The obvious prompt for this page is completing the Practical listening series with Section 10, Decolonizing technology in March 2020 (a couple of weeks before quarantine rules descended here, as it happens).
I'm also retiring the old bibliography from that series, the page for which also served as something of a chronology for my non-review writing. Presumably such a chronicle will now come to accompany this space. However, I'm also not intending more long productions, and so want to focus on shorter entries instead as more manageable in terms of exertion & time commitments.
I think I'll keep this introduction brief, though, and so get to some specific further thoughts....
(And to that implied new bibliography... a link added here subsequently for convenience.)
Todd M. McComb <mccomb@medieval.org>In considering this new project, and in particular, what prompts me to make an entry, I feel compelled to note that I come into it with no particular plan: I mean, the overall goal is to contribute some thoughts toward decolonizing tech — the meaning of which will emerge over the course of the discussion — but I'm not undertaking this series from an outline or sketched outcomes. (I do have a series of topics already noted for possible discussion, but no order, and I doubt that the first 20 entries here are going to end up matching my approximately 20 bullet points very closely. Things will change. I do intend to elaborate some specific notes from Decolonizing technology at some point, though....) In that sense, there's always "too much" material, but part of the intent here is to be able to respond to current topics. And I want to do that in a manageable format, both for myself & for readers. So I'm not intending to litter this page with citations or links either, but I'll often have a specific source as trigger for an entry.... (I suppose much of this paragraph is just to assuage my own ego, since I've carefully planned my prior theoretical writings, and will feel more exposed like this. Maybe that's an improvement, but there's consequently always going to be a sense of "But what about...?" remaining here. And an answer might not come soon.) And it'll probably take a while to get to some obvious questions too, since I do need to recall aspects of prior frameworks....
1
So to recap something of the analytic (or, reductively, rubric)
that I elaborated in (the relatively elaborate) PL10, the sense of
"decolonizing tech" here is deliberately ambiguous between
the internals of "tech" as an industry, and a/the
(hypothetical) use of technology in (broad) decolonizing projects
per se (i.e. with "decolonizing" figured as an adjective
applied to tech): In this, the latter is obviously the larger goal,
or at least is directed toward that larger goal, but the former can
have a role too. (Some say it accomplishes the more general goal
directly, but that's liberal fantasy. A more diverse set of
collaborators doesn't change the economic system by itself, although
obviously it does blur the contours of exploitation, the boundaries
between haves & have nots....) I've also elaborated a sort of
three-headed analytic on ownership-control-authority: These topics
have been treated somewhat differently in different texts, but in
much of this specific space, they coincide in the corporate
"persons" of the tech monopolies & their main driver,
greed. (It's worth noting that greed can & is suspended for
matters of ownership & control in the tech industry, though.
Profit taking can come later....) I've also interrogated technology
specifically around the body, whether as extending or disciplining
the body (with the important caveat that extension can simultaneously
yield discipline), and via various notions of speed: Under
neoliberalism, hoarding per se comes to be about speed, about
outpacing (i.e. about "discovery" per
Basic Mechanics), not
only outpacing "competitors" (& establishing monopolies,
the corporate dream scenario, increasingly attainable per reduced
regulation), but the law. And whereas I discussed the way that law
(as a technology, mind you) tends to lag, an aspect of this
intertwining that I failed to discuss was the violence of law per
se (although I did name it as a colonizing technology).... As it
happens, Judith Butler's new book The Force of Non-Violence
only appeared as I was completing that essay, and I put off reading
it until recently — thinking it might involve layers of
minutia, as sometimes in Butler: But no, this is a rather clear
rethinking of the meaning of non-violence, and should be accessible
to a more general reader. (Despite the many citations, Butler
explains the ideas she uses. Although, I'd already read almost
everything cited, so maybe I'm in no position to judge that....)
And part of that rethinking is to take up Walter Benjamin, and the
basic thesis that law — as prohibition — inherently
invokes violence. (The history of law per se is one of Benjamin's
arguments.) When I wrote of the deliberate entanglement of the
tech industry, then, of staying ahead of law (via speed), I wrote
— in a sense — about conscious efforts to outpace such
legal violence. And I've been in so many places so close to the
tech industry for so many decades now, being involved at least
peripherally in so many decisions, and then eventually coming
increasingly to lose every important battle... until the current
situation, with the for-profit sector having achieved not only
ascendance, but impunity: So a domain in which commerce was actually
explicitly forbidden(!) when I encountered it, has come to be the
trashiest of neoliberal paradises.... (I'll come back to more
specific aspects of my experience here at some point....) And in
fact the neoliberal arguments involved should be linked directly
to what Benjamin has to say on the violence of law, as the rhetoric
was remarkably similar — but more specifically about the
inability of regulatory bodies to understand (the internet or web)
& so to act appropriately. (In the minds & rhetoric of
greedy techies, of course, this was not a lament about needing
better regulations, but rather an argument for why not to attempt
it: Can't win, don't try, being a generalized update to Thatcher....)
So people were very concerned about exactly this sort of legal
violence, a brake on their (eventually profitable) ecstasy, but
also long before there were big profits to protect.... And so
another emphasis for Butler is on equality, something she claims
is inherent to a truly non-violent society. (As I've articulated
in so many ways over recent years, hierarchy & rupture are two
sides of one coin, so I'll certainly agree, pace what "equality"
can mean....) But Benjamin is coming from an anarchist perspective,
and so what is anarchy in this context? (This is where the old
internet arguments really go off the rails....) Anarchy is a
situation where people don't have power over others. That's not
to say only formal a priori power, but actual power in
practice. (Rather, the latter is to be minimized.) Basically
"anarchic" resistance to a centralized tech authority
instead led to massive power for some: The "system"
failed to correct for power imbalances that were developing —
& for many of the players, this was quite intentional. (The
people involved basically erected the Hobbesian proto-universe
online, despite it never having existed before.... And they did
it because it was always their dream world. The rest of the rhetoric
was mainly about distraction, just as it is now.) Developing during
the era of neoliberal dominance, then, the internet became the
ultimate neoliberal wet dream, with its markets & optimizations
& ultimately its ability to concentrate wealth ("more
efficiently!") — & to bully (i.e. outside formal
proscription). So let me turn back to earlier in this historical
arc: As technological developments came to exceed legal contexts,
they did bring their own de facto laws, their own ways of
doing things. And as opposed to Butler, who never seems to move
off of law as prohibition (as it's also figured by Benjamin), this
is precisely where positive law enters the picture. (Note that
Butler has explicitly bemoaned her own inability to discuss the
body, and this is where a different such discussion also belonged.
I will return to this topic as well, which for some, including
Butler, is ultimately psychoanalytic....) There's also the sense
of escapism that accompanied internet ecstasy for many, suggesting
(again) the positive drives, a generalized sense of excess.... And
what is or isn't violent, or relative to what context, seems easily
to be spun by rhetoric — & has been for millennia (as
interrogated in part by Butler) — such that prohibitions on
"violence" (e.g. of protestors) can end up furthering
oppression, i.e. systemic violence. (There's a sort of developing
topology to these contemporary moments, to evoke Byung-Chul Han,
whom Butler doesn't mention, although they do both operate at least
partially under a Foucauldian umbrella....) And the virtual world
seems to have been made for spin.... So what would "positive"
law applied to tech, i.e. as avowal rather than prohibition, look
like? Well, it'd look a lot more like religion (specifically,
liturgy) — & does often appear that way, including in the
mode of neoliberal greed, the presumptive superiority of "the
market," etc. And I realize that any talk of religion tends
to inflame techies, despite (or because of) how thoroughly religious
they tend to act, so I'll need to come back to that thought.... In
the meantime, note that basically all of these things are technologies:
Indeed, the way that Butler figures & circumscribes non-violence
per se, i.e. as suspending & interpolating concepts (e.g.
grievability), positions it clearly as a sort of mediation (i.e.
as inherently technological). And so I'll let Butler's book conclude
my old bibliography, as I jumpstart this
new project....
2
I'm not anticipating that entries here will go on tracking bibliographic
entries directly for much longer, but I do want to take up a few
— perhaps tangential — thoughts from François
Bonnet's After Death (which actually appeared in French in
2017, but in English only recently). Bonnet seeks not only to trace
the historical contours of presentism, per e.g. last year's
Concepts of contemporary history
(which would have benefited from Bonnet's perspective), but especially
to discuss its effects on the contemporary subject. (In this, his
concern with individuation seems to follow Stiegler's, but the
latter is not mentioned. The general issue there is the changing
boundary or non-boundary between the individual subject &
society... & the world in general.) And although the anesthetic
(& so amnesiac) qualities of presentism do certainly concern
the contemporary musical & artistic space, it's to notions of
guaranteed safety that I want to turn next: Indeed,
I've already positioned modernity
per se as an exercise not only in (global) imperial hoarding, but
as an attempt to eliminate risk or "fortune." (Rather,
in concentrating the Earth's wealth for a few, modernity reallocated
precarity. It should be emphasized, though, that various aspects
of this hoarding project are still being praised, including that
concentrations of "capital" provided a spur to technological
development: Let's not embrace benevolence in assessing such a
motivation, though, but rather the cynical business of remaining
in control.... So much Western technology is still war technology.)
The modern risk abatement project is then reconfigured in the
postmodern (or nascent neoimperial) era, in Bonnet's terms, around
a broad forgetting of death (i.e. of the historical & finite
character of individual human life): Note, crucially, that this
presentist forgetting is not the elimination of risk, but rather
its forgetting, its reconfiguration into spectral form (i.e. as a
vague "cloud," to throw out a current technological
metaphor). Of course, such a situation is thrown into further
relief by the new risk (& spectacle) of coronavirus. And
response to that risk has been largely predictable within this
frame: For one, poverty (as correlated or aligned with racism,
sexism, etc.) is always a vector for increased exposure, but is so
particularly in areas (including where I live) where medical care
is rationed according to socioeconomic status. (Any sort of general
epidemic is thus, fundamentally, a genocidal tool against the poor
— at least in economically hierarchical societies. And
coronavirus is certainly being deployed this way....) Following
that logic, it's then upper middle class (i.e. the classic Western
"bourgeoisie") fears that dictate policy & practice,
fears portrayed as truly novel (& thus terrifying) by people
who were already largely in denial regarding the risks in their
lives (including to others due to their own actions...). The
situation also brings condescension, reinforcing class lines &
portraying the precarious as themselves dangerous: Another "state
of exception" appears, such that fear brings calls for safety,
with increasing fascist imposition on its heels (as various long-term
fascist policy demands have now been imposed unilaterally &
with little resistance), all part of a global race toward the right
(a race buoyed by "technologies" such as centrism...).
So what we see is a shock, an interruption to a particular regime
of denial (& a new danger, but not a reconfiguration of precarity
per se), an opportunity to implement more restrictive policies in
general (not unlike the 9/11 terror attacks) — & then
we'll see the regime of denial reconstitute itself: Many people
already seem to be easing their safety concerns, despite no fundamental
lessening of virus risk. (Part of this can be figured as a narrowing
of uncertainty. Or simply as moving away from ultimately impractical
hypercaution.) But that's also because coronavirus risk was never
of a different order: It remains to be seen how the totals (&
arguments over classification) turn out, but it looks to me now as
though e.g. deaths in the US due to virus (& note that the US
response has been figured as especially problematic) will be roughly
10% of projected 2020 deaths here (which, I should also note, were
already being projected to rise...). The point? Most of the other
risks have already been assimilated to regimes of denial. So another
important point concerns numbers & calculation per se (as the
foregoing already starts to suggest): We've been hearing —
again, especially from the most bourgeois elements — that the
value of life is incalculable, and hence that coronavirus risk
should be figured as basically infinite against other life issues.
And I want to highlight this anti-calculation sentiment —
which is already fading, and was certainly never ubiquitous —
within the very heart of the neoliberal calculation regime:
Considering neoliberal apathy toward anything that can't be exchanged
— the exchange of images online coming to exemplify this
situation for Bonnet, such that calculation need not refer (explicitly)
to price, but to data more generally... — such an interruption
is critical (to e.g. postmodern conceptions of "event"),
even as the regime continues to synchronize images of each of us
for marketing & propaganda purposes. That we remain thoroughly
calculated (even as notions of "the value of life is
incalculable!" ring out now more than ever) is of course also
evident within the Western health industry, particularly around
concepts of "insurance," but also via medicalization per
se.... And (the history of) "medical science" is joined
at the hip to Western modernity, including in two basic ways:
Modernity forged biologism around labor (itself a technology), i.e.
increase population so as to increase production & increase
accumulation. (Each additional labor unit, at least in principle,
provided additional profit....) Thus, people who could not work
needed to be repaired — not for themselves, but so that they
could (or would) work again. Moreover, in its quest for concentrated
accumulation (or stockpile), modernity generates many new health
problems, whether from its labor regime directly, poisonous
contaminations, harvesting necessities of life, etc. In other
words, although "medical science" is hailed as a great
achievement by modernity (even the greatest, in some circles), much
is not only devoted to problems caused by modernity itself, but is
still oriented according to paradigms of work directed toward wealth
accumulation. (And the other major historical paradigm of Western
medicine arises not from the labor regime, but from charlatanism
aimed at the newly rich. That strand actually has the longer
history.... Consequently, in the US anyway, both health &
insurance are for-profit industries, the former retaining an incentive
to keep people alive but sick....) These labor regime issues would
be problematic enough, but returning to the overall topic here, a
significant element of discontinuity between the modern &
postmodern eras lies within the regime of biologism itself: Human
labor is no longer to be maximized, but rather kept to more
"manageable" proportions, with the remainder replaced by
(different, more obedient) technology (presumably continuing to
seek infinite production & profit... & so without much
long-term sanity). Moreover, the neoliberal regime emphasizes human
competition & even biological legacy... meaning that the specter
of genocide (or at least necropolitics, i.e. "competing"
on health) is increasingly everywhere. (Per the general analytic
here, one must also look into situations of ownership & control,
and we've seen the tech monopolies clearly augment both for themselves
during this crisis, again as traditional middle class opposition
falls quickly in line — i.e. around the "exception"
& its cultivated fears. That US politicians might seek to
regulate online media or sales now seems to be an even more remote
possibility....) And then, although perhaps I've already involved
too much at once, a final issue to raise in this entry is that of
antisocial (or anti-human) sentiment masquerading as environmentalism:
Condescension toward many people's "poor" virus safeguards
already has various groups being figured as dangerous per se, and
genocidal impulses (to reduce the population in general, and so to
further concentrate wealth) will surely be proliferating in upcoming
rhetoric, including around environmental concerns. (Tangentially,
e.g. friendly virus warnings to "Stay inside!" don't
actually make sense in any specific way — unless figured
against such an us-them axis & global involution more generally,
such "competition" still being the basic premise of
neoliberalism....) Figuring the poor as "the problem"
(including the global poor) is certainly nothing new, but I very
much want to emphasize that a healthy ecology involves everyone
& everything. That's a simple truth, at least until ramified,
because a healthy ecology also involves death & change: Notions
of static immortality are themselves illusory (as most everyone
actually already knows, if they bother to remember) & even
dangerous. While life is — ultimately, paradigmatically
— dynamic & risky.
3
I'd intended a bit of a break here, but not like this: It's not
only that the virus response in this country has been a debacle on
the macro scale (sailing past that 10% incremental mortality I'd
noted earlier...), but that various corresponding adjustments in
my personal life have left me feeling agitated, i.e. without much
daily mental clarity. And mental clarity is sort of the point to
discussions such as this, e.g. anticipating problems or countermeasures
& trying to think ahead, rather than being reactive in a
short-sighted way. (People with more resources can, of course,
hire extensive staffs to plan for such circumstances. Disruptions
thus provide a window of opportunity for people who are ready to
implement their agendas. And creating paralysis within the general
population is a strategy.) In other words, this sort of thinking
is more important than ever during a crisis, & so I feel a need
to try to muddle along here.... In fact, the circumstances remind
me that "theory" is always in danger of reifying anyway:
Clarity fades (perhaps almost imperceptibly) into reification, as
various ideas take not only shape but assume power. And some people
around me like to describe what I do as "philosophy"
sometimes, but to be clear, I don't embrace that term (which I read
as internal to imperialism, in a similar sense as "human"
tends to reinvoke liberalism...): Indeed, philosophy is a technology
— or even a "gimmick," in Sianne Ngai's terms, i.e.
an "object" that's both too much & not enough. (And
the latter is easy enough to observe, between the grandiosity
involved in dictating formal possibilities & the lapses of
practical applicability....) Instead, I look at tracings or
untanglings, but that's not to say that any such activity isn't
susceptible to issues of reification, i.e. basically any time a
result is formalized. (Among other issues, this involves writing,
or expression — presumably linguistic — per se. Ideas
thus become words, i.e. static, and invoke issues of legibility,
even of ontology....) Questions of avoiding reification while
thinking, & especially while expressing thought, then become
(at least for me) questions of segmentation & typology as well,
i.e. of the (analytic) sense of exposition & organization: Such
reification is technological reification, pace language as technology,
with questions of reification further becoming questions of hypocrisy
from any decolonizing perspective, as static "philosophy"
comes (eventually, if not immediately) to enforce a status quo....
(Fascists thus love reification, in practice, i.e. the calcification
of typological hierarchy & segmentation.) Moreover, such
reification is constantly happening to any idea once articulated,
that or its vanishing... but then, vanishing may simply be change
& motion. (I want to recall the issue of exemplarity as well,
itself a gimmick, i.e. too much & too little: In other words,
examples become reified — i.e. made canonical — themselves,
at which point they're no longer contingent as examples. Moreover,
an example generally requires some kind of segmentation, if not a
full-fledged typology....) In this sense, critique is always also
consolidation (certainly pace Kant) — as is reaction. But
what then of "reinventing the wheel" in every circumstance?
Practicality — including pace the opening to this paragraph
— is certainly an issue, but decolonizing also cannot be
another kind of universalizing.... Instead, we're going to need
ideas that are fluid & accommodate constant change.... Any
specificity then becomes both strength & weakness, not only
because it suggests a hardening of (possibly relevant) thought in
motion, but also because of the general scene of the battle, with
its layers of secrecy & leverage. (But then, I'm not any good
at secrecy myself, even if I do try not to draw too clear a picture
for the wrong people....) Emphatically though, these observations
are not about defeatism: Rather, they're statements that fluid
circumstances are our real circumstances! (It doesn't feel comfortable
to me to be writing right now, but it shouldn't.) Something more
rigorous (& pretty — or clear) is often useless in the
face of real problems, and that goes for communication in general:
Western epistemology focusing on "science" is one way of
communicating ideas about the world, but does it (always, or even
usually) work? Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ways of knowing
must be evaluated for their practical outcomes (& I'd add, must
never become exclusive). Ironically, in the Western arena, this
describes marketing rather better, i.e. it's done according to
measured "communication" outcomes. (Of course, this leads
into various forces of technological enchantment/entrainment &
capture....) We clearly need other stories, and we need other
stories that work as communication — not that fit some abstract
criterion of truth (which can be nothing but reification or distraction
anyway). What has knowledge even become today? It's my specialty,
I guess, but in the "prove it" world of neoliberalism
(& science, mind you), knowledge is generally proven by using
it to obtain wealth (as discussed more extensively in
Concepts of contemporary authority)
— and again as suggested amid the opening to this paragraph,
wealth is increasingly required to gain knowledge.... (Such an
observation then opens to the regime of calculation as noted in the
previous entry, reification & technical specificity often serving
to elide the entire ecological scene — or reduce it to numbers.)
And so I'm reminded that "decolonization is not a metaphor,"
rather it's colonization per se that becomes fluid under neoliberalism,
as private corporations escape their prior nation-state containers,
and continue to implement neoimperial regimes of people with (highly
asymmetric) power over others. (And that's increasingly accomplished
via producing & hoarding knowledge....) Of course, these are
the for-profit "owners" of contemporary technology, and
their "property rights" continue to be enforced by the
castrated inheritors of the nation-state administrations: These
technology owners are also greatly expanding their power at the
moment, largely without counter, as they increasingly control
communication per se. (And note that ongoing quarantine provides
them the perfect laboratory for mastering the body via the virtual
as well, a tricky endeavor to be sure....) In any case, if the
rest of the planet is to defeat these "property rights,"
& to produce laws that limit the amount of power anyone can
have over anyone else, it'll still involve some kind of expression,
a reification, a series of thoughts to which one can return, i.e.
a history... in some sense, flowing somewhere. In that sense,
response also becomes relational, i.e. a flowing from the middle
— i.e. as technical insertion (i.e. mediation) per se, concepts
flowing in an infinite hall of mirrors (or forging a relationscape,
per Erin Manning).... (Untangling can then easily come to double
relation per se, as a matter of perspective....) That's ultimately
the technological fate & (analogic) character of theory, but
there's also a pharmacology of theory: One might say that it's
useful until it works too well, i.e. until it becomes too clear.
(In the meantime, what's clear enough is to fight these unprecedented
concentrations of power — often equated legally to property
— in the field of media & communications....)
4
The prior entry raises not only the ambition of "mastering the
body via the virtual," but issues of my own (writing &
theoretical) clarity. And at the risk of indulging too much
autobiography — & at a risk level that I'll definitely
be exceeding here at some point — I'd like to untangle the
latter around an interrogation of presence: I haven't had so much
a lack of ideas, and certainly not a dearth of affect (figured here
as a sort of pre-idea), but exactly as already noted, a lack of
clarity. The situation thus immediately underscores the collective
nature of individuation & selfhood, meaning that "voice"
is always collective in important ways. (A nonlinear & iterative
process of semiosis, whether functioning unconsciously or consciously
as education, forges our own modes of self-expression, in particular
our sense of what needs to be expressed....) In other words, I
need some sort of audience in order for (my) ideas to take concrete
shape, and I've barely had a chance to speak with anyone for many
months. Lacking such concrete interaction, I find that my thinking
remains fuzzy, such that more effort is required in order to conjure
a (necessary) context. Of course, many people are interacting more
over the internet: Personally I've been trying to keep my internet
use about the same, so I've been feeling a significant drought in
my interactions — & also in the quality of my interactions
even so. Such an observation is obvious enough, yet I heard e.g.
significant buzz about doing away with in-person voting for the US
election last year, and responded immediately wherever I could,
namely that (further) removal (or sublimation) of "presence"
per se from the political arena would be disastrous. I was roundly
mocked around Silicon Valley ("shouting someone down"
being a normal activity here) — but fortunately, Black Lives
Matter decided that presence was actually important (& consequently
the election outcome wasn't as disastrous as it could have been).
So what then of technologies of presence, as I propose to call this
developing set of means for interacting with others, generally via
(digital) sound or video? I'm going to set aside issues of
"privacy" for this entry, but do intend to return to that
discussion soon (& privacy is a liberal or bourgeois concept,
so not something I truly embrace, even if I do share overlapping
concerns...). Instead, let me figure presence around notions of
embodiment, and how one's "body" appears in social media:
For one, there are greater choices in how to (re)present oneself.
(No one knows you're a dog?) But those choices are largely internal
to whatever technology of presence is being used, meaning not only
that one might "be present" differently in different
places (for better or worse...), but that one's presence is by
permission of a tech company (i.e. a for-profit entity). So I also
want to turn to a note from PL10 (& I'd suggested already here
that I'd be revisiting some of these notes),
No. 14 on the extension
or even amelioration of embodiment: Is "bodily imprisonment"
indeed mostly a feminist issue? A trans issue? What of the posthuman
& its pharmacology more generally? (On the internet, no one
knows you're a woman? Or it's actually becoming a privileged arena
for pinkwashing & various pink collar jobs?) As the note asks
then, what does a regime of virtual presence mean for reproduction
& gender? (What e.g. of reproduction strictly internal to a
virtual space? That could soon be meaningful....) Such questions
lead immediately back to notions of ownership as already articulated,
i.e. who "owns" one's virtual presence? Moreover, corporate
ownership of our social interactions yields not only a sense of
subjection — specifically in terms of the iterative process
of semiosis, as noted above, yielding voice... — but of
appropriation. And not only appropriation of profiles or definitions
of "who we are," as framed as distinct & individually
addressable (& surely as maps that quickly become more real for
many than what they supposedly designate...), but as "presences"
that can simply be switched off. So what then of political presence?
Obviously it's completely vulnerable to the framing company or
organization, and one can be "virtually disappeared"
without any (even nominal) crime being committed. (Various non-people
& duplicates can be virtually appeared as well....) There's
no "public space" of internet presence, nowhere that
someone can express themselves without (perhaps imminent) danger
of exclusion. There's also increasingly little means to know who
or what is or isn't fabricated (e.g. as multiple amplifications of
a single opinion).... So now, while sliding into the alternately
horrific & hopeful world of the posthuman (or at least, hopefully,
of the post-imperial), what does human presence mean? Is someone
without a "social media presence" even fully human, or
fully political, today? (I'll have to dive into the pornographic
at some point later too....) Are these images — in the very
general sense — property? (Does property get a voice?) Once
again notions of technological property quickly outrun the law....
And social media technology does become a weapon, civilizations
largely being based upon (technological) weaponry, now as the new
governmentality — & as a hierarchical force, a centripetal
force, i.e. both as drawing people together & as establishing
a small number of (corporate) decision makers in tiers over the
rest of the world. In other words, despite (or because of...?) the
many divisive projects online, internet spectacle becomes &
remains a central attraction. And internet attention is not
"policed" in the same way as it once was either, i.e.
when a variety of interesting & open-ended conversations occurred
in broad public forums, with noise & spectacle per se now having
largely eliminated productive discussion & even clarity of
thought: There becomes no real (governmental) reason to limit
public information, or even discussion, which becomes practically
impossible anyway amid the noise. And this frothing sort of
speculative, virtual world continues to offer many more possibilities
for technological mediation, whether of identity or otherwise: A
sense of "magic" also tends to return (& must be noted
as such), producing (or arising from) a ramified series of fictions,
already asking per PL10 note No.
198, "... in what world does one live & on whose
authority?" The question becomes concrete (via the virtual)....
And the question suggests various (new?) slants on realism, whether
e.g. of the right or left sorts, as well as concepts of (virtual)
pessimism & notions framing imagination: Leftist realist art
has thus long been critiqued for (effectively) limiting the latter,
but fascist realism is at least as declaratory: The internet bully
becomes the basic Hobbesian figure, working to synchronize domination
while corporate employees execute their mechanical "moderation"
policies (often around the bully, who already knows the game...).
This is the real world, we are told! Now virtual.... It's also
(inescapably) about who we are & what we become & on a daily
(if not momentary) basis.... In any case, realism per se isn't the
issue — although the power to declare the real is certainly
an issue for fascists — but rather the need to trace relations
within this situation, i.e. to determine how posts & identities
function both online & outside the virtual frame. In other
words, according to what (phenomenological?) field of presence (or
perspective) is the political subject formed? Such interrogation,
particularly amid proliferating technological mediation, is bottomless
— but some sort of meaningful ownership of one's online
presence is also an obvious component of decolonizing tech, i.e.
of evading capture by or "within" tech media (escape per
se perhaps being iterative...), but also of (crucially) continuing
to trace a kind of (political) presence that can't simply be switched
off. (Of course, that one's humanity might simply be switched off
assumes that such a switch was ever read as "on" in the
first place. Again though, online, how does anyone else really
know?)
5
Whereas the previous entry suggests some (e.g. political) risks
around losing presence, there's also growing (individual) risk in
our society around being present (such risk, broadly speaking, also
being a facet of the power of presence...), including via the
increasing prevalence of surveillance — combined with private
ownership & decision-making around using such information (e.g.
to disqualify people from economic participation). Particularly
around the tech industry, such concerns have often come to be figured
as notions of "privacy" — a notion called to double
duty after having already figured private ownership & private
business. In other words, within our social framework, the privacy
debate basically becomes about ownership. And a sense of ownership
then (automatically?) comes with an inclination to exploit: The
latter remains a given in most "privacy" debates, in that
freedom from harassment is figured (only — or
"practically") as about someone else's access to information,
not about freedom per se from harassment & exploitation. (In
principle, the latter are often already crimes! But are nonetheless
widely accepted & allowed, or even encouraged....) Within this
frame, then, people are basically demanding ownership of their
"personal information" & ultimately the ability to
engage in some sort of marketplace around that information, i.e.
to sell themselves. (The alternative is apparently to have oneself
stolen, and this happens frequently as well....) I.e. many people
are demanding the same sorts of bourgeois or neoliberal rights as
"private businesses" — becoming entrepreneurs of
themselves, again as an ongoing aspect of the postmodern (neoimperial)
condition.... Of course it's no wonder that such demands are framed
within the horizons of liberalism, or that they're being subjected
to the usual misinformation campaigns by profit seekers: That's
our society & so what we really need is renewed figuration of
the public, rather than multiplied retreats into privacy. Further,
it's religion per se that defines (public) social values —
as I once again (e.g. per
PL9) insist upon a
capacious definition: The notion that "we" are doing
away with religion per se (especially as a circumscribed sort of
"wrong belief"), when scientific rationalism is
"merely" changing social values, is untenable: Anyone
raised in a social structure will have been exposed to a variety
of ideas about social belonging, and those sorts of "values"
(while later able to be questioned...) do prove very durable. That
is religion, plain & simple! .... Okay, so the different
religions in our society (some surviving from prior eras, or else
diverging differently from prior eras) have a different sense of
values around privacy, including e.g. exactly what should be made
public or private. (This is a very broad statement. E.g. neoliberal
fundamentalists believe, in very coarse terms, that anything
profitable should be private — & that things that aren't
profitable shouldn't be done.) I might even suggest that one's
religious beliefs then condition one's feelings around a hypothetical
nexus of privacy & freedom (the freedom to exploit & to
hoard privately coming to define that notion in many circles
today...), and indeed that while religion does have a private
component (& might even come to define the private per se, in
many circumstances...), it's ultimately about a relation with other
people. And different religious attitudes come to suggest different
"echo chambers" in our society, such that views are
amplified & reproduced accordingly.... (And one might go on
to suggest even more of a nexus between surveillance & religion,
i.e. raising questions of transparency around religion per se. But
how transparent can anything ever really be to a small child? And
they're always learning....) And then what is private expression,
versus public expression, in terms of what one can really say? (In
an internet world without "public places" there's surely
more to be said....) So if we want people to have a sense that
there's more to life & the world than what they can perceive,
that it's bigger than themselves, that they ultimately need to learn
to live together with various people & non-people, even those
they might not understand.... We clearly need better communication
on these & other important points (e.g. better stories), i.e.
communication that actually works on a practical level. (Today
that often means marketing-based.... And in terms of stories, I
find it fascinating that the first several Star Trek franchises
have basically no surveillance... to the point that they don't even
know if someone is kidnapped from their own spaceship, these being
essentially military vessels.... Perhaps it's silly to dwell on
popular fiction, but someone with real media power made a point of
portraying a technological future this way.) Particularly when it
comes to deep-seated values & other religious notions, then,
these are also matters of legibility (e.g. per
PL8), especially questions of
what is or should be legible to whom: That's basically a matter
of education (including proliferating educational settings), such
that (in some ways) I'm talking about "unconscious"
education in figuring the religious.... And education has been a
public function (including sometimes as specifically religious),
but it's also increasingly under attack on that basis. There's
thus a basic embedded question there of what's public, i.e. public
knowledge, i.e. public legibility (& both in terms of what
people are allowed to know & what people are required to know).
(And already per PL10n67,
Western legibility does always both require & posit e.g.
segmentation & typology, technical alternatives coming to involve
— reciprocal — mystification, with any spectrality
generated being papered over — presumptively, anyway —
by the same proliferation of surveillance technology....) Legibility
then becomes a public question, a question of public, a figuration
of worlds.... What should be legible & to whom? (The cost of
omniscience will always remain unattainably high....) In some
sense, this is a question of deriving meaning from information,
some of which might otherwise go unnoticed.... So whether in public
or private, what should people learn? (This is also a question of
collective individuation, per the previous entry, and even of
expression & voice....) Note that there's already some real
"separation of powers" in place around that question,
though, and a sense of "checks & balances" regarding
what to learn ought to be respected: After all, not everyone needs
to know everything for society to function well, and such
"differential" is really much of our (postmodern) issue,
particularly as (like much else) even larger asymmetries are being
forged. (And as PL10n37
heralded "open listening" or a micropolitics around
uncertainty, itself figured tentatively as a sort of religious
value, so as to "disarm authoritarian listening," such
hope only seems to have become more remote, at least regarding
online communication, over the past year....) That there might be
various layers of students & teachers is then inevitable —
the situation itself coming to figure (at least partially) religion
as I've defined it — but there's also a weaving of (these
already existing...) "information asymmetries" (&
e.g. their protocols of initiation, private, religious or otherwise)
more broadly through society. So is this situation only a matter
of (the mechanics of) eventually teaching everything, or is some
information to be withheld entirely? Again, from whom? And back
to near the beginning of this entry, who owns knowledge? Moreover,
what is public knowledge? (And recall that regimes of denial largely
function by obscuring self-knowledge, so the ramifications of
collective individuation must be considered....) In other words,
what are the boundaries or borders of knowledge? To whom or what
are they permeable? (And is this a formal matter, or one of simple
resonance or technique?) Of course, in our society, privacy itself
becomes a (private) technology, e.g. something to be purchased....
(And a lengthier discussion of pornography will still have to wait,
but such an allusion — & recall that porn was an early
font for internet activity — does raise another intersection
of religion & privacy, figuring a boundary often regarded as
vague.... Like all surveillance in our society, porn also generates
a kind of appropriation.) Privacy-as-product then allows one to
purchase illegibility (from some perspectives) as a kind of freedom,
basic freedom from exploitation receding into the distance.... (Per
the general rubric here, one might posit that such a transaction
requires subjecting one's body to relations of even greater speed.
In other words, it's not a slowing or easing of relations, but an
addition... and granted only by a more powerful institution &
according to its own terms.) And so that privacy is basically a
liberal-bourgeois notion is obvious enough, but it's probably also
worth noting some early modern history (again) here: Early evocations
of "free & public market" (eventually whittled down
to "free market" during the long seventeenth century...)
explicitly included the concept of all transactions being public,
the novel proliferation of private transactions being precisely
cause for alarm at the time.... (Now it's become almost unthinkable
that businessmen, even such public figures as our noxious ex-president,
should have all their deals made public....) And that "public
market" meant a physical space might merely seem to be
old-fashioned now, but where is our public space (as figurative
market or otherwise) online today? Further to neoliberal terms, a
private-public dual has even come to figure a basic cannibalization
of the latter by the former, i.e. via the broad drive to
"privatize," i.e. to liquidate & exhaust the public
sphere: This is very much the context from which notions of
"privacy" must be read! And in that context, "information
businesses" are currently liquidating yet another public sphere,
i.e. the space of people's everyday activities (& knowledge
thereof), yielding broad (& privately administered, constructed
according to techniques of marketing & propaganda...) typologies
of who is told what. These typologies & associations should
certainly be made public knowledge. (Does what your smartphone
learn about you actually help you? Demand it! Not some formal
"excuse" for being more trouble than anything....) And
there need to be public places to discuss these issues. In other
words, let's center the public in any discussion of privacy (which
is instead often figured in the negative...), private hoarding (of
anything) being a central issue today: What should the public know
about itself, whether individually or collectively? (Note that
e.g. "background checks" appear to be proliferating....
Note further such important "public knowledge" as who won
a democratic election....) It seems that the public side of an
increasingly imposed public-private dual is largely being made to
disappear.... But that's also where democracy lives, i.e. in public
discussions of public issues.
6
And now I want to interrogate specific notions of "pornographic
transparency" — beginning with some remarks from PL10
note No. 197: Han is
someone who offers worthwhile analysis of the contemporary situation,
but also relies upon an untheorized "pornographic transparency"
trope. In particular, while concerns over strategy & secrecy
need to be considered, and it's certainly the case that (political)
notions of transparency have been (in line with the neoimperial
regime & its ongoing) universalizing, such an analysis would
benefit from considerations of legibility & perspective. And
"legible to whom?" does become an increasingly significant
question due to growing (information) asymmetries. In that sense,
pornography becomes a spectacle, and so another kind of (increasing)
obfuscation.... Han is correct that many urges toward
"authenticity" ultimately become about marketing oneself,
though, and that the emotionalization of commodities can bolster
consumption, even that "values" come to be packaged &
sold as products — & I certainly support his call for
play (in contrast to more work). But while pornography might
exemplify (in some sense) the basic neoliberal principle of making
everything available for exploitation, is it actually transparent?
Han's claim that the naked body is stripped of symbols — while
sounding (naïvely) correct — is false: The porn industry
encounters a body "covered" in symbolic markers. (And
that the nude cannot engage in seduction seems a strange implication....
What Han is lamenting, of course, is abandonment of particular sorts
of traditional — i.e. culturally derived — mating
rituals, indeed seemingly those of hetero-patriarchy per se.) Yet
the elimination or marginalization of ritual is surely underway,
including as Han describes, both in terms of neoliberal (economic)
transparency & according to a sea of "multiculturalism"
that seems only to render daily life into a haze, i.e. as relatively
unmarked by ritual events (& so into a perpetual present). If
religion is ultimately about attention, then (& its resonance
with others...), the religion of the (neoliberal) interior increasingly
becomes consumerist distraction. Pornography is not only a
distraction, though — & one should note how "mildly
pornographic" images are suffused into a variety of marketing
& propaganda, i.e. are not confined to explicit sex videos...
— but a product, i.e. something itself commoditized. And
porn is not transparent at all! Indeed it figures illusion, and
is notoriously unsatisfying (as e.g. Adorno had already noted the
profusion of sexual images as rendering the population both more
aroused & less satisfied...), regardless of what its consumers
might be seeking. (Jennifer Nash has figured such dissatisfaction
around feelings of possession, i.e. to penetrate the inscrutable
& impenetrable e.g. black woman & so finally to SEE her....
Except that, beyond the simply factual realm, where the consumer
of porn will not be doing any penetrating, he doesn't ultimately
really see anything more real. There is still only a body, the
surface of a body.... While extreme closeups become completely
unsatisfying, i.e. violate the conditioned scopic distance.) Likewise
porn discussions are usually unsatisfying, at least for people who
aren't wanting the erotic component, because all that's really
happening is watching people perform sexual activities (assuming
"traditional" pornography, that is...) — something
we already know that people (somewhere) are often doing. And further
to "transparency," becoming voyeur (i.e. consuming porn)
implies an immediate sense of distance: One is watching (&
unknown, at least until online forms of interactive porn...), not
present, with the (asymmetric) non-presence conditioning &
animating the experience. (A sense of closeness implied by intimate
images is thus held in suspension by the format itself via its
imposed distance, i.e. reinjecting an antisocial quality as well
as entrenching the typical scopic orientation....) But what of
participants, i.e. consent to being watched? Ubiquitous surveillance
now means that various "pornographic" images (& sounds)
are constantly being collected by technology companies, governments,
etc. In that sense, one's personal life becomes transparent, and
per the previous entry, one finds many discussions of "privacy"
etc. So people are concerned with becoming pornography for others,
perhaps, especially as such positions are usually abjected in Western
society, but are also concerned with randomly (or not so randomly)
encountering unwanted images themselves in various contexts. (And
tricking someone into seeing something they "can't unsee"
was once a popular internet game too, porn — & bargain
hunting... — having been relatively early motivations for
others to join us "academic researchers" online....) Both
seem like legitimate concerns (including e.g. for children), and
as usual, in this society can be figured around notions of ownership,
i.e. of owning one's presence (per an earlier entry), and in turn
around notions of porn as appropriation, i.e. of "having oneself
stolen" per the previous entry: One might even conclude that
porn figures some sort of boundary, as having oneself filmed under
different conditions is widely (albeit not always) considered to
be okay.... And considering the difficulties (e.g. per Zupancic)
of defining sex per se, a definition for porn is not straightforward
(as e.g. "a video of people having sex" is presumably not
practically sufficient...). Indeed, I keep coming back to notions
of perspective, legibility & consent — e.g. of "how
to" sex videos seeming to have legitimate educational purposes,
not to mention sexual depictions as artistic expression, etc....
One might then say that "appropriation" is a particular,
non-consensual form of making legible (i.e. to some perspectives
— often especially the privileged perspective of the transcendent,
ocularcentric spectator). Various aspects of "sexual
entertainment" are then summoned & arrayed in order to
cultivate or enforce standard social hierarchies & their
perceptual asymmetries, underlaid by basic commodifications of
"sex" promising satisfaction without entanglement —
& instead usually delivering further entanglement (in imagery)
with little satisfaction. But this is all about contemporary porn's
embeddedness within late capitalism, and very little about watching
people have sex per se! (Satisfaction without entanglement is a
capitalist slogan/lie in general, after all.) Yet discomfort around
porn — such that Han can use it rather uncritically, i.e. as
a stopping point for discussion — persists, and really beyond
the notions of property & ownership that I've tried to indicate
here. And I've already noted the way that concepts of religion
have intertwined concepts of the private (by first defining concepts
of the public), neoliberal religion basically being profitability
per se (as buoyed by an imposed non-relation between traditional
religion & "business") — this being where notions
strictly separating "loving" sexual activity from (presumably
profitable, for someone) sex work are usually located. However,
feminists have long interrogated why so much sex work (&
housework, etc.) is uncompensated, with notions of "sanctity"
consequently coming to sound like anti-labor clichés. (I
would never actually advocate for extending neoliberal economic
relations, but given our immersion in them already, they could
certainly be arrayed more equitably....) In that sense, the
"reproductive domain" has still been held (at least
partially) apart from the political-economic, but the context of
Western society also suggests that suppression of women (& their
power, economic & otherwise) was the actual target (of such
reservation) — & not the opposite, as usually claimed.
And that a naked woman walking casually down the street should
instantly become a target for all manner of violence (especially a
woman of color) is then an image that broadly underlies Western
social hierarchy — as simply having "a good attitude"
about one's body & sex will not stop many people in this society
from reading abjection — & so from responding to abjection
(prototypically) as the bully does, i.e. as a call for further
abjection. (Any attempt to push against the status quo in this
arena is then typically met by repressive responses following the
usual lines of privilege... those changing only slowly. In that
sense, pornography can thus make some things quite transparent, or
rather legible: Per the de facto terms of our society, someone
else might be owed something for a woman having bared her body!
This is a powerful claim about property....) But some people, women
included, are also able to weaponize their sexuality, i.e. to tap
into a power that has generally been proscribed by liberal society
(or else banished to a dangerous "other"): A sexual
presence (& this is not synonymous with the unveiling of some
body part...) can take on a sort of conspicuousness, i.e. according
to the allure of porn (or even prior regimes of seduction...), or
as something from which the innocent might require protection, i.e.
modulation of attention in general (as such imagery comes to be
used clinically in mainstream corporate marketing, i.e. as technology),
thus figuring terms such as "obscenity." But what is
actually read as obscene? (This is where one can see that the naked
body is rich in symbols! And let me also specifically distinguish
modesty from shame: They involve different interactions with power.)
PL10 note No. 117 then
goes on to suggest a "pharmacology of conspicuousness,"
further to bodily alienation (which can itself become conspicuous),
and so posits an internal-development / external-imposition dual
that probably conditions people's ongoing responses to their own
sexual imagery as well (along with responses to technology more
broadly): E.g. "youporn" & exhibitionism are thus
increasingly popular, as widespread surveillance simultaneously
concerns others for their own personal privacy. (One might
characterize people who are "selling themselves" as taking
control....) Moreover, the entire 24x7 nonstop consumer culture
can be figured as increasingly pornographic (as does Han —
& do note the insomniac qualities of porn), i.e. as the elimination
of all barriers to exploitation, whether temporal, observational,
etc... — such that all activity ultimately becomes a basis
for profit (which, note, likewise requires "suspension"
or a framework for calculation...), and of course according to
asymmetric (i.e. hierarchical) terms. (And in the absence of ritual
markers, people do come to reterritorialize e.g. on celebrities
— including for their pornographic images, i.e. as suspended
within another framework of social distance. So this is, once
again, a world packed with symbols — if rather flimsy symbols.)
And in a previous entry I asked what human presence might come to
mean, and even e.g. whether someone without "media presence"
can be considered fully human or political today. In other words,
I asked about voice — and voice does figure much of the
indeterminacy surrounding pornography today, i.e. whether it's
exploiting or empowering.... (That depends on these other relations
I've been tracing....) In any case, porn does not make a good trope
for some kind of extreme over-transparency: Its making-legible is
not only considerably more contingent than that, but raises aspects
of pre-capitalist relations. Yet it does also raise a variety of
(technological) questions around consent, ownership & perspective
(not to mention religion, etc.)....
7
Having been at this project for a while — & of course
it's something of a "further thoughts" project anyway...
— the results do come to seem rather rambling. (As already
noted, circumstances haven't contributed to the greatest writing
clarity either.) At some point, I should probably pull out some
"main points" to emphasize in more compact fashion, but
for now I do want to continue something of a "brainstorming"
mode & in turn the usual tangents-filled style in order to trace
some of the (many) implications.... In particular, I've been able
to find relatively little "conceptual" discussion of law
from a "critical" perspective, i.e. how law works (in our
society in general, not just how it fails some groups...), how it's
functioned other times & places, how it's instituted.... In
short, how do we change to different sorts of laws & what should
that be like? And regarding this issue, I want to return to an
orientation on anarchy, not figured as a dearth of law, but rather
as a general(ized) limit on individual power. (In other words,
there would be laws — & differences between people —
but tendencies to render such differences into a hierarchical society
would be formally retarded. And I'll set the question of
"enforcement" aside for the moment.) But then (as discussed
here already) notions of "anarchy" have been used online
in order to bring the tech empires enormous power, as indeed
"technology" becomes a means to outpace law per se, i.e.
so as to operate according to scenarios without established limits
or conventions. Such hierarchization has then derived — in
part — from information asymmetry per se, i.e. basic notions
of what is legible to whom. (Such asymmetry is growing rapidly.)
And then law per se is then typically asymmetric, i.e. as a state
function that might involve some layer of political consensus, but
is often simply imposed on other groups. (In that sense, historical
notions of "freedom" always seem to reference the figure
of the slave, i.e. the lessening of particular asymmetries, but not
in reference to any kind of underlying equality. Rhetorical
"freedom" in our society is then further figured specifically
as the freedom to exploit, not as freedom from exploitation, and
so as hypothetical entry into a potentially exploitative position!)
Legibility issues are not new, however, and so hierarchies deriving
from law (always) involve differential treatment. Differential
legibility also forges arenas for profit, such that e.g. according
to contemporary (techie) "privacy" rhetoric, one might
even buy it directly. In any case, further to Paragraph
5, anarchy thwarts broad legibility, i.e. the "God's
eye" perspective, and so rests more upon molecular interactions
& habits. So I want to take up some thoughts from PL10
Note 170, in particular
notions of positive law:
PL10n161 had already
noted that, under liberalism, law is generally figured in the
negative, i.e. as prohibition (anything else being, in principle,
OK). And Paragraph 1 had already asked "What
would avowal rather than prohibition look like?" Notions of
avowal (or affirmation) & prohibition then forge & figure
the body as well: One might call this an ethic, in very broad
terms, i.e. as a way of living (in which e.g. bodily extension
already becomes a sort of bodily discipline...) — & of
course, formal law will lag any such established habit. (Again,
the tech empires have capitalized on this situation, with e.g.
Facebook already able to forge & channel broad social interactions
according to their own fascist, profit-seeking discipline. Such a
forge is both world-making & increasingly an engine of human
individuation. In other words, this is all happening irreversibly
& fast. And it's happening in the general realm of positivity
& affirmation!) Call it all "de facto" law perhaps
(or simply habit), and realize that it's being established now by
private companies according to their own personal goals. Per the
previous Paragraphs, then, the situation leaves many people questioning
our own legibility, i.e. around e.g. (political) presence or
surveillance, as there's little protection versus exploitation.
(And "virtual" profits of this sort have been fully
convertible to wealth in general, such that they can lay claim to
— & dominate — real resources. Such a situation
suggests erecting barriers to fungibility, to which neoliberalism
is fully opposed....) Supposedly there's "no alternative"
& these things just happen, because it's "human nature"
or whatever. No, it's just greedy people (consistently) getting
their way. So what would "anarchic government" be like,
specifically as a technology for limiting power imbalances? For
one, law needs greater flexibility: It should be viewed as a living
entity (i.e. contrary to notions of eternity or universality...),
in order to limit exploitation in any particular moment, and it
needs to be "enforced" by community standards, i.e. real
(social) belief in the law (i.e. as liturgy). Regarding its
historical structure, then, one might think of law as a sort of
memory, i.e. needing constant reinterpretation (& suffering
hazards of e.g. exemplarity...). And then one might figure e.g.
traditional concepts such as karma as a kind of accountability
— although let me be clear, that I don't envision passivity:
People need to speak up for any sort of "molecular" law
to function (& let's recall that "law" per se is
fundamentally erected against the bully — i.e. as the many
against the one). In any case, we can't tolerate some kind of
"external" law-as-command. Communities need their own
law-liturgies (in which they actually believe...), even as the
global world requires cooperation as well. There is already a
variety of "molecular" law existing (within neoimperial,
top-down "molar" systems...), though, e.g. communities
on which external laws are (partially) imposed & differentially
enforced, even entire regimes of "extra-legal" violence
(e.g. around "drugs"), such that states can come to collude
with the worst exploiters. E.g. Veena Das then suggests that various
de facto laws occupy various interstices (or in a sense I've
previously invoked here, logistic dimensions...), even that
technologies of law incorporate various fictions. Establishing
"grass roots" law-liturgies then becomes about finding a
voice (reciprocal to finding an audience...) — & in the
physical world, can bring bodily violence, while in the virtual
world can simply (& quite legally) mean being "disappeared"
(but without bodily violence?). How do we move to some kind of
"positive" scheme then? (Particularly when so many people
these days are opposed to any sort of justice?) How do we stay
ahead of the bullies & (financial) exploiters? It seems that
a sort of hypothetical, "predictive" law would only be
gamed, assuming the exploiters know its algorithms... and I've said
that knowing the law is essential. (Is it, though, in all its
details? I do reject e.g. revenge, categorically....) But those
remarks still seem to proceed from notions of mastery, so what of
distributed social law of which no one is really master? I envision
some kind of open-ended scenario, I suppose, but it requires (mostly,
as there will always be some sociopaths...) a real desire to do the
right thing, i.e. a strong religious orientation toward a community
(of which many are increasingly unsure anyway...). Per PL10
Note 194, I've also
(tentatively) suggested a sort of "machinic undoing,"
i.e. disautomation (& "unharnessing" of biology,
becoming illegible...) & (imposed) slowness. In other words,
if tech empires are outrunning the law, how about limiting their
speeds? (Indeed I'd already suggested in
PL10n160 that any
relevant technology policy entails a politics of speed....) There
are conceptual issues here: What is the "base" speed,
so to speak? Ecologies include many.... But we could probably peg
"human" activity to human speeds, the basic idea being
to allow time for reflection & the generation of meaning (&
appropriate social disposition). The main issue for me isn't so
much multiple temporalities, though, as various could be tracked,
but the evolutionary context of human activity, i.e. our basic
biological embedding. (E.g. we cannot make a "law" to
limit the speed of biological pathogens.) However, speed is also
something of a proxy for energy use, and so for environmental damage
in general, meaning that a slowing could be the only way (regardless).
And counter to accelerationism (called out as inherently universalizing,
e.g. by Yuk Hui), slowness does seemingly preserve an opening for
various temporal & spatial intersections, i.e. for an ecological
pluriverse of human (& non-human) differences. What are we in
such a hurry to do anyway? (This is not a rhetorical question: We
already know that the answer is profit.)
8
There're a couple of specific notes that I still want to elaborate
from PL10, starting here directly from
number 45 (before
presumably wrapping up those plans in the following entry...). And
although who controls "technologies of preparation or
reflection" is certainly significant to the technology sector
(pace e.g. the previous entry), and thus involves a contest of speed
around allowing the relevant time (to digest), I actually want to
consider the parenthetical remark there in more detail: A polarity
of use between appropriation & expropriation is clear enough
(pace, especially, a double meaning for "loss"), but
Agamben's characterization of landscape as "exemplary"
of the inappropriable requires further comment: Indeed, I want to
consider this remark in parallel with (Agamben's) other remarks
e.g. dismissing perspectives of the colonized as simply inversions
of the dominant paradigms already under examination (& often
examined quite fruitfully by Agamben, at least for my understanding
of Western thought...), i.e. as adding nothing new. Pace Bhabha's
classic treatment (& more recently e.g. Mbembe...), he's also
clearly wrong. And so I already noted that changing perceptions
or perspectives change (the) "landscape" as well, but I
also want to note explicitly the (obvious) notion that indigeneity
(& so indigenous persons, as well as their ecological situation...)
has not only been figured as "landscape" for centuries,
landscape itself has figured precisely something long appropriated
under imperial (& now neoimperial...) conditions! So this
observation suggests another sort of foreground-background equivocation,
but more than that: "Polarity" or duality per se is
simply inadequate to render the various relational shades of
connection between people & things. We are not really separate.
And this notion of indigenous as landscape resonates with me on the
internet as well, specifically for having been within the bubble
of the early internet & its proscriptions against commerce,
forging the sorts of "resources" that were... eventually
appropriated by commercial entities toward their own profits. (Those
entities might not have always seized the "content" per
se — & indeed they've created an entire rhetoric &
tension around the notion of "content provider" —
but they did seize both potential revenues & the culture itself.
In the latter case, one might then say that they completely reworked
the habit of online use by subjugating the "landscape"
& thus forged a new regime of affirmative law online... now
pressing neoliberal values into every niche of daily life. And
needless to reiterate, this happens at & via speed.) In that
sense, I was already primed for Harney & Moten's
"undercommons" concept, which in another sense, affirms
that landscape is rich in (changeable) relations, suggesting a kind
of generalized logistic flow (as typically & lamentably optimized
for profit, especially now online...). Before the commercial
explosion, the online situation — which, again, was admittedly
within a bubble of privilege! — was also characterized as
anarchic (including per issues raised in prior entries...), and
that mostly provided cover for the "polarity of use" to
generate a kind of privatization (as paradoxical, or neoliberal,
expropriation). Concepts of "online property" thus exist,
more or less from the start, in a layered form — at least
when it comes to "content" — i.e. via how &
where that content is embedded (or discovered, per specifically
modern rhetoric). In effect, various forms of content (those without
their own legal teams...) were rendered into landscape, while the
"framing organization" became the capitalist actor. So
new modes of ownership were also being forged, and those have
involved varieties of appropriation more or less from the start
(i.e. since even early non-profit internet activity might have
involved copying other material, framed then as for the public
good...), including (at first) the "acceptance" of creative
people who didn't fit the established norms of corporate US decorum.
(Individual, sometimes eccentric, caretakers then yielded to
institutionalization — as less specialized skills became
required.) And that sort of feeling for collectivity, indeed
reminiscent of undercommons idea(l)s (& even, e.g. per Tsing,
longstanding Asian modes of logistic "post"modernity...),
did forge its own sort of "positive law," although that's
largely been incorporated into neoliberal financial logics (which
were, alas, never very far removed...). The old internet had a
sort of ritual quality too, and if (pace Han) ritual is community
without communication, we're now much more toward the opposite pole
of communication without community. Is the individual human even
the subject of knowledge online? Or is it collective data profiles...?
But let's not yield immediately to the nostalgia of (liberal)
individualism in response! What of segmentation & legibility?
The undercommons questions (the merits of) both, Harney & Moten
now touting incompleteness (& Mbembe raising transversal motion
as "traditional" demand!).... Moreover, doesn't Western
(modern, imperial) thought (implicitly) posit individuation as
reciprocal to property ownership per se? If (e.g. per Bey) blackness
is (definitionally, pace modern racism) lawless, i.e. exposes law
(as a practical matter) as a conspiracy of history, then —
pace the previous entry — there're also matters of voice (to
consider), i.e. within molecular interstices (long accompanying
Euro-modernity, pace analyses from both Asia & Africa...), voice
per se figuring expression versus exploitation. But in this thinking,
voice only derives from property, itself the core concept of
liberalism, such that (per Harney & Moten again), intellectual
interiority per se becomes a property of the owning mind, making
(as they say) "the mind-body problem" redundant, "the
body" already having been relegated to logistic organization
in service of the mind (as mirroring or generating the pyramid of
colonial, now neocolonial, empire in general). In the terms opening
this Paragraph, then, the (Westernized) body is finally rendered
into landscape — i.e. as fully exploitable. (And for Bey,
whiteness is thus rendered as a kind of property, undoing property
relations serving to unravel whiteness....) And in that sense,
there's no historical subject of law (at least as justice...) to
which to turn: To reprise the
end of Postmodern Aesthetics, we will need to forge &
develop (& situate) new forms of (virtual) life (to continue
the phrase from Wittgenstein...), then, new reckonings of additivity
& thresholds, trans-motion across (formerly pyramidal) hierarchies
(& blurring of entities...) — as well as modes of
ephemerality (since, per e.g. Mbembe recently, putting the infinite
into perceptible form requires constant redoing...). Indeed, we
are already forging a kind of ritual of change online.... So what
is multiplicity online? How might one refuse individuation? Or
embrace the kenotic? What, then, of collective voice around/as
collective property? (To return to Agamben, where is the garden
online? And by whom is it tended?) And we certainly do need to
refuse the hierarchical law of property, of putting everything into
its own proper bucket (even figured as the digital per se...?), of
"order" per se — including within "our"
selves. Indeed we must refuse rigidity broadly, including around
who & what we are, in order to forge new (& liveable)
relations. (But then, such flexibility will bring great danger as
well. As danger is now our condition, again, as always.)
9
Topologies of violence (pace Han) have become considerably more
intricate versus the old center-periphery days of empire, with (what
I call) spatial involution placing extremes of wealth & poverty
in ever-closer geographical association, but the topology becomes
increasingly intimate as well via online connections & the push
(especially via smartphones) to inject capitalist relations into
every (virtual) moment: The structure of violence in our society
(& so globally...) then (pace an earlier paragraph here) begins
to project a pharmacology of presence as well, as oneself & the
bully aren't "really" present together... but might
nonetheless encounter each other more than ever. And the
"bully" isn't only some aggressive individual (perhaps
working in concert...), but increasingly entire (for-profit &
international) institutions, who work to achieve massive (e.g.
information) asymmetries over entire populations, and thus (distributed
but) hierarchical topologies. (And as noted, such a system doesn't
really fit the spherical globe, which requires a more transverse
embedding, but then, that would involve accumulating less lasting
power....) Such "asymmetries" have also been revisited
here (in recent paragraphs) around pornography & law, the latter
crucially (i.e. strategically) involving speed, and so a temporal
sort of violence. Indeed, the public is particularly ill-suited
to countering rapidity per se, as per the prior paragraph, the body
comes to be forged as a kind of landscape (for exploitation), its
segmentations already prearranged online. There's habit involved
to anything of the body, an ethic, and even a liturgy... as I've
tried to draw out in this space. And these are not matters of
prohibition alone, or even discipline (although the latter might
be thought as positive discipline... as cultivating habit), but of
avowals (i.e. as liturgical) as well: The interactive, online world
is ideal for this sort of formation, then, i.e. induces activities
forging habits (which do not take hold as readily in a more passive
setting...). Habits toward "production" run deep too:
In my experience teaching preschool, all children have an urge to
contribute, and although that is beaten (not only metaphorically...)
out of many, it might e.g. be re-engaged via senses of play....
(So I completely reject the idea that humanity is too lazy to support
itself without being forced, although we do have many jaded &
otherwise broken people these days....) In other words, the online
world aims to capture & project a sense of self-discipline,
although that fades rather easily into a need simply to "obey"
the technology. And e.g. per PL10
Note 86, such activity
ramifies typologies of labor: As that note already indicates, then,
there's a pharmacology of specialization (& that's on both the
side of labor & of management...), and even a sense (pace Harney
& Moten) that e.g. "professional" comes to define
minimal (not aspirational, or even adequate...) standards. (And
I've since figured "accentuating corporeality" more in
terms of a pharmacology of presence, but hopefully that doesn't
come to neglect the body....) Anyway, a typology of labor (at least
of this sort) already posits segmentation — itself a kind of
technology, as noted within the note — such that one can
observe the labor-side pharmacology in e.g. guilds, i.e. restrictions
on entry into skill acquisition yielding (labor) power, but also
yielding a kind of definitional identity, i.e. into castes or senses
of restriction. This sort of disciplinarity then comes to forge a
history, i.e. takes on weight (also pharmacologically) from the
past. In contrast, the online world has created more "generic"
jobs, i.e. jobs requiring little training or investment (on the
worker side...), such that labor competes with itself to the maximum
extent — & these jobs are then evaluated by consumer
ratings or comments, i.e. the generic worker is then re-individuated
externally. (These jobs also emphasize economic quittance, i.e.
the lack of ongoing relations or obligations. One performs a single
task for a particular fee, with no formal embroilment.) And as
noted (i.e. in Paragraph 4), the variability of
online presence allows e.g. a kind of gender blindness (to broach
one major, historical typology of labor...), yet also seems to allow
for a new kind of "pinkwashing" as "care work"
is supposed to be done for free (i.e. along with one's nominal job).
And perhaps it doesn't need saying, but "free" is an
extreme (but not unusual) form of lower pay for women's work! (One
might interrogate e.g. "business" justification for high
profit, namely risk, and how that's figured "men's work"
as well.... Of course, what such rhetoric seems to valorize is
gambling per se...! Despite that modernity has largely taken aim
against chance or fortune....) What we find, then, is that the
"freedom" of women to take "men's jobs" has led
to the further devaluation of "women's jobs" & care
work in particular. But as e.g. Federici argues so forcefully,
domestic work/social reproduction can never be eliminated! Indeed,
this might generally figure human attention to each other, and as
opposed to attention to media & technology, such attention only
seems to be getting poorer: Notions of Ballardism & "spinal
catastrophism" only reemphasize for me that the human body
& hands evolved together with using them to maintain the human
body! (In other words, people have e.g. back problems because it's
no longer normal for their families, broadly speaking, to maintain
their bodies on a daily basis.) We've consequently marginalized
quite a bit of "bodily intelligence," as such labor is
basically being appropriated toward other purposes. And the
"replacement" we have is the modern medical industry,
i.e. another highly specialized branch of the contemporary (&
growing...) typology of labor. The for-profit medical industry
then does rather little to restore proper biofeedback to the body
(& recall e.g. stories of how junk food researchers attempt to
confuse the body's feedback, so we'll eat more...), instead focusing
on the opposite: The medical industry is mostly concerned with
making us feel less, e.g. via anesthetics, and in bringing our
(renewed?) numbness back to work promptly. In other words,
"healthy" is healthy enough to work, and we don't actually
want anyone feeling anything else very clearly! (This situation
already heralds the denial regime....) Bodily discipline is also
increasingly figured via sports (i.e. war-proxy & "useless"
"men's work," now being hailed for women...), including
notions of health: One can be regularly injured, but patched back
up, and get right back out to the same dangerous activity! (Both
the refigurement of war & the maintenance of "tribal"
aggressions with neighbors — & so belonging per se —
also illuminate "sports" as a primary colonizing technology.
Leagues basically contextualize such interactions within & in
service to the pyramidal, imperial system.) Sports also continues
to refigure labor time, e.g. via tension to produce immediately or
to fit into specific media slots. And there's an ongoing perversion
of comedy underway as well, not only via the classic punch up/down
distinction, but via genrefication per se: I.e. genre boundaries
are used to curtail transverse motion, the unbounded quality of
comedy figuring its power. And with "directness" becoming
increasingly impossible politically, fiction & acting continue
to function as significant communication pathways (as they've already
been in various repressive situations...), more slippery formats
(as here...) becoming harder simply to deny or invert. The growing
rigidity of labor typology thus supports social denial more broadly,
particularly when enforced asymmetrically (as we come to know less
of what others are doing...). And the "generic" quality
of new internet jobs (encompassing e.g. delivery...) does increasingly
involve a preexisting box to which one must conform (i.e. such that
labor activities are even more strongly pre-segmented & typed).
There's thus a sort of epistemological violence encroaching here
as well, not only in terms of (e.g. scientific) probing being
potentially destructive (i.e. physically), but in terms of
"fitting" oneself to a crude or manipulative survey &
into a particular box. (How we relate to ourselves is thus set
aside, or reconfigured, while becoming typed. We must change our
lives, as the saying goes — in increasingly many places!)
And this sort of sculpting not only animates the rapidly expanding
(both anesthetic & angry!) denial regime per se, but within a
situation of constantly rising noise: In other words, people's
fears are intentionally inflamed, sending more & more people
into a sort of anti-social bunker mode.... But then, per the
(de)colonial orientation here, this is hardly new: It might be new
that imperial "interiors" are forced to deal with these
situations (i.e. via involution), but e.g. Africa (e.g. recently
per Mbembe) & Asia (e.g. per Tsing) have been dealing with a
sort of logistic undercommons (pace the Western empires...) for
centuries. For Mbembe, such a situation defines modernity per se.
So where does this lead? How might selflessness & dispossesion
become positive figurations for society again, i.e. as something
other than generating revenue streams to be captured by billionaires?
How might we topple such wasteful & ill-fitting hierarchies?
Where is the garden, tended by whom?
10
In Paragraph 2, I'd suggested that (often flawed)
notions of pandemic risk were interrupting the basic regime of
denial in this country, but the latter regime is clearly being
reconstituted at this point, now incorporating coronavirus exposure:
Denial thus resumes its broad, structuring function in Western
society, ascending in part via spatial involution (e.g. per the
previous entry): Under postmodern globalism, contradictions are
now closer in space, denial often being directed generally at
asymmetry per se. (Also per the previous entry, an anesthetic
approach to health always already figures a kind of denial regime.)
Denial becomes a sort of "portable" structure, propagating
across topics & subjects, i.e. becomes a significant contemporary
technology. (There's thus little truth in politics. Instead of
real debating of the issues, there're slogans & various
disingenuous attempts to short circuit discussion.) And such
technology generally operates as a blend of the obvious & the
fallacious, producing a sort of "productive" fiction that
inverts particular facts. Direct inversion (i.e. "up is
down") is then the most basic format for denial, its portability
tied to its relatively simple structure. The result forges a sort
of noise machine (i.e. "free speech"), where truth isn't
formally suppressed, but is nonetheless obscured. (Social denial
is then supported by labor typology, i.e. "sculpting"
selves according to role, perhaps intentionally inflaming fears,
etc.) Anger intertwines noise. "Bunker mode" —
the refusal (the impossibility...) of rational interaction —
results. Any attempt at communication, especially via the sorts
of simple statements necessary to penetrate an anger-addled mind,
are then assimilated — immediately — to binary positions,
i.e. placed in buckets according to a strict prior segmentation.
That sort of intellectual rigidity is then the "natural"
response to noise & anger. And within such a territory, the
basic contradictions underlying "bucket" positions come
to define oneself: Beyond a category for self-placement, denial
tends to drive to the core of our selves as well, becoming obscured
once fully planted there. (For instance, as a small child, I was
told that I didn't have the injuries that I knew I had. I was also
untreated. Eventually I believed that I was fine, that I'd always
been fine... only to have to address the health consequences 50
years later, when I had no choice but to lift the veil of denial.
That a "scientist" such as myself could have been in
denial about such intimate matters for decades is something I still
ponder on a daily basis. There were a variety of effects. More
on this at some point....) So denial becomes a technology, both
portable around society & within selves. One might consequently
feel that one is "chasing" a message in an attempt to
communicate in public, especially about critical political issues,
constant inversions & negations (of any statement) figuring
broad rhetorical distraction. Rhetoric per se is about misdirection,
then, about evoking a sort of circuit through other ideas, perhaps
to avoid a mental block, but as often as not, to derail. (One might
even figure rhetoric via a sort of exosomatization, per Ross following
Stiegler, as a general "circuit through the outside"
engaging e.g. exteriorized memory, but also as opening & figuring
noetic potentials of choice. Rhetoric thus inflects individuation
itself through external ideas, i.e. reinvents consciousness.)
There's a sort of play. And then when it comes to intertwining
confusion & conflict, i.e. maintaining a kind of social paralysis
(in which e.g. bullies can increasingly operate without oversight...),
there're increasingly many figurations of tradition:
Concepts of contemporary history
(as already referenced in Paragraph 2) had already noted the sort
of overdetermined rhetoric parsing historical legacies, including
via a torrent of (potential) futures that are (in principle) being
figured constantly by e.g. financial markets, but rhetoric around
"traditions" also seems increasingly to yield a choice
of pasts. Partly that's a matter of perspective, including from
differing people, but there's also a fundamental rhetorical assertion
— even (or especially?) in the US — that "tradition"
evokes bullying & strongly contoured wealth hierarchy. And
this is completely against North American tradition! We practically
invented "checks & balances" & the basic notion
that no one should dominate. Now we seem to want to forge a new
aristocracy of wealth. Of course, there've been various figurations
of indigenous North American idea(l)s over the years, and that's
partly contingent on early encounters — e.g. with Puritans
& figurations of shame. (Sexual denial & repression entered
North America this way, and were subsequently introduced, intentionally,
into various other societies....) Early encounters thus suggest a
kind of "immunization" against future encounters, i.e.
subsequently encountered ideas being assimilated immediately to a
preexisting dynamic, i.e. contingently. Such an immunology (pace
Sloterdijk) then comes to define how a society regards itself as
distinct from another (or something else entirely...), i.e. as
"individuated" or possessing different idea(l)s —
in turn yielding immunization against various "competing"
ideas. Social immunization involves propagation as well, then,
i.e. intergenerational propagation, and beyond direct instruction,
ideas & beliefs are often propagated implicitly. (A sort of
social liturgy might well be implied, but it's certainly not explicit,
or at least not explicit around all foundational ideas.) Even
repressed ideas, i.e. trauma, are then propagated, perhaps in a
sort of "hocketing" effect via collective unconscious,
i.e. not necessarily "sticking" to the individuals most
logically involved. (E.g. Freud attempts a far more tenuous tale
in Moses and Monotheism, occurring over thousands of years,
versus the mere hundreds of North American imperialist intervention....
Freud was, of course, also a key figure in interrogating sexual
denialism more broadly.) Such propagation doesn't necessarily rely
on biological families either, as various earlier societies have
organized & prioritized social relations differently (i.e. as
affine resonances beyond filial hierarchy, e.g. per
PL7). And in some sense,
such a difference maintained for imperialists as well, their
businesses & families perhaps being in different parts of the
world (since e.g. the Crusades...). In The Dawn of Everything
(from here, DOE, more later...), Graeber & Wengrow then
explore such long-term propagation & differentiation via notions
of schismogenesis (pace Bateson), as basically the driving dynamic
for social segmentation & immunology: Define your group against
some other group. The "negative image" involved in such
a response obviously invokes a strong binary, and one can thus
perceive an increasingly schismogenetic component (even) within
society today, consciously cultivated. Invoking Stiegler again,
then, one might figure collective individuation as a sort of
schismogenesis, perhaps involving multiple parallels — but
such a group-against-group definition does require a degree of
parity. (Which is why right-wingers tend to define their ideas
only against white "liberals" today, and not just anyone....)
However, basic (e.g. information) asymmetry is growing exponentially
today, particularly via exosomatization, such that one should begin
to expect further nonlinear effects. In some sense, this phenomenon
traces the breakdown of transactional equivalence (i.e. quittance
per se), i.e. neoliberal assertion of exact parity & parallel
between parties to a transaction. (I.e. "It was your
choice!") And such notions of nominal equivalence lock conflict
into particular patterns, but the right also seeks explicitly to
cultivate irreversibility (e.g. as nonlinearity, or folding...),
i.e. in order to lock supposedly-fair transactions into history per
se. Notions of "quittance" then become critical to
"environmental economics" as well (not to mention
intergenerational wealth disparity...), in that one's effects persist
after a transaction: This situation in turn figures the basic
imperialist denial of historical impact (i.e. of impoverishing their
targets). And moreover, economic asymmetry is the basic driver of
(anti-environmental) overconsumption. Exploitation is consequently
figured as rational, i.e. via rationalization per se (perhaps via
exosomatic rhetoric...) as hinge between desire & action.
Insatiable hoarding of wealth is then conditioned (asymmetrically)
further via such denial as an affective & intellectual closing.
However, discovering any real political solution will require
affective openness, and so denial per se (especially as an increasingly
robust technology...) is a fundamental problem. And it's a fundamental
problem buried quite deeply within many of us (& so able to be
"activated" by clever propaganda & rhetoric...) —
its only possible (but perhaps also quite difficult) remedy being
truth.
11
And far from being opposed, denial actually intertwines "values"
— thus figuring religion, one might go on to observe —
such that now I want to turn to a related ethic of care:
Practical listening
had already figured attention economy (as a sort of care), but also
as fungible (i.e. mostly as profitable care), whereas now I want
to orient further on the everyday (i.e. per Section 5). And the
everyday is conditioned by (technologies of) hegemony, power &
control, i.e. via weaving denial with care: Any interrogation of
social norms or situations — of truth per se — then
comes to confront realities of intergenerational propagation (per
the previous entry), i.e. ideology. "Collective individuation"
(pace Stiegler) thus follows an arc similar to that of "artistic"
influence, including via ethnographic (& other) modes of
rhetorical confusion, such that influence is rarely strictly filiated.
(Intergenerational influence can involve various shifts in perspective
through the years....) In that sense, technologies of care not
only intertwine denial, but combine to produce a sort of immunology
(or in internal-social terms, liturgy), incorporating historical
trauma (again, perhaps in confused form...) into its nexus of denial
& care. (Resulting "identities" are then subject to
manipulation via — frequently exosomatic — rhetoric
around care.) But what of this care, particularly pace the
"garden" references from prior paragraphs here? Exploitation
per se might even be figured as a kind of care, i.e. as
"rational" care, but let's consider its less fungible
modes, i.e. ongoing care or open-ended "investments."
E.g. food production is a temporal mode of care (& potentially
of exploitation), often requiring ongoing attention — in a
sense, perhaps, paralleling a temporal art such as music. And
certainly paralleling notions of generational influence. But care
(& attention) is also being refigured "artistically"
(usually per hegemony) according to various modes (or genres), two
I'm continuing to interrogate being sports & comedy: One might
observe that while the former (including pace Paragraph
9) involves a kind of bodily care, the latter registers a sort
of "misalignment" in care. Such a "situation"
then requires a sort of autotheory, i.e. forms of auto- or self-care,
i.e. in order to locate oneself within ensuing fields of (social)
tension, including as conditioned by (self-)denial & proliferating
figurations of non-care. (One's self-perception thus already entails
a nonlinear ecology. And "autotheory" has also been
figured as basically feminist, i.e. as an aspect of situating per
se....) Any sort of thinking-change then must confront this
immunological nexus of care (& denial), not only according to
notions of symmetry & beauty, but according to necessarily
asymmetric embeddings, e.g. eating food. (Social mirroring generally
proceeds according to relations of parity, but an ecology involves
various spatial & temporal scales.) And "change" has
been the focus here, including via a sort of critical medievalism,
i.e. in order to frame modernity (temporally) as object of study,
deriving a (retrospective) regime of care from decolonial aesthetics....
Moreover, especially pace DOE (as introduced in the previous
Paragraph), how might such a nexus of care figure "freedom?"
(One might figure first according to topologies of violence, and
the basic distinction between freedom to exploit & freedom from
exploitation....) Besides various limitations on power (as explored
in DOE), premodern societies reflect greater attention to
the body per se, i.e. individual bodily care (v. as landscape, pace
Paragraph 8), but not necessarily individual voice:
One finds a different sort of segmentation, such that e.g. racism
comes to make sense only (as "system") according to modern
imperialism, perhaps ramifying later according to indigenous
autotheory.... Such a dynamic then reflects the transactional
orientation of modernity-imperialism, i.e. versus traditional ecology
& niche proliferation. (Segmentation is regularized according
to the modern, profit-seeking typology.) And notions of quittance
underlie this modern, transactional orientation, including via
notions of irreversibility, but also (purportedly) by eliminating
"tensions" of ongoing care. (And while modernity sees
itself as emphasizing production, not without reason, it's also
been operated in "foraging" mode at various points, i.e.
by seizing goods — including environmental "goods"
— of others. And the contemporary era continues to embed a
significant degree of foraging as well, although differentially
between populations, but also originating from within some very
different social tiers.... "Care" can also come to be
distinguishable from disdain only by perspective. After all, the
Western history of "private property" is founded on the
right to destroy....) Quittance thus figures the modern drive to
move on to the next transaction, rather than to linger in an ongoing
(perhaps tensional, "uncool") relation of care, but also
serves to obscure real costs: While "economics" has
largely been about rhetorical manipulation (i.e. in service of
imperial hoarding), it would also be possible to figure such costs
more accurately — but of course (obscuring &) externalizing
costs is the central generator of profits. (One might also interrogate
financialization per se according to its non-local orientation,
basically figuring postimperial predation from that perspective....)
As is, market prices end up with little relation to full or actual
costs. And social reproduction is of course largely ignored, i.e.
left to the individual worker to manage (i.e. as externality).
However, social reproduction generally figures the temporalities
of care (pace multiple ecological scales...), i.e. cultivation
(including of the body...) per its embedding. Reproduction also
encompasses far more than sex, but sex per se (including today as
spectacle...) continues to interrogate quittance (v. ongoing care)
as well, including via commercial prohibition. And sexual selection
is thus very much a target of hegemony: Wealth is a primary vector
(& contemporary theme for authority more generally...), but
I've also continued to figure sports & comedy as a sort of warp
& woof of contemporary (at least Western) social fabric (&
its governmentality), the first directed toward a clear goal, the
second transverse. (One might even regard comedy as a sort of
suspension of care, but ultimately as interrogating & modulating
care indirectly, i.e. transversally.) The resulting fabric might
then be said to enmesh & figure (together) denial & care,
including in close contact, e.g. via the simultaneous bodily
glorification-denial of professional athletics. (Music might also
be figured as diagonal through this fabric, or as another dimension,
increasingly repetitive itself as commercial product....) Of course,
reproduction figures filiation as well — & "family"
propaganda is louder than ever (e.g. as motivation for unpaid labor)
— simultaneously ramifying race. And then sports, especially
via team affiliations, modulate attention & caring over time
— indeed, there appears to be little "quittance"
for sports fans! (They tend to remain very invested, including
through adversity.) After all, games figure winning per se —
including sexually. And while games do have an explicit goal, much
manipulation around hegemony occurs at a subconscious level, i.e.
incorporating denial: The goals & values involved aren't
necessarily avowed (& "unconsidered" religion is
always its most pernicious form...), slinking off into (non-)tradition
per se.... But then care work continues to be undervalued in
general, including per feminist norms (including of empowerment...),
i.e. to be figured as an externality, if at all — often
remaining (hierarchically) implicit, rather than being articulated
specifically on its own. (One might also interrogate care work
according to notions of undercommons. There's always e.g. a sense
of operating, by necessity, under conditions of non-ownership. And
today, probably some further sense of caring "in spite
of....") Moreover, care work tends to figure basic (e.g.
social) asymmetries, not only in terms of asymmetries in care between
different people or groups, but according to frequently non-reciprocal
relations of care itself: So once again, a figuration of Earth as
garden, i.e. of human responsibility.... But human responsibility,
in general, is also segmented (rhetorically) into various notions
of difference, i.e. aligned schismogenetically & according to
differing productions of cultural groups. (Such schismogenesis
always includes a negative component, and so from an internal
perspective, figures a social immunology — or liturgy.) So
asymmetries of care penetrate the individual as well, e.g. denial
also animating lapses in self-care.... (Of course, avowal of a
hopeless situation, i.e. giving up, can also lead to various other
negative behaviors....) One might consequently interrogate shifting
topologies of care.... But what we clearly need are functional
technologies of care, i.e. so as to overcome reductive, transactional
figurations of attention (as economic). We need that attention,
that care, toward what is actually important — & in an
ongoing way. Indeed, in that sense, there's certainly no world
labor surplus (as care per se needs to exceed production).
12
"Liberal" continues to be a central term in US political
debates — & much of this discussion will apply elsewhere,
but the usage here also has its unique trajectory — particularly
since its comingling (as epithet) with "leftist" under
neoliberal fundamentalist (i.e. Reagan Revolution) rhetoric. (And
note that rhetorical association of Democrats with communists was
so explosive at the time that corporate media flipped its political
reporting colors to compensate, yielding the now standard red for
Republicans, the turn to populism from that corner likely remaining
impossible without such a "color" change....) In that
sense, "liberal" actually becomes an epithet for economic
conservatism, pace neoliberal innovations, i.e. the traditional
bourgeois philosophy of capitalism (with its slogan "laissez
faire"), historically justifying itself according to prior
social values: Liberal imperialism thus posited notions of
"progress" & a general "civilizing mission"
for itself, claiming its system would (eventually) improve everyone's
lives.... Thus there's a universalizing component to liberalism
(& its derivatives), a basic homogenizing of situations around
the globe, including opening them to capitalist business enterprise.
(This has long been a sort of deterritorialization — or one
might say smoothing.) And such a universalizing attitude (as well
as notions of "progress") are central to Marxism as well.
But in that sense, liberals & their ideological successors have
(usually by force) imposed their attitudes & situational
conditions around the globe, continuing to push (for greater
exploitation) today along the arc of neoliberalism, together with
anti-federal resistance to boundaries (at least for capital). As
capitalism, this generally involves privatizing, i.e. seizing
resources for oneself, supported by official violence when needed
(& then deriving concerns such as "privacy...").
Property relations that were originally derived (practically) from
conditions of imperial exploitation (i.e. on foreign soil), thus
turn to a rhetoric of progress (having already used a similar logic
e.g. to justify slavery...). So in that sense, a "liberal"
is only unacceptable to a neoliberal for not having gone far enough
(in embracing economics over politics), i.e. in clinging to prior
ideals (or at least rhetoric) of social value (which for the
bourgeoisie, ironically include a lingering sense of human equality).
That's why various commentators have come to describe neoliberalism
as a sort of fundamentalism, i.e. as seeking to collapse all values
into (fungible) money & quantification per se.... But then,
via a peculiar trajectory of schismogenesis (at least in the US),
aggressive neoliberal innovation in the economic realm was wedded
politically to "conservative" social values: The key to
understanding "liberal" as an active political term today,
then, is to understand not only how prior (liberal economic) policy
became too restrictive for endless (now globalized) demands to
increase profits, but how the history of liberalism & its
practical associations could be played rhetorically according to
local resentments. In this, the neo-conservative movement (i.e.
the wedding of extreme economic deregulation to a fantastical view
of a nonexistent prehistory) is playing not only upon the "relative
leftism" of US Democrats (i.e. of a group proffering a
"safety net" within actually-existing rich-get-richer
capitalism), but upon the universalizing history of liberalism per
se. This registers in the social domain — often ignoring,
of course, the growing economic exploitation (which is couched in
simplistic logics) — precisely because liberalism was always
imposed upon the rest of the world, i.e. didn't originate there.
(And this proceeded in two stages for the US, the otherwise
paradigmatic liberal nation, its colonial existence having maintained
for around a century & a half, forging a preliminary fusion
prior to establishing its independence through violence, and then
quickly submitting much of the remainder of North America, likewise
through violence.) In other words, although the frequent conflation
of liberal with leftist (at least since Reagan) has been a rhetorical
lie (& one that recent Democrats have sometimes even encouraged...),
the notion that "liberals" have imposed their views on
others is historically grounded. Indeed, I'll suggest that in parts
of this country where indigenous biology continues to be most
present, there also continues to be tremendous resentment. (And
I'll emphasize that processes of schismogenesis may have twisted
this genetic-political chain into various affine shapes, but the
basic geographic contour is clear, even if the resentment is vague.)
Turning to Stiegler's views on entropy & locality then, one can
readily observe that not only does global smoothing efface local
relations in terms of lowering energy efficiency & increasing
planetary entropy, but in terms of psychic entropy as well: In
both cases, we need (around the world!) local solutions to local
problems, rather than a new imperialism imposing the next round of
canned solutions from above. (And there is simply no escaping this
fact politically. Unfortunately, matters of climate urgency also
intervene in the patience that'd ordinarily be preferred....)
However, what "conservative" (i.e. neoliberal) rhetoric
offers instead is more aggressive rich-get-richer policies, including
further opening of localities to globalized economic exploitation,
while embracing a supposed social conservatism: But as DOE
documents so well, not only did these sorts of Hobbesian (&
Smithian) situations never really exist, but the US is in fact
(pre)historical home to some of the most non-hierarchical human
relations on the planet, consciously constructed to prevent anyone
from dominating others. That's our history! (And with a lot of
queer people too....) Instead, Republicans offer a new aristocracy,
now based purely on economic hoarding (& so inherited wealth,
etc.), but also something the US very explicitly (& seemingly
epochally...) rebelled against not even 250 years ago! (And not
only that, but they're leveraging the resentful attitudes of
crypto-indigenous people, by which I mean "white people"
with substantial indigenous biology but very little explicit culture,
convincing them that a new sort of Old World feudalism is the only
viable social organization that has ever existed! This assault on
historical truth deeply offends me every day....) In other words,
the trajectory of ideas matters, and even if a locality derives a
very similar solution to another, it can still become "theirs,"
but it does need to feel as if it comes from them. (In a very basic
sense, this is a matter of authority. Per liberal epistemology,
it might even be considered a sort of scientific laboratory —
but always local, each time.) And in that sense, although I simply
can't describe people who've generally (schismogenetically...) come
to despise conservation as "conservative," the notion
that they're conserving their own power isn't so wrong. (For
Stiegler, this becomes a matter of countering symbolic misery.)
Unfortunately, the result has been demagoguery — especially
as localities themselves become increasingly fantasmic around
fabricated & illusory (pre)histories.... So liberal-as-epithet
becomes a form of complaint, sublimated registering of historical
relations, of having been subjugated, now feeling/being instead the
bully in turn... i.e. feeling a wound, easily turning to lashing
out when poked. (Schismogenesis relative to the dominant —
if never by numbers! — liberal ideology then functions,
especially with increasing media sophistication, to collapse what
should be a varied local response into a unified anti-position,
i.e. no limits on the rich! In that sense then, boundaries, i.e.
defining localities per se, can be figured purely as loci for profit
extraction. It's thus axiomatic under right-wing populism that
e.g. labor not be allowed to cross borders.) Such a reemphasis on
hierarchy & authority — via falsely claimed history —
is then also reflected in increasing "family" rhetoric,
and that goes for "classic" liberal messaging as well
(despite e.g. superficially differing statements around patriarchy):
Family is clearly becoming an overloaded construct, but also involves
social constriction (pace e.g. the posited universal family of
Christianity — a religion, by the way, that doesn't claim the
world to be unchanging, indeed crucially so in its tale of the
second coming...), i.e. a way for inherited wealth to forge an
aristocracy, or simply the only option that someone has for material
or therapeutic support. (In that sense, "family" can
sometimes be seen to fuse with ongoing pan-liberal notions of
"property," i.e. specifically as a sort of exclusion.
And the more exclusive, the better?) Hence there's a refiguring
of human responsibility underway, but also seemingly against the
way such responsibility was figured by traditional Christianity
— i.e. the religion supposedly defining "social
conservatism" in the US context.... (This does come with a
lot of other misleading noise about responsibility too.) There's
also the broad contour of general reactions by conquered populations
to relations of external authority (or occupation) that I've come
to hear in this country as well (per e.g. a Sicilian paradigm): Law
in general becomes someone else's law, replaced now by someone
else's ghosts, even a yearning for a sort of transcendental position
that was foreign to this continent, a king... whose historical role
has (sometimes) been as the people's champion against the ordinary
aristocracy. And yet more dualities. But the "melting pot"
of the US (in contrast to the mestizaje of Mexico) became a rhetorical
melting pot of various peoples (although mostly European) only
meaningfully from the Old World, New World culture being increasingly
suppressed (as e.g. the FDR administration was still innovating
cultural genocide during my parents' early lives...), even though
again (pace DOE), it's from the New that we've all learned
our notion of "freedom." (And I feel the basic need to
emphasize that it's "the moderns" who've proven, and
thoroughly, that they don't know how to live on this planet! So
it's completely unacceptable for them to be directing any further
process, just in terms of track record.... Moreover, historical
notions of quittance need to be interrogated more thoroughly according
to a pharmacological approach, the renewed neoliberal emphasis on
fungibility & quittance being clearly in the service of
hierarchical exploitation as well....) And of course notions of
"freedom" not only figure the word "liberal"
(& variants), but continue to be an explicit rallying cry for
(especially) the (crypto-indigenous) right — figured here,
pace the previous entry (& per DOE) as freedom to exploit:
There's then the liberal sense of "self" (as exploiter),
shored up to some degree by neoliberal consumerism, but changing
little in structure in the past few decades (but with more warning
signs...), so buoyed by corporate marketing & propaganda, itself
an increasingly fraught actor on the stage of "freedom...."
Such an unwinding of collective individuation (again pace Stiegler)
is then at stake in "local solutions to local problems,"
i.e. itself (potentially) an individuating nexus developing around
practical art-as-work v. cog-like implementation of top-down ideas.
(Part of the post-truth haze is also very simply about an unwillingness
to discuss political goals explicitly. But easing notions of
universality will also mean easing the modern quest for certainty,
i.e. accepting constant nonequilibrium.... After all, at equilibrium,
entropy can only increase — life itself indeed being a direct
affront to entropy!) Any machinic unwinding then, if it's to limit
the power anyone can have over anyone else, cannot involve concentrating
institutional power either, particularly according to the current
methods & concerns of technocracy, concentrated power per se
(contra Hobbes) as ultimate target for elimination (rather,
minimization or easing). But there's also a paradoxical democratization
of knowledge underway, i.e. an overturning of ("scientific")
epistemology & "expert culture" in general, i.e. where
the propaganda-infused opinions of the public (supposedly) make
(democratic) policy: The basic instrumentality of modern scientific
epistemology, i.e. of reliably manipulating (physical) reality,
thus turns toward a new-old instrumentality of declaring reality
(i.e. in the "royal" mode), and so forcing those farther
down the social hierarchy to bear the consequences. (The practical
effect, as intended, is elevating wealth over knowledge per se as
principle of authority. And ever steeper information asymmetries
are generally leveraged for profit extractions too, as well as for
other negotiations....) Registering a reduced quality of life then
only makes many USAians angrier, anger & agitation fusing with
further propaganda to support more extreme versions of the same
disastrous approaches.... So in other words, the rhetorical-political
use of "liberal" (as epithet) in this country sutures a
couple of lies (i.e. about relation to current political rivals
& about history) to a fundamental issue around decolonizing,
further serving to obfuscate the latter, i.e. the need to make
legible & so to embrace local (e.g. "locavore")
solutions over modern-imperial fungibility & imposed universality.
13
So after the previous, almost ecstatic offering (bordering again
on autobiography — or the perverse identifications of
colonialism...), during which I didn't turn (at least not explicitly
via links) to my prior work, I want to take a moment to recap some
thoughts on presence: The topic had already been the impetus for
Paragraph 4 here, after I'd raised the prospect
of "mastering the body via the virtual" the previous
month, and so I dutifully coined "technologies of presence"
as a developing set of means for interacting (e.g. via the internet)
at a distance.... I'd also already noted that I'd basically been
mocked for raising "presence" as a political issue, a
very basic political issue about society & togetherness (&
indeed ownership of oneself), and then went on (in a couple of
subsequent paragraphs) to interrogate some prominent risks around
being present. And I kept expecting more discussion of these issues
elsewhere, e.g. seeking academic monographs on the topic. I was
generally disappointed, though: So now it's time to attempt more
urgently to articulate a politics of presence — over the next
few paragraphs here. I'm consequently taking a bit of a "break"
in this entry to summarize, reframe, and (re-)introduce:
Religious inclinations
had basically introduced the notion of presence to this space (&
I not-so-humbly suggest that that entire discussion is more interesting
than people seem to think it is...), largely as an artistic
interrogation, but only in the middle of its final paragraph: There's
then a single note [PL9n140] concerning presence, specifically
around a notion of "presence economy" (from Steyerl)
promising unmediated (artistic) communication, and I'd asked: What
is this presence & what is its liturgy (i.e. its public ritual
of social binding)? But Steyerl is also emphasizing a bringing to
presence (via artistic relation), and not the (subconscious) latency
of presence per se.... And then in the final section of
Postmodern Aesthetics,
I called for forging a different sort of contemporary presence (i.e.
around new worlds...), with the bullet points calling further for
"a general accounting for presence" & moreover noting
that "presence & legibility remain ongoing interactions
& involve (ontological) negotiations themselves." (However,
Decolonizing technology
didn't return explicitly to this topic, even if it alluded to it
often via the noun-verb "present....") In that sense,
presence can & has been figured always as co-presence, further
as (background) figuration of collective individuation. "Presence
with..." can then suggest the notion of foreground-background
inversion, i.e. perspectives modulating legibility (& attention)
per se. There's thus (also) a sort of spectrality to presence,
concealment (perhaps) versus expression.... (In that sense, per
Paragraph 8, presence can become appropriable in
a similar way as landscape, suggesting a polarity-duality that
nonetheless remains inadequate to this topic, specifically in
evocations of co-presence, but that can also resonate in such a
perspectival notion as undercommons — & indeed in the
general hapticality, versus ocularcentrism, of everyday life. One
might interrogate such a landscape via senses of the familiar too,
of course, gestural irruptions presencing....) Virtuality then
promises an augmentation of presence, i.e. an embrace of the
non-local. Or does it involve more the dilution of presence per
se, i.e. as inherently local? One might take a specifically
phenomenal approach to such a question, especially via object
relations, such that virtuality comes to involve a layering of
presence, i.e. adding object relations. ("Dilution" per
se might then be figured via attention economy....) But pace
Stiegler & the prior entry, "locality" is critical to
respecting (& restraining) entropy relations, i.e. as basic
(haptic) orientation only seeming to be undermined by virtual
layering (presumptively from elsewhere): Can virtual orientations
possibly be layered so as to reduce entropy generation? Can more
mean less? (I don't believe this to be impossible, but it must be
considered very carefully....) Of course, various technologies of
presence have long existed, i.e. allowing communication at a distance,
e.g. acousmatic music out of sight or a circulating royal decree....
Religion & liturgy might even be said to revel in virtuality,
and likewise promise an augmentation of presence. (And so one might
speak also of liturgical technologies, including as basically
technologies of presence....) But what of layering? Multiple
co-presences? (A vague multiplicity does make sense to the
subconscious mind....) Also the layering of figurations: Today's
virtual wants already to tell us what it means, before we ever
perceive it. (And in that sense, e.g. notions of immediacy &
alienation are also constructed.) There're also the increasingly
developing negative (technological) expectations, i.e. the sense
that online space is likely to be hostile in one or more ways
(including by being saturated with untruth). For Berlant then
— who offers perhaps the most similar sweep to what I'm about
to articulate here, although via very different style & means...
— such a sense enfolds a "nonsovereign relationality"
as "sensual ordinary of the world" (not unlike Stiegler's
"symbolic misery..."), such that (sometimes overbearing)
presence (including of oneself) must be made endurable. (One might
thus suggest yet another nexus between technologies of self &
governmentality....) Such affective contours & orientations
then figure a nexus of consciousness & presence as well... i.e.
figure a sort of (collective) consistency to the subject itself,
perhaps (or rather, prospectively). And Paragraph
11 had already figured (& reprised) music — via care
— as a sort of diagonal through an everyday sports-comedy
social fabric of sexual presence, so I intend further to disarticulate
that nexus of (especially American) presence in the next few entries,
beginning with interrogation of the ongoing centrality of sexuality
to human (political) presence.... In that sense, as patriarchy
renders women as figures of "sex" per se, notions of
embeddedness (e.g. pace PA here) come to suggest a specifically
feminine presence as well, perhaps figuring (some notions of)
authority (pace CA), but also as fantastical "mother
nature" etc. (This is also the repressed authority of patriarchal
modernity.) So virtuality can only multiply embeddedness, or to
align my language more with (still trendy!) quantum physics,
"entanglements" (which suggest a somewhat different, but
certainly relational, valence...). That's mostly been about
generating more noise (e.g. so as to dodge responsibilities, as
usual).
14
And then, not to undertake a full discussion (or even a full recap...)
of thoughts on sex, or sexual presence, but to locate its ongoing
centrality, particularly for increased hierarchical (i.e. fascist)
control: Psychoanalytic theory has centered sexual drives &
their repression in human behavior, such that sexual desire comes
(subconsciously) to figure the (vague) "other" in general,
and thus co-presence per se. (And advertisers have indeed seized
upon Freud's work since WWII, continuing to innovate....) The
explosion of pornography on the internet then intensifies the basic
engine of titillation-without-satisfaction (turning toward frustrated
masturbation, perhaps...), i.e. brings a further sort of cleavage
into sexual experience, i.e. the simultaneous closeness of images
& distance of an actual human body. (Per Paragraph
6, technological voyeurism also raises new questions of ownership,
e.g. of "stealing" sex.... There's also the ongoing,
basic removal of senses of ritual from social interactions —
& not ritual per se, but senses of it.) So psychoanalysis
interrogates the field of sexual tensions in which we live, and
that field is now taking on more (virtual) layers. And while various
practices of psychoanalysis seem only to underscore heteronormativity
(i.e. sexual conformity per se), early Freudian practice actually
emphasizes the "open" quality of sexual desire (&
hence of sexual expression). Virtualization of sex can even be
read as another sort of queering, i.e. as changing the (presumptive)
structure of satisfaction — to the extent that satisfaction
is ever actually involved (i.e. at least as horizon). Hence e.g.
queer theory continues to ask "What is sex?" In some
sense then, physical sexual mechanics per se are only artifacts of
fields of desire, and pace Paragraph 11, sexual
desire & so sexual selection become targets of hegemony, such
that everyday interweaving of denial & care produce a sort of
hegemonic sexual immunology. (The modern nexus of titillation had
already avoided talking about sex & the body — i.e. as
repressed "nature.") And the immune system is an apt
metaphor, not only because of constant talk of (medical) infection,
but because of increasing "silo"-ing of the public by the
contemporary neoliberal (tending toward fascism...) moment: Actual
sexual satisfaction has little to do with keeping populations under
control today, the goal being more to maintain tensions while
sublimating desire. The figure of the "incel" (the
straight "involuntary" celibate male — who then
decides to hate women) becomes the exemplary citizen for the new
right-wing order, suppression (amid steepening hierarchy...) yielding
antisocial violence, and (crucially) not against the patriarchs
seeking to eliminate sexual satisfaction from the exploited classes,
but against women & the abject in general. Sexual repression
thus figures specifically a bully mentality, i.e. "downward"
flow of violence.... (Gender difference also continues to drive a
sort of schismogenesis for the right: It's another way to divide.
Note, however, that the current attitude toward sexual satisfaction
among the demos differs markedly from that of the previous,
specifically "modern" drive to increase the species, i.e.
as biologism-labor.) Further, augmented surveillance technologies
suggest the "opportunity" to monitor (& so to proscribe)
everyday sexuality like never before, and under patriarchy, women
are obviously the primary target: Concepts
of contemporary authority had already noted sexuality as a
kind of authority (which, under patriarchy, is located with women
— i.e. as something to be taken back), i.e. yielding a sort
of control, usually observed today more in the realm of celebrity
(i.e. personal charisma & beauty), but also continuing to figure
the family per se as a kind of joint territory (of sexual authority).
Our patriarchal society also refuses to allow a straight conversion
of sexual attractiveness into wealth (unless e.g. one is being paid
to look sexy in an ad for something else...), but then "good
sex" also continues to be figured more in the realm of images
than by comparing actual haptic sensations.... As a form of authority
then, contemporary sex is seen to figure "winning" &
so is highly conditioned by ocularcentric, i.e. distance-based
notions of sexual attractiveness. Of course, such a detour through
expectations & social-acclaim-as-proxy-for-enjoyment only
underscores (psychoanalytically) that sexual satisfaction always
already involves (psychic) ambivalence, even an element of
impossibility.... "Pleasure is never obvious" in the
first place, and so the contemporary right seeks to exploit that
disjuncture: Queer theory has even noted a generalized hatred of
sex, linking it structurally both to self-hatred & to hatred
of democracy. (It's even remarked that all panic is actually sex
panic, and some have posited that the fight-or-flight reflex should
really be figured as a fight-flight-fuck response....) The open
quality of sex (following the lack of negation in the unconscious...)
as noted, is then the primary driver not only of everyone's internal
"hatred" of sex, but of specifically fascist hatred of
sex: Sex crosses all boundaries. (Pace my earlier remarks on
borderline personality [HR], e.g. Berardi now fears a sort
of general sexual autism arising.... This is the limit case of
silo-ing.) E.g. PL10
had already noted that sex continues to posit & provoke a sort
of anti-technology (or anti-typology), and such a tendency does
sound alarms for both the (hierarchical) coherence of the (liberal)
self & for neoliberal governance. Basically it's the transverse,
border-crossing qualities of sexual desire that make it a problem
for fascist rigidity. (And again pace [CA], unlike violence,
sex need not invoke hierarchy. However, sexual violence is also
common, i.e. so as regularly to reassert hierarchy....) Homologies
between sex & capitalism then follow easily, not only around
"screwing someone" (as both can also certainly involve
deterritorialization...), but more specifically in terms of quittance,
i.e. in opposition to (ongoing) care. And as sex per se is located
(typologically) with women, that's also been figured (at least by
feminists) as (responsibility for) "reproduction" more
broadly, i.e. as social reproduction (or technologies of care...),
or even as the reproduction of the Earth in general. (And moving
beyond humanity, even more asymmetric than gender is eating itself...
the point being that a simplistic sense of egalitarian satisfaction
never actually applies to living, or not for long. Typologies are,
in some ways, unavoidable.) It's also come to revolve substantially
around clothing (as technology, but more specifically as grammatization
of presence...), again interrogated & contested e.g. by
queering.... (Of course, "fashion" has long embedded a
basic hatred for the feminine form: It's exploiting another sort
of cleavage in sexual desire, conjuring the unfeminine-unreal hence
hyper-feminine woman....) "Family" is of course
(increasingly!) the basic scene (or territory or locus...) of social
reproduction & its negotiations, but also figures another kind
of (hierarchical, reified) silo, i.e. according to notions of
following an orderly (biologistic) tree-like grammar. (And silo-ing
is about having no messy messages from elsewhere: One's views
should always be confirmed.) Such a grammar has also been figured
by religion, "morality" (contra theology, pace
PL9) figuring
liturgical control, religion (as social binding) always already as
the scene of sexual & reproductive contestation. (And under
neoliberalism, sexual "binding" comes to involve hoarding
sex as well.) Yet we're also experiencing a changing of the
public-private nexus, particularly around virtuality, and hence of
the scene of (public) religion. (And sexual expression has indeed
been its own liturgy, at least in other times & places....)
Moreover, despite that the commodification of sex still resists
direct commercial transactions (of other than images...), pornography
does figure a spectacle of images, such that it reveals further the
structure of the commodity itself, i.e. as addiction (pace e.g.
Jameson): A changing (contemporary, beyond simply the pandemic...)
presence of death, as noted by increasingly many commentators, also
follows in the wake of this sort of narcotic field of tension
(including as extension of the basic modern suppression of Fortune...
& into the sexual eugenics that continues to haunt the contemporary
moment [CA]). Law is then a kind of articulation of presence
(& its own ritual...), i.e. the articulation of a state of fact
(pace Stiegler — & maybe also the presence of articulation...),
linked itself (historically) to religion (as social binding):
Universalizing (i.e. imperial) law then mixes with a more transient
close-to-the-body (i.e. prior to the new surveillance regime...)
sense of law that lingers beneath neoliberal (becoming fascist,
hinging on "quantity...") hegemony (& still beneath
imperial patriarchy per se), the movements of persons coming to
enact their own anti-typological (i.e. sexual) field, i.e. forging
another nexus of body-law (especially involving sexual panic). In
other words, the messy anti-typological movement of persons raises
further fears of an increasingly messy & anti-typological sex
(which, in turn, leverage inherent hatred of sex-self-democracy).
And to be clear, this situation is not fully addressable via "sex
positivity" — even as sexual activity does involve unique
potential to de-silo. There's (always) still (unresolvable) tension,
i.e. a (sexually multiple & open...) field of presence.
15
Continuing to focus on presence, now moving toward the heart of the
broader project here, music sculpts phenomenological time, i.e. as
projection of (sonic) presence. Music might further be said to
figure temporal legibility — although
PL8 connects only via such
notions as "touching" qualities (so as to facilitate their
interrogation), treating presence per se silently (or rather, as
liminal spectrality...) — & so figures attention or even
embeddedness-entanglement as well. (One might even conjure the
subconscious here, pace the introductions of Paragraph
13, itself also formatted as a language... but beneath language,
perhaps, or as a partial reflection of practical language per se.)
Musical presence thus comes to figure (situational) affectivity in
general. Moreover,
PL9 introduces
presence as an answer to the broad (practical) question "For
what might one listen?" — & so music already as
interrogation of presence (pace even a notion of "presence
economy" — & a tracing of liturgical relation
[PL9n140]). The nexus between music & religion then
figures e.g. (originally) the acousmatic, i.e. sound unseen (i.e.
as only partially present...) — as well as traces (at least
historical) sexual sublimation. In a sense, acousmatics then figures
"presence" per se, particularly as the voice itself (as
emanating from inside the body...) remains similarly (at least in
some sense) obscured. Postmodern
Aesthetics thus raises a "contemporary pharmacology
of music" (in Section 3A), e.g. notions of weapon versus
palliative, as well as implicated sexual tendencies.... And then
PL10 continued to
note musical ubiquity amid cultural hegemony (e.g. tonality as
technology [PL10n156]), even raising issues around
"ownership" of time (as "performative togetherness,"
i.e. liturgy) — as well as, as a sort of musical-social
immunology (pace Paragraph 11). So these preliminary
investigations of presence come to revolve around the body, but
also (sometimes) present music as central to a more general
phenomenological inquiry (as the development of recorded music did
apparently spur that very field...), including via the "avant
garde" & technological novelty. (I consequently wrote a
Thirty years on the web
essay recently, reflecting in part on such a becoming-multimedia....)
And the body does figure a kind of presence by itself, but also via
its embeddings, i.e. its rhythms (including its labor): Musically,
rhythmic motion can then figure an alternation, i.e. sound versus
silence or stillness per se — the latter raising a sort of
presence itself. The nexus of music & bodily rhythm then figures
dance (as "music embraces bodily relation" [WF]),
itself enacting a pharmacology of sublimation, including broad
figurations of sexual activity: Notions of "making beautiful
music together" date to a previous era, but popular music
continues to project a strong sexual vibe (largely becoming
"about" a sexual presence... which is evoked in sound,
but also portrayed via (virtual) physical presence), to the point
that one might even ask (by way of evaluating, i.e. aesthetically):
Did the music lead to sex? (E.g. I recently read that "jazz
is sex." The remark is surely racialized, yet there's also a
real sense of freedom & boundary crossing....) Of course, music
does figure sublimation as well — and the "excess"
of sex (always) comes to exceed rhythm per se, i.e. forges a kind
of nexus with generalized (becoming) speed.... (And whose notion
of "success" does the question address anyway? Titillation
alone is the marketing goal....) Such investigations often figure
more conscious senses of music, but notions of ambience —
& so "ambient music" — also figure embeddedness
more broadly (& so rely on the attraction of familiarity in
this domain, versus e.g. jokes or competitions, where novelty is
usually required for satisfactory entertainment...). As noted then,
music — as technology — is ubiquitous today, and
regardless of the situation (work, shopping, accompanying other
sorts of imagery...), typically projects support for the hegemonic.
(So one can speak directly of mining historical sediments, pace
Koselleck. Or pace Hartog, of media per se becoming presentist,
thus yielding a thickening of the present [CH].) Such
thickening also implies an increasing politics of speed, i.e.
intensified textures of presence. Such intensities also lead into
silo-ing (pace Paragraph 14), both intentionally
(from above) & as panic reaction, and so involve a basic
contemporary reconfiguration of co-presence. (One might even figure
a sort of alternative "promiscuity" of musical taste,
i.e. averse-transverse to fascist typological genre, i.e. the latter
urge to destroy whatever one doesn't understand....) So ubiquitous
(ambient) music also refigures the nexus between private &
public space, i.e. the indoor & outdoor of sound (paralleling,
perhaps, indoor & outdoor sex?), or the liturgical per se. It
also figures the spectator, i.e. as non-creator, "soundtracks"
as basic public (affective) synchronization, whether in the theater,
at a sporting event, the mall, etc. (This was already virtualization....)
Ubiquitous media presence also forges conflicts in/over public
space, i.e. when various private spaces collide, figuring noise....
However, "noise" also raises a basic pharmacology: Does
"dissonance" spur change? Or does constant noise make
cooperation impossible (thus buoying a "might makes right"
approach)? Today's fascists are obviously confident that, at least
past a threshold, the second condition will prevail. (Hating noise
thus becomes much like hating democracy, so in turn, much like
hating sex....) Of course, life itself does have its consonances
& dissonances, such that (at least some) noise is inevitable
(as are the "excesses" of democracy...), but there're
still questions of attention & focus (i.e. of how one responds
to trolling...). Collective individuation hangs in the balance,
though, something I might even figure (rather idiosyncratically)
according to horizontal (individual) or vertical (collective) issues
of musical tuning & consonance per se (reflecting also that
musical groups involve non-unitary modes of being [PL7n103]),
not unlike familiarity (& so inertia) presenting its own
pharmacology (pace e.g. [PL10n116]). So if we must bring
other worlds to presence, or forge different sorts of presences,
music is indeed useful for presenting (& tracing, per
[PA/3B]...), but note e.g. that there's no (overall) soundtrack
to the internet (versus the situated non-virtual). There're instead
(a few) technologies of hoarding ([PL10n115]), themselves
binding "stockpiles" (as technical reifications, pace
modernity) — or one might say monopolies (or even
"familiarities" per se). There're also proliferating
urges toward mastery, i.e. reprises for the modern (security) fantasy
([RF]), including sexually. But then, there's definitely
no perfect music (although there's always, potentially, new music,
i.e. movement forward, the next tracing of relation...). I suppose
that's unsatisfying.
16
Turning further now to "articulate a politics of presence"
after a year-end break (& so with some loss of continuity from
Paragraph 13), technologies of presence (fundamentally)
yield technologies of governmentality, including via sexual
sublimation. It's thus surprising that such a ubiquitous contemporary
(governmental) technique as "sports" receives so little
theoretical attention from the left. I've consequently returned
to the topic repeatedly, particularly as sports presents perhaps
the most dynamic scene of public bonding — i.e. liturgy —
in contemporary American life. (Of course, many people do also try
to avoid it.) Sports are thus a significant & ascending vector
for collective individuation in general, especially as (neoliberal...)
technologies of competition. And they are "personal" (at
least for the participants) in the sense that winners & losers
are identified individually (i.e. contra what can be the more
transverse-collective motions of comedy...). But not nearly everyone
participates directly, so focusing on the straight-ahead (persistently
goal oriented, stratifying...) aspect of sports implies various
(virtual) layers of presence in turn, such that sports can present
more broadly as a sort of reality theater. (And note that "reality
television" often does take on the character of sports, i.e.
with specific rules, winners & losers.) Indeed the theatricality
of sports — including e.g. its sense of tragedy, or even
comedy — is ultimately the major selling point among spectators,
such that attention to sports also yields to a generalized scene
of celebrity (& charisma), sports (& comedy) simply becoming
different, but increasingly overlapping, performance venues or
stages. Virtualization of experience is increasing as well then,
meaning quasi-ubiquitous attention to celebrity etc., yielding
strongly contoured everyday personality sculpting.... And such
contours have seemed especially potent in the Americas, which didn't
appear to know theater quite in the hoary Greek sense, but did
connect a sense of the sacred to ritual reenactments, including
competition in ball games. (There's thus already a history of
ritual signification alongside any notion of "entertainment"
per se. However, due to lack of study elsewhere, I'm unclear on
these historical dynamics for the world more generally....) So
virtuality has long presented its own play of truth, including in
the play of children (& animals). Yet this notion of
"brother-in-law competition" does permeate American
anthropology, e.g. as broached in
Affine resonance,
already as modulation of violence per se. (But now sports are being
used in the West to cultivate violence in women....) Pace the
current context then, I also noted there the increasingly minor
difference between a public security & a sporting bet
([PL7n78]), suggesting even that "the need to gamble
produced sports" ([PL7n79]) & that "spectator
sports are basically pornographic" ([PL7n75]). Meanwhile,
What is familiar? had
already interrogated the notion of sports as bodily bonding (pace
sex, heteronormativity...), the "artificiality of the sports
world" being presented as an economist's dream laboratory,
including its nexus with public performance & spectacle....
But there was almost nothing there on dance (& not really until
Chapter IV), although it's implicated by "music embraces bodily
relation" — pace notions of Fordism, which are then
raised (again, but not by name, in PL10n151) around repetitive
motion (& injury), e.g. versus creative expression (& related
goals of bodily health). I then presented some more substantial
thoughts — also oriented on governmentality — in
Intersections of
art & control, noting new forms of celebrity & the
increasing aestheticization of violence (including via inescapable
yet fake competitions — surely a neoliberal masturbatory
fantasy), passive spectatorship & (tribal) sexual selection
moreover figuring an ambivalent work-play dual. (Such a dual does
continue to figure notions of use. And sports continues to underscore
that economic compensation only rarely corresponds with usefulness,
at least in any basic sense.) It's also noted there that sports
even tends to forge its own body of law, such that the truisms of
sports can emerge further into contouring everyday life (& so
collective individuation), especially via their "leagues"
(i.e. governing bodies, usually hierarchical...), themselves a
"primary colonizing technology" (pace Paragraph
9, which also broaches the marginalization of bodily intelligence,
pace "topologies of violence" & deprecated care
work...). Sports thus reconfigures labor-time (& e.g. is
ambivalent toward individual health), and not only notions of
"winning" per se (pace Paragraph 11),
but quittance as well: Sports fandom might well demand more loyalty
than most personal relations (including suggesting proxies for
quasi-imperial conquest, even feudalism). Indeed sports relationality
is quite broad, perhaps extending into (& ramifying) even the
artistic, and certainly into "memorabilia," a booming
industry for hoarders. I've also felt a special nexus with sports
journalism, not just in the sense that most political topics wind
their way through sports (somehow anyway, often with no clarity...),
but since the games themselves — the basic objects of inquiry
— are already open to public scrutiny (unlike e.g. business
dealings). There's thus an available sense of evaluating journalists
(or journalism per se), pace of course the commercialism... such
that "American" games are now prototypically games for
money (as is music, but not quite yet sex...). Fandom reinforces
a sort of "silo" as well (pace sexual silo-ing), increasingly
often involving less sportsmanship than e.g. between the participants
themselves, totemic (& now "brand") associations
taking on broad meaning (such that brands themselves might be
criticized for their specific imagery...). Sports analytics also
continue to forge the "economist's dream," with
winning-oriented "salary cap" spending dutifully yielding
a supposedly ideal mix of stratospheric superstar compensation with
minimum wages filling out most roster slots.... Competition is
definitely about allocation there too (& outcomes & calculation
per se) — but about sex as well: Notions of "sexual
winning" also extend beyond participants, i.e. virtualize
themselves (e.g. through fandom — but also purely through
gambling), now ramified by various online & virtualizing
"gaming (i.e. sporting) platforms." (These also forge a
somewhat different virtual nexus between spectator-user &
creator-performer.... Note that it's also quite possible to injure
oneself at the computer.... And that this kind of virtualization
presents new & different forms of silo-ing, particularly by
removing physical bonding between competitors....) So sports
permeates more milieus, including via refiguring economic platforms,
i.e. becomes increasingly spectral (to go along with spectacular...).
Contextualizing this activity, i.e. framing "winning"
(& bullying), i.e. as e.g. leagues again, then explicitly
reasserts governmental technology (& usually mining for profits...)
along new virtual planes & layers. It's usually worth asking
then: "Who is actually creating what?" (I mean, at a
basic level, there's nothing wrong with finding out who runs faster,
etc.: Beneath the hegemonic leagues & institutions lies ordinary
human curiosity & behavior.... Rather, it's specifically the
valuation that's become increasing externalized, i.e. as wedded to
the governmental per se.) And so what really is present?
17
So to conclude (for now) this arc through presence, particularly
via sports & comedy as a sort of "warp & woof"
of American public presence (although alternate coordinate mappings
would presumably be appropriate as well...), let me continue to
recall that What is familiar?
had positioned sports & comedy as forms of play (without enough
ongoing interrogation around comedy later in the piece...), but a
comedy-sex-sports nexus of play was then introduced only in
PL6 (both as a weaving
of presences & ultimately as central to fascist aesthetics...),
not only framing sports (& gambling) as a sort of prophecy, but
comedy as revealing the emptiness of the universal position....
That "sports & comedy modulate violence, and therefore
sexual selection, differently" [PL7n89] then yields
notions of public displays of (sexual) fitness (i.e. around play
per se), including genres of togetherness. Articulating the irruptive
gesture of comedy indeed began (in WF) with notions of popular
entertainment (& the deterritorialization-reterritorialization
pair, i.e. instantiating governmentality...), suggesting both that
comedy will occur (like it or not...) & that it resists familiarity
per se. And it isn't simply that comedy seeks novelty — or
that competition doesn't happen anyway (pace the previous Paragraph)
— but that comedy equivocates, especially around the
personal-impersonal. There's e.g. an impersonal but participatory
sense of comedy (at least when it's "about someone else")
that figures sociality per se (& so collective individuation
in turn...), i.e. also yields longstanding urges somehow to
"manage" humor. Competitions are generally managed by
(sporting) leagues then, but the indirect motion of comedy resists
direct intervention:
PA/3A
then noted that comedy plays a basic lack-excess dual, inducing a
sort of motion that can blur hierarchy (or assimilate to hierarchy...),
laughter per se as a sort of enjoyment of anxiety — i.e.
enjoying the social dispersal (or reassignment) of anxiety. (From
this perspective, "anxiety" per se becomes inherently
about the social.) In other words, the personal-impersonal
equivocation of comedy realigns us socially (pace
PL7 again), but via
"transverse" motion (versus straight-ahead competition)
— perhaps analogously to queer approaches in general, per
e.g. Berlant drawing parallels between comedic & sexual ambivalence
(including e.g. the pleasure of awkwardness), and into interrogations
of both violence & comedy within sexual activity.... If democracy
is a sort of slapstick for Berlant then, democracy obviously becomes
homologous to comedy as well (as was articulated via the det-ret
form of capitalism, already in WF...) — & of course
one might continue tracing homologies from prior paragraphs,
transitively between capitalism & sex, "screwing someone"
& quittance (pace Paragraph 11), static
hierarchies (including via basic biologism) imposed contra regimes
of care. So comedy might register misalignment in care, or further
suspend care: "Genre" comedy, contra open equivocation
(& "open" sex...), can then further bullying per se,
i.e. according to the punch-down versus punch-up dual. (Comedy,
in parallel with eating, can never involve fully egalitarian
satisfaction, however. Yet there's still a potential matter of
siloing, and e.g. of confirming hierarchy or disturbing it....)
The basic power of comedy (as akin to sex) then lies in its sense
of uncontainable excess, or disorder & messiness — contra
e.g. tragedy (& its clear morality, per ancient Greek governmental
norms), itself more in line with (most, traditional) religion...
— i.e. in its function as a kind of anti-typology (or even
anti-technology, pace that per
PL10, comedy is
certainly also a technology, at least once segmented...). In
contrast, sports is usually a big typological (i.e. sorting)
operation. But then comedy can reimpose its own sorts of symmetries...
even in the literally transverse motion of the ancient chorus.
(Perhaps transverse motion can be said to interrogate care in
general....) And that's mostly been about imposing limits, i.e.
curtailing comedic motion (or scope) according to notions of genre.
Yet per e.g. Berlant, the joke itself already poses a sort of limit,
i.e. as relief from complexity... but then where that limit lies
rarely remains stable. (A joke thus becomes a test of relationality
& even perhaps paradoxically, of individuation....) So where
does "stand up" comedy fit as a specifically American art
form (pace the blues perhaps, busking, of course sports...)? It
seems to weave a longstanding (pre-imperial) culture of criticism,
interrogating hierarchy & usefulness (& labor) per se.
Moreover the public liturgies of comedy & sports have their
alignments in music as well (i.e. their accompanying sounds, their
ambiences...), a weaving usually of & with the hegemonic.
There's a culture of participation (i.e. collective individuation)
woven too, something physical laughter inherently spans, perhaps
even making spectators into participants — yielding a much
more direct nexus then (of comedic equivocation per se) than typical
of spectator sports, or of public sex (i.e. porn). And laughter
with a group can feel world-making while remaining impersonal.
There's thus a broad public-private nexus at work here (&
constantly being refigured...), a sort of sexual dimensionality
across a laughing or cheering crowd, (ambient) music, coordinated
emotional response.... (There's a significant contemporary vector
around female comedians & sexual comedy as well, i.e. refiguring
sexual authority. But also a basically older dynamic around whose
jokes "land," perhaps in analogy to who climaxes, indeed
figuring comedic compatibility as sexual compatibility....[WF])
However, those are also bodily responses, i.e. come to shift (at
least in part) into a more virtual world that's been notoriously
difficult for comedy (yielding e.g. the emoticon...). And whereas
sports can be about speed per se, comedy (as is well known...) is
more about timing, about varying senses of spontaneity &
"reading the room," i.e. around cues often lacking (or
manipulated?) in a virtual environment. In forging a politics of
speed then — & it could certainly be suggested that the
aspiration itself is already a sort of politics... — one might
note e.g. a sort of nexus between speed (such that sex itself can
be figured as a kind of generalized becoming-speed...) & a
(potentially fluid) spectator-creator dual, i.e. intensifying
textures of presence, now adding layers of virtuality. Such a
liturgy of speed of course suggests accelerationism (& any
positive figuration there seems to be wishful thinking...), but
also (increasingly, simply) financial capitalism per se. The latter
never seems to be funny.
18
While the previous pair of entries referenced "winning"
as a sort of (social) coordinate direction (i.e. spanning presence),
what actually is winning? Winning per se becomes a technology in
general, yielding a broad rhetoric: Winning what? Different
possibilities & differing perspectives are possible.... So
whereas I'd framed sports as a kind of "sorting operation,"
— & won't be addressing notions of winning a joke here...
— sports also are personal, with a short (& usually
concrete) horizon: The brief drama of winning something as
entertainment (the specific reality theater...) yields to the
"entertainment" of ongoing stratification per se —
pace e.g. Further notes on
fascist aesthetics, i.e. fills a (capitalist, imperial)
need for hierarchical segmentation & typology. One might thus
conclude that the technology of "winning" isn't so much
about winning anything in particular, but rather about underlying
notions of stratification, and in turn that these notions are
historicized. (There's a basic sense of establishing a work-play
dual around concepts of use, as noted by Paragraph
16 as well: Rhetorical "winning" must involve being
seen as winning, i.e. spectatorship.) So while in sports (generally
speaking...), winning is never really permanent, as there's always
a next competition, with younger challengers on the way, in today's
world, there's still a projected sense of broad competitions having
been won for all time. (It's obviously in the interest of
"winners" to insist that winning is forever.) Pace the
rambling complexities of Paragraph 12 then, are
"liberals" winners? We heard not so long ago that history
had ended accordingly, but what of the intergenerational politics
of winning & losing more generally? (E.g. "race"
— a term already suggesting a competition — can be
viewed as technology for marking intergenerational winning &
losing, i.e. for all time....) Whereas sporting events are more
concrete then, history & memory come to have a vagueness, e.g.
to be conditioned by narratives & identifications: Now we can
only be spectators when it comes to events of the past, but we come
to feel invested in such narrativity nonetheless (& pace
WF/IV,
these are often libidinal investments), including to the extent
that intergenerational propagation (& "success") is
highlighted by modernity via (biological) evolutionary narrative.
(Playing like an
animal had also already noted spectatorship as an inherent
aspect of "play," e.g. per Bateson [WF/III/8n27],
including as forging the sort of suspension-framework —
explored somewhat analogously around pornography here in
Paragraph 6 — required for self-referentiality
& indeed individuation....) So evolutionary narrative (often
figured as "Social Darwinism") has configured intergenerational
imperatives rhetorically, including (beyond biology per se) in the
urge for capitalist hoarding, i.e. "to provide for one's
great-grandchildren." What else constitutes "winning"
in this sense of intergenerational propagation, i.e. beyond a
specific competition or even as "sticking" to an individual
body? Sexual reproduction is of course central to intergenerational
(biological) propagation, and so notions that "winners"
(including in sports) attract the "best" sex partners
come to apply. But returning now to a more explicit postcolonial
(& one might hope, decolonial...) context, while I've referenced
New worlds, new forms
of life... a couple of times already in this series, the
concluding (open...) bullets to
Postmodern Aesthetics
suggest e.g. that "materialism" can be read aesthetically,
i.e. specifically as sensory-based (v. rational-rhetorical). So
whereas our era also broaches "immaterial labor" (per
Lazzarato), the use of bodies ramifies other questions of materialism:
Simply put, does a biological population, raped & stripped of
all culture, but surviving genetically into another era (e.g. as
US citizens), qualify as some sort of material winner? There're
arguments that we're better off now, specifically materially!
There're also arguments that "winning" avails the use of
bodies — so "whose" genetics is it? In any case,
both culture (& money...) & genetics can propagate
intergenerationally, but it could be one or the other, and indeed
even conquered populations can & do influence colonialists
culturally. Sometimes indigenous populations even remain culturally
dominant, e.g. per the broad "stranger king" phenomenon,
although the establishment of law per se is usually figured as
winning. However, whereas formal power can (& sometimes does)
intervene in daily life, hegemony in general is expressed in more
mundane relations: There might be questions of differential powers,
of different domains, their balance & custodianship, intergenerational
transmission happening in different ways.... Or there might be
various attempts at centralization (i.e. the pyramid...), and of
course if the colony aims to take over the body (of the land, of
the people...), rather than simply to conduct external business....
Either way, the imperialists (& especially the settler colonists)
tend to see themselves as (culturally — but actually, militarily)
superior, believing their own epistemologies simply to be dominant:
This is true (fantastically) even as minorities, but also e.g. in
the US context where indigenous cultures are completely subjugated
or even annihilated. Yet as e.g. Bhabha has demonstrated, imperial
perspectives do not exhaust the epistemic threads in such a situation,
even as they might also violently insist that they do. (And this
isn't so distinct from the notion that history is written by victors.
Or also why Eurocentric concepts of "materialism" continue
to be applied to situations of broad biological rape.) So while
basic bullying of dominated populations can dictate some of what
ideas continue to apply, including intergenerationally, it can't
really extinguish abjected perspectives per se, or the full swerve
of resistance. (Imperial bullies like to say "This is for
your own good!" So always implying the juvenile classic
"Why do you keep hitting yourself...?") There isn't real
reciprocity, including not of knowledge. So even the ideas of the
colonized can be propagated (sometimes) by unwitting colonizers:
There comes to be a kind of spectrality, a sort of nightmare of
power, i.e. per the inherent non-negation of dreams, the raw sense
that ideas per se somehow overcome barriers of power & history
(& inclination). Pace Paragraph 12 again
then, schismogenesis occurs across & sometimes against conscious
identifications, anti-mimesis per se even yielding a sort of mimesis,
the seepage or imprint of proximity, the draw of (inter-)family
violence.... (So as I'd already remarked, such schismogenesis &
related psychological drama "twisted this genetic-political
chain into various affine shapes" — by which I refer to
intergenerational transmission across the colonizer-colonized
divide.) And none of this is akin to the "fair play" of
sports, not only because it involves the uncontained violence of
war, but because there's no "suspension" in general, no
neutral framework from which to spectate-appraise (& no willingness
to replay the game anew). Oppositional methods thus fray in
desperation, but proliferate nonetheless (like blood spurting from
a stomped carcass, if you'll pardon the image...). They proliferate
without the reciprocity of knowledge though, and with today's
neoimperialism moving online & into "big data,"
information asymmetry becomes the operative overall context: Beyond
the hope that extremes of asymmetry might actually undermine typology
[N2], direct surveillance of subjugated populations increasingly
suggests the ability to eliminate epistemic blindnesses. Yet
historical study suggests that such an outcome is far from clear
(even as it's clearly the ambition...), despite pending "nomos"
of the internet [PA/3B], the latter largely based (again)
on speed. Moreover, there's more than simply information collection
(or the reification of populations) underlying such asymmetries,
but also the colonization of knowledge (& of the internet...)
per se, both the resultant glorification of ignorance [N2]
& the imposition of (continuous) trauma via imagery [3B]
(i.e. horror-based control). Internet colonization, building
directly on US imperialism (as one of modernity's most brutal
colonization regimes), thus seeks to reconfigure processes of
semiosis (& self-semiosis) more generally — semiosis (per
Steigler) figuring life itself. (One even begins to perceive a
developing epistemic "homeostasis" around broad cultural
semiotics, e.g. climate change making weather prediction more
difficult at a rate roughly equal to increasing computing power....
Postmodern society thus seems to be driving its own incommensurability,
including within physics itself, or rather reconfiguring a general
living & circulating semiosis into a pyramid-like view from
above, in turn obscuring many other perspectives....) And then on
the internet, and for the new generation of profit-seekers, speed
per se comes to figure such a reworking of semiosis, both
"outrunning" prior forces of balance & law, and forging
a prospective irreversibility (via entropy & noise). After
all, hoarders want their "wins" to continue applying
forever. (Their wealth stockpiles are "supposed" to
provide them & their personal descendants — I won't
necessarily say biological... — with the ongoing, surrogate
use of other bodies. And they seem more than willing to forge new
forms of semiotic/AI "life" as well, if that's what it
takes to keep their hoards private.) So, sensible policies in
response to these trends will have much to do with "winning"
info wars, and will certainly involve issues of public (meta-)custodianship
of information. In the current environment though, such a challenge
around "truth" is becoming steeper every day, particularly
with the effects of increasing noise. (And much rhetoric around
"competition" has always been noise.)
19
Per Paragraph 10, denial remains among the most
potent structuring principles in Western culture & politics, a
highly portable technology for thrusting untruth into the heart of
selves. There're thus in turn physical-bodily structures of denial,
such that "denial" comes not only to figure non-presence
(or even — liturgical — presence of absence), but its
bodily presence. Per Paragraph 11 then, the nexus
of care & denial drives collective individuation (i.e. identity),
including via rational(ized) topologies (& "investments").
And PL10 had already
raised technologies of bodily discipline (e.g. "labor"
per se), the colonization of bodies (specifically the body as
property...), as well as prospects for replacing the body (with
technology). Considering the imperialist-capitalist development
of "property" as concept, the body (as enclosure...) might
then be said to be "owned" by the mind, which itself (per
one of the worst imperial apologists, Locke) also involves
"properties," i.e. as aspects of (some) selves. The
materiality (& contingency) of bodies is thus deprecated (along
with e.g. "nature"), including versus more contemporary
notions of the (neurological) physicality of "the mind"
per se (which can certainly be overstated too, but should be
acknowledged as well, e.g. in phenomena such as "falsely"
held facial expressions evoking the actual underlying emotion they're
mimicking...). Civilization per se becomes (if it ever wasn't...)
a kind of war machine, i.e. for the control (i.e. denial) of bodies
— martial technology fundamentally enabling the control of
the many by the few. And the machine continues to have both subjects
& objects — known in turn by their differing (human)
bodies: Capitalism thus puts into question who are (the) people,
but also generally inverts the (prior) primacy of care work, i.e.
enacts a broad turning away from focus on the human body, and toward
(externalized, i.e. excess) "production" per se. This
is the plantation mindset, to which capitalist production (&
"ownership") remains tied (& which differs e.g. from
prior, "religious" modes of bodily denial). And not only
does "production" (which I'll quote again, since its
requirements have become so normalized through the imperial era...)
divert care, but invades concepts of the human realm more broadly
via biologism (& hence dialectics...), i.e. the (re)production
of humans. (So for instance, e.g. the elderly are deprecated as
non-productive — although some have now turned the tables via
finance capitalism. Nonetheless "youth" remains an
essential postmodern production per se.) These circumstances thus
suggest moving past an (e.g. Marxist) emphasis on production in
general, toward a bodily materialism (pace the prior entry here...),
i.e. beyond production-based "standards of living" per
se. And of course "the environment" is also itself related
directly to bodily health, such that one can figure (post)modernity
in general as basically converting health (quite broadly) into
production. Not only does "healthcare" become a (for-profit)
industry then, but it's long attempted to refigure this situation
(technologically) around retrenched patriarchy (& indeed further
violence): Paragraph 9 (from November 2021) had
thus already interrogated "topologies of violence" (from
Han), not only in the increasing presence of technology (i.e. the
smartphone) in every intimate moment, but in the marginalization
of bodily intelligence (& care per se, pace e.g. "spinal
catastrophism"), as well as in the "equation" of
health with production. Women have thus been stripped of traditional
roles (& knowledge) around family health (& so become figured
as "superstitious" by exponents of modernity). (Renewed
patriarchy was also reflected in more specifically gendered scripts,
different forms of bodily denial, plus the advancement of stricter,
e.g. racial, body typologies in general. And one should note as
well renewed notions of "disability" here, i.e. around
industrialized "health" & production.) Of course,
the conversion of health into production did not address only half
of the (historically imposed...) mind-body duality, and beyond the
broad proliferation of painkillers & anesthetics in general,
is seen increasingly to involve mental health crises: Beyond
motivational prompts (i.e. "giving 110%"), and the various
blood pressure and/or blood sugar issues (often prompted in large
part by unresolved physical stresses & resulting nerve damage,
i.e. diminishing bodily feedback & sensitivity per se...),
sexual dysfunction increases broadly as well. So sexual sublimation
has long been identified as a reserve for further production-profit...
(although repression is also generally "treated" today
by talking alone, i.e. more to normalize any issue). Per prior
comments then, hatred of sex (e.g. as anti-typological) is then a
proxy for hatred of the body, love per se increasingly figured (i.e.
under puritanical liberalism) as "private" (& as
distanced from the body per se... — such that already per the
first real entry here, i.e. pace Butler, "talking about the
body" becomes a philosophical problem...). It isn't only
"love" though making people blind, but further proliferation
of e.g. internet technology, prompting a further turning from
(self-)care, further optimization of exploitation (i.e. profit) per
se, as well as further unbinding of libidinal energy. Bodies are
increasingly "framed" (i.e. isolated, or suspended) e.g.
in tech shells, enacting a sort of bodily separation-segmentation,
so as to further operationalize neoliberal economic rationality
(& of course so as to limit potential affective promiscuity
between bodies). And bodies (i.e. people) are increasingly aggravated
by the new sorts of "material" work they're asked to do
with technology, i.e. by the bodily denial involved. (According
to theories of immaterial labor, one might thus recalculate the
sorts of efforts involved.) The "glitches" of tech &
e.g. "streaming" become wedded to everyday phenomenology
— as well as constantly (as a sort of repetitive micro-trauma...)
draw attention back to the technology itself. And then the promise
of knowledge on the internet seems (once again) to be unwinding
elder wisdom (which itself can become hostile as finance...),
becoming more hollow as it goes: Does (any) technology help us to
know ourselves, our specific bodies, better — not only in
principle, but in practice? What are its semiotics, and what does
it also obscure or deny? (This basic pharmacological question
should belong to my general tech rubric...) Per the previous entry
then, information asymmetry is reaching new levels, info wars are
already being lost.... So beyond the bullying & painkillers
(& their broad implications for bodily health...), people today
seem only to be getting stupider, in part (inevitably) due to
encroaching tertiary retention, but also according to the advancing
denial regime: Memories can become vague, "conditioned by
narratives & identifications," such that denial starts to
overwhelm empiricism per se. (And memory might already be subsumed
into various bodily tics, old injuries & partially repressed
harms. These are also "secondary retention....") The
routine emotions of denialism overcome sensory evidence then, leading
to varieties of acting out (including around narratives of winning
& losing...), the inherent anxiety of social relation becoming
increasingly unleashed: The agitated narrative of Paragraph
12 might then be realigned according to themes of resentment
(i.e. ressentiment, per Nietzsche, et al.), a sort of reactive
"jealousy" triggered (in part through schismogenesis) by
colonialism. Of course, Nietzsche et al. also argued inherently
in favor of the (dialectical) acceptance of modernity, i.e. for the
(tautological?) legitimacy of imperialist conquest per se....
Decolonizing, they weren't. And since (collective) individuation
is always asymmetric, the individual body is bound to an inherent
sort of ignorance, but ignorance is also sustained specifically by
(contemporary) regimes of noise, including via aestheticizations
of violence & the sort of "epistemic homeostasis"
broached in the previous paragraph: Governmentality is then
fundamentally (re)introduced into healthcare by the process of
listening to a stranger (i.e. the medical professional) listening
to one's body, i.e. enforcing distance within (intimate) self-semiosis.
Once again then, one runs up against an unarticulated politics of
speed, i.e. against the rush toward (specialization &) production
& profit — rather than being able to operate at speeds
appropriate to actual bodies. Speed becomes another kind of denial
(such that "everyone" is becoming relatively disabled in
turn by its violence?). And one can physically feel this.
20
And of course beyond our quasi-individual bodies, denial continues
increasingly to structure large-scale (molar) social interactions:
Schismogenesis already involves a sort of denial, conditioning
individuation in turn, but clashes of cultures also come to figure
a nexus of "winning" — such that denial or failure
are felt (in part) collectively. So violence & insecurities
come to be felt by the social body in turn (including as further
means of segmentation...) — yielding a nexus between presence
& denial, i.e. a sort of spectrality. And per the previous
entry, denial is not only a highly portable technology, but (pace
innovations of the modern era) converts (bodily) health into
production: The same can be said of the social body, "molar"
(or macro) optimizations forcing a (productive...) alignment onto
(molecular, micro-economic) chaos. And indeed general antagonisms
are very much on the rise, coping with various (social) frustrations
then involving renewed focus on narrative (& narrativity per
se), i.e. the nexus of study & post-truth. And so after my own
(relatively minor) dis/relocation this year, pace the fractured
thoughts involved, I want to wrap up some recent threads here,
before turning (soon) to a new investigation of (decolonizing)
knowledge practices.... Again per the previous Paragraph, individuation
(& in turn human bonding) are generally fraught with bullying
& broad emotional-physical breakage (& now also e.g. more
painkillers...), but a fundamental denial regime also continues in
the wake of the modern (i.e. imperial) era: Denial of "class
consciousness" has long been a topic, as is consciousness of
history (& e.g. slavery) in general, and increasingly so, but
there's also a clear sense in which the "American middle
class" arises from the mentality of the European aristocrat,
i.e. a situation in which every man (& sometimes woman) imagines
himself a baron (this mentality arising from the historical
conquests...). The result has been not only an (ongoing...) explosion
of concepts of "private property," but of wealth stockpiles
(a term elaborated somewhat e.g. in
PL10...) more
generally, highly wasteful (& entropic) in their anti-social
redundancies. Consequently "property" becomes a form of
denial directed at everyone else (as in "keep out!").
These presumptive (& sometimes universalizing...) aristocrats
(i.e. us) still need subjects & workers though: "Freedom"
thus becomes freedom to exploit, not freedom from exploitation.
(And human beauty is widely attributed to people who don't really
work, but that's a topic for another time....) Moreover, again per
the previous entry & "individual" regimes of denial,
the elderly are both spurned for being unproductive, and (for the
few...) take revenge as "owners" via the financial system,
this situation now involving ownership of (corporate) Artificial
Intelligence as well. Extending Stiegler then, perhaps it's time
to interrogate movement beyond tertiary retention, but it's still
the case that AI is taught via human textuality (i.e. world-making),
such that AI becomes a particular kind of stockpile (as well as
follows a vector of speed per se...). So per the developing tech
rubric here, how might AI allow us to know ourselves better? What
does it obscure or deny? There's a tremendous amount of noise, for
instance, noise (including as affirmation or strategy...) forging
a nexus with denial per se, including around attention &
governmentality. And these days a vast proliferation of false
equivalences also emerges from the neoliberal economic machine, not
only (re)invoking imperialism via e.g. figuring exchange as
competition, but per a kind of universalizing fungibility mandate
(i.e. to ensure the dominance of historical, financial wealth across
social domains...). "Virtualization" is then an entire
domain opening for false (or partial) equivalences, figuring
replaceability (particularly for labor) too. (False equivalences,
including via virtualization, involve very little consent: They
basically slide into place, soon becoming habits of thought....)
Virtualization has also involved a sort of framing or suspension
(e.g. notoriously undermining comedy online, but limiting affectivity
in general...), suspension figuring a kind of overthinking or
mediation (for now), but also an ongoing reconfiguration of the
public-private dual, including (very broadly) ritual per se. So
per Paragraph 15, if music is a hinge for presence,
it can also figure (e.g. acousmatically) the virtual, i.e. notions
of some sort of (usually absent?) soundtrack to the online world
— but of course music is hoarded (as stockpile) as well. What
is public here? What is noise? Internet technologies certainly
amplify frustrations, especially absent (eventual) in-person airings,
such that the social body per se even becomes more virtual...? What
is now its ground? So again per Paragraph 18
& notions of winning, perhaps it's time to figure "the
economy" as culture (& so figure a "cultural
materialism"), i.e. differently from being a target for
mathematical optimizations. And even if denialists do seem to be
leading the way in public posturing these days, "denial"
is not really a vision, such that one obvious challenge is to move
beyond denying denial, i.e. into positive articulations. Nominally
"conservative" positions have already abandoned conservation
per se (except for conserving their own power, perhaps...), instead
substituting a wildly apocalyptic vision — i.e. as
"alternative" to apocalyptic climate change — such
that history itself is increasingly refused. (We thus need knowledge
& truth more than ever, some further fundamentals on those
topics to appear here in the coming months....) So this is an
unmooring, particularly from groups usually obsessed with the past,
a retreat into (contemporary!) identitarian politics (i.e. an ironic
becoming-molecular...). A nexus of speed (particularly pace emerging
AI...) & timeliness or historicism thus comes to virtualize not
only presence but history or time per se, speed itself becoming
perhaps the ultimate technology for denial.... And already pace
the open-ended musings of
PA/3B, temporal
intersections become more critical, particularly as they relate to
temporal sovereignties, issues of legibility again raising the
spectrality of denial. Perhaps there needs to be (found, constructed...)
a mode of time for truth: What did or doesn't happen, history &
(false?) equivalences... narrativity again, alas... and knowledge
practices, moving next here to strip away the biases & blinders
from the imperial field of epistemology: Let's see what's left
(but let's not fear for knowledge per se either, because we do
already know that indigenous people were able to live on this
planet...).
To bibliography page for this sub-project.
To jazz thoughts main page.
© 2020-24 Todd M. McComb