Jenny’s latest post on teen sexting, especially with its Salt-N-Peppa-referencing title, had me thinking about music, teen sexuality, race, and technology. These fears about newfangled technologies (and their means of distribution) corrupting (white) teen sexuality remind me of various mid-20th century (white) anxieties about (white) teen sexuality and rock music, and its circulation as records, radio broadcast, and TV performance. And notice all the repetitions of “white” in that last sentence. Race–specifically, blackness–was at the center of these anxieties. Back then, emerging technologies (recordings, radio, TV) could circulate racialized sounds, ideas, and affects in ways that confounded the institutions and informal practices that enforced a strict segregation between white and black bodies, white and black people. New technologies undermined older, segregationist technologies (like segregated theaters or clubs). So, these anxieties about media technology and teen sexuality were deeply and fundamentally racialized. John Waters’s original 1988 Hairspray does a brilliant job of connecting mid-century anxieties about racialized teen sexuality to specific technologies (i.e., records and television).

So I wonder, then, about the role of race in contemporary teen-sexting hysteria. In a society that pathologizes non-white sexualities, the concern about technology corrupting “healthy” or “real” sex, romance, and relationships is a worry about whiteness and white people. But how are the new(ish) technologies that facilitate sexting both evidence of and participants in broader shifts in what we think “race” is, and how it works to perpetuate white supremacy, which is itself also shifting? How are anxieties about teen sexiting, such as the humanist objections that sexting discourages and devalues “real” (F2F) human interaction, also about race? If, as theorists such as LaDelle McWhorter argue, “sex” in Anglo-America is inseparable from race and from race and white supremacy, these anxieties about what sexting does to “sex” are also fears about what sexting does to race and to white supremacy. But what does sexting–or, at least, what critics think sexting is–do to race and to white supremacy? How might our responses to sexting–rules about it, and the enforcement of these rules–work to amplify the surveillance, criminalization, and victimization of teens of color? Or, how might rules intended to combat the exploitation of teen girls be used to intensify the policing of people and communities of color, exacerbating their vulnerability?

It was really hard for me to find critical theoretical research on sexting and race, mainly because any search of sexting + race + [black/white/latino/racism/etc.] pulled up so much noise about Anthony Weiner and the NYC mayoral race that anything potentially useful to me got buried in the irrelevant results. There was one recent empirical study about sexting habits among ethnic minority students (for what it’s worth, “ethnic minorities” are not the same thing as “races,” even though the article studies racial groups…). Interestingly, this study sometimes got spun into some version of “minority teens are sextuously promiscuous.” That’s not what the study actually argues, or even a conclusion it supports; however, this interpretation is enabled by a clusterfuck of stereotypes in which sexting’s unhealthful- and unnatural-ness gets conflated with the pathologies (mistakenly, racist-ly) attributed to non-white sexualities. If we think that sexting is unhealthy and deviant, then it’s easy to lump that in with stereotypes about the deviance, abnormality, and excessiveness of non-white sexualities. But what does the myth of the sextuously promiscuous non-white teen do? Might it somehow racialize specific kinds of technology use as “non-white”?

I think it just might do that. Andreas Husseyn argued (way back in 1985) that we tend to view new technology in terms of a virgin/whore dichotomy. We are often ambivalent about new technologies, and consider them both desirable and disgusting, supportive and threatening. To make these ambivalences seem less, well, ambivalent, and more firmly determined, we apply the same double-standards that we apply to women in patriarchy: there is “good” and “bad” technology, just like there are “good” and “bad” women. As I have argued here, this virgin/whore dichotomy is, in both cases, racialized: “good” women are white, “bad” women are racialized as non-white. So, this framework suggests that these anxieties about technologically mediated teen sexuality are also anxieties about race because we relate to technology in racialized terms. “Whorish” bad tech is racialized as non-white. From this perspective, anxieties about teen sexting aren’t that different than anxieties about rock records, radio, and (M)TV: new technologies threaten white teen sexuality with racially pathologized contamination.

If you have any suggestions for good articles/studies/blog posts on sexting and race/racism, please post them in the comments–I’d love to read some critical theoretical analysis along these lines.

[This is cross-posted at Its Her Factory.]

A few recent events and articles/news items have me thinking, in a somewhat disjointed fashion, about both what it means to “do theory” or to practice philosophy, and how, exactly, one should go about doing and practicing these things.

In particular, it seems like philosophy is stuck between being reduced to a hard science, on the one hand, and being incompatible with “digital humanities,” on the other. And in the end I think this double-bind has the very troublesome effect of discouraging, silencing, and marginalizing what could be the most innovative things philosophy has to offer science, digital humanities, and contemporary intellectual life more generally. 

You should read Fuck Theory’s virtuosic rant about the relationship between philosophy and “science”–read the whole thing, for yourself. It’s not just, well, right, it’s also a pretty good piece of writing. The crux of FT’s argument is this:

The best thinkers – throughout history, in every field of inquiry – embrace whatever insights and information that their thought requires. The best scholars in the humanities respect the sciences; the best scientists are the ones who actually take the time to read the occasional book and can form a decent sentence. The worst thinkers are the ones who insist on inane distinctions, who set up false binaries instead of knocking them down, and who think of knowledge as an either/or proposition instead of embrace the notion that knowledge is a mosaic of perspectives that together generate an evolving and diverse picture of existence.

Personally, I think “science” can be incredibly useful to research in the humanities. I have regular arguments about this with traditionalists in my discipline. But I don’t think this because I want to “infuse” the humanities with science, I think this because I consider all human knowledge to be a single vast and manifold field, and I pick and choose what’s useful to me and not what the disciplinary guilds of contemporary academia think I need. This true when literary scholars frown at my diagrams, and it’s equally true when obnoxious, ill-informed assholes like Steven Pinker tell me that evolutionary psychology is useful for literary criticism.

FT absolutely nails the underlying problem with both Pinker’s article, and how we talk about “philosophy” generally: the always political, always ideological attempt to naturalize a distinction between “real” intellectual pursuits and “frivolous” ones. The problem, then, is a dogmatically conservative definition of whatever field one works in. And, in the contemporary academy, the “conservation” of philosophy is an urgent concern. Philosophy majors and departments are being eliminated, and my own state Governor went on record decrying the uselessness of philosophy and women’s studies.

So, to riff a bit on Anthony Appiah’s read of Du Bois’s “On the Conservation of Races,” they are trying to kill us (“us” being philosophy departments, majors in philosophy, etc.), so we need to make arguments for our own conservation. Philosophers have something unique to contribute to the academy, which is why they should keep us around, fund us, and let us produce more budding philosophers.

But, as FT suggests, the best arguments for our conservation will actually stress the intellectually and disciplinarily progressive nature of philosophical practice. Philosophy’s canonically significant ideas are often hybrids–Descartes was a mathematician and a philosopher, Kant taught mostly geography courses even as he wrote philosophy, and many of the most influential contemporary philosophers–like Angela Davis, Amartya Sen, Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, Martha Nussbaum, and Judith Butler–all do highly interdisciplinary work. Philosophy’s unique contribution to intellectual life will transform intellectual life, and won’t be recognizable as “philosophy” in and by today’s standards. That’s why (disciplinarily) conservative arguments for philosophy’s value will fail. Philosophy’s value isn’t in what it is currently, but in the transformations it will help bring about. So, attempting to conserve a hypostasized snapshot of the discipline impedes it from participating in the very transformations that give it value. Or, preventing it from changing undercuts the most important contributions philosophy can make to ongoing intellectual life. (Like, ideally, philosophy should help abolish the university as a racist, sexist, ableist, classist, nationalist institution of privilege shepherding and profit generation. It can help us do that if we let it–which importantly involves rejecting philsophy’s own racist, sexist, ableist, nationalist elements, concepts, ideas, and practices. To be transformative “philosophy” as we know it must be transformed.)

I think some of that transformation is happening in and on social media. Not only are philosophers like me increasingly connected to and in conversation with scholars working on related topics in other fields, but philosophical practice is itself mutating (actually, I think these two phenomena are related, but that’s for another post). These mutations occur at the level of output–philosophical work happens on blogs, as long Facebook and Twitter interchanges, in videos and in podcasts. But they also occur at the level of research (or “input”). In the same way that philosophy isn’t just about writing, it’s not just about reading, either. If philosophy wants to be continually relevant and adequate to contemporary life and its problems, then it needs to transform itself, to work in and with the media in which our societies most readily represent, express, record, and communicate themselves. In the same way that the meaning of a phrase or a text can be lost in translation, our attempts to translate contemporary phenomena into legacy philosophical media will “lose” important details/considerations in the process.

Which is what makes this past week’s discussion of students’ use of social media even more important. Brian Leiter, pretty much the keeper of mainstream philosophical views/mores/norms, and thus the most loved and hated figure in professional philosophy, calls Twitter “childish noise” and advises grad students in philosophy to stay off social media entirely if they ever want a job. Other philosophers have a more moderate, likely use-and-experience informed approach to Twitter and other social media. These approaches argue that social media are just another professional platform for publishing your work in philosophy, for interacting with other scholars and their work, and so on.

Social media are a type of these “new” philosophical inputs and outputs–an new method, if you will, of practicing philosophy. It is true that you cannot accomplish in 140 characters–or even a 1000-word blog post–what one conventionally accomplishes in your average 7000-word journal article. But that’s the point: it’s a different medium. And philosophy doesn’t have to be restricted to one medium–in fact, its most mainstream definition already recognizes at least two media as “proper” to philosophical practice–the prose essay and formal logic (truth tables and syllogisms, anyone?). Oh, right, and there’s speaking as well as writing. Speaking is totally OG philosophy–Socrates was, after all, quite worried about what the new medium of writing would do to the practice of philosophy. So if some of the foundational texts and methods of Western philosophy (I’m thinking Plato here) are about philosophical practice adapting to the then-new media of writing, why can’t philosophy now adapt itself to “new media”? Sure, that’s going to change the inputs and outputs–philosophical research and philosophical ideas–which means “philosophy” itself will change. But that’s healthy. We need to change if we want to stay viable, both as a part of the academy and as a perspective from which to critique it.

To argue that philosophy students should not engage in this sort of intellectual practice is to prevent philosophy from developing and changing along with the rest of intellectual life (of which the other disciplines in the academy are just a small part). It also, and perhaps more importantly, keeps philosophy insular (philosophy students would be less likely to make extradisciplinary connections) and tradition-bound. This argument against social media use by grad students (and junior scholars) also advantages students and scholars at/from prestigious programs–in other words, those who already have access to connections, resources, and networks that students and scholars at less prestigious institutions can only access (or can more readily access) through social media. If you’re at an Ivy League school or a Leiterific doctoral program, resources and visibility aren’t something you have to seek out, at least in the ways that we at non-flagship state schools without doctoral programs have to actively pursue. Social media will by no means level the playing field within the discipline, but it certainly is an important resource for students and scholars who don’t already have all the advantages, so to speak.

So this brings me to the final thing that spurred me to all this metaphilosophical reflection. I’m a contributor at Cyborgology, a blog about social theory and technology. My work fits in quite well with everyone else’s–I don’t think it’s glaringly different, and we can all have productive conversations with one another with little to no “translation” necessary. But this week the American Sociological Association met, and for the first time it was really obvious to me that at least in this way I was the thing that was not like the others, the philosopher walking among sociologists. At the level of actual work and research, I feel more at home with this crew than I do with pretty much anything that appears on your average APA (American Philosophical Association) program (and, fwiw, most of the SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) too). This past week, however, institutional and disciplinary structures intervened to remind me that I’m supposed to have a discipline, which is not the same as the discipline these other people have.

My only response to the straw-man tension between “sociology” and “philosophy” is: fuck that childish noise. I thought we already knew that “disciplinary” distinctions, canons, and institutions discipline us, make us docile intellects, so to speak. It’s not inconsistent to claim both (a) philosophy has something distinct to contribute to emerging areas of study and collaborative/transdisciplinary research, and (b) “philosophy” is changing in medium, practice, and content. Perhaps philosophy is most “itself” when it is other than itself? Or, in the words of XCP Collective blogger educated ice, “philosophy is already more, and other, than what it is.” In order to practice philosophy in the way I think it must be practiced–not conservatively, but progressively, pushed to new media, new experiences, new phenomena, new problems–I must actively engage intellectuals from all over the academy and, importantly, from beyond it. I need to be in conversation with people whose training and research “inputs” are different than mine. At the same time, I still have something distinctively philosophical to offer, based on both my training and research “inputs,” but also on my “outputs”. I think that as a philosopher, I have a license to care about theory for its own sake, theory as such. Other disciplines require more obvious and direct connection to some studied object, population, culture, text, or whatever. And that’s good. And I need them to do that kind of research so that when I go down a theory-hole, I’m not jumping off from a poorly-grounded and poorly-researched base. At the same time, these scholars in other disciplines need us philosophers to do the best theorizing we can, so that their work is in dialogue with the best, most helpful and productive theoretical tools/concepts/questions/problems possible.

At this point I’m back at Gang of Four: Why Theory? Because: “What we think changes how we act/so to change ideas/change is what we do.” Philosophy (the practice, I mean; the discipline, not so much) is never more itself than when it is becoming what it is not–by, for example, engaging new media, collaborating with outsiders, and so on. Philosophy is always more, and other, than what it is.

[First, I need to apologize for the poor formatting in this post–I’m on vacation and working from an old iPad, which is doing wonky things to the WordPress interface.]

I’ve been chewing on some thoughts about this summer’s big musical releases–Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail (MCHG), Kanye’s Yeezus, and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (and somewhat relatedly, Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop”). All of these records and singles used technology and social media in new-ish ways (or rather, ways relatively new to major-label releases and big hit records) to distribute, market, and generate buzz about the work. MCHG was released first as what Chris Richards calls “a data collection exercise disguised as a smartphone app,” and Yeezus’s “New Slaves” was debuted at guerilla listening parties across the globe, accessible via interactive map on his website (kanyewest.com now features an different interactive media object, the video for “Black Skinheads”). In an attempt to draw significant mainstream attention to mid-career artists who either never had or lost that sort of visibility, Thicke and Cyrus made sexist and/or racist videos to generate buzz on teh interwebs. (What’s new here is that sex and racial non-whiteness are no longer inherently outrageous and offensive to mainstream (white) taste–in post-feminist, post-racial America, that level of offense is reserved for certain types of misogyny and racism performed by people who supposedly ought to know better. This is a really interesting line of inquiry, but not, ultimately, the one I want to follow in this post.)

Sasha Frere-Jones has a provocative new piece about Jay and Ye’s new albums up at The New Yorker, so that spurred me to make my questions about these two albums a bit more choate. Frere-Jones’s article itself deserves careful analysis and discussion, and not only because he compares his disappointment with Jay Z’s politics and performance to his disappointment with the George Zimmerman verdict. (I’m happy to have that discussion in the comments here; I hope to have something up on my personal blog in the next week.) Here, however, I want to follow Frere-Jones’s general strategy of thinking about the broader social implications of MCHG. 

Most early reviews of the album focused on its marketing and format innovations. A week before the album was officially released as such, Samsung made a million copies of the album available via an Android app. So, before it was even an album, MCHG was a smartphone app…an app that wasn’t just music playback, or even an interactive musical/visual/textual/gamified experience, but an app that tracked and logged massive amounts of user data.

Tom Ewing, a very smart music writer who also knows more than a thing or two about big data, has a particularly nuanced read of the MCHG/Samsung deal. The album release was a way for Samsung to “do something social,” i.e., to do a social media branding/sponsorship campaign. While most critics focus on the data-collection part of the project, Ewing re-centers the analysis to focus on the social part of it. “If you do something social these days,” he argues, “it’s easier to collect a ton of data than not.” Here, Ewing implies that that the data collection was a side-effect, or at least a second-order function subordinate to the app’s primary intent, which was to be “social.”

Why is music, a hip hop album, the means for a tech company that makes the devices we all access social media on, to “do something social”? What specific social relations does this app facilitate? Or, what concept or structure of sociality does the app assume?

These are all open questions (which I hope we can discuss below in the comments). I have what I think is a partial answer, but I’m also quite certain that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Cultural theorists have used the concept of commodity fetishism to explain the social function(s) of commercial music. When music is a commodity (that is, an object valued purely for its monetary or “exchange” value, its value vis-a-vis other commodities), it functions, socially, as a fetishized object. Fetish objects are replacements or substitutes for some other thing, which is usually absent, mythical, or otherwise “unreal.” Fetishized commodities are substitutes for social relations–or, in more classically Marxist terms, relations among commodities substitue for relations among people. For example, the brands one wears or doesn’t wear can signal social class, race, ethnicity, subcultural affiliation, regional affiliation, and other markers of social identity.

But MCHG isn’t a commodity–or rather, when formatted as a smartphone app, the musical work MCHG isn’t a commodity, even though it is also formatted as a traditional album that is sold, for example, on iTunes. When music is shared data, it is not a substitute for social relations, but instead a measure or index of the quality of social interaction. Instead of being the medium through which we transact social relations (or, inded, the message), music is the “market index” that lets us take the temperature of already-existing social relations. Social relations aren’t about exchange (as, for example, in social contract theory: I trade some freedom for some security), but about momentum or intensity. In its app form, MCHG is not only or primarily the material substrate for our social relations, it is what reveals them to us—it collects our data-sociality for our data-selves.

As a datafied performance index, MCHG collapses the distinction between records and record charts–this record functions like record charts themselves. Record charts express the intensity or momentum of a record’s saturation in society. According to French economist and cultural theorist Jacques Attali, charts (like Billboard’s Hot 100) present records’ value as both (a) stockpiled consumption-time—the number of “listens,” and (b) stockpiled market activity. With respect to (a), because charts measure radio plays, internet streams, YouTube plays, and other “free” audio transactions, record charts are particularly clear examples of the commodity’s obsolescence, both as an object and as a medium for market transactions. With respect to (b), Attali thinks record charts aren’t that different from the DOW, CAC 40, or FTSE: “the hit parade system advertises the fact that …an object’s value is a function of the intensity of the financial pressures of the new titles waiting to enter circulation,” which makes charts “the public display of the velocity of exchange” (Noise 107; emphasis mine). Intensity and velocity measure quantities in time; they are statistical approximation of how much of X in given time window Y (e.g., how many listens per week).[2] Value doesn’t express the useful qualities or compare quantities, but measures the intensity and velocity of the transaction. That is why “hit parades…play a central role in this new type of political economy” (Noise 170) and exemplify a general shift in the production and conception of value. In Attali’s view, record charts already in the mid 1970s explicitly worked like then-contemporary neoliberal economists wanted and hoped society would work: they measure the intensity of investment in stockpiled human capital.

So ultimately what I’m arguing is that MCHG, especially in its app format, is a really neoliberal record. It facilitates the kinds of social relations and subjectivities that neoliberalism idealizes: a quantified data-self who measures its human capital in financialized terms (investment, intensity, velocity, etc.), social life as a competitive, deregulated market, and so on. In this light, Jay Z’s claim that his presence is itself charity makes a lot of sense: if we’re all just stockpiles of human capital, then Jay’s presence is itself a donation of the only value that matters. This reading of MCHG also helps explain why, as Britteny Cooper argues in Salon, Jay Z needs a better race politics. Cooper rightly identifies Jay’s “presentism” as a contributing cause of his worldview, a worldview in which presence is charity and black critique is passé and obsolete. If we follow Attali’s analysis of neoliberal political economy, time isn’t something that moves forward or backward (future progress, respect for elders’ struggles), but something that exists solely to be stockpiled and, perhaps, charitably donated. When we think about the political implications of MCHG’s format, we need to consider what it does, socially. Moreover, when we discuss the social implications of MCHG, we need to talk about its form and format, not just its lyrical content.

I was halfway through what I thought was going to be today’s post, and then Hugo Schwyzer up and quit the internet (so, you’re gonna have to wait till next week to get that post about Magna Carta Holy Grail & the kinds of social relations music facilitates when it is packaged or formatted as an app). I assume that Schwyzer’s retirement will likely follow the Jay Z or Bret Farve model, but, while it lasts, it’s a good opportunity to open out conversations about privilege, oppression, and the media, about the role of men in feminism, and about allies more generally. 

Hugo Schwyzer is a professor of history and gender studies at Pasedena City College, and he has been a sort of male feminist superstar, writing for widely-read mainstream venues like Jezebel and The Atlantic. So, he’s a very, very public male “face” of and for feminism. And for a lot of reasons, he’s been the subject of vehement criticism, trolling, and plenty of ad hominem attacks, too, much of it from feminists (male, female, trans, queer, and otherwise) on the left. (And let me just say, if I was influential enough to make Malcolm Harris bring out his A-game trolling, well, I’d be pretty happy about that, even if it meant I was wrong about something.)

I want this post to be a place where we can discuss the issues following from Schwyzer’s retirement. Less mansplaining, more feminist pedagogy. In this spirit, I’ve identified some of the issues below, and I’d love it if we could help one another think them through.

1. If he needs to take a break for health reasons, then he should. There’s nothing wrong with taking time off from work to focus on your health (or caring for family and friends). (I’d also buy the argument that he needed to take a break to intellectually and politically regroup and rethink his approach.) However, it seems like this breakup with the internet is of the “it’s not me, it’s you” type. Schwyzer names his personal health as the second reason he’s quitting. The first reason he cites is “the toxicity of take-down culture,” which he finds “exhausting and dispiriting.” He continues:

The cheapest and easiest tweets and articles to compose are snarky and clever dismantlings of what someone else has worked hard to create. The defenders of this culture of fierceness call it intellectual honesty, but it is an honesty too often edged in cruelty. I’ll admit It: I’m a most imperfect man. I have an absolutely dreadful past, one for which I continue to make quiet amends. I’m also frequently a smug and sloppy writer. But despite that past and my glib prose, I don’t think I’m wrong that when it comes to a concerted effort to drive me off the internet, I’ve been more sinned against than sinning.

“More sinned against than sinning”–Really? If we’re keeping score here, then it seems like a hard sell to argue that a white straight cis-dude is so sinned against that he can justifiably quit his public feminist activism. In this sort of scorekeeping, how do we count the “sins” of institutionalized white supremacist patriarchy? If we follow this calculus, then no oppressed person would ever have any motivation or obligation to engage the institutions that oppress them.

Yes, people are mean to each other on the internet. But Schwyzer doesn’t experience the specifically gendered, racialized, sexualized threats that non-white-straight-cis-dudes regularly experience. His critics might be playing power games with him, but even so, they don’t use the full force of patriarchy, white supremacy, and cis/heteronormativity to reinforce their dominance and his vulnerability. (Lindy West has a great analysis of this over on Jezebel.) He’s not put in his place in a way that emphasizes his gendered vulnerability vis-a-vis a male critic and patriarchal institutions like rape culture. For example, in this interview he cites the following as an example of the worst of what he experienced:

All of us who write online want validation to some degree. We’re ready to take criticism when it’s balanced by affirmation. I just felt that it was very one-sided. After I wrote about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, this guy Chris tweeted, “the number one job of male feminists is to never let Hugo Schwyzer get another freelancing gig.” It got 120 retweets and 140 favorites in an hour. I mean, that wildly overestimates the job, right? And it was just really hurtful. I was like, I don’t want to go through this anymore.

If this is the worst, well…His critics don’t frame their objections in language that is also (and sometimes even primarily) sexual harassment. He’s not being threatened with rape or lynching, being called a c-word or n-word. This happens all the time to women, even and especially female academics. As this well-known study argues, sexual harassment is so pervasive that it “impedes women’s full participation in online life, often driving them offline.” For all the ways Schwyzer can be called out for being wrong, these call-outs can never be framed in ways that make him as vulnerable as someone who isn’t a white straight cis-dude.

And this is why I think there’s a massive, astronomically large, qualitatively incalculable difference between Schwyzer’s “Goodbye” and something like Keguro Macharia’s “On Quitting.” Macharia left the American academy because it was harming him in ways that, frankly, are just incomparable to Schwyzer’s discomfort.

At a required end-of-year meeting with my then department chair, I confessed that I was exhausted. I was tired of the banal and uncomprehending racism of white students who spoke of blacks as “they” and “them” and complained about “their broken English” and “bad dialect”; I was tired of a system that served black students badly, promising an education that it failed to deliver, condemning them to repeat classes, to drop out, to believe they were stupid; I was tired of colleagues who marveled when I produced an intelligible sentence; I was tired of attending conference panels where blackness was dismissed as “simple,” “reactive,” “irrelevant,” “done”; I was tired of being invited to be “post-black” as the token African, so not “tainted” by the afterlife of slavery; I was tired of performing a psychic labor that left me too exhausted to do anything except go home, crawl into bed, try to recover, and prepare for the next series of assaults.

In light of Macharia’s essay, Schwyzer’s “Goodbye” seems, well, offensive in its comparative triviality. I think we could have a more productive conversation about feminism and quitting by turning our focus away from Schwyzer and towards Macharia’s essay. I’d also like to talk about your thoughts on West’s proposal that, instead of ignoring trolls, women/feminists/oppressed people of all sorts “feed trolls until they explode.”

2. Laura Bates argues that it’s “pretty offensive when people tell us…we should leave Facebook instead of making a fuss.” Plenty of people far more vulnerable than Schwyzer have much thicker skin (and maybe this is related? Maybe this tolling seems overwhelmingly mean only to someone who’s generally been protected from bullying and harassment by his privilege?), and continue to make a fuss in spite of the threats, the pain, and the fear. To be honest, my initial response to reading his goodbye post on his blog, and the above-cited interview about it, was, somewhat ironically, “Geez, man, grow a fracking pair.” Less glibly, to be an academic and/or a public intellectual, you have to be able to take criticism, constructive or otherwise. If you have ideas, people are going to disagree with you. And that’s OK. In fact, you probably haven’t had any significant impact until someone has written a scathing takedown of your work. (Fiddy tol’ me go ‘head change yo style up/An if they hate then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up, as they say. Or, read Marx’s thoughts on Hegel.) Moreover, as an academic, I was especially surprised that Schwyzer, as a fellow academic, hadn’t gotten used to the scathing, nasty, soul-crushing critiques that are often delivered by peer reviewers for journals. But then, I’m not sure that it’s a good thing that academia is as bad or worse than the internet in this regard. I also worry that I may be so desensitized by my own experiences of harassment that, like a fraternity or sorority active, I dismiss as a normal part of the culture what I should otherwise recognize as hazing. So, I’m very receptive to any attempts to argue me down from my “boo-hoo” response. If you had a similar response and wanted to make a case defending it, I’d also be really interested in hearing that.

3. Schwyzer has the option of quitting. I don’t know about y’all, but without the internet, without Cyborgology, Twitter, my personal blog, other professional blogs, I’d be pretty disconnected from other scholars. I’m not at an R1 (a big research university) and I’m not in a city like NYC/LA/Chicago/Boston with lots of universities and access to many other intellectuals in my field(s). Whatever networks, visibility, and influence I have, I have because of the internet. If I quit that, well, poof, it’s gone. And moreover, I don’t really have option of quitting this being a woman thing. Schwyzer can stop speaking about feminism in public, but I can’t stop being a woman, and I can’t stop being in public–I need to work, I need to buy groceries, walk my dogs, etc. For those of us without the option of quitting, what survival strategies help?

4. Feminism is hard. Being a feminist is hard, not just for men, not just for white women, but for all feminists. As Sara Ahmed has argued, it means killing a lot of joy, both for ourselves and for others. If your feminism is easy and makes you feel good all the time, well, then, you’re probably doing it wrong. Perhaps one productive thing to come out of Schwyzer’s erstwhile resignation is a serious conversation about how to support one another as we live with and work through the emotional pain, fragility, sadness, despair, melancholy, mourning, discomfort, awkwardness, and all the other difficult, unpleasant feelings that come with practicing feminism.

5. Perhaps the bigger question begged by l’affaire Schwyzer is about the role of men, especially cis-men, in feminism. As readers of Cyborgology should know, men can be awesome feminists. And men should care about feminism, because patriarchy affects us all (at least as far as globalized Western civilization reaches).  It’s a system of social organization that affects everything and everyone. This means that men are gendered, and that they have a stake in feminism. They’re not outsiders looking in, but deeply implicated in the gendered phenomena that feminism studies, critiques, and challenges. And it’s this implication that shapes men’s roles in feminism. I’d like, if we can, to talk about the specifics of this in the comments. Given their various situations vis-a-vis white supremacist patriarchy, how can men do better by feminism, and as feminists, than Schwyzer?

In our ongoing conversation about tracking “negatites” (what you might have but ended up not doing–this is a riff on Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the role of negation in human existence), I think we Cyborgologists may have hit on something. David’s post implied or begged the concept, I identified it, and Sunny explained how it relates to quantum physics. In a comment on Sunny’s post, David described this “Theory of Negatite Social Action (NSA, haha)” that we’re proposing as something “like the dark matter of social action.” I don’t know a lot about quantum physics, but I DO know a lot about political philosophy. So while I’m going to rely on y’all to fill in and/or correct me on the physics and big-data-tech side of things, I’m going to attempt to use some political theory to push these ideas forward and see where it takes us. Because this is genuinely an attempt (or an experiment, even), I’ve framed my post in the form of questions. Consider my answers provisional attempts at thinking through these questions.

1. Why do we care about negatites/dark social action? Why is it relevant now?

Here, I want to argue why I think explicit attention to negatites/dark social action is something that is likely to happen, if it isn’t already happening. There are two main motivations to monitor, track, and care about what people could but don’t do. 

The first reason is economic. Neoliberal capitalism is primarily geared to extracting further surplus value from what has already been exhausted by traditional means (mainly commodification and expansion of markets). For example, the 8-hour-day is as productive as technology and labor laws allow, so now we demand hourly workers commodify their affective lives (in what is called “affective labor”), and salaried workers are expected to be more or less permanently on call. Or, now that globalization has “flattened” the world, we Westerners look to our own history for new, increasingly “exotic” subcultures to appropriate–retromania has (apparently) replaced orientalism. As critical theorist Jeffrey Nealon explains, “the force of the new globalized economic Empire…doesn’t primarily turn outward in an expansive, colonialist or consumerist assimilation. Now, it turns inward toward intensification of existing ‘biopolitical’ resources.”

Eventually we will have exhaustively catalogued everything one does, and plugged this data through every meaningful algorithm there is. Eventually, in other words, there will be no “new” data to mine. So, once we’ve exhausted this data set, the only place to turn is to tracking and processing data about what one doesn’t do. What opportunities did a shopper pass up? What didn’t people buy, and why? Of the 3 routes Google maps suggested I take, which 2 didn’t I choose? Among my contacts, who don’t I talk to? What apps do I download and then never (or rarely) use? Of all the people who downloaded Magna Carta Holy Grail, how many of them do not own another Jay Z record (or, is it a “Jay-Z record,” since he hasn’t yet released a post-hyphen album)?

So, theoretically, it’s plausible that at some point there will be a compelling profit motive for big data to catalogue and process our negatites. In a way, this information would be meta-metadata, an even more abstract layer of information implied in all the data outlining the conditions of our actions (where we were, with whom, when and for how long, etc.) How will this impact our understanding of what it is to be a “self,” or what it means to “do” something, to have agency? How will it impact our social relations? Our sense of social or ethical obligation to other people? Our use of media? Relations of production & consumption? Once prosumerist business models are fully leveraged, how will people try to extract surplus value from not-doing, opting out, disengagement, and other negatites?

The second reason is epistemological–it has to do with our understanding of what counts as “knowledge” and how knowledge works. Perhaps we want to pay attention to this type of “dark” action because we now have the conceptual and technological tools that allow us to recognize, observe, describe, and catalog it? Conventional epistemologies treat knowledge as known content–knowledge of something. However, content isn’t particularly valuable anymore–you can find any bit of information you want with a simple internet search, and writers, designers, musicians, and other creative types are pretty much expected to give away their “content” for free. As the PRISM scandal revealed, not even spies care about content anymore; they care, instead, about processes, especially relational process. (I argue this more extensively here.) That’s why PRISM monitored metadata–how you communicated to whom, not what you communicated. In this piece I argued that PRISM-style surveillance treats information like overtones or harmonics–it didn’t gaze at images, it tuned in to resonances among various bits of data.

And this concept of resonance and harmonics brings me back to Sunny’s post from last week, which expanded on my initial comment about negatites. Quantum mechanics, as Sunny explained it (and I’m relying on this explanation, because I know nothing about theoretical physics), uses the concept of a wave function to describe something like negatites:

A fundamental element of the theory behind quantum mechanics is that outcomes at the subatomic level are produced when the wave function of a particular particle collapses, reducing all possible states of that particle to a single “real” observed state. In other words, a bunch of things are potentially true, and then only one is (a thought experiment exploring the more wacky angles of this is of course the (in)famous Schrodinger’s Cat paradox).

Conventional European epistemologies seek to know the “single ‘real’ observed state” of a thing. Like quantum mechanics, neoliberal epistemologies seek to know the wave function itself. Big data, after all, is designed to help governments, banks, and companies to predict and compare probable outcomes, like consumer behavior or stock performance.

How do we observe or monitor the wave function itself? Not by panoptic gazing, but by a process somewhat akin to hearing. Physicists use probability density algorithms to describe wave functions. When graphed, a probability density algorithm looks like a sine wave. Guess what else is a sine wave? You got it–sound. A sound is composed of a tone and many, many overtones or harmonics, and is irreducible to a single “real” observed state. A sound resonates. So, perhaps there is no longer need to “reduc[e] all possible states to a single ‘real’ observed state” because we can, with the instruments provided by big data, interface directly with the wave function itself? Besides acousticians and physicists, guess who else trades in sine waves and probability density algorithms? Big data. Statisticians stole the terminology of “signal” and “noise” from acoustics, after all.

I know this epistemology point is not as developed as it needs to be (I feel like I have all the dots, but I haven’t yet adequately connected them). Statistics, quantum physics, acoustics–they all share the “wave function,” and this wave function seems to be central to perceiving and manipulating “dark action.” Perhaps the wave function is the conceptual tool that makes “dark action” real for us; it works analogously to developing chemicals that make a photographic image reflect light that most human eyes can see.

2. How does “dark social action” work? How are negatites social?

Thankfully, I don’t think I need to reinvent the wheel here. I mentioned in my comment on David’s original post that I got the concept of “negatite” from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being & Nothingness. It makes sense, then, to turn to Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity (her response to/critique of Sartre’s text) to flesh out the social and political functions of negatites.

For Beauvoir, the world–the material, concrete world of stuff which is inseparable from the ‘social’ world of history, ideas, and values–is the cumulative result of human action. Each time I choose to do something I simultaneously choose not to do a number of other things. I’m continuing to write this post, even though I should be heading out the door to the gym, or letting the dog out, or checking my Twitter feed, etc. To exist as a human means positively realizing (positive as in present rather than absent) these negatites as not-accomplished. They are just as real as actions that I did concretely accomplish because they impact other people, the environment, things…what I don’t do shapes the world just as much as what I do do. So, it’s not just the one “real” objective state that affects the world, and thus other people.  All the un-collapsed (to echo Sunny’s terms) negatites tangibly impact and influence “reality.”

The current shape of the world, or my current situation in the world, is the positive realization of negatites. Negatites exist as not-having-been-actualized. To use an example from Sartre, if I choose to stay home and care for my elderly mother instead of enlisting in the military to fight the Nazis, this choice to not join the military has positive (positive as in “present” rather than absent, not as in “good”) effects on my immediate world, on my mother’s life, on the lives of those with whom I might have served, on the environment, on the wear and tear of my mother’s house, etc.

Negatites are social because they affect the world, give it shape and direction. “Each individual project,” Beauvoir argues, “is asserted through the world as a whole.” My positively realized negatites–what I did yesterday, or what I did five years ago–contributed to crafting a very specific material/historical situation today; this situation determines the range of my present possibilities, and the present possibilities of lots of other people–what you could perhaps call imminently-realized or yet-to-be-realized negatites. As Beauvoir puts it, “one can reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be defined except by its interference with other projects. To make being “be” is to communicate with others by means of being.” But for Beauvoir, human being is fundamentally negative–human existence is, in her view, like the uncollapsed wave-function. So, “communicate with” others not just in what we do, but also in what we don’t do. Our positively realized negatites tangibly affect others, just as others’ positively realized negatites tangibly affect us.

I think it’s important for us to mash-up/bastardize both Beauvoir’s existentialism and object-oriented ontology (if these are unfamiliar terms, don’t worry, you can understand my claim without knowing how it fits or doesn’t fit in the history of Western philosophy; if you’re familiar with them, check out the footnote). Both human subjects and non-human objects have negatites. How can an object have negatites, if objects don’t make decisions? Well, objects affect other objects, and in their multiple, contingent relations amongst one another, objects’ effects combine in unpredictable ways to produce unanticipatable results. This isn’t quite the “butterfly effect,” mainly because that, as I understand it, describes the exponentially-unfolding consequences of what did happen. This NSA theory is trying to describe the perhaps imperceptibly vast consequences of what didn’t happen (or, more precisely, positively realized negatites).

And what big data is trying to do, perhaps, is make perceptible these imperceptibly vast consequences of what didn’t happen. They’re just variables for which we can control. The more negatites we can quantify and plug in to our algorithms, the better our predictions will be.  It seems like big data is invested in predicting whether you’ll choose to stay home with your mother or enlist and fight the Nazis.

From Beauvoir’s perspective (which I’m not entirely sure I agree with on this matter, at least not yet–I need to think it through more carefully), the problem with this attempt to control for all negatites and make all outcomes ever-more-reliably predictable is that it voids ethics. As she argued in 1947,

It would be utopian to want to set up on the one hand the chances of success multiplied by the stake one is after, and on the other hand the weight of the immediate sacrifice. One finds himself back at the anguish of free decision. And that is why political choice is an ethical choice: it is a wager as well as a decision; one bets on the chances and risks of the measure under consideration; but whether chances and risks must be assumed or not in the given circumstances must be decided without help, and in so doing one sets up values.

The decision to care for mom or fight the Nazis is an ethical one because in choosing you posit the chosen action, and all it implies, as more valuable than the other one, and all that it implies. Family or nation? The life of one person you love or the lives of many you don’t and will never know? Perhaps we could use some data to predict when mom would die with or without your help, and compare that to what the chances of the allies defeating Hitler are with you or without you in the army…But Beauvoir’s point would be that values and probabilities are not collapsible or reducible. This isn’t a bet, a calculation made based on the odds, it’s a choice made based on the values you have determined to be most important. The fact that you love your mother a lot makes it really mean something that you’d choose to enlist in the resistance over caring for her–Hitler must be one evil dude. The fact that Hitler is such a world-historically evil dude means that your love for your mother must be tremendous if you chose to stay home and care for her rather than enlist in the resistance. Perhaps the underlying point here is that neoliberalism wants us to see all decisions as bets (as matters of risk-management), because human capital (being a winner) is the only real value that matters? And to more efficiently maximize our human capital it needs a better understanding of our negatites, as well as our positively realized actions?

To sum up my thoughts on this question, “NSA” theory is an attempt to think about the social implications of positively realized negatites. Or, from another perspective, NSA theory would describe social action as a wave function. In traditional Western political theory, it’s very important that people recognize themselves as living in the “real” observed state of things: it’s important that we know if our experiences are real and not merely dreams (as in Descartes), that we’re really eating steak or remembering experiences we really had (as in the Matrix and Blade Runner, respectively), and that we’re not duped by ideology(as in Marx). Perhaps NSA theory would posit all these ‘realities’ as equally real–some just seem more ‘real’ because things like white supremacy interrupt our ability to observe the “reality” of some of the wave’s oscillations/harmonics/permutations/properties/etc. Understanding social action as a wave function might help us imagine alternatives to what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism,” the ideology that there is no alternative to contemporary capitalism. If there is no one single “real” observed state of society, then capitalism couldn’t be the only possible reality. So, as easily as NSA might be co-opted by big data capital, it might also be a productive resource for critiquing it.

So, whew. That’s a lot. I’m going to stop for now. What I’ve tried to do is open out this idea of “Negatite Social Action” for further discussion. I’ve taken some conceptual tools from philosophy and pushed them about as far as I can take them. Next, at least for me, come some concrete examples; it’s time to turn away from straight-up theory and start theorizing through something that’s actually going on (or not going on, as the case may be!). And though I’m definitely happy to talk theory with y’all, I would really appreciate it if those of you who are more familiar with the physics, the tech, and the sociology of this to chime in with some specifics, either to reinforce or (even better) to complicate what I’ve proposed here. And I do hope you will push back–these are all fresh, undeveloped ideas that need lots of refining.

Robin is much less verbose on Twitter as @doctaj.

The idea that technology and techno-scientific urbanization/development is making life more noisy is not new. Luigi Russolo wrote about this in his famous futurist manifesto The Art of Noise. “In antiquity,” he argues, “life was nothing but silence. Noise was not really born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility” (4). Russolo’s manifesto was written in 1913. “ON IT” like usual, The New York Times published a couple of stories about it last week.

While it’s certainly not news that cities are noisy, the Times article does suggest that the politics of urban noise have changed significantly since Russolo’s time. Urban noise works (or produces political effects) differently because it is understood differently–it’s not industrial and machinic, but post-industrial and affective.

The second article linked above treats noise as a toxin that contaminates what you might call our “affect system”–like the body’s limbic system or cardiovascular system, but instead of managing hormones or blood oxyegenation, it manages affective tenor—stress, happiness, well-being.

Beyond harming hearing, chronic exposure to noise increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. Children in classrooms buffeted by outside noise lag behind, and their teachers report lower job satisfaction. Pervasive background noise may damage the hearing center of babies’ developing brains, research has found, possibly leading to auditory and language-related development delays. And though people may assume they have grown accustomed to noise, a constant din, even at low frequencies, often takes a heavy physiological toll. Noise can cause stress even when a person is sleeping.

Noise elevates levels of negative affective response–stress, anxiety, distraction, uneasiness. These negative affects then impede us from functioning at maximum capacity. The problem with noise isn’t aesthetic–it’s not ugly, irrational, or offensive. Noise isn’t disruptive, either; we still go on with our day’s work or night’s rest, just at diminished capacity. Noise prevents us from flourishing. It produces ill health. That’s why it is treated as a toxin.

As with all toxins, exposure to noise is determined by privilege—wealthy Manhattanites can soundproof their penthouses, but Queens residents have to suffer through continued clamor as they appeal to bureaucratic processes designed to regulate noise pollution. So privileged Manhattanites can, like the fabled princess who was so sensitive she could feel a pea under a tower of mattresses, retain their finely-tuned senses/sensibilities.

This association between aesthetic sensitivity and privilege is interesting because it reverses 20th-century trends…the very trends set, in part, by Russolo’s manifesto. Russolo was worried that traditional musical sounds were too pure to have any affective punch:

In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion (Russolo, 5).

Russolo thought we needed industrial noise to reinvigorate art music. “We get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds,” he argues, “than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies” (6). Modernist aesthetics value transgression and difficulty. The ability to tolerate and appreciate noise was a sign of avant-garde taste; so, cultural elites stereotypically valued “noisy” works, while the unwashed masses preferred kitsch. In the Times article, this modernist association between noise tolerance and privilege is reversed: sensitivity is a privilege reserved for those with means to protect themselves from it and preserve their delicate aural/affective palate, and noise-tolerance is the effect of exposure. Sonic ecologies should be (re)purified. You can even see this reversal in contemporary pop music aesthetics: mainstream pop–from the Biebs to Skrillex–is really noisy, while hipsters and NPR listeners prefer traditionally pretty, harmonious, folk-y, “new sincerity”-style artists.

To me, it seems sorta weird to complain about noise in the city that brought us scratching and No Wave (and everyone should check out Caroline O’Meara’s great work on NYC, geography, & No Wave). But then, those were products of the divested city, the Bronx & pre-Guilianni downtown left to “drop dead.” In the redeveloped, fully-neoliberalized contemporary Manhattan, maybe sounds become “noise”–that is, they become a problem–when they are wasteful, unrecycled by-products of other activities?

The article largely discusses noise as byproduct of (re)development, the unattractive waste from capitalist projects.  Manhattan residents, given their overall wealth and privilege, are already structurally insulated from such byproducts–it’s not their water that gets contaminated by natural gas fracking, for example. Construction noise, however, can’t be outsourced because real estate redevelopment is necessarily place-specific. Apple can make your iPhones in China, but real estate speculators can’t tear down and rebuild Manhattan real estate anywhere but on site. These redevelopment projects, which intensify and magnify the value of already-valuable property, generate “toxic” byproducts. Noise–especially construction and transportation noise, which is the focus of much of the article–is a “problem” for Manhattanites because it is one of the few byproducts of neoliberal development that can’t be outsourced to less-privileged areas.

“Music is a better noise/Than rumbling catapults/and fumbling cranes” (Essential Logic, “Music Is A Better Noise”).

If noise is so sickening to privileged constitutions, I wonder what this means for the political possibilities of new types of industrial music. What kinds of noises would be musically or sonically toxic (rather than machinic, as in trad industrial, or glitchy, as in cyberpunk)? (Interestingly, toxicity was a common lyrical theme in 90s goth/industrial…but what about musical/sonic toxicity?) How would they work politically?

Those are genuine questions–I don’t even have a tentative response to them. So, if you have any thoughts, I’d be very happy to hear them below.

Follow Robin on Twitter: @doctaj.

Laurie Penny’s great new piece about Manic Pixie Dream Girls (MPDGs) has me thinking about the role of women/femininity in the compositional structure of music, film, and other media.  Penny uses a narrative metaphor to explain the subordinate role of MPDGs in contemporary patriarchy: patriarchy expects and encourages women to ghostwrite or be, as Penny puts it, “supporting actresses” in men’s stories.  When women (such as Penny) craft their own autobiographies with themselves as the protagonist, this upsets both patriarchal conventions, and our aesthetic sensibilities, which have been trained to expect and enjoy these conventions.

But, especially in light of the finale of this past season’s Doctor Who (so, uh, need I say it: spoilers) I think the MPDG supports men’s/masculinity’s centrality–in other words, patriarchy–in specific ways, ways that are uniquely appropriate to the compositional logic of contemporary media.

Feminist theorists of music, film, literature, and visual culture have identified several specific ways that conventional media formulas—like classic Hollywood narratives, sonatas, European operas, and so on—subordinate female characters  and feminized compositional elements. Their subordination isn’t accidental or incidental; the logical coherence of the artwork depends on it. Cinematic narrative, sonata form, and tonality (the system used to compose the score for works like Carmen or Madama Butterfly) are all methods for constructing coherent works of art—works that logically and systematic develop through conflict/dissonance and resolve into coherent, consonant wholes. Often women/femininity is used to generate the conflict that makes a story interesting (e.g.: “Boy meets girl; boy loses girl…”); she is the “problem” the story has to solve. The solution usually takes the form of either marriage—this is the answer to The Sound of Music’s question, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?”—or death—both Carmen and Madama Butterfly end this way. In these styles of storytelling, women/femininity are the “irrational” elements that must be resolved to preserve the centrality and rationality of men/masculinity.

But the MPDG, though certainly a problem, doesn’t get resolved in either of these ways…because, I think, MPDG is part of a different media ecology. MPDGs, especially as depicted by the Doctor’s companion(s) Clara [Oswin], don’t get married and don’t die because the “illogical” logic of contemporary media forms do not require the assimilation or elimination of femininity. We’ve abandoned the linear teleology of narrative form and tonal harmony for the “wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey” logic of what Steven Shaviro calls “post-cinematic” media, or the shock-and-awe pastiche of contemporary EDM (Electronic Dance Music). “Wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey” media are generally organized as modular composites—there is no grand narrative or goal, just interchangeable parts. These parts are juxtaposed to produce maximum sensory/affective impact, usually in the form of “dissonance” (overdriven volume, speed, intensity, etc.). Wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey upheaval and irrationality is the whole point of the story.

Men/masculinity are still the primary, orienting factor in such stories (and in the universe, real or fictive), even if the stories seem otherwise illogical and even if women’s “irrationality” gets a lot of play. MPDGs make their own noise—they do stuff, that’s why they’re “manic”. In older styles of film/music composition, this mania was corrosive and had to be eliminated. In wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey contemporary media, this mania is generative of and for patriarchy.

Just think about what happens to Clara in the season finale: to save the Doctor, and thus time, the universe, and everything, Clara jumps into the time vortex. She doesn’t get married off (like River Song, Amy Pond, or even Martha Jones and Rose Tyler), and she doesn’t die. Instead, she goes viral (talk about manic), infecting space-time itself. A version of her inhabits each possible past and future moment. Her self-sacrifice is what maintains the time vortex at an optimal level of wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey-ness, because it allows her to support the Doctor in every possible and actual moment in space-time.

Contrast this to Madama Butterfly’s suicide; she supports her Lieutenant Pinkerton by eliminating herself as a factor—i.e., a problem—in his life. The elimination of the problem gives the work/his life logical coherence. But the Doctor doesn’t need coherence; he requires a wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey universe, after all. Clara supports that type of universe by making herself omnipresent (or at least potentially omnipresent). Her feminized mania (her “impossibility”) is what generates the wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimeyness that fuels the Doctor’s exploits and supports his lifestyle as wandering hero/antihero. (We can also consider the differences between Butterfly’s 19^th-century colonial conquest and Doctor Who’s timey-wimey white savorism, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Similarly, in these “illogical” styles of storytelling, none of the characters have to have “personality” or “interiority”–they just have to have, well, swag—spectacular, over-the-top, larger-than-life presence, what Penny calls “vaguely-offbeat” and “funky…eccentricities.” For example, Rick Ross doesn’t rap about how it feels to be a problem; he raps about excess and superfluity (excessive consumption, money, sex, bling, leisure, even words become excessive when they’re rhymed with themselves). He’s not performing a character with personality. Instead, he’s performing excess and superfluity itself; Rozay is not the “real” or “true” or even “fake” Ross—he’s Ross ad absurdum. Similarly, Rob Horning’s work on selfhood and subjectivity does a superb job of explaining how neoliberal values and social media tech reconfigure “authenticity” to be less about interiority and more about public performance of idiosyncratic uniqueness. So, the fact that the MPDG “isn’t understood from the inside” and “is permitted precisely no interiority” isn’t what differentiates her from her male/masculine counterpart. The difference is that she doesn’t get to benefit from her own wackiness, he does.

To contemporary patriarchy, MPDG’s mania isn’t a problem to be solved, but a resource to be exploited. That’s why she’s so gosh darn attractive. And in a post-feminist world, men can feel like nice guys who aren’t sexist because, after all, they aren’t killing women (either literally, or figuratively by usurping women’s legal personhood into a marriage contract) or demanding that they be passive or vanilla or whatever traditional “good girl” stereotype. We want our girls to be seen and heard . Poly Styrene’s maniacal scream in the beginning of “O Bondage, Up Yours!” isn’t disruptive or out of context in contemporary pop—just think of all the screaming on “Yeezus,” for example. MPDGs, as Penny notes, get to have a story, just not a very significant one; their stories have to feed back into and amplify a “really” important story.

So it’s not enough just to write one’s own story—that’s what, as Horning convincingly argues, neoliberal labor markets demand of everyone (or, at least with everyone with enough whiteness and other human capital to begin with). “The data self,” he argues, “no longer seeks meaning through action” such as writing; “it seeks to be processed into meanings. It’s available for audit and pliable to the incentive structures built into social-media platforms.” Active/passive and subject/object binaries–which conventionally separate active, male subjects from passive, female objects—aren’t applicable to the story that “data” composes. There’s no meaningful distinction between “writer” and “written”; the very activity of writing is a supporting activity . Facebook, hell, even Academia.edu (who won’t stop prodding me to upload my papers) want me to write, write, write. Because that’s how they make money. My writing supports their ‘story’. Privilege isn’t writing one’s story (authorship, active agency); it’s being taken up by the algorithms and molded into the blingiest “Google Alert” (to use Horning’s term) out there. Is there any greater sign of success these days than being made into a meme or Twitter parody?

So in addition to worrying about who’s writing who’s stories, and who’s being made the supporting cast, we need also to worry about how our writing and data-generating gets fed back into the system, and for whose benefit. Patriarchy manifests not just in storytelling, but in “the momentum of sharing” (Horning) of these stories. So, to address this issue of momentum, we need to care about things like the citation rate of female authors (e.g., in philosophy journals or literary reviews)–how women’s work is or is not fed back into the algorithm. Because that feedback matters: YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Google–what I type in the search box (my ‘writing’) feeds back into and shapes the search and recommendation algorithms. We need to be teaching or adapting the algorithm to take work by women and other traditionally “underrepresented” groups seriously, or developing alternative algorithms that work better for us, that allow us to support one another instead of “The Man.” Feminists need to intervene both at the level of momentum and at the level of benefit or profit…because, in the feedback loop that organizes the the irrational, wibbly-wobbly/timey-wimey “story” of contemporary life, these are inextricably related. How do we write stories that, when amplified, boost everyone’s signal, not just those of the most privileged members of society?