That the body is a set of possibilities signifies (a) that its appearance in the world, for perception, is not predetermined by some manner of interior essence, and (b) that its concrete expression in the world must be un- derstood as the taking up and rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities.
How do we define and claim agency in a world that is built on inherent inequalities and oppressive normative forces?
Reserved points: foreign relations, communications, military, and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, left to the British after granting Egypt nominal independence. Was this really independence? This must have raised serious concerns among the Egyptian people, which the Wafd failed to address.
Attributed to the failure of the Wafd in representing the wave of nationalism that was growing in momentum in Egyptian popular politics; military takeover was still not "inevitable", as is anything within the context of history.
Rather, they are driven by concerns higher on theagenda of most developing countries, such as promoting economic growth, increasing energy security, andimproving local environmental conditions.
Technological innovations in this case are more directed towards sustainability because they present more efficient economic solutions to our problems rather than their actual sustainability/climate change. Where does this reliance diverge, and what are we looking at as far as investment in new technologies when that divergence occurs?
These are the instructions encoded into the very form of the mp3.
I think some of it was definitely included by design, but then again there's that part of me that wonders whether the advent of the personal computer and internet would have drawn us to similar conclusions surrounding the general make and concept of the mp3 anyways. Always fun to play devil's advocate- sometimes situation and idea can coincide constructively and define eras in technology or the human experience.
In other words, the mp3 is a medium which, in mostpractical contexts, gives the full experience of listening to a recording whileonly offering a fraction of the information and allowing listeners’ bodies todo the rest of the work.
By supposing a louder, less focused environment (and individual, by extension), the mp3 can use situation of use to enhance its own effects. Pretty ingenious and insightful!
e legal, political economic and broader culturaldimensions of file-sharing. By examining the mp3 as an auditorytechnology, it reveals some important dimensions of the relationshipbetween the so-called ‘new’ media1and the human body that have beenneglected largely by scholars who privilege the visual dimensions of newmedia
Some technologies break a certain barrier between the normal rhythm of innovation and invention by going that extra step- a lot of the psychological impact of the mp3 might come from the big difference relatively that the mp3 made coming off of its immediate predecessors. It makes sense to look a little deeper at what exactly this difference constitutes.
namely, that the computer was not the deusex machina that ushered the Chinese language into an age of technologicalmodernity.
I'm just curious, and I know this may be a somewhat pointless question, whether there might have been any conception of the tablet way of writing and converting directly to text on the computer at any point- that would solve a lot of the problems we see with keyboards. All that would need to be understood is the database of Chinese characters, which can quickly and easily be downloaded onto computers. Now that we have the technology, is it something that we can envision gaining popularity in China?
onstituted a frequently used character in a police station, forexample, might be a “rarely used character” (hanjianziorlengpizi) in a bank,and vice versa
There's an added layer still when we think about occupations and terminology! We can see the difference between character-based languages and alphabetic languages in typing now.
o refine these sensitivities, typewriter manuals moved students througha series ofétudes, which ranged from the clerical and quotidian, such asreproducing sample business correspondences, to the overtly political, suchas reproducing the last will and testament of Sun Yat-sen, the “Manifesto ofthe Chinese Nationalist Party at the First National Congress,” and otherpolitically energized texts.
I remember doing something similar with learning to type on the English keyboard, although I imagine these schemes are far, far more complicated than those that I used. There's an added dimension when we incorporate style and formality of speech into language, especially if different styles require different characters- for me, it was all within the same alphabet.
Sheffield settled on a set of 4,662characters, excluding tens of thousands of others and affecting a sharpbreak in the way that infrequent characters were handled within printing.For typesetters, highly infrequent characters were organized in such a waythat increased the amount of energy required to produce them, therebyperhaps contributing to their further descent into the abyss of nonusage,and yet at the same time keeping them part of the same mode of inscrip-tion as even the most common of characters. By contrast, Sheffield de-signed his machine such that the production of any “4663rd character”required the operator to resort to an entirely separate mode of inscription,one that stood outside the machine itself (for example, by using a brush orpen to handwrite the missing character on the page). He cut the lexicalspace of Chinese in two by, in a manner of speaking, tracing his blade alonga seam already scored countless times by practices fundamental to move-able-type printing.
Did this method take into account the varying dialects of Chinese, the characters most common in those as well? That may have had an impact on the characters most and least common; then again, I'm not a linguist, but I wonder whether at least the disparity existed between the two most spoken dialects of Chinese.
It was onlythen, after this primary partition, that Jin organized his characters second-arily according to the Kangxi radical-stroke system
I think an issue with this scenario is that we didn't see too much collusion regarding adapting the typewriter to fit Chinese typeface; the real problem is that the narrative makes it seem like the greater world kind of left the Chinese to play catch-up with the advent of the typewriter/keyboard, where it really shouldn't (I would think with our economic connections, especially shouldn't going forward!).
This phenomenon was global, moreover, with type-writers and telegraph codes for Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Thai, Cambodian,and many other scripts developed with attention to the same concerns.
The point of technology is to adapt our ways of life in an innovative manner to make our lives more efficient. Because inventors, like all humans, have selfish motives, they will (imperfectly) create technologies that are tailored only to the societies and people within the scope of their minds. And once we see that these technologies are globally applicable, it does absolutely take amendment and re-innovation of the same technologies to apply them to different societies. I think inherently there is prejudice in technologies, but that's a function of the individuals behind those technologies and the overarching theme of self-motivation. To make up for these gaps in foresight, struggles like these are necessary to modify technologies for all societies and individuals deemed incompatible with the original form. There, to me, isn't necessarily a huge way around that beyond just broadening thought. But the reality is that we will almost never, in the forward trajectory of science and technology, be able to account for every single individual with a single design. We should be encouraging collusion to open up new issues and solve problems systematically rather than dwelling on the inequalities of technologies when they appear to be exclusive.
“first we must abolish Chinese characters. And if we wish to getrid of the average person’s childish, naïve, and barbaric ways of thinking,the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.”
This sounds like a really interesting argument that flies in the face of thousands of years of usage of the language in an ancient to modernizing society (albeit with a few tweaks here and there, but it has ultimately survived the test of time thus far). Attacking the language as a whole over the technology seems like a rather lopsided way to look at it. Shouldn't technology be tailored to fit the society? Isn't that the challenge of most, if not all, technologies? This also implies a Euro-centric view of the world, especially the modern world.
were replete with stories of “model workers” in variousindustries, and such exuberant claims should not be accepted uncritically
A way to encourage other workers? Chinese nationalism?
Howcan one both make " biopo*", function and exercise the rights ofwar, the rights of murder and ,1" furr.rJ., J d""rh, without b.:.;i"gracisr? That was the problem, and that, I ,i'rrU, ,, still the problem
I think if we think about the psychological logic or anthropological clues underlying race inequality and colonialism, we could potentially attack this question?
No ma*er whether it is Fourier at'the beginnt"r;ñ;;nruryóor the anarchists at the end "f ;,, y"" _ill always find a racist com-ponent in socialism.
?
A racist State' a murderous State'and a suicidal State
Outside the realm of the Nazi example, this illustrates an irony we see with most historical campaigns with a similar bent
Thir' p.*; ,;'uur, *nr.n ran through theentire social body of Hrur; ,o.;.ty, *u, n.r, manifested when thepower to take lìfe, the poìMer of liie and death, was gr"rrr"a ,rol orrtyto the State but to a whole series of ir,Jirrido"lr, to a considerablenumber of people (such as the SA, ,fr.-is, "ld ,o on
The groupthink phenomenon and excusing murder and killing by creating some construct of power is easily legitimized through governmental bodies and units within those bodies designated for that express purpose
I think that, broadly speaking, racism justifies the death-functionin the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that thedeath of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is amember of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in aunitary living plurality.
Encourages the idea that one's survival depends on the death of the other- this divisive mentality is easily preyed upon in the concept of racism to fit economic and later social needs/desires
If the power of normalizationwished to exercise the old sovereign right to ltill, it must becomeracis
This is a way for the greed for power to surpass biopolitics
There is a direct connection between the two.ln a normalizing society, face or racism is the precondition that makeskilling acceptable.
Inequality, presupposed or imposed on another person by the views and persuasion of yet another, creates exactly the conditions that allow for this to arise. Racism especially creates a visual basis for this (psychology of which is still unclear to me)
Itwithin " pop.,r",;o.
Racism can be seen within the realm of regulatory mechanisms that works to sort out groups of people (systematizing social attitudes? justifying inequality present within classical sovereign states?)
The normalirirrg ,o.iety i, usociety in which rhe norm of discipline and the 'orm of regurationintersect along an orthogonal articulation.
Regulation has been redefined to consider the variability in character, needs, desires, and decisions of people that presents itself in biopolitics
Health_insurance systems,old-age pensions; rules on hyli.rr. rhat guarantee the optimallongevity of the population; the pressures that the ,re.y orgarriatio'"-f :h. town brings to bear or, ,"-uality ".rd th"..fo.. på.r."tiorr
Regulatory mechanisms can absolutely influence human behavior as a consequence of encouraging people to make decisions for themselves that are beneficial to the common stock
One might say this:_ lt is as though po*.r, which used ro havesovereignty as its modality or organirì.rg ,.h.-u, found itserf unabreto govern the economic and politi."l body of a society ,t ", *", ,r"_dergoing both a demographic .*plorion and industrializatio
Biopolitics redefines power at its core and the meaning of sovereignty, the viability of classical notions of power, in fact, looking to the present day. We're seeing a lot less totalitarian and fully sovereign states emerging as major global powers today, for example.
And thanks to a powerthai is not simply scientific prowess, but the actual exercise of thepolitical biopower established in the eighteenth century, we have be-.o-. ,o gooà "t keeping people alive that we've succeeded in keepingthem alive when, in biological terms, they should have been dead longago. ,tnd so the man who had exercised the absolute power of lifeand
This shows the consequences of biopolitics on the course of history, how it can register course corrections and minutely, but noticeably and often consequently, change history's trajectory itself.
,{.nd they are, finally,phenomena that occur over a period of time, which have to be studiedover a certain period of time; they are serial phenomena
Kind of characteristic of how we study history, where we have to look through a very specific set of steps that can't disregard or presuppose around the underlying factors that led to each in the sequence of decisions.
It ha, become the most private andshameful thing of all (and ultimately, it is now nor so much sex asdeath that is the object of a taboo)
Death has a considerable cultural taboo and associations with darkness, uncleanliness, and despair (perhaps something to do with 'letting die' in the new order of thinking about governance)
Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and som_ber absolute power that was ,h" po*., of sovereìgnty, and whichconsisted in the power to take life, w" now have th""._..g.rrce, withthis technology of biopower, of this technolog.y of power over ,,the,,population as such, over melì insofar as they are lirrirrg rr.irrgr. tt i,continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make iive
Turning to an active support of life and encouraging actions that promote an equal opportunity for the commonwealth to succeed
And most important ofall, regulatory mechanisms musr be established to establish an equi-librium, maintain an avefage, establish a sort of homeostasis, and com-pensate for variations within this general population and its aleatoryfield.
From control to maintenance, we're turning to an observe-and-react mode of governance as opposed to a rigid set of rules imposed sans context
This is the problem, andit will become very important in the early nineteenth century (thetime of industrialization), of old age, of individuals who, because oftheir age, fall out of the field of capacity, of activity
Called it again- Industrial Revolution will absolutely pit the issues of machine men (which arises as a necessity in order to continue modernization of entire states through technologies that require more monotonous factory jobs) with the rising view of society as a biologically-driven living, breathing, and dynamic model.
they result in the developmentof a medicine whose main function will now be public hygiene, withinstitutions to coordinate medical care, centralize information, andnormalize knowledge
I definitely predicted this one in the earlier annotation- the rise of public health (public hygiene) as a field clearly illustrates the change in mentality, a shift towards recognizing the importance of biopolitics and how that's affected society in return
It is these processes_the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity,""1 :o on-together with a whole ,".i., of related economic andpolitical problems
bio-politics define a lot of the fields that we call interdisciplinary and, incidentally, we find the most important today- public health comes to mind as a great example of biopolitics at work and an important tool in protecting the common stock
Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies' the new nondis-ciplinary Power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man'to ,rrrrr-"r-1i',ring-being;
The notion of the group made up of individual parts, each with its own unique characteristics- where we get into the issues that necessitate law enforcement, process of law (and law itself) and influence a newly dynamic view of society that changes the modalities of new technologies
Attempts were made to increase their productive force through ex-ercise, drill, and so on. They were also techniques for rationalizingand strictly economizing on a power
Characteristic of an emerging Industrial society; economic needs and demand powered a lot of these innovations centered around homogeneity and systematizing of the individual
he jurists asr.: whel we enter inro a contract, wharare individuals doing at the level of the sociar contract, *h.r, th"ycome together to constitute a sovereign, to delegate ubrol.rt" po_",over them to a sovereign?
Whenever there is a contract in existence, we question whether protecting ourselves as individuals overrules the implicit deferral of individual choice and power to the governing body with which we make that contract
In any case' the lives anddeaths of subjects become rig-hts only as a result of the will of thesovereign.
Because of the right to life being an existing principle, there's a level of protection exerted by the qualifications for having that right to live that puts power over life in the hands of the State
You know thatin th" classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death wasone of sovereignty's basic attributes'
Those in power (the State) had power over the individual's right to live or die (and to an extent, still do today in the form of a democracy, where the people make up the State and juries that determine whether a defendant will live or die)
while the theme of race do., ,rotdisappear, it does become part of something very different, namelyState racism
This trend is still true of race today; we're seeing a lot of institutional and "reserved" racism in today's society, especially with our society susceptible to stereotyping and not readily accepting of "the other" (physical appearance, cultural practices, language)
Considering that universities are profiting off the exclusivity of a major research database, we might wonder whether in more developed countries with more equal access to educational opportunities we should consider open access in the first place. This raises the question of whether institutions even achieve the goal of selecting a maximized and optimized group out of the population who can maximize access to scholarly works and research.