(Note: the following fragment of a first draft of an introductory portion of my dissertation work continues from my previous post. I have posted here this here for feedback by friends and fellow scholars. Everything here can and probably will change by the time the work is done.)
For me, this experience of global channel surfing made the sometimes esoteric-sounding theory of Donna Haraway understandable in an immediate, visceral way. In her essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway describes the power and danger of vision and the metaphors we affix to vision. She writes, “the eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything interests of unfettered power.” (1991, pg 188) Haraway points out that in the contemporary moment the metaphor linking vision to diembodied power has been reinforced by technologies that allow “the eye of any ordinary primate like us” to be “endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system.” (1991, pg 189) Under the conditions of this “technological feast,” she argues, “Vision […] becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put this myth into ordinary practice.” (1991, pg 189)
Clearly, it would only be fair to number me among those gorging themselves at the “technological feast” Haraway describes. A white-boy wanna-be hacker with his Linux box plugged into the global network from a non-descript apartment in an anonymous college town, my vision flits effortlessly across thousands of miles from high orbit, to the streets of Manhattan, to the Wyoming back-country, to the colonial artifact of the Panama Canal. My senses expand to include not only the visible spectrum my primate eyes can see but also the long, cool wavelengths of radio waves. For awhile, I was also viewing images taken using infrared (the GOES satelitte provides IR images) and ultraviolet light (the SOHO satelitte provides UV pictures of the Sun) but I chose to stop recieving these images because they bored me. The tourists lined up along the rail at the Miraflores lock, or along the walkway at Old Faithful are unaware of my gaze, they have no means of discerning my presence so they pay me no heed. I pay attention them, however, as a crowd of tourists may indicate an off-frame ship about to pass through the lock, or some rumble indicating the geyser is about to erupt. This sense of effortless movement, of disembodied vision, of superhuman power is clearly one of the sources of the pleasure I derive from my webcamera monitoring hobby.
But of course, this sense is an illusion.