This post was written by Prem Sylvester, an MA student working on the DDI’s Beyond Verification: Authenticity and the Spread of Mis/Disinformation project.
To whom or to what do we delegate the power to represent the world? This is the question that Dylan Mulvin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, presented in his talk at the Digital Democracies Institute on April 6th, 2022. This is also the central question of his richly researched book, Proxies: The Cultural Work of Standing In, to answer which Mulvin points us in the direction of proxies.
With the globalized sprawl of knowledge production and cultural relations, how we come to know the world ‘out there’ relies significantly, per Mulvin, on logics of surrogacy, delegation, or ‘standing-in’. Through processes of standardization and normalization — what Mulvin broadly calls proxification — that depend on an array of sociotechnical infrastructures, institutions, and communities, certain places, things or people are made reliable, or trustworthy as forms of knowledge. These “necessary fictions”, that become fixed points in the standardization of knowledge and the production of models for the world ‘out there’, are proxies.
Pointing out as (stretched) examples cardboard cutouts of asparagus and sandwich boxes in UK shops, Mulvin noted that these objects, as potential proxies, remind one of the supply chain disruptions post-Brexit even as they attempt to make us forget the absence of the ‘real thing’. With the proliferation of data doubles, gig workers who perform shopping and delivery services on behalf of consumers, and technical proxies for servers and in databases, “trusted delegates” that are assumed to be reliable proxies for other people are commonplace. Through such examples as the fabricated image of deceased actor Paul Walker in Fast and Furious 7, CGI versions of actress Carrie Fisher, and deepfakes of Anthony Bourdain’s voice, Mulvin also emphasizes standing-in as a mode of genealogical connection. We may be, then, in the age of the proxy, insofar as we increasingly depend on proxies to ‘paper over’ the gaps in malfunctioning infrastructure, or suspend disbelief in the failures of our institutions. Mulvin’s focus is precisely on these technological and cultural tools, and the embodied work and communities of care that enable them to consistently ‘stand in’ for something else. It is in paying attention to the materiality and lived experiences of standing in, in mapping the process of delegation, of proxification, thatwe can map how an institution works, how it is held together, or how it performs being held together. It is therefore also vital, per Mulvin, to look beyond the digital.
Source: Dylan Mulvin
Through a historical tracing of four proxies — Yodaville, the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), the Len(n)a image, and the Standard Patient Program — Mulvin points us to the work of proxies, and the work they do in the world. Generally speaking, proxies leverage a representation of our current world to foresee and craft a world to come. Proxies, then, are imaginative and function as analogies, i.e., they must function as if they are the thing for which they stand. Mulvin asserts that, as analogies, there is no truth proposition to proxies, only conditions and contexts under which they hold. The history of proxies therefore offers an account for how institutions come to invest in shared references and analogies for the world — how proxies take ‘form.’
Yodaville, located in the hot desert of Arizona, USA is what the US military describes as a new kind of “urban target complex.” It is intended to stand in for “the chaotic environments found in densely populated areas of the developing world” and hence help the military exercise their power in a proxy space that is designed to emulate potential theaters of war. Interestingly, it is made largely of shipping containers, a notable model of logistical and infrastructural standardization — in other words, it could be easily organized in accordance with the specific material forms that the military wanted. Yodaville, as Mulvin describes it, is an imagined ‘out there’ that could be brought into the domain of standardization and training ‘in here’; it is simultaneously this unfamiliarity with nonlocal contexts and the plasticity of Yodaville as a simulated elsewhere that gives the this site its power as a proxy. At the same time, Yodaville points us to proxification as an exercise of power — given the localization of American imperial power, Yodaville acts as an assertion of domestic territoriality while proxying for potential nonlocal sites of military conflict.
Proxification, while being a relational process of making, is also inescapably tied with processes of maintenance — the work required to ensure a proxy can continue to function as such. Taking the example of the IPK, Mulvin noted that the definition of the kilogram, whose quantity of mass the IPK stands in for, was expanded to include the cleaning, washing, and storage of the IPK itself. Not only does this indicate that we can only know a kilogram’s mass in relation to other masses, not what it is, but also how there is something inescapably bodily about how we handle data. The IPK therefore extends “data hygiene” in the history of information systems to the pre-digital.
The Lena(/Lenna) image, which was integral to the development of digital imaging or digital image processing, further demonstrates the embodiment of proxies, and specifically, how its differential — specifically, gendered — embodiment impacts its function as proxy. While the image was framed as a possible solution to a set of technical questions and eventually became an icon of the discipline through repeated use, it was originally excerpted from the November 1972 centerfold of Playboy magazine. While it emerged in the US Department of Defense’s search for ‘novel images’, the image sits with a number of other visual proxies — such as the Shirley images used to calibrate still photography, NTSC images used to calibrate North American colour television sets, and the Jennifer in Paradise image used as a demonstration for Photoshop — that were attuned to what Mulvin described as a white femininity.
Source: Dylan Mulvin
Extending the body as a proxy to their logical conclusion, Standardized Patient programs make literal the act of humans standing in for the world of possible illness. Taught to perform the normal symptoms of disease and disability as a kind of masquerade, these proxies — played by both professional models and actors, as well as amateurs — were aimed to build physician empathy. In other words, the proxies entrain and standardize the performance of empathy to stave off lawsuits alleging medical malpractice in real-world situations. Such performance, shorn of the standardized patients’ bodily messines that might interfere with their ability to function as a proxy, emphasizes the contingent, makeshift, and ritualized forms of labour workers use to justify their own proxification.
Mulvin’s methodological argument, then, is that by looking at these sites and practices of embodied labour that creates and animates usable analogies for the world, we can find the material, the aesthetic, and the choreographed politics of representation that shape the power and sense-making of institutions. To understand the significance of the proxy is therefore to move away from what a proxy does to what the community around it does to keep the proxy alive. The work — the infrastructural labour — that surrounds proxies therefore includes:
- Choosing proxies
- Interfacing and interacting with proxies
- Repairing and maintaining proxies
- Being or acting as proxies
Source: Dylan Mulvin
Proxies have spatial and temporal histories — they are marked by how they are used and where they have traveled (including across scales, as Mulvin pointed out with reference to Gabrielle Hecht’s conception of interscalar vehicles), and sometimes, as in the case of the IPK and the Lena image, how they are discarded. In such cases, the proxy no longer holds as an analogy for a shared world, or when the supporting relation shifts so that the terms of their proxification no longer hold. This is the key point that Dylan Mulvin’s fascinating talk left us with. The persistence of proxies depends on its community of relations and infrastructures of knowledge production — there is no proxy qua proxy.