commentary

One secondary effect of the blow-up over Jack Halberstam’s trigger warning essay is the widening skepticism of the term “neoliberal” as a sort of empty buzzword. Because I just finished teaching a grad seminar whose main objective was to figure out what the hell we mean when we say “neoliberalism” (here is the tumblr for the class), I thought I might be of some assistance here. I think the term “neoliberalism” can mean something useful and specific if we’re more cognizant of its use.

It seems to me that a lot of the confusion around the term is that it is used in (at least) two senses: one indicates a period in time, and one indicates an ideology. Just as “the Cold War” or “modernity” can refer to both a historical time-frame and a dominant ideology that shaped that historical period, “neoliberal” can mean both “now” and the ideology that informs this “now.”

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I had no idea the upcoming ABC sitcom Selfie was going to be a thing (this fall if you for some reason care) until I saw an ad spot for it while half watching the World Cup or something. Very suddenly I was more than half watching, and within a few seconds I was tweeting angrily.

I mean. Read the premise (courtesy of Wikipedia). more...

I was scrolling through Tumblr the other morning (like I do) when I came across “the world’s tallest slum.” Located in downtown Caracas, an unfinished 45-story skyscraper that was supposed to host Venezuela’s business elite is now home to an estimated 3,000 squatters. The “Tower of David” (named after finance tycoon that started and abandoned the project) is now owned by the state but there are no government-provided utilities. The building is, in essence, not much more than an immense concrete frame, upon which the residents have begun to build a community. They pool money to pay for building security, there are bodegas on every floor, and water and electricity reach as high as the 22nd floor. This is no small feat of engineering or human organization, but it isn’t comfortable living either. I don’t think it would be romanticizing the living conditions of these people to say that they (and no one else) have made something that is both modest and remarkable for themselves. Abandoned by both private industry and the government, some people pooled their limited resources and made their lives a little more livable.  Zulma Bolivar, a Caracas City planning official in an interview with the New York Times described the situation in one sentence: “This tower is a perfect example of anarchy.” more...

This is a cross-post from its her factory.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “music is traversed by a becoming-woman” (272). By this they mean that Western systems of musical organization evoke and confront the very phenomena that serve as these systems’ constitutive exclusions.  For example, while tonal harmony was a hierarchical system of consonances (i.e., chords), it nevertheless relied upon the introduction and resolution of (as the nineteenth century progressed, increasingly jarring and destabilizing) dissonances. Similarly, the abjection/rejection/marginalization of “woman” (or better, “girl”) is what solidifies and guarantees patriarchal orders: maleness/masculinity become the “norm” or the “absolute” only insofar as femaleness/femininity are circumscribed as abnormal, unthinkable, and invisible (or, to use Irigaray’s terms, insofar as “woman” is the sex which “is not”). Thus, to claim that “musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman” (Deleuze & Guattari, 299) is to posit that [Western, tonal] music works by “confronting its own danger, even taking a fall in order to rise again” (Deleuze & Guattari, 299).  As Susan McClary and Catherine Clement have famously argued, the logic of tonality turns upon the evocation and ultimate containment of “feminized” musical elements (e.g., chromaticism, actual female characters in operas, etc.). To say that “musical expression is a “becoming-woman,” then, means that femininity is the danger a musical work confronts, only to rise again. Traditionally, patriarchy has treated femininity as a deterritorializing force, something whose destabilization is necessary and even pleasurable.

But plenty of feminist and non-feminist scholars have pointed out that neoliberalism co-opts and rebrands traditional (white) femininity: the Young-Girl is the ideal model for human capital, just as feminized work–flexible, care-oriented, informal/unpaid–is the new model for labor. As Natalia Cecire puts it, “neoliberalism operates through hypertrophied forms of femininity.” Femininity isn’t deterritorializing, but the mechanism of reterritorialization.

So, in the same way that neoliberalism co-opts femininity and has it lead the charge to “creative destruction,” does it also co-opt “sound” or “music” as the primary medium of and/or metaphor for this work?

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Emotional Contagion is the idea that emotions spread throughout networks. If you are around happy people, you are more likely to be happy. If you are around gloomy people, you are likely to be glum.

The data scientists at Facebook set out to learn if text-based, nonverbal/non-face-to-face interactions had similar effects.  They asked: Do emotions remain contagious within digitally mediated settings? They worked to answer this question experimentally by manipulating the emotional tenor of users’ News Feeds, and recording the results.

Public reaction was such that many expressed dismay that Facebook would 1) collect their data without asking and 2) manipulate their emotions.

I’m going to leave aside the ethics of Facebook’s data collection. It hits on an important but blurry issue of informed consent in light of Terms of Use agreements, and deserves a post all its own. Instead, I focus on the emotional manipulation, arguing that Facebook was already manipulating your emotions, and likely in ways far more effectual than algorithmically altering the emotional tenor of your News Feed. more...

As you may have heard, “Yo” is a social networking app has distilled social networking into its most elemental form. Basically, you can’t share any content on Yo–no words, no images, no links. All you can do is exchange the same monosyllabic ping, “yo.”

It’s so simple, many find it laughable: what, indeed, is the point? Well, it’s certainly not to communicate content. In the same way that a Yves Klein painting is about the medium of paint (specifically, color), Yo is about social networking. If “content” is traditionally a means to the end of clicks, Yo cuts out this middleman. It’s more efficient than traditional social networking–no content to waste our time, or for a company to waste money producing, transmitting, and supporting.

Yo isn’t a novelty. It’s the quintessence of communicative capitalism. As Jodi Dean defines it, “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics”–for example, as the deliberative exchanges among citizens [1]–“are the basic elements of capitalist production” (56). Put differently, communicative exchanges have no “use” value–their message doesn’t matter; rather, they’re just empty exchange value like any other commodity. Thus,

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Every time I see someone make the argument that representation in fiction isn’t a big issue, and that advocating for diversity is just a waste of time because audiences can identify with anyone, and anyway, trying to include a wide range of backgrounds is just tokenism, I have the overwhelming urge to grab them by the shoulders and hiss, “If you really believe that representation doesn’t matter, then why the fuck are you threatened by it? If not seeing yourself depicted in stories has no negative psychological impact – if the breakdown of who we see on screen has no bearing on wider social issues – then what would it matter if nine stories out of ten were suddenly all about queer brown women? – Foz Meadows

So about my last post and related kerfuffle.

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On Monday I posed two related questions:  “Are wearables like Glass relegated to the same fate as Bluetooth earpieces and the Discman, or can they be saved?  Is the entire category irredeemable or have we yet to see the winning execution?” I concluded that most of the problems have to do with the particular executions we’ve seen to date, but it’s also very possible that the very idea of the wearable is predicated on the digital dualist notion that interacting with a smartphone is inherently disruptive to a productive/happy/authentic lifestyle. Lot’s of devices are pitched as “getting out of the way” and only providing a little bit of information that is context specific and quickly (not to mention discreetly) displayed to the user. I contended that the motivation to make devices “invisible” can bring about some unintended consequences; mainly that early adopters experience the exact opposite reaction. Everyone pays attention to your face computer and nothing is getting out of the way at all. more...

Earlier this week, I became aware of an art piece called “x.pose,” which is intended to make a statement about the data exhaust we generate and what large companies may or may not be doing with it. x.pose is a collaboration between two artists, and the first paragraph in a description of it on one of their websites reads as follows:

x.pose is a wearable data-driven sculpture that exposes a person’s skin as a real-time reflection of the data that the wearer is producing. In the physical realm we can deliberately control which portions our bodies are exposed to the world by covering it with clothing. In the digital realm, we have much less control of what personal aspects we share with the services that connect us. In the digital realm we are naked and vulnerable.

First, yes: digital dualism. I’ll set that point aside and come back to it later. Right now, I want to focus in on that first sentence, particularly where it says “exposes a person’s skin.” A person—sure, that could be any of us.[i] The sculpture exposes “skin” belonging to a person, a wearer. Data exposure is like bodily exposure. That’s not gendered, right?

Actually, it’s quite gendered. While x.pose draws attention to some important issues, it also starts from a number of problematic assumptions and reinforces some of the most sexist and patriarchal strains of privacy critique. Just in case you had any doubt, here’s what the piece looks like:

Newsflash: We can’t all wear that.

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Women’s expertise is constantly undermined and trivialized. For example, holding pop music in low regard (thinking it can only ever be frivolous, ideologically overdetermined, or sold-out) is one way of trivializing a field in which women, especially black women, have made hugely significant artistic, cultural, and economic impacts.

Women academics, writers, and journalists also face constant challenges to their expertise. There’s the calling someone “Mrs.” instead of “Dr.” microaggression. There’s mistaking someone for staff, or, as is often the case with me, for a student. This latter example is, in my experience, common to face-to-face interactions: every time I can remember having to respond to the “What are you writing your dissertation on?” or “Will you get a Ph.D. after your MA?” question with “Umm, I have tenure” has been IRL.

Tressie Cottom’s new piece “Who The Fuck Do You Think You Are? Academic Engagement, Microcelebrity, and Digital Sociology from the Far Left of the Matrix of Domination” breaks down the different ways white women and women of color are discredited when they engage digital publics. Or, put differently, Cottom shows some of the different ways that women’s expertise, epistemic credence, and legitimacy are challenged on digital media.

The tl;dr of Cottom’s report is: White women are sexually harassed. Women of color are treated as frauds. She writes, “whereas white women tend to report a significant number of rape threats when they write publicly, I find that the overwhelming threat issued in my comment section and inbox are threats to my academic credibility.” Rape threats tell white women they’re not allowed to be in academic spaces as experts; rape is about power, and these threats are a way of telling women they’ve overstepped their power. Fraud threats tell WOC that they’re not legitimately allowed to know things, or to affiliate themselves with “legit” academic institutions. This is different than pushing back against someone who oversteps her power; these fraud threats assume that WOC have no “power” (knowledge, affiliation) to assert in the first place.

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