subversive theory

If you have a Letterboxd profile, I hope you will follow me through the link here. I am desperate for new movie recommendations.

Next month I will begin to revive my online activity and attempt a more coherent project. It feels good to have some excess mental energy that can be expended.

Here are my two cents on A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark.

"It baffles me just how uneven this book is. At its best, it is an insightful elucidation of a new type of relationship emerging and thriving within political economy, which is that of the hacker class and vectoralists, and, at its worst, it is an uninspiring rehashing of the philosophies of Marx and Deleuze.

First, the good stuff. The hacker class is never fully demarcated but is cast as a kind of middle-class precariat which works via abstractions. That is, they create new abstractions by writing a piece of code, a poem, or inventing a new concept with which to analyse a current issue. They are not farmers or welders, they deal only circumstantially with tangible objects; instead, they work on the immaterial that at least initially resists easy commodification. Vectoralists, on the other hand, are a new iteration of the bourgeoisie, believes Wark, and they function by capturing vectors and turning them into commodities. They usually do not own the infrastructure giving rise to the vector but they manage to make themselves inevitable due to their ability to highjack its flows. Throughout, this relationship is well-described and nuanced. For example, Wark fleshes out how these two classes are sometimes able to come together and work against similar enemies.

The bad stuff consists mainly of Wark's writing style and the book's insistence on squashing thought into pre-made Marxist and Deleuzian conceptualisations. It is a trick similar to what Wark does in Gamer Theory. Therein, Wark tries to recast the role of the critical theorist through the conceptualisation of video games. It ends up being an example of old wine in a new bottle. Nothing substantial arises from such an act. In this work, however, I believe Wark's argument would have benefitted from not turning the hackers into their own distinctive class of difference, but, rather, to occupy a two-way position of a surplus and a nothing. It might be what Wark is going for but the relationship between the hackers and the vectoralists resembles more closely the one between the Lord and the Bondsman in Hegel's system.

However, I believe this rehashing is deliberate on Wark's part. Oftentimes, Wark will commend the idea of plagiarism, propelled by an underlying idea of the Situationists's "literary communism". The point is to wrest ideas free from becoming private property by avoiding citation. References and citations make out a tax; in order to use a concept, you must first pay the tax of referencing the owner of the concept in your text. Wark's interpretation of literary communism leads her to claim that removing the private property aspect of concepts opens up a space in which ideas may flow freely, in which so-called canonised Master Thinkers have been dethroned, and in which everyone may participate without the presupposition of having read a lot of difficult texts beforehand. The idea is refreshingly egalitarian, and I commend it, but I always wonder what such an influx of new participants might do to the quality standards of the works being created. If we are to avoid gatekeeping editors and publishers, these standards need to embedded within literary communism itself in such a way that people end up recognising the standards as patterns and conforming to them unwittingly.

I am once again at it on my Goodreads. This time I have read Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Below follows my two cents on it:

"Even a compelling book spoils in the face of time. Such is the case with McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.

The book was written and compiled in the sixties where the future was still dangerous. Enthusiasm ran high, aided by delightfully speculative sci-fi authors and increased streams of information. But innovation had already ran out of steam just twenty-five years after the publication of this book. Technology didn't become the unified project it was set out to be, connecting disparate communities and achieving marvellous feats of progress. Instead, owners of private property captured and occupied the vectors and made the flow of information contingent to capital. Ingenuity was lost to rigid standardisation.

When McLuhan writes about the difficulties of having to make sense of a new world through old concepts, we cannot claim that he was referring to anything else but to the acts of PR. The old concepts were redefined through marketing. A concept such as innovation, earlier committed to grandiose improvements, designates now the incisive ability of capturing unclaimed societal processes and monetising them. This innovative process is simple: you give a start-up a flashy brand design and then encourage them to grasp onto a process in which there is still potential for swapping out the buyer's personal property with precarious renting. The old concept of innovation was too cost-intensive. Innovation of that kind requires time, taking risks, and repeated failures. This is not a feasible business model in a world ruled by immediate profits.

An irksome thing about this book is its deification of the child. Numerous times it is heralded as approaching the world in an immediate and thus unspoiled manner. I, again, refer to Helen Hester's monograph on xenofeminism for a meticulous analysis and refutation of the phenomenon of casting children as the pure image of the future. The child enjoys this special status both on the right and on the left, and there is a need for fostering new kinships apart from the old familial structures.

Fiore's graphic layout of this work cemented the central point: the medium is that which significantly shapes how we do something. The readers are defamiliarised through the design, demanded to either flip the book upside-down or reflect it through a mirror to read the texts. The composition is distinctly modern, the typeface an aloof sans serif. However, it is grating how McLuhan and Fiore insist in text and in design that form and content are two distinct phenomena and that we must uphold a demarcation. The relationship between form and content is more murky as they are not easily distinguishable from each other. The medium becomes substantive. I didn't get the feeling that McLuhan and Fiore went quite as far in this direction as they should.

I have a Goodreads account in which I write reviews of the stuff I read. You can find it here. I will follow all of you back, if you choose to follow me. I need some new inspiration!

Below you will find my two cents on Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation by the working group Laboria Cuboniks.

"Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, while never explicitly a manifesto, has consistently been described as one. This description puts certain expectations of genre and style upon the work, which might mire its reception when it does not fulfil them.

This work, however, is a breath of fresh air into a stale theoretical environment content with sloganeering and momentary action. It is predominantly a project of salvaging: salvaging seemingly tainted and impure concepts—such as alienation, reasoning, and the universal—which in the literature have been closely tied to their origins in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The repression of these concepts comes from a bastardised analytical relationship with history in which past events are regarded as blueprints for assessing future events. In moderation this practice should be encouraged, but when performed in the excessive manner that it is, it leads to the foreclosure of the new in general and a refusal to re-work old concepts to fit better aims specifically.

The work argues for a politics rooted in alienation. This alienation, however, is not the one characterised by Marx but, rather, the human's alienation from any notion of authentic nature. As Laboria Cuboniks points out, this is not a recent invention of capitalism but a rift that has been gradually opened up alongside the proliferation of reasoning. Humans were reasonable, and thus alienated, long before modernity and capitalism came to be. A politics aware of this alienation allows for interventions into a given and theological nature, which has been used to justify various horrors, e.g., the confinement of women's bodies. Such interventions may be major, initiated by humanity at large, or may be minor such as the feminist makeshift technologies concocted in times of prohibition of abortion (analysed in Helen Hester's book on Xenofeminism).

By drawing on Sellars and Brandom, Laboria Cuboniks tries to dethrone "Reason" to emphasise reasoning in its stead. That is, they abandon the old way of "Reason", as a faculty in the minds of white men, and open up for the practice of reasoning as a social enterprise, a messy and entangled doing, which entails participation of multiple agents within a diverse field of communities. This would entail silenced and oppressed groups as well. As they write: "There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself–and this contradiction can be leveraged." One of the tasks ahead is to forge a conception of a minor reasoning encompassing difference.

The same task awaits that of the universal. The universal should not be constituted politically by ascribing one principle indiscriminatorily to a diverse fields of phenomena. Instead, it should entail a gradual and piecemeal transformation from below. No universal is truly universal. It is always a patchwork capable of being reworked one place at a time. But this reworking must strive to be all-encompassing.

Why this need to salvage such concepts? Because the left today is impotent to foster any sustained change. It is satisfied with local and small-scale interventions which have no truck with large-scale abstractions. What Laboria Cuboniks argue for is a displacement of strategy: the left should not turn its back to the universal itself, and thus to complete social transformation, but rather switch to a different account of the universal, one which is intersectional and piecemeal.

I find a lot of value in the moves this work makes. However, I wonder whether Laboria Cuboniks may themselves usher in a new sort of theology: this time, one pertaining to technology. As is the case with transhumanism, for example, technology itself may be theologised. Laboria Cuboniks is not crossing this boundary but I do believe a broader view of technology might remove any remaining tinge of doubt. In Theory, for example, well-known technology is being diffused through Foucault's technologies of self, as voluntary and transformative practices, and Heidegger's question regarding technology, in which technology becomes a tool to diagnose a present. Xenofeminists henceforth should draw on other references than the two mentioned. This could come about, for instance, through a more detailed elaboration of Firestone's concept of technology.

“If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.”

"Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical ‘history of thought’ is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism—because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it. There is no ‘feminine’ rationality, nor is there a ‘masculine’ one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with itself—and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular."

"My philosophical project can be summarized in three theses, which I will begin by briefly formulating and then explicating.

The absolute is thinkable only by a refusal of the principle of reason. To put this in my own language: speculation, understood as thought about the absolute, is possible only by not being metaphysical.

The challenge of a revival of speculation is irreligion. I maintain that irreligion is possible only by being speculative - by being, therefore, thought about the absolute, and not a critique of absolutes. A symmetrical aspect of the second thesis is this: every critique of absolutes shares in an essential characteristic of modern religiosity, namely fideism.

Here we come to the object of our principal concern: the challenge of irreligion become speculative consists in an eschatology of immortality. I maintain therefore that the possibility of immortality is only thinkable by being irreligious, and that a true philosophy of immanence attains to this not by an idea of finitude but by an ethic of immortality. Another, more classical, way of formulating this thesis consists in affirming that philosophical irreligion is not a form of atheism, but rather the condition for an authentic access to the divine."

“Now, theory does not seem like the most exigent business in a rapidly warming world. There is that itching feeling that the only meaningful thing to do now is to let go of everything else and physically cut off fossil fuel combustion, deflate the tyres, block the runways, lay siege to the platforms, invade the mines. Indeed, the only salubrious thing about the election of Donald Trump is that it dispels the last lingering illusions that anything else than organised collective militant resistance has at least a fighting chance of pushing the world anywhere else than head first, at maximum speed, into cataclysmic climate change. All has already been said; now is the time for confrontation. This essay presents no arguments for restraining such impulses. It is, however, written in the belief that some theories can make the situation clearer while others might muddy it. Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy, not by blurry charts and foggy thinking, of which there is, as we shall see, no shortage. Theory can be part of the problem. If everything is up for re-evaluation in a warming world, this must apply to it as well: theory too is called to account, required to demonstrate its relevance and declare its contributions, even if some of its producers and consumers would never consider joining some direct action against fossil fuels.”

“Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system — towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension — take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried....”

“It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too, e.g. about the changes of the moon and of the sun, about the stars and about the origin of the universe. Now he who wonders and is perplexed feels that he is ignorant (thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders); therefore if it was to escape ignorance that men studied philosophy, it is obvious that they pursued science for the sake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility. The actual course of events bears witness to this; for speculation of this kind began with a view to recreation and pastime, at a time when practically all the necessities of life were already supplied. Clearly then it is for no extrinsic advantage that we seek this knowledge; for just as we call a man independent who exists for himself and not for another, so we call this the only independent science, since it alone exists for itself.”

“I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty will no longer be forbidden.

I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great—that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly." Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty—so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women—female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.”

"There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exceptions. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all.”