Utopia

I apologize for putting a link instead of posting the photo.  It’s on Flickr with all rights reserved so I can’t reproduce it here.

My Utopic Imagining of Gender/Technology

As I was perusing the Halberstam reading, I was struck several times by the idea of random interference, which is analogous to human desire, and also by the view of postmodernism as chaotic and unshaped.  I was especially drawn to the bottom of page 448: “The concept of the unified bourgeois subject… has been shot through with otherness and can find no way to regroup or reunite the splinters of being…”

I found this idea to be analogous/similar to concepts in Halberstam’s postscript: “This does not imply that differentials of knowledge, responsibility, and power no longer exist; rather they can no longer be assumed.  Instead they shift and flow and develop…” and ” Such a theory shows that we are already as embedded within the new technologies as they are embodied within us.”

There’s an overarching idea here of chaos and randomness and the mixing together of everything that was once separate, everything that we used to have labeled and organized in little boxes.  And the entities acting within this new chaotic world can be impulsive and spontaneous.  All of this impulsiveness and spontaneity leads to more mixing and more chaos.  Being an impulsive person, I find this chaotic world pretty utopic.

The Flickr image and the image above embody this chaos and also depict what came before the chaos.  In each there is a central focus, a source, which I see as the way the world was before the blurring of the lines began.  The Flickr image, more than the image above, represents something concrete being blurred and by the time you get to the present day (aka the foreground of the picture), you can barely make out what the letters in the words are, the lines are blurred, the rules have been broken/are being broken.