Saturday, January 27, 2018

The Place, Time, and Power of Representation | Peter Polack

Where to begin? Representation is the power that comes from the dominance of a particular point of departure. In our discourse, our arguments, and our explanations, we must always begin from somewhere, and this conceptual starting point represses alternative conceptualizations of reality. It disempowers new beginnings with recourse to old ones, or masks the beginnings of others with our own. What is unique about critical theory is that it recognizes the characteristic power of representation, and so it can destabilize it. We see this in the work of Edward Said and David Hudson: their contention is that particular points of departure – “Orientalism" and “global information inequality” – have overshadowed particular circumstances, and that taking the latter as a new point of departure is essential to destabilizing dominant conceptualizations of reality. At first glance, there seems to be a paradox here: why should we take Said and Hudson’s own points of departure instead of those of the Orientalists or normative “global information inequality” discourse? It is because the former are critical theory: only they call attention to the distinctive power of representation; the latter merely employ it.

To call attention to the power of representation is to take a representation as one’s point of departure, and to locate the conditions of its development as belonging elsewhere; that is, in another place or time. For Said, the emergence of the Orient takes place in the West. Orientalism is developed within the West according to “institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding” that are absolutely removed from its subject matter. The Orient is thereby constructed and “restructured” in such a way that cultural or scientific representations of it take precedence over individual accounts of it. In this way, the West becomes the dominant point of departure for conceptualizing the Orient – for any scholar “to get at the Orient he must pass through the learned grids and codes provided by the Orientalist.” The critical theoretical move is to identify that Orientalism is a representation: it is a different entity than its subject matter, with its own rules, discourses, and internal consistency. That such a representation can take shape distinctly from its subject matter enables its power.

Accordingly, Hudson addresses the representations of “global information inequality” discourse, which take technological solutionism as their point of departure. To call attention to the power of these representations qua technological solutions, Hudson identifies that they mask historically contingent problems with invented problems of information access. For example, “good governance narratives” propose that certain nations are underdeveloped because they lack information technology solutions. At the same time, these narratives maintain paradoxically that information technology solutions are licensed by the developed nations that produce them. Therefore, “good governance narratives” deploy the solution of information technology to ostensibly resolve unequal material conditions without any mention of their historical emergence. By indicating that “good governance narratives” propose to solve longstanding problems with a scope of solutions that is framed by technological futurisms, Hudson demonstrates that their technological point of departure has developed distinctly from an understanding of material and historical conditions of inequality. However, he does not manage to elaborate how such a discrepancy can come to pass. What enables “good governance narratives” to take hold as a representation of material circumstances of inequality?

It is Said's critical theory that escapes the criticism of representation to address the conditions of its emergence, perpetuation, and power. Said acknowledges these conditions explicitly when he identifies Orientalism as “a system of opportunities for making statements.” To Said, Orientalism is not just a narrative constructed to dominate others (although its particular works have this tendency) as it is a self-perpetuating regime of discourse that rewards its adherents for “discursive consistency.” Whereas Orientalists are rewarded whenever they enforce or justify the legitimacy of their descriptions (herein lies their "didacticism"), non-Orientalists are also rewarded whenever they subscribe to or pronounce these prevailing conceptualizations. In this way, Orientalism is a system of representations that serves to penalize alterity – both in Western discourse and in non-Western ways of life – and every conforming contribution to Orientalist discourse can only “intensify, make more rather than less representative, the perspectives of the Orient.” The point of departure inaugurated by Orientalism exerts a centripetal force on thought.

The power characteristic of representation, then, is not an autopoetic force that emanates from singular representations of the Orient or the “developing world.” Instead, the power of representation is the condition of possibility that is produced and reinforced by a particular point of departure, which may itself comprise many representations. It rests not on the quality or the conviction of these representations but on their prevalence, their accessibility, and their inscription into cultural norms – in short, on their dominance over a field of possible places to start from. This is what Said addresses when he characterizes the Orient as “a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.” It is why Hudson asks us to “recognize that racialized difference is produced and reproduced contextually and often implicitly.” Representations frame our reality and shape our thought whenever we do not critically examine them as points of departure. Because whether these representations begin as accidents or conspiracies, they end in entrenchments. 

References

Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Journal of Information Ethics, 25, no. 1 (2017): 62-80. 


Said, Edward W. "Orientalism: western conceptions of the Orient. 1978." Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin (1995).

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Exploitation and Internships: Evaluating the Exploitative Nature of Internships in Archival Environments from a Marxist Critical Standpoint by Sakena Al-Alawi


Archivists are constantly collecting, arranging, describing, digitizing, creating finding aids, and making archival collections accessible online. Their duties are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and require a specific set of skills and a significant amount of education. Some digital archivists are compensated or marginally acknowledged for their part in research, but a majority of their labor goes unrecognized. Volunteers and archival student interns receive even more subsistent compensation in the form of class credit for their work, yet the institution gets something more valuable—their labor. Separately, their labor is worth about equal exchange for what they are given in terms class credit, but their accumulated labor creates the very research that builds capital for the institution. I use Marxist critical theory to dissect student and volunteer digital archival labor in academic institutions to determine if they are being exploited. If so, is exploitation unavoidable? Is there a place for neoliberal, bourgeois ideology in digital archival environments?
Archival student interns and volunteers are neither hired by the university nor are they contracted freelancers, their labor is not as easily quantifiable as regularly paid archivists. Volunteers can give their time in exchange for just the experience or their enjoyment. Sometimes, students volunteer their labor for the same reasons as regular volunteers or they can use their archival experience on their curricula vitae to show prospective employers. Both laborers have the potential to earn wages or an exchange of equal value.[1] This earning potential affords student interns and volunteers the label of wage laborer, but I would go further in complicating whether or not their labor is being exploited by institutions in the same way that the proletariat’s labor is exploited through competitive antagonism in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. The capitalist uses the labor of the proletariat and the proletariat uses the capital from the capitalist in an attempt to gain status, fueling competition between proletariats and the distinct classes.[2]
In the case of the volunteer, there is not so much competition as there is a love of their labor. Volunteers are enthusiasts. For a student, in terms of class credit, all are required to do the archival labor as part of an assignment, therefore there is no competition unless the student is interning, mirroring the paid archivist. When their labor is commodified is when exploitation occurs. Thus, exploitation is situational.[3] In Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives, Michelle Moravec illustrates how student labor is situationally exploitative:
While there are clearly benefits to students from meaningful engagement in crowdsourcing projects, the authors of ‘A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights’ argue that students should not be required to perform digitisation or other routine tasks, which could be construed to include transcription, without pay as part of an internship or class project. […] Cifor and Lee note ‘neoliberal models for archival labour, which favour outsourcing and costing above all else, can also serve to support unjust and damaging institutions.[4]

The experience and knowledge students gain from their archival labor is immeasurable, but what the institutions gain from their labor is obvious and can be exploitative if pay is not introduced into the relationship. However, the only way institutions can make these provisions is if they can get the funding. In most cases, funding only comes when institutions have something to bring to the table by way of recognition and social power. Without exploiting the labor of students, production is slow and slow archival work means cutbacks. Institutions themselves are folded into the struggle of the factory system where the institution seeks to create more subsets of labor, dividing work amongst many student laborers to produce immediate results that they can show benefactors for funding.[5] As a result, they feed into the pre-established system that has devalued their institution and the archivists position. The bourgeois of Marx’s era has evolved into a neoliberal bourgeois class that has the technology to “obliterate all distinctions of labour” but we cannot ask the institution to be the one to make the change.[6]
In The TwitterEthics Manifesto, Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim suggest “if we want to transform the space to what we want it to be, we must disrupt the system.”[7] The way in which we can shift this paradigm is by finding a way to even out the exploitation. While opinion is split on both, I propose a fusion of two possible solutions. Firstly, hopefully, through means of pay but if not through means of pay, maybe in the form of acknowledgement. If going through pay, institutions would have to start by leveling the playing field between archivist and intern. This would have to come through the institution itself.[8] Whereas, if we were going to reverse exploitation through acknowledgement, it would come through the likely source of researcher.[9] The researcher is a key player in that they have the ability to change the system from the outside. It cannot be the job of the system to change itself, instead all archival users who access the digitized collection can aid in changing the system by citing and acknowledging archivists who made these collections available online in their papers. Neoliberal ideology is just a reimagining of a failed pre-existing capitalist system, whereas the researcher has the ability to create a new system much similar to the communism of Marx and Engels. Like Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, archival scholars’ writings can bring awareness to this imbalance of power. Together, both solutions can bring about change.




[1] Karl Marx, “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital,” In The Marx-Engels Reader, Part II: (New York: WW Norton, 1978), 204.
[2] Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 1848. Available at:
[3] David Hesmondhalgh, “User-generated Content, Free Labour and the Cultural Industries,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10(3,4) (2010): 276-248.
[4] Michelle Moravec, “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives,” Australian Feminist Studies, 32(91-92) (2017): 192.
[5] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party.”
[6] Marx, “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital.”
[7] Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim, “Twitter Ethics Manifesto,” 2014. Available at: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto
[8] Stacie Williams, “Implication for Archival Labor.” 2016. Available at:
[9] Moravec, “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives.”

Bibliography  
Hesmondhalgh, David. “User-generated Content, Free Labour and the Cultural Industries.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10(3,4) (2010): 276-248. 

Kim, Dorothy and Kim, Eunsong. “TwitterEthics Manifesto.” 2014. Available at: 
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto

Marx, Karl. “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital.” In The Marx-Engels 
Reader. (New York: WW Norton, 1978), Part II: 203-217. 

Marx, Karl and Engels, Fredrick. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 1848. Available at:      
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Moravec, Michelle. “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives.” Australian Feminist 
Studies, 32(91-92) (2017): 186-201. 

Williams, Stacie. “Implication for Archival Labor.” 2016. Available at:   
https://medium.com/on-archivy/implications-of-archival-labor-b606d8d02014