What Next?

I want to tie this off with a bow and deliver it for Christmas. I want this to have a neat conclusion like a good college essay, like a good story, like a goodbye. What next, what next, what next? I have some senses of where to go, but those senses are inarticulate, they still feel untrained by even a constructed truth. The further I go, the more my conclusions become trailing pauses, and maybe that's not a mark of semester fatigue but a growing sense of the vast gulf that stretches upon all sides, the gulf of complexity and confusion in which shouted conclusions are lost acoustically, sent back in fragments.

I wanted, in short, to round out the semester with a kind of overview of sorts--an attempt, I suppose, to figure out what I can do to bring what I've learned in the course into my own life. Clearly, if that introduction is anything to go by, it hasn't been the easiest of projects. Hence the overwrought poetics there.

See, the thing is, I think I've got a sense now of how to apply the theory side of things to my own work. I have a sense of what it means to be a cyborg scholar.

For example:

At long last, in part due to my attempts to apply his ideas in the essay on Forbidden Voices, I think I have a solid sense of how to begin working with Latour's ideas about propositions and articulation. I can see applications of the ideas in particular to queer subjectivity--by shifting the discourse to one of propositions rather than absolute truths about queer nature, it might be possible to embrace ever more complex articulations of what it means to be queer.

This, in turn, potentially sheds some light on the idea of queerness in the animal kingdom. There's a real danger in applying broad human categories of behavior to animals, particularly ones as socially affected as categories of sexual behavior, but this drive to articulate while, to some extent, withholding conclusions can maybe allow for a greater understanding of nonhuman queerness that doesn't translate easily into simple metaphor.

And, of course, the move towards articulation mirrors the moves by Haraway and Sandoval toward a fragmentation of identities that is mirrored, as far as queer performativity is concerned, with the ever widening proliferation of queer identities, including, increasingly, categories such as "heteroflexible" that blur the lines between straight and queer. These seem to me like propositions rather than truth statements; ways of expressing a particular kind of existence that doesn't easily fit under a wide politically mobilizeable category.

So, I'm getting a sense of how the pieces fit together. The different scholars are talking to each other not just in real life but in the virtual space created by my knowledge of them, if that makes any sort of sense.

But where I'm falling short, I think, is the application of this theory not to my academic life but to my civilian life (leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not I have a life outside of academia. Wow, that's a grim thought).

In other words, what next?

What do I do to bring these ideas into my lived experience, both in the realm of the material and the realm of the digital?

I have found this to be a deeply affirming experience in some ways. I love junk culture--pop and schlock and overblown nonsense. Seeing science fiction show up again and again in the writings of Haraway and others makes me feel so strongly that I'm not crazy for finding so much of value, so much that resonates, in these works. One way forward for me, then, is to treat my unseriousness a bit more seriously. I'm missing some pretty horrifyingly huge chunks from the Canon of junk culture, and it's time those holes were filled. (I've got a new Octavia Butler novel and a book of Ursula Le Guin's short stories sitting on my desk right now, waiting for when I need a break from writing essays.)

So that's one thing.

I've pondered M'Charek's discussion of the shifting nature of identity and its construction quite a bit these past few weeks, and in previous posts I've mentioned how difficult it is to escape that constructive process in the digital, but to some extent I do still believe that I can wrest some control of my identity in the digital world... or maybe wrest control is the wrong term. Rather, I can metamorphose into something different on the 'Net, I can slip and slide and play with my form. The practical limits of time and money and energy that restrain me in the material world from expressing myself as fluidly gendered do not weigh quite so heavy here in the realm of light. What's next for my persona here? I'm not really sure, but I'm excited to let go a little and see where my own mind takes me.

So that's another thing.

But these are just a couple of small things, and they're maybe not enough to lead me into the future. It feels like a grasping attempt at meaning more than a fully fleshed out plan for where to head with this new knowledge.

Maybe, however, that's simply the questing state that feminist--or broadly theoretical--discourse demands: a kind of continual process of becoming.

It surprises me in some ways that this semester we have talked very little about adolescence, another state of in-betweenness, an uncomfortable cyborg state. This feels like an adolescence in some ways, or maybe a first poking forth from the chrysalis, the emergence of a new insect into a vast world of moving colors. It's frustrating and disorienting to be in such a vast field, but it's also exhilarating, I think.

I sometimes hear that in a transhuman world of vastly increased lifespans and cyberization, transformation and continuous evolution will be impossible. I can't quite understand this mentality. Technology is a continuously disruptive force, as is biology, and externalities--the queering forces of nature--seem to always find their way back in.If I can't find a conclusion, it's because as a cyborg I'm in this state of perpetual becoming. My future identity is flexible plastics.

I am Cyborg Maria.

And we started with Janelle Monae so it's only fitting if she sings us out.

Fantasizing

I love science fiction and fantasy and weird, weird porn, in part because these genres tend to toss turpentine across the sharply delineated De Stijl canvas of the world. The boundary between reality and metaphor in these genres is slippery at best, and that's seductive in the extreme.

I think I'm attracted to deconstruction and poststructuralism for the same reason, actually. I'm never totally sure, in reading Haraway, of just how literal she's getting with her cyborgs--how much the realm of science fiction is intruding into reality--or how far someone like Halberstam is prepared to take the complex layers of metaphor and myth that she weaves. If Alan Turing's bite from a cyanide apple isn't literally the inspiration for the Apple logo, and isn't literally a type of Fall, does it really matter for the way we're constructing the universe?

We've been talking a lot lately about attempting to find lines of communication across dramatically different ways of interpreting the world, and it seems like maybe there's some compatibility between this view of the world as a fluid set of signs that construct a narrative beyond the literal and the Byzantine notion of typology and prefigurement. If Hercules can be a type of Samson, or Jonah a type of Christ, Turing can be a type of Adam, and the circumstances of his Fall (without, significantly, an Eve--if the heterosexist godmachine of state Christianity denounces her lack, what does that do for the original myth itself where Eve is the initiator of the fall?) shape the course of cybernetic life just as Adam's banishment affects biological life. It's in the realms of the poetic, in the realms of science fiction and fantasy that these modern myth structures can emerge (and when did Literary Fiction become so god damn boring; when did it all turn into a reflection of a particular kind of middle class Real World?).

I'm including Weird Porn in this because I think that's a realm where, in the best cases, the boundaries between male and female can get extremely--ahahah--slippery. Roles can flip and new dynamics, new genders, new sexual biologies, even, can be developed.

Which isn't to say that in ANY of these fields such flippings and floppings DO occur. There's just as much potential for weird porn or for a fantasy novel to retain the same boundary between metaphor and reality, the boundary between human and monster, man and woman. I'm so bored with dark and gritty fantasy with "realistic" or "historically accurate" gender dynamics. I'm so bored with modes of criticism that don't try to confuse or undermine gender structures. I'm so bored with hentai that reproduces the same stereotypical porn gender dynamics with demihuman subjects.

And I'm not the only one either. Autostraddle just ran a great review of Blue Is The Warmest Color which, fascinatingly, suggested that the straight male gaze within the film was a disappointment in part because it meant that the film failed to arouse or titillate:

It didn’t look like a young woman discovering the body of her partner for the first time. It didn’t look like an experienced partner relearning passion in the arms of her new lover. The voyeuristic angles, the awkward and choreographed movements, and all of them made me feel uneasy, unable to forget the directorial eye, and, quite frankly, bored. I feel sorry for those straight individuals who thought they were about to see something scandalous. Besides Kechiche’s somewhat clunky fetish for women’s asses, there’s little here that would shock your average Crash Pad viewer.

This is so interesting to me because it suggests that the film is weak not because it includes explicit sex scenes, but because those explicit sex scenes fail to capture anything essentially queer (or anything essentially vital at all). It made me think of Ursula "Writing About Queer People Of Color Before You Were Born" LeGuin's scathing critique of the adaptation of her Wizard of Earthsea series and the whitewashing of the cast:

I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense.

It's frustrating, in a field that has such potential, to be confronted with continuous artistic laziness.

Anyway, for me these readings and their call for a loosened conception of metaphor and gender and sexuality and humanity speak to my own compulsion as an artist to explore these unfamiliar spaces. I need to catch up on my queer sci fi as well--I still haven't read any Butler, much as it shames me, my house, and my cow to admit it. And it seems to me that the boundary-breaking science fiction and fantasy and porn are in need of some serious critical analysis. Maybe I'm the right person to engage these topics a bit more closely? I suspect it's still kinda taboo in academic criticism to be anything other than critical of porn in particular, but maybe it's time for that to change.

Maybe, too, it's time to screw around with the types that we're constructing. Is Turing a type of Adam, after all, or is he a type of Eve? Or Sophia, perhaps? There's so much room here for weird recombinatorials that I think we could keep ourselves artistically amused and aroused for a long time.

This is Cyborg Maria, and I'm ready for my stories to take a walk on the wild side.

Toxic Affinities

One of the most fascinating recurring themes in our texts and discussions is the notion that the technologies we're marshaling for the cause of Feminism may be mobilized just as readily by those we generally see as our opposition. Sometimes those affinities and opponents might even be invisible to us.

I get the impression that some feminists see the debate on positivism and a sort of evangelical mode of science as largely in the past, for example--that no one seriously posits Western science as the sole origin of truth anymore. This is probably true in Theory circles, but I'm not sure it holds true outside of the academy. Look at someone like Christopher Hitchens, who is as much an evangel for atheistic, scientific rationality as a person could be. What an odd guy is Hitchens--supporter of the Iraq war, enemy of Zionism... it's kind of fascinating to me actually to see how a radically antitheist position led him to this strangely contested relationship with American Neoconservatives, loudly triumphing an imperialist war on the one hand while condemning the support of Israel and the return to an extremist Christian position on issues such as evolution!

I'm not sure how we interact with someone like Hitchens. Do we mark him as an opponent on postcolonialist grounds, or on the grounds of the toxic affinities he has with the racist, homophobic, chauvinist policies of the American radical right? Or is he, like everyone else, caught in a postmodern condition of sullied (or simply always absent) innocence?

The weird thing about Hitchens, too, is that he, like Dawkins, like AI advocates such as Eliezer Yudkowski, doesn't seem to see himself as not-innocent, as subject to the same errors of thought that have plagued humans for centuries and have often manifested themselves not just in religious systems of power but in scientific and medical ones as well. By ousting the Abrahamaic myth structure I think they've concluded that they're beyond Original Sin, to really run with this metaphor further than it should probably be run with...

Not that we're necessarily doing a lot better when it comes to putting our money where our mouths are. The rise of climate change deniers or anti-vaccination agitators is a hell of an unintended consequence of postmodern criticism. And I suspect there's nothing more uncomfortable than having, as a Tumblr friend of mine just did, your post about the classist implications of anti-GMO legislation favorited and retweeted by the PR division of a major chemical company. Yikes.

The fact that so many of the critiques of postmodernism from engineers and scientists are whiny, lazy, and made in transparently bad faith ends up, I think, distracting us from these problems within our own camp--the uncomfortable and toxic affinities we may have made.

It's kind of a distressing state of affairs, I guess that's the confusing state we're in--a world without innocent positions.

This is Cyborg Maria and I have no idea what to think of any of this.

The Keeping of Many Names

The meat world often ends up being an interesting test case for the digital world. This should be a little worrying for techno-utopians, since part of the whole idea behind moving toward a digital future is that we should be able to transcend the errors of the existing world. The fact that we can map problems in meatspace onto problems in cyberspace suggests that we take our baggage with us.

Which, not coincidentally*, is sort of obliquely-speaking the theme of Amade M'charek's essay "Fragile differences, relational effects: Stories about the materiality of race and sex." The stories in question are two tales of identity in Holland; one is a story of M'charek's own identity and her attempts to navigate Dutch society, and the other is the story of a medieval Dutch boy whose identity was reconstructed (and fabricated) by modern scientific techniques.

Part of her argument is that identity shifts and comes into new configurations depending on setting and the other individuals being interacted with. This is fascinating stuff, and very useful for understanding the performative nature of identity--the idea that it's not so much that I'm, say, a particular gender but that I am performing genderedness. The edge that M'charek adds to this is the lack of agency that we as individual actors have over how others view our performance. She relates how, after attaining a short haircut in order to seem less overtly "Muslim" and thus avoid harassment, she was accosted by a white woman who, thinking she was a man, accused her of "pinching her buttocks." The woman, upon realizing her gendered mistake, she hastily retreated behind her "strongly built partner" and let him handle things.

She goes on to suggest that from moment to moment during that altercation her identity shifted: 

"At the beginning of this conflict, the woman with the short haircut was enacted as an Arab man. Upon her face becoming visible, she became a woman. However, within these seconds, and standing not in front of the blonde woman, but in front of the man instead, her identity changed for a third time. Confronted with the heavily built Dutch man, she became a representative of a people. A people that is often typecast as potentially dangerous and difficult to control. The woman was thus enacted as the Arab woman, the Other."

Which just goes to show that there's no pleasing some people, no matter what identity is being enacted.

What I find particularly interesting about this is that the chain of events cascaded from the decision to avoid enacting a stereotype that ultimately was reasserted in the end, anyway. This suggests to me that there's a limited ability of individuals to create their own identities. In a way, this feels almost obvious once it's said out loud. If one of the major moves in Theory over the last century was the realization that an author can't depend upon the reader to interpret zir text "correctly," it's not a large leap to consider a boy a text prone to misreadings--even deliberate misreadings.

This has some rather unsettling implications for life in cyberspace. I think many of us that have second lives on the Net tend to believe, to a greater or lesser extent, that we can transcend our identities or keep them separate. We can, we hope, escape the prison of our enacted physical bodies and take on new names. But Redditors are male, Tumblr users are female, who's ever met a queer gamer, you're just pretending to be a woman for attention, and so on and so on. In the absence of a physical persona, URLs take on the function of signifiers that allow us to typecast users just as much as appearances are used to typecast in the physical world.

I think the pain of having your identity pinned down is the pain of having your waveform collapsed, the pain of knowing that no matter how diffuse you make yourself, no matter how many names you keep, the enacted identities that others project stalk you, a constant shadowy substance ready to harden upon you if someone catches sight of it in strong enough light. The waveform collapse, to me, is one of the greatest anxieties of living in the digital age, because the utopia of fluid identity that we were promised in science fiction is tenuous. 

You can only run so far before the body catches up.

Call me Cyborg Maria.

*I mean, of course it's not coincidence. If it was, this article would just be nonsense that happened to arrange itself in a useful argle bargle glub glub cthulhu ftagn.

**Even leaving aside the supervillian's impulse to leave little hints to alternate identities. Was Tom Marvolo Riddle foolish when he anagrammed his name, or was he leaving a trail in the hopeless wish that someone else would be brilliant enough to retrace his footsteps, discover his game?

Articulated Bodies

And what if you could have genetic perfection? Would you change who you are if you could?

Figure 1. Actual footage of me at my computer.

As I sit here tapping away at my keyboard (see fig. 1) it occurs to me that I've barely ever actually done any real blogging. I run a blog, nominally, but I've always treated it like my own academic journal, the peer reviewer being myself. It's casual in content and style, but ultimately I'm plotting out what I want to say fairly carefully and composing my pieces with conclusions in mind.

I find myself freezing up now that I'm writing an actual web log. Organizing my thoughts live is an unsettling experience, in part because suddenly the certainty of purpose and argument that I've grown to depend upon is gone.

That's kinda what the reading this week is about, though, so luckily I can make this seem like a real slick, premeditated transition between my neurotic rambling and the actual content.

The main thing that's overshadowing these proceedings is Bruno Latour's essay "How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Social Science," and unfortunately I'm finding the essay's arguments slipping through my grasp no matter how many times I creepily subdivide my cyborg fingers.

Let me try, for my sake as well as yours Dear Reader, to sum up what I think he's driving at.

For goodness sake, though, don't quote me on any of this.

Latour's big criticism of science seems to be that it's not interested research. Part of the argument, which I'm not sure I buy--it seems like a misapplication of formal logic--is that scientific research is structured in such a way as to elicit binary responses from human and nonhuman subjects of study. You either get a result that maps onto your theory (the theory statement is true), in which case all you've got is a tautology, or you get a result that doesn't, in which case your statement is false and is discarded. Latour proposes an alternate system that uses propositions determined to be articulate or inarticulate--articulate meaning that they can encompass a wider array of values and possibilities, and inarticulate meaning that an array of possible stimuli elicits the same response and results in, effectively, a dead end. He's in favor, in other words, of an embodied science that accepts a multiplicity of possible results, like the fingers splitting and branching out to achieve greater articulation of movement. (Alright, I admit it, that image isn't actual footage of me, it's from the anime Ghost in the Shell. I had you fooled for a minute there, didn't I?)

The deeper point behind all of this is actually pretty significant. Latour is trying to pull apart Science's institutional ability to claim access to the absolute truth and a right to reshape society accordingly. The problem with the Institution of Science in modern society is that it invisibly urges us to accept its definitions and methodologies. Inevitably, those definitions and methodologies result in a normalization of certain types of bodies--ways of feeling, ways of responding to stimuli, ways of taking in and processing sensation, &c. Here, he's drawing on Michael Foucault (because honestly, it was only a matter of time before he crept into the proceedings) who describes a process where Power creates discourses that, as we engage in them, result in our incorporation into the system that Power uses to support itself.

Now, the problem with Latour is that, so far as I can tell, he doesn't really explain in any sort of methodological detail how to go about setting up an "interested and interesting" experiment. In fact, he's deliberately shying away from setting up a methodology, which is all well and good for him but sort of leaves the rest of us in the lurch. He wants us to set up a methodology that will result in resistance, but I'm not sure he makes it clear just what that resistance would look like.

This meant that my post-reading conversation with my girlfriend ended up being more baffling than anything else.

Let me give some background information to make sense of what's to follow. So, I'm a big fan of cyberization. If someone told me tomorrow that they could replace my body with a cybernetic shell that had the capacity for the sensation of touch and hearing and sight (and maybe smell and taste but I can be haggled down on this count. It's not like my nose works that well to begin with), I'd gladly sign in blood and politely avoid staring much at the bargainer's goat hooves and forked tongue.

My girlfriend Sara, on the other hand, is highly suspicious of the notion of cyberization. She's a dancer, and very passionate about physicality. She would be rather upset if I suddenly became a cyborg (and not just because of the whole literal-deal-with-the-devil thing).

There's an interesting semi-complication here, though, in that she's the beneficiary of cosmetic surgery (which is the actual topic this week, although I wouldn't blame you for not realizing it considering how long it's taken to get there). Her lower jaw grew out more than normal, causing issue with chewing and swallowing that she had surgically corrected a few years back. So, one component of her experience was medical. However, they also implanted thin implants in her cheeks to bring her cheekbones to slightly higher prominence.

Now, already I think her case goes some way towards unsettling the discourse on cosmetic surgery. While it would be nice to differentiate smoothly between cosmetic and corrective surgeries, the blended nature of her surgery makes strict categorization difficult (which is part of why the insurance company waited until a few hours before the surgery took place to finally inform her that they would, in fact, be accepting her claim, the money-grubbing capitalist bastards). One of the recurring themes in the reading for this week was the idea that women (and men) receive plastic surgery in order to correct what they perceive as a deficiency with their bodies. For them, the surgery is not elective but necessary to live a full life.

So, the first way in which Sara positioned herself as resistant to my questions was simply in having this experience that I don't think easily fits into some criticisms of the beauty industry. Her surgery was corrective in the strict sense that it was necessary for her to eat in a comfortable way... but it also involved a measure of aesthetic reorganization as well. When Sara says that she loves her smile now, and feels both happy and empowered by the greater normalcy of her smile as compared to before her surgery, should we read her experience as being a product of a beauty industry that has self-generated a "problem" that demands their presence and authority to effect a solution, or should we read it as a reaction to the actual pain and discomfort she felt and no longer has to deal with? Does the fact that the place where her jaw was broken cause her pain sometimes alter our reading of her case?

I honestly don't know.

To return to my utopian cyborg nonsense, though, I think her resistance to cyberization despite her own surgery experiences sheds some interesting light on Kathy Davis's analysis of cosmetic surgery in the face (ahaha) of the artist Orlan. Her basic argument is that Orlan's utopian view of cosmetic surgery as a vehicle for self expression is out of sync with the lived reality of other women and men that receive cosmetic surgery. Sara feels largely the same way about her own surgical experience compared to my airy-fairy cyberutopianism--there's a gap between the lived-in reality of her biological and psychological needs, and the science fiction desire to augment and adapt and become something Other. Whereas I'm fascinated by people like Genesis P-orridge, and love the idea of treating my body like an impermanent, metamorphic canvas, she isn't so much. Which one of us is the more caught up in a particular system of conditioned belief, I wonder?

The final idea I want to toy with here, then, is the notion common in transhumanist circles that the body is an error-ridden system, a vast problem, that we must transcend.

I suspect Latour would say that our glorious vision is another scientific system of biopower--maybe even the most advanced and obsessive form of biopower, since we've managed to pathologize the whole of being.

Confronting my beliefs with this system is more than a little unsettling, since it suggests that rather than opening us up to a vast range of expressive possibilities, we're simply asserting a new normalized body and way of interacting the world... with us, the transhumanists, being the ones in control of the new order. And if technology continues advancing at its current rate (we are getting closer and closer to fully functional neurally-linked prosthetics) the question that Sara's case raises, of what is "elective" and what is "corrective" and who is in charge of pathologizing the body in order to make these determinations will become more and more important, which is why I'm tenuously jumping from contemporary cosmetic surgery to this sci fi nonsense.

And really, the whole thing is pretty unsettling to me. There's nothing quite like realizing that you've been potentially arguing for the political economy of Repo! The Genetic Opera.

This is Cyborg Maria, the 21st Century Cure.