I find Pharrell’s massive hit “Happy” really, really irritating. And, for that reason, I love it. In the same way that The Sex Pistols were Malcolm McLaren’s massive joke on us, this song is, I think, Pharrell’s attempt to pull a fast one on the economy of viral “upworthiness”–an economy that, as David has shown, is really racist.

So, before I get into “Happy,” let me first explain what I mean by the “viral economy of upworthiness.” To be really simplistic, what I mean by the term is this: the rhizomatic, exponential spread of positive affect (“upworthiness”) across social media, which uses fan labor (ie., the labor of sharing and spreading) to generate profits for media corporations (both the social media corporations, like YouTube, and the record companies, who profit from each play/click.) In a way, the viral economy of upworthiness is a lot like finance capital–instead of algorithmically intensifying money, this economy algorithmically intensifies positive feelings and/or affects. For example, as David argues, Upworthy videos “zoom in on heroic moments that are emotionally powerful”; Upworthy banks on the viral spread of these good feelings. The viral economy of upworthiness spreads positive affect like a disease, because the business model only works when happiness spreads like cancer. Social media business models require users to share things (that’s how we make ‘connections’ that generate the oh-so-valuable “data” sold to third parties), and apparently positive affects like happiness are more shareable than negative ones (there’s still no “dislike” button on Facebook, right?). What David’s article brilliantly points out is that this organization of the means of production is also a racialized and imperialist one, one in which non-white, non-Western people do the groundwork for this economy of viral upworthiness. Capitalism says there can be no majority for the pity (Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid--who knew KMFDM basically predicted social media capitalism?), so to speak, so it outsources the work of transforming tragedy or bad feeling into happiness or upworthiness onto the same groups of people who have historically done the white/Western world’s un/undercompensated dirty work.

OK, cheeky music jokes aside, let’s talk about “Happy.”

For a number of reasons, the song sounds manic and anxious. First, there’s the tempo. It’s about 160 BPM. For some reference, Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” (whose first line is “When I get high, get high on speed”) clocks in at 180 BPM, Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a proper dance banger, is 128 BPM, Kesha & Pitbull’s “Timber” is 130 BPM, as is Fatboy Slim’s “Eat Sleep Rave Repeat.” So, “Happy” is a full 30 BPM faster than most contemporary EDM-pop songs, songs designed for crowds of twentysomethings hopped up on MDMA. In this light, “Happy” seems a bit like a super-sized dose of sonic Adderall, a properly legal and bourgeois dose of speed that helps propel us through our hyperemployed days and perform the upworthy affective labor so many of our jobs demand. We’d need Adderall to make it all the way through the song’s marathon 24-hour video. Perhaps this video is commenting on hyperempolyment and real subsumption, capitalism’s increasing ability to realize its dream of the 24-hour work day? (And seriously, don’t those drawn out “eeeeeee”s in the chorus suggest the clenched-jaws of a speed freak?)

Another reason this song sounds manic and anxious is because, as Kariann Goldschmitt (@kgoldschmitt) pointed out in a conversation we had on Twitter, the song never releases any tension. The song is basically one long plateau with two breaks that build a little bit of tension without releasing it in a hit or a climax (like the soar in “We Found Love,” or the drop in something like “Tsunami” or “Bangarang”). The break from 1:49-2:13 builds sonic tension: the clapping intensifies the rhythmic texture, and the addition of the choir and the resonance of the church sanctuary intensifies the timbre, but the downbeat of the new verse doesn’t release that tension. There’s a condensed version of that intensification at 3:02-3:13, and yet again we are denied a proper climax point. Being “Happy” seems like a lot of affective labor with no payoff–the surplus value of our happiness labor goes to somebody else.

And I think that’s what Pharrell is trying to point out. As I read his performance, he’s slyly critiquing the affective labor “upworthy” white supremacist pop culture requires of black performers.

First, what role to black culture workers play in white supremacist upworthiness? As I have argued before, black culture workers are often like sous-chefs who prep the affective/emotional mise en place for “our” performance of upworthiness (they do the work of “organizing” whites’ ignorance of ongoing racism). That is, they’re supposed to perform positive affects and emotions–like heroic overcoming, as in the example David discusses in his post–that audiences then transform into a higher-order upworthiness. “We” perceive “our” appreciation of “their” performance as evidence of “our” commitment to multiculturalism. However, if black people were manifestly unhappy, that would shatter the myth of post-racial multiculturalism. So, post-racial white supremacy demands blacks play happy. [1]. And that’s just what Pharrell does. He plays happy.(Perhaps this is one reason “Happy” was the song that broke the recent 14-week absence of lead black artists from the top of the Billboard Hot 100? It provided precisely the kind of surplus value people expect from black artists?)

But, there are (at least) two ways that his performance works against the literal interpretation of it as the expression of happiness. First, his vocal performance adopts some strategies used by Billie Holiday to transform banal, racist and sexist Tin Pan Alley rejects into nuanced art songs. Angela Davis discusses Holiday’s “working with and against the platitudinous content” of pop songs (Blues Legacies & Black Feminism, 163) at length. Here, I want to focus on one specific type of vocal embellishment that Holiday uses all the time, and that Pharrell also uses throughout “Happy”: they both mimic, in their vocal melodies, the pitch shifts that people use in spoken language to indicate sarcasm. Holiday does it here in “When a Woman Loves a Man,” which, when taken literally, is a really sexist song. Listen to how she dips down and back up in the first verse (e.g., “just another ma-an,” “she’ll just string al-ong”):

Sure, these are super sexist lyrics. But by mimicking the pitch patterns that Americans use when being sarcastic, Holiday ironizes these lyrics. She’s not endorsing them, she’s making fun of them. This is reinforced by the song’s last line, which doesn’t go down in pitch, but up. In spoken language, that indicates a question: “That’s how it goes, when a woman loves a man?” By phrasing this as a question rather than a declamation, Holiday sarcastically critiques the song’s sexism. Pharrell echoes Holiday’s vocal sarcasm in “Happy”’s verses–for example, listen to how he moves the pitch around on “balloon” at 0:26 in the first verse. There’s also “news” in the beginning of the second verse. The choruses use another type of sarcasm: deadpan. The choruses are sung almost entirely on the same pitch. This mimics the flat deadpan one uses to indicate that you don’t fully believe what you’re saying or reiterating, often because you’re expected/forced to say it.

So, I think there’s a good bit of musical evidence that Pharrell is critiquing the white supremacist expectation that he perform upworthiness for white audiences. But his visual performance also gives us some evidence that he’s pulling a fast one on us: his hat.

He wears the hat throughout the video, but it’s central to his overall ‘brand’ at the moment. It even has its own Twitter account. So, this hat is important.

The hat is a vintage Vivienne Westwood hat. As Alison Davis notes over at The Cut, this is the same style hat that Malcolm McLaren wore in his hip hop video, “Buffalo Gals.”

This is the same Malcolm McLaren who formed and managed The Sex Pistols–mainly as a huge art prank. McLaren was the master of “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle”. The “swindle” here is that the joke is on us–the Pistols are basically a prank, a massive troll designed to rile up the general public. The Pistols aren’t authentic working-class rebellion–they’re manufactured for some too-clever art-school condescension at bourgeois moralism.

And that’s precisely what “Happy” is–it’s trolling bourgeois upworthiness. That’s what the hat is supposed to tell us: in the same way that McLaren was trolling Thatcherites, Pharrell is trolling Obama/upworthy liberals.

Most (white) people seem to take the song literally. They don’t get the sarcasm, or the troll. Perhaps the question this song begs most is: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

[1]This accords with what Sara Ahmed says in her famous “Feminist Killjoys” essay: “Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, “it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation.” To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye “anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous”.”

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

This will also be my last post for a few weeks–I’m traveling three weeks in a row for speaking gigs: 4/17 at Stony Brook, 4/23 at Colby College, and May 2-5 at Penn State. If you’re near any of those places, I’d love it if you came to my talks! Hit me up on twitter for details.

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Beats Music is the first streaming service that may make me cease regular use of my full-to-the-brim 80 gig iPod classic. I use that dinosaur because I am really picky about my music–by which I mean, I know exactly what I want to listen to, and I want to have easy access when and wherever I may be in the mood to listen to, well, anything from Nicki Minaj to Nitzer Ebb, which are right next to one another in my iPod “Artists” list. I love crass, stupid pop music (“Timber,” anyone?), so it’s not that I’m a snob who wants to have what I think are my elite tastes reaffirmed–I just want to have reliable access to what I do actually like without having to wade through crap I don’t.

So, one thing that I like about Beats is the back catalog. For example, one song I really like to run to is Belgian Techno act LA Style’s 1991 “James Brown Is Dead”–it was hard to access on Spotify (at least back when I tried it out), but really easy to find on Beats.

But the thing that stands out, at least to me, about Beats are the playlists. They are really well-curated and most are even what I would call thoughtful–there was careful consideration not only of which songs to include, but their order and arrangement.

Beats playlists are made by human experts. Unlike a lot of other streaming services, Beats doesn’t just rely on statistical algorithms trained by data. It also relies on people who have already spent a decade or more studying and working in music.. Speaking in the April 2014 issue of Details, Beats CEO Ian Rogers explains this approach: “The algorithm works best when it has human input, and our premise is that you’ve got to start with really expert human input.” Though the Details profile tries a bit too hard to make this into a digital dualism (algorithms vs “somebody there on the other end”), I think this is actually a “mixed reality” approach to curation. Instead of training algorithms, algorithms run on input provided by already highly trained experts. So, for example, somebody–an ethnomusicologist, say–makes a playlist that I listen to a lot because it’s superb (shoutout to whoever compiled the “Best of Dance-Punk,” “Madchester Indie Dance” and “Best of Industrial Rock” lists!); the algorithms then recommend to me new playlists (“Daft Punk Is Playing At My House,” “Intro to Ministry”) based on my listening data. And so far this has produced a consistently good to great listening experience for me.

Now, this raises all sorts of questions about, say, the distinction between expert and menial labor (people doing the ‘expert’ labor, algorithms doing the menial crunching), about the quantifiability of everything that goes into an ethnomusicologists’s training (knowing not just about how music sounds, but music scenes and cultures, about how artists and songs influence subsequent artists and songs, etc.), and even about the quantifiability of taste. We think we can quantify taste–this is what all those recommendation algorithms do. But those algorithms never really work as well as anybody (users or designers) want or hope.

The other innovative thing that the Details profile mentions is feature called “The Sentence”:

you just enter your setting, mood, company, and genre of choice. (Example: “I’m on a rooftop and feel like drifting off to sleep with my bff to pop” delivers J. Cole’s “Land of the Snakes”; choose seminal indie and you hear Belle and Sebastian’s “She’s Losing It.”) “Our goal was to bring the joy of discovery and the joy of having just the right song for the right moment,” says Reznor, who likens the process to scoring scenes in a film.

“The Sentence” uses variables of “setting, mood, company, and genre” to taylor your sonic experience to your ambience. It churns out music that reflects how you feel at any given time–at least, that’s how it should work. I think “The Sentence” is really theoretically or philosophically interesting because it treats music and sound primarily as a matter of feeling, ambience, and ecosystem. “The Sentence” provides the sound so that you can finely-tune your affective experience (how you feel) of any environment. I still need to think more thoroughly and carefully about this “Sentence” feature.

To be honest, “The Sentence” never gets it right for me as a listener. Maybe the options they provide aren’t right for me; maybe I just haven’t figured out how to game the options to produce the outcomes I would like. Or maybe I just don’t think about music in terms of feelings and affect in the first place and would prefer a different sort of interface (which I’m sure is part of my dissatisfaction, actually).

Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.

This week in my grad seminar, we discussed new materialism, technology, and embodiment via Elvia Wilk’s Cluster Mag article on “How the feminist internet utopia failed, and we ended up with speculative realism,” and Julian Gill-Peterson’s blog post “We Are Not Cyborg Subjects, We Are Artisans.” Wilk’s article is about, in part, the way that posthumanism, as a concept and an area of academic study, shifted from 90s cyberfeminism to postmillennial new materialism/speculative realism. It’s also a feminist analysis of the expectation that our online selves accurately and truthfully represent our “real” fleshy bodies (as are manifest, for example, in the nymwars). Peterson’s post is about transgender embodiment; it uses a new materialist framework to argue that technology is not something mixed in with an already self-sufficient body (e.g., a cyborg), but a co-requisite of embodiment from the beginning. As Peterson argues, “all bodies are formed through technogenesis and the active participation of the body’s materiality in its continual becoming, its continual modification.” Things like games, toys, interaction with caregivers–all these things draw out and shape its bodies potentialities into a typically “human” body, one that, for example, knows how to use its opposable thumb, and has hand-eye coordination. Peterson’s point is that trans* embodiment isn’t more or less technologically mediated/assisted than regular embodiment–it’s just different technologies with a vastly different politics. The world has been materially, technologically, socially, epistemically, and politically organized to make bodies cis-gendered, so trans* embodiment requires working against the grain or bending the circuits of normative technogenesis.

One of these normative circuits is the demand for what Wilk calls the “1:1 self-to-body ratio.” [1]  As we discussed it in class, the “1:1 self-to-body ratio” is the idea that the identity you claim, your “self,” must legibly correspond to the identity others perceive on or attribute to your body. If I say I’m a woman, then my body must be visible or legible to others as, if not fully cis-female, then feminine enough not to raise suspicion that I may be misrepresenting myself. This 1:1 self-to-body ratio is one of the norms that makes so-called “catfishing” a problem. It is generally considered deceptive, if not fraudulent, to present your “self” (the person people interact with online) as having a different kind of body than you “really” do.

The 1:1 self-to-body ratio is where Wilk’s discussion of internet norms overlaps with trans* theory. Hegemonic understandings of trans* identity and embodiment are grounded in a similar 1:1 self-to-body ratio, which is often referred to in trans* studies as the “wrong body narrative.” As Janet Mock explains,

To me, “trapped in the wrong body” is a blanket statement that makes trans* people’s varying journeys and narratives palatable to the masses. It’s helped cis masses understand our plight – to a certain extent. It’s basically a soundbite of struggle, “I was a girl (boy) trapped in a boy’s (girl’s) body,” which aims to humanize trans* folks, who are often seen as alien, as freaks, as less-than-human and other.

You’re in the “wrong” body if your body doesn’t perceptibly match up to your felt sense of self. The wrong body narrative translates, via the 1:1 ratio, trans* identity and embodiment to normal/normative understandings of human subjectivity and embodiment.

So there’s this overlap between the 1:1 ratio in internet usage, and the 1:1 ratio in gender identity (cis/trans). I need to think more about this, but it seems to me that it’s not entirely the same 1:1 ratio in each case, but variations on the same theme. But maybe it is more homogeneous. I dunno. This overlap, though, might be a helpful way to situate work like Micha Cardenas’s stuff on “transreal” aesthetics and politics…which I really need to go back and look at more carefully. And that’s pretty much where I am on this/where we left things in class. If anyone has any further thoughts, or recommended reading on this issue, I’d love to hear them.

[1] The 1:1 ratio wasn’t always an internet norm. As Wilk notes, a lot of 90s cyberfeminism theorized the internet as a place where one’s “self” did not need to correspond to one’s “body.” But then, as Wilk implies, “protecting women” from things like sexual abuse, exploitation, and bullying became an excuse to demand real-name technologies and impose the 1:1 ratio on online interactions. Sounds like another instance in which hegemony/white supremacist patriarchal capitalism uses “protecting women” as an excuse to actually further exploit white women and POC.

Robin is on twitter as @doctaj. Her avi pic may or may not perfectly correspond to her present physical appearance.

Over at the CUNY Digital Labor Working Group Blog, I’ve been participating in a symposium on Angela Mitropoulos’s book Contract and Contagion. I think there are a lot of conversations and ideas that will be of interest to Cyborgology readers, so I want to highlight a few of these and encourage you to visit the DLWG blog and participate in the conversation yourself.

Anne Boyer discusses the politics of how we arrange ourselves:

Indeed, “how to arrange” ourselves and our infrastructure is the question forced back at us at every turn by this minute of history: it is as much a question posed by the blockade or the riot as it is the occupation, it is as much a question posed by the struggle in the home or for a home as it is in the struggle in the workplace and the streets.  It is there when we are sick and there is no one to care for us or our people are sick and we are not there to care for them or when we have no people at all; it is there in the ports and shipping hubs; it is there in our digitized labors and the industrial and reproductive labors that support them; it is there in the leveler of an unstable climate that increasingly turns even what we might think of the polis into an urgent site of necessary care and renders the oikos as shelter for no one.

To be a bit reductive, Boyer is arguing that politics (either reactionary or revolutionary) isn’t so much in what we do as it is in the institutions or arrangements in and through which we work. A “leaky” arrangement, to use Boyer’s term, is one that allows resources (time, energy, attention, material support) to be siphoned or diverted from the channels that reproduce and maintain current arrangements. Perhaps leaky arrangements bend circuits (of capital, of care, of time, of money, of social reproduction) so they create what Atari Teenage Riot has called “riot sounds”? I ask this last question both because my contribution to the forum is about sound, but also because I think ATR’s concept of “riot” is different than the traditional, political concept of riot and more like the “leaky” riot that Boyer discusses. You can read more about how I understand ATR’s notion of “riot sounds” here. This sort of circuit bending echoes what Constantina Zavitsanos calls “looking at a thing side-eyed or periscopically”: how do we bend the frequencies so they do different things, emphasize different angles, shift figure/ground relationships? I need to think more about this relationship between leaky rearrangements and riot sounds.

But, for Cyborgology readers, Boyer’s piece opens up questions such as: How are algorithms ways of arranging ourselves? Patricia Clough also opens up this question in her post, where she argues “they are real objects, spatiotemporal data structures.” How might we make algorithms “leaky,” especially because algorithms can adapt to compensate for leaks? Or, as Clough also suggests, algorithms are already “leaky,” but that leakiness is obscured in various ways.[1]  Basically (and I may be oversimplifying here), algorithms can appear to reduce everything neatly to quantifiable terms because the terrain in, on, and through which they operate is already smoothed out in very particular ways, so that some messy reductions seem neat and clean instead. For example, patriarchy and white supremacy might make an inadequate quantification seem adequate–standardized test scores can pass as adequate measurements of scholastic aptitude or teacher performance because white supremacy and classism covers over the racialized socioeconomic conditions that affect student performance. So the leaks are there. How do we bend the algorithms or the circuits of social reproduction so that the leaks, well, leak in ways that water our roots? How do we make riot sounds of our own, sounds that are immoderate in ways that make the lives of us “women and slaves” more survivable?

Aren Aizura talks about

little data. For instance, parental surveillance: the time of the preteen fighting to have the “independence” of an iPhone is long gone. These days parents totally want their kids wired up. Give your kid an iPhone and you can sync her messages to download into your phone: incoherent emojis, texts from boyfriend/girlfriend and all. Want to know where your daughter is? Just bring up the app and you can see her GPS signal pulsing on the map, still or moving. This is not 1984, you understand. It’s just parents keeping track.

Little data, then, takes the tools of big data and applies them not to populations (which is what big data does), but to individuals–your kid, for example, or even yourself (e.g., the Quantified Self movement, which Aizura discusses). Aizura uses little data to highlight the ways that contemporary contracts (as practices, as institutions) maintain the same old inequalities with fancier, newer, more efficient tools and methods. For example, little data updates a longstanding tradition of devaluing so-called women’s work when it is performed by women in the home, but valuing it when it is appropriated by men and performed in a publicly visible forum (think about the different status of home cooks, who are generally women, and chefs, who are l

argely men). Aizura’s discussion of the role of the QS phenomenon in the ongoing devaluation of feminized care labor resonates with my earlier post on feminization and hyperemployment. Aizura’s post suggests that quantifiability does the work of gendered (de)valuation of care work: “Nurses in the global north are trained precisely to perform impersonal data collection; by contrast, South East Asian health tourism markets depend on South East Asian care workers being understood to “care more” about patients, elderly people, children, and to expect less remuneration.” Care that can be profitably quantified is “masculinized” (i.e., incorporated into the wage-labor economy), whereas unprofitably quantifiable or just unquantifiable care is “feminized” (i.e., excluded from the ‘real’ economy).

I wonder if affect is how we perceive and pay attention to non-quantified care, which Aizura suggests is also “a kind of attention.” If affect is an easy way to access non-quantified care, it seems to me, at least, that it’s also an easy way to render this non-quantified care quantifiable. For example, beats music, which I think is fabulous as a music streaming platform, will craft a radio station for you based on how you feel. Called “The Sentence,” this feature asks you to fill in the variables in the following sentence: “I’m X feeling like Y with Z to ABC.” This is just one easy example of how we’re turning affect into data. And I don’t think the answer is to find affects that aren’t quantifiable, but to think about ways of making data and quantification itself “leaky,” to use Boyer’s term. How would you use this beats interface to make “riot sounds” in its algorithms?

[1] Clough writes: “Quantities rather are conditioned by their own indeterminacies since algorithmic architectures are inseparable from incomputable data or incompressible information—that information or liveliness between zeros and ones.”

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

This post is really a series of questions that arise when I tried to think about my earlier post on the production of WOC/black feminists as “toxic” in light of Jodi Dean’s new post “What comes after real subsumption?” I’m hoping maybe that we can think through these questions together.

First, though, let me summarize what I take to be Dean’s main argument. “Real subsumption” is the idea, in Marxist philosophy, that neoliberal capitalism has taken areas previously outside the formal economy–like women’s unwaged work in the home, or leisure time–and folded them into the official means of production (that is, they are explicit sources of profit and directly produce surplus value for others). Dean’s main interest is in the subsumption of speech, especially political speech, into the means of production:

Communicative capitalism encloses communication in capitalist networks. Political speech (discussion, opinion) is captured and made to serve capitalist ends (whether as content, traceable data, generator of the one, dispersed multiplicity).

So, for example, social media takes our (“free”) speech and (“free”) assembly and turns them into sources of revenue for large corporations.

Though it is possible to imagine real subsumption as an inescapable, totalizing force that engulfs everything with no remainder, turning even its waste into a resource, Dean wonders if it leaves a “really” un-subsumable byproduct (that is, a byproduct that could be subsumed only with a method different than the one offered by “real” subsumption).

For now, I’ll call this phase after real subsumption “absolute subsumption.” Capital goes through itself and turns into an execrable remainder, the non-capitalizable, that which is completely without use or value. It can’t be exchanged. In fact, it stains, corrupts, or damages whatever it touches — like nuclear waste. It is utterly bereft of potentiality. Rather than being completely after real subsumption, absolute subsumption emerges within it over time…These cycles have a limit point, a point where what’s been destroyed creates such waste that it’s no longer worth trying to do anything with it. Capital would just rather leave — abandoned buildings, towns, cities, regions, continents.

So the process of real subsumption actually does produce a toxic byproduct. It is toxic because the cost of flipping it is greater than any returns that could be made on its sale. In other words further recycling/subsumption would be a drain on profits.

Crucially Dean notes that though we cannot capitalize on the waste itself, we can capitalize on the images of toxic waste:

I think that this non-capitalizable remainder appears to us in images, the frequently circulating images of abandoned buildings, ecological devastation. The image is recuperated for exchange, while the real remains. Disaster porn hints at this real even as it mobilizes state and capital in dispossession projects.

Representations of toxic waste can be filtered back into the processes of communicative capitalism (e.g., in disaster porn, or in a million thinkpieces on “toxic” feminists and “vampires’ castles”), but the representatives of toxicity, the abandoned material itself, that stays unreconstructed. This might explain how white feminists can profit from their discussions of black feminists toxicity: the image of black feminist “toxicity” is disconnected from black feminists as embodied subjects and as people. Toxic blackness can be profitable for neoliberal feminism precisely because it is only an “image”; “absolute subsumption” allows white supremacist patriarchy to profit from black women’s toxicity while simultaneously abandoning black women.

One final point Dean makes is that this toxicity may be a feature of the social structure of social media. The relationships and networks we build both enable us and trap us (and in this way sound much like the mirror in Lacan’s mirror stage, which is both enabling and disabling):

Communicative capitalism involves voluntary cooperation — we build the networks that enclose us (no one forces us to use Facebook, Twitter, etc). This suggests a limit point to voluntary cooperation, the point where it becomes its opposite, a trap: when we all communicate, we get trapped in our communication. Communication becomes excessive, and this very excess makes it execrable.

I may be misunderstanding something here, but it seems that Dean is arguing that the point of diminishing returns–the point at which voluntary cooperation becomes a trap, the point at which recycling consumes more than it produces–is what separates out excrement from useable fuel. Deal also seems to be arguing that this type of waste-production is tied to the specific architecture of social media–the kinds of relationships it enables produce a very specific kind of waste/excrement.

So at this point I don’t really have any answers, just questions. Maybe we can think through them together? Here they are:

1. Is my read of toxicity as blackness in the penultimate paragraph right? Or not? Or partially?

2. What about human capital that’s “such a waste that it’s no longer worth trying to do anything with it”? How are people produced as “the non-capitalizable remainder that lacks potential”? Is this remainder not the proletariat, but blackness?

3. In the last paragraph, I suggest, via Dean, that the platforms and business models of specific social media projects produce “toxicity” in very particular ways. What are these ways? What are these toxins? Do different platforms produce different forms of toxicity? Different people as toxic?

4. How is the model of waste production that Dean discusses similar to or different from something like a Kristevan concept of abjection or Butler’s idea of “constitutive exclusion”?

As Jenny’s post last week discussed, Facebook lets us identify our gender in very specific ways. But this blog post suggests that Facebook may also be a medium for performing gender. The post’s title suggests that “suspension” from Facebook is a “status symbol”–but I wonder if it’s not a gendered, nationalist/racialized status symbol, a symbol of a specific type of Indian masculinity?

Shriram Venkatraman writes:

one of my informants from this group, casually stated that he was banned from Facebook, meaning that his account was suspended for a couple of days. This was pretty strange and when further probed, he stated that he was thrown out because he had sent Friends request to strangers (read “foreign women”, specifically Caucasians) and Facebook had his account suspended as he seemed to be spamming Friend Requests to people he just didn’t know and who in no way shared any mutual friends with him. This was not the first time this happened to him. In fact, the first time Facebook had his account temporarily suspended he didn’t even know why his account was banned. But, he seemed to understand from the trend of account suspensions, that whenever he sent out numerous friends request to people (women) he didn’t know, his account was automatically suspended, or at least this was what he attributed his temporary account suspension to.

So, Facebook is set to suspend the accounts of non-white and/or non-Western men when they try to friend too many women–especially, it seems, white women. Is this another manifestation of social media’s tendency, which I talked about last week, to treat non-white users as threats to white women? I mean, when I read the post, it immediately struck me as another instance of the sort of racist sexism that uses the supposed vulnerability of white women to rape by men of color as an excuse to overpolice and oppress men of color. Lynching is another example; Birth of a Nation is another.

These men respond to Facebook’s suspension policy in a very interesting manner. They turned it into “a game they played; the more number of times their account was temporarily suspended and the number of days their account got suspended with the story of why their account was suspended earned them brownie points within the group.” Are those brownie points a kind of gender status, points for being a rebel? As Venkatraman argues, “the yardstick for heroism had shifted from the number of friends they made to the number of times they rebelled and were suspended for trying to make (read “spam”) friends.”

From this perspective, the suspension game sounds like a way for these men to turn racist policies into something that’s pleasurable rather than damaging. While it may shift the racial politics a bit, it still instrumentalizes women, using them as means to gain alternative status points. Women are just pawns in this game. Which means, in my view, that politically this game is a wash: it uses patriarchy to ameliorate racism.

Concepts like “the male gaze” and “controlling images” are Gender Studies 101 material: they’re the basic terms in which many feminists understand the media’s oppression of white women (in the case of the male gaze) and black women (in the case of controlling images). The gaze and controlling images are how white supremacist patriarchy subject women to its control.

But I think contemporary social media and big-data political economies are using different devices to control women, especially black women. Social media and big data facilitate a specific form of sexist racism, one that controls women through racialized discourses of toxicity and unhealthy behavior patterns. Instead of turning women into objects and/or erasing their agency, social media and big data let non-white women do and say whatever they want, because their so-called “aggressive bullying” produces the damage against which white women demonstrate their resilience. A similar claim has been (in)famously leveled against “feminism,” especially “intersectional feminism”: it vampirically drains the lifeblood of the progressive, radical left.

What’s specific to the construction of WOC, particularly black women, as “toxic”? Or feminism itself (often represented by ‘intersectional’/WOC feminism) as ‘vampiric’? What about social media, and perhaps even to Twitter, makes the unruliness/threat posed by WOC to white women/white feminist culture industry function in a very particular way, i.e., as toxicity and vampirism? How is the construction of women on social media as toxic/vampiric related to economies of viral upworthiness?

****

Resilience: So, everything I’m going to say below presumes familiarity with my concept of resilience discourse. It’s one of the main themes in my forthcoming book, but for a tl;dr, check here and here. From the first link:

“Resilience” means recovery that is profitable for hegemonic institutions, like capitalism and white supremacy. Individuals and groups can recover, survive, cope, and flourish in ways that don’t (adequately) support hegemony–but those don’t count as “resilience.” Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction.

One economy–the literal, capitalist economy, and the more abstract economies of multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy, of aesthetics, of ethics, and so on–is premised on creative destruction (to use Harvey’s term). Developers redevelop areas that don’t maximally contribute to the interests of the capitalist elite, just as artists remix, in retromaniacal/xenomanical/just plain appropriative ways, the sounds of “other” times, places, people. As I’ve been writing about a lot, resilience discourse and therapeutic culture generally is also a form of creative destruction: what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. The eternal return is the means of production.

The eternal return is also about affirming potentially toxic (think about Nietzsche’s own language, his metaphors of illness, swamps, indigestion, priestly poison, bad conscience, ressentiment, bad air) states and affects. Turn a “no” into a “yes.”

***

First I want to look at the way various groups of feminists are constructed as toxic or vampiric. There are two (in)famous essays that do this. First, Michelle Goldberg’s “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” which describes the “dysfunctional, even unhealthy” culture of Twitter feminism as “toxic. Indeed, there’s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it—not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists.” This toxicity drains the “revivifying” boost the internet gave to feminism. It does so by establishing a constant tenor of fear among digitally-engaged feminists. Goldberg highlights this fear throughout her article. However, this constant state of anxiety and readiness is, as I will argue, not a bug so much as a feature. It is the normal and desired state of affairs in resilience discourse.

Second, there is Mark Fisher’s equally infamous essay “Exiting the Vampire’s Castle,” here he accuses feminists of both (a) propagating ressentiment that amplifies “depression and exhaustion” and prevents people from properly, resiliently overcoming, which in turn (b) obscures class consciousness behind identity politics. In order to contest neoliberal capitalism, we have to, in Fisher’s view, organize “in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity,” one in which “people feel good about themselves.” That is, class consciousness requires us to overcome and bounce-back from identity-politics style “guilt and self-loathing” (e.g., like white guilt). In other words, Fisher’s arguing that “good” radicals will embody Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return: we ought to positively re-value sources of pain, divisiveness, and guilt. We must, in other words, overcome. But is this class solidarity the effect or outcome of exiting the vampire’s castle (VC)? In other words, does Fisher’s argument naturalize the VC as the ground of class solidarity? Must there always be vampires for “us” to overcome, a castle full of “bad air” from which we demonstrably exit?

***

In both essays, feminists, especially feminists of color, are tasked with manufacturing the raw materials–negative affects like guilt or anxiety–on which “good” subjects labor, and, through that labor, generate human capital (e.g., radical cred, moral/political goodness, proper femininity, and so on). They bring us down so we can then perform our upworthiness for liking, favoriting, clicking, sharing audiences. Resilience is part of the means of production, and the “toxicity” of WOC feminists is the first step in this supply chain. Black women do the labor of generating the toxicity that then becomes the raw material upon which white women work; white women do the affective/emotional labor of overcoming, which then translates into tangible employment (writing gigs, etc.).

Suey Park’s essay in modelviewculture shows how this works. Goldberg’s essay is, as Park puts it, one of the most prominent symptoms of “an effort to gentrify digital spaces in the name of safety and dignified discourse is sweeping the Internet, hoping to cleanse “pollution” by erasing undesirable influence.” White feminists subject WOC feminists to something like a controlling image of toxicity and disease so that they, the white feminists, can be seen as uplifting the online community into something respectable and safe. However, what she calls “gentrification” I actually think is resilience. Resilience and gentrification are similar, but there are important differences. I’ll explain the difference between gentrification and resilience once I explain Park’s argument.

Building on Whitney’s work on MySpace and gentrification, Park argues that

Twitter is the new MySpace: a “dangerous” online “ghetto” that threatens white middle-class users. In other words, by not being a segregated space, Twitter is marked as an unsafe space for the white middle-class user who has to share a platform with people of color, especially when whiteness and privilege are made visible.

There are material differences between Twitter and Facebook. It is generally understood that the latter reproduces already existing networks of friendship and acquaintance, whereas the former is more open to interactions across conventional network-boundaries. The material constraints and affordances of traditional networks of friendship and acquaintance have been carefully adjusted to maintain the safety of white users and white supremacy. Viewed through the “gentrification” paradigm, the material constraints and affordances of Twitter have yet to be fully domesticated by and for white supremacy–Twitter is still a bit too “native” or “wild” and needs to be cleaned up.

However, if we view this through the lens of resilience discourse, the material constraints and affordances of Twitter seem to be specially designed to incite and amplify toxicity. Opening white women and children to ‘attack’ from non-white “bullies” actually works in the interest of white supremacist patriarchy. “Toxic” black women generate the damage that “good” white and “model minority” women then resiliently overcome. Patriarchy thus kills two birds with one stone: it uses otherwise privileged women as the tools by which it further oppresses the most precarious, multiply-marginalized women. From this perspective, Twitter is an engine for generating, channeling, and amplifying black femininity as the toxin for which “good” women (women that, as Goldberg describes, are “earnest and studiously politically correct”) are responsible for cleansing from society (cleaning up always is women’s work, right?). Analyzing Twitter toxicity as an instance of resilience discourse clarifies how “good” white femininity is designed to perform the work of anti-blackness. Anti-blackness has long been one of white femininity’s jobs; it just takes a new form in resilience discourse. Instead of securing and protecting us vulnerable white women from the evil black threat, MRWaSP leaves us vulnerable to so-called “threats” so that we can demonstrate our agency, our independence, our post-feminist subjectivity in bouncing back from and eliminating that threat.

I totally agree with Park’s read of Goldberg’s article; I just think “gentrification” isn’t quite the correct lens through which to view the problem of “toxic” feminists. The gentrification narrative implies eventual domestication and securitization: the point is to get rid of the toxic, decrepit, crumbling elements and make them ‘nice’ again. Resilience discourse normalizes toxicity and decay–even though individuals learn how to deal with them, they never go away. (In part because individual cures never solve systematic, institutional problems.) In fact, hegemony produces some women as toxic so that others can be resilient; it’s like the virgin/whore dichotomy rewritten for Lean-In digital feminism.

Park emphasizes this fact. The toxicity narrative treats WOC as themselves problems, not people with problems: they can cause toxicity, but they cannot experience it. Thus, “the invoking of ‘toxic’” obscures and naturalizes the precarity faced by WOC. Digital social media actively produces minority populations as unhealthy and pathological. For example, Flowingdata’s “Where People Run” maps visualize jogging routes recorded by fitness tracking apps. Here is my city, Charlotte NC:

I live between the two faint little scratches midway down the far right of the image (around 3:00 if this were a clock face). It looks like nobody walks, runs, or exercises in my neighborhood. And this is patently false, because I walk my dogs at least once a day, and see plenty of people out exercising too. Our activity is illegible as “healthy behavior” because it is illegible to big data and the institutionally-authoritative researchers (corporations, universities, governments) who use it. So, this whole swath of East Charlotte looks “unhealthy,” especially as compared to our wealthier, whiter neighbors across Independence Boulevard in South Charlotte. This map, the visualization of fitness tracking data, actively produces communities of color (my zip code is majority black and hispanic) as unhealthy, pathological, and, indeed, toxic.

So, part of the reason I think resilience is slightly different than gentrification is that gentrification is the revamping and eventual elimination of existing damage, whereas resilience involves the active production and maintenance of specific populations as damaged and damaging, or, as virally toxic.

***

From this perspective, Fisher’s essay ironically and unfortunately makes more of the “toxicity” that resilience discourse demands. Arguing that “the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements,” Fisher misidentifies the feminisms that have been co-opted by the neoliberal bourgeoisie: it’s not the vampires, but the Leaners-In, not those full of ressentiment, but those who are brilliantly and spectacularly overcoming. (And, importantly, its precisely Lean-In feminism that obfuscates class.) The eternal return is part of the means of capitalist production and MRWaSP reproduction, and Fisher’s essay has bought into it. Decrying “the VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage,” Fisher’s essay basically victim-blames “toxic” feminists for embodying cultural labor that’s foisted on them–sort of like how anti-black rape culture blames black women for embodying the controlling images the white male gaze foists on them.

***

Social media is, at least in part, an affective economy of upworthiness. Resilience generates both human capital and capital capital (often in the form of data that’s sold to third parties or targeted advertising). It distributes gendered, racialized labor in very specific ways: white women overcome the damage produced by women of color, thus cleansing teh interwebs and making it a sparkly, feel-good place for everyone else…just like moms always do. This also produces a hell of a lot of money and privilege for white women and MRWaSP capitalism in general.

I walk my two dogs, Laika and Sputnik, once or sometimes twice a day. On these walks, they sniff around a lot. One day, while they were on a particularly strong sniff binge, I wondered how their olfactory interaction with the physical world translated into a metaphysics, specifically, into an understanding of time. Sputnik and Laika could smell this patch of sidewalk’s recent past–they knew that my neighbor Mickey and her dogs Bentley and Beauty had taken a walk earlier this afternoon (I’m guessing this was the case because they go nuts for their scent, as Mickey always gives them treats). That’s not something I would know unless I (a) talked to Mickey, or (b) had surveillance camera data from the car dealership by this particular patch of sidewalk. What, for me, was an imperceptible, unknowable “past” was for them a perfectly accessible fact. The past was physically present for them in a way it was not for me. Surely this different perceptual orientation to the physical world translates into a different metaphysical experience of time and, well, of reality more generally. When the world is sniffed rather than seen, different features and patterns of relationships emerge as the prominent, organizing factors of that world.

I wasn’t particularly interested in following up on that idea until I read that “sniffing” is a metaphor commonly used to describe a specific type of data surveillance.

…Dataium software used a controversial technique to attempt to determine whether a visitor had been to nearly 100 other sites, including edmunds.com, bmw.com, usatoday.com, google.com, and linkedin.com. Known as “CSS history sniffing”, this technique exploits a security vulnerability in older Web browsers, such as Internet Explorer 8. Modern browsers have plugged this privacy hole. Dataium CEO Eric Brown told the Journal it has used the technique intermittently for testing.

This sensory metaphor seems really appropriate: in the same way that my dogs can reach into the recent past and “sniff out” who’s been peeing on their telephone pole, this Dataium software can reach into my browser’s recent past and “sniff out” the sites I’ve been clicking on.

It’s interesting that data sniffing is considered manifestly “unscrupulous behavior,” as the article puts it. I think I suggests how strongly our notions of privacy and propriety are shaped by the sense of sight and vision, that is, by a very specific sensory orientation to the world. Technology often augments our senses. My eyeglasses, for example, augment my naturally pretty crappy vision, just as telescopes augment even great eyes to superhuman strength.

Often, physiological and technological limits function as de facto ethical limits. It’s impolite, and, indeed, illegal, to watch what people do behind the solid, opaque walls of their homes, for example. The limits of conventional human sight are ensconced in US privacy law. When physiological and technological limits are overcome, we need to make explicit ethical rules to govern behavior that used to be physiologically and technologically impossible.  Data “sniffing” augments “senses” that have generally been of little explicit ethical import. In Western culture and philosophy, smell generally isn’t thought to bring us epistemologically significant information. Sure, it helps us tell if the milk is bad, but this sort of practical information isn’t as culturally/epistemologically privileged as “theoretical” or “scientific” information, on the one hand, or political representation (“speech”) on the other. Or, to be more technical, smell, unlike either visual or auditory communication (writing and speech), does not take propositional form or carry propositional content.

Traditionally, “sniffing” was not a way to gain epistemologically, culturally, or politically relevant information–at least, not for humans. Now technology has augmented our ability to “sniff”–i.e., to perceive the past in ways previously unavailable to typical human sense perception, and perhaps manifestly typical“sniffing” behaviors feel creepy and unscrupulous because they ask us to comport ourselves to the world in ways that feel, well, unhuman. I doubt my dogs would feel creeped out that some other dog sniffed their pee on the local telephone pole (I mean, they’re counting on it–that’s why they mark the pole in the first place). Sputnik and Laika are used to leaving scents and having those scents sniffed, so they behave accordingly. Perhaps we’re just not used to thinking about and being accountable for the scents, both literal and figurative, that we leave around. What if learning to live in the world of big data and “history sniffing” means learning to relate to our bodies, our senses, and our world in different metaphysical terms (like how my dogs may have a different intuitive metaphysics than I have)? Perhaps before we think about the ethics of these technological advancements, we need to reconsider our metaphysical assumptions?

[This is a very rough, thinking-as-I-write piece. It may jump around a lot. If I’ve left something underexplained, let me know!]

Yesterday, Mike D’Errico posted a wonderfully provocative essay about brostep, the Military Entertainment Complex, and music/game tech to Sounding Out. I want to flesh out a few initial responses to his piece. I really, really like Mike’s attention to the interface between music and gaming technology and gender, but I think the post under-theorizes gender. The “bros” in brostep are doing the work of patriarchy, but I think they’re doing this work with tools and methods–that is, with “tech”–that complicates traditional notions of masculinity and traditional gender politics. In the end, I want to contrast the industrial Dad with the neoliberal/communicative Bro.

Given the closeness of masculinity, war, and aggressive music in Mike’s post, I want to preface my comments with a reference to L7’s 1992 song “Wargasm.” Here we have a band, composed entirely of women, performing a pretty aggressive anthem about War (this song critiques Bush 41’s post-cold-war warmongering…I always think of it in constellation with the Dead Kennedys’ “Kinky Sex Makes the World Go Round”). So this is one counterexample or alternative discourse/genre that might help us reflect on the specifics of Mike’s argument. Another counter/alternative example would be the marching band–that’s the Military Entertainment Complex for sure!) What about the marching band, the technologies of the instruments, of the drill, ties it to a specific political-economic-technological discourse? If the marching band is an example of an industrial-imperial MEC, what is specific to the MEC manifest in brostep production environments?

The marching band is a good place to start thinking about what’s distinctive to the MEC and its “virtual politics of viral capitalism,” as Mike puts it. Marching bands require individually disciplined bodies: everyone wears identical uniforms, has identical body comportment, marches in step and plays in time. Band camp and rehearsals mass produce individuals so they can be cogs in a sound machine. Similarly, the band’s instruments are the product of industrial mass-production technology. There’s a reason why Western music didn’t really include many large ensembles of wind instruments until the dawn of the Modern era: only then did we develop technology that allowed instrument makers to reliably produce standardized instruments (so that a flute from one maker was compatible with a flute from another maker, for example). The industrial mass production of instruments in the late 19th century made wind instruments less costly and more widely available for community musicians. So in a lot of ways the traditional marching band or drum corps is a part of the industrial-disciplinary MEC.

The virtual/viral MEC Mike talks about is post-industrial. We have left the era of industrial mass production and disciplinary conformity and entered the era of neoliberal/communicative capitalism and biopolitical “diversity.” Noise is no longer revolutionary or disruptive–the constant chatter of clashing voices is the very ‘signal’ that keeps neoliberal capitalism plugging along. Whereas industrial capitalism required conformity (mass production = standardization), neoliberal capitalism requires distortion. And it requires this distortion from everyone, not just bros, men, or masculine subjects. The rewards for that noisemaking are unevenly distributed so that patriarchy wins, but everyone is required to max out, to scream as loud and as long as possible.

Maximalism is one way of making noise, but it’s the sole one Mike focuses on in his post. He argues that “proliferation of maximalism suggests that hypermediation and hypermasculinity have already become dominant aesthetic forms of digital entertainment.”  It may be that brosteppy maximalism is a particular brand (and I mean this literally, in the sense that The Gap is a brand) of noisemaking, a brand affiliated with specific gender, class, and race status. It seems to me that the brostep maximal aesthetic Mike identifies is affiliated mainly with mall-shopping, low-to-middlebrow youth culture. There are other ways of making noise. For example, once maximalist dubstep got co-opted by mass-market youth (“bro”) culture, hipsters turned to minimalist trapstep; as I discuss here, this minimalism is the effect of maximizing maximalism beyond the limits of human perception. It seems to me that neoliberal capital actually wants each individual person, each separate demographic, to make noise in their own unique, specifically-tailored way. Thus, for example, Max Martin and Taylor Swift can adapt dubstep drops for her audience demographic.

The hardcore distortion Mike discusses certainly does the work of patriarchy, but as a generalized ideal not limited to “masculinity,” at least as traditionally conceived as a quality attributed to “men.” Distortion is the general means of production. And in this model, instead of thinking about masculinity as an attribute of individual people, it’s more helpful to think of patriarchy as an attribute of the overall mix. Young-Girls and Spring Breakers can central players in bro culture.

The “Bro” in brostep isn’t the individual listener, it’s patriarchy–a specifically neoliberal patriarchy. It’s not the “Dad” of industrial capitalism, the father who puts down his law to which we all must conform (like the Dad in Lang’s Metropolis). This Bro is patriarchy as corporate ‘person’ who wants each individual to be entrepreneurial–to take risks, to ‘disrupt’–because these individual ventures generate the dynamism on which the corporate bro feeds. This Bro is cool with whatevs–drugs, sex, even letting girls Lean In and being a little bromancy and gay himself. Excess isn’t just tolerated; the Bro expects and demands excess from individuals, because that’s what keeps him going.

The Bro as corporate patriarch is evident in the tech Mike discusses in his post. I would argue that the wobble bass is a metaphor for the way that individual variability contributes to a dynamic overall balance. As Mike points out, the wobble bass, is produced by creating a program or routine that maintains a defined balance (or, perhaps more accurately, a defined imbalance) among individually varying signals. As he explains,

In Massive, the primary control mechanism is the LFO (low frequency oscillator), an infrasonic electronic signal whose primary purpose is to modulate various parameters of a synthesizer tone. Dubstep artists most frequently apply the LFO to a low-pass filter, generating a control algorithm in which an LFO filters and masks specific frequencies at a periodic rate (thus creating a “wobbling” frequency effect), which, in turn, modulates the cutoff frequency of up to three oscillating frequencies at a time (maximizing the “wobble”).*

“Modulat[ing] various parameters of a synthesizer tone” and dynamically monitoring “up to three oscillating frequencies at a time,” the “control mechanism” achieves an overall effect across individual variability. Unlike the industrial dad, who disciplines each individual into conformity, the corporate bro manages our relationships so that “he” profits from our wild individual exploits. The bro’s mastery lies in his deregulation. He distributes the profits from all this individual noisemaking to his “shareholders.”

The Bro doesn’t want us to march in lockstep; he wants each to march to hir own drummer, to create cacophony, to accelerate anarchy. “Mastery” is central to Mike’s critique of the brostep aesthetic:

Yet, automation and modular control networks in the virtual environments of digital audio production continue to encourage the historical masculinist trope of “mastery,” thus further solidifying the connection between music and military technologies sounded in the examples above….In the face of the perennial “mastery” trope, I propose that we must develop a relational ethics of virtuality.

But this “mastery” isn’t the conventional Dads-style control; it is the “collective self-mastery” of accelerationism. The so-called Accelerationist Manifesto reads:

We de­clare that only a Promethean politics of max­imal mas­tery over so­ciety and its en­vir­on­ment is cap­able of either dealing with global prob­lems or achieving vic­tory over cap­ital. This mas­tery must be dis­tin­guished from that be­loved of thinkers of the ori­ginal Enlightenment. The clock­work uni­verse of Laplace, so easily mastered given suf­fi­cient in­form­a­tion, is long gone from the agenda of ser­ious sci­entific un­der­standing. But this is not to align ourselves with the tired residue of post­mod­ernity, de­crying mas­tery as proto-​fascistic or au­thority as in­nately il­le­git­imate. Instead we pro­pose that the prob­lems be­set­ting our planet and our spe­cies ob­lige us to re­fur­bish mas­tery in a newly com­plex guise; whilst we cannot pre­dict the pre­cise result of our ac­tions, we can de­termine prob­ab­il­ist­ic­ally likely ranges of out­comes. What must be coupled to such com­plex sys­tems ana­lysis is a new form of ac­tion: im­pro­vis­atory and cap­able of ex­ecuting a design through a prac­tice which works with the con­tin­gen­cies it dis­covers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of geo­so­cial artistry and cun­ning ra­tion­ality. A form of ab­ductive ex­per­i­ment­a­tion that seeks the best means to act in a com­plex world. (emphasis mine)

Unlike the “clockwork” universe that uses rules and regulations to master, Bro mastery is accomplished through relational improvisation. Just think about all the “nice guys of OK Cupid,” for example. I’ve argued here that relational aesthetics isn’t conter-hegemonic, but quintessentially neoliberal. So I’m not entirely sure that the “relational” ethics Mike calls for will necessarily ameliorate Bro-gemony.

An alternative to Bro-gemony might look like something altogether uncool, inflexible, and reactionary. I’ve thought about the aesthetics of precise quantization here, and Jace Clayton makes a similar point on his blog:

distortion is a lazy way to heaviness or hardcore. This is why crunk (US southern hiphop, lots of synths, gangsta posturing, syrupy bass, fantastic sung choruses, etc etc)  &, in the UK, grime, is so nice: think about Lil Jon’s clean synth lines, squeaky clean, narcotically clean, as clean as synthetic drugs in a plastic pill case–crunk is HEAVY, but without distortion.  Crunk production leans, at least in small part, on the realization that one of the noisiest soundwaves is the sine wave—compared to a pure amplified sine tone, power electronics distortion musicians like Merzbow are downright pleasant to listen to.  Put another way, once you start listening to distortion *not* as this is the result of a reference signal being dragged behind the digital dumpster and roughened up and just listen to it as is, well, distortion is kinda soft nine times out of ten. Which is where Allal’s banjo comes in, where Lil Jon’s production values come in, where the grimiest of the grime tracks come in–primarily with weird little synth doodles, playstation music: the new hardcore embraces cleanliness like never before. Obviously, multiple notions of heaviness are the best, and so hardcore producers across genres often get really really boring because most of the producers are zoning in on a pin-hole notion of heaviness, of aggression, and how to attain, contain, and release it. (emphasis mine)

When Bro-capitalism demands that we make lots of noise, that we distort ourselves to the max, things like cleanliness and fastidiousness function counter-culturally, maybe…until they get co-opted.

* Jace Clayton has problematized Mike’s use of “algorithm” here. I would suggest that ‘algorithm’ is more metaphorical than literal, describing the dynamic management process. This is often accomplished by algorithms, but there are other systems of control that aren’t strictly algorithmic but function in ways that resemble algorithms.

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

This is a cross-post from my research blog, Its Her Factory.

This week in my graduate seminar we talked about resilience discourse. I’ve written about resilience before, and the concept is a key theme in my forthcoming book with Zer0 Books. It’s also, as I understand, a trendy and common concept in programming and IT. For an introduction to the concept, you can refer to the blog post I cited a few sentences ago, or Mark Neocleous’s article in Radical Philosophy.

Here I want to focus on the question of critical alternatives to resilience. Resilience is and has long been a way that marginalized and oppressed people respond to, survive, and thrive in the midst of oppression. But now that resilience has been co-opted so that it’s a normalizing rather than a revolutionary/critical/counter-hegemonic practice, how does one respond to, survive, and thrive without being or practicing “resilience”?

1. “Resilience” means recovery that is profitable for hegemonic institutions, like capitalism and white supremacy. Individuals and groups can recover, survive, cope, and flourish in ways that don’t (adequately) support hegemony–but those don’t count as “resilience.” Resilience is a specific form of subjectification that normalizes individuals and groups so that they efficiently perform the cultural, affective, and social labor required to maintain and reproduce a specific configuration of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. More simply, resilience is the practice that makes you a cog in the machine of social reproduction.
2. It is totally possible to deal with damage and trauma in other ways. People do that all the time. But these ways don’t count as “resilience” because they’re not generating surplus value for the means of social reproduction. That is to say, these alternative methods of “dealing” don’t perform the cultural, ideological, and material/economic labor that produces the surplus value hegemony needs for its continued growth and health. For example: In a nominally post-feminist society, patriarchy demands that women demonstrate their agency, their strength, their overcoming of traditional patriarchy. We demand women “love” their bodies rather than hate it; women who have different relations and attitudes toward their bodies (e.g., Muslim women who veil or otherwise practice modesty) are both unintelligible as (real) women, and widely viewed as pathological. In overtly and vocally “loving” their bodies, women demonstrate that “negative female body image” is no longer a problem our society has to solve; they’ve solved it for us. Individuals are responsible for overcoming institutional problems.
3. Resilience is labor–it is part of the means of capitalist and white supremacist/patriarchal production. Resilience is a form of creative destruction; that is to say, it is a variation of broader neoliberal strategies and ideologies. It proceeds as follows: (1) incite, manufacture, identify damage and trauma as such; (2) visibly and spectacularly overcome this damage by laboring on yourself so that (3) others’ perceptions of your overcoming generates a “moral” profit–your labor generates virtue (in the strict philosophical sense), and that virtue is your payoff. A resilient system or person is “virtuous”.
4. But what does that mean, that a resilient system or person is virtuous? It means that they maintain a consistent overall state of virtue–by practicing resilience as a habit, they maintain a virtuous character. This shows us that resilience is a method for maintaining overall balance over, above, and amid micro-level variability. No matter what shit happens, we can make diamonds out of those turds and maintain if not grow our overall profits/wealth/health.
5. Resilience is a practice that maintains overall stability. It is, as Jason Rines pointed out in class, a method for preserving a status quo. Resilience is in this way quite different from something like a dynamic system, in which all elements change and adapt. In dynamic systems, the macro- and micro- levels both change in mutually-responsive interactions. In resilience discourse, the micro-level phenomena change for the purpose of stabilizing an unchanging macro-level. (I’ve used the metaphor of an audio equalizer to describe this process.)
6. Humans are pretty good at adapting (i.e., in participating in dynamic systems). Well, “life” in general is pretty good at adapting. (This is another point Jason made). So perhaps we don’t need to find alternatives to resilience so much as keep doing what we’ve always been doing: adapting. At some point, if we refuse to do the social, ideological, and economic labor to which resilience interpellates us, the overall balance of profits and losses (i.e., profits to hegemony, losses to the most precarious) will be upset, maybe? This might look something like: take care of yourself, but not for the purposes of being a “good,” “virtuous,” or “healthy” person. It might mean being boring, average, and mediocre.

Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.