I just finished reading Asad Haider’s book Mistaken Identity and I want to use it as an excuse to work through a critique of Butler that I’d been trying to articulate elsewhere for a few months. So this isn’t quite a review of Haider’s book (which, incidentally I really liked) but instead a sort of expansion on one of the books major threads: namely, that the current discourse surrounding identity politics can be more productively reoriented toward some form of political solidarity, or what Haider terms “universalism.” It’s a basically good and productive goal, and I think it’s worth thinking about the theoretical feasibility of this move. Because, although Haider himself is much more directly interested in praxis, he justifies a lot of his argument on a notion of identity explicitly borrowed from Judith Butler, whose own theoretical work aims to pull off a similar translation from the precarity of individual identity toward some form of universal solidarity, the varying degrees of success of which serve as the occasion for the present writing.

So first a bit about Mistaken Identity itself: it’s book about identity politics and their function within both academic and activist discourse (as well as, implicitly, the trickledown from both of those discursive modes into online discourse). Haider helpfully traces the more explicitly socialist focus of the rhetoric for groups like the Combahee River Collective who were foundational in the development of what is now termed “identity politics,” and the gradual cooption of that rhetoric by people in positions of power (who, obviously, distance themselves from anything even remotely socialist leaning). In this way, he argues, identity politics has become sort of vague set of slogans divorced from specific political aims.

Throughout the book, Haider offers a helpful critique of identity politics without dismissing it out of hand (as seen in other recent critiques of identity politics like Angela Nagel’s Kill All Normies, which I’ll return to a little bit below). So while Mistaken Identity advocates for a class-focused socialism, the move here isn’t simply to say “class > race” but rather to argue that identity issues are both ends in and of themselves as well as a means toward a broader form of political solidarity, while simultaneously pointing out that identity-focused rhetoric can be disingenuously co-opted by people in positions of power to overemphasize the former at the expense of the latter. In this respect Haider follows fairly closely after Judith Butler, whose own work on gender and the “public dimension of the body” in books like Gender Trouble sort of inevitably (if somewhat awkwardly) gives way to a more global sense of identity (and the attendant forms of global solidarity and recognition) advocated for in her later work in Precarious Life and Frames of War.

In following Butler’s notion of relationally-emergent identity so closely, though, Haider ends up inheriting a lot of the same problems she runs into, and he doesn’t quite get into how tricky they are to resolve. So while for example the argument that intersectionally emergent identities ought to be leveraged to produce a kind of universal political solidarity works well as an aspiration (and, to be clear, I agree that this is a good goal for any serious leftist movement looking to mobilize all of this static energy presently engulfing our discourse on “identity”) the actual mechanics of that move are not at all obvious. In fact, Butler spends a lot of time trying to work this out for herself over the course of her writing: In her earlier work, Bulter’s “public dimension of the body” is implicitly a local one. Gender Trouble, for example, demonstrates how we perform our bodies in space on an ongoing basis, such that gender emerges as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame.” For Butler, “identity” is something that emerges relationally through performance: Other people see us performing this “set of repeated acts,” and that seeing informs both their understanding of who we are and, implicitly, their conduct toward us. This is a fairly localized conception of how identity emerges, and it lends itself well to a critique of microagressions and the kind of localized bits of interpersonal racism and sexism that many people are forced to put up with, but its less obvious at first glance how this is meant to produce meaningful kinds of social or political solidarity (nevermind solidarity on an international or even global scale). That is to say, if the emphasis is on performance (rather than relationality, or the cumulative effect of others’ perception of our own performance), discourse on “identity” tends to sort of atrophy: individuals become increasingly concerned with how their own performance is perceived by others, rather than how to build productive modes of relating to the world.

It’s on a fairly tenuous understanding of this conception of identity that Angela Nagel, for example, leverages her own critique of Butler, suggesting that microblogging platform Tumblr could be seen as “the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas,” because it’s filled with “stories of young people explaining and discussing the entirely socially constructed nature of gender and [the] potentially limitless choice of genders that an individual can identify as or move between” (70). While I don’t think the writings of a handful of extremely online teens is necessarily the most useful or generous place to look for the “fruition” of Butler’s ideas, Nagel’s critique is instructive insofar as it begins to touch on how difficult it can be to usefully employ Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature identity in a context beyond these localized interactions with people, and toward something like Haider’s broader project of universality (which will necessarily require attention to people with whom we have very little localized engagement). A more substantive version of this critique is offered by Karen Barad in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, which I’ll quote from here at length both because it indirectly refutes Nagel pretty nicely but also because it fleshes out the root of a problem that I think Nagel is actually reaching out for:

Butler cautions that this claim — that gender is performed — is not to be understood as a kind of theatrical performance conducted by a willful subject who would choose its gender. Such a misreading ironically reintroduces the liberal humanist subject onto the scene, thereby undercutting poststructuralism’s anti-humanism, which refuses the presumed givenness of the subject and seeks to attend to its production…However, despite these crucial elaborations, it is not all clear that Butler succeeds in bringing the discursive and the material into closer proximity. The gap that remains in Foucault’s theory [of discursive practices, which Butler herself leans on] seems to leave a question mark on Butler’s ability to spell out how it is that ‘the reiterative and citational power practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ can account for the matter of sexed bodies. Questions about the material nature of discursive practices seem to hang in the air like the persistent smile of the Cheshire cat (61–64)

To put that a little differently, Butler’s emphasis on performativity productively raises the relationally emergent nature of individual identity (which Nagel wholly misinterprets), but still places a premium on the performance or stylization of the body such that its actual materiality is figured as a sort of passive recipient of discursive inscription rather than an active constituent of the discourse itself. As a result, it’s not bodies themselves so much as the aggregate performative inscriptions imposed upon bodies that produces Butler’s conception of relational identity, which, as Barad describes, leaves a gap between the connotative power of a given performance and material conditions as such. In practical terms, this means that materiality in Butler’s account (i.e., both “material conditions” of a given class position in the Marxist sense as well as the actual bodies that iteratively constitute our society) is always mediated by performance, which inevitably leaves a kind of gap through which disingenuous actors can appropriate the discourse: Liberal commentators can obfuscate a more direct discussion of material conditions by rehashing the relative merits of various performative modes, policing language, etc. (phrases like “concern trolling” or, more to the point, “performative wokeness” gesture toward this kind of move).

This gap between performance and materiality is addressed somewhat indirectly in Butler’s later work, which moves to translate this same relationally emergent conception of identity onto a more global scale. In Frames of War, she ends up kind of hedging her earlier emphasis on performativity in discussing how identity emerges in a global context, arguing that “[the] differential distribution of precarity is at once a material and a perceptual issue, since those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden or starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (25). In this way, Butler seems to acknowledge the inherent blindspots of a discourse built on performativity, yet it remains unclear how, within her framing of identity, we can address materiality directly: actual human bodies are going to remain a kind of passive substance upon which performance is inscribed, whose status as ethically relevant becomes a function of some vast network of global perceptibility. It’s a problem of scale, with the implicit suggestion that some people are more relevant as global actors than others: In a global context, our romantic notion of the rights-bearing human is refracted into spectacle, human suffering is distilled into a potential catalyst for intervention, and actual material conditions become relevant only insofar as they can be perceived by (globally powerful) others.

Again, none of this is to suggest that Haider’s culminating gesture toward “universality” is misguided. It establishes a clear goal for leftists looking to engage with identity politics in a more productive way. What’s important, here, is to recognize what genuine Universality might actually entail. When Haider argues, for example, that “Universality does not exist in the abstract, as a prescriptive principle which is mechanically applied to indifferent circumstances. It is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says no one will be enslaved” (113), we ought to both recognize the usefulness on his emphasis on insurgent intervention on actual material conditions, but, simultaneously, raise the more complicated issue of what insurgency looks like outside of the well-worn conception of the humanitarian intervention offered by liberal humanism. If the project here is to move beyond the narrow conception of the rights-bearing, identity-wielding individual, we have to take seriously the idea that some other conception of the kinds of beings that iteratively populate the world will need to be described in its place.

Identity Politics, Solidarity, and Judith Butler’s notion of the Body in “Mistaken Identity” was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To start, let’s maybe think a bit about how human responsibility is figured for Heidegger. Here’s an interesting bit from his “Letter on Humanism”:

The human being is in thrownness. This means that the human being, as the ek-sisting counterthrow [Gegenwurf] of being, in more than the animal rationale precisely to the extent that he is less bound up with the human being conceived from subjectivity. The human being is not the lord of beings. The human being is the shepherd of being. Human beings lose nothing in this ‘less’; rather, they gain in that they attain the truth of being. They gain the essential poverty of the shepard, whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of being’s truth” (260)

So, is this a good way of understanding Barad’s conception of human responsibility? Does what she terms our “ability to respond” figure us as a kind of “shepard” to the universe? This is obviously a tricky analogy, in that it sort of flattens out the rest of the beings that, in an agential realist account, iteratively co-constitute the universe alongside us humans as a flock of sheep, but it also captures something that I think is essential to Barad’s critique of the liberal humanist subject: Where liberal humanism more or less situates The Human as the ‘lord’ of the rest of nature (in so far as he is not so much “responsible” for it but rather a kind of arbiter of what is to be done with it), Barad’s agential realist account really emphasizes the degree to which our responsibility (literally, ability to respond) obligates us to participate in the world’s ongoing enactment in a manner that is sensitive and responsive to the others alongside whom we iteratively emerge. For both Heidegger and Barad, we can see this effort to eschew the liberal humanist justification for anthropocentric exceptionalism, while at the same time retaining a kind of unique position for “the human” on the basis of our capacity to respond or “be called”.

Heidegger, Barad, and Agential Realist Responsibility was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is a very short thing written for a panel discussion on posthuman conceptions of community at the university of manitoba, 3 feb 2017

In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett develops a theory of vital materialism that employs the Deleuzian notion of assemblages to conceptualize the diffuse set of actors (both “human” and not) that are involved in the enactment of any given phenomena. The goal, for Bennett, is “to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (viii). For Bennett, the emphasis on a wider set of beings is meant to recontextualize human intentionality as just one of many actors behind the enactment of any given phenomena, such that “[t]he locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman work group” (xvii). While Bennett’s work aims to fulfill the noble posthuman project of “decentering the human”, her conception of agential heterogenetic assemblages, wherein “strong responsibility seems… to be empirically false” (37), could be understood to suggest an eerie and chaotic agential landscape wherein human intentionally is subsumed into a blur of nonhuman forces, and human responsibility gives way to a kind of agentive nihilism. While I don’t think this is actually Bennett’s intention, it is definitely something that anyone reading her work is going to have to contend with. So, in what follows, I’d like to talk a little bit about why certain aspects of Bennett’s otherwise compelling notion of vital materialism are so troubling, with a particular emphasis on her usage of heterogeneity as the basis for the assemblage.

The whole issue, as I see it, is summed up pretty cleanly when Bennett attempts to cash out her theory into a kind of ethics. She writes, “[p]erhaps the ethical responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating” (37). So rather than instilling a sense of responsibility toward one’s assembled community of human and non-human others, Bennett’s notion of the assemblage leaves the human actor observing his relationality to others only indirectly, while he vigilantly monitors his own participation in assemblages whose trajectory he appraises to be “likely to do harm” (37). What’s important to note is not only how this conception of agency leaves the human disconnected from what he would otherwise view as “his” actions, but, perhaps more fundamentally, the fact that, in a certain basic sense, it actually reaffirms the distinctly humanist ontological binary between human and nonhuman that Bennett is trying to distance herself from: The human is still figured as the starting point of inquiry, as he vigilantly calculates and reacts to his relationship to a heterogenetic assemblage from which he is implicitly uniquely capable of extricating himself.

While Bennett’s turn toward this residual humanism does read jarringly against the theoretical project of her work, my suspicion is that she is lead to this position on the basis of her heterogenetic account of the assemblage: because her notion of assemblages implicitly requires a set of ontologically distinct beings who then iteratively enact a “confederate agency” (37), Bennett’s vital materialism does not sufficiently problematize “the human” as a given point of departure: The heterogeneity of her assemblages in fact necessarily fixes the ontological status of “the human” as a discrete being before its inscription within the assemblage. Thus, the human subject remains the starting point of his own calculus, with all the anthropocentric and individualistic assumptions that the liberal humanist conception of “the human” entails, who then situates himself within an assemblage of others, who figure mostly as potential impediments to the enactment of his particular intentions. Granted, this is a decidedly uncharitable reading of Bennett’s theory, but without challenging the ontological primacy of the “human” being, she is left with no recourse to combat the inertial presence this humanistic anthropocentrism.

To remedy this, I advocate for what one could call “dynamic homogeneity” in assemblage thinking, or a conception of agency that not only directs its attention toward the assemblage, but actually takes the process of assembling itself to be ontologically primary.

Rather than conceiving of agency as a set of discrete phenomenal assemblages which are themselves constituted of similarly discrete, marginally interactive actors, dynamic homogeneity describes a singular, ongoing and indeterminate process through which ostensibly discrete beings (both human and not) are contingently assembled.

The benefit of this approach is that it effectively dissolves any hard or lasting boundary between the human and the assemblage, such that our human actor is freed from the illusion that he could ever truly choose not to participate in the assemblage with which he is inherently entangled: because his existence as such is necessarily contingent upon the singular, dynamic, and ontologically-primary process of assembly, he is also inherently and irrevocably tethered to the human and non-human community alongside whom and which he emerges. Thus, we are not so much focused on wether or not to participate in an assemblage that may be set up to cause harm, but rather how our own irrevocable participatory behaviour can be modified to encourage the flourishing of the whole ongoing assembling process. This is the basic move made by posthuman theorists such as Karen Barad, who argues, “There are no singular causes, And there are no individual agents of change. Responsibility is not ours alone. And yet our responsibility is greater than it would be if it were ours alone. Responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then” (394). Like Bennett, Barad rejects the notion that responsibility is “ours alone”, but then goes on to suggest that, precisely because it is not ours alone, we are responsible not only to ourselves, but to our whole assembled community. By making the process of assembling ontologically primary, a dynamically homogenous account of vital materialism productively affirms our irrevocable participation in the world as an ongoing act of becoming, and emphasizes our responsibility to the community of others alongside whom we contingently emerge.

Dynamic Homogeniety: A Short Talk on Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I spent the afternoon yesterday reading through Grafton Tanner’s Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts. It’s a fun book! It’s some of the best writing I’ve seen on how the internet actually feels right now: disjointed, ephemeral, endlessly complex and yet somehow still fundamentally shallow.

One of the main arguments of the book, as I see it, is this idea that late capitalism has more or less forced the drive for innovation in art to atrophy, such that what we’re left with is a bunch of mass-produced consumer art that just mines the aesthetics of the past and sells them back to us (i.e., contemporary radio pop is mostly the same rehashed ideas over and over again, comicbook superheroes have re-emerged as an acceptable form of entertainment for adults, star wars is back, etc.). Thus, artistic innovation, marginal as it is, takes on a new form as well: it responds to late capitalism’s slick marauding of the past with some past-maurading of its own, but rather than turning old art into the polished new products, it seeks to transform earlier artifacts of consummerism into warped and uncanny versions of themselves.

The main example of this, for Tanner, is vaporwave, which, as he suggests, “take the fit, smiling, white-teethed mask off Muzak and replaces it with a more sinister face — the dead stare of unfettered capitalism” (41). For Tanner, vaporwave is the quintessential genre of late capitalism, as it employs capitalism’s own tricks and repurposes them for its own end (i.e., endless repetition, rehashed asthetics, shallow gestures toward broader concepts or themes). Tanner’s discussion of vaporwave’s relationship with consummerism is really illuminating and gave me a lot to think about.

What I wanted to draw attention to, though, is Tanner’s suggestion that Vaporwave actually manages to escape the endless cycle of production and consumption that characterizes late capitalism. He writes, “for the most part, there is a product we cannot consume in the virtual plaza, and that is vaporwave itself. Vaporwave is the sound of the virtual plaza reframed and thrown back at us in an attempt to reveal for us capital’s stronghold on our existence, but its method of production and distribution lies totally outside the financial transactions that occur in the plaza” (45). At first glance, this is a fair point: vaporwave is usually produced by individuals in their spare time, usually distributed for free on bandcamp or youtube.

But what’s worth considering, I think, is that what vaporwave is offering extends beyond the artifacts it produces. Vaporwave can also be understood as an aesthetic (or, “a e s t h e t i c 美的”, if you will), by virtue of which it is inherently available to be appropriated by the same late consummer capitalist culture that it is critiquing. In this sense, vaporwave producers are actually just performing the free creative labour in a process that is always already capitalism. While the novelty of the genre might feel subversive now, it‘s not particularly difficult to imagine a vaporwave soundalike scoring a make-up commercial or something (btw, has this already happened?). Consider how quickly vaporwave’s spiritual precursor chillwave transitioned from the Hot New Thing into a sort of punchline once some mainstream blogs got a hold of it (note as well that the longest lasting artifact of chillwave is probably Washed Out’s Gary Low-sampling “Feel It All Around”, which is now best known as the theme music for IFC’s Portlandia).

My point is basically this: while I agree with Tanner that vaporwave does serve as an interesting example of how art can continue to respond to the impositions of late capitalism in genuinely surprising ways, I remain sceptical as to wether it provides a model for actually transcending the late capitalist ethos in any sustainable way. The best we can hope for, maybe, is that, as late capitalism continues to mine our cultural past in an increasingly invasive and grotesque manner, art will responsively become weirder and more difficult to translate into a marketable product.

Btw, you can buy Babbling Corpse here at Zero Books.

You Never Leave The Mall: On Grafton Tanner’s Babbling Corpse was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s a weirdly affecting experience to browse the Amazon reviews for Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love. For many people, this book has obviously been extremely meaningful: many reviewers refer to Gilbert as “Liz”, and expound the virtues of her extremely personal narrative, which, as one reviewer instructively suggests, leaves one feeling “inspired, entertained, and hopeful”. Indeed, this sense of unimpeded inspiration and hope seems to be one of the central appeals of the book, as another reviewer suggests that this memoir functions as proof that “one can live one’s life in an ever expanding circle of vitality and joy”. So, with that in mind, this morning I’d like to examine how Gilbert uses this sense of personal inspiration throughout Eat Pray Love to subtly endorse individualist consumerism as a vehicle for spiritual fulfilment.

From the outset of the narrative, it is clear that Gilbert’s primary objective is to establish a sense of trust and complicity between the narrator and her readers, such that when she introduces the reason for her unhappiness, readers are encouraged to consider her situation in relation to their own. Note, for example, the bland generalities she employs to describe her discontent at the opening of the narrative: “I was supposed to want to have a baby. My husband and I…had built our entire life around the common expectation that after the doddering old age of thirty…I would have grown weary of traveling and would be happy to live in a big, busy household full of children and homemade quilts, with a garden in the backyard and cozy stew bubbling on the stovetop” (10). In this way, Gilbert aims squarely at the hidden fears of other middle aged women who find themselves disinterested in the heteronormative American Dream, and invites them to reflect on exactly why the normative family unit is an unfulfilling imposition on their agency as individuals.

In this sense, Gilbert offers a valuable and easily-accessible first-hand account of what Lauren Berlant would call “cruel optimism”, or, the phenomenon in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). For Berlant, Liz Gilbert’s anxiety would be understood as the disconcerting tension between her attachment to the pursuit of what she has been lead to believe is the “good life”, and her aversion to the normative domestic role of women within that life (i.e., rearing children, tending a garden, making stew). And this tension is really the crucial thing, as it activates Gilbert — and therefore, her trusting readers — to an awareness of the cruelty of their attachments. As Berlant goes on to argue, “if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone…even in a subtle fashion, the fear is that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything” (24). This is to say, the sudden revelation of the paradoxical cruelty of one’s attachments also reveals the precarity of one’s being-in-life, as the subject is forced to find new objects toward which she can orient herself, or else risks a complete loss of attachment to anything and becomes disillusioned with the world as a whole. Thus, an awareness of the cruelty of one’s attachments is both a risk and an opportunity, wherein one’s normative attachments are productively disturbed and the potential to locate new and more fulfilling attachments is activated.

But this is where Berlant and Gilbert’s projects diverge. Where Berlant explicitly lays out the roots of cruel optimism in the reductive logic of consumer capitalism and goes on pursue more productive modes of “being in life without wanting the world”, Gilbert subtly re-inscribes her briefly disillusioned reader back within the logic of consumer capitalism. For Gilbert, the language of female empowerment is employed only so far as to encourage her trusting reader that self-interested consumption is actually a viable method of rebelling against the oppressive norms of their patriarchal society. Thus, when Gilbert goes on to allow herself to “express little baby-step wants” (23), she’s simultaneously granting a kind of permission to her reader as well: her admissions that “I want to go to a Yoga Class”, or “I want to buy myself a new pencil box” (23) are rendered not as fairly straightforward impulses toward consumerism, but as very real personal victories against a society that demands female selflessness. When she first sees the photograph of David’s “spiritual teacher”, she writes, “My heart skipped a beat and then flat-out tripped over itself and fell on its face. Then my heart stood up, brushed itself off, took a deep breath and announced: ‘I want a spiritual teacher’ ” (25). While there is obviously nothing particularly radical about this statement, it’s framed to suggest a new “spiritually active” mode of being in the world. Gilbert’s “heart” heroically brushes itself off from the imposition of selflessness and demands a new set of “spiritual”, or self-interested consumer goods toward which she can orient herself. Thus, the entirety of the narrative that follows, despite what appear to be very real moments of “spirituality”, are always already couched within the logic of personal consumption. This new “spiritual” mode of being is predicated on a slight shift from the normative domestic consumerism that Gilbert defiantly eschews, into the superficially distinct mode of empowering self-interest.

Indeed, the whole text of Eat Pray Love is self-consciously presented as an artifact of consumerism, as the spiritual journey that Gilbert enjoys is entirely enabled by a $200,000 publisher’s advance. As Gilbert describes: “I can actually afford to do this because of a staggering personal miracle: in advance, my publisher has purchased the book I shall write about my travels” (35). Personal miracle or not, the advance reminds us that this text and the “spiritual content” it contains are already products that have been purchased, and will be sold. Thus, to buy into its message of self-empowering spirituality is to confirm the legitimacy of the mechanisms that enabled its production. Again, this does not undermine the very real spiritual experiences that Gilbert describes: spending one fifth of a million dollars and a year abroad to explicitly indulge in self-discovery would doubtlessly be a very transformative experience. But by explicitly embedding that experience within the logic of consumption, Gilbert is subtly reaffirming the ostensibly irrefutable centrality of consumerism as the mediator of human experience: Thus, her trusting reader, who deeply identifies with Liz Gilbert’s disillusionment in the cruelly optimistic “good life fantasy” of house, husband, children, and domestic duties, is seduced by an even greater consumer fantasy of spiritual fulfilment: as Ruth Williams succinctly describes, “the EPL brand purports to allow women to ‘buy’ a piece of Gilbert’s spiritual journey” (615), which, of course, presupposes that spiritual fulfilment is something that can be purchased at all.

Thus, unlike Berlant, who envisions a mode of being beyond “The Good Life fantasy” in which “one would achieve both mental health and a commitment to equality [by embracing] precarity as the condition of being and belonging” (194), Gilbert simply expands what “the good life fantasy” entails: she affirms the inherent value of the heteronormative relationship and its accompanying set of consumer goods, and then appends the additional fantasy of spiritual fulfilment through self-indulgent consumption, a fantasy which the marketplace is eager to accommodate.

Cruel Mysticism: The Construction of the Spiritual Consumer in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ryder Ripps is an internet artist who I’ve been aware of, and interested in to varying degrees, for maybe four years. His work is consistently visually striking, and I generally appreciate his willingness to engage openly and seriously on things like “meme culture” and the changing nature of intellectual property. He’s overall a pretty interesting guy, seems to be my general impression. I wanted to kind of collect some thoughts I had about his work and his general online persona following a particularly jarring exchange he had on facebook with some journalist from the guardian, and I thought it might be cool to publish this here with a title intended as a sort of Ryder Ripps-focused clickbait. Wonder if he’ll see this, lol.

So, the prompt for this whole thing was a series of exchanges that Ripps had with this journalist from the Guardian, after Ripps attended some kind of young republican meet-up to watch the third U.S. presidential debate and was interviewed as if he were a Trump supporter. He offered some fairly unexciting quotes seemingly emulating the kind of rhetoric and concerns a certain portion of Trump supporters ostensibly tend to use.

Anyway, so the article gets published, Ripps finds it, screen-caps the relevant part and posts it to facebook, claiming to have “trolled” the reporter from the guardian. Its a kind of funny bit; Ripps has been an outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders throughout the election cycle, and for people aware of him and his work, the quotes offered here are obviously disingenuous.

People really liked this joke:

Ripps himself tries to frame the whole gag as a kind of commentary on the ‘age of clickbait journalism’ , which, sure:

And so the journalist that initially wrote the piece responds, I think because Ripps calls him out on twitter, and Ripps’ quotes in the article get pulled, and they (eventually) amend a little ‘correction’ disclaimer at the bottom of the article, noting that one of the sources for the article ‘deceived’ their journalist.

Then the journalist himself posts on Facebook about this whole weird thing, basically saying he doesn’t get why this is ‘trolling’ or how Ripps has done anything to coherently criticize ‘the capitalist system’, and mostly just seems disinterested in (if somewhat bewildered by) the whole event.

So of course Ripps jumps on this thread and, in a series of increasingly infantile responses, just shits all over the journalist and the journalist’s friends. For those somewhat familiar with Ripps, this too feels kind of like a joke: he’s fucking with them, weakly name-calling, critiquing their ‘comebacks’ as dated and unoriginal. It’s pretty rough to look at, honestly, but it is definitely a kind of performance.

So the question, and the impulse behind the current writing, is who is he performing for? It’s obviously not for the journalist and his friends, who are not in on the ‘joke’. It also probably isn’t directly for his own Facebook audience, who seem to be mostly absent from the thread (most of Ripps’ comments remain ‘unliked’, except for a few of those weird passive aggressive ‘likes’ from whatever person he was attacking). What seems more likely, at least to me, based on my fairly limited knowledge of Ripps’ work, and the Internet artist community in general, is that Ripps is engaged in some kind of performance that is primarily for himself: he’s become so abstracted from his own online conduct that his online persona is some kind of long performative action, of which ‘he’ is the primary audience member and critic.

And this is the kind of weird rabbit hole of abstraction that I’d maybe like to write a little more about, both because it feels like a quintessentially modern kind of performance and because, wether or not Ripps is the best example of this kind of thing (at it really might be the case that he’s not), it’s I think a kind of widespread practice amongst people (and especially artists) whose work (and thus lives) are increasingly entangled with the internet.

Consider, for example, this Instagram-based performance piece called Excellences and Perfections, by Amalia Ulman. The Telegraph, which (in my view, egregiously) hailed this as “the first Instagram masterpiece”, summarizes the work like this:

The whole “performance” is cataloged on Ulman’s personal instagram account, such that her followers could watch this series unfold in real time. Again, the idea here is that the artist is self-consciously performing a role, rather than (unself-consciously) “living it”, and thus able to claim ownership over the resulting series of instagram posts as “an artwork”, rather than simply an account of what she was doing over the last few months. Here’s how Ulman explains “the joke”:

There’s obviously a lot going on here, but the thing I’m mostly interested in pointing out is that the only thing that makes this a piece of art, rather than just the lived experience of this woman, is that Ulman, the artist, declares herself to be distinct from Ulman, the fictionalized character of the performance: It’s not really Ulman but rather “her anti-heroine self” who is “performing” a series of stereotypical gender-specific lifestyles. What’s notable about this level of abstraction, wherein Ulman is one step removed from “her character’s” actions, is that it actually kind of weakens the impact of the statement she’s is attempting to make through the work: if “being a woman” is a performance, then wouldn’t it be more impactful to simply own these actions as her own? And perhaps more significantly, why would she choose to emulate, by way of a fictionalized “woman”, only the blandest and most well-worn stereotypes for young women? Isn’t that pretty low-hanging fruit, in terms of performativity?

I guess what I’m getting at is that performativity for its own sake is not only boring, but also unproductive. Both Ripps (as as the “dumb camo hat”-wearing Trump supporter, and later, online troll) and Ulman (as the “L.A. ‘It Girl’”), are self-consciously “performing” roles that are stereotypical (and thus easily recognizable as “performances”) only to step back and go, “look at me performing, everything is performing, isn’t that interesting”. The overall impact of this, rather than somehow presenting a “nuanced critique” of the dominant social structures that encourage this kind of normative performance (i.e., what Ripps refers to as “the capitalist system”), seems to simply reaffirm the hopelessness of these struggles, wherein the artist takes a position of comfortable detachment, and, rather than trying to consider alternatives to the stereotypical performative roles offered by our advanced capitalist social structures (i.e., what Rosi Braidotti calls “epistemological nomadism”), simply shrug at it: “we’re fucked, isn’t that funny?”

And this is maybe the root of the problem: Judith Butler published Gender Trouble over 25 years ago. We know that social roles (gendered, political, etc.) are performative. You’re not saying anything interesting by doing work that just highlights this performativity and essentially posits that because all of our conduct is performative and mediated by normative social structures, we might as well just “troll” others or otherwise exploit our awareness of this fact from a position of cool, detached nihilism. Its the artistic equivalent of this classic meme™:

It’s instructive to note that much of Butler’s recent work is focused on moving beyond normative performative roles into modes of being that are more responsive to the rest of the world. In Frames of War, Butler examines how the normative social structures of Western society mediate which bodies can be seen to matter: “These categories, conventions and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, that induce a subject of this kind, precede and make possible the act of recognition itself…the point, however, will be to ask how such norms operate to produce certain subjects as ‘recognizable’ persons and to make others decidedly more difficult to recognize” (5–6). Rather than wallowing in the shallows of normative, culturally-mediated performativity, Butler goes on to advocate active responsiveness to the world, such that those who the dominant structures of power deem “unrecognizable” (or, what she’s previously termed “unmournable bodies”) can be fully recognized and engaged with.

And this is basically the point: living with a strong sense of performativity is important. it demonstrates an awareness to how our being is iteratively constructed in the world. What’s more important, though, is that that sense of being is tethered, at least peripherally, to the others with which you are entangled. To be a “troll”, to perform a disregard for others (i.e., others who are not the embodiment of ‘the capitalist system’ or whatever, but are just some people trying to to their goddamn jobs) is to foreclose on the kind of responsive engagement that an awareness to the performativity of being ought to catalyze. It’s not enough to recognize that everything (including your ‘self’) is a construct, the next step, if you want to see yourself as someone coherently criticizing “the capitalist system”, is to use that understanding to foster a more responsive sense of being, to become with the entangled others that “the capitalist system” encourages us to ignore.

Responsive Performativity, or Why Ryder Ripps is the [something] of [something else] was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So for James, then, the question is less about locating, in the world, where agency “comes from”, because, as he points out, “each partial process, to him who lives through it, defines itself by its origin and its goal; but to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it, that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place, and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond” (173). That is to say, any specific point along a causal chain, while perhaps accountable to its own limited role within the larger network of causality, is never exclusively accountable, but rather entangled. Thus, the question for James is more productively put as follows: “What practical difference does it make if, instead of saying naively that ‘I’ am active now delivering this address, I say that a wider thinker is active, or that certain ideas are active, to that certain nerve-cells are active in producing the result?” (176). Ultimately, that is, James is searching for the practical import of these “halting-places”, where we can at least provisionally locate a discrete, goal-oriented actor.

In this sense, James’ notion of activity has, perhaps, less to do with assigning blame and more to do with clarifying why the world is experienced as it is: When I accidentally use my rent money to buy rare books over the internet, we would probably be unsatisfied if I tried to explain that, actually, my actions were rooted in my subjection to the neoliberal pressure to define myself through consumption, and therefore I can’t really be responsible. Similarly, I can’t imagine being able to pin this situation on an errant string of neurons that predetermined my actions. For James the appeals to both macroscopic ideological structures and the more basic firing of neurons encapsulates the “old dispute” between materialism and teleology: is the world produced through “elementary short-span actions summing themselves ‘blindly,’ or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act” (179). He suggests that even while we naively believe that the world functions on some balance between both (and this still seems to be basically true), thus far we’ve been unable to produce a rigorous account of this precarious agential balancing act between micro- and macroscopic phenomena. As he observes, “how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate upon for many years to come” (179).

Crucially, though, while James doesn’t have a direct answer to this problem, he does know where we should be directing our focus: “The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, but these elements things, or be they conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome in the world process, and in the meaning of the succession stages with the elements work out” (186–87). For James, the answer to “where effectuation in this world is located” (186) can not be revealed through exclusive examination of discrete parts (which serve only as “halting-places” for agential orientation) but rather in the dynamic entanglement of the system as a whole.

William James’ Agential Realism was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bauman’s notion of freedom follows Schopenhauer’s, wherein one “feels free in so far as the imagination is not greater than one’s actual desires, while neither of the two reaches beyond the ability to act” (17). In this sense, there are basically two paths to freedom: one either expands one’s ability to act (which Bauman calls “objective freedom”) or, one could confine one’s imagination and desires and imagination within the confines of the available range of action (i.e., “subjective freedom). In either sense, if some sense of balance between imagination/desire and potential action is achieved and sustained, the discourse of freedom becomes more of an abstract signifier, and less of an actual motivating force.

Where this becomes an issue, for Bauman, is that the consumer capitalist values of liquid modernity are basically built around a subtle reinscription of what it means to be “free”. We see artifacts of this in our daily Western lives: consider the general rise hedonistic self-interested consumption and decline in interest in “the public good”, or the increasing role of the public space as a platform for “exposing” or amplifying private concerns (the distinctly modern brand of celebrity, who exists in the public space primarily because he or she can entirely disolve his or her sense of privacy is a kind of interesting example of this). For Bauman, the causes of this shift are “rooted in the profound transformation of the public space and, more generally, in the fashion in which modern society works and perpetuates itself” (25).

This change is perhaps best exemplified in his discussion of Orwell’s 1984, which, he notes, functions as “an inventory of the fears and apprehensions which haunted modernity in its heavy stage” (26). The collapse of privacy and the individual, the schzitophenic notion of Doublethink, or the disappearance of non-normative histories into the “memory hole” were of deep concern to the modern public of the 1950s.

Less than 70 years later, though, those same anxieties don’t really resonate. As Bauman observes, we “no longer recognize [our] own chagrins and agonies, or the nightmares of [our] neighbours, in Orwell’s dystopia” (27). And this is surprising, considering much of what Orwell predicted as actually come to pass: consider our general indifference to being serveilled by various government agencies, or even, perhaps somewhat more sinisterly, our enthusiastic willingness to share that information in the first place: despite the fact that we know feeding personal information into facebook is basically just providing amunition for better targeted advertising, we do it anyway, because we feel, on some level, that sharing that information is an expression of our freedom.

Thus, and this is really the key point that Bauman wants to make, we are faced with “a wide and growing gap between the condition of individuals de jure and their control to become individuals de facto — that is to gain control over their fate and make the choices they truly desire” (39). Rather than the freedom to persue hedonistic consumption, the individual must endeavor to recapture some notion of “the public space”, wherein we, as empowered individuals (or, even better, empowered citizens) could work toward constructing a sense of community that actually reflects our examined and reasonable interests.

Freedom From What: Bauman’s Notion of Emancipation was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Posthuman Humanities: Life beyond Theory

The project for the final chapter is a discussion of the impact of posthuman theory on the Humanities. Braidotti begins by pointing out that traditionally the Humanities have functioned under the assumption that the “human” subject is the Vitruvian ideal: “It is the image of Man as a rational animal endowed with language” (143). Braidotti points out that this positioning of Man at the centre is unfairly anthropocentric, and as such, serves to fuel Europe’s self-centred pursuit of its own interests, potentially to the detriment of those it deems to be “others” (ranging from women and non-europeans to non-human animals and the earth itself). Braidotti points to the relatively recent development of critical disciplines that have identified and worked to dismantle this dynamic, including feminism, post-colonialism, and cultural studies. She points out that the increasingly disparate schools of criticism pose challenges for the organization of universities, such that what is needed is “methodological innovations, such as a critical genealogical approach that by-passes the mere rhetoric of the crisis” (144). The new challenge, for critical discourse, is not only the deconstruction of the subject, but, crucially, a reassembling of the planet that accounts for the forging of non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances that will allow us to move toward positive change. The Humanities, then, are faced with the challenge of incorporating this new worldview, in which “The Human” hangs unsupported by the increasingly distant anthropocentric canon. Braidotti is hopeful: “[f]ar from being a terminal crisis, however, this challenge opens up new global, eco-sophical dimensions” (145). The recent expansion of fields like Animal Studies and ecocriticism speak to the power of scholarship to push through into the new post-anthropocentric humanities, and help craft an ethical and critical framework fitting our posthuman age.

Braidotti then traces the genealogy of the crisis of the Humanities, starting with the “culture war” of the 1950s, during which the post-structuralists were attacked by the science community: Scientists “have encouraged the by-now familiar reaction of dismissal of the Humanities through the intellectually lazy charge of moral and cognitive relativism” (151). Braidotti notes that, in spite of these attacks, it is important to acknowledge the contributions made by the post-structuralists toward a reinvigoration of the humanities. Foucault’s declaration of the decline of Man is not a “manifesto for relativism”, but rather, a necessary reexamination of the increasingly problematic understanding of anthropos. With this in mind, Braidotti points out that the science community’s reaction to the post-structuralists is “to mistake the messenger for the message” (151). As the previous chapters have made clear, the insularity of the methodological approaches for both Western humanities and sciences does need to be examined and the institutionalized practices of Euro- and anthropocentrism need to be accounted for. As we move into the 21st century, the Humanities have a responsibility to spring forth from their defensive stance and work towards a rigorous and comprehensive posthuman apparatus for both science and humanities research, and in doing so, shift focus toward “planetary intellectual challenges” (153).

Braidotti then suggests ways in which the Science and Humanities communities can work together, by locating areas of overlap. She compiles a short overview of recent interdisciplinary work (projects like Stephen Gould and Rosamond Purcell’s dialogue between science and art through a “sophisticated interplay of images and scientific information” (154), or Sarah Franklin’s “path-breaking work on Dolly the sheep” (155)) and suggests that such an “embarrassment of riches” is indicative not of a crisis of the Humanities, but rather, an expression of the renewed vitality of the field. She notes that a unifying feature of these interdisciplinary projects is that they are epistemologically grounded, such that the methodologies and apparatuses can be clearly defined. In this way, we can see the influence of the science community as well as the poststructuralist problematization of a default frame of reference. What has emerged is a vast degree of variation between epistemologies, such that the human sciences have become increasingly disparate and dis-unified. Crucially, this dis-unity points to “overabundance, not lack” (156). Braidotti points to “matter-realist” thinkers like Karan Barad who, in Braidotti’s view, perfectly symbolize the rich theoretical insight that the humanities have to offer the science community. Barad’s Agential Realism is an epistemological framework that builds on recent scientific developments in the field of quantum mechanics, providing a practical interpretation of the impact of science on ethics. That is to say, the role of the Humanities, for Barad, is to push scientific insight toward their logical practical conclusion. If matter is essentially one infinite substance (which science claims it is), then agential realism follows as a rational epistemology for understanding agency.

With these transdisciplinary models in mind, Braidotti outlines the “golden rules” of her posthuman theory: “cartography accuracy, with the corollary of ethical accountability; trans-disciplinarity; the importance of combining critique with creative configurations; the principle of non-linearity; the powers of memory and the imagination and the strategy of defamiliarization” (163). These guidelines, Braidotti asserts, are designed primarily to encourage a relationship of mutual respect between the humanities and the life sciences. Several of these terms have already been explored at length in previous chapters, but Braidotti provides further explanation of some key aspects: By “cartography”, she means a “theoretically based and politically informed reading of the present” (164). Cartography accuracy refers to a scholarly awareness of one’s place within a system of power. By explicitly acknowledging one’s situatedness within a given power system, one can effectively qualify any knowledge practices and productively avoid assuming one’s own position as a default.

She provides a similar clarification of her usage of “non-linearity”, suggesting that “it would be self-defeating for the Humanities to stick to the traditional rule of visualization by automatically adapting linear thinking” (164). Because many of the challenges of the posthuman era are complex and poly-centred, our theoretical framework should be similarly poly-centred. That is to say, we should approach these problems on their own terms. This logic of non-linearity should also be applied to scholarship, as linear modes come to be replaced by a more rhizomatic styles of thought, the ‘truth’ of a text comes to be located in the lines of interaction that connect it to paratextual “outsides”, as opposed to “the authority of a proper noun, a signature, a tradition, a canon, or the prestige of an academic discipline” (165). This notion has important implications for the practice of criticism, as citations can be understood not as “flat repetitions”, but rather iterations of the “affective charges of texts as events” (166). That is to say, the practice of citation is not only the restating of an idea, but rather, the invocation of a separate cartography. It is, as Braidotti evocatively describes, “a relay point between different moments in space and time” (166).

With this complex networking of time in mind, she turns to a discussion of the role of memory in her posthuman theory. According to Braidotti, memory is “the active reinvention of a self that is joyfully discontinuous, as opposed to being mournfully consistent” (167). That is to say, memory is the fluid context that positions the perspective of the subject in space and time. Because memory is not inherently tethered to any objective reality, it can (re)construct the individual perspective through discursive practices. The subjective perspective is not the result of a linear stack of memories, but rather, a position constructed through an inherently imperfect narrative of recollected experiences plus their affective metadata. In this way, the possibility for change is opened, as individuals are no longer tethered to any kind of hard-coded or irrefutable point of reference, but rather, can interpret memories differently given a new set of discursive tools.

Braidotti then turns to examine the effect of this theoretical framework on how we understand the Humanities. She points out that, in the posthuman era, it is crucial that the Humanities not be constrained to discussions of “The Human” or “Man”, arguing that “the Humanities need to embrace the multiple opportunities offered by the posthuman condition” (172). As much of this book has demonstrated, critical theory is uniquely well-equipped for this task, with a vast archive of methodologies and theory to develop compelling and novel approaches for dealing with the increasingly complex and dynamic issues of the post-anthropocentric era. For this reason, Braidotti advocates an institutional push on behalf of the Humanities to participate more actively in real world problems, stating: “[t]he epistemic and the ethical walk hand in hand into the complicated landscapes of the third millennium” (178). Braidotti points out that since the 1960s and the rise of consumer capitalism, universities have increasingly become corporate institutions, in which the “hard sciences” work to create better products for consumers and the “soft sciences” “dispersed their foundational value to become a sort of luxury intellectual consumer good” (178). What is needed is a new kind of university (or rather, “Multi-versity”) that fits the dynamic posthuman predicament: concepts like open source, open governance, and open data will become central tenets of the new university, as the increasingly interconnected global community is accommodated with access and participation. Knowledge should be understood not as a commodity but as a process that you, as a member of a global community, have a right and responsibility to participate in.

Summary of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (Part 4) was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chapter 3

The Inhuman: Life beyond Death

Braidotti opens the chapter with a brief tracing of the concept of “the inhuman”, starting with Marcel L’Herbier’s film L’Inhumaine from 1924, and concluding with Lyotard’s The Inhuman, published in 1988. She notes that the concept of the inhuman, over the last century, has transformed from the inscrutable and eroticized “other” presented in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis into Lyotard’s vision of the inhuman as “the alienating and commodifying effect of advanced capitalism on the human” (108). The rapidly changing technological landscape has transformed the relationship between humans and machines from one of “self” and “other” into one of mutual interdependence, as machines become increasingly implicated into the definition of the subject. With this in mind, Braidotti announces the project of this chapter as a defence of the position that “the current historical context has transformed the modernist inhuman into a posthuman and post-anthropocentric set of practices” (109). Braidotti advocates a shift toward a “matter-realist” vitalism based on a Spinozist monistic substantial universe to radically shift the discourse on death and mortality in our technologically bio-mediated present and future.

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, a Zoe-centric turn provides a new set of rhetorical tools with which we can identify the exploitation of “other” bodies through the uneven dynamic of power in the globalized economy, but this rhetoric is not always used for positive change. For example, the recent emergence of neo-conservatism and religious fundamentalism in the U.S., which often speaks explicitly of valuing life (i.e., “pro-life” protests), has produced a political regression of rights for women and the LGBT community. Zoe-centric rhetoric, then, emerges as a force for both positive and negative progress. Similarly, the rhetoric surrounding issues like climate change often speak of “disappearing nature” in the face of civilizational expansion, thus problematically reasserting the dichotomy between “nature” and “culture”. This rhetoric produces, in the human subject, a deep anxiety about the rapid disappearance or destruction of “nature”, as well as a misguided understanding of nature as something separate from humanity. The public morality is unable to fully internalize the notion that we are literally a part of nature, and that its mortality is inherently tethered to our own. What is needed, argues Braidotti, is a more sophisticated understanding of death in the posthuman turn, such that progress can be made toward more sustainable and empathic public policy. The recent fascination with death in popular culture (as evidenced by the unrelenting popularity of forensic investigation dramas or video games that simulate the unreal glory of combat missions in war-torn countries) speaks to the urgent need to re-evaluate and rigorously redefine our understanding of what “death” means in the posthuman present.

Braidotti suggests that an emphasis on the vital self-organizing nature of Zoe would work to blur the distinction between “life” and “death” for individual subjects, arguing that “[t]his vitalist materialism rests solidly on a neo-Spinozist political ontology of monism and radical immanence, engendering a transversal relational ethics to counteract the inhuman(e) aspects of the posthuman predicament” (115). That is to say, a focus on Zoe reinscribes the individual subject within the whole of the substantial universe. In this way, humanity can work toward a solution to the “posthuman predicament”, which is Braidotti’s term for the “significant changes in the status of the structure of the inhuman and inhumane practices” (116). This would include, for example, schools of thought that encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own physical fitness and well-being. While these practices productively encourage a greater awareness of each of our posthuman bio-organic existence (thus, ultimately, rejecting naturalism), it problematically “perverts the notion of responsibility towards individualism” (116). Institutions like national healthcare can be dismantled on the misleading grounds that they function as “handouts” for individuals who refuse to take responsibility for themselves (The U.S. conservative media’s overwhelmingly negative response to “Obamacare” is a very bleak example of this). This kind of fuzzy logic problematically excludes those for whom the products necessary for a healthy lifestyle (i.e., healthy food, medication, a good education) are financially inaccessible, thus those who are already marginalized within society become further marginalized, and can now be blamed for their own marginalization. In this way, argues Braidotti, the posthuman predicament goes beyond the model of bio-power described by Foucault, as the bio-mediated structure of advanced capitalism effectively replaces anthropocentric individualism with a model in which humans are understood as a trend-oriented set of data points, which, crucially, does not account for all people within the system, but rather, those who can be reliably catered to as consumers. As Braidotti explains: “[b]ecause genetic information…is unevenly distributed, this system is not only inherently discriminatory, but also racist at some basic level of the term” (117). In this way, the political policy is designed specifically to promote the sustained life of those who are deemed to be the “healthy” normative core of society and implicitly necessitates the death of those deemed unhealthy. The necro-political aspect of this model inherently embeds the corpse within the embodied self, as individuals come to understand nonconformity to normative societal values as synonymous with their own death. For this reason, a central insight of Foucault’s bio-power remains valid in today’s technologically bio-mediated society: “bio-power also involves the management of dying” (119).

Braidotti then turns to examine the nature of contemporary bio-politics. She points to political scientist Achille Mbembe’s observation that “Bio-power and necro-politics are two sides of the same coin” (122). That is to say, the management of bio-power for specific privileged groups is inherently tethered to the instrumentation of death for other groups. For example, Braidotti looks at the posthuman face of modern war, in which unmanned drone strikes have greatly (and unevenly) increased the mortality rates in targeted populations. Drone strikes are hailed, by Western leaders of industry, as a safe and clean way to conduct combat operations, regardless of the fact that these drones regularly kill unidentified civilians. In this way, warfare has increasingly become another avenue for commercial privatization, such that death has literally been reduced to another commodity. Braidotti observes, “[m]any contemporary wars, led by Western coalitions under the cover of humanitarian aid are often neo-colonial exercises aimed at protecting mineral extraction and other essential geo-physical resources needed by the global economy” (123). Braidotti follows this with what she calls a “techno-bestiary” (124), or a description of the robotic technologies that are increasingly characterizing the face of modern warfare. The dominant trend amongst these technologies is non-locality, as they are generally monitored by remote human operators, but, crucially, Braidotti points out that “by-passing the human decision maker is already technologically feasible” (125–26). Increasingly, technological advancement is changing the way we think about death and accountability.

Braidotti goes on to point out that death as a concept is caught in a sort of contradiction. On one hand, it is a central component of political practice, as the rapidly expanding technological repertoire of killing techniques increases human vulnerability. On the other hand, death is under-examined within critical theory and social governance practices, where the emphasis is decidedly focused on Life and bio-power. Fortunately, posthuman theory is uniquely poised to provide new insights into critical understandings of death. For example, Patrick Hanafin suggests that “renewed interest in necro-politics, coupled with a transversal vision of posthuman subjectivity, may help us provide a political and ethical counter-narrative to ‘the imposed bounded subject to liberal legalism’ ” (128). Hanafin argues that death should not not be understood as the teleological conclusion of being. For Hanafin, death as conclusion translates into a “bio-political regime of discipline and control of bodies” (129), as individuals become increasingly focused on their own survival, potentially to the detriment of the public or planetary good. Instead, Hanafin advocates a shift toward “singularities without identity” who relate primarily to each other and their environment. Essentially, Hanafin is advocating a shift away from Western individualism, and toward a Woolfian notion of thinking “as if already gone”. The central aspect of this model, as Braidotti points out, is the reimagining of a life-death continuum, not as it relates to the individual, but as it relates to Zoe.

Braidotti then turns to directly confront the question of a posthuman theory of death. As she points out, “[o]ne’s view on death depends on one’s assumptions about life” (131). For Braidotti, this refers to her matter-realist view of life as a generic force of “cosmic energy”. The death of the individual, then, cannot be seen as the teleological end of life, because life is not an inherent property of the individual, but rather the opposite: the mortal individual is best understood as a kind of temporary echo chamber for zoe, the temporality of which inherently means that death has always already occurred. That is to say, because the individual is tethered to her mortality, death is not a limit that she approaches, but rather a threshold that she transgresses. For this reason, “death as a constitutive event is behind us; it has already taken place as a virtual potential that constructs everything we are” (132). Because of it’s unavoidability, death is understood by consciousness as a precursor for existence. The actual event of death is just an iteration of the potential that has always already existed. Death is not an indifferent and inanimate state of matter, but rather a position on on the spectrum of vitality. For this reason, “Death is the becoming-imperceptible of the posthuman subject and as such it is part of the cycles of becoming, yet another form of interconnectedness, a vital relationship that links one with other, multiple forces” (137). That is to say, both life and death are impersonal, generic expressions of zoe, and understanding them as such has the potential to, ultimately, transgress ego and dissolve the boundaries between subjective individuals, such that the primary focus of each individual becomes the sustained existence of Zoe. As Braidotti opines: “Sustainability does assume faith in a future, and also a sense of responsibility for ‘passing on’ to future generations a world that is liveable and worth living in” (138).

Summary of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (Part 3) was originally published in Open Objects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.