Hello, welcome to episode three of Dr. bird's eye view. I am your host, Dr. bird pronouns (She/they/Dr.) for anyone on TikTok LOL This is episode three of a podcast that I absolutely just despise creating because talking to myself isn't my favorite thing if anyone hasn't noticed (beacuse huge lapse between episodes). So sorry for the lag...
But thus far we have talked about the overall idea that I'm stitching together from my Dr. bird's eye view. We've talked about how we learn and a little bit about humanness. So today I want to talk about what it means to be an authority, because of course, Before you can actually talk about our idea of authority, you need to understand who has been deemed fully human and the way that we go about learning who has been deemed fully human.
So hopefully you're seeing the method here. So as promised, I'll be going over some artistic, some activists, and some academic ways that we go about understanding authority.
To begin, I think you can't really talk about what it means to believe someone is an authority without talking about the way again, societies have been built.
As I have said before, primarily my research is oriented in the US context, but a lot of what I talk about is rooted in just a general understanding enlightenment subjects. So with that said, academically, the way that we understand authority is rooted in whatever institutions have existed.
You can refer to Kendi's (2016) book Stamped from the Beginning that talks about the way that establishments and institutions of power used institutions that existed prior to them, and they demonstrated who was and wasn't an authority or who was an expert that should be listened to.
What Kendi argues, academically, is that there's been religious organizations that established authority first. Thinking about Abrahamic religions, broadly, using some sort of oftentimes white and male God to establish authority.
But of course, our idea of "whiteness" is totally based off of whatever context we're in geographically, materially, ideologically, and culturally.
[And] there was, of course, racialization before the US started. However, the idea of whiteness is unique to the United States and then broadens out because the definition changed once the nation began. Anyway, I digress.
What Kendi says afterward is that basically there were scientific and political institutions that establish themselves off of those definitions of authority. They're those definitions of who was someone we should be listening. Who runs things, who has the power, etc. So who/what were those authorities?
Well, there is another great book that I've read on the entirely audio app clubhouse in my critical media ecology club. It is called The Rise of Universities.
He was just tracing out the background of the rise of universities. [His] Last name is Haskins. So anyway, check out that book. I read the entire thing. It's a pretty short book. It's like a hundred some pages on the little archived library [critical media ecology club on Clubhouse] for anyone to peruse at their leisure. You don't even need a clubhouse account, but he [Haskins] talks about the way that those authorities were a very narrow lived experience.
So we know, of course, even going back as far to Aristotle, Plato, and the like, that education is the way that we've gone. Establishing how people know things and who's worthy of being in power. So what we know about the rise of universities, much like what Kendi described is that they started inside of churches.
This wasn't a coincidence. As I'm often saying, this is something that the educational institutions that eventually became, of course, the overall scientific community, they were building off of the preexisting authority figures. Which were, of course Abrahamic religion positions of power. And what they did is they set up shop inside of these churches, these institutions that already existed.
And guess who was allowed to be an authority of those institutions? A very limited lived experience, specifically those who had, a cis-male definition of body. Of course, they didn't know what cisnormativity was, and we could get into a long discussion of gender versus biological sex.
But what we do know is that those deemed masculine enough could be an authority figure because, uh, apparently in a patriarchal society, that's (and able-bodieness, education, richness, land-owning, and in the U.S. whiteness..etc.) what makes someone an authority...
That is who was allowed to -- not only be in positions of power -- but to have literacy and to establish any type of educational legitimacy at all. Okay, so what we also know about the time is that most of the public wasn't able to read. So guess how they learned through listening to the already existed authorities? They listened to them read something.
Guess how vulnerable that makes a general population...? Incredibly vulnerable.
In fact, they're almost entirely at the whim of whoever they're hearing -- if they actually believe what they're saying.
And guess what? If they didn't believe and they went outside the lines, they were going to be -- absolutely -- attacked.
Like they...they weren't going to be treated nicely (if you can imagine! /sarcasm) because authority, if it doesn't actually get the respect, it's going to do anything it possibly can to obtain that power, which is where coercion comes in. Penalties come in. And guess what? Things like laws, with that. Think about that when you consider the way the educational systems are set up to this day.
There's another great book that I read on critical media ecology (club on Clubhouse)( archive, which is called Invisible Women by Dale Spender, incredible book. This is a book written in the eighties, if I remember correctly. What Spender does is talks all about the way that in the eighties we see linger. Evidence is, and this is of course shifting us from a purely academic insight into one more based in activism and of course, feminist scholarship, particularly shifting us from one A to the second A.
Spender talks all about the way that these institutions did everything they in could to keep anyone besides that very limited lived experience. Again, in enlightenment subject, a white cis male who is able-bodied out of the. This is how the authorities were established. They were boys clubs, white boys clubs in the United States, of course, that did everything they possibly could to ensure that every other form of thinking, every form of knowledge, way of learning, way of being was erased.
And what spun our traces out is the way that our histories have always existed in a more multiplicitous way. Again, think about the way that linear time is something that we've come to take for granted because of the way institutions have been built and the way that of course, any other conception of time or existence has been basically treated as if it doesn't exist.
When, of course, plenty of other cultures have understood different ways of being that orient our lives completely differently. With that said, Spender talks all about this at great length. Again, check out the critical media ecology reading of that book. I absolutely loved it. I cited it in a number of works. But how does this relate to our understanding of activism broadly?
Well, of course, Spender was, from what I understand, a white second wave feminist, so she clearly doesn't represent the entirety of activism, . There have been plenty of other critiques of time, including Sarah Sharma. She wrote an incredible piece called Exit Dr. Sharma, A big shout out and love to you, as always been very supportive of my work.
She's written a good amount about time and the way that the colonial conception of time and the patriarchal conceptions of time, of course, which are bound together, have not allowed most. To exit the idea of who is allowed to do certain types of work, who is allowed to be present, what sort of roles people are expected to have since, of course, in a corporatized world, many of us are valued on our productivity.
Productivity leaves little room in an increasingly mechanized society for. And those of us that aren't deemed full subjects, we haven't been allowed to actually embrace our own self care and we haven't been allowed to leave. Right? Think about it like this. The way that you can understand that, um, differently is by recognizing that, of course, as many other feminists have detailed, there's been certain types of labor that've been deemed worthy.
Usually that's associated with any type of logic or masculine. Sometimes also hard labor, especially a white man. There's suddenly now legitimate forms of labor just as many other feminists like Arlie Hochchild have as well about the second shift and emotional and intellectual labor, big being constantly shouldered on a, especially Black and Brown and Indigenous scholars.
In my dissertation, I also teased around with the idea. The fourth shift, which would be sexual labor, to simply tie it back into. The definition of authority, of course, dictates what type of labor one does, right? There's a really long history of about, especially the white feminization of labor that different activists have traced out that detailed the way that what was feminized labor after World War II is something entirely shaped by race and gender, and many other categories that, of course, all constantly intermingle together.
And informer ideas of what is seen as feminine labor and what is more masculinized. And of course this becomes exceptionally complicated when we talk about ways that gender were enforced, and especially Black folks broadly. But of course, the way that these colonial binaries of gender and sex were very much especially used to dehumanize Black folks.
This is to say that how do we understand authority today and how do we tease out a. Well, I think that's what a lot of artists are doing today. For instance, think about any type of AI art that exists. I've written a paper that I haven't yet submit anywhere. and it's about the bot written script trend. I don't know if you're all familiar with that, but if you haven't, you should Google it.
It was a little trend that took off. I know I presented a paper about it at the Media Ecology Association in 2019, and for those who don't know what it is, It was a little trend, mostly taken off off Twitter and what this creator did, I think his name's Keaton, what he did is he pretended to give a bot a thousand hours of an Olive Garden commercials, so like an AI bot.
So right. The bot was supposed to make like a funny commercial based off of seeing all this footage of Olive Garden commercials. What I found by looking into that, that phenomen. Was like a little bit different than I think what people would usually perceive at like first glance. So what I found is that I think it was actually kind of a backlash to our fear of being replaced to buy technology like that.
And of course this was years before Chad GPT took off or anything sophisticated like Dolly too or any of the other AI. With that said, because we have had a very big fear of certain technologies for a very long time, so how does this tie into authority specifically? We know that. And this ties in kind of everything together, all three ass from the academic to the activist, to the artistic.
We know that the definitions of what it means to be human, as I talked about in the last episode, as well as definitions of intelligence. Or human greatness, just broadly like some sort of superhuman. These have always been defined by, again, a very limited lived experience. They are built into everything that we have, as all biases are built into all forms of technology, including humans, and the form of implicit ideologies that also manifest explicitly in material realities, but as well as, algorithms and things like that.
What I'm thinking is, is that with the rise of AI, And the discourses that are in response like about six months ago there was a like rising discourse on platforms like TikTok that were warning people not to use AI art. Cause they take other people's art and then they make an amalgamation. So artists were arguing that this technology steals their art and then claims it as its own and think about that.
Right. If we can tie that back to this phenomena revealing to us an entire art that, again, as always was built on an institution of elitism, that was built on an institution of very limited lived experience that defined what was and what wasn't. High brow art and as media ecologists [now] often detail, it reveals to us who gets to decide what is valid, and it also reveals to us the way that so much.
Culture, especially within a commodified society, a neoliberal transnational and global capitalist society -- built on colonial foundations -- is rooted in people that are already existing authorities taking ideas of those who are more marginalized and deeming them as their own. . I think that's all I'm going to rant about today.
This is the longest I think I'm ever gonna make my episodes, but thanks for sticking around. If you have any questions about anything I've said, let me know. Whenever I have the spoons to answer you, I'll go about doing that. Excellent. We finally got episode free in the books all about Authority. Again.
Each episode I go into the triple A of the Covid era, which I'm calling the envirusment. So "environment" plus "virus" equals the envirusment, and we will discuss some brief examples going into my info dump archive that is my brain LOL I'm discussing from my Dr. bird's eye view, some art, some activists and some academics that discuss certain topics.
So if you like this, please do a go ahead and subscribe. I'll try to make these episodes more frequently. Maybe if I stick with this info dump method, I'll actually be a bit more reliable on getting this episodes out. So thanks again. See you next. Or maybe more appropriately. Hear me next time. .