(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.)
But this sense, of course, is an illusion. I may feel as if I am “seeing everything from nowhere,” that I am perfectly invisible, invulnerable, and autonomous, but I am not. The tourists collected on the viewing platform may not be able to detect my presence, but those who administer the web servers for the Panama Canal authority certainly can, if they care to look. Their logs will show my IP address requesting an image from their server once a minute for however long my program is running. The same is true for those who provide me with access to all the other webcams. On any given day, they probably never notice my presence, never think to look through the log files that would reveal the traces I had left, but if someone were to decide my behavior was in some way rude (because I was downloading too many images and using up more than a fair share of the server’s ability to transmit files) or even suspicious (because I had taken to closely monitoring at least three critical pieces of infrastructure: a major canal, a major airport and the United States’ primary space launch facility) it would be an easy enough task to shut off my access to the cameras and stop the travels of my electronic gaze cold in its tracks. If an entity were determined, and had the authority to compel my internet service provider to assist them, they might even trace my electronic gaze back to my physical body and subject that body to surveillance, interrogation, or punishment.
There are counter-moves I could make, of course. I could, for example, employ a proxy server to conceal my true IP address. There are also counter-counter moves that server operators and agencies of surveillance could make, and so on. But even if I were to successfully evade being seen in such a way, the act of evasion proves that I am not invisible, I am not viewing from some magically invisible “nowhere,” but that I have a specific, potentially visible location that I must actively attempt to conceal. For Haraway, understanding “the particularity and embodiment of all vision” (1991, 189) allows for a potential rehabilitation of this “much maligned sensory system.” (1991, 188) She writes that, once we see past the illusion of infinite and unbounded vision, “the ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.” (1991, 190)
Thus, each device sending images to my webcam browser represents, not a magic window faithfully re-presenting reality for me, but rather an active perceptual device constructing a view based on its position and sensory capabilities. Switching between the views shows clearly that even the view from high orbit is partial. It may see the terminator sweep across the disk of the Earth, but it is impossible to infer from this what a sunset and sunrise will look like along the canyons of Manhattan or behind the smooth rock face of the Half-Dome. The world looks different when viewed in visible light, infrared, radar waves. To use the terms of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour (an important influence of Haraway’s) the cameras are not “intermediaries,” or “what transports meaning or force without transformation,” but rather they are “mediators,” that is to say they “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.” (2005, 39)
Furthermore, as my discussion of the potential visibility of my webcam monitoring self revealed, the system taken as a whole, me sitting before the compound eye of my internet-enabled creation, must itself be considered a specific, embodied point of view. This point of view is itself a mediator, as I build a specific set of meanings from the images I see influenced, of course, both by the images themselves and the larger network of mediators I am myself embedded in. The recitation of my morning ritual provided here gives some clues as to some of the elements in this network. They include multinational corporations, workers, machine tools, chemical stimulants, international standards organizations, nation-states, volunteer programmers, copper wire, the english language, radio frequencies, the US Code of Public Law, and base 2, 10 and 16 mathematics. Making visible this web of associations shatters the illusion of autonomy provided by the “god trick” of infinite vision. I am not perfectly free but rather, as Latour writes, “made to act by a large star-shaped web of mediators flowing in and out.” (2005, 217) This is not to say that I am wholly determined by the forces interacting with me, since Latour holds that everything is a mediator, his understanding is that everything in the network exerts a form of partial agency. Using the example of the puppet he writes, “the puppeteer still holds many strings in her hands, but each of her fingers is itching to move in a way the marionette indicates.” (2005, 216, emphasis in original) The networks of human and non-human mediators I mobilize also mobilize me, and vice versa.
So, an examination of my morning reveals how my existence is thoroughly one of a cyborg, in Haraway’s sense of a “creature simultaneously animal and machine,” living in a world “ambiguously natural and crafted.” (1991a, 149) Furthermore, it demonstrates how I am living in a specific form of this cyborg experience, since (among others) workers in the plants building my computers, the owners of the plantations that grow my coffee, and the system administrators monitoring my use of the network are all linked to the same cyborg network of machines and humans I am, while occupying clearly different positions within it.