CRASSH

Infrastructure shadows and permeates our bodies in action, interaction, and history.  These shadows take the form of absences and presences encoded by all types of information technology - which are not, themselves, yet considered institutionally.  As the body of shadows accumulate (in the form of blogs, electronic traces of many sorts, the aggregation of information about individuals), little in the way of moral or sentimental order guides their proliferation.  Documents and traces follow, in ever-thickening ways, nearly every domain of life:  book-buying, health, where one lives, how standard one may be or no be (think of the simple choice of meals one has aboard an airline, such as vegetarian or the default buyer of meat.  Nothing prevents the airlines from selling their list to direct order firms and publications that cater to vegetarians.)  As an aggregate social form, these shadows of the self are under-theroized.  

Many concerns have emerged about privacy at the first level, and much has been written about this.  Less exists, however, about the existential and political ways of life engendered by the volume and entanglement of multiple infrastructures.  Many of these traces are invisible until challenged, yet they form potent constraints and possibilities for action for each individual and aggregation in society. Take for example, the notion of residual categories in multiple systems of information/representations (for example, ‘none of the above’; ‘not elsewhere categorized’; ‘not otherwise specified’; ‘other’). These are ubiquitous in all working classification systems, but where they are, how they appear, and how they are used change historically and politically.  Their presence also reflects how we conceive of technical descriptions of nature: something always escapes formal description.

Design and technical concerns about how residual categories should be used in classification systems have had two main axes – statistical (that is, how not to lump all the other categories in one place) and incidental (that is, the instance when an especially dangerous item, person, or event – even one – should be closely examined).   This talk adds a third axis:  the point of view of an individual or group classed as other, forming a lived residual category. This talk will examine the analytic power of combining these three axes, and how we might use these shadow bodies to think about new forms of subjectivity.