T R A N S C R I P T

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The work of the Suicide Box in its imaging of suicide recovers statistical representation as political performance. The images demonstrate the technologies of representation, the political moves that have accrued weight without contest and without consent. The politics of information is invisible in its ubiquity, and yet it has radically transformed many diverse areas of knowledge, considering the transformation effected in and with information. technology in areas such as genetics, epidemiology, risk analysis, sociology... even the economy we live in and the fundamental of the vote. Our lives, to others, are rendered as information. Consider the slogan used to advertise a new database package, "information is power." This slogan represents a common view -- though, testifying to its cultural saliency, it's not explicit about the nature of the relationship between nature and power, except that the purchase of the database product assures you both. The received view of the relationship of power to information goes something like this. First, applying information can achieve power. That is, descriptions of how things are and how they function can create opportunities for manipulation or control. Secondly, the misapplication of power can distort the correctness of data, hiding or concealing information or generating false information. Thirdly, information can liberate us from the repressive effects of power, uncovering the distortion that power imposes on information. Truth of falsity of something is seen as a property of the information such that power is the distorting lens of the information camera. Power and information are presumed extrinsic to each other and somehow independent. Fundamentally, power is not seen to affect the truth of the information, and power is not seen to contribute constructively to information.

However the account of power and information which the Bureau's research demonstrates is one in which power does not simply impinge on information from without -- rather that information arises from power relations. The very technological attention to suicide is the critical element in its existence as information -- it simply did not exist in this form prior to the bureaucratic eye lent to it by the Bureau. And the subsequent information is better understood not in a static correspondence, non-correspondence, truth, falsity, but in how and what it is used for, Therefore, the information is not fully abstractable in representational theories. It is partial, and contingent on how it is framed, rather than neutral, empirical, and comprehensive. < back  Page:  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10  |  11  |  12