Technological Family Intimacies

Technological Family Intimacies Alison Frances Marlin ORCID 0000-0003-4632-4580 Doctor of Philosophy, Arts August 2016 School of Historical and Philosophical Studies This thesis is submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree 2 Abstract Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as Skype, Facebook, mobile phones and email have become participants in many families and their doing of family intimacy, to the concern of some commentators. This thesis proposes that ‘technological family intimacies’ emerge in collective acts of doing family with technology, along with the technologies and human family members themselves. It asks how ICTs authorise and afford the emergence of particular sorts of intimacies, and particular intimate human subjects, and not others, and how these human subjects creatively negotiate this authorising and, in turn, authorise technologies to become in particular ways. In order to ask such questions, the thesis works between and connects two analytic modes which are usually kept separate: a humanistic framing common in sociological accounts of intimacy and family; and a relationistic framing which is primarily found in Science and Technology Studies and anthropology. In order to connect humanist and relationist modes of analysis, the thesis remakes intimacy from a humanistic concept, in which it is a property of relations had by humans, to a relationistic concept in which intimacy is a mode of being human. A second relationistic concept of a family collective, made up of human and technological participants, is introduced. This collective is shown to be working, in stories told in interviews, to design intimacy as promissive: as promising its continuation into the future. Interviews with individuals, couples and families in Melbourne, Australia, and in and around Cambridge and London, UK, form the main empirical material of the thesis. Interview participants are taken as worldly analysts whose analytic work is not different in kind from the work of academic analysts. The stories told by these interview participants are themselves taken as participants in the collective act of the interview, and in the collective work of doing family intimacy with technology and authorising the becoming of entities. The thesis re-tells some participant stories which work through comparison to generate a figure of a ‘technology-using intimate self’ which counts as an actor, who knows about family intimacy and technology and works with ICTs to promote the emergence of particular sorts of intimacies. Other stories elicit the emergence of a subject-object hybrid, 3 a person on/in a screen on video chat or an ‘enscreened family member’, showing some of the intimate relations this entity enjoys with other family members, and the ways that it authorises embodied humans to become as human. This working with stories, and as part of family, interview and academic collectives, is doing ontology: working to elicit the emergence of some entities, concepts, subjects and objects, and not others. Entities authorise each other to become, to emerge with the capacity to act in this way and not that. What is at stake in this mutual authorisation work is who and what counts as an actor and how it is authorised to act, and just as importantly, how we learn to live well with the technological others which we invite to become part of our families. 4 Declaration: This is to certify that: i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the Doctor of Philosophy, Arts except where indicated in the preface, ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, and iii. the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Alison Marlin 5 6 Acknowledgements Only one name goes onto a PhD thesis, but many people contribute to it. My interview participants gave generously of their time and their stories, without which there would be no thesis. My supervisor, Helen Verran, has contributed to every part of this thesis, and I am extremely thankful for her generosity, wisdom, and loyalty to her students in difficult institutional times. I have learned so much from her, and I hope that I may be half as good a supervisor one day. My fellow graduate students have provided inspiration, commiseration and excellent conversation, especially Michaela Spencer, Christian Clark, Vicki MacKnight, Megan Lomax, Gillian Vesty and Emily Adams. At Melbourne, I have been fortunate to have the support of excellent teaching staff, including Mike Arnold and Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, from whom I learned about the sociology of technology, history and philosophy of science, how to teach, and how to be an academic. Administrative staff make the world go around, especially Sarah Gloger, Research and Training Support Officer, without whom I, and so many other research students, would have been vastly more confused. Overseas, Amanda Windle has been a wonderful friend and generous in her support and encouragement. Alex Taylor, Brit Ross Winthereik and Estrid Sørensen have all inspired me by proving that it is possible to be a successful academic, generous to junior colleagues, and have a family life, all at the same time. They have also all provided more specific inspiration and support at different times. My family have provided encouragement and support from start to finish. My mother’s faith in me and her conviction that I was doing the right thing, as well as her reminders that PhD theses are graded as a pass/fail, have been a constant support. My sister has listened to endless thesis updates with apparent interest. My husband, Christian, became part of my family at a difficult time and has shown extraordinary grace in difficult circumstances. I am grateful for his support, his love, and his reminders that there is more to life than thesis writing. 7 But most of all, thanks go to my late father, Professor Chris Marlin, who died during the time I was working on this thesis. He taught me a love of research, of teaching, and of universities. He was the first PhD in my family, and was very proud that I was going to be the second. 8 Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................... 11 Chapter One: Accounts of Intimacy ............................................................................... 29 1.1 Accounts of Intimacy ............................................................................................ 29 1.1.1 Contemporary Accounts of Historical Intimacy ............................................ 30 1.1.2 Accounts of Contemporary Intimacy ............................................................ 33 1.1.3 Contemporary Intimacy and Information and Communication Technologies ................................................................................................................................ 38 1.2 The Humanist Analytic, Critiques of Humanism and Social Explanations of Intimacy ...................................................................................................................... 56 1.3 Towards a Generative Relationistic Analytic ....................................................... 64 Chapter Two: Intimacy as a Matter for Concern and Intimacy as a Matter of Concern 72 2.1 Intimacy and Information and Communication Technologies: a Matter for Concern .................................................................................................................................... 72 2.1.1 A Matter for Humanist Concern .................................................................... 75 2.1.2 A Latourian Matter of Concern ..................................................................... 76 2.2 Philosophical Plumbing ........................................................................................ 80 2.3 Intimacy as a Mode of Being Human – A Relation ............................................. 83 2.3.1 Enactment ...................................................................................................... 86 2.3.2 Multiplicity .................................................................................................... 88 2.3.3 Ontological tensions ...................................................................................... 92 Chapter Three: Family as Collectively Designing Intimacy .......................................... 96 3.1 Early Humanistic Conceptions of Family ............................................................ 96 3.2 The Concept of Family as Mobilised in Recent Sociology: The Rise of Perspectivalism ........................................................................................................... 98 3.3 Family as Collective made up of People and Technologies ............................... 105 3.4 The family collective as designing intimacy ...................................................... 108 9 3.5 An Example of Designing Intimacy: Intimacy as a Promissive Relation .......... 110 3.5.1 Extending Intimacy ..................................................................................... 111 3.5.2 Sustaining Intimacy ..................................................................................... 114 3.5.3 Constant Intimacy ........................................................................................ 116 3.5.4 Bounding Intimacy ...................................................................................... 120 3.6 Design as a Mode of Participation

Load more