New Publications, Presentations, Articles, and Research

Sorry for not using this venue lately for my ongoing research. Will probably return to using it in the new year. For now, here is completed, ongoing, and future work. (Also, most of my free time has been soaked up by the search for a permanent job.)

Publication Schedule:
1) Hostis: A Journal of Incivility. Printing has already started. Expect copies to be available within a couple weeks via our distributor.
2) Escape. Book proposal nearly finished. Solicit publishers within next three months. Manuscript for submission: 67,500 words.
3) Dark Deleuze. In preparation. Final manuscript to be 15,000-25,000 words.

Presentation Schedule:
1) Chicago, “Feminist Mappings of the City,” November 2014, (passed).
2) Vancouver, “Militancy, Antagonism, and Power: Rethinking Intellectual Labor, Relocating the University,” January 2015.
3) Walla Walla, “Direct Action Training,” February 2015.
4) Spokane, “‘Money is Just Paper but it Affects People Like Poetry’: Capitalism and Public Address,” February 2015
5) Pittsburgh, “Weather Station,” April 2015.
6) Riverside, “#GHE20G0TH1K: Afropessimism as Aesthetic Blackness,” June 2015.

Upcoming Article Topics:
1) Feminism and the Metropolis
2) Wages for Housework, Wages for Facebook: Antagonism at the Point of Circulation
3) The State, Concept not Object: Abstraction, Cinema, Empire
4) (In preparation) Insinuation as Communication
5) (In preparation) Irregular Media: Digital Resistance after Guerrilla Warfare
6) (In preparation) What Does Capitalism Sound Like?

Ongoing Research Areas:
1) The Non-Representational Turn: Anti-connectionism, Insufficiency, Opacity
2) The Inhumanities: Anonymity, Code, Subjectivity
3) Negative Feminism: Gender, Hatred, and Pop Culture

Wages for Facebook

In January 2014, the website “Wages for Facebook” was launched. The single-page maximalist manifesto slowly scrolls by in large blocky caps, beginning with the declaration that:

“THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING…”

The text is a rewriting of key passages from “Wages Against Housework,” a pamphlet central to a feminist campaign in the 1970s condemning the unpaid labor of housework and caregiving. The theoretical import of the 1970s campaign was huge at its time – “Wages Against Housework” challenged certain historical materialisms that relegated power and social reproduction to a superstructural level altogether separate from the material base of production. Extending the “social factory” approach to value production, this materialist feminism demonstrated why the cultural, corporeal, and subjective dimensions of social reproduction are just as fundamental to the material structure of capitalism as economics.

Stacks on Stacks on Stacks

What if governments, institutions, and NGOs treated us as users? Borrowing conservative jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion “nomos,” which describes the interactive forces of political geography, jurisdiction, and sovereignty as a whole, theorist Benjamin Bratton argues that planetary-scale computing is reconfiguring subjectivity. Schmitt’s conservative project was a lament for the nomos of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, a legal order that helped European nations consolidate into states and facilitate the golden age of colonialism. Bratton agrees that there is a new nomos on the way, but it is a nomos of the stack.

Software as Ideology

Digression I just cut from a paper:

Hardware alone appears meaningless. When you gaze into an electric circuit, nothing gazes back into you. Software’s visual environments seem to be the real point of access – in particular, operating systems populated by desktops and recycling bins (Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” 43). Transistors are not represented on the screen here. This is not to say that software exists independent from hardware. In fact, the basic function of hardware is to emit “signifiers of voltage differences” (Kittler, “There Is No Software,” 150). What connects hardware and software is then a “functional analogy to ideology” (43).

“It is Raining”: A Philosophy of the Digital Stream (new intro)

“It is raining,” philosopher Louis Althusser writes. These words: a declaration; a marked change in the world outside; an announcement about the rain felling outside Althusser’s room at the Sainte-Anne clinic in late 1982. Only then, two years after his scandalous psychotic fit, did he begin writing again.[1] Peering through the window to outside, Althusser ended his dry spell with a book “before all else,” “about ordinary rain.”[2] Such ordinary rain is not the common sense notion of rain that pertains to water falling from the sky. Althusser’s rain is far more commonplace: it is the underground current of materialism that runs through the history of philosophy (“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” 167). This watershed year also marked the emergence of another type of rain, which is seen through an altogether different window. 1982 was the year Time magazine named “the computer” its personal of the year. Three decades later, we now watch the streams that rush across our digital screens.

Metropolis as Media: A Presentation

If you’ll be in the area, join me for this presentation in Seattle later this month.

The Metropolis as a Media Object and The Polarized Politics of Asymmetry

The reconfigured terrain of network culture frustrates many traditional modes of social engagement. Political power has both spread and concentrated – spreading as global corporations, international bodies, and private interests bypass the forces of traditional political institutions, and concentrating as information systems employed in government and industry enable the surveillance, registration, and control of populations.[i]

The common form of dissent in digital culture is rather the tactical use of media to signify “the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible.”[ii] Tactical media’s emphasis on symbolic disruption leads to a focus on artistic practices, from persuasive video games made to criticize immigration policy to chat-based interventions in the US Military’s controversial recruiting game America’s Army.[iii] The prevalence of cultural and artistic critique as the preferred style of political engagement should be expected, as it echoes a wider transformation in contemporary power whereby “the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become ‘cultural.’”[iv] The literary import of tactical media threatens to obscure potentials singular to media, however, as it focuses on the expression of and not the struggle within the “computational layer” or information itself – a slippage that threatens to ruin tactical media by “confusing tactics and strategy.”[v]

There is a way to cut through this confusion: if the urban space of the Metropolis is theorized as a media object, whereby “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,” then culture and materiality intersect, which allows analysis to go from signs to signals and from semiotics to physics and back again.[vi] This principle is elegantly demonstrated by Austrian design studio mischer-traxler’s project “The Idea of a Tree,” an autonomous solar-powered production project that transduces the intensity of inconstant natural inputs to mechanically produce one object a day from sunrise to sunset. The product of process is a bench-like object that incorporates the sun conditions of the day by varying thread and glue color and thickness as it is wrapped around a mold to make a three-dimension representation of the day and place of production.[vii] The simultaneous transduction and transcoding of environmental energy into a material object exemplifies that multidimensional objects can be both technically diagrammed and studied according to their cultural expression. Generalizing from “The Idea of a Tree,” then every media object similarly contains both a diagram and an expression that make up its emergent environment.[viii] Media and literary studies have outlined theories for such a multi-dimensional analysis, demonstrating the different operations of speech, writing, and code.[ix] The Metropolis should then be described in similar terms to network culture not only by information, but the vectors of change that result from an abundance of information and an acceleration of informational character.[x] In particular, the Metropolis can be said to utilize information in three distinct ways: as “the relation of signal to noise,” “a measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system,” and “a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system” – all of which find corollaries in culture.[xi] Bringing together digital telecommunication flows and physical corporeal flows, urban geographers have conceptualized the contemporary process of urbanization through Internet eXchange points and MIDT airline traffic data[xii] It is through a similar combination of digital culture and informatization more generally that strategies common to struggles in the culture, technology, and environment of the Metropolis can be identified, analyzed, and enhanced.

Abstractly, the Metropolis connects through inclusive disjunction, a process that puts otherwise foreign elements into communication with one another and does not require its pieces to operate through a shared logic but unfolds their interiors through exposure.[xiii]

Affective Critique: Mediation as a Response to Cynical Ideology (Paper Proposal)

The role of critique in contemporary cinema has been displaced. Consider the story of Chicago gang member Danny Toro, who would watch Scarface almost every day for 10 years despite the film’s heavy-handed critique of its gangster protagonist Tony Montana. Perhaps as equally perplexing, the film American Psycho is popular among many yuppies even though its point is to critique the masculinity and violence of a financial culture much similar to their own. Or even more striking: fraternities across the country hold “Fight Club” events inspired by David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s book although the film is an in-your-face condemnation of preppy social climbing.

Diagnosing this problem, Slovenian philosopher and critic Slajov Zizek writes that we no longer live in an age where “they know not what they do,” but rather: “they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.” To make his argument, Zizek echoes the theory of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that we have entered the age of “cynical ideology” whereby the demystifying correction of ideological camera obscuras no longer motivates social action – or in the words of French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, the critique has “run out of steam.”

The alternatives suggested by all three are disappointing, however: Zizek proposes empty political doctrines (“signifiers without a signified”), Sloterdijk recommends a return to the irony and sarcasm of the Greeks (“kynicism”), and Latour calls for a “stubborn realist attitude” (“empiricism”).

In contrast to these three alternatives, I propose contemporary theories of affect as replacement for the diagnostic and effective functions of ideology critique.

Media & The Materialism of the Encounter

Akihito Takuma, Lines of Flight, op.389, oil on canvas, 2013

“It is raining,” French philosopher Louis Althusser writes as an introduction to the underground current of materialism that runs through the history of philosophy (“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” 167). But Althusser’s apartment window and the drops that inspired him to write manuscript that is “before all else, a book about ordinary rain,”[1] have been displaced by an even more ubiquitous window – the screen – and a new rain – the digital stream.

This article repeats Althusser’s materialist philosophy of the encounter. It is a materialist philosophy that arrives late in Althusser’s career to combine electric readings of Deleuze, Derrida, and Epicurus not present in his earlier writings on ideology, the state, and determinism. In repeating Althusser, however, this paper is not a return to Althusser – his conjuncture: debates within the French Communist party over Stalinism and the role of class struggle, or the philosophical legacy of Machiavelli and Hobbes – but rather, it chases the current of materialist philosophy as it flows into the field of media studies.[2]

Vein 4: A System of Compulsory Visibility

This post contained an draft version of a dissertation section. A more recent version is now available on the works page.