Helene Moglen

Transcription

Good evening, May I begin by requesting that you turn off your cellphones. My name is Michael Cowan. As president of this campus' Emeriti Association I am pleased to welcome you to this lecture. One, in an on-going series of association sponsored lectures by distinguished UCSC Emeriti. I wish to thank the Literature Department and the Center for Cultural Studies for cosponsoring this lecture and to offer particular appreciation to the Chancellor's Office and Events Office for providing generous financial and logistics support including free parking. This evening is a special one, perhaps even a surprising one. And not merely because of the reference to Frankenstein on the lectures title seems particularly appropriate to this week. The Emeriti lecture series is now entering its 11th year. To date, sixteen Emeriti have delivered lectures in the series, This is the first of these lectures to be delivered by a woman. I trust it will not be the last. Exactly thirty-five years ago, today, on October 29th, 1978 A certainly happily, spooky, and even uncanny coincidence. A symposium was held on this campus as a part of the inauguration of Robertson Simmer as our fourth chancellor. The title of the symposium was, "Liberal Education for the 21at Century". Of the seven speakers at the symposium, only one was a woman. A Brooklyn born scholar with a bachelors degree from Bryn Mawr and a PhD from Yale University and the author of major books on the 18th century, novelist Lauren Stern. And the 19th century novelist, Charlotte Bronte, who had four months earlier arrived from her position as a founding faculty member from the Suny campus at Purchase, New York to become professor of literature and the Dean of Humanities and Art at Santa Cruz. Dean Helene Muglen's remarks at that symposium were titled, "Liberal Education and the Arts". Focusing on, as she put it, "The importance of the arts to a liberal arts education." She argued that, "We tend to recognize and validate all to redly analytical knowledge. Knowledge that is rational, orderly, lawful, objective. And we tend to reject knowledge that is intuitive, feeling-full, subjective. The knowledge of the poet and the dreamer. It is the artificial separation of the two that cripples the contemporary intellect. To overcome such artificial separation, Mulgen called attention to what she termed, "The Play of Art, the Play of Religion, of Language, of creative scientific work of the best humanistic thought of all imaginative interpretation. Here, the pain of separation, the awareness of other's otherness is eased by the joy of mastery. Let me used these remarks by Professor Mulgen to suggest only two of the commitments that have energized her extraordinary career as a scholar, teacher, and administrator. On one hand, her commitment to subject and closed critical scrutiny are the artificial separation generated by the historical contraction of gendered, sexual, racial, and other differences and the psychic and social pain caused by those constructions. And on the other hand, her commitment to engage the play of creative imagination in bridging those differences. In exploring both their traumatic and acceleration, accelerating inner penetration. And in considering the ambiguities and ambivalences involved in these complex dynamics that mark what it is to be human at particular moments and in particular places. Consider for example these comments, among others we could find, from her very important 2001 book. "The Trauma of Gender", a feminist theory of the English novel. Mulgen notes that although there are many variations among the theorists who have contributed to what she calls the "Feminist Psychoanalytic Project", "All these theorists," she stressed, "insist that the individual should not be considered in isolation but should be examined in its interactions with others. All our concerns are defined as psychoanalytic theories that are responsive to social and political influences. Although in my readings", she affirms, "are psychoanalytically informed, I also try to respond to the interpretive requirements of the text. I consider the boundary between fiction and psychoanalysis to be permeable. And I redly cross it in the interpretive interest of both discourses,". Helene Mulgen has been an extraordinarily inceptive analyst of what occurs within boundaries. Be at the boundaries of a single text, or a single literary genre, or an academic discipline or institution, or a set of gendered defined roles. But I'd like to focus my reminding comments this evening on the creative imagination she has demonstrated in her own impressive work as a boundary crosser, as a maker of connections, and generator of creative conversations across artificial separations, and as a celebrator of the transformations that take place as a result. In the spirit of such transformative play, let us consider Helene's career as a lively-nonfiction novel. And mark five chronologically, overlapping, and interpenetrating chapters in which her creative imagination has been amply on display. Chapter one: Her work as a scholar. In addition to the three books of hers that I've mentioned, Helene is the author of numerous boundary crossing articles. Ranging from the feminist analysis of a variety of American and English novels to a consideration of the role of advocacy in the classroom. Her 1987 discussion of competition among academic women, published in the leading feminist journal, Sign and co-authored with a prominent woman scientist, generated a major productive debate over the complexity of women's use of empowerment. The important question of feminist approaches to raise, entered her coedited 1987 book, "Female Subjects in Black and White", raised psychoanalysis feminism. Chapter two: Helene's contribution as an activist in major state and national forums. She has chaired several major committees and commissions of the Modern Language Association. Including one on the status of women, on writing and literature, and on the future of doctoral programs in English. She has ably severed as a progressive member of the California Consul for the Humanities and of the board of governors of the UC Humanities Research Institute. She was also an engaged participant of the UC psychoanalytic concussion who's anual conferences brought together scholars and clinicians doing psychoanalytic work. Chapter three: Helene's references as an adventurous and highly regarded teacher. who has creatively brought her expertise as theorists and literally and cultural analysts. to both the undergraduate and graduate classroom. While at Santa Cruz she has taught a wide range of courses in English literature, women's studies, cultural analysis, and feminist theory. Among her most popular courses has been one on gothic fiction. A subject that certainly resonates with the topic of her talk this evening. One of her most important contributions as a teacher, has been her focus at all levels, on enhancing her students' writing skills. She has herself written powerfully on the importance of literacy, both to individual development and to the engagement of ones responsibilities as a local, national, and global citizen. And she has actively supported others on this campus, in the Santa Cruz community, and in the larger professional world in their promotion of literacy education. Chapter four: Helene's contribution as an energetic and creative camps leader. In addition to her five years as Dean of Humanities and Arts, and four years as provost of Kresge College during which she gave particular attention to strengthening interdisciplinary teaching and research. She also made an important difference for women and for the cause of feminism at UCSC. As Dean for example, she instituted an annual retreat that brought together women faculty from the Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. The women's studies program enjoyed significant growth under her leadership as Dean, and then as Chair of the program. as dean and then as chair of the program. And she played a central role as program in promoting this campus' nation and international visibility, as a center for feminist studies research. Both its founder and first director of the feminist studies focused research activity and later as founding director of the institute for advanced feminist studies. In the 1990s, Helene served as chair of this campus' academic senate. one of the first women to occupy that position. And she ably represented the campus on the university wide senate's academic council In that latter capacity, she persuaded then UC president, Richard Atkinson, to appoint a university wide commission on the humanities. To enhance graduate study, and research in the humanities, broadly construde to embrace the humanistically oriented social sciences A goal of enhancement I might note that still remains an uphill battle. Chapter 5: Helene's contribution as a creative advocate for collaboration between between this campus and the Santa Cruz community. In 1985, she founded and served as co-director of the campus' Women's Center which for nearly 30 years, has brought together students, staff, faculty and community members on behalf of collaborative projects and mutual support. Since her retirement in 2008, she has co-taught downtown, a creative writing workshop for veterans. And for the past three years, she has co-directed Santa Cruz Commons An exciting multi-faceted project that has facilitated the collaboration of community activists and activists academics. Clearly Helene Moglen's career is an adventurous work still in progress. I thus might end my comments on this ongoing narrative by suggesting one of the many important questions she has posed to us is whether our creations, including the stories we tell ourselves and each other, can, so to speak, assume and life of there own. Can wander away from their creator. Can be appropriated by other for their own purposes. Can be used for ends, for good or ill. Not anticipated by their original creator. This is certainly the season for such questions. And Helene is certainly much more qualified than I am to address them. In fact, she is sure to address a few of them this evening. Please join me in welcoming and honoring a colleague for whose intelligence and progressive vision and commitment I have the highest respect. And of whose infectious energy I stand constantly in awe. Professor Emeriti, Helene Moglen. Well, I think we should just all go home. Thank you for coming. Could we have the lights a bit lower? Okay... So... I just want to begin with a couple of acknowledgements. First of all I want to thank my partner, Sheila Namir. Who has suffered through the writing of this paper nobly with me. And gotten me unstuck many times. As all of you now know I am not a computer scientist. So I do want to acknowledge two books that are very important in provoking my thinking. One is Sherry Turckles, "Alone Together" and the other, Evgeny Morozov's "To Save Everything, Click Here" I wish I've made up that title. I also want to acknowledge The New York Times Every day has been a feast in thinking about these issues. So, this is a talk about the power of stories We create ourselves as subjects in the stories that we tell. Stories about ourselves, about our relations to others, and about ourselves as other to ourselves. Strange but familiar creatures. that hover on the edge of comprehension. We also create societies in the stories that we tell. Stories we call literature, history, anthropology, journalism, cultural theory. But no matter what our stories are about, their form is as important as their substance. Narrative structures which reflect the consciousness that shapes them establish the parameters of psychological and social meaning. Over the years, while writing about the English novel I composed a story about the relation of two fundamental forms of narrative. Realist and fantastic. The relation of those forms to a specifically modern form of consciousness Recently I've become interested in applying that theory to culture in which to our culture, to our post-modern culture in which the virtual thrives This will be the emphasis of my talk tonight but before I consider how consciousness and narrative are currently changing I want to suggest very briefly what they are changing from. In the past, as I've tried t understand how consciousness was transformed by the advent of capitalism, the emergence of the middle classes, and the ideology of individualism. I've returned repeatedly to the well known story that the sociologist, Norbert Elias, told. About what he called the civilizing process It was through this process, in the 16th and 17th centuries that individuals became, he tells us, "Evermore self-centered and aware. Their lives increasingly divided between intimate and public spheres. Between newly permissible and prohibited behaviors" Elias argues that in this period the management of behavior became an increasingly private matter. Handled by the family on one side and by personal conscience on the other. More rigid social prohibitions were internalized and experience of self-control and the psychic self was deepened and divided. Effective impulses, feelings which should have bound individuals to one another. Were incorporated into an increasingly closed psychic economy. Which defined them as private and interior. Manner increasingly achieved the intensity of morality which constructed desire as perversion. Pervasive feelings of guilt and shame marked the partition of the self into the judging and the judged. An inexpressible resistance to social prohibitions, signaled the existance of the unconscious mind. The modern form of self awareness that emerged from individualism. saturated every aspect of social and psychological life self-conscious individuals experience themselves as preeminent in their relationships. And they focused intensely on themselves. At the social level, they felt themselves to be autonomous active agents in a world that is available to comprehension and control. Stamped by the spirit and practices of capitalism they were inquisitive, pragmatic, and competitive. When they encountered other, they tended to treat them instrumentally as objects. The psychological level, as Elias suggests, the individual's obsession with its own interior life produced the division, between the self that watches and the self that is seen. In other words, the "I" that thinks about the self, when we think about ourselves, the person who thinks is not the same person who is thought about. And in that sense, we're all, in some very profound way, always already divided. Like the self that we see in the mirror, who is ourselves, but also emphatically not ourselves. It's a self that is both solipsistic and psychologically divided. Omnipotent at one moment, fragmented, desiring and paranoid in the next. The narrative through which this modern form of self awareness found expression reflected individualism's outward and inward looking aspects. Realism, which is the more familiar of the two, is fundamentally an outward looking social form of storytelling. Genres include, for example, History, sociology, journalism. And in fiction, if we want to make that distinction between fiction and non-fiction, social realism, the historical novel, The buildings Roman, the novel of domesticity. All of these are shaped by the consciousness of the self. In its moral, ethical, cultural, political, historical and psychological relations with others. The formal methodology of realist narratives, the way the realist stories are told. support the ideological assumptions of individualism. They create coherence through the overarching perspective of a single omniscient narrator. With whom the reader identifies. They present truth as a result of reliable representation and they employ language as if it could capture the complexity of experience. They form characters with intelligible interiorities. And they shape linear narratives that integrate personable and collective histories. In my book, "The Trauma of Gender" I privileged the fantastic narrative. tonight while I'm talking about "Frankenstein" a bit, I want to give realism its due. In contrast to the social emphasis of realism, fantastic narratives focus on the self's relation to itself. They map psychological states that individualism produces and they expose anxieties that social differences create They show that the belief in autonomy is false and based in fears of psychic vulnerability. Focusing on the divided nature of the self they depict a subject who struggles for psychic integration. but comes to recognize that self division is its doom. Through their characters, fantastic narratives enact psychic processes through which the subject finds the self reflected in others. And others reflected in itself. And because the boundary that separates the self from other is always shifting and unclear, narrators who tell their own fantastic stories are never reliable. And readers who identify with them are condemned always to distrust. All fantastic narratives, fiction theory, non-fiction reflect the self obsession which is individualism's shadow side Readers find it in the splitting and doubling of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" "The Portrait of Dorian Grey", "Moby Dick" "The Turn of the Screw", "The Heart of Darkness" "Ulysses" "Mrs. Dalloway" all the tales of Edgar Allen Poe, most of the novels of Faulkner. "Beloved", psycho-analytic theory, the superheroes of comics, the theater of the absurd, magical realism, the television series "Dexter" and "Mad Men" and as we shall see discourse's a virtuality. Mary Shelly's novel "Frankestein" or "The Modern Prometheus" which was published in 1818, is the iconic fantastic text. At ground level it represents the creation of the self. Through it's interaction with, it's taking in, it's identification with others. As the child, it forms itself through it's interactions, it's taking in of it's parents. And really it's parents, also, are form, with it's taking in of the child. And on the other side, it's self-destruction through it's denial of it's own psychic complexity. Now in the beginning of the story, and most of you if you haven't read it, you've probably seen it. In the beginning of the story, Victor Frankenstein is much loved. by his doting parents, his friend Clerval, and his more than sister Elizabeth. And of course his personality is based on his identification with them. His edenic childhood ends when he is about to leave to university, and he suffers what he calls, "The first misfortune of my life." "An omen of my future misery." His mother dies from a fever she catches while she is nursing his more than sister, Elizabeth. The loss marks the shattering of Frankenstein's psychic wholeness, and the beginning of a psychic division that becomes a doubling. When we divide, we also double. When we become the self and the other in the mirror, we are two. After his mother's death, Frankenstein goes to university, becomes enthralled with natural science, seeks to discover the cause of life, and to bestow animation upon lifeless matter. Frankenstein's aspiration is to be the father of what he calls a new species. which would he said, which would, he says, "bless me as its creator and source." He begins his project by assembling a creature from corpses he has disinterred from graves. In his monomaniacal labors he forgets his family and friends and cuts himself off from the natural world he has always loved. He sees by a singularly pragmatic purpose. to facilitate his work, he makes his being monstrously large without recognizing the implications of its malformation. The climactic moment of his project is not the birth scene, when the miserable monster comes to life, which it usually is in the films of Frankenstein. It is when he first sees himself as the object of the monster's gaze. He says, "His eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me." Appalled by the monstrosity of his production and the threat of his own objectification, Frankenstein denies responsibility for his malformed double; whose haunted, guilty victim he then becomes. His refusal to recognize his monster, his other, as his own is a refusal to recognize, to know, himself. The inevitable follows. Denied recognition by his creator, denied social identity by his difference, and denied a partner, whom Frankenstein refuses to create, the monster murders Frankenstein's young brother, William, his friend, Clerval, and finally, Elizabeth herself. The murders make explicit the self destructive nature of Frankenstein's effort which lacks ethical, moral, or practical vision. Having lost the ability to connect to others from whom his psychic identity has been formed, Frankenstein is isolated and overwhelmed by paranoia terrified by the destructive impulses of the vengeful other the monster, who was himself. Frankenstein's psychic state suggests the possibility of madness or of self obliteration, the alternative conclusions of most fantastic stories. Now Frankenstein is an iconic fantastic fiction because its central metaphor of man and his self created monster works on the levels both of the individual and the collective. Although the monster obviously represents an aspect of Frankenstein's psyche, he is also a separate subject in a social world he shares with others. At one point, the monster tells the story of his creation from his own perspective, the perspective of the despised other who is doomed to live with the social and psychological meanings of his difference. As readers experience the shifting of narrative perspectives from Frankenstein to his monster, From self to other, they enact the primal uncanny self-other relation, even as they followed the monster into a social space. It is Shelley's narrative mapping of the interrelation of psychological and social discourses that distinguishes Frankenstein from other fantastic fictions of the nineteenth century. From Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, for example. Or from Dracula, from which the perspective of the other is completely absent. We never hear the vampire tell his own story from his own perspective. The importance of social context of realism to an understanding of fantastic narratives is suggested by the significance of gender in Shelley's text. Generally, Frankenstein is read a cautionary tale about an overreaching scientist who is overtaken by the unexpected consequences of his ambitious, but oddly misguided effort. But the full significance of Frankenstein's thwarted project depends upon the readers recognition of the fact that Frankenstein is a male scientist who wants to assume the females procreative role, the role of the mother, but with the grandiosity of a God. It's an excellent example of male narcissism. Frankenstein's refusal to his monster of loving connection and empathic caring is a refusal of qualities that the society designates as feminine. With this frame, we see that Mary Shelley, who was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the early feminist, has written a critique of the gender division of labor which is also an assessment of an inhumane and masculine modern science. Looking back to the death of Frankenstein's mother, we can see that it marked the violent internal separation of the masculine from the feminine self. A separation demanded by Mary Shelley's society, as it is to some extent by her own. The narrative about gender is a realist narrative which is essential to the complex meaning of the fantastic story. Indeed, it is always the case that fantastic and realist perspectives are interdependent even when one of them is dominant. The critics challenge is always to unearth the subordinated narrative in order to challenge the assumptions of its prominent counterpart. This is the archaeological function of the interpretive story that I want to tell now about the postmodern subject who plays in the virtual world projecting and searching for itself in the mirror of the machine. Reports of its encounters are also fantastic narratives that seem to have little to do with reality. But it is only by bringing the social underpinnings of the relations of virtuality to the surface that we can begin to understand the possibilities of agency, maybe. There are two categories of technological innovation. They're reflected in stories about our personal encounters with machines. One has to do with technologies of knowledge, the other is social media. Interactions with technologies of knowledge are exciting because they tap into deep fantasies of omnipotence. Like Frankenstein, who assumes that his knowledge of science will give him power over life and death. We often assume that through the internet we can gather enough information to control all aspects of our lives. With the help of powerful search engines in addition, of course, to wikipedia, we are able to satisfy our curiosity, support our assumptions and claims, and engage our desires, while also fulfilling our needs. The heady feeling of mastery that gouts of information provide is intensified by the thrilling wizardry of our smart, sensor powered gadgets which have become indispensable, prosthetic devices. But like children who must finally discover the limits of their illusions of autonomy, we learn repeatedly, though never with finality, that information is not knowledge and that the urge for transparency and control produces a ceaseless flow of data that reproduces our insatiable desire for more. Social media tap into another illusion of the fantastic, which is not about omnipotence but concerns the self's relation to itself as another. Like Frankenstein's relation through his monster. On the face of it, social media provide roots for interactions with others. But above all, they create spaces for our interactions with ourselves. Ourselves as if we were others. In the virtual world, the social is often absorbed by the psychological and realism is appropriated by the fantastic. Avatars, profiles, online personae- all are our projections, products of psychic doubling and splitting. These are our uncanny selves who seem full and empty, fictive and real. It is not surprising that our interactions with them leave us sometimes exhilerated at other times, depressed. There is much to be said for the value of experimentation with virtual identities. There is also an important distinction to be made between identities we perform and those we create through the absorption of meanings we associate with others. The question is whether virtual performance can be translated into the deep vitality of identity without the presence of an actual other, who has memory, history, feelings, and desires of its own. And what does it mean to project multiple selves into the virtual world without attempting to link them? What form of subjectivity does this multiplicity produce? And how does it relate to the subjectivity that functions in a place outside of the virtual? In response to these questions, one can argue that social media offer us technologies of connection rather than opportunities for relationship. Facebook is an interesting example, beginning with its name. A book of faces, a catalogue of appearances. In honor to participate in Facebook's virtual world, one has to create, usually with some anxiety, a profile. Which is a version of oneself as other. This imaginary self then friends imaginary others who are represented by profiles of their own. Friend: A noun with a history of rich and complicated meanings. As friend's formed into a verb, which is curiously flat. It denotes a virtual subject imposing a virtual association on a virtual object for the purposes of virtual intimacy. Evidence of connection is supplied by the number of friended others whom one accumulates. And by a corespondance of likes. One problem, as Morosoff has pointed out, is that too many matching likes reduce one's sense of authenticity. Which can only be showed by the addition of data, which leads to a repetition of the loop. Another aspect of Facebook's psycho-social world reflects the paranoid edge of the self-other relation. It is similar to the moment when Frankenstein knows himself to be the object of his created monster's gaze. Subject to, rather than subject of. We invest our profiles avatars and robots with their own aliveness but as our dependence upon them grows, questions about our own reality develop. The urgency intensifies as the tipping point of technology approaches and we become objects of the subject-self of the machine. This is the moment at the extreme. A moment of the technological sublime when the relation of the self and other flips and paranoia yields to surrender. One example of the technological sublime is provided by our interactions with predictive apps. Which are in an advanced stage of development by Google now. These apps are intended to be robotic assistants who eliminate "the unpredictability of human existance." In order for the apps to anticipate and inform us of our every need, we have to provide them access to our memory, our trace of likes, our email, and the histories of our relationships. In response, they will tell us where we should go, what we should do with whom, and when. Seen in a positive light, these apps relieve us of anxieties about our social choices, the management of time, and the unreliability of recollection. Viewed negatively, they enable us to surrender to our paranoia, emptying ourselves out in order to give our substance to the other. Becoming zombies who respond to the insatiable thirst of vampires, so this is an outstanding Gothic story for Halloween. Now at the extreme edge of what we might call the technological sublime, is reported in the New York Times with the title "This Man Is Not A Cyborg, Yet." We find Dmitry Itskov, a 32 year old Russian multimillionaire who conceptualized and runs the Avatar Project. Itskov's Promethean plan is for the mass production of a race of low cost avatars. He has hired David Hanson, the founder of Hanson Robotics, to initiate the project by making a robotic model of his own head, of Itskov's head, to which his consciousness will ultimately be transferred. Although the robot will look and speak like Itskov, 36 motors gauruntee it, it'll be possessed of a better, immortal self, we're told, with an evolved mind, great compassion, and an aversion to pain, war, and death. Itskov is living a monastic life, apparently, to prepare his consciousness for the climactic moment of it's transfer. In an interview with Charlie Rose, which included Hanson's robot of the science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick, there's actually a picture of the robot in the New York Times today, Itskov and Hanson explain that Itskov's robotic other will establish a new model for what it means to be human. Iskov himself will become vistugual, it appears, as he gives himself as other to the machine. In our interview with Charlie Rose, Iscof and Hanson were unreliable narrators like Frankenstein unaware of the social implications of their experiment. Like Alice's tea party, the interview had the feeling of a fantasy, run-a-muck. With Hanson coxing responses from an impenetrable Philip Dick While Rose questioned the two visionaries and the robot with an awkwardness, the Blide his usual urbanity. Although Iscoff's intentions seem extreme, his fantastic story is familiar in its implicit need for a realist narrative to balance it. To make the realist underpinnings a fantastic narrative about the virtual legible, we need to destruct the boundary between online and off, reminding ourselves of the realist narratives that underlie the fantastic story. It is then that we can ask, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of the computer, "Who, beside ourselves, is looking back?" The answer is Big Business and the state, and their motives are greed and power, money and social control From the standpoint of business, the internet is an advertising delivery system, from which giants of technology benefit the most. Google and Facebook are concerned with efficiency and profit, not the ethics of information, production, organization and exchange. Their users are sources and targets of the data that they sell. Consumers, only after, they themselves have been consumed. Facebook, for example, makes that loop explicit when it markets, as endorsements, personal comments that their users post, along with their names and photographs. Entrepreneurial companies also use the Internet to appropriate and monetize education. University administrators are now rushing to sign up from MOOCS: massive, open, online courses, which are also profitable delivery systems of information. Like users of Facebook, clients of online courses are both consumers and consumed. They process the information they are provided, for which they often pay, or they become data. The companies like Coursera and Udacity can sell back to them as assessments and services and to others like advertisers, public relations companies, and perspective employers. Administrators are drawn to the efficiency and economy that online courses promise the reduction of faculty,among them. Faculty see that relational pedagogical strategies, which particularly benefit emerging student populations, are rejected in the favor of the pragmatic approaches that shaped No Child Left Behind. These increased efficiency's produced forms of education that encouraged social accommodation, rather than responsible citizenship. The same mind set is reflected in a new metric of college assessment that has aroused much interested in some opprobrium. Now in addition to the familiar annual ratings of colleges and universities, by US World and News Report, we have the innovation of Pay Scale. This company has responded to concerns about the profitability of education by ranking more then a thousand institutions according to the average earnings of their graduates. Pay Scale has also calculated and ranked the average return on investment for each college and the percentage of graduates who currently hold jobs. Given the standards of their evaluative system, it's not surprising that women's colleges with strong liberal arts traditions, for example, have placed poorly. Wellesley, for example, was rated "7th" by US News and World Report and it's five hundred and sixty second (562), according to pay scale. Bryn Mawr, my own alma mater was in the six hundreds. Engineering schools dominate the rankings and national military academies do particularly well. It appears that STEM, STEM is science, technology, engineering and mathematics. STEM and security now control the imaginary of the culture. While the appropriation of the Internet and its users for Big Business is disturbing, the appropriation of both, for the interest of the security state arouses anxiety on another level all together. As powerful as companies like Facebook and Google may actually be, they're also cogs in the listening and watching machines of the NSA. As documents provided by Edward Snowden have revealed, the agency secretly gained access to virtual all telephone and Internet communications that entered, left and crossed the country. Using PRISM, its domestic surveillance program, the agency has obtained user information of the nine major Internet companies: Microsoft, of course Google, Facebook, Yahoo among them. Although the revelations keep coming, the message is essentially the same. Later, Levison delivered it in an open letter after he closed his small email encryption company, to avoid turning the personal information of his clients over to the NSA. He wrote, "Without congressional action or a strong judicial president, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." There is plenty of evidence to support Levison's statement. In its defense against a class action suit for illegal wiretapping, for example, Google argued that gmail users along with non gmail users who correspond with them, have implicitly consented to the companies spying. By extension, of course, they have also consented to spying by the NSA. Similarly, the government has observed in several contexts that spying on individuals and countries is entirely normal. Just after Snowden's revelations started to appear, the sale of Orwell's novel: 1984, shot up in Amazon 5,000 percent. *audience laughs* It seemed the people suddenly wanted to know what it might feel like to live in a totalitarian state. There was a shared intuition of danger, not of something that is, but of something that could be. At least for a moment, there was a collective sense that there already has been too much. The idea of selves appropriated by the state represents another tipping point, the realist counterpart of the fantastic story of Iscoff's surrender of his consciousness to a robotic head. In recent months, there has been increasing interest in the political implications of strategies employed by a security state that guards its own secrets, while secretly hoarding information about its citizens. Snowden's careful statements, along with reports about the NSA documents he harvested, have finally provoked debates about the rights of citizens to privacy. These debates have been significantly informed by sacrifices made, for example, by Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Snowden himself, on behalf of that particular entitlement. Although the three men are substantially different form one another, in their motives and practices, they're all hackers. And as hackers they share a similar orientation to the Internet. They all work inside of their machines and are not, like most of us, users directed by them. They not only seek versions of themselves in technology, they also participate in efforts to transform it. For this reason, it is not difficult to understand why they would associate personal, political, and technological freedoms with one another. And why they would relate those forms of freedom to privacy in whatever ways they might define it. It is more difficult to understand what privacy means in the larger culture of the virtual, where sharing proliferates and disclosure is always inadequate. Where everything we think and feel is data to be accessed, quantified, traded and stored. How can we make personal claims for privacy when so many of us implicitly assent to being spied on through our cellphones, Internet searches and social media, for purposes that we might not support and might actually oppose? How, in short, can the personal and the political, for most of us, be related? If we surrender privacy in our personal lives, how can we begin to understand its importance and struggle to defend it collectively? The seductions of technology are substantial in their promise of omnipotence and in the possibilities they offer for regressive play. The costs of these seductions are high however, and the highest may be the amnesia they produce about personal and social meanings of privacy. At the physiological level, privacy clears an internal space for reflection, creativity, and becoming. It is there that we encounter our "secret selves" which are sources both of strength and provocative perplexity At the social level, privacy expands to include others we have chosen in relations of collaboration and intimacy. Here, the fruits of self-reflection are shared and effective knowing finds expression. With privacy, groups form, alliances emerge, communities flourish. Without it, there is fragmentation, paranoia, and distrust. To the extent that privacy enables self reflection it provides the foundation on which the work of humanists rests. Philosophy, history, literary and cultural criticism all might be said to emerge from a process of deferral, in which questions are asked, interpretations advanced, personal and collective memories sifted and shaped. In the long pause of self-reflection, thought and feeling interact, words are animated by sound and rearranged by play. Only later, are ideas formed, arguments made, and values defined. Only later are stories written. Humanists have keys to the space, but everyone is able to open the door if they want to find uncertain, ambiguous and fragile truths that are worth discovering, preserving and defending. There is a humanist in Mary Shelley's novel, and it is of course, the monster. He is the terrifying production of Frankenstein, the ambitious but pragmatic scientist who sees the figure of his repression as a threatening and dangerous "other." But as the abandoned monster reflects upon the meanings that his lonely existence suggests, he creates himself as the humanist, that his creator has forcefully denied. There's the sensual love for nature, his joyful acquisition of language, and his frustrated yearning for empathic and reciprocal human relationships, friends, not "friending." For the reading that he does, he learns how to interpret bits and pieces of his experience, pulling them together into a powerful and complex story. At first he studies Frankenstein's minute laboratory notes, which provide him information about the details of his construction, but not the human knowledge that he seeks. From Plutarch Lives of the noble Greeks and Romans and from (Girtisharo a Water) he gets a sense of history and heroic character and feels, what he describes as artor for virtue and appearance. He becomes a man of moral, ethical and intellectual seriousness, and after reading Paradise Lost, he also has a passionate sense of injustice. Through Milton, he locates himself as a betrayed atom and an unwilling Satan. Fulfilling his promise, as Frankenstein cannot, the monster flourishes as a poet, critic, philosopher, and historian. But doomed to utter loneliness by his creator, he becomes the fallen angel, turning against his father and therefore, inevitability against himself. Their deaths are murders and suicides, but there is an important distinction to be made between them. At the end of his life, Frankenstein is represented by Shelley as clinging to his misguided ambition. He says, "I, myself have been blasted in these hopes," he says before his death, "yet another may succeed." The monster lives to mourn the death of his creator calling him a generous, and self-devoted being. Through his ordeal, he has achieved a capacious moral consciousness, which allows him to understand the base nature of the society that made him evil. He also knows himself to be superior to his creator, a realization of Frankenstein's potential. Shelley gives him the last words and the status of a tragic figure on the funeral pyre he has built. The first science fiction written in English turns out to have a humanist as its hero. [applause] Thank you. [applause] So I'd be happy, of course, to have questions, discussions, responses... Yes? [inaudible speaking] "I have a question regarding the concept of social networking sites like Facebook 'where people willingly give up reams of information about themselves that they never would dare to "in times past, and the concept of the panopticon." Yeah, that's an extremely interesting question. I think it is extremely interesting, and the difference is clear, right? The panopticon is not what people chose. It was a punishment, effectively. It was part of a punishment imposed upon them, what you're talking about... is a choice... to give up all information and to be seen by whoever wishes to see us. It's a great comparison. Others? Yes, would you just wait for the microphone? "I don't know, just at the very end I was wondering where Mary Shelley figures into your analysis, "There's Frankenstein, there's the monster, and then there's the author, Mary Shelley and I..." "I'm just wondering if you can figure her into the story?" Yeah -- thank you, Susan... Of course I have a very long story about that, but... The short version is... that Mary Shelley deeply identified, of course, with the monster. And...saw herself very much in that position in relation, on a personal level. To Shelley, her husband... but also in a general way, I think, given the gender division of labor in her society... So...I think she deeply loved the monster. And the ways in which she creates the monster, the language that she gives him... The humanity she gives him, I think, sort of marks, very much, where her own sympathies are. Others? Yes? "Would you say something about the similarities between the Frankenstein story and... "current efforts for...genetically engineered human beings?" Yeah, I think that implicitly, I'm trying also to address that, I think it's another effort on our part... to create versions of ourselves, I mean, it's an extraordinarily gothic story on that level, right? The desire...I mean, we are never enough! We are not even enough, doubled, for ourselves. But we always, always, always need to be projecting, creating versions of ourselves And of course, the search that you see in Iscoff... Which is the search for immortality... And when he talks about transferring his consciousness, it is so he can live forever. Yeah. Thank you. I can't quite see if there are others -- there's a hand. Back there, in the middle. "Can you say a little more about how you think this..." "invasion, or abrogation of privacy that is this massive collection of data..." "that's going on...is a real threat to that process of humanistic discovery and inquiry that you described?" I think... I think that what privacy is... is not only the freedom from being spied on, being looked at... It's also freedom to. And that was I tried to talk about a little bit in my paper, that... one needs a kind of privacy without, in order to have a kind of privacy within. Or... If one has -- if one creates that privacy inside, which I think people do under extraordinary pressure... And in situations...of radical being spied upon, it's a kind of battle which cannot be, sort of, collaboratively shared. I mean...there's not a separation, it seems to me at least, and I'd be interested to know whether you disagree. Between a kind of... giving one's self up to being seen and preserving a part of one's self... that one can only see one's self. I mean, something of that sort. Yes? "I am in such deep agreement with so much of what you say, and yet there's a kind of doubling... "or resistance, specifically in the sense that one becomes data and consumed as commodity, "before one can even engage in the purchasing of commodities, and that this goes to every detail... "of... one emits data consciously and unconsciously..at an extraordinary energy cost to the planet." "You and I talked about the carbon footprint of all this, the carbon footprint of cloud computing, for example." "But. Simultaneously, there's a kind of irrelevance to that in the sense that..." "the sorts of uses that I experience and that others I live with experience, with each other that loops..." "virtual relationality with face-to-face relationality with travels of various kinds, through imaginative and material sights of many kinds..." "and a kind of generativity culturally, and productions of kinds of subjectivity and community that are both similar to and different from..." "the subject that you began your talk with. That there's some kinds of emergent being with and accompanying each other..." "that go on in these media forcefully, even while they are productive of vast wealth that is then against one's self." "There are many kinds of doublings going on, including forcefully a profound sensual relationality with other people..." "whose profiles you never read and who never read yours, and whom you don't 'friend', but who... "either already are friends, or who craft kinds of kinships, friendships, so forth, so on... of quite...complex and sensitive kind." "In many genres, I've written many stories that are some of my best writing.." "Including in the senses that you mean that as a psychoanalytic and literary critic..." "For and with friends... and I don't hear that dimension in what you're saying, and I "know you have that in your teaching, and I want to hear more about how you do that." [laughs] Donna, you must be kidding! [more laughter] "I'm not, actually!" [laughs] I mean, you've just told the wonderful story, or series of stories and I think what I'm trying to do is to tell a story. There's no way, that I see it, as a full story, as an adequate story, as the only story... It is one kind of story, and it's a story that I think I've come up with, I'm emerged with... As a result of perceiving what I call in my title, "the dissolution of the humanities." So...this is a story very much from a humanist's point of view, and it's about those... You know, that's all I can say, I don't have a further response, except to say... that you write your stories all the time, and they're wonderful stories, and they are very different from this story. As well as also somewhat connected to it. Maybe one more... question? So one here, and then one there. "I'm curious...it seems you've talked about this ingrained nature to be... "lusting after technology, which we all are kind of a part of. I was wondering if you could maybe shed some light "like...what the end -- I don't know, it obviously is in all of us, and we're here discussing that right now..." "But like...what is that end result, like is there some greater force at work, we're all earthlings here, you know" "On this, kind of, quest of being human, but...is there some reason we have this -- we're the only species it would seem, that has this..." "innate lust to like, get the latest... progress, or whatever progress is. But I just kind of was wonder if you had any thoughts on that." Yeah...and that's a big question, and... I don't know that I have any answer, we're always pushing forward, right? At every moment, I think, people look around them and think how different this moment is from the last. And... of course we do think, "This is terrible, what's happening now! Look at what we're losing." And we're often more aware of what we're losing than of what we have. And I think that Donna's question was also, to some extent, about that. Where's the story about these other good things? And there are... of course, such stories. But a story sort of about the teleology of it all, where it's all going? That's another story. But I, it's not mine. But thank you for the question. I think we have one last question... "I hesitate to approach this, but you touched on it..." "Would you say, is there a gender divide here? "In...terms of the vision for the future of this technology?" "Versus...the durability of a humanistic outlook. Is there a gender divide -- is it a spectrum? Is it..." "Cautionary on both sides?" Yes, thank you for the question. I... It was very interesting to me...how relatively small a part gender actually has in this paper. And given Michael's very generous introduction, it's clear to, sort of, many of you... that much of my work has been feminist. I think my view has become increasingly complicated in those ways... And there's no way that I think I could say "yes, there's a gender component," It doesn't feel to me part of this argument, in an important way, I think that... It was a very important part of the argument for Shelley. And certainly we can see the ways in which the humanities are "coded feminine," and the ways in which coding feminine of the humanities is part of... the dismissal of the humanities. I was just thinking, actually this week... Years ago, many students had double majors here, and one of the majors was women's studies... and the other was often in the sciences or social science. And their parents only knew about the other major, they didn't know they were majoring in women's studies... And I was just thinking this week, "I'll bet that's true about the humanities now," that's their double major that their parents don't know about. Because how are they going to survive in the world? So, I think that part of my story... that's I think the gendered part of the story. Okay, thank you. [applause]