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April 25, 2001, 8:49 a.m. || scattered

I haven't prepared my comments for the MIT conference, even though I leave tomorrow morning. I feel tired or restless, or both. I sat on the tiled floor re-reading my battered copy of Scattered Hegemonies while Miriam Kronenberg (co-founder of the Luna Sea Women's Project) led the class in a series of performance exercises in "communication," and I wondered what I could possibly have to say about authenticity and digital art. It's the postcolonial theory in me -- I just can't let celebrated concepts like "hybridity" go without a raised eyebrow and some interrogation.

I do have this to say for myself -- how many others inspire completely unsolicited confessions in hallways like, "So okay, this is part of the story. I think Star Trek: Voyager is really sexy and I masturbate to the show, but that's not the main part of the story, which is that...."? 

Let me tell you, not many.

RANDOM GEEK OBSERVATION THAT IS NOT SO NEW #45-23V:

The proliferation of differences is not necessarily a critique. In fact it can be a disguise -- in a space in which all is difference, and an uncritical "difference" has become a desirable site of identification, it becomes too easy to forego a critical engagement with historical specificity or accountability. Moreover, it becomes too easy to then examine difference (the gaps, the elisions, the non-coherence of the self, etc.) within identity to the theoretical and political detriment of accounting for difference between identities.

Norma Alarcon in her essay "Conjugating Subjects," for example, criticizes French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy for evacuating mestizaje of its historicity and signifying politics. In supposedly "opening up" the meaning of the term (i.e., de-essentializing its meaning from its "biologisms") to include French male citizens such as himself, he forecloses its strategically politicized connotation and recuperates the bourgeois liberal subject outside of the power relations implicated in the policing of borders and bodies. In the same spirit Allucquere Stone argues that all users in digital space are mestizas, crossing borders, speaking multiple languages, et cetera, while ignoring that some mestizas are socially and materially bound by their status to manufacture the hardware of others' cyberspatial existence.

These cautions apply to too much that I've been reading lately.

RANDOM GEEK OBSERVATION THAT IS NOT SO NEW #47-24D:

Rolling her eyes, R. gives me the gossip about an Anglo-American woman, an English graduate student in the Marxist studies working group, who refers to herself as a proletariat. She reasons that she is a proletariat because she is forced to work for a living, which is enough to distinguish her from the fat cats of capital. Sure, she is an academic-in-training at an elite institution, but she does not own the means of production and that is enough (in her eyes) to qualify her as working-class.

I wave my hands in annoyance, "Um, what? Hasn't she ever heard of the petit-bourgeoisie?!"

(Or, as Caren Kaplan suggests, "A politics of location [i.e., the attempt to account for one's social position] is problematic when it is deployed as an agent of appropriation, constructing similarity through equalizations when material histories indicate inequalities.")