Alexis_B | Topic Reading Response | Week 4
Luggage as a Blogject? FedEx as “today’s canonical instance of Blogjects”?! Incredible. In the sense that a Blogject’s location is tracked and interpreted in some way, is there a way to rationalize infinitely more mundane/everyday agencies as such? Maybe that’s an oversimplification. I’m inclined now to reflect on my experiences through airport security, with luggage carousels, with my Amazon order history, in the items I have mailed and received both locally and internationally as being more than just a collection of checkpoints in space and time. “Spime”. Oh boy.
The distinction of the agency of Blogjects as causing or effecting change is an important one. Agency seems to imply that there is some kind of consciousness at play. What blogjects do have is the potential to stir things up; to interrupt the world. Whether it’s our physical trajectories (following rerouted luggage to another country, etc.), through discourse, questioning, controversy, and so on.
The following passage was an extremely heavy one (to me):
“Agency is literally imbued in Blogjects. Things that matter completely sully the previously starched white relationship between subject and object, human and nonhuman. Things that matter inflect the course of social debate and discussion, and cannot help inflicting local and global change. Witness the Spotted Owl. Witness the Pacific Northwest Salmon. Witness all the non-human, non-subject "things" that became fully imbued with the status of first-class citizens. Heck, most humans don't have the capacity to effect the kind of worldly change and receive the same order of protection, status and economic resources as a fish” (Bleecker 9).
Charged words. Yet the treatment and lives of marginalized people in the United States as well as globally begs for such acknowledgement. What do we do with this information? How do we respond to the postulation of blogjects as more influential than the lives of human beings? Is it an unbearable truth or does it demand to be refuted?