consensus cannot stand against the new forms of communication presented through the Internet. The disembodiement of subjects and the manner in which machines play a crucial role in the line of communication poses too many problems for Poster to accept Habermas’ notion.

Poster observes that the Internet has created new forms of decentralised conversation, new collectives of people, new ways to undermine the power of the state, new ways to view property; and yet he notes that theory has not caught up with this development despite society creating this new form of democratic engagement.

“The “magic” of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.”

Poster believes that the creation of the subject and discourse on the Internet is part of the same dynamic process.

Politics will need to be re-thought to accommodate the disembodiment that occurs on the Internet. A new form of leader will necessarily need to emerge.

Databases as discourse | Mark Poster

CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere

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