Slippery subjects: bodies, texts and technologies

Guy Merchant

Photographs reproduced with the kind permission of Eric Pickersgill.

I want to start with the photographs of Eric Pickersgill. Pickersgill is a

young American photographer whose collection called Removed - in
which peoples mobile devices are simply erased from the picture - has
catapulted him into instant stardom. Aside from the fact that this is a very
familiar and contemporary story of rapid gain in media traction, theres
also something rather interesting going on here, in the photographs
themselves. The images are undoubtedly powerful. Actually I think theyre
quite beautifully composed, but the distracted, perhaps rather unhappy
look on the subjects faces, accentuated by the lighting and the moody
black and white tones suggest something else. Something like alienation
or dis-connection. And interestingly in that veritable oracle of cultural
commentary, the Daily MaiI, we are told that they show how addicted
weve become (Tweedy, 2015). But Pickersgill himself is more
circumspect. Theres more nuance when he claims that:
The perception and expectations of social engagement are being
altered by the ability for users of this technology to connect with
anyone anywhere. The dividing of attention between those who are
physically near you and those who are not is widely debated.
(Pickersgill, nd)
Two points to start with. Firstly, I think we could probably say the same
about print literacy or at least print literacy in the last hundred years or
so of its history - connecting with anyone anywhere may be a bit of
hyperbole (lets not fuss over that), but print literacy, just like digital
literacy, certainly does allow for communication at a distance; and then
dividing our attention is hardly new: Youve always got your head in a
book. as my mother used to put it. I heard her, and then again I didnt
hear her. I was too distracted. She didnt have my full attention, whatever
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that is. Secondly though, a question, and this is my central concern - is

there something distinctive happening around technology, that invites a
re-think of Language-Literacy-Identity, the concern of this conference? And
if so how do Pickersgills photographs speak to this? Are we somehow
different, trying to make sense of ourselves in this post-modern, postcapitalist, post-referendum world? Are we locked into a world of technoconsumerism in which Facebook defines how we interact, or covering over
some sort of existential anxiety with a catalogue of selfies? How do we
make sense of all this - and, of course, where is literacy in all this?
When Julia Davies and I wrote Web 2.0 for Schools (2009) we included a
vignette about literacy in everyday life, inspired in fact by David Bartons
observation that people act within a textually mediated world (Barton,
2001:100). It went like this:
The commuter train is full there is no option but to stand. To either
side of me there are facing seats around shared tables. On one side
a young man is sorting through old train tickets, talking across the
table to his friend opposite. Next to him, someone has started work
already, entering figures into a spreadsheet on a laptop. The
conversation the young man is engaged in draws to a close as his
friend pulls a book from his bag and a pencil to mark the text. The
book is The Discourse of Design. Next to the reader is a young
woman. She is texting her friends. Looking down I notice that she is
commenting on how the train is rammed, she was lucky to get a
seat.
(Davies & Merchant, 2009:12)
I thought it painted a reasonable picture of everyday life and how texts
(digital and non-digital) are closely woven into how we live, work, maintain
social relations and so on. Maybe if all material, texts and tools had been
erased (or removed as in Pickersgills photographs) it would all look rather
different. They might all look sad who knows?
Earlier this year I found myself making similar observations again on a
train to Manchester. I noted:

Reading from a tablet whilst making notes on an A4 pad with green

and black pens
Reading a novel on a Kindle, balanced on handbag
Working on a spreadsheet on a chunky black laptop
Displaying an e-ticket to the inspector on a smartphone
Looking at Derbyshire whilst listening to music through headphones
Reading a paperback
Working with music software (wearing Dr Dre headphones)

I dont want to make any exaggerated claims about this. In fact, I just use
it to say that over seven or eight years a trend seems to be continuing.
Its normal. Our devices are part of who we are and its getting ever more
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difficult to separate them out. Perhaps they cant be so easily removed

and maybe those commentators who argue that we are already cyborgs
are right after all we are human-machine hybrids. But thats too far, too
soon - maybe we should step back to the identity theme.
Why I was wrong
Around the same time that the original vignette was composed, the Web
2.0 for Schools time, Julia and I were already seasoned observers of digital
culture. From our work on blogging (Davies & Merchant, 2007) and our
adventures in photo-sharing on Flickr (Davies, 2007; Merchant, 2010), we
were struck by the ways in which these relatively new spaces provided
opportunities for identity performance. Lasch (1980) aside, there was
relatively little noise about narcissism back then. And anyway many
people didnt really know what a blog was, but we observed that there
was a lot of textualising the self, blurring private and public, selfpromotion, or just showing off. To account for this, we turned to Giddens
(1991) and his idea that identity is about our capacity to keep a particular
narrative going and to produce an on-going story of the self (p54). New
digital spaces seemed to be an important arena for performing the self.
That this might all take place against a backcloth of commodity
capitalism, or lead to a sort of commodification of the self was not part of
the critique then, but as academics working in an increasingly marketised
system we might just reflect on how all that is beginning to shape our
professional lives in an insidious fashion. But thats another problem.
The problem at that time was how to unscramble the frantic activity of
posting, the displays of conspicuous consumption the urge to
communicate who I am to the world, or at least to that part of it that was
the imagined audience. Thinking about this and with reference to the way
in which children did similar things in a sequence of digital projects
undertaken with co-conspirators, I thought I could discern two different
kinds of identity performance. I referred to these as anchored and
transient (Merchant, 2006). The former were tethered to wider social
categories (such as race, class and gender), whereas the latter drew on
interests that might be more susceptible to change (popular culture,
fandom and so on). It worked for a while, but it really didnt hold water.
There were three main reasons for this. Firstly, it was based on an
assumption that anchored identities had a certain fixity and that they
exist in an anterior sense, ready to be taken up, being comprised of
relatively stable bundles of behaviour, (think a wardrobe of clothes, an
outfit)- in fact, rather like some interpretations of Foucauldian
subjectivities. In their collaborative work Deleuze and Guattari (see 1987,
for example), railed against this, and the baton was then taken up by
Massumi who wrote
structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that
explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules.
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(Massumi, 2002:27)
Secondly, it failed to account for any sort of interplay for instance
between popular culture and gender, fandom and class, and so on. A big
mistake. And then finally, as a way of looking it was limited. It was a way
of looking at texts and one that glossed over how children and adults
came together with each other, in particular places and particular times,
with particular feelings, histories in fact all the complexities that make
meaning making interesting! In a way Id enacted my own version of
removed, except in this case Id erased everything except the text on
screen.
It seems to me now that we can only figure identity in the ways in which it
momentarily coalesces with everything else by that I mean places,
moods, texts, other people, and all the other stuff, including technologies,
that happens to be around. This is not a way of glossing over the political,
in the end it is an argument for more stories. I side with Jeanette
Winterson, who wrote in response to the Brexit debacle: Inequality is not
a law of nature, like gravity. We make it up as we go along. (Winterson,
2016). And we make it up through the stories we tell, and the stories we
enact. The same goes for this language-literacy-identity issue - how we
look at it or how we story it matters, because in doing that new things can
come to light, new possibilities emerge and we can be more attentive,
perhaps, to what is removed in various discourses, including our own.
Dreamcatchers and allegories a slight diversion

The Ojibway People, a Native American tribe of the Great Lakes, would tie
sinew strands in a web stretched across a small circular or tear-shaped
frame of willow typically two or three inches in diameter - as a charm to
protect sleeping children. They hung these charms or dreamcatchers from
a loop above the babys cradle to ensnare bad dreams but also to let
through good ones. Good dreams were believed to be the source of
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wisdom and possibility and they would slide down the feather at the
bottom to fall into the babys head. Of course dreamcatchers are
everywhere now. I can remember my own children making them on
summer camp when they were young. Someone gave me one once. I
didnt know what to do with it. But the dreamcatcher works for me as a
useful metaphor for an approach that Cathy and I have adopted and Im
still learning, and developing today.
I start from the idea that particular configurations of discursive, material
and semiotic practices, flow in and out of the lives of individuals and
communities, and that they temporarily mesh with the ideational and
affective trajectories at play. Its a view of literacies as an emergent
assembling an idea that Cathy and I have developed elsewhere. To
evoke this fluidity, this multiplicity we think we need different approaches,
and the stories, the stacking stories we are working with could be thought
of as dreamcatchers. We weave web of things we can grasp, that can be
fairly easily told, and then there is the slippery, ephemeral stuff the
removed element, elusive but, to us at least, so important.
Or to look at it another way, we could think of allegory a story that
points to a hidden meaning. Again, something that is in some ways
removed, but nevertheless present. In condensing the complexity of
people-meaning-making as an emergent phenomenon into a story or
story-fragment, we just might be able to evoke surprise, difference,
something new. Law & Singleton suggest that
knowing is as much about feeling and sensing and smelling
difference, as it is about telling or drawing. It is as much about
appreciating the textures of performance, of reading between the
lines, as it is about the lines themselves. It is as much about evoking
as it is about describing.
(Law & Singleton, 2003: 251)
So now three of these dreamcatcher stories (allegories seems far too
grand a word), and some reflections on what is presented, what is perhaps
removed and what might be evoked.
Three dreamcatcher stories
Story 1 from Boxes of Poison
When Cathy and I started to look at children engaged in classroom-based
virtual play, we stumbled on the idea of simply setting the accounts from
fieldnotes, video and chatlogs alongside one another (see Burnett &
Merchant, 2014). Not to enact some sort of triangulation, although that
might have been in our minds at the planning stage, but really to explore
the connections and disconnections between our stories the gaps, the
holes, what got left out as well as what got included. Working from the
idea that no story is really the whole story and that in any account
something has been removed we tried to look at how different elements
were assembling in virtual play through multiple stories that tangle with
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and interrupt each other showing that there is so-much-more out there
(Tsing, 2015:viii).
Again as before excitement at seeing the tally of visitors. Some
uncertainty about role encouraging avatars to go in the right
direction. 15 avatars are in dashing all over the place, falling in the
sewage. Chaos as they get used to the navigation controls. I give
occasional tips make your way to a ladder; over here; click on the
door etc. They dont seem curious about who I am (but maybe they
are in the classroom). Im also very interested that my view which is
so partial just shows them flailing around and then eventually
finding their way into the town square, Its almost as if their real
voices are muted. I imagine that the classroom is quite noisy...as
they exchange tips or maybe express frustration.
The speed at which I feel I have to act is interesting. I feel a bit like a
guide. They begin asking me questions. I feel the need to show
them places. Its a bit like being a parent on a school trip. Not quite
sure what the teacher had mind, but the activity of the kids always
pulls you off course.
I have a technical frustration. Im trying to gather screenshots as I
go along, but because of the way Ive configured my fly function,
each time I do a screenshot I start to levitate. I find I cant stop, so I
have to quit the world (disappear), then re-enter and teleport to
where some of the kids (avatars) are. I wonder if they find this a bit
perplexing. Some tell me to stop flying. I explained this later to
them in our Skype conference

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Were up by the vaccination tents for some time. I have a screen

shot here. The positional geography really interests me. Of course
this is just a product of my point of view, but the avatars remain in
that sort of configuration for quite some time. It is almost as if a
particular social space is emerging. Occasionally an avatar will go
streaking by! I go (slowly) up the hill to the Mansion House. I notice
that they follow. I thought it was completely sealed off, so Im
surprised to be able to get in. They are behind and seem to take a
little longer to get through the gate. We stand around by the door
again in the same sort of social space with the same represented
distance between us.
Theyve gone very quiet, standing still. In a panic I text the teacher,
fearing that the world has crashed. He tells me theyve gone out to
play.

How does literacy-technology-identity assemble in this account?

What is removed?

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Story 2 from the Macro Lens

John Law (2004) in reflecting on how we as researchers enact certain ways
of seeing and certain ways of being uses the term method assemblage to
describe this complex entanglement:
the enactment of a bundle of ramifying relations that generate
representations in-here1and represented realities out-there2.
(Law, 2004: 161).
How we talk about our own processes of meaning-making is an important
part of research in the social sciences, and also, of course, in the study of
literacies. Reflecting on how we enact and engage with empirical
materials opens all sorts of possibilities. Chris Bailey (2016) for instance,
has been doing some fascinating work using comic strips and this sits in a
growing body of creative and multimodal approaches (see for example
Smith, Hall & Sousanis, 2015). In my own modest way, and influenced in
no small part by object-orientated-ontology (eg: Bogost, 2014), Ive been
experimenting with imagining the stories that technology might tell and,
of course, what further questions that might bring, particularly to that
human/non-human aspect of assembling.

First a bit of essential background. When I upgraded to an iPhone6, I

realized it took better photographs than my digital camera. It was Spring,
Im a keen gardener, so I started taking close-ups of plants and flowers
and posting them on Instagram. The photographs drew a few comments,
including one from a friend who asked me what lens I was using. To
abbreviate the story, that was how I was introduced to the world of clip-on
lenses. Perhaps my macro lenses felt like this:
Yes, she told him about me. How it would be better if we were close.
He knew. At first there was nothing. I was just waiting. Waiting for
him to make the first move. It seemed like forever. And then he
pointed at me. He got it. We clicked. I travelled all night in the dark
in the back of a van just to be with him. It was morning when I
arrived on his doorstep. He quickly brought me into the house. I was
opening to him. His hand was on my zip. He sees my twelve and my
1 in-here is shorthand for statements, data and depictions (the sort of
things we produce and publish)
2 out-there is shorthand for natural phenomena, processes and so on.
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twenty four.and thats it. And now we can always be close, living
happily ever after, unless he loses me or unless he forgets me which
he will, in time, inevitably.
How does literacy-technology-identity assemble in this account?

What is removed?

Story 3 from Maker Circles field notes

Most of my working life has involved either teaching, working with
teachers or working with those people who work with teachers. In the 21st
Century Literacies Project a further collaboration with Cathy (Burnett &
Merchant, 2015), were experimenting with the stacking stories approach
described above in order to capture some of the meetings were holding.
Abandoning the idea of conventional fieldnotes, one aspect of this is just
attempting to story what happens. Heres part of a story of one such
meeting:
We meet, we exchange stories, we hear about Eve's plans, we hear
about Jane's plans. We think our way forward, and in thinking our
way forward new possibilities open out. Like the telescopic ladder,
only a lot more so. A ladder stretching well beyond the fire alarm
system just behind Jane that a man in overalls was attending to (for
our benefit, I assume). We break off in admiration of the ladder. Well
Eve and I were admiring it anyway. Eve was thinking it might solve
some storage problems at home. I was wondering if they'd reach the
windows upstairs. Even though we pay for them to be done, it's
never quite enough, is it? Smeared. A bit like the screen on Eve's
laptop.
The laptop comes into our meeting on several occasions. A bit like
an unruly pet. 'Sorry about the laptop' Eve says, and its little silver
lid pops up and down at various points during the morning. Just to
my right and through the smears I can make out Eve's screensaver.
A blurry image of her two lovely daughters (that must have been a
really quick thought, because in truth it could just as well have been
a random picture from the internet). But anyway the laptop is
eventually pressed into service to record our conversation - perhaps
some snippets of other people talking, background noise, an
eruption of noisy men, Eve unleashing her carbonated water and so
on and so forth. Laptops are scrupulous observers of sound in
certain frequencies and within range. And of course this one finds
details of conferences and grants quicker than you can think of
them. It's well behaved, the laptop, undemanding - it didn't seem to
want its battery topping up. There were no pings, alerts or random
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notifications. We like well-trained machines.

How does literacy-technology-identity assemble in this account?

What is removed?
So what?
These stories foreground certain things and not others. We might imagine
how other stories, other points of view might highlight different episodes,
different interactions and different affective intensities. But writing them is
an experiment, an experiment in thinking differently about those things
that all to quickly become familiar. As Koro-Ljunberg & Ulmer (2016:100)
say of their work this writing is an experiment that extends and
challenges rather than confirms or builds. The writing gets its energy from
departures, and it operates through surprise, movement and the
unexpected. Written accounts are by their very nature a representation of
what we see, feel and think and in this way they help to create a reality.
And of course when we write up an account from fieldnotes and other
sources there is always an element of crafting that is involved just to
make our data readable. The challenge is to avoid editing out
uncertainties, the complexity of affect, and things that are on the
periphery of our attention.
The various ways in which we have talked about new literacies continue to
offer rich insights into changing practices of meaning making in the
contemporary world. Yet many of the key concepts we use such as text,
context, event, and even literacy itself seem to have become less clear
over time they have become slippery. We cant quite grasp them. Recent
work that has brought poststructuralist and post-humanist perspectives to
bear on the business of everyday meaning making adds further
complication to this, by drawing attention to what has been left out in
earlier accounts, and challenging us to take account of embodiment,
affect and multiplicity. In this session I have looked at meaning making in
terms of specific configurations of discursive, material and semiotic
practices. Using a range of empirical materials, I have tried to draw
attention to how meaning flows in and out of the lives of individuals and
communities, temporarily meshing with their ideational and affective
trajectories. I suggest that this sort of approach opens up new possibilities
for research, and can help us think differently about language and literacy
seeing identity performances as folded into an emerging present and not
in some way removed from them.
And so, back to Eric Pickersgill. These are not to be confused with the
real whatever that is, they are framed, composed and crafted. Like
method assemblages they are enacted. And when I look again, I realize
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that part of what his photographs are evoking is what is absent. Part, and
it is only part, of what we do is imagine the devices that are/were there
and also the movement, the interaction, the liveliness theyre all frozen
out. And thats part of what were getting at with stories, trying to point to
what is hiddenand what is possible when people, technologies and
literacies entangle (with everything else). That and whatever slips down
the dreamcatcher for you.

References
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