This academic exploration began with the following reflection:
“I want to learn to recognize and talk about differences. What is to appropriate? How to respectful make use of others knowledge? Other (hi)story? The reflection over these questions, I believe, can help in the design of technological devices that respect the self and the other”[2]
Through the process I kept pondering on this and along the way I discovered and initiated a first a proximation to its resolving. The audiovisual element this text complements is the result of a combination of technologies (e.g. music, edition software, images, emotions) and thoughts. I want to highlight three songs that influenced the creative and analytical process from the start: Maggot Brain by Funkadelic; Family affair by Sly and the family Stone; and Crease by Funkadelic. Let me briefly comment on the last two. Family affair touched my heart and it connected me with the s*it that goes around in the world, but at the same time it made me feel the love and care of my mother. Crease, was a burst of information that I needed to share.
Maggot Brain just blew my mind. It is my first ever heard Funkadelic complete song and album. I usually don’t pay attention to lyrics (yes, terrible!) and just go with the flow, so the song was a perfect match. The “funkier” songs are more difficult for me to absorb, but my journey through the P-funk reminded me how powerful lyrics can be. For example:
“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit”
(Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, 1972)
These initial words just got my mind working and triggered many ideas and thoughts that I can’t communicate through a common text. However, music and images were my best attempt to make sense of what I was encountering with. The playlists that I had been curating blended with the readings and discussions inside the course and suddenly I felt as if I was being born again; this time Mother Earth was inviting me to learn through funk. This is the story that blends in the audiovisual material, one conceptual that opens a discussion on new notions of ontology (can funk be real?), epistemology (where can I study funk?), and methods (how can I study funk?) and a personal revelation of how one could study science, technology and society in a comprehensive way.
I wanted to share a message with whoever wanted to listen. Through the course I once more understood the complexities of time and humanity, while some of us want to act and change, we have to be aware that we all have different development processes. For topics as complex as gender, race, slavery, or colonialism we need to take our appropriate space and time, we need to go through catharsis. We need to encounter our past, deal with it in the ways we feel like it, forgive others and more importantly forgive ourselves, but then move on. This is what I decided to do in the audiovisual piece, to send a message of change and positive action; for that I mixed audio and video but more importantly I rephrased some text and quotes for them to be read in a different way, but without conflicting with what I understood was the meaning of the original author (or at least I hope so).
What I learned through this process will influence my current (and future) professional life. It helped me recognized the importance of studying technologies from different perspectives and to be aware that different classes will have different understandings, interests and meaning of technology, all important in their own context – we can’t just put people that we don’t understand in boxes that simplify the richness of a human being. More specifically, in understanding money as a socio-technical arrangement I have to look into the inputs that different actors bring to the table and the importance that all of them have in the project. Aspects as the coordination and doing of a weekly market meeting and the use of a monetary application to control others’ behaviors, co-existed with academic ideas of monetary design and economic frames. This is the current answer to the initial reflection, but it is just the first step of a long process, a process now entangled with Funk.
“I want to learn to recognize and talk about differences. What is to appropriate? How to respectful make use of others knowledge? Other (hi)story? The reflection over these questions, I believe, can help in the design of technological devices that respect the self and the other”[2]
Through the process I kept pondering on this and along the way I discovered and initiated a first a proximation to its resolving. The audiovisual element this text complements is the result of a combination of technologies (e.g. music, edition software, images, emotions) and thoughts. I want to highlight three songs that influenced the creative and analytical process from the start: Maggot Brain by Funkadelic; Family affair by Sly and the family Stone; and Crease by Funkadelic. Let me briefly comment on the last two. Family affair touched my heart and it connected me with the s*it that goes around in the world, but at the same time it made me feel the love and care of my mother. Crease, was a burst of information that I needed to share.
Maggot Brain just blew my mind. It is my first ever heard Funkadelic complete song and album. I usually don’t pay attention to lyrics (yes, terrible!) and just go with the flow, so the song was a perfect match. The “funkier” songs are more difficult for me to absorb, but my journey through the P-funk reminded me how powerful lyrics can be. For example:
“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time
For y'all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
Or drown in my own shit”
(Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, 1972)
These initial words just got my mind working and triggered many ideas and thoughts that I can’t communicate through a common text. However, music and images were my best attempt to make sense of what I was encountering with. The playlists that I had been curating blended with the readings and discussions inside the course and suddenly I felt as if I was being born again; this time Mother Earth was inviting me to learn through funk. This is the story that blends in the audiovisual material, one conceptual that opens a discussion on new notions of ontology (can funk be real?), epistemology (where can I study funk?), and methods (how can I study funk?) and a personal revelation of how one could study science, technology and society in a comprehensive way.
I wanted to share a message with whoever wanted to listen. Through the course I once more understood the complexities of time and humanity, while some of us want to act and change, we have to be aware that we all have different development processes. For topics as complex as gender, race, slavery, or colonialism we need to take our appropriate space and time, we need to go through catharsis. We need to encounter our past, deal with it in the ways we feel like it, forgive others and more importantly forgive ourselves, but then move on. This is what I decided to do in the audiovisual piece, to send a message of change and positive action; for that I mixed audio and video but more importantly I rephrased some text and quotes for them to be read in a different way, but without conflicting with what I understood was the meaning of the original author (or at least I hope so).
What I learned through this process will influence my current (and future) professional life. It helped me recognized the importance of studying technologies from different perspectives and to be aware that different classes will have different understandings, interests and meaning of technology, all important in their own context – we can’t just put people that we don’t understand in boxes that simplify the richness of a human being. More specifically, in understanding money as a socio-technical arrangement I have to look into the inputs that different actors bring to the table and the importance that all of them have in the project. Aspects as the coordination and doing of a weekly market meeting and the use of a monetary application to control others’ behaviors, co-existed with academic ideas of monetary design and economic frames. This is the current answer to the initial reflection, but it is just the first step of a long process, a process now entangled with Funk.
“Funk can move and remove, and thereby improve the quality of one’s day-to-day existence”
(Bolden, 2013, p.26)
How can Funk be related to technology? This development process begins in Funk, at the core of what an individual is and could be. The recognition of the sameness that we all are, invited us to question if the construction of science, technology and society has been consistent in giving non-dominant populations the deserved space. The words and stories inscribed with red ink of African Americans (and other oppressed cultures) has been erased with ‘white liquid paper’ and written with ideas that hegemonies presented as the one and only true. The blindness of some, doesn’t mean we all have to follow along but veils of ignorance need to be ripped out one by one.
Funk as a signification of human expression “should be understood as an alternative form of rationality” (Bolden, 2013, p.3). These understanding invites to the recognition of emotions and sensuality in the production of knowledge and cannot be rationalized in the same way one would approach the mainstream conception of technology. To comprehend Funk, one needs to pursue a connection with subtle elements that are better translated into the physical realm through mechanisms beyond simple reason or logic, one needs to free the mind and let kinetically oriented cognitive mechanisms flow, in other words let the body and spirit move and remove. Funk allows us to adopt an alternative, sometimes better, vision about normality.
The power to transforming is in all of us; at the core we are Fire. There is no distinction to be made since we are potentiality: we are funk, we create funk, we funk. However, this potentiality needs to be translated into information through the combination of both abstract and material elements. Technology is not only a tool to achieve a task, but can also be a medium to coordinate and bring together people in search of new meanings, problems, identities, or bring to front ideas that other believed were not worth it. A way to think about technology is through three aspects: material, organizational, and cultural (Brock, 2020). This allows a more nuanced view of technology where concepts as freedom, sensuality, rebellion, love, or fraternity blend with materials like the feathers that create musical instruments, iron in chains, or the ink inscribed in lyrics.
Technology can be studied in many different ways. When approaching science, technology and society, objects of study can be humans, non-humans, or even more than humans. As Sinclair (2004) points out technologies are not the result of a neutral process and these can be shaped through politics, “they do not come to us as a given” (ibid). There is something constant between any approach and this is the role of the observer, the researcher, the scientist. Sometimes thought as neutral, this actor has a fundamental task on how technology is being constructed; research is based on decisions. Who or what is brought to action in a study is the result of a conscious, but sometimes unconscious, chain of decisions influenced by interests, biases and/or ideologies. It is important to be critical to the assumptions from the past and be aware of the biases that have left important elements, people, and stories unexplored. Science, Technology and Society is not just one, there are many Sciences, Technologies, and Societies that need to be recognized. Hegemonic unquestionable “trues” are subject to protest.
To accept plurality in technology also requires a more nuanced methodology. To talk about multiplicity in technology it is first important to recognize difference and their complexities. It is not only a matter ethnicity but also about understanding contexts, more specifically the culture that resonates with the audience one is investigating. What is technology and for whom? are questions that need to be reflected upon empirically, theoretically, and methodologically. As Fouché (2006) points out, methodologies need to be reconsidered in order to include those that were not “important” enough for those in writing (hi)stories. Power can be given or taken, and it is important that scholars interested in studying stories meaningful for those ignored in the past, create stories that are relevant for the minorities in focus. Keep in mind that “from the perspective of the margins the dominant accounts are less than maximally objective” (Harding (1991) in Brock, 2020).
But be aware that this is not just an issue of audiences; it is an issue of race and justice. It is a matter of acknowledging that African diasporas and other minorities around the world have been subject of mistreatment and undermining. Despite all this, African Americans have managed to develop and perform different technologies to confront structural, social, ideological, spiritual, and material struggles. Due to the amount of time that western hegemonies violently stole from minorities, non-dominant technological practices and adaptation strategies were slowed down, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. As Sinclair (2004) points out, if minorities are to be inspired, stories of the commons need to be told – in the vernacular there are thousands of examples waiting to be explored. In the vernacular one could find the technology that has been developed and used to solve the problems of peoples in different cultures and classes. There is no one size fits all, and each designer has its own message.
A reconceptualization of a frame of reference is a process of recognition, understanding, and forgiveness of ourselves. While stories of oppression, resistance, labor and consumption can serve as a catharsis, Brock (2020) proposes a step forward. He questions ontological, epistemological, and methodological means in which blackness has been studied. The author points at three main elements: Libidinal economy, pathos, and ratchetry. The libidinal allows a different cognitive translation of the abstract into science, by suggesting the union between body, mind, and spirit. It recognizes desire in the core of our impulses (ibid, p.34). Pathos, looks into the eyes of the others and connects with them in ways that perhaps reason would not be able to explain. Pathos “encourages an evaluation of the world from the perspective of the oppressed rather than the elite” (ibid. p36). Finally, there is ratchetry defined as the “digital practice born of everyday banal, sensual, forward, and ‘deviant’ political behavior rooted in Black culture and discourse” (ibid, p .126). Ratchetry points into the empirical moments that enact black technoculture – the funkentelchy.
Fouche (2006) asked about new ways of understanding science and technology. The author invited us to look into the vernacular to find our roots and then find different methods and tools to observe, study, and learn from the perspective that aligns to ourselves and not just to comply to what other might have said, to reveal that ‘double consciousness[1]’ (Dubois, 1897) and let it pass away. But how can one understand technology in a different way? How can one create new frames of reference? Can we really see a different world with just the same eyes? The answer to this question is a process that begins with unfolding the organizational, material and cultural elements folded in technology as a black box and later studying the relationships between the groups that co-exist within society; even though we can only see with our own eyes, reality is the intersection of many other visions and lives.
Funk permeates all and there are new opportunities to cross through these barriers and create new understandings. New generation of individuals have the power of changing the belief that people have about others and themselves, but also the opportunity to be kind, learn to transform, and shade new lights into our understandings of science. Think of yourself Black creator of self-determined mind, think what could be the results of the blood inventor-creator with a nation behind you (Baraka in Fouche, 2006). But for this we have to be open to funk. The mind/ego makes the distinctions, Funk doesn’t.
References:
Bolden, T. (2013). Groove theory: A vamp on the epistemology of funk. American Studies, 52(4), 9-34.
Brock, A., & Brock, J. A. (2020). Distributed blackness. New York University Press.
Brown, S. (2013). The Blues/Funk Futurism of Roger Troutman. American Studies, 52(4), 119-123.
Fouché, R. (2000). Say it loud, I’m black, and I’m proud”: African American and vernacular technologic creativity. Retrieved October, 15, 2004.
Rambsy, H. (2013). Beyond Keeping It Real: OutKast, the Funk Connection, and Afrofuturism. American Studies, 52(4), 205-216.
Sinclair, B. (2004). Integrating the histories of race and technology. Technology and the African-American experience: Needs and opportunities for study, 1-17.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/
[2] Taken from Reflection Week 2