No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Volatile Memories: Personal Data and Post Human Subjectivity in The Aspern Papers, Analogue: A Hate Story and Tacoma
Abstract
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new technologies.
... media in terms of self-empowerment, taking agency over one's image, and their significance in retaking one's narrative and visibility, especially for marginalized persons, this article focuses on the use of selfies in interface games: games which incorporate hypermediated and overemphasized interfaces, and which are notorious for deeply personal and (auto)biographical stories (Gallagher, 2019b;Kubiński, 2021). ...
... The term interface games describes a group of digital games that frame the entirety or vast majority of their narrative within the fictional interface that mimics real-life interfaces-most commonly of computers or mobile phones (Gallagher, 2019b). Due to their emphasis on the software and hardware used in the experience of play and the hypermediacy of the interfaces, the interface games are necessarily selfreflexive and, thus, meta. ...
... Interface games have been recognized by many developers and scholars as uniquely suited to represent the experiences of people of marginalized and oppressed identities (Gallagher, 2019a(Gallagher, , 2019bKubiński, 2021). For this reason, in the discussion of the use of interface games in the representation of the experiences of refugees, Víctor Navarro-Remesal and Beatriz Pérez Zapata (2019) replace the concept of empathy, which has been deemed problematic by several game scholars (see: Ruberg, 2020;Schrier & Farber, 2021) and instead write about compassionate play (or "games for compassion"). ...
This paper discusses the use of selfies in narrative-driven interface games, that is games that place the narrative within fictionalized interfaces resembling those of computers or smartphones, as methods of creating intimacy between the characters and the player, while simultaneously maintaining the player’s separateness as a witness of personal stories, rather than their active actor. The article analyses how inter-character and player–character intimacy and emotional distance can be negotiated through the implementation of selfies into the narrative within interface games. The inherent intimacy of such games, which often tell personal stories of people of marginalized identities, is juxtaposed with the constrictions on the player’s agency—both in the overall gameplay and in their inability to take the selfies themselves. Three games are discussed according to three frameworks used to discuss selfies as noted by Gabriel Faimau (2020): a dramaturgic lens (the selfie as self-presentation), a sociosemiotic approach (the selfie as an art of communication), and a dialectical framework (selfie as a social critique).
Data are increasingly interwoven in various aspects of our social lives. In our everyday and professional lives many kinds of data are produced, as we make online searches via search engines, chat with loved ones and friends via social media, or use a maps app on our smartphone to find our way in an unfamiliar place. To use these digital data for decision-making, and literally anything else, people rely on computational technologies. With these, digital data can be processed, recombined, operated with, used, and sold. Going hand in hand with the pervasiveness of data in our society is the process of datafication.
Researchers across manifold academic disciplines and fields from computer science to sociology, media studies, communication research, humanities, and education research are working on topics concerning this datafied society. In the recent years, this body of academic work has been consolidating under the terms ‘critical data studies’ or just ‘data studies’, drawing on various ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches to studying datafication processes. How, then, in this manifold of perspectives, academic knowledge about datafication processes and our datafied societies is produced? What is ‘critical’ in data studies? How do scholars conducting research on datafication reflect about “what matters we use to think other matters with;” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) in their studies? With my thesis, I advance our understanding of how what is known about datafication and datafied societies is produced.
I show how empirical datafication research produces re-situated conceptualisations of datafication and discuss the role of critique in data studies. I propose "care-ful data studies" as a pathway for further, generative, care-ful critique, contributing to the literature bridging data studies with feminist traditions of thought.
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world.
New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.
Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Recent years have witnessed an intensive growth of systems of measurement and an increasing integration of data processes into various spheres of everyday life. From smartphone apps that measure our activity and sleep, to digital devices that monitor our health and performance at the workplace, the culture of measurement is currently on the rise. Encouraged by movements such as the Quantified Self, whose motto is ‘self knowledge through numbers’, a growing number of people across the globe are embracing practices of self-quantification and tracking in the spirit of improving their wellbeing and productivity or charting their fitness progress. In this article, I examine the biopolitical aspects of the Quantified Self practices, exploring some of the ideologies and rationalities underlying self-tracking culture. I argue that such practices represent an instantiation of a ‘biopolitics of the self’ whereby the body is made amenable to management and monitoring techniques that often echo the ethos of neoliberalism. Rather than being restricted to an individualized form, self-tracking practices are also becoming part of a biosocial and communal phenomenon in which individuals are incited to share with others information about their physical activities and biodata. In exploring some examples of this data sharing culture, I critically address the extent to which the sharing of personal physical data can be seen as a ‘solidaristic’ act that can contribute to a larger Big Data ecosystem and inform the wider medical community and healthcare research and policy. I link this discussion to debates on ‘data philanthropy’, highlighting the emerging tension between philanthropic discourses of data sharing and issues of privacy. From here, I go on to discuss further ethical and political concerns, particularly in relation to data security and the marked shifts in healthcare responsibilities.
This article attempts to question modes of sharing and watching to rethink political subjectivity beyond that which is enabled and enforced by the current data regime. It identifies and examines a ‘shareveillant’ subjectivity: a form configured by the sharing and watching that subjects have to withstand and enact in the contemporary data assemblage. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how ‘shareveillance’ produces an anti-political role for the public. In describing shareveillance as, after Jacques Rancière, a distribution of the (digital) sensible, this article posits a politico-ethical injunction to cut into the share and flow of data in order to arrange a more enabling assemblage of data and its affects. In order to interrupt shareveillance, this article borrows a concept from Édouard Glissant and his concern with raced otherness to imagine what a ‘right to opacity’ might mean in the digital context. To assert this right is not to endorse the individual subject in her sovereignty and solitude, but rather to imagine a collective political subjectivity and relationality according to the important question of what it means to ‘share well’ beyond the veillant expectations of the state.
In this book, Astrid Ensslin examines literary videogames—hybrid digital artifacts that have elements of both games and literature, combining the ludic and the literary. These works can be considered verbal art in the broadest sense (in that language plays a significant part in their aesthetic appeal); they draw on game mechanics; and they are digital-born, dependent on a digital medium (unlike, for example, conventional books read on e-readers). They employ narrative, dramatic, and poetic techniques in order to explore the affordances and limitations of ludic structures and processes, and they are designed to make players reflect on conventional game characteristics. Ensslin approaches these hybrid works as a new form of experimental literary art that requires novel ways of playing and reading. She proposes a systematic method for analyzing literary-ludic (L-L) texts that takes into account the analytic concerns of both literary stylistics and ludology.
After establishing the theoretical underpinnings of her proposal, Ensslin introduces the L-L spectrum as an analytical framework for literary games. Based on the phenomenological distinction between deep and hyper attention, the L-L spectrum charts a work’s relative emphases on reading and gameplay. Ensslin applies this analytical toolkit to close readings of selected works, moving from the predominantly literary to the primarily ludic, from online hypermedia fiction to Flash fiction to interactive fiction to poetry games to a highly designed literary “auteur" game. Finally, she considers her innovative analytical methodology in the context of contemporary ludology, media studies, and literary discourse analysis.
In Henry James and Sexuality, Hugh Stevens argues for a new interpretation of James's fiction. Stevens argues that James's writing contains daring and radical representations of transgressive desires and marginalized sexual identities. He demonstrates the importance of incestuous desire, masochistic fantasy, and same-sex passions in a body of fiction which ostensibly conforms to, while ironically mocking, the contemporary moral and publishing codes James faced. James critiques the very notion of sexual identity, and depicts the radical play of desires which exceed and disrupt any stable construction of identity. In a number of his major novels and tales, Stevens argues, James anticipates the main features of modern 'gay' or 'queer' fiction through plots and narrative strategies, which opposes heterosexual marriage and homo-erotic friendship. This original and exciting work will transform our understanding of this most enigmatic of writers.
There's no baseness I wouldn't commit for Jeffrey Aspern's sake.’ The poet Aspern, long since dead, has left behind some private papers. They are jealously guarded by an old lady, once his mistress and muse, a recluse in an old palazzo in Venice, tended by her ingenuous niece. A predatory critic is determined to seize them. What can he make of the younger woman? What are his motives? What are the papers worth and what is he prepared to pay? In all four stories collected here, including ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, and ‘The Birthplace’, the figure of the artist is central. Extraordinarily prophetic, James explores the emergent new cult of the writer as celebrity, and asks, who cares about the work for itself? Can the man behind the artist ever truly be known, and does our knowledge explain the act of creativity? This new edition includes extracts from James's Prefaces and Notebooks which shed light on the genesis of the stories.
»Houses, Secrets, and the Closet« investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in 18th and 19th century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, Sensation Novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the ›closet‹ - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities.
The article analyzes the relation of humans and technology concerning so called ‘intelligent’ or ‘autonomous’ algorithms that are applied in everyday contexts but are far removed from any form of substantial artificial intelligence. In particular, the use of algorithms in surveillance and in architecture is discussed. These examples are structured by a particular combination of continuity and difference between humans and technology. The article provides a detailed analysis of boundary practices that establish continuity and oppositions between humans and information technology, referring to their exemplary depiction in movies. Both strands of boundary practices have the potential to challenge as well as sustain the position of the human as liberal, autonomous subject. Finally, it is shown how the particular combination of continuity and difference that structures the use of algorithms maintains the power of liberal, autonomous subject positions, while the shift of decisions to the algorithms seems to decenter the human.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Moving beyond established ideas of haunted Henry James, this book argues that death is as important a concept for understanding James's fiction as gender, sexuality and modernity, which have come to dominate James studies. Combining formal analysis and close reading with theoretical and historical approaches and focusing on key novels and tales from across James's career, Andrew Cutting explores five instances of Jamesian death: sacrifice, the corpse, morbidity, afterlife and demography. This is the first full-length study of this subject.
The event known as #GamerGate (GG) emphasized the need to take the study of game culture seriously and pursue it across several platforms. It demonstrated how seemingly ephemeral media created echo chambers of anger, and how the outbursts of hypermasculine aggression exemplified by hooligans also can connect to games and play. Starting from how GG gained popular attention, this article outlines and discusses the nature of GG, the relation to the victims, the sense of victimization among the participants, and how it may have been provoked by the long-standing, general disregard of games as a culture and a cultural artifact of value. It discusses GG as a swarm using this metaphor to describe its self-organizing nature. Further comparing GG to hooligans, this article also introduces a class and marginalization aspect to understanding the event, opening up for discourses that complicates the image of game culture as mainly a culture of isolated consumption.
Metadata and data have become a regular currency for citizens to pay for their communication services and security--a trade-off that has nestled into the comfort zone of most people. This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication. Datafication is rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims. As part of a larger social media logic, it shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief. Dataism, as this conviction is called, is so successful because masses of people-- naively or unwittingly--trust their personal information to corporate platforms. The notion of trust becomes more problematic because people's faith is extended to other public institutions (e.g. academic research and law enforcement) that handle their (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology makes us want to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.
The headshot burst into the cultural imaginary with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and it has been remediated from historical anxieties about execution and brain death to the eye-popping spectacle of the exploding head to video games, where it has entered a regime that holds virtuosic reflexes as the highest form of capital. By examining the textual and technological history of the headshot, this article develops a theory of mechropolitics: a way of thinking about political death worlds as they operate in the mechanics of video games and digital simulations. Moving beyond questions of whether violence in video games has a direct effect on aggression, mechropolitics mobilizes aesthetic and social justice critique to unmask the affective structures operating within digital death worlds. These prioritize twitch reflexes and offer few consequences—precisely the scenarios that render events like police shootings both legible and likely.
Biography mediates between bios and graphein; it maps the work of culture onto the living body and enfolds the living body into the work of culture. The biographical promise is twofold: to construct a narrative out of the life traces of a dead or otherwise absent subject, and thus to stage a three-way encounter in which the biographer mediates between reader and subject. The fundamental premises of this endeavour have been called into question by a variety of antibiographical arguments which are explored here. The aim is not to reassert a binary of the biographical and the antibiographical, but to show how the dialogue between them might help to dislodge the concept of self from the central position it still occupies in theories and practices of life writing. What biography seeks to bring to the reader—and what antibiography doubts it can—is not a speaking/writing self, but a silent/absent other. In its mediation of otherness, biography can stand as a challenge to the tendency of self-narrative, self-inscription and self-representation to predominate within life writing. By considering the critique of biography that has flourished alongside the biographical tradition in the counter-traditions of anti-, pseudo- and metabiography, we might reinvigorate our sense of what distinguishes biography from other life-writing practices. The paper enlists pseudobiographical fictions—literary and cinematic—for an antibiographical archive, locating critical interventions in such unlikely places as Ingmar Bergman's 1964 comedy All These Women.
In this condensed version of her book, Sedgwick reflects about the "closet" as a regime of regulation of gay and lesbian lives that is also important to heterosexuals since it guarantees their privileges. Sedgwick affirms the "closet", or the "open secret", has been basic to lesbian/gay life for the last century even after Stonewall (1969). She also states that this regime - with its contradictory and constraining rules and limits about privacy and disclosure, public and private, knowledge and ignorance has served to shape the way in which many questions about values and epistemology were comprehended in the Western Society as a whole.
From earliest times, humans have developed strategies for increasing their ability to remember and commemorate significant events in the history of their communities. Epics have been created, memorized, and passed on through generations even before the development of written records. Monuments have also been built to commemorate important events. Stratagems for helping people to retain information, mnemonics, have allowed us to develop what has been termed memoria technica—‘artificial’ memories. In this essay, while recognizing that new technologies support people and organizations in their remembering processes, I wish to stress that other complementary human activity that constitutes the duality of memory, namely forgetting. This is a topic that has been relatively neglected or treated in a cursory fashion in much academic discourse to date. I note some examples of the scattered but intriguing work on the subject, from very different disciplinary perspectives, before turning attention to the potential relevance of judicious forgetting in the context of new technologies and visions of the future. Examining the role of forgetting opens up some interesting possibilities. We should re-frame our discourse and expand the design space concerning ubiquitous computational technologies in our everyday life to incorporate aspects of this forgetting dimension.
:Like many of James's major fictions, "The Aspern Papers" concludes with the burning of documents. Such closure is usually understood as both ethical and ironic. It is possible, however, that Aspern's archive is not merely a "McGuffin"--an empty signifier around which the narrative revolves--but rather is an agency that wills its own destruction. Following Derrida's argument in Archive Fever that the archive is always already on fire, this essay explores the figurative economy by which living bodies are in the grip of the dead and which sustains a continuity between the hand that writes and the hand that burns.
An abstract is not available.
- Chun W. H. K.
Opacity and the closet
- N De Villiers
de Villiers, N. (2012). Opacity and the closet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ennslin, A. (2014). Literary gaming. Boston: MIT Press.
The interface effect
- A R Galloway
Galloway, A. R. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge, England: Polity.
What Remains of Edith Finch
- Giant Sparrow
Giant Sparrow. (2017). What Remains of Edith Finch [PS4].
What is posthumanism? Minneapolis
- C Wolfe
Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Literature and the rise of the interview
- R Roach
Mystery House [Apple II
- Line On
- Systems
Queer games after empathy: Feminism and haptic game design aesthetics from consent to cuteness to the radically soft. Games Studies
- T Pozo
Pozo, T. (2018). Queer games after empathy: Feminism and haptic game design aesthetics
from consent to cuteness to the radically soft. Games Studies, 18. Retrieved from http://
gamestudies.org/1803/articles/pozo
Henry James and the occult
- M Banta
Banta, M. (1972). Henry James and the occult. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Analogue: A Hate Story
- C Love
Love, C. (2012). Analogue: A Hate Story [OSX].
On August 19 see Hate Plus’s completely canonically impossible harem route!
- C Love
Algorithms of oppression
- S U Noble
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression. New York: New York University Press.
On-Line Systems. (1980). Mystery House [Apple II].
The Re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Winter
- D Scott
Scott, D. (2000). The Re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Winter. Small
Axe, 8, 119-207.
The mysteries of Udolpho
- J Robinson
On August 19 see ’s completely canonically impossible harem route! Love Conquers All Games
- C Love
- Sedgwick E. K.
The Beginner's Guide
Everything Unlimited Ltd. (2015). The Beginner's Guide [PC].
USA: self-published. Fullbright
- Portland
Portland, USA: self-published.
Fullbright. (2017). Tacoma [PS4].
A moment in time with THE woman. VNs Now
JP. (2011). A moment in time with THE woman. VNs Now. Retrieved from https://web.
archive.org/web/20121030202712/http://www.vnsnow.com/christinelove.htm
Literature, media, information systems
- F Kittler
Kittler, F. (1997). Literature, media, information systems. London, England: Routledge.