DJs need to know how to mix records, sure, but even the best mixer will tank if they don’t know how to read a crowd. You have to know what kinds of songs keep your crowd dancing, and what kinds of songs send them to the bar or the bathroom. Usually this involves a combination of prior knowledge (of the venue, of who you’re opening for, the night’s theme, etc.) and actual observation of the crowd–do they look and sound like they’re into it?
Lightwave is a platform that uses WiFi enabled wristbands to track and transmit biometric data–their temperature, heartrate, and the volume of sound they hear–from individual crowdmembers to a program that analyzes and visualizes that data. Lightwave visualizes audience responses to…well, that’s one of the questions I have here: what experience is it visualizing? Is it the DJ performance? The clubbing itself? Both? It seems absolutely incorrect to say that Lightwave visualizes audience responses to music. Clubbling is a social and interactive experience, and music is just one factor in the mix, so to speak. When you’re dancing, you’re responding to other people around you, to the overall ‘vibe’ of the crowd–this is what makes it more fun than dancing to the same records alone at your house.
And the Lightwave crew seems to recognize the fundamental sociality or interactivity of clubbing. At their SXSW party this year, Lightwave used the devices to gamify the DJ set. As the video in this Fast Company article shows, the crowd was instructed that “your actions will unlock the show.” The crowd had to work to “unlock” achievements like drinks or moments of musical pleasure (i.e., drops). So, though Lightwave could theoretically be used by DJs help them do their job of reading a crowd, this sounds a lot like I, the clubgoer, now have to work for my own leisure, leisure that I’ve already paid for (in terms of cover, clothes, drinks and/or drugs). That is, Lightwave outsources the work of the DJ to the dancers.
The visualization of the data Lightwave collected at the A-Trak set is really interesting. It’s broken down by gender (pink and blue)–men and women seem to respond differently to the music–women reacted more intensely to to Tommy Trash’s Fuckwind, and men to A-trak’s remix of “Heads Will Roll.” But the crowd as a whole–represented on the grayscale bar–responded most intensely to moments of interaction, either with other clubbers or with the DJ. This begs the question: does Lightwave use biometric data to monetize interactivity in a way that parallels the way social media monetizes interaction? Does Lightwave transform the medium of music into a “social” medium (at least insofar as it brings music in line with the political economy of social media)?
One secondary effect of the blow-up over Jack Halberstam’s trigger warning essay is the widening skepticism of the term “neoliberal” as a sort of empty buzzword. Because I just finished teaching a grad seminar whose main objective was to figure out what the hell we mean when we say “neoliberalism” (here is the tumblr for the class), I thought I might be of some assistance here. I think the term “neoliberalism” can mean something useful and specific if we’re more cognizant of its use.
It seems to me that a lot of the confusion around the term is that it is used in (at least) two senses: one indicates a period in time, and one indicates an ideology. Just as “the Cold War” or “modernity” can refer to both a historical time-frame and a dominant ideology that shaped that historical period, “neoliberal” can mean both “now” and the ideology that informs this “now.”
Sometimes, “neoliberalism” is used as a historical marker: our era is the “neoliberal” one. Generally, people use the term “neoliberal” to denote things they don’t like about our historical situation. It’s a kind of shorthand for “contemporary society” with a “which sucks” inflection. This shorthand sense is where all the looseness and imprecision comes in. As Hegel said, “now” can be narrowly particular because it can mean any particular point in time. So, “neoliberal” gets used to mean “now,” which means something specific because it can refer to any specific thing.
But things suck for a reason. This reason lies in the deeper sense of “neoliberalism,” the useful sense. As an ideology, “neoliberalism” is a very specific epistemology/ontology (or, more precisely, it’s an ideology in which epistemology and ontology collapse into one another, an epistemontology) [1]: neoliberals think everything in the universe works like a deregulated, competitive, financialized capitalist market. [2] Many scholars from all over the map seem to agree on this basic definition of neoliberalism. For example:
David Harvey: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices which proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by the maximization of entrepreneurial freedoms within an institutional framework characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, free markets, and free trade” (145); “The corporatization, commodification, and privatization of hitherto public assets has been a signal feature of the neoliberal project. Its primary aim has been to open up new fields of capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability” (153).
Stuart Hall: “Political ideas of ‘liberty’ became harnessed to economic ideas of the free market: one of liberalism’s intersecting fault-lines which re-emerges with neoliberalism” (13); “Neoliberalism, then, evolves. It borrows and appropriates extensively form classic liberal ideas; but each is given a further ‘market’ inflexion and conceptual revamp” (15).
Lester Spence: “What distinguishes neoliberal governmentality from other forms is its attempt to simultaneously shape individual desires and behaviors and institutional practices according to market principles, while simultaneously CREATING the market through those individual and institutional desires and behaviors” (12).
A lot follows from this epistemontology: human capital, big data (the generalization of financialization as both episteme and medium), post-identity politics, globalization, creative destruction, resilience, sustainability, privatization, biopolitics, relational aesthetics…We can call all these things “neoliberal” because they are manifestations or elaborations of its underlying epistemic/ontological project. A rigorous understanding of this epistemontological project is a necessary first step in analyzing, critiquing, and working with and against all of its mundane manifestations. The concept of “neoliberalism” can be really helpful if we account for why it seems to apply nearly indiscriminately to everything.
RIght now, though, I want to hone in on one tiny aspect of neoliberalism’s epistemology. As Foucault explains in Birth of Biopolitics, “the essential epistemological transformation of these neoliberal analyses is their claim to change what constituted in fact the object, or domain of objects, the general field of reference of economic analysis” (222). This “field of reference” is whatever phenomena we observe to measure and model “the market.” Instead of analyzing the means of production, making them the object of economic analysis, neoliberalism analyzes the choices capitalists make: “it adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior and the internal rationality of this human behavior” (223; emphasis mine). (The important missing assumption here is that for neoliberals, we’re all capitalists, entrepreneurs of ourself, owners of the human capital that resides in our bodies, our social status, etc.) [3] Economic analysis, neoliberalism’s epistemontological foundation, is the attribution of a logos, a logic, a rationality to “free choice.”
Just as a market can be modeled mathematically, according to various statistical and computational methods, everyone’s behavior can be modeled according to its “internal rationality.” This presumes, of course, that all (freely chosen) behavior, even the most superficially irrational behavior, has a deeper, inner logic. According to neoliberal epistemontology, all genuinely free human behavior “reacts to reality in a non-random way” and “responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment” (Foucault, sumarizing Becker, 269; emphasis mine). Human behavior is systematic because it’s dynamic: it is the predictable pattern of responses to determinate variables. The object of neoliberal economic analysis is the “calculation” (223) of the program, protocol, indeed, the algorithm that makes apparently incoherent choices cohere into a model that can then be used to predict that individual’s future choices. Economic analysis finds the signal in the noise.
What I’m arguing is this: Foucault’s analysis of the role of ‘choice’ in neoliberal epistemology/ontology shows us why algorithms are so central to contemporary capitalism, media, and science.
If each individual is modeled as an algorithm (which is not too far-fetched a claim: big data and the government model individual users’ behavior in this way), how do these individual algorithms interact? I think Foucault’s work is particularly helpful on this count. As he reads the American neoliberals (Becker, the Chicago School, etc.), they think an individual makes choices in “pursu[it of] his own interest” (270); “interest” is the metaphor for the overarching logic or rationality that systematizes discrete choices. And, as I’ve just shown above, that rationality can be modeled algorithmically. Thinking about interest algorithmically, that is, as wave-form shaped probability functions, helps us understand what Foucault means when he says that neoliberals think individual interest “converges spontaneously with the interest of others” (270). What does it mean to “converge spontaneously”? Well, if we take individual interests as wave-forms, these wave forms will have their own periodicity, their own frequency. In general, individual periods will be out of phase. But, if left to run independently over time, individual frequencies will synch up and fall in phase, like windshield wipers on a bus. These individual frequencies will converge spontaneously with one another. Phase convergence is how contemporary acoustics understands harmony: when tones and their overtones fall in phase, we hear consonances; when tones and overtones are too significantly out of phase, we hear dissonances. “The will of each harmonizes spontaneously with the will and interest of others” (275) because like sound waves, algorithmically-modeled individual behaviors will fall in phase and out of phase with one another. [4] Though seemingly spontaneous, the phasing isn’t random–it’s the effect of predictable responses to material conditions (just as, for example, the two tapes in Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” slide in and out of phase because of minute differences in the materiality of the tape players and the tapes themselves).
So, this long tangent about algorithms and social harmony is both an example of the benefits of having a precise definition of neoliberalism. This specific definition of neoliberalism helped me draw correlations among neoliberal epistemontology–everything is a deregulated, financialized market–and the increasing centrality of algorithms to contemporary society. Moreover, Foucault’s language of harmonization helps me fill what Kate Crawford has called the “metaphor gap” in understanding/theorizing how algorithmic media/culture industries work.
[1] As Foucault explains in Birth of Biopolitics: “Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking” (218).
[2] As Stuart Hall notes, “Actual markets do not work that way” (20). Neoliberalism (like classical liberalism) is an ideal theory: this “free market” is an ideal-as-idealized model, a top-down picture of how things ought to work in perfect conditions. It is not a bottom-up description of how markets actually work in imperfect conditions.
[3] As Foucault explains, this market-thinking “means taking this social fabric and arranging things so that it can be broken down, subdivided, and reduced, not according to the grain of individuals, but according to the grain of enterprises…the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other” (241).
[4] This point is too technical to really develop in this venue, but it’s something I’m working on for my next book: this model of social harmony is very different from the classically liberal model of social harmony. Neoliberal social ‘harmony’ doesn’t eliminate dissonance; rather, it understands out-of-phaseness/dissonance as pervasive. It’s only “spontaneously” and by chance that consonant convergences occur. The point is to find phenomena that are predictably in (and out) of phase. Classically liberal theories of social harmony treats dissonance as something that must be assimilated and/or eliminated (Susan McClary’s work on tonality here is important; see also my Philosophy Today piece on Kristeva’s interpretation of Don Giovanni). All this is to say that theories of social harmony track musical understandings of harmony–you could almost say neoliberalism offers a post-tonal theory of social harmony (perhaps to match its post-identity politics).
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “music is traversed by a becoming-woman” (272). By this they mean that Western systems of musical organization evoke and confront the very phenomena that serve as these systems’ constitutive exclusions. For example, while tonal harmony was a hierarchical system of consonances (i.e., chords), it nevertheless relied upon the introduction and resolution of (as the nineteenth century progressed, increasingly jarring and destabilizing) dissonances. Similarly, the abjection/rejection/marginalization of “woman” (or better, “girl”) is what solidifies and guarantees patriarchal orders: maleness/masculinity become the “norm” or the “absolute” only insofar as femaleness/femininity are circumscribed as abnormal, unthinkable, and invisible (or, to use Irigaray’s terms, insofar as “woman” is the sex which “is not”). Thus, to claim that “musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman” (Deleuze & Guattari, 299) is to posit that [Western, tonal] music works by “confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in order to rise again” (Deleuze & Guattari, 299). As Susan McClary and Catherine Clement have famously argued, the logic of tonality turns upon the evocation and ultimate containment of “feminized” musical elements (e.g., chromaticism, actual female characters in operas, etc.). To say that “musical expression is a “becoming-woman,” then, means that femininity is the danger a musical work confronts, only to rise again. Traditionally, patriarchy has treated femininity as a deterritorializing force, something whose destabilization is necessary and even pleasurable.
But plenty of feminist and non-feminist scholars have pointed out that neoliberalism co-opts and rebrands traditional (white) femininity: the Young-Girl is the ideal model for human capital, just as feminized work–flexible, care-oriented, informal/unpaid–is the new model for labor. As Natalia Cecire puts it, “neoliberalism operates through hypertrophied forms of femininity.” Femininity isn’t deterritorializing, but the mechanism of reterritorialization.
So, in the same way that neoliberalism co-opts femininity and has it lead the charge to “creative destruction,” does it also co-opt “sound” or “music” as the primary medium of and/or metaphor for this work?
Why might we think this? Kate Crawford’s paper on listening and online interaction, which I really like, argues that listening is a better conceptual resource for metaphors to describe the kinds of attention, relation, and interaction naturalized in more-or-less contemporary social media. There, she cites Nick Couldry’s argument that the “‘reciprocal, embodied nature of listening; its embeddedness always in an intersubjective space of perception’” (cited in KC 525) is what makes it particularly appropriate to describe online environments. But think about it: reciprocity, embodiment, embeddedness, intersubjectivity–all these sound a lot like the stereotypical attributes of trad white femininity. It seems like sound’s femininity is what makes it so well-suited to theorize and describe digital, socially-mediated life.
This connection between sound and femininity suggests a connection between hyperemployment and communicative capitalism. Though Crawford doesn’t explicitly argue this in her article, her analysis easily lends itself to the following interpretation: “background listening” is the traditionally feminized work–the un/under-compensated care work usually tasked to women as both consequence and cause of their marginalization–of the social media economy.
The kind of attention required for background listening is what we might call, after Sandra Bartky, a “feminine discipline”–the practice of this discipline is what makes one legibly feminine. “Background listening” is similar to the “distracted” listening that characterizes radio and/or ubiquitous music listening, the very kind of listening, she points out, that got Adorno in such a tizzy. But, if you read Adorno more closely, this distracted or “regressed” listening is thoroughly feminized. As I show in this book, just about every time he talks about this kind of listener, he makes reference to (sexualized) female body parts shortly before and/or after. In Adorno, distracted listening is femininized. But, as Crawford shows, this is precisely the skillset one needs to navigate Twitter. Women’s work involves knowing exactly when to tune in and hear everything in full detail, and when to tune out irrelevant noise. For example, isn’t this what moms do with kids? They lurk around, tuning in when needed but also letting kids have space. This is what my mom referred to when she said she, like all moms, had eyes in the back of her head.
This ability to tune in (and out) is also the same skillset that we require of care workers: they must be intimately and personally attentive to the unique and distinctive needs of others. Just as it’s difficult to outsource the work of a babysitter, a housekeeper, or a nurse, “it remains difficult,” Crawford notes, “to outsource the act of listening” (531). Both involve addressing specific, materially-rooted concerns that can’t be uprooted or abstracted from their context. And because of this, such labor is extremely inefficient. And that’s why it is “of low value…[and] difficult for it to be recognized as an important and value-generating form of work” (531). [1] The kinds of listening that are least efficient, the kinds of listening that can’t be made to “Lean In,” but are doled out to the least advantaged members of society. They’re the kinds of listening that produce hypotrophied, rather than hypertrophied, femininities, femininities that keep you at the margins instead of shooting you to the center.
A caveat: these are all modernist accounts of sound and femininity that neoliberalism appropriates. What was marginal to modernity is central to neoliberalism (in general). This begs the question: so what about neoliberal accounts of sound and femininity? I’ve talked a bit about the latter in my post on the financialized girl. There I argue that patriarchy still feminizes–that is, it structurally produces some kinds of people/phenomena as women, as neither included nor potentially included in society/capitalism/humanity. But what about “sound”? What kinds of sonic, acoustic, and auditory phenomena get, perhaps we can say, phased out of this normalized and normalizing account of sound? What sonic phenomena don’t sync up with it, produce either dissonances in need of domestication, or sub/supra auditory frequencies we can’t even hear?
[1] “However, a commitment to background listening comes at a cost – the cost of human attention. A senior executive at Dell may underscore the importance of listening to customers, but in practice this means that more than 130 Twitter feeds emanate from Dell Corp., and each is connected back to a staff member who must personally maintain that account while adhering to corporate communication protocols (Soller 2009). This is the labour of listening. But how is this labour to be quantified? As long as listening is not considered to be an important part of online participation, of ‘low value’ in the process of online engagement, it is difficult for it be recognized as an important and value-generating form of work” (531)
Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962. It’s like the “Yo” of painting.
As you may have heard, “Yo” is a social networking app has distilled social networking into its most elemental form. Basically, you can’t share any content on Yo–no words, no images, no links. All you can do is exchange the same monosyllabic ping, “yo.”
It’s so simple, many find it laughable: what, indeed, is the point? Well, it’s certainly not to communicate content. In the same way that a Yves Klein painting is about the medium of paint (specifically, color), Yo is about social networking. If “content” is traditionally a means to the end of clicks, Yo cuts out this middleman. It’s more efficient than traditional social networking–no content to waste our time, or for a company to waste money producing, transmitting, and supporting.
Yo isn’t a novelty. It’s the quintessence of communicative capitalism. As Jodi Dean defines it, “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics”–for example, as the deliberative exchanges among citizens [1]–“are the basic elements of capitalist production” (56). Put differently, communicative exchanges have no “use” value–their message doesn’t matter; rather, they’re just empty exchange value like any other commodity. Thus,
a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism is precisely this morphing of message into contribution…The message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool. Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation” (58).
Yo embodies Dean’s definition of communicative capitalism: it’s a platform that eliminates message in favor of pure circulation. This works because the circulation is what generates value for data collectors, brokers, and analysts. It doesn’t matter what we say, only that we ping one another, that we establish patterns of relationships, patterns of behavior, patterns of circulation. “A contribution need not be understood; it need only be repeated, reproduced, forwarded. Circulation is the content, the condition for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution” (59): these are Dean’s words, published in 2005, but they’re also a very accurate account of Yo.
Dean thinks that “the intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism forecloses the antagonism necessary for politics” ( 54). On the one hand, this is basically the “slactivism” objection. On the other hand, it’s more nuanced than that: Dean thinks that communications have been evacuated of all use value–words have no power anymore, they’re just fungible units of value, like money. This means we can neither (a) debate their substance, nor (b) use speech as a political tool to effect changes in policies, laws, and the organization of society.
Speech, understood as the transmission of meaning, that might be relatively obsolete these days. But circulation might have its own politics, its own political possibilities. In fact, I would argue that most contemporary concerns about, say, data surveillance, these are actually contests over the politics of circulation, not the politics of speech. (Or, maybe more accurately, they’re primarily about circulation, secondarily about speech.) Going back to that block quote from above, the rise of metadata analysis shows us that who sends a message, who receives that message, who both sender and recipient also talk to, when, where, and for how long, all these things matter. Again, it’s not the content that matters, but the metadata–the qualitative features of that circulating datum. So when we think about having real, tangible effects on the organization of our social, political, and economic relations, we ought to think about the means, methods, and qualities of circulation. And maybe Yo, or something similarly simple, is just the sandbox we need to play in to hone our skills?
[1] In other words, Habermasian deliberative democracy.
…but people still address me as Mr. Robin James *sigh*
Women’s expertise is constantly undermined and trivialized. For example, holding pop music in low regard (thinking it can only ever be frivolous, ideologically overdetermined, or sold-out) is one way of trivializing a field in which women, especially black women, have made hugely significant artistic, cultural, and economic impacts.
Women academics, writers, and journalists also face constant challenges to their expertise. There’s the calling someone “Mrs.” instead of “Dr.” microaggression. There’s mistaking someone for staff, or, as is often the case with me, for a student. This latter example is, in my experience, common to face-to-face interactions: every time I can remember having to respond to the “What are you writing your dissertation on?” or “Will you get a Ph.D. after your MA?” question with “Umm, I have tenure” has been IRL.
The tl;dr of Cottom’s report is: White women are sexually harassed. Women of color are treated as frauds. She writes, “whereas white women tend to report a significant number of rape threats when they write publicly, I find that the overwhelming threat issued in my comment section and inbox are threats to my academic credibility.” Rape threats tell white women they’re not allowed to be in academic spaces as experts; rape is about power, and these threats are a way of telling women they’ve overstepped their power. Fraud threats tell WOC that they’re not legitimately allowed to know things, or to affiliate themselves with “legit” academic institutions. This is different than pushing back against someone who oversteps her power; these fraud threats assume that WOC have no “power” (knowledge, affiliation) to assert in the first place.
I’m a white woman with some degree of academic-ish microcelebrity, and, on reading Cottom’s paper, I was seriously puzzled as to why none of that ever happens to me. I don’t get either of these sorts of challenges to my expertise–since I began blogging in 2009, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a rape threat on my blog or on social media (though I have been sexually harassed IRL). Mostly, it’s my arguments that are challenged (e.g., facts are refuted). If I’m dismissed, usually it’s some version of “Get a life, love. Stop trying to read so much into things.” Basically, I’m dismissed as too academic. ….which makes NO SENSE! I explicitly identify as a woman–in my pics, in my bio, hell, even on Facebook–but yet I seem to have avoided the kinds of gendered challenges to my expertise that are most women academics online commonly face. So why is my experience so different? I am sure Cottom’s findings are accurate, so what is it about my experience that makes me an outlier?
Driven by both intellectual curiosity, and some pretty intense emotional/psychological worrying, I spent a few days stewing over these questions. I don’t think my lack of online harassment is due to the fact that philosophy, my discipline, is different than others, or than internet culture generally (in fact, philosophy is probably WORSE in all these respects than the internet in general is). [1] I don’t think it’s because I’m too micro of a microcelebrity–I’m no superstar or anything, but women with less, erm, Klout, seem to get these challenges. I don’t think it’s because I have tenure; in my experience, tenure did nothing to ameliorate the misogynist micro- and macro-aggressions I face in my job/role as an academic. So what is it? WHY is my experience with online harassment so anomalous?
…It took me a few days to figure this out. I looked back at comments on Its Her Factory, I looked waaay back in my Twitter mentions…Then, one morning, when I was walking the dogs, it hit me: “DUDE, YOU HAVE A DUDE’S NAME: ROBIN. And not just a dude’s name, but one of the Anglo-iest of Anglo dude names (…Sherwood Forrest, anyone?). That’s why people don’t treat you like they treat other women online: your name masculinizes you.” My name lets me pass as a man, or at least as masculine enough to be a credible expert in things like philosophy, music, and technology. Basically, I’m passing for a dude.
Upon this realization, I went to the academic literature. I had a ton of questions:
Do possibly male names, like Robin, read differently (i.e., as more obviously male) than explicitly non-gendered avatar names, like, say, Sputnik or Skylab or whatever?
Do digital environments enable some kinds of gender passing that aren’t available, or aren’t as easy, IRL? Or do digital environments make some well-established types of gender passing more difficult than or less relevant than they are IRL?
For example, this paper implies that “names, locations, and avatars” (4) are the main features of online gender performance–not, say, clothes or body comportment, which are more traditional means of gender performance.
This article summarizing the new report on online harassment overlooks the ways that old methods and attitudes adapt to new media. Arguing that “unfortunately, the same gender stereotypes and hateful attitudes that exist in our culture are also following women in their online activities,” it does correctly attribute blame to patriarchy, not to the medium itself. BUT, patriarchy adapts itself to specific media–this is what Laura Mulvey’s famous “male gaze” essay shows us, right? That “the male gaze,” though now widespread, is the result of patriarchy’s adapting itself to/alongside classic Hollywood cinema?
Women academics have historically strategically de-gendered their first names (philosopher L.A. Paul is an example); does this practice continue with digital microcelebrity women? This paper suggests so; it argues that women “prefer to use gender-neutral names to be accepted by mostly male audiences” (2).
This paper finds that in hacker culture, skill and expertise is granted not on the basis of one’s work itself, but on one’s ability to defend it in flame wars (38). I wonder if something similar is going on in these attacks to women digital microcelebrities: they’re getting flamed (more or less), but because they’re women in patriarchy, the gendered flames are more intense and more threatening. Academic philosophy has a similar flame-y culture: we devour each other in barrages of absurdly aggressive questions and comments. Women just get an additional layer of misogynist aggressivity, too. And the character of that misogynist aggression varies according to race, as Cottom’s paper finds.
I don’t think I’ve sufficiently answered these questions; I need to read a lot more extensively to do that. But, I think my personal experience has relevance beyond my own self-awareness. If anything, it gives us a more nuanced understanding of how gendering works in digital environments, about the distribution of gendered challenges to women digital microcelebrities, and it raises some broader questions about gender performance and digital environments.
In particular, I think my personal experience shows that there is room for a lot more research and more nuanced data about online harassment and the role of identity in granting epistemic credibility in online environments. There is probably a feedback loop between new technologies and new forms of the good ‘ol -isms (racism, sexism, etc). And these feedback loops are likely specific to individual platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.).
[1] In fact, what goes on IRL in philosophy sounds a lot like what happens to women digital microcelebrities. Beingawomaninphilosophy shows that there’s tons of sexual harassment and lots of microaggressions that challenge women’s legitmiate participation in and affiliation with the field. Though there is scholarship on this, it would be nice to have more public awareness (e.g., on the aforementioned blog) of how women philosophers of color’s experiences of harassment and discrediting differ from white women’s.
In an earlier post, I asked what happens to femininity when the kind of second-shift care work traditionally assigned to women is increasingly a feature of all work, especially conventionally masculinized jobs. This post picks up where that one left off. Here, I’ll use Michelle Murphy’s concept of “the financialization of girls” to help me argue that “femininity” is something that distinguishes unpaid care labor (which is feminized, or girl-ized) from the kinds of profitable self-investment in one’s human and social capital required, nowadays, for success.
Analyzing NGO promotional videos, reports, mission statements, and the like, Murphy shows that the figure of “The Girl”–the so-called “Third-World” or otherwise poor, victimized, “thoroughly heterosexualized” young woman–has become the primary focus of international development discourse and practice. This “abstract and universalized girl-child” is one huge stereotype: it’s how the global elite thinks poor girls in non-Western liberal democratic societies are. This girl is always undereducated and undervalued.
Because of her lack of formal education and her situation in a “traditional” society (a society that seems, to the global elite, more misogynist and regressively patriarchal than Western liberal democratic societies), The Girl is seen as a risk, and in her personal risk hangs the balance of the entire planet’s future. If she has an “unproductive life”–one with many children and little economic contribution–then the world’s environment and economy will only suffer. If she has a “productive life,” however, we all win. Basically, The Girl is human capital ripe for flipping–if we invest a little in her, we’ll get back huge returns. [1]
The Girl is human capital. This is absolutely fundamental to Murphy’s analysis. It’s what distinguishes this type of patriarchy from more traditional types which treat women not as capital, but as private property–not something to invest in, but something to exchange (I’m thinking about Gayle Rubin’s famous piece on “The Exchange of Women” and Luce Irigaray’s reading of Marx in “Women On the Market,” for example). When women are treated as private property, patriarchy focuses on regulating women’s reproductive capacity. This is because reproduction and the family form are about the transmission of private property (from father to “legitimate” children). But, as Murphy explains,
A focus on human capital moves the point of intervention and adjustment from fertility itself to education; from distributing contraception to “women” to producing the conditions for higher rates of return on “girls,” a change that has come to dominate World Bank and UN-affiliated programs in the last decade. Since the 1990s, the figure of the racialized, “third-world girl”—typically represented as South Asian or African, often Muslim—has become the iconic vessel of human capital.
The Girl is the effect of viewing gender through neoliberal lenses that turn everything into a financialized market. Or, in other words, financial capitalism has altered gender roles, on the one hand, and the techniques by which one assumes or is assigned a role, and The Girl is one prominent example of a financialized gender role.
In the 70s, feminist theory (most famously the Rubin and Irigaray pieces I mentioned above) explained how commodity capitalism structured patriarchal gender roles and relations: “men” were the people and institutions in the position to exchange and profit from exchanges of “women”; “women” were the people and institutions in the position of being exchanged, whose circulation generated profits for others. I talk a bit about that model of gender as exchange here and here.
But in financial capitalism, nothing gets exchanged–investment directly compounds the value of money, seemingly growing money right out of, well, money. In this model, girls are what are financialized–they’re low-value, relatively low-risk ‘stock’ that “men” invest in. In financialized capitalism, “men” are the people and institutions in the position to invest in and profit from The Girl; “women” are the people and institutions who are or have been invested by others, and who do not get the profits/surplus value from their own human capital. Having the surplus (human, social) capital to invest, for example, in service labor is the effect of being a “man”–that is, of occupying the position of structural dominance in a patriarchal system. Lacking the surplus capital to invest in oneself, let alone in others, is the effect of being a woman or a Girl–that is, of occupying the position of structural subjection in a patriarchal system.
Investing in Girls generates surplus human capital for the investor, not for the Girl whose capital is vested. Investing in Girl-capital is fundamentally different than feminized care/affective labor. Care and affective labor are often investments in others–for example, I’m investing my time and my talents in my students when I mentor them on the weekend over Facebook Messenger as they scramble to finish an application before a deadline. However, I don’t get the surplus value back from that investment–my students do. In this example, I’m investing in others, in others human capital, but in a way that doesn’t return profits to me. You might say my investment of human capital is alienated from me. That’s feminized care labor. Investing in Girls, on the other hand, generates human capital value for me–for example, doing white saviorist-y volunteer work boosts my human capital, and my own self-esteem (which is a kind of human capital). In both cases, the feminized position–that of the care worker, the Girl-as-finance-instrument–is the one in which investments reap profits for others.
When I perform the traditionally feminized work of hyperemployment, it doesn’t feminize me, it doesn’t turn me into a Girl. I am investing in myself, in my future success. I am my own capital. The Girl is feminized because she is capital for others–others invest in and profit from her. So, the financialized Girl is a necessary complement to hyperemployent and the generalization of care/affective labor: it’s how we mark gender roles now that everybody’s supposed to do the things conventionally regarded as “women’s work.”
This idea of the financialized Girl has a few more important implications that, though don’t have time to develop here, I would like to pursue in the future.
1. Earlier this week on Facebook, Erin Tarver (@drtarver) and I were talking about the trend of using “Football 101” to market college football fandom to women. Erin brilliantly observed that these type of events include women in football fandom as inherent, eternal novices–as needing a “101” course because whatever knowledge they may have of football isn’t the “right” knowledge. Including women via remedial education both expands the market for football and maintains the normative masculinity of football fandom, football fan discourse, and so on. So, it’s a way to include women while maintaining male/masculine dominance. This moves strikes me as similar to the financialized Girl, b/c Girls are included in capitalism as sites of remediation: girls need to be educated, improved, ‘flipped,’ etc. This Football 101 example makes me think that middle-class, college-educated, Western–that is, more privileged–women are still financialized, but in more subtle ways. Isn’t this what “Lean In” culture is?
2. Along these lines, what about our dominant narratives about women in technology? ….“Girls Learn To Code” programs which treat girls as sites of investment for the future of technology (i.e., the future profits of tech venture capital)? Also, what’s the gender politics of crowdfunding sites? How does the financialized Girl fit into David’s critique of Upworthiness?
3. This is a nerdy theory point: The financialized Girl model suggests that Tiqqun’s Young Girl is, as they claim, not a gendered concept. If the YG is their metaphor for mainstream Western human capital, then structurally the YG is masculinized–the YG reaps the profits of her investments in herself. The YG is the opposite of the financialized Girl. This means that Tiqqun’s gendering of YG as feminine, then, is really just a way to use a ton of implicit misogyny to critique dominant discourses of human capital–that is, it’s a way for them to transfer the negative associations we have about women and femininity to this concept of human capital.
[1] Murphy argues: “Her rates of return are so high precisely because her value begins so low. The girl is an undervalued stock for global finance and for future global economic recover precisely because she is constituted as the “poorest of the poor.”” The Girl is the cheapest stock available, so with just a small investment it’s possible to sell quite high what you’ve bought quite low.
[2] In fact, human capital theory was largely a rejection of the Marxist idea of alienation–treating oneself as capital means that you reap the profits from your labor, not your employer.
from the daily mail, take with appropriate grains of salt
What sort of ideological context would make the emergence of social media, as we know it today, both possible and likely? What background ideals and institutions would motivate the development of what we now know as social media? In other words, what theory of society would help us understand why today looks like it does, why media technology and culture developed in the ways that they have, why, out of all the uncountable possibilities the internet offers, we have Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Instagram, and not something else?
There are two ways to approach these questions: the first way would be to trace the history of the development of technologies–see what sorts of material/scientific advances happened when they did, and why (e.g., economic and regulatory reasons, etc.). That’s not what I’m interested in doing. My approach is not historical, but philosophical (duh): I want to know what kind of society would want something like “social media” as we know it. I want to see what set of background assumptions and ideas need to be present for what we now know as “social media” to make sense.
So, just to be clear: I’m not presenting a historical or factual argument as to how and why this happened. I’m trying to give a theory of the kind of society that would support such a development.
I think Jacques Ranciere’s account of neoliberalism (chapter 5 here)–which he calls “consensus” or “postdemocracy”–is a plausible account of the kind of society that would want both the technological infrastructure and the cultural habits that encourage us to broadcast our thoughts, our images, our “likes” and “favorites.”
For Ranciere, what is distinctive about neoliberalism is that it eliminates the need for (and thus ideal of) representation. The idea of representation is, if you think about it, pretty central to classical democratic liberalism: I do not directly participate in the day-to-day government of my society, but I vote for someone to represent my interests in governmental bodies. So, there’s a difference between “the people” and the people’s representation, between how things really are and how we say they are, between reality and appearance. The de facto/de jure distinction is another example of this gap between fact and its representation.
Traditionally, we’ve been able to make evident a gap between what the law says–e.g., “all men are created equal”–and how society actually works, how that law is executed. The law may say “all men are created equal,” but if we can provide evidence that both (a) a particular group of people are actually, in fact, included in the category “all men,” and (b) they are not, on the ground and in practice, treated with the equality that the law nominally entitles them, then we can show that there is an inconsistency between the law and its application, and make a case that this inconsistency must be remedied. Basically, it’s a claim that the de jure and de facto state of affairs don’t match up, and must be brought in line. This is how, for Ranciere, women’s suffrage, civil rights, most of the social justice movements of the past have worked. These appeals for justice rely on a dualist metaphysics, one that posits an inconsistency between “how things really are,” on one hand, and “how things appear” on the other.
Neoliberalism, according to Ranciere, collapses the de facto into the de jure–it eliminates the dualist metaphysics (the appearance/reality dualism) and replaces it with a monist metaphysics: how things appear is how they actually are. There is no gap between appearance and reality, no “interval between law and fact” (112), because what appears is a direct and comprehensive representation, or better, visualization, of the facts of the world.
This shift from representation to visualization (this way of putting it is mine, not Ranciere’s) follows from a shift in the technologies or methods of governance. Words, the conventional medium of law and of political debate, don’t directly correspond to what they mean: they’re signifiers that refer to and condense/misrepresent an infinitely more complex signified. Data, on the other hand, can present itself as identical to and coextensive with whatever phenomenon it expresses. Data is “the conjunction of science and the media” which understands itself as “exhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing the count of those parts in line with the image of the whole” (103). Data isn’t treated as a symbol or signifier of the facts, but as a measurement of the facts themselves.
What Ranciere means by data is public opinion polling (writing in 1995, he might be thinking about Bill Clinton’s reliance on public opinion polls). Such polls are a method of “scientific modeling and forecasting operating on an empirical population carved up exactly into its parts…the total distribution of the people into its parts and subparts” (103). Public opinion polls assign everyone to a demographic, and then measure the distribution of opinions across demographics. 18-24, 25-39, 40-65, 65+ — a this seems like a comprehensive, all-inclusive metric: it includes everyone of voting age, which in the US is 18. And even if this isn’t comprehensive and all-inclusive, all that needs to be done is to make more finely-grained categories: we can break age demographics down by gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, religion, education level, and on and on. Ever-advancing technology “is supposed to liberate the new community as a multiplicity of local rationalities and ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural, or aesthetic minorities” (104). Twitter, for example, supposedly gives voice and access to people who are otherwise closed out of corporate media. The law might be limited in its capacity and its application, but opinion is unlimited. [1]
Ranciere argues that this conjunction of science & the media that I’m calling “data” co-opts and neutralizes the ability of minorities to challenge their exclusion from and marginalization in the law. He calls this “state mimesis of the political practice of litigation. Such a mimesis transforms the traditional argument that gives place to the show of democracy, the internal gap in equality, into a problem that is a matter for expert knowledge” (109). What the law considers a problem of justice (unequal treatment before the rule of law), data considers a problem of knowledge–we just have to tweak the algorithm so that it works better. That’s how I interpret Ranciere’s claim that “identifying and dealing with the lack must then be substituted for the manifestation of wrong” (107)–it’s not that society is unequal, but that our algorithm isn’t functioning as well as it should.
The (supposed) advantage of “data” is that it allows us to think that we’ve solved all problems of justice, that we live in a post-racial, post-feminist, classless society, in a flat and perfectly meritocratic world. It looks like everyone is included, that everyone has a voice and that their voices count. From this perspective, the only injustices are making false claims about exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (e.g., calling out sexism gets interpreted as itself sexist).
As Jason Rines (@badhumanist) pointed out in class this week, while Ranciere’s talking about opinion polling, the “science + media” complex has changed a lot in the 20 years since Ranciere wrote this. Instead of opinion polls, we have social media and communicative capitalism. What is social media but the exhaustive, increasingly fine-grained presentation of everyone’s opinions, and opinions of others’ opinions (“likes,” “favorites,” “shares”)? On something like Twitter, it’s not just that, a Ranciere describes, “the count of their speech [is] identical to their linguistic performance” (102), but that linguistic performance is itself what is quantified. Social media is a tool for counting, quantifying, and tracking linguistic performance as such. It “reflect[s] the community’s identity with itself as the law of their acting” (112). This “law of their acting” would be like the algorithm that describes the pattern of behavior characteristic of all the subjects in X group. This law is identical with the performance because it (supposedly) describes and codifies performance. It’s not a representation of their speech, but the very empirical, factual patterns their speech exhibits.
Whereas classical contract theory says societies are legitimate because their members agree/consent to the rules of that society, “consensus” society argues that it is legitimate because its rules are merely formalizations of what people actually do already. Its rules are just the facts of everyday life expressed in data.
So, a social order that stakes its claim for legitimacy on data, and in which quantifiable behavior counts, more or less, as political participation and enfranchisement, such a social order will be deeply invested in developing more ways for people to quantify their behavior, their ‘opinion.’
I’m not trying to make any causal claims here–I’m not going so far as to say Ranciere tells us the causes for the development of social media. Rather, his theory of consensus or postdemocracy help us understand the kind of society that would support the developments in media technology that have given rise to what we now know as social media.
[1] The limited nature of the law, in contrast to the unlimited nature of opinion, is fundamental to JS Mill’s “On Liberty.” This text is one of the key philosophical accounts of liberalism. Its distinction between law and opinion, as well as its emphasis on civil rather than individual liberty, may make it more neo-liberal than traditionally liberal.
I want to thank my Theories of Neoliberalism class, especially Jason Rines (@badhumanist), Ashley Williams (@ash_bash23), Ryan Shullaw, and Lloyd Wymore, for the conversation and questions that resulted in this post. The class tumblr is available here.
This is a slightly expanded cross-post from Its Her Factory.
The Chainsmokers’ song “Selfie” is the new novelty song that everyone (or, almost everyone) loves to hate. In this Fact Magazine critics roundup, the song is called everything from “a low point…even for EDM,” to the one thing worse than the “arena-bound, taurine-fuelled, optimised-for-raging EDM” that the song nominally parodies. It seems like everyone hates it because they think it embodies what one might interpret as Tiqqun’s “Young Girl,” the ideal subject of neoliberal capitalism, human capital itself–or at least, the song gives voice to who we derisively imagine that ideal neoliberal subject to be: the vapid, selfie-obsessed young woman who is only concerned with amping up her value (her “likes” on Instagram) and her enjoyment (or her male/bro equivalent).
Is all the derision targeted at what the song’s about? Or do people dislike it because of how it sounds? Or both?
I want to leave aside, at least for a moment, what the song is about and focus on how it sounds, how it works as a piece of music. Maybe a better understanding of the music will give us a more nuanced grasp of “#Selfie”’s lyrical and visual content, and people’s reactions to that content.
The song is basically a combination of (a) a ripoff of the treble synth riff, cued up here, from LMFAO’s 2011 “Party Rock Anthem” and (b) the soar from Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” The LMFAO rip is first audible in the very beginning of the song, and the Soar (the soar is: (1) the Zeno’s-paradox style rhythmic intensification up to and past the limit of our ability to hear distinct rhythmic events + (2) the measure of instrumental silence with the “but first, let me take a selfie” vocal + (3) the “hit” or drop on the following downbeat) you hear starting here:
So, musically, the song regurgitates two, well, old megahits. “Party Rock Anthem” and “Gangnam Style” are not fresh or trendy–they’re worn out, too young to be retro but too old to be hot. Though the song’s soar would not have been out of place in, say 2012, most contemporary EDM pop uses a much more restrained, less exaggerated and crassly maximalist soar. (Think, for example, of the soar in Calvin Harris’s most recent single, “Summer.” Compared to his 2012 “We Found Love,” the soar in “Summer” sounds refined and demur.) Compared to its contemporaries on the pop and dance charts, “Selfie” sounds both backwards and vulgar (both excessive and common). But this is the point: it’s a parody song. It’s not designed to sound “good.” It’s presenting us a caricature of EDM at its supposed worst, much in the same way that “Spaceballs” parodies late 20th c space operas, or “Scream” parodies horror films. This raises the question: if you’re making a parody EDM track to skewer mainstream EDMC (EDM culture), why make that song about selfies? If the Chainsmokers were looking for some lyrical content to compliment their sonic caricature, why choose the so-called “selfie” as this compliment? Why is the selfie–or what the song presents as a selfie (which, like the musical content, is likely a caricature of ‘selfie’ practice)–the best content to compliment this sonic caricature?
I’ll get back to that question later. For now, I want to stay focused on the music. First, it’s interesting how the refrain “but first, let me take a selfie” serves in place of the scream or silence or other sonic shock that precedes the drop. For example, in a lot of brosteppy songs, the drop is immediately preceded by some sort of distorted, disruptive vocal–”bangarang” in Skrillex’s “Bangarang,” “tsunami” in DVBBS’s “Tusanmi,” you get the idea. I like to think of that vocal disruption as analogous to the “shock” in shock capitalism: in the same way that a tsunami wipes out civilization and prepares it for redevelopment, the sonically distorted “tsunami” interrupts the flow of the song and prepares listeners to experience the reintroduction of order (the ‘hit’ on the next downbeat) as even more intensely pleasurable. The idea is that this apparent disruption isn’t actually disruptive–the shock is not an end, but a necessary first step. Why, then, would a girl taking a selfie be so (apparently, but not actually) disruptive? Why does the girl selfie need to seem like a disruption? Who benefits from–where’s the profit or surplus value in–the perception that girl selfies are disruptive?
Perhaps the answer to these questions is this: the devaluation of girl-selfies as disruptive is what makes other kinds of human capital appear both more valuable and less disruptive/violent/appropriative/etc. In the same way that the song’s hook and soar are too crass and unsophisticated for anything but the dumbest and most mainstream of EDM listeners, are selfies just too crass and unsophisticated a means of human-capital building? I mean, anyone can take a selfie, but not everyone can, say, take an unpaid internship, get plastic surgery, lose weight, quit smoking, etc. Or, perhaps in the same way gendered devaluations of pop music give “classic” or “intelligent” music its (gendered) value, the devaluation of girl-selfie-capital gives more sophisticated kinds of human capital its worth. (As musicologist Susan Cook argues, “the ‘popular’ gives the ‘classical’ its worth; the ‘classical’ is worthwhile only if the ‘popular’ is worthless” (141).)
So, that’s the song. But the video is also very interesting. It’s basically a montage of fan selfies. That in itself isn’t particularly noteworthy. However, the fans’ participation in the video was an explicit and intentional marketing decision. As Liv Buli notes in her Forbes.com article, this participatory (what art historians and aestheticians would call “relational”) strategy
creates a personal connection between the video and the fan, ensuring that not only would there a built-in audience for the video, but that there would be the added imperative to share. “It is social engineering to an effect,” says Luckett. [one of the Chainsmokers]
The Chainsmokers and their managers wanted to make a hit record; and, given the way the music industry measures hits, the best way to make a hit record, apparently, is to make a viral video. And the best way to make a viral video is to build in fan participation. [1] The article notes that the duo also take this approach to their music: they encourage remixes and samples because that contributes to the, erm, virality or clout, I guess, of their original. Thing is, it’s a lot easier to take a selfie than it is to remix an entire pop song. So, it seems like the way to maximize fan participation is to find the media to which fans have the most mastery and access.
I’m obviously rather pleased that this seems to support my argument here that music is coincidental to contemporary music industries and mainstream consumption practices. But at this point I also have a number of other questions:
What’s the relationship between virality as an industry strategy (or a ‘mode of production’), on the one hand, and relational aesthetics or social practice, on the other? (Has anyone written on this?)
Is listening as an aesthetic practice or leisure activity getting disarticulated from other aspects of mainstream music fandom and the music industry? Maybe not. But regardless, what’s the role of listening in an aesthetic and an economy that de-centers the musical work and musical experience?
[1] Buli’s article begins by noting that “#Selfie” is the most viral of all viral music videos to date: “The EDM duo currently ranks as the most viral act on YouTube, both in terms of plays and new subscribers over the past 90 days. They are all over Soundcloud, trail 5 Seconds of Summer for most viral on Wikipedia in the past 90 days, and have the fifth largest percentage increase in US radio spins of all artists in the last month.” So there’s something measurably, perhaps even qualitatively different about the kind of virality it exhibits.
Earlier this week David wrote about science dads and their dadsplaining: “Science Guys ask us to question everything and everyone but them. Or, more precisely, they are but mere men (almost always men) delivering a message that they see as self-evident,” he writes. Science Guys often don’t have a lot of respect for philosophy, because they think, as Neil Degrasse Tyson (in)famously said in his interview with Nerdist, philosophy is too question-y and not ‘splainy enough. Philosophy “can really mess you up,” as Tyson said, because there’s “too much question-asking” and not enough, well, solutions or action, I guess. In Tyson’s view, philosophy messes you up because “you are distracted by your questions so that you cannot move forward” and be a “productive contributor” to society or knowledge. [1]
As it has been institutionalized in both the Western canon and the academy, philosophy is just another Dad dadsplaining. As many philosophers will argue, philosophy, unlike the other namby-pamby humanities disciplines, is a lot like science; we’re not stuck with our heads in “the text,” we really know things about the world! (I really like this takedown of that view of philosophy.) But in the same way science dads betray the practice of science, philosophical dadsplaining betrays the practice of philosophy. Read in a certain way, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates shows us that philosophy is the opposite of dads: it’s about corrupting the youth (which is what Socrates is charged of in the Apology) and getting distracted so you can’t move forward, or so you take the oblique path. [2]
In the Apology (here, apology means defense), Socrates defends himself against several accusations, which include corrupting the youth. How might Socrates corrupt the youth? Well, he asks a lot of questions. And he never really arrives at many firm answers. The early Platonic dialogues, which portray Socrates in conversation with one or more other men (or, in the case of the Meno, boys), never manage to find a sufficient, conclusive answer for the question(s) they investigate. For example, Euthyphro never really tells us what piety is, though we know some things it isn’t. It’s telling, perhaps, that Socrates employs just this form (called elenchus), in addressing the specific accusation that he corrupts the youth; he leads Meletus through a series of questions about “improving the youth.” Read in this way, Socrates corrupts the youth because he messes them up with too many questions and not enough answers.
Philosophy, as Socrates practices it, also prevents him from moving forward…literally. In Plato’s Symposuim, Socrates and Aristodemus (the narrator’s friend) are on their way to a party when “Socrates, becoming absorbed in his own thoughts by the way, fell behind him as they went; and when my friend began to wait for him he bade him go on ahead” (174d). Socrates stopped in his tracks so he could work through an idea that struck him as he and Aristodemus were walking to Agathon’s party. And he staid there until he was finished thinking. Practicing philosophy prevented Socrates from moving forward, from reaching his destination, from joining others in their sociality.
Philosophy can really mess you up and prevent you from being a “productive contributor” to society…and that’s what’s great about it. It makes you stop and think, which can prevent you from following the paths and/or scripts (of thinking, of behaving) that best serve, say, the neoliberal university, capitalism, white supremacy, and so on. I mean, who wants to contribute to those things? If those are the paths we’re supposed to follow forward, stalled and oblique trajectories seem like much better options.
Let me give one brief example of how getting “messed up” in questions that don’t move obviously forward is absolutely urgent and necessary. So, Tyson and his interviewers think philosophy messes us up because it devolves into a quibble about the definitions of words. Yeah, sure, some academic philosophy is like that. And most of the time that sort of philosophical work is very boring to non-specialists (and, uh, to specialists too…) But when we’re discussing, say, the use of the singular “they,” this isn’t just some quibble over language; it’s about a tool trans* and genderqueer people need to prevent violence of all sorts–linguistic, legal, psychological, and physical. Pronouns can be a matter of life and death, of violence and justice. (Jules Hamara gave a superb paper on this at the DePaul Philosophy Graduate Conference this past February.) So in debating whether and how “they,” a traditionally singular word, can be plural, we might be quibbling about words, but those words really, really matter.
Now, this quibble about words doesn’t necessarily move us forward in the ways that the academy wants–it’s not going to bring in huge grants or donations, for example. It might even be seen as a waste of resources–who needs such humanistic inquiry when STEM will save us because jobs! But this so-called waste or deviation from the profitable, ‘productive’ path forward, this might be what it means to corrupt the youth these days. Corrupting the youth might mean something like failing to produce profitable, exploitable workers/human capital. It might mean helping students develop other ways of knowing, as David advocates for at the end of his Science Dads piece.
In the end what I’m arguing is that philosophy can, at its best (which it often isn’t, but that’s another matter), mess us up and keep us from moving forward. That is, it can interrupt the instrumentalization of knowledge for violent institutions. It can, to use Sara Ahmed’s term, be a practice of “willfulness”–of standing in the way, of being a problem (as Du Bois would put it). Perhaps the only solutions to a society as messed up as ours will be found in apparently messed up ideas or paths that don’t seem to move directly forward. And philosophy might be just the thing to help mess us up and stop us in our tracks.
Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.
[1] I know Tyson has backed down from and qualified his statements in this interview. But I want to take the strongest, most overstated form of these claims and argue that yeah, philosophy is precisely those things, and that’s why it matters.
[2] Socrates and his dadsplainer student Plato certainly had their flaws. I’m not endorsing Socratic and/or Platonic thought as a whole. I’m only using these two moments in Plato’s description of Socrates as examples or ideals of what philosophy can be, but actually often isn’t, especially in Plato.
Music is great for working out, sure. It seems that most people think it’s the BPM that matters–the tempo is what guides our bodies as they plod along on the treadmill or elliptical or the pavement, or as we spin, Zumba, or cardio-funk ourselves away in class. For example, there are a LOT of Beats Music playlists designed specifically for working out, all organized by BPM. There’s an album titled “Trance Workout Energy Boost 132-140bpm for Running”, or “The Gym Beats vol. 4 128bpm”. The official Beats Dance channel has curated a “Running at 180 BPM” playlist. Then, there’s this article from April’s The Wire, ostensibly about “listening suggestions for the more discerning gym bunny.” As Stewart Home writes,
sports science is having an impact on how some people use music in the gym. According to academic researcher Costas Karageorghis, there is a “sweet spot for music in the exercise context associated with a tempo range of 120–140 bpm.” There are even people listening to what they think will improve their workout rather than what they actually like, although you’d think that what you like would seem to be one of the criteria for picking tunes that will maximise your performance.
According to Home, there is a certain kind of gym goer who listens to music functionally (as a tool to achieve a specific outcome) rather than aesthetically (what one likes, pleasure in listening). As Home continues,
For many in the class the music is purely functional…The music in body conditioning and boxercise classes is simply there to provide a beat as we workout. We’re focused on the exercise not the music.
Now, I absolutely do not endorse or agree with his low opinion of the music that gets played in gyms, most of which is EDM and EDM-y pop; I actually like a lot of this music (that is, I aesthetically appreciate it even when I’m not working out). I am really fascinated by this separation between function and aesthetics. I shouldn’t be surprised by this separation, especially as a fan of industrial music (and someone who runs to lots of industrial at the gym, no less); the first so-called ‘industrial’ music was music designed to keep factory workers calm and focused on their work, to increase their productivity, and so on. Many people also like better to take a supplement during the workout. The workout benefits of glycerol are great and super effective. Glycerol supplement is extremely effective in enhancing energy within the body and building endurance. Glycerol is additionally very helpful in weight loss because it helps tons in reducing and burning the additional fat accumulated round the body. The supplements are available all round the market and aren’t much expensive. the merchandise is employed by athletes and other sportspeople round the world. When consumed during a combination of water it increases the hydration inside the cells within the body, which allows tissues to remain hydrated throughout an extended endurance workout program. But before I get into this (non)relationship between function and aesthetics, I want to think a bit more carefully about what, exactly, this function is. For these people who prioritize function over taste in workout music, what’s the outcome that BPM is supposed to deliver? BMP is, in these cases, a tool for what?
BPM is supposed to keep you moving at a specific pace, a specific intensity of activity. It will make sure you finish your distance in the right amount of time, that you run fast enough, that you burn enough calories, that your heartrate hits the right level. Musical BPM monitors athletic performance with quantified inputs rather than (just) quantified outputs (as with FitBit). It’s a tool to make sure you achieve the quantified outputs you want (calories, mets, distance, pace, heartrate in range–all the equipment at my gym tracks all these). Plug and chug, as it were, and voila. Musical BPM is a self-control device, a formula to produce a performance we self-trackers can be proud of.
Ok, so, that’s the function. But what about the separation of function from aesthetics? I’m interested in the relationship between a song’s function as a workout aid and a song’s aesthetics because for me, well, the two are inseparable. It’s not just the BPM but also the aesthetics that motivate me to run faster, harder, longer. It’s not enough for a song to be fast–it has to have a climax, a big hit, a soar and/or a drop, a break. That climax is a build-up of musical “energy,” and it’s that energy that motivates me. The buildup of musical pleasure and its release in the hit/drop/break is what pushes me onward in my run. A song’s aesthetics are precisely what is functional, at least to me in my workout.
…And probably in other people’s workouts, too. For example, many of the tracks on the various Beats “Working Out to EDM” have huge soars and drops. But also, there’s this Ludacris video that depicts people working out:
..
The song has two huge soars (~1:20 and 2:35), and we see images of people working out only after the first soar has peaked (that’s when we see a woman running outside on a trail, someone surfing, and another person rock climbing). Placing the workout scenes in the most aesthetically significant parts of the song (the climaxes, or in the buildup to them, as with the basketball scene) suggests that there’s a general sense of correlation between physical performance and aesthetics–the scenes of intense exercise are matched to the most aesthetically intense moments in the song. Are there other relatively contemporary videos that depict exercise or fitness in a way that connects them to the song’s climax and/or compositional development?
When it comes to workout music, if aesthetics are still functional, why do we tell ourselves that aesthetics and functions are separate? And why do we reduce function purely to BPM? Sure, tempo can be an aesthetic feature of a song, but why do so many people treat tempo as the only relevant feature of workout music?
I’m sure the answer to these questions lies somewhere in the relationship among (a) the methods of exercise science, which prioritize straightforwardly quantifiable things like BPM (you can quantify other features of a song, even aesthetics, but not so straightforwardly; you need a musicologist or music theorist to do that translation); (b) the political economy of contemporary media; and (c.) structures of subjectivity that are focused on quantifiability and measurable success (e.g., quantified self).
Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.
About Cyborgology
We live in a cyborg society. Technology has infiltrated the most fundamental aspects of our lives: social organization, the body, even our self-concepts. This blog chronicles our new, augmented reality.
