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  • Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Michael Miller — Seeing Ourselves, Loving Our Captors: Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    a review of Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press Forerunners Series, 2016)

    by Michael Miller

    ~

    All existence is Beta, basically. A ceaseless codependent improvement unto death, but then death is not even the end. Nothing will be finalized. There is no end, no closure. The search will outlive us forever

    — Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

    Being a (in)human is to be a beta tester

    — Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    Too many people have access to your state of mind

    — Renata Adler, Speedboat

    Whenever I read through Vilém Flusser’s vast body of work and encounter, in print no less, one of the core concepts of his thought—which is that “human communication is unnatural” (2002, 5)––I find it nearly impossible to shake the feeling that the late Czech-Brazilian thinker must have derived some kind of preternatural pleasure from insisting on the ironic gesture’s repetition. Flusser’s rather grim view that “there is no possible form of communication that can communicate concrete experience to others” (2016, 23) leads him to declare that the intersubjective dimension of communication implies inevitably the existence of a society which is, in his eyes, itself an unnatural institution. One can find all over in Flusser’s work traces of his life-long attempt to think through the full philosophical implications of European nihilism, and evidence of this intellectual engagement can be readily found in his theories of communication.

    One of Flusser’s key ideas that draws me in is his notion that human communication affords us the ability to “forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to solitary confinement and death: the world of ‘nature’” (2002, 4). In order to help stave off the inexorable tide of nature’s muted nothingness, Flusser suggests that humans communicate by storing memories, externalized thoughts whose eventual transmission binds two or more people into a system of meaning. Only when an intersubjective system of communication like writing or speech is established between people does the purpose of our enduring commitment to communication become clear: we communicate in order “to become immortal within others” (2016, 31). Flusser’s playful positing of the ironic paradox inherent in the improbability of communication—that communication is unnatural to the human but it is also “so incredibly rich despite its limitations” (26)––enacts its own impossibility. In a representatively ironic sense, Flusser’s point is that all we are able to fully understand is our inability to understand fully.

    As Flusser’s theory of communication can be viewed as his response to the twentieth-century’s shifting technical-medial milieu, his ideas about communication and technics eventually led him to conclude that “the original intention of producing the apparatus, namely, to serve the interests of freedom, has turned on itself…In a way, the terms human and apparatus are reversed, and human beings operate as a function of the apparatus. A man gives an apparatus instructions that the apparatus has instructed him to give” (2011,73).[1] Flusser’s skeptical perspective toward the alleged affordances of human mastery over technology is most assuredly not the view that Apple or Google would prefer you harbor (not-so-secretly). Any cursory glance at Wired or the technology blog at Insider Higher Ed, to pick two long-hanging examples, would yield a radically different perspective than the one Flusser puts forth in his work. In fact, Flusser writes, “objects meant to be media may obstruct communication” (2016, 45). If media objects like the technical apparatuses of today actually obstruct communication, then why are we so often led to believe that they facilitate it? And to shift registers just slightly, if everything is said to be an object of some kind—even technical apparatuses––then cannot one be permitted to claim daily communion with all kinds of objects? What happens when an object—and an object as obsolete as a book, no less—speaks to us? Will we still heed its call?

    ***

    Speaking in its expanded capacity as neither narrator nor focalized character, the book as literary object addresses us in a direct and antagonistic fashion in the opening line to Joshua Cohen’s 2015 novel Book of Numbers. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands” (5), the book-object warns. As Cohen’s narrative tells the story of a struggling writer named Joshua Cohen (whose backstory corresponds mostly to the historical-biographical author Joshua Cohen) who is contracted to ghostwrite the memoir of another Joshua Cohen (who is the CEO of a massive Google-type company named Tetration), the novel’s middle section provides an “unedited” transcript of the conversation between the two Cohens in which the CEO recounts his upbringing and tremendous business success in and around the Bay Area from the late 1970s up to 2013 of the narrative’s present. The novel’s Silicon Valley setting, nominal and characterological doubling, and structural narrative coupling of the two Cohens’ lives makes it all but impossible to distinguish the personal histories of Cohen-the-CEO and Cohen-the-narrator from the cultural history of the development of personal computing and networked information technologies. The history of one Joshua Cohen––or all Joshua Cohens––is indistinguishable from the history of intrusive computational/digital media. “I had access to stuff I shouldn’t have had access to, but then Principal shouldn’t have had such access to me—cameras, mics,” Cohen-the-narrator laments. In other words, as Cohen-the-narrator ghostwrites another Cohen’s memoir within the context of the broad history of personal computing and the emergence of algorithmic governance and surveillance, the novel invites us to consider how the history of an individual––or every individual, it does not really matter––is also nothing more or anything less than the surveilled history of its data usage, which is always written by someone or something else, the ever-present Not-Me (who just might have the same name as me). The Self is nothing but a networked repository of information to be mined in the future.

    While the novel’s opening line addresses its hypothetical reader directly, its relatively benign warning fixes reader and text in a relation of rancor. The object speaks![2] And yet tech-savvy twenty-first century readers are not the only ones who seem to be fed up with books; books too are fed up with us, and perhaps rightly so. In an age when objects are said to speak vibrantly and withdraw infinitely; processes like human cognition are considered to be operative in complex technical-computational systems; and when the only excuse to preserve the category of “subjective experience” we are able to muster is that it affords us the ability “to grasp how networks technically distribute and disperse agency,” it would seem at first glance that the second-person addressee of the novel’s opening line would intuitively have to be a reading, thinking subject.[3] Yet this is the very same reading subject who has been urged by Cohen’s novel to politely “fuck off” if he or she has chosen to read the text on a screen. And though the text does not completely dismiss its readers who still prefer “paper of pulp, covers of board and cloth” (5), a slight change of preposition in its title points exactly to what the book fears most of all: Book as Numbers. The book-object speaks, but only to offer an ominous admonition: neither the book nor its readers ought to be reducible to computable numbers.

    The transduction of literary language into digital bits eliminates the need for a phenomenological, reading subject, and it suggests too that literature––or even just language in a general sense––and humans in particular are ontologically reducible to data objects that can be “read” and subsequently “interpreted” by computational algorithms. As Cohen’s novel collapses the distinction between author, narrator, character, and medium, its narrator observes that “the only record of my one life would be this record of another’s” (9). But in this instance, the record of one’s (or another’s) life is merely the history of how personal computational technologies have effaced the phenomenological subject. How have we arrived at the theoretically permissible premise that “People matter, but they don’t occupy a privileged subject position distinct from everything else in the world” (Huehls 20)? How might the “turn toward ontology” in theory/philosophy be viewed as contributing to our present condition?

    * **

    Mark Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (2016) provides a brief, yet stylistically ironic and incisive interrogation into how recent iterations of post- or inhumanist theory have found a strange bedfellow in the rhetorical boosterism that accompanies the alleged affordances of digital technologies and big data. Despite the differences between these two seemingly unrelated discourses, they both share a particularly critical or diminished conception of the anthro- in “anthropocentrism” that borrows liberally from the postulates of the “ontological turn” in theory/philosophy (Rosenberg n.p.). While the parallels between these discourses are not made explicit in Jarzombek’s book, Digital Stockholm Syndrome asks us to consider how a shared commitment to an ontologically diminished view of “the human” that galvanizes both technological determinism’s anti-humanism and post- or inhumanist theory has found its common expression in recent philosophies of ontology. In other words, the problem Digital Stockholm Syndrome takes up is this: what kind of theory of ontology, Being, and to a lesser extent, subjectivity, appeals equally to contemporary philosophers and Silicon Valley tech-gurus? Jarzombek gestures toward such an inquiry early on: “What is this new ontology?” he asks, and “What were the historical situations that produced it? And how do we adjust to the realities of the new Self?” (x).

    A curious set of related philosophical commitments united by their efforts to “de-center” and occasionally even eject “anthropocentrism” from the critical conversation constitute some of the realities swirling around Jarzombek’s “new Self.”[4] Digital Stockholm Syndrome provocatively locates the conceptual legibility of these philosophical realities squarely within an explicitly algorithmic-computational historical milieu. By inviting such a comparison, Jarzombek’s book encourages us to contemplate how contemporary ontological thought might mediate our understanding of the historical and philosophical parallels that bind the tradition of in humanist philosophical thinking and the rhetoric of twenty-first century digital media.[5]

    In much the same way that Alexander Galloway has argued for a conceptual confluence that exceeds the contingencies of coincidence between “the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism” (347), Digital Stockholm Syndrome argues similarly that today’s world is “designed from the micro/molecular level to fuse the algorithmic with the ontological” (italics in original, x).[6] We now understand Being as the informatic/algorithmic byproduct of what ubiquitous computational technologies have gathered and subsequently fed back to us. Our personal histories––or simply the records of our data use (and its subsequent use of us)––comprise what Jarzombek calls our “ontic exhaust…or what data experts call our data exhaust…[which] is meticulously scrutinized, packaged, formatted, processed, sold, and resold to come back to us in the form of entertainment, social media, apps, health insurance, clickbait, data contracts, and the like” (x).

    The empty second-person pronoun is placed on equal ontological footing with, and perhaps even defined by, its credit score, medical records, 4G data usage, Facebook likes, and threefold of its Tweets. “The purpose of these ‘devices,’” Jarzombek writes, “is to produce, magnify, and expose our ontic exhaust” (25). We give our ontic exhaust away for free every time we log into Facebook because it, in return, feeds back to us the only sense of “self” we are able to identify as “me.”[7] If “who we are cannot be traced from the human side of the equation, much less than the analytic side.‘I’ am untraceable” (31), then why do techno-determinists and contemporary oracles of ontology operate otherwise? What accounts for their shared commitment to formalizing ontology? Why must the Self be tracked and accounted for like a map or a ledger?

    As this “new Self,” which Jarzombek calls the “Being-Global” (2), travels around the world and checks its bank statement in Paris or tags a photo of a Facebook friend in Berlin while sitting in a cafe in Amsterdam, it leaks ontic exhaust everywhere it goes. While the hoovering up of ontic exhaust by GPS and commercial satellites “make[s] us global,” it also inadvertently redefines Being as a question of “positioning/depositioning” (1). For Jarzombek, the question of today’s ontology is not so much a matter of asking “what exists?” but of asking “where is it and how can it be found?” Instead of the human who attempts to locate and understand Being, now Being finds us, but only as long as we allow ourselves to be located.

    Today’s ontological thinking, Jarzombek points out, is not really interested in asking questions about Being––it is too “anthropocentric.”[8] Ontology in the twenty-first century attempts to locate Being by gathering data, keeping track, tracking changes, taking inventory, making lists, listing litanies, crunching the numbers, and searching the database. “Can I search for it on Google?” is now the most important question for ontological thought in the twenty-first century.

    Ontological thinking––which today means ontological accounting, or finding ways to account for the ontologically actuarial––is today’s philosophical equivalent to a best practices for data management, except there is no difference between one’s data and one’s Self. Nonetheless, any ontological difference that might have once stubbornly separated you from data about you no longer applies. Digital Stockholm Syndrome identifies this shift with the formulation: “From ontology to trackology” (71).[9] The philosophical shift that has allowed data about the Self to become the ontological equivalent to the Self emerges out of what Jarzombek calls an “animated ontology.”

    In this “animated ontology,” subject position and object position are indistinguishable…The entire system of humanity is microprocessed through the grid of sequestered empiricism” (31, 29). Jarzombek is careful to distinguish his “animated ontology” from the recently rebooted romanticisms which merely turn their objects into vibrant subjects. He notes that “the irony is that whereas the subject (the ‘I’) remains relatively stable in its ability to self-affirm (the lingering by-product of the psychologizing of the modern Self), objectivity (as in the social sciences) collapses into the illusions produced by the global cyclone of the informatic industry” (28).”[10] By devising tricky new ways to flatten ontology (all of which are made via po-faced linguistic fiat), “the human and its (dis/re-)embodied computational signifiers are on equal footing”(32). I do not define my data, but my data define me.

    ***

    Digital Stockholm Syndrome asserts that what exists in today’s ontological systems––systems both philosophical and computational––is what can be tracked and stored as data. Jarzombek sums up our situation with another pithy formulation: “algorithmic modeling + global positioning + human scaling +computational speed=data geopolitics” (12). While the universalization of tracking technologies defines the “global” in Jarzombek’s Being-Global, it also provides us with another way to understand the humanities’ enthusiasm for GIS and other digital mapping platforms as institutional-disciplinary expressions of a “bio-chemo-techno-spiritual-corporate environment that feeds the Human its sense-of-Self” (5).

    Mark Jarzombek, Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age

    One wonders if the incessant cultural and political reminders regarding the humanities’ waning relevance have moved humanists to reconsider the very basic intellectual terms of their broad disciplinary pursuits. How come it is humanities scholars who are in some cases most visibly leading the charge to overturn many decades of humanist thought? Has the internalization of this depleted conception of the human reshaped the basic premises of humanities scholarship, Digital Stockholm Syndrome wonders? What would it even mean to pursue a “humanities” purged of “the human?” And is it fair to wonder if this impoverished image of humanity has trickled down into the formation of new (sub)disciplines?”[11]

    In a late chapter titled “Onto-Paranoia,” Jarzombek finally arrives at a working definition of Digital Stockholm Syndrome: data visualization. For Jarzombek, data-visualization “has been devised by the architects of the digital world” to ease the existential torture—or “onto-torture”—that is produced by Security Threats (59). Security threats are threatening because they remind us that “security is there to obscure the fact that whole purpose is to produce insecurity” (59). When a system fails, or when a problem occurs, we need to be conscious of the fact that the system has not really failed; “it means that the system is working” (61).[12] The Social, the Other, the Not-Me—these are all variations of the same security threat, which is just another way of defining “indeterminacy” (66). So if everything is working the way it should, we rarely consider the full implications of indeterminacy—both technical and philosophical—because to do so might make us paranoid, or worse: we would have to recognize ourselves as (in)human subjects.

    Data-visualizations, however, provide a soothing salve which we can (self-)apply in order to ease the pain of our “onto-torture.” Visualizing data and creating maps of our data use provide us with a useful and also pleasurable tool with which we locate ourselves in the era of “post-ontology.”[13] “We experiment with and develop data visualization and collection tools that allow us to highlight urban phenomena. Our methods borrow from the traditions of science and design by using spatial analytics to expose patterns and communicating those results, through design, to new audiences,” we are told by one data-visualization project (http://civicdatadesignlab.org/).  As we affirm our existence every time we travel around the globe and self-map our location, we silently make our geo-data available for those who care to sift through it and turn it into art or profit.

    “It is a paradox that our self-aestheticizing performance as subjects…feeds into our ever more precise (self-)identification as knowable and predictable (in)human-digital objects,” Jarzombek writes. Yet we ought not to spend too much time contemplating the historical and philosophical complexities that have helped create this paradoxical situation. Perhaps it is best we do not reach the conclusion that mapping the Self as an object on digital platforms increases the creeping unease that arises from the realization that we are mappable, hackable, predictable, digital objects––that our data are us. We could, instead, celebrate how our data (which we are and which is us) is helping to change the world. “’Big data’ will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” the same data visualization project announces on its website’s homepage.

    While it is true that I may be a little paranoid, I have finally rested easy after having read Digital Stockholm Syndrome because I now know that my data/I are going to good use.[14] Like me, maybe you find comfort in knowing that your existence is nothing more than a few pixels in someone else’s data visualization.

    _____

    Michael Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Rice University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in symplokē and the Journal of Film and Video.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] I am reminded of a similar argument advanced by Tung-Hui Hu in his A Prehistory of the Cloud (2016). Encapsulating Flusser’s spirit of healthy skepticism toward technical apparatuses, the situation that both Flusser and Hu fear is one in which “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation” (xixx).

    [2] It is not my aim to wade explicitly into discussions regarding “object-oriented ontology” or other related philosophical developments. For the purposes of this essay, however, Andrew Cole’s critique of OOO as a “new occasionalism” will be useful. “’New occasionalism,’” Cole writes, “is the idea that when we speak of things, we put them into contact with one another and ourselves” (112). In other words, the speaking of objects makes them objectively real, though this is only possible when everything is considered to be an object. The question, though, is not about what is or is not an object, but is rather what it means to be. For related arguments regarding the relation between OOO/speculative realism/new materialism and mysticism, see Sheldon (2016), Altieri (2016), Wolfendale (2014), O’Gorman (2013), and to a lesser extent Colebrook (2013).

    [3] For the full set of references here, see Bennett (2010), Hayles (2014 and 2016), and Hansen (2015).

    [4] While I cede that no thinker of “post-humanism” worth her philosophical salt would admit the possibility or even desirability of purging the sins of “correlationism” from critical thought all together, I cannot help but view such occasional posturing with a skeptical eye. For example, I find convincing Barbara Herrnstein-Smith’s recent essay “Scientizing the Humanities: Shifts, Negotiations, Collisions,” in which she compares the drive in contemporary critical theory to displace “the human” from humanistic inquiry to the impossible and equally incomprehensible task of overcoming the “‘astro’-centrism of astronomy or the biocentrism of biology” (359).

    [5] In “Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Julian Murphet identifies four interrelated strands of post- or inhumanist thought that combine a kind of metaphysical speculation with a full-blown demolition of traditional ontology’s conceptual foundations. They are: “(1) cosmic nihilism, (2) molecular bio-plasticity, (3) technical accelerationism, and (4) animality. These sometimes overlapping trends are severally engaged in the mortification of humankind’s stubborn pretensions to mastery over the domain of the intelligible and the knowable in an era of sentient machines, routine genetic modification, looming ecological disaster, and irrefutable evidence that we share 99 percent of our biological information with chimpanzees” (653).

    [6] The full quotation from Galloway’s essay reads: “Why, within the current renaissance of research in continental philosophy, is there a coincidence between the structure of ontological systems and the structure of the most highly evolved technologies of post-Fordist capitalism? [….] Why, in short, is there a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business?” (347). Digital Stockholm Syndrome begins by accepting Galloway’s provocations as descriptive instead of speculative. We do not necessarily wonder in 2017 if “there is a coincidence between today’s ontologies and the software of big business”; we now wonder instead how such a confluence came to be.

    [7] Wendy Hui Kyun Chun makes a similar point in her 2016 monograph Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. She writes, “If users now ‘curate’ their lives, it is because their bodies have become archives” (x-xi). While there is not ample space here to discuss the  full theoretical implications of her book, Chun’s discussion of the inherently gendered dimension to confession, self-curation as self-exposition, and online privacy as something that only the unexposed deserve (hence the need for preemptive confession and self-exposition on the internet) in digital/social media networks is tremendously relevant to Jarzombek’s Digital Stockholm Syndrome, as both texts consider the Self as a set of mutable and “marketable/governable/hackable categories” (Jarzombek 26) that are collected without our knowledge and subsequently fed back to the data/media user in the form of its own packaged and unique identity. For recent similar variations of this argument, see Simanowski (2017) and McNeill (2012).

    I also think Chun’s book offers a helpful tool for thinking through recent confessional memoirs or instances of “auto-theory” (fictionalized or not) like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013), and perhaps to a lesser degree Tao Lin’s Richard Yates (2010), Taipei (2013), Natasha Stagg’s Surveys, and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). The extent to which these texts’ varied formal-aesthetic techniques can be said to be motivated by political aims is very much up for debate, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that many of them revel in the reveal. That is to say, via confession or self-exposition, many of these novels enact the allegedly performative subversion of political power by documenting their protagonists’ and/or narrators’ certain social/political acts of transgression. Chun notes, however, that this strategy of self-revealing performs “resistance as a form of showing off and scandalizing, which thrives off moral outrage. This resistance also mimics power by out-spying, monitoring, watching, and bringing to light, that is, doxing” (151). The term “autotheory,” which was has been applied to Nelson’s The Argonauts in particular, takes on a very different meaning in this context. “Autotheory” can be considered as a theory of the self, or a self-theorization, or perhaps even the idea that personal experience is itself a kind of theory might apply here, too. I wonder, though, how its meaning would change if the prefix “auto” was understood within a media-theoretical framework not as “self” but as “automation.” “Autotheory” becomes, then, an automatization of theory or theoretical thinking, but also a theoretical automatization; or more to the point: what if “autotheory” describes instead a theorization of the Self or experience wherein “the self” is only legible as the product of automated computational-algorithmic processes?

    [8] Echoing the critiques of “correlationism” or “anthropocentrism” or what have you, Jarzombek declares that “The age of anthrocentrism is over” (32).

    [9] Whatever notion of (self)identity the Self might find to be most palatable today, Jarzombek argues, is inevitably mediated via global satellites. “The intermediaries are the satellites hovering above the planet. They are what make us global–what make me global” (1), and as such, they represent the “civilianization” of military technologies (4). What I am trying to suggest is that the concepts and categories of self-identity we work with today are derived from the informatic feedback we receive from long-standing military technologies.

    [10] Here Jarzombek seems to be suggesting that the “object” in the “objectivity” of “the social sciences” has been carelessly conflated with the “object” in “object-oriented” philosophy. The prioritization of all things “objective” in both philosophy and science has inadvertently produced this semantic and conceptual slippage. Data objects about the Self exist, and thus by existing, they determine what is objective about the Self. In this new formulation, what is objective about the Self or subject, in other words, is what can be verified as information about the self. In Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (2014), Ronald Day argues that these global tracking technologies supplant traditional ontology’s “ideas or concepts of our human manner of being” and have in the process “subsume[d] and subvert[ed] the former roles of personal judgment and critique in personal and social beings and politics” (1). While such technologies might be said to obliterate “traditional” notions of subjectivity, judgment, and critique, Day demonstrates how this simultaneous feeding-forward and feeding back of data-about-the-Self represents the return of autoaffection, though in his formulation self-presence is defined as information or data-about-the-self whose authenticity is produced when it is fact-checked against a biographical database (3)—self-presence is a presencing of data-about-the-Self. This is all to say that the Self’s informational “aboutness”–its representation in and as data–comes to stand in for the Self’s identity, which can only be comprehended as “authentic” in its limited metaphysical capacity as a general informatic or documented “aboutness.”

    [11] Flusser is again instructive on this point, albeit in his own idiosyncratic way­­. Drawing attention to the strange unnatural plurality in the term “humanities,” he writes, “The American term humanities appropriately describes the essence of these disciplines. It underscores that the human being is an unnatural animal” (2002, 3). The plurality of “humanities,” as opposed to the singular “humanity,” constitutes for Flusser a disciplinary admission that not only the category of “the human” is unnatural, but that the study of such an unnatural thing is itself unnatural, as well. I think it is also worth pointing out that in the context of Flusser’s observation, we might begin to situate the rise of “the supplemental humanities” as an attempt to redefine the value of a humanities education. The spatial humanities, the energy humanities, medical humanities, the digital humanities, etc.—it is not difficult to see how these disciplinary off-shoots consider themselves as supplements to whatever it is they think “the humanities” are up to; regardless, their institutional injection into traditional humanistic discourse will undoubtedly improve both(sub)disciplines, with the tacit acknowledgment being that the latter has just a little more to gain from the former in terms of skills, technical know-how, and data management. Many thanks to Aaron Jaffe for bringing this point to my attention.

    [12] In his essay “Algorithmic Catastrophe—The Revenge of Contingency,” Yuk Hui notes that “the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle” (125). Drawing from the work of Bernard Stiegler, Hui shows how the pharmacological dimension of “technics, which aims to overcome contingency, also generates accidents” (127). And so “as the anticipation of catastrophe becomes a design principle…it no longer plays the role it did with the laws of nature” (132). Simply put, by placing algorithmic catastrophe on par with a failure of reason qua the operations of mathematics, Hui demonstrates how “algorithms are open to contingency” only insofar as “contingency is equivalent to a causality, which can be logically and technically deduced” (136). To take Jarzombek’s example of the failing computer or what have you, while the blue screen of death might be understood to represent the faithful execution of its programmed commands, we should also keep in mind that the obverse of Jarzombek’s scenario would force us to come to grips with how the philosophical implications of the “shit happens” logic that underpins contingency-as-(absent) causality “accompanies and normalizes speculative aesthetics” (139).

    [13] I am reminded here of one of the six theses from the manifesto “What would a floating sheep map?,” jointly written by the Floating Sheep Collective, which is a cohort of geography professors. The fifth thesis reads: “Map or be mapped. But not everything can (or should) be mapped.” The Floating Sheep Collective raises in this section crucially important questions regarding ownership of data with regard to marginalized communities. Because it is not always clear when to map and when not to map, they decide that “with mapping squarely at the center of power struggles, perhaps it’s better that not everything be mapped.” If mapping technologies operate as ontological radars–the Self’s data points help point the Self towards its own ontological location in and as data—then it is fair to say that such operations are only philosophically coherent when they are understood to be framed within the parameters outlined by recent iterations of ontological thinking and its concomitant theoretical deflation of the rich conceptual make-up that constitutes the “the human.” You can map the human’s data points, but only insofar as you buy into the idea that points of data map the human. See http://manifesto.floatingsheep.org/.

    [14] “Mind/paranoia: they are the same word!”(Jarzombek 71).

    _____

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  • Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

    Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

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    Petra Dierkes-Thrun interviews Susan Stryker, leader of an unprecedented initiative in transgender studies at the University of Arizona, and one of two founding co-editors of the new journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (together with Paisley Currah). Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. The author or editor of numerous books and articles on transgender and queer topics for popular and scholarly audiences alike, she won an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a Lambda Literary Award for The Transgender Studies Reader, and the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for The Transgender Studies Reader 2.
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    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert.
    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert. Photo by Paisley Currah.

     

    DIERKES-THRUN:  The University of Arizona recently initiated an unprecedented cluster hire in transgender studies and is actively working towards a graduate degree program in transgender studies. Can you tell us a bit more about the history and the thinking behind this strong, coordinated move at your institution?

    STRYKER: After the University of Arizona (UA) recruited me away from my previous job to direct the Institute for LGBT Studies in 2011, I came in saying that I wanted to put equal emphasis on the “T” in that acronym, and they were supportive of that. But none of us anticipated that the T was going to become the tail that wagged the dog, so to speak. It would not have happened had I not been courted by another, much more prestigious university during my second year on the job. UA asked what it would take to retain me, and I said I wanted to do something unprecedented, something I would not be able to do at that other university, something that would transform my field, while also putting UA on the map in a bold new way. I said I wanted to launch a transgender studies initiative, which represents my vision of the field’s need to grow. The institution said yes to what I proposed, and to the upper administration’s credit, they saw an opportunity in what I pitched.

    The truly unprecedented institutional commitment came in the form of strategic hiring support for a transgender studies faculty cluster. As UA has been quick to point out to conservative critics of this initiative, no new funds were identified to create these faculty lines—they came from existing pools of discretionary funds, and represent a shifting towards emerging areas of study of faculty lines freed up by retirement or resignation. That said, no university anywhere in the world has ever conducted a faculty cluster hire in transgender studies. Four lines were made available: two in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and two in colleges elsewhere in the University. We wound up filling three of those positions last year—hiring in medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and religious studies—and are in negotiations about where to place the remaining line.

    UA has a strong institutional culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as a good track record of supporting LGBT issues, so this fit right in. They understand that transgender issues have a lot of cultural saliency at the moment, and that studying the rapid shifts in contemporary gender systems, including the emergence of historically new forms of gender expression, particularly in the context of the biomedical technologization of “life itself,” is a legitimate field of study and research. Pragmatically, they saw the initiative as a way to attract and retain innovative and diverse faculty members, to bring in out-of-state tuition dollars, to compete for external research grants, and to push back against the popular misconception that Arizona is only a politically reactionary place. From the institution’s perspective, there was no advocacy agenda at work here, just an opportunity to increase the bottom line by building on existing faculty and research strengths.

    The lowest-hanging fruit, which can be accomplished with relatively little bureaucracy, is a graduate concentration, minor, or designated emphasis in transgender studies, and there is definitely support for that. We hope to have that in place within a year. It is also possible that a currently existing MA program in Gender and Women’s Studies could be adapted relatively easily to accommodate a transgender studies emphasis, but that involves a lot of inside-the-ballpark negotiation with current GWS faculty. Actually creating a new, stand-alone graduate program at the state’s land grant university would require approval by the Arizona Board of Regents, and ultimately by the Governor’s Office, so that will be a longer and tougher row to hoe.

    The final element of the initiative is approval to pursue establishing a new research enterprise called the “Center for Critical Studies of the Body.” The rationale here was to provide a non-identitarian rubric that could bring transgender studies into dialog with other interdisciplinary fields, such as the study of disability, trauma, sports, medical humanities, etc. No funds were provided for this, just a green light for starting the process of cobbling a center together.

    Of course, it’s vital to ask the question why, in an era when the teaching of Chicano/a studies is literally being outlawed in Arizona public schools, when xenophobic attitudes inform the state’s border politics, attention to transgender identities and practices can appear palatable. How does institutional investment in transgender studies at this particular historical juncture play into a deep logic of “managing difference” through expert knowledges, or get positioned as less threatening than calls for racial and economic justice? As the person heading up this initiative, I want to be attentive to ways I can use trans studies to advance other concerns that currently have a harder time getting traction in Arizona. I think my deepest challenge in trying to spearhead this initiative lies in resisting the ways that transgender studies can be co-opted for neoliberal uses that fall short of its radical transformative potential.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The University of Arizona also provided financial and logistical support for the establishment of a new journal of record for the field of transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press in 2014, with you and Paisley Currah (Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as founding co-editors. How did that come about?

    STRYKER: Launching this journal had been a long-term project of mine and Paisley’s and was already well underway before the opportunity to launch the broader transgender studies initiative came up, but it nevertheless constitutes an important element of what has become the bigger project. UA has significantly supported the establishment of  TSQ by contributing about one-third of the start-up costs. Those funds were cobbled together from a lot of different institutional sources, including the Provost’s Office, the office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies.

    DIERKES-THRUN: For our readers who are just now becoming acquainted with transgender studies as a diverse intellectual and academic field, how would you summarize its most important constants and changes over the past two decades? What are some important subareas and affiliated fields for transgender studies?

    STRYKER: I’d recommend taking a look at the tables of contents in the two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader. The first volume, from 2006, offers a genealogy of field formation, highlighting historical ties to scientific sexology, feminism, and poststructuralist theory.

    It includes work from the “transgender moment” of the early 1990s that changed the conversation on trans issues and tackles many of the topics that were of interest in the field’s first decade—questions of self-representation, diversity within trans communities, the increasing visibility of trans-masculinities. The second volume, from 2013, showcases the rapid evolution of the field in the 21st century, which is self-consciously moving in strongly transnational directions away from the Anglophone North American biases of the field’s first decade. There has been much more attention paid to the relationship between transgender issues and other structural forms of inequality and injustice, and, post 9/11, to questions about borders, surveillance, and security—and the ways that non-conventionally gendered bodies experience heightened scrutiny and limitations on movement, and can be seen as posing a terroristic threat to the body politic. There are increasing affinities with posthumanist work, as well as with animal studies, critical life studies, and the so-called “new materialism.” The first several issues of TSQ suggest something of current directions in the field: they address decolonization, cultural production, population studies, transanimalities, higher education studies, archives, transfeminism, political economy, sex classification, translation, surgery, sinophone studies, and psychoanalytic theory.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Can you say something about the trans- and international context of transgender studies today? What are the most important challenges there and why should we be thinking about them?

    STRYKER: The field has indeed been moving in a strongly transnational direction for more than a decade. I was particularly pleased that The Transgender Studies Reader 2 was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology/American Anthropological Association, precisely because the field of transgender studies challenges us to think anew about how we understand sex/gender/identity cross-culturally. I think one of the biggest intellectual challenges has to do with fully acknowledging that some of the fundamental categories that we use to understand “human being”—like man and woman—are not ontologically given, but rather are themselves historically and cultural variable and contingent. Translation is also a huge problem—how do we facilitate the exchange of knowledge across language and culture, when the very categories we use to organize and recognize our own being and that of others can be so deeply incommensurable?

    DIERKES-THRUN: In the introduction to the inaugural issue of TSQ, the editors write, “Transgender studies promises to make a significant intellectual and political intervention into contemporary knowledge production in much the same manner that queer theory did twenty years ago.” What are some of the most needed intellectual and political interventions that you anticipate transgender studies can and will make?

    TSQ coverSTRYKER: First and foremost, I see it creating more space for critical conversations that involve transgender speakers. Bringing trans studies into the academy is one way of bringing more trans people into the academy. Of course I’m not arguing that trans studies is something that on trans people can participate in. Far from it—anybody can develop an expertise in this area, or feel that they have some sort of stake in it. But just as disability activists said in the 70s and 80, “nothing about us without us.” What’s most significant is creating an opportunity for the privileged and powerful kinds of knowledge production that takes place in the academy (about trans topics or any other area that involves people) to be not just objectifying knowledge, what we might call “knowledge of,” but also “knowledge with,” knowledge that emerges from a dialog that includes trans people who bring an additional kind of experiential or embodied knowledge along with their formal, expert knowledges. It’s the same rationale for any kind of diversity hiring initiative. People have different kinds of “situated knowledges” that derive from how they live their bodily differences in the world. It’s important to have people in critical conversations who come from different perspectives based on race/ethnicity, gender, ability, national origin, first languages, etc. Transgender represents a different kind of difference that offers a novel perspective on how gender systems, and therefore society, work.

    DIERKES-THRUN: You also say, in the same TSQ introduction, that transgender studies “offers fertile ground for conversations about what the posthuman might practically entail (as well as what, historically, it has already been).” The posthuman is a topic of interest to many of our readers. Could you map out for us what specific or broader contributions transgender studies can make to past and future discussions of the posthuman?

    STRYKER: The first thing we say of a new child is “It’s a girl” or It’s a boy.” Through the operation of language, we move a body across the line that separates mere biological organism from human community, transforming the status of a nonhuman “it” into a person through the conferral of a gender status. It has been very difficult to think of the human without thinking of it through the binary gender schema. I think a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people face derives from a fundamental inability on the part of others to see us as fully human because we are considered improperly gendered, and thus lower on the animacy hierarchy, therefore closer to death and inanimacy, therefore more expendable and less valuable than humans. A transgender will to life thus serves as a point from which to critique the human as a universal status attributed to all members of the species, and to reveal it instead as a narrower set of criteria wielded by some to dehumanize others.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The journal description announces that TSQ “will publish interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship.” What have been some of feminist and queer theory’s most important blind spots when it comes to thinking about the transgender experience?

    STRYKER: Transgender Studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in the early 1990s, at roughly the same time as queer theory. There’s been a robust conversation about the relationship between the two, especially given the simultaneous formation of what’s come to be called the “LGBT” community. I contend that trans studies, as it was first articulated, shared an agenda with queer studies in the sense that it critiqued heteronormative society from a place of oppositional difference. It argued that “queer” was not just a five letter word for homosexual, but rather that queer encompassed a range of “different differences” that all had a stake in contesting various sorts of oppressive and coercive normativities related to sex, sexuality, identity, and embodiment. As queer theory developed, however, issues of sexuality really did remain in the forefront. From a transgender studies perspective, the whole distinction between homo and hetero sexualities depends on a prior agreement about what constitutes “sex,” on who’s a man and who’s a woman. Destabilizing those material referents, or needing to account for their sequentiality, their fuzzy boundaries, their historicity or cultural specificity, or their hybridity really opens up a whole different set of questions. In addition, trans studies is not organized primarily around issues of sexuality; equally important are questions of gender, bodily difference, heath care provision, technology studies, and a host of other things that have not been central to queer studies. So the debate between queer and trans studies has been about whether they are different parts of the same big intellectual and critical project, employing the same transversal methodologies for bringing into analytical focus and contesting oppressive normativities, or whether they overlap with one another—sharing some interests but not others—or whether they are really two different enterprises, concerned with different objects of study.

    My personal answer is all of the above, sometimes. At its most radical, trans studies offers a critique of the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation and civil rights struggles have advanced themselves by securing greater access to citizenship for homosexuals precisely through the reproduction of gender normativities—the liberal “I’m just like a straight person except for who I have sex with” argument. What actually provides the commonality there between homo and hetero is an agreement about who is a man and who is a woman, and how we can tell the difference between the two. Trans studies puts pressure on that tacit agreement.

    With regard to feminism, I think the major innovation transgender studies offers has to do with how gender hierarchies operate. In the most conventional feminist frameworks, what has seemed most important is to better understand and thereby better resist the subordination of women to men. Without contesting that basic tenet, transgender studies suggests that it is also necessary to understand how contesting the hierarchized gender binary itself can increase vulnerabilities to structural oppression for those people who don’t fit in, or who refuse to be fixed in place. That is, in addition to needing to address power structures that privilege normatively gendered men and masculinity over normatively gendered women and femininity, we also need to address a wide range of gender nonnormativities, atypicalities, transitivities, and fluidities. I see this as extending, rather than challenging, fundamental feminist insights.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Many of our readers may not know this, but traditionally, the relationship between queer theory and transgender studies and activism has been quite contentious. Is the fact that there is now a separate academic journal for trans studies indicative of an ongoing divide with queer studies, despite what you call the recent “transgender turn”?

    STRYKER: There’s a big enough and deep enough conversation on trans topics to merit and sustain an independent journal for the field, that’s all. There is more publishable scholarship on trans issues and topic than will ever fit into GLQ, given that journal’s broader scope, or that can ever fit into one-off special issues of disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals devoted to trans topics. Worrying that the advent of TSQ signals a divergence or parting of the ways between queer and trans studies is an overblown concern. Personally, I’d hate to see queer and trans studies drift further apart, because I feel strongly committed to both. I think trans studies is expansive enough to encompass a lot of queer scholarship on sex/gender nonnormativity, while also advancing scholarship on transgender-related topics that queer studies has never been particularly interested in.

    DIERKES-THRUN: As someone who has worked as a historian, social activist for trans rights and documentary filmmaker on trans history, how would you describe the state of our society’s understanding and attitudes towards transgender today? Does it feel like the tide has finally shifted?

    STRYKER: I think it is a mixed bag. Pretty much everybody today knows that there is this thing called “transgender”, but they can’t say exactly what it is. They know if they want to be considered progressive they are supposed to be OK with it, even if they secretly feel squeamish or judgmental or confused. That’s an improvement over the situation in decades past, when pretty much everybody agreed that there were these sick people and freaks and weirdoes who wanted to cross-dress or take hormones or cut up their genitals, but they were not important, and society really didn’t have to pay any attention to such a marginal and stigmatized phenomenon. So yes, there has been a shift, but yes, there is still a long way to go.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Which projects are you working on now?

    STRYKER: I have a really heavy administrative load right now. I was already trying to run a research institute, teach, commute between my job in Tucson and my home in San Francisco, and launch a new peer-reviewed journal, before the trans studies initiative became a possibility. That has definitely been a “be careful what you ask for” lesson, in terms of workload. I feel like I don’t write anything these days that doesn’t start with the words “Executive Summary” and end with the words “Total Budget.” It will probably be like that for a couple more years, especially until I complete my agreed-upon term of service as director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the end of 2016.

    But there are a couple of projects percolating along on the back burner. At the time I came to Arizona, I was working on an experimental media project called Christine in the Cutting Room, about the 1950s transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who burst onto the global stage when news of her sex-change surgery made headlines around the world. The project was sparked for me by a comment Jorgensen made in an interview with television journalist Mike Wallace. She was talking about her pre-fame job as a film cutter in the newsreel division at RKO Studios in New York, and said that she “used to work on one side of the camera” because she “didn’t know how to appear on the other side.” That gave me the idea of approaching the question of transsexuality from an aesthetic perspective, as a technique of visualization, accomplished through media manipulation. I saw Jorgensen using cinematic techniques of media cutting, suturing, image creation, and projection to move her from one side of the camera to the other, by moving herself from one kind of “cutting room” to another. I have always been interested in ways of exploring trans experience outside the pervasive psychomedical framework, and this project lets me do that. I mix archival audiovisual media of Jorgensen herself, found sound and images, electronic glitch music, and a scripted voice-over narration performed by an actress playing Jorgensen. At some point I hope to edit this material into a narrative film, but I have found it also works well as a multimedia installation in galleries and clubs.

    I am also trying to write a book. I’ve finally hit on a way to piece together into one overarching argument lots of fragments of abandoned or incomplete projects on embodiment and technology, the early Mormons, members of San Francisco’s elite Bohemian Club, transsexuals, urban history, and popular music. My working title is Identity is a War Machine: The Somatechnics of Gender, Race, and Whiteness. It’s about the processes through which we incorporate—literally somaticize—culturally specific and historically revisable categories of individual identity within biopolitical regimes of governmentality. I won’t say any more about it at this time, because this book itself could be one of my many unfinished projects.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Transgender as a topic of public curiosity seems to be everywhere in U.S. media culture these days, from Laverne Cox and Orange Is the New Black to Chelsea Manning, Andreja Pejic and others. (There is also a lot of naïve conflation with drag and cross-dressing, as the media treatment of Conchita Wurst illustrates.) Do you worry about the glamorization and commodification of certain kinds of trans bodies in the media and the silence around others? Are famous celebrity spokespeople like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock good or bad for the movement, from your perspective?

    STRYKER: In the wake of the repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy regarding homosexual service members, and after the Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality, transgender has emerged in some quarters as the “next big thing” in minority rights. I have a lot of problems with that way of framing things, and am very leery of the ways that story functions as a neoliberal progress narrative, and of the ways in which protecting trans people (now that gays have been taken care of) can exemplify the values of inclusivity and diversity, so that the US or the West can use support for trans rights to assert influence over other parts of the world who purportedly do not do as good a job on this front. What is truly amazing to me, after having been out as trans for nearly a quarter century, is the extent to which it is now becoming possible for some trans people to access what I call “transnormative citizenship,” while at the same time truly horrific life circumstances persist for other trans people. Race really does seem to be the dividing line that allows some trans people to be cultivated for life, invested in, recognized, and enfolded into the biopolitical state, while allowing others to be consigned to malignant neglect or lethal violence. The contemporary celebrity culture of transgender plays to both sides of this dichotomy. It’s increasingly possible to see trans people represented as successful, beautiful, productive, or innovative (and I salute those trans people who have accomplished those things). At the same time, you see people like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock using their platform to call attention the persistence of injustices, particularly for trans women of color. I am truly inspired by the way they both speak out on race, classism, the prison-industrial complex, and sex-work.