I've had a few days to reflect on this project, and I'd like to take another stab at explaining my thoughts.
In all of this, I think I'm confusing event, rhetoric, the subject, and circulation, although I'm sure they overlap in a lot of important ways.
Did I depict--not a great verb here, I know--an event? I think there is a strong reason to think that I was on the right track to thinking an event. I say this because, based off of what Casey has said in class, my personal definition of an event would be: a glitch that shows movement between networks. For example, parrots have been known to order stuff using Amazon's Alexa. That would be an event, as I am defining it here. Alexa is supposed to work in a certain, human network; it's only supposed to take orders from humans. But a bird can mimic a human place an order too. A bird placing an order on an Alexa is a glitch; an actant in a non-human network acts in a human network. For this project, I tried to show movement between networks, but I don't think I did. I think I selected a topic in which such movement takes place, but I don't think I showed the movement. To be clear, though, Trump saying he wants to shoot immigrants in the legs in front of an alligator-and-snake-filled moat arises in one network (news), but it is soon recategorized into a different network (satire).
As I write these words, I think I realize what the problem was. The networks are too similar, if not the same. But that's kind of interesting, actually. News and satire aren't in a different network. They're in the SAME network. Hu. So, I should have done something more like the parrot and Alexa example, since the non-human/human divide--but isn't it not really a divide, though? Isn't that Latour's point? The division itself is an artifact of culture?--gets me at two different networks for real.
That being said, I don't know how I would have written an event text for something like the parrot and the Alexa. I therefore think I understand the concept of what we were supposed to do--show an intra-network movement, where what you use to "show" that movement isn't separate from or an example of that movement, that is, where there's no distance between the thing that's moving and the thing that's showing the movement--I just can't think of a way to do that. I can point examples of the concept of intra-network translations, In other words, even if I were to have created an event text that got the concept right--and I don't think I did--that analysis would still lack performativity--in the same way that the Alexa parrot example lacks performativty. It's just an example. And an event text is not an example of an event; it's an immutable mobile. Neither the event text nor the event itself could exist without the other. I didn't do that. Next time!
To conclude, I'll also note that I had another ah ha moment while reading Jennifer Gabrys this weekend (11/2-->11/3). A sensor is a subject. But a sensor is a subject in the same way that one portal game augments the original Google Maps database. The Google Maps database is not like a piece of hardware. In a way, it is a piece of hardware. A Google Maps database is on the same footing as a wifi router (A. Mackenzie), that is, because you can reconfigure that router to do perform different actions, and that reconfiguration is the "qualitative change" of which Boyle and Rivers spoke in the "augmentation" piece (87). Now, this reconfiguring is, shall we say, interesting, because it begs the question of who is acting (Lundberg & Gunn). Who's moving the Ouija board? Is it the database/hardware itself? or the designers? Is the agency distributed? Or is it still the human's agency? albeit mediated through the hardware? In this new paradigm of rhetoric, tinkering with a sensor--qualitatively changing it so that it can do something new--is SYMMETRICAL with that sensor's new capacity. And in that way, as Gabrys says, there's something special about the activity of tinkering, provided it doesn't become fetishistic; that tinkering is an exceptional subjectivity (Agamben; Jenny Rice): it's on the outside of the inside of that sensor, maybe.
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