Preface Politics of Gaze academica edu.docx

Y.Ibrahim (Forthcoming, 2019) ‘The Politics of Gaze: The Image Economy Online’. Routledge: London Preface I didn’t get to see my mother on the day she died. I heard my father narrate her passing moment over the phone – me in London and him in Singapore. ‘She wasn’t her usual self today’, he had said earlier. She woke up sluggish and didn’t feel fit to be moved from her bed. As a main carer he noticed the smallest of changes in her and he concluded she didn’t look herself. Is it a stroke? No, it can’t be – she’s picking lint off her clothes they surmised and left it at that. But as the light went out in Singapore and without saying goodbye my mother slipped away gasping for air. How do you react when you lose someone before she is gone? We spoke regularly but she spoke the same words, the same sentences and in the same order. Never a variation. As Mama receded into the inner recesses of her mind, we saw her only through her illness. Her dementia had carved out her personality claiming it as its own. From a reserved shy woman, Mama had become a stranger acquiring new behaviours, losing her inhibitions, displaying a tendency to be extremely tactile and craving sugar and sweets throughout the day. The proud woman who defended her family fiercely had become a clingy child needing constant care and copious amounts of ice cream to placate her submission. But Mama in the sepia-tinged image of her seated regally is untouched by old age and dementia. Images haunt, disrupting reality without completely relinquishing it. The visible, invisible, phantoms and ghosts traverse through photographs reclaiming them as memento mori. Like Roland Barthes grieving for this mother through her imagery, my mother in the image of her younger self is haunting yet pristine. When I point that I’m not in the picture, she would assure me I was. Under the soft folds of her saree she is expecting me, her third child. This photograph was a rare occasion to communicate my parents’ mobility and civility. The taking of their image in a studio with props, in itself would be an occasion. From their generation of rare and occasional posed images, to mine filled with kodak camera and home mode imagery of films which needed to be processed, to my daughters’ instant ‘click’ generation of non-stop digital imagery through the smartphone, image in its immaterial modes was creeping into our ‘second-hand’ lives with ferocious intensity. It would start to embed itself in every experiential moment and the everyday. Photographs would no longer be just special moments of capture defining our lived reality through scopic encounters. They would saturate our every encounter building immaterial repositories which would bear testimony to our acts and deeds. It will move into the banal and the routine while connecting us into wider ecologies of watching and capture, pledging our lived lives to unstable immaterial modes where the gaze of the stranger is not a strange encounter, but an integral part of our transacted lives online. In the process as ‘generative’ bodies, producing content and image we will recode our vision of the wider world through a ‘click economy’ where new forms of voyeurism, commodification of lives will emerge through relentless watching and non-stop capture. This book traverses through and ruminates about a society and humanity in which images underpin our modes of communication, validation and authentication. A society which looks out on others through a screen culture and reciprocally, our human activities, the trails of data they produce will be abstracted into a big architecture of data and content capture online. Mobile technologies tightly embedded onto our bodies will seek to transplant vision while morphing our biorhythms requiring us to maintain other worlds of communication and transaction while living and existing in physical modes. The glare and gaze of others will invoke new forms of visibility, censure and exhibitionistic tendencies. A moral economy convening through our immaterial modes of image production and consumption, aided through technologies which transplant our vision through screens. This constant glare of others will swathe us with new degrees of attention and vulnerabilities. As we watch and consume the world through images, we are watched by others, known and unknown. This I term the ‘glasshouse society’ where we are stripped of private spaces. It has produced a naked humanity were image culture will reclaim the material body as immaterial offering online. The glare, light, shadows, reflections produced by the glasshouse society will play with our senses creating a sensorium which will seduce us into converting life into image, as a mode of existence. This ‘naked’ posthuman will be both part of the back-end operations of secret algorithms. but also an entity who will trade herself as data to transact online. The glasshouse society will renegotiate our sense of self, our inhibitions, the boundaries between private and public. In leveraging on our curiosity over others, we will occupy a hybrid subject-object positionality which the glasshouse society will abstract and extract relentlessly. The gaze of the glasshouse society is not unidirectional, neither is it bi-directional in its flow. Its rhizomatic assemblage will press visibility into the unknown, play with our sense of openness and transparency while making us feel that more of the hidden should be pledged to the architecture of watching and capture. It captures our curiosity to consume the world and the wider world commodifying us seamlessly in the architecture of the glasshouse society. The glare of this constant gaze and its consequences of watching and capturing our lives are not completely evident in our time. As algorithms co-mingle us and enmesh us with data, we will be tightly entangled with wider sets of competing agenda online, where we are commodified and transacted without being in a position to unravel the bind of our complicity with risks and opportunities which await. Despite our constant modes of converting our material lives into the immaterial in the digital economy, I also pledge this collection of work to the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) academics. Our academic contributions remain embodied in an ‘enlightened’ academy, judged through our pigmentation. Like the glasshouse which manifests existing biases and prejudices, despite its constant light and glare, and possibilities to invoke gaze and scrutiny, the gaze of the academy is streamed through a coloured glass. I hope the tint lifts. Yasmin Ibrahim 4